Paul A. Baran

Life and work

Baran was born as Saul Baran in Mykolaiv, Imperial Russia, to a Jewish family, on August 30, 1909. His father, a Menshevik, left Russia for Vilnius, Lithuania in 1917. From Vilna the Baran family moved to Berlin, and then in 1925 back to Moscow, but Paul stayed in Germany to finish his secondary school. In 1926 he attended the Plekhanov Institute in Moscow. He left again for Germany in 1928, accepting an appointment as an assistant on agricultural research with his advisor, Dr. Friedrich Pollock. In his formative years in the 1920s, Baran studied Marxist doctrine and joined socialist youth groups.

He remained in Germany and was associated with the Frankfurt School Institute for Social Research. He then received a Diplom-Volkswirt (graduate degree in political economy, equivalent to a master's degree) in 1931 from the Schlesische Friedrich-Wilhelms-Universität zu Breslau. While in Breslau, he participated in the fight against rising Hitlerism by speaking at trade union meetings, authoring articles and leaflets, and giving radio broadcasts. Under the guidance of Emil Lederer, Baran completed his dissertation on economic planning and received a PhD in April 1933 from the University of Berlin. Earlier that year, he met with noted Marxist economist Rudolf Hilferding, author of Finance Capital. During this time, Baran was writing articles under the pen name of "Alexander Gabriel" (reportedly to protect his parents in the USSR) for the German Social Democratic Party journal Die Gesellschaft.

After the Nazi regime consolidated power, Baran fled to Paris in May 1933 where he did research jobs. In 1934 he obtained a visa to visit his parents in the USSR. Next, he went to Vilnius, then to Warsaw, and from there to London. In 1939, with the signing of the Molotov–Ribbentrop Pact and just before the Nazi invasion of Poland, Baran emigrated to the U.S. where he enrolled at Harvard and received a master's degree in economics.

Short of funds, he left the Harvard PhD program and obtained a series of positions during World War II: first, a research fellowship at the Brookings Institution where he worked on problems of price controls; then, a brief stint at the Office of Price Administration; and from 1942–45, he was in the U.S. Army, assigned as an economist to the Office of Strategic Services (OSS) where he attained the rank of Technical Sergeant. In 1945 he contributed to the U.S. Strategic Bombing Survey, working under the direction of John Kenneth Galbraith and traveling to post-war Germany and Japan. In 1946, he held a post with the U.S. Department of Commerce and lectured at George Washington University. Next, he spent three years with the Federal Reserve Bank of New York before resigning to join academia.

Baran was hired as an associate professor at Stanford University in 1949; two years later, he was promoted to full professor with tenure. As economist Robert Heilbroner wrote, "Until his death in 1964, Paul Baran was virtually the only left-wing Marxist economist in the United States who held a full-time academic appointment. Since he was nothing if not outspoken in his beliefs, he was undoubtedly a trial for the authorities at Stanford, who, to their credit, resisted continual pressure from patriotic organizations to fire him." Notable among Baran's Stanford students was the future Marxist economist Richard D. Wolff.

In 1949, Baran initiated an active partnership with the newly formed leftist magazine, Monthly Review, edited by Paul Sweezy and Leo Huberman. Baran helped to set the magazine's intellectual direction. A few years earlier, he had tried unsuccessfully to launch his own weekly magazine which he hoped would be an American equivalent to The Economist.

Baran was married once, to Elena Djatschenko. They met shortly after he began teaching at Stanford. Before divorcing, they had a son Nicholas born in April 1952. Nicholas became an attorney and a computer technology journalist. He co-edited the book of his father's correspondence.

In 1960, Baran visited post-revolutionary Cuba along with Sweezy and Huberman, and was greatly inspired. As a warning sign of his declining health, Baran suffered a heart attack in December 1960, but he recovered sufficiently to continue working and traveling. In 1962 he visited Moscow, Iran, and Yugoslavia. In his last years, he worked intensively with Sweezy on their analysis of the modern American economy, Monopoly Capital. In March 1964, at age 54, Baran suffered a fatal heart attack before the book could be completed. Sweezy went on to finish Monopoly Capital and shared the writing credit with Baran when it was published in 1966.