Michael A. Lebowitz (November 27, 1937 – April 19, 2023)[1] was a Marxist economist and Professor Emeritus of Economics at Simon Fraser University in Vancouver, Canada.
[3] As a result of this disparity, he began to study Thorsten Veblen and Karl Marx, critics of mainstream theory, and to collaborate with Labor Research Associates, contributing several articles (as "an economist friend") in Economic Notes.
In 1994, he participated in the World Solidarity Conference on Cuba in Havana (during the Special Period) and came several years after for the annual North American and Cuban Philosophers and Other Social Scientists meetings.
In 1997 he came to Cuba to research the effect of the Special Period on solidaristic institutions, gave several talks at the Faculty of Economics, and met Marta Harnecker.
In 2004, Harnecker and Lebowitz urged Chavez to create a thinktank which could be a home for foreign intellectuals who wanted to come to support the Bolivarian Revolution, and in 2006, Centro Internacional Miranda (CIM) was officially founded with offices and meeting rooms located at the Hotel Anauco, where they lived.
In 2011 Harnecker and Lebowitz returned to Vancouver and proceeded to produce several books, one of which won her the Libertador Prize in 2013 for A World to Build: New Paths Toward Twenty-First Socialism (as published in English in 2015).
Working with several Cuban intellectuals and with the support of the Venezuelan Embassy, beginning in 2016 the program organized several talks and panels and published a series of short books (including Lebowitz's "What is Socialism for the 21st Century?