US newsObituary

Harry Magdoff

Socialist who co-edited the Marxist Monthly Review and influenced the 1960s new left

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 with Paul Sweezy 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, grounding in statistics and his analysis of persistent stagnation marked his criticism of economic orthodoxy. It also indicated a continuity between the mainstream ideas of President 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 from CCNY for activities around a student paper, Magdoff took his economics degree from New York University's school of commerce in 1935, and then joined the new deal's works progress administration.

His analysis of measuring productivity in manufacturing, published as a book-length 1939 government report is still used today, and enhanced his reputation. In 1940 he joined the national defense and advisory board, studying bottlenecks in production under wartime conditions. A report by his circle of colleagues was said to have appeared on Roosevelt's desk on December 7, 1941, the day of Pearl Harbor.

Magdoff then joined the war production board, analysing the metal working industries. By 1945, as chief economist in the commerce department's current business analysis division, he ran the influential Survey of Current Business. In 1946, Henry Wallace, then the secretary of commerce in President Truman's administration asked Magdoff to become his special assistant.

Wallace had been vice-president under Roosevelt from 1940 to 1944, was the darling of the new deal left, and a mystic visionary of postwar global cooperation. Magdoff prepared position papers for cabinet meetings while overseeing the bureau of standards and the census. But by autumn 1946 Wallace was out of government. Cold war reshuffling was taking place.

Magdoff returned to New York as programme director of the new council of American business, writing newsletters and position papers. But the cold war abruptly terminated Magdoff's 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 blacklist. So he became a financial analyst, sold insurance and eventually settled upon a publishing company specialising in reprints. He also taught intermittently at New York's New School and at Yale University, and 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, with his son Fred. Magdoff enjoyed the admiration of former Burlington mayor, later socialist congressman Bernard Sanders, who reflected that Magdoff was the "true heart of the greatest generation of Americans". Magdoff had, in a sense, always represented that time of the 1930s and 40s, depression and wartime, experiences and lessons for those who would listen, and learn.

In 1932 he married his wife Beatrice Greizer, who predeceased him. He is survived by his two sons.

· Harry (Henry) Samuel Magdoff, economist born August 21 1913; died January 1 2006

ncG1vNJzZmivp6x7tbTEoKyaqpSerq96wqikaKaVrMBwfo9pbWielZd8c3yOoKyaqpSerq%2B7waKrrpminrK0etSsmA%3D%3D