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Henry Samuel Magdoff (born 21 August 1913) and married to Beatrice.

Early years[edit]

A child of poor Russian Jewish immigrants, Magdoff grew up in the Bronx. In 1929, at age 15, Magdoff first started reading Karl Marx when he picked up a copy of The Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy in a used-book store. "It blew my mind," recalled Magdoff in 2003. "His view of history was a revelation... that got me started reading about economics. We were going into the Depression then and I wanted to figure out what it all meant." [1] His interest in Marx led him to embrace socialism.

He studied mathematics and physics from 1930 to 1933 at the City College of New York taking engineering, math and physics courses and was active in the Social Problems Club with many school mates who later joined the Abraham Lincoln Brigade, a Comintern organization [2] that fought in the Spanish Civil War. Magdoff attended New York University after 1933 studying economics and statistics and received a B.S. in Economics in 1935. He was suspended and later expelled from City College for his activities related to editing Frontiers, a radical student magazine not sanctioned by the school.

Government service[edit]

In the mid-1930s, Magdoff moved to Philadelphia to take a job with the Works Progress Administration measuring the productivity of various manufacturing industries. An FBI investigation later revealed that Magdoff made false statements regarding his employment after graduation in order to obtain employment with the federal government. [3]

By 1940 Magdoff was working for the New Deal Works Progress Administration (WPA) as its Principal Statistician. He received several letters of recommendations from David Weintraub, who also worked in the WPA. Of Weintraub, the Senate Interlocking Subversion in Government Committee said, "Weintraub occupied a unique position in setting up the structure of Communist penetration of Government agencies by individuals who have been identified by witnesses as underground agents of the Communist party." During World War II Magdoff worked on the War Production Board.

Espionage[edit]

The Official History of counter intelligence operations in the United States, published by the United States Office of the National Counterintelligence Executive (ONCIX), lists Magdoff as a member of the Perlo group of Soviet spies (p.31). Magdoff was identified by Arlington Hall cryptographers in the Venona project, and FBI counterintelligence investigators as a Soviet source under the code name "Kant" in 1944. [4]

Elizabeth Bentley was placed in contact (pgs.3-4) with the Perlo group in early 1944 for the purposes of obtaining secret government information for transmission to the Soviet Union. Magdoff was part of this group. Venona decrypt # 687 [5] reports on the meeting:

They are reliable FELLOWCOUNTRYMEN (members of the CPUSA), politically highly mature; they want to help with information. They said that they had been neglected and no one had taken any interest in their potentialities"

Magdoff at the time was ending a prolonged leave of absence due to a gall bladder operation. Being a new recruit, or "probationer", in Soviet parlance, a background check was done. Venona decrypt # 769,771 transmits the personal histories of the probationers of the new group:

"KANT" [Harry Magdoff] became a member of the CPUSA a long time ago, being [8 groups unrecoverd], works in the Machine Tool Division of the War Production Board.

In Moscow, the head of KGB foreign intelligence operations Lt. General Pavel M. Fitin, then sent a request to Secretary General of the Comintern Georgi Dimitrov, to complete Magdoff's recruitment. The document was unearthed in the Comintern Archives in the late 1980s (Wikisource:Fitin to Dimitrov, 29 September 1944). This document has been reported in a book published in 1989 by Harvey Klehr, John Earl Haynes, and Fridrikh Igorevich Firsov, and separately in the memoirs of Alexandre Feklisov [6], who was the Soviet Case Officer for Julius Rosenberg and Klaus Fuchs, published in 2001.

Moscow responded to New York KGB headquarters on 25 February 1945 in Venona decrypt # 179,180. [7] Magdoff's codename of "Kant", had been changed to "Tan", according to Allen Weinstein and Alexander Vassiliev's study of the Moscow archives. It was not uncommon to change codenames. Moscow expressed concern that knowledge of some probationers working for various groups was widely known among other CPUSA members. Code name "Tan" also appears in Anatoly Gorsky’s December 1948 Memo on the Failed American Networks. [8] Gorsky was then a senior official of the Committee of Information (KI), the Soviet agency at the time supervising Soviet foreign intelligence. [9]

A top secret internal FBI memorandum dated 1 February 1956 from Assistant to the Director and head of FBI's Internal Security Section Alan H. Belmont to L.V. Boardman discussed the advantages and disadvantages of using Venona project materials to prosecute suspects. In that memorandum, which remained classified forty-one years until the Moynihan Commission on Government Secrecy obtained its release to the public in 1997, Boardman quotes the 13 May 1944 Venona transcript, which named several members of the Perlo group, including Magdoff. Ulitmately, in consideration of compromising the Army Signals Intelligence efforts, the decision was made not to prosecute. (pgs.68-71)

Post-war[edit]

Magdoff left employment with the United States Government, then with the United States Department of Commerce, on 30 December 1946, and went to work for the New Council on American Business in New York and was happy to leave government service. Magdoff worked there with many business associates until 1948, at which time he began employment with Trubeck Laboratories in New Jersey.

Following the war he was an economic advisor and speechwriter to former Vice-President and then unsuccessful Presidential candidate Henry Wallace. In the 1950s Magdoff began a career in academia.

His first and perhaps most influential book, The Age of Imperialism, was published in 1969. The book sold over 100,000 copies and was translated into fifteen languages. Two years later, after the death of Leo Huberman, he began co-editing with Paul Sweezy Monthly Review, the leading independent Marxist journal in the United States, and has continued to edit the magazine into his 90th year. Under Magdoff's direction, the Monthly Review has focused more and more upon imperialism as the key unit of analysis for global development and the forces challenging neocolonialism in the Third World as the most likely prospects for challenging the system. This perspective put the magazine and its press squarely on the "New Left" intellectual agenda since the late 1960s.

Magdoff's work has kept him in the forefront of leftist thought in the U.S. from the 1930s to this day. The Great Depression left a strong impact on Magdoff's perspective on capitalism. One of the few prominent socialists in the U.S., Magdoff recalls the sense of doom felt by capitalism-watchers at mid-century, and has held that nothing since 1929 leads him to believe that the system has become immune from cycles of severe crisis.

Magdoff and the late Paul Sweezy together produced five books. Magdoff's most recent book is Imperialism without Colonies, published when he was 89. Today Magdoff co-edits the Monthly Review with John Bellamy Foster.

Magdoff has two sons. His son, Fred Magdoff, is an expert in plant and soil science. His wife of almost 70 years, Beatrice, died in 2002.

Venona[edit]

Magdoff is mentioned in four Venona transcripts that were recovered. These four are:


Books published[edit]

  • Imperialism Without Colonies (2003)
  • The Age of Imperialism (1969)
  • Imperialism from the Colonial Age to the Present (1977)

Books with Paul M. Sweezy[edit]

  • The Dynamics of U.S. Capitalism (1970)
  • The End of Prosperity (1977)
  • The Deepening Crisis of U.S. Capitalism (1980)
  • Stagnation and the Financial Explosion (1987)
  • The Irreversible Crisis (1988)

External link[edit]

Sources[edit]


Magdoff, Harry Magdoff, Harry Magdoff, Harry

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