Paul Marlor Sweezy (April 10, 1910 – February 27, 2004) was a Marxist economist, political activist, publisher, and founding editor of the long-running magazine Monthly Review.

[3] Upon his return to the United States, Sweezy again enrolled at Harvard, from which he received his PhD degree in 1937 for a thesis on an English mineowners' cartel, The Limitation of the Vend: A Study in Monopoly and Competition.

[citation needed] Sweezy worked for several New Deal agencies analyzing the concentration of economic power and the dynamics of monopoly and competition.

This research included the influential study for the National Resources Committee, "Interest Groups in the American Economy" which identified the eight most powerful financial-industrial alliances in US business.

[3] On December 14, 2016, the U.S. Congress "awarded the Congressional Gold Medal collectively to the members of the Office of Strategic Services (OSS) in recognition of their superior and major contributions during World War II".

[citation needed] Sweezy wrote extensively for the liberal press during the post-war period, including such publications as The Nation and The New Republic, among others.

[3] In 1949, Sweezy and Leo Huberman founded a new magazine called Monthly Review, using money from historian and literary critic F. O. Matthiessen.

[13] He was the chairman of the Committee in Defense of Carl Marzani and was particularly active fighting against the prosecution of members of the Communist Party under the Smith Act.

[13] Sweezy's work in economics focused on applying Marxist analysis to what he identified as three dominant trends in modern capitalism: monopolization, stagnation, and financialization.

Because Sweezy's approach combined and integrated the micro effects of monopoly with the macro level insights of Keynesian theory it proved superior for understanding the stagflation of the 1970s.

[1] Sweezy was lauded by economist and public intellectual John Kenneth Galbraith as "the most noted American Marxist scholar" of the late 20th Century.

Post 2008, consolidating corporate powers with aid from United States government policies continue to roll surpluses of productivity into militaristic ventures across the world in order to monopolize more industries such as media, banking, real estate, pharmaceutical, and technology to control pricing across commodities and services and labor.

The increasing concentration and centralization of capital, the rise of giant corporate conglomerates (as seen in Japan since the 80's deflationary period began) forced effective demand to decline.