Harry Magdoff: From the time of his youthful work as an economist with President Roosevelt's 1930s New Deal onwards, Harry Magdoff, who has died aged 92, believed in the necessity of planning, as opposed to market chaos.
It was in 1969 that Magdoff, the US's most prominent Marxist economist, published The Age of Imperialism: The Economics of US Foreign Policy. Translated into 15 languages, it had a substantial impact on the 1960s American new left. In it, Magdoff argued that empire, not class, was the great contradiction of the age.
Also in 1969, Magdoff became co-editor of Monthly Review, the magazine that had published The Age of Imperialism.
The two lectured to audiences around the developing world and Magdoff's expertise and experience with business executives, his grounding in statistics and his analysis of persistent stagnation marked his criticism of economic orthodoxy. It also indicated a continuity between the ideas of Roosevelt's 1930s New Deal and those of 1960s new left.
Later, with the decline of the new left and the collapse of the eastern bloc, Magdoff emphasised the transfer of US economic world leadership from manufacturing to finance. He also commented on the exaggerated global gap of incomes and the ecological crisis.
Magdoff was born in the Bronx in New York City, the son of impoverished Russian-Jewish immigrants, and discovered socialist ideas as a teenager. He also discovered Yiddish literature and fleetingly considered life as a poet.
Studying mathematics and physics at New York's City College in the 1930s, he shared the campus with the likes of the anarchist peace activist Paul Goodman, the later blacklisted communist screenwriter and director Abraham Polonsky, the social democrat Irving Howe and the future neo-conservative Irving Kristol.
Expelled for activities around a student paper, Magdoff took his economics degree from New York University in 1935 and then joined the New Deal's Works Progress Administration.
In 1940 he joined the National Defence and Advisory Board, studying bottlenecks in production under wartime conditions. He then joined the War Production Board, analysing the metalworking industries. By 1945 he was chief economist in the Commerce Department's current business analysis division. In 1946 Henry Wallace, then secretary of commerce to President Truman, asked Magdoff to become his special assistant.
Wallace had been vice-president under Roosevelt from 1940 to 1944 and was the darling of the New Deal left and a visionary of postwar global co-operation. Magdoff prepared position papers for cabinet meetings while overseeing the bureau of standards and the census.
By autumn 1946, however, Wallace was out of government. Magdoff returned to New York as programme director of the new Council of American Business, but the Cold War abruptly terminated his government career.
Like many other New Dealers, he supported Wallace's third-party presidential bid in 1948, writing its small business programme. With Wallace's ignominious defeat, Magdoff soon faced congressional and grand jury investigations, FBI harassment and the black list. He became a financial analyst, sold insurance and eventually settled upon a publishing company specialising in reprints. He drew close to Monthly Review, established in 1949, for which he wrote from 1965.
By the end of his life, Magdoff had turned over direction of Monthly Review to a pair of younger scholars and in 2002 he moved to Burlington, Vermont. Burlington mayor, later socialist congressman Bernard Sanders, saw Magdoff as the "true heart of the greatest generation of Americans".
In 1932 he married Beatrice Greizer, who predeceased him. He is survived by their two sons.
Harry (Henry) Samuel Magdoff: born August 21st, 1913; died January 1st, 2006