R.I.P. - Harry Magdoff

Via The Monthly Review:

Harry Magdoff died in Vermont on Janury 1, 2006.
We will miss him.

“I never expected a socialist America in my lifetime. That doesn't mean that I was smarter than anyone else, but it just wasn't my temperament.

Every summer the Marxist School has a picnic at our place, and after they go swimming and have their food, we sit for several hours and talk under a tree. It's very nice. One person at the end this last time said, “What do you expect, and how can you be the way you are without expecting socialism?”

I said, “I don't know. I don't expect anything particular. But this is the way I am. I can't be any other way. I have to believe that there can be a better world.”

Magdoff has been one of my personal intellectual heroes for his work on the logic of empire, particularly The Age of Imperialism. His voice and scholarship will be missed by those of us on the Left.