Memoirs

791243 RRPXXX10.1177/0486613418791243Review of Radical Political EconomicsWeeks et al. research-article2018 Memoirs Memoirs Review of Radical Political Economics 2018, Vol. 50(3) 582–598 © 2018 Union for Radical Political Economics Article reuse guidelines: sagepub.com/journals-permissions https://doi.org/10.1177/0486613418791243 DOI: 10.1177/0486613418791243 rrpe.sagepub.com Fifty Years of Radical Economics: Beginnings in Ann Arbor Figure 1. Cover and Table of Contents of First Issue of the Review of Radical Political Economics. Weeks et al. Participating in URPE from the Global South David Barkin Department of Economics, Metropolitan Autonomous University, Xochimilco, D.F. 16000, México. Email: barkin@correo.xoc.uam.mx 591 592 Review of Radical Political Economics 50(3) Writing from México on the occasion of the Union for Radical Political Economics’ (URPE) fiftieth, I consider it important to reflect on some important issues as an expatriate and as an active member of the Review of Radical Political Economics’ (RRPE) editorial board for much of this time. When I first moved to México in the early 1960s, I was not aware of the profound changes this move would entail. After all, as a product of the evolving elite university environment, I had ample opportunities for constant interaction with many of the most progressive participants in the profound transformations emerging in the Third World. There were the various Marxist currents of uneven development emerging as part of the anticolonial (independence) movements in Africa and South Asia; there were similar trends developing in the Caribbean; and, of course, there was the energy generated by the eruption of the Cuban Revolution in 1959. I was fortunate to have at least passing contacts with all of these literatures and sometimes even with the principal actors— as a “very young” student in New York City in that period, the weekly brown-bag lunches at the Monthly Review offices were an incredible opportunity to interact with many of the progressive thinkers of the moment. These informal discussions and the often-lengthy afternoon walks around lower Manhattan opened unimagined windows on transformations in society and thinking that seemed light-years from the formal university education I was being spoon-fed. My early trips to Puerto Rico and then to Cuba, following previous ones to Perú and México, set the stage for what became a lifetime of political economy and an oscillating lifelong relationship with URPE, an organization that emerged after I had already made the decision to leave the United States. Latin America was in the throes of profound changes in which I had privileged opportunity to participate. URPE’s early contacts with the Faculty of Economics at the University of Havana, following the traumatic disruptions occasioned by the early rush to the ten million ton sugar harvest, created a solid basis for an ongoing relationship that remains solid to this day. Unfortunately, aside from a marginal institutional participation in the antiwar movement and expressions of solidarity with the Chileans after the 1973 coup d’état, international solidarity did not influence the principal lines of professional interests or activities of the members of the organization. Similarly, the “eruption” of The Club of Rome’s report on the Limits to Growth in 1972 (Meadows et al. 1972) did not (and still does not) have a significant impact on the directions of intellectual pursuits of most of our members. My activities at that time were divided between strengthening my institutional ties in México and trying to promote anti-imperialist activities in the United States. After my collaboration with the Unidad Popular government in Chile, I took a position at Lehman College in New York City (to teach economics in Spanish!), with a predominantly Puerto Rican student body. Although there was a great deal of political activity going on—and heterodox economics programs were emerging at the New School for Social Research and the recently revamped economics department at the University of Massachusetts (among others)—URPE’s professional involvement in international political economy remained marginal. Throughout this period, I participated actively on the editorial board of the RRPE. I was constantly concerned about its direction, reflecting much more the esoteric excursions into the narrowest limits of what was very broadly construed to be heterodox economics, and the lack of any profound engagement with the real struggles of peoples to reshape their societies and their economies. To confront this problem in a small niche of our activities, I volunteered to take on the direction of the RRPE’s Book Review section, with the explicit charge to attempt to include literature that better reflected the concerns of these struggles and the viewpoints of people from other parts of the world. This involved a serious change in the role of the book review editor, since this required more time devoted to identifying some more “activist” literatures and recruiting potential reviewers from new venues. In retrospect, on the eve of my stepping down from this position six months ago, I would say that I have been somewhat successful in increasing the breadth and diversity of the materials finally published in the section. Weeks et al. 593 I remain concerned with URPE’s lack of an integral interaction with present-day struggles in the Third World and the ever-increasing intensity of the environmental crisis. Although most of the professional work focuses on the problems of regulating the capitalist economy and the debates among the various theoretical strands of Marxist and heterodox thought, the pressing problems of the impact of the imperialist world on the rest of the planet remains generally an unexplored agenda for future issues of the RRPE. This is especially true in the area of ecological economics, in which I have devoted considerable effort during the past decade—a search in our pages for themes like “social metabolism” or “entropy” reflects the collective lack of engagement with two of the most significant analytical tools with which heterodox economists should be familiar. In ending this short reflection about URPE’s history, I would urge us to devote some substantial intellectual and political resources to changing this balance. The analyses of the crises of the global south require a combination of engagement with the local political forces, many reacting against local oligarchs and transnational capital that are actively engaged in the myriad modern forms of enclosures, and the global environmental movements that are battling against the destructive forces of global capitalism so eloquently invoked by James O’Connor (1988: 22) when he first described its “second contradiction”: “capitalist threats to the reproduction of production conditions are not only threats to profits and accumulation, but also to the viability of the social and ‘natural’ environment as a means of life.” Although the internal struggles within the wealthiest parts of the capitalist world are certainly imposing extremely heavy costs on these countries and most particularly on the disadvantaged peoples within their societies, they pale in comparison with the extraordinary damage that the current operation of the global economy is occasioning on the billions of peoples outside this sphere, whose societies are disintegrating and whose natural patrimony is being devastated. References Meadows, Donella H., Dennis L. Meadows, Jørgen Randers, and William W. Behrens. 1972. The Limits to Growth: A Report for the Club of Rome’s Project on the Predicament of Mankind. New York: Universe Books. O’Connor, James. 1988. Capitalism, nature, socialism a theoretical introduction. Capitalism, Nature Socialism 1 (1): 11–38. Author Biography David Barkin is distinguished professor in the Departamento de Producción Económica at the Universidad Autónoma Metropolitana in Ciudad de México, and a founding member of the Ecodevelopment Center. He was elected to the Mexican Academy of Sciences and is an emeritus member of the National Research Council. He served as Book Review editor of the Review of Radical Political Economics from 2000 to 2017 (barkin@correo.xoc.uam.mx)