The theory of the “Permanent War Economy” has played an important role in the debates of the radical left from the late 1940s onward. Several generations of radical intellectuals have developed the argument that the US ruling class has used arms production to compensate for the imbalances and crisis tendencies of capitalism, building up in the process a vast military-industrial complex, as Dwight Eisenhower called it, that has taken on a life of its own.
The founder of this theory was Edward L. Sard. Sard was a brilliant Marxist economist who worked for the US government during World War II and had a front-row seat for the development of the war industry.
Sard wanted to remain invisible to a wider public and operated under five different names as a writer. This no doubt explains why he has remained a relatively obscure figure, despite the influence of his ideas. His consecutive pseudonyms will serve as a means of mapping his development.
Edward Sard was born in 1913 in Brooklyn as Edward Solomon, the son of Charles Solomon and Augustina Hess Solomon, two college graduates who worked at high schools in New York City. Tina Solomon was a suffragette who cofounded a sorority during her student years at Barnard College. It was chiefly through her influence that Edward and his younger brother Eugene (born in 1923 and named after Eugene Debs) received a left-wing education.
Edward was an excellent pupil and also played chess at the highest level. In 1929, he won a scholarship and became a student of economics, first at Cornell and then at Columbia. After…
Auteur: Marcel van der Linden
