Five years ago, Sam Bowles was a conventional economist – not by choice, but because conventional economics was the only kind offered at Harvard when he came here in the early sixties as a graduate student. Bowles helped to change that.

In 1968, in the charged atmosphere of growing opposition to the war and increasing polarization within the universities, he and a number of other young economists at Harvard, Yale, the University of Michigan, American University, and a few other schools, began approaching economics in a new way – at least, in a way that was new to them.

Their approach has developed into a new variant of Marxist economics that places particular emphasis on the operations of modern “monopoly” capitalism and on Marx’s social and political – rather than strictly economic – theories. As a result of their interest, Marxist economics – up to now, largely untaught in the economics departments of American universities – is receiving a degree of attention it has never before received in this country.

Bowles specializes in the economics of education. His early work was based on a view of education as an investment which students make to increase their later earning potential. Now, Bowles began viewing the educational system as a means for fitting students into the class structure of the capitalist system.

He began de-emphasizing the choice the individual student makes in deciding to obtain a given amount of education and, with Herbert I. Gintis, former lecturer at the Ed School, began stressing the role of education in preparing the students to accept the existing economic structure.

For Bowles and other Harvard economists who call themselves radicals, planning and teaching Social Sciences 125, “The Capitalist Economy: Conflict and Power,” played a crucial role in the transformation of their thinking.

Soc Sci 125 grew out of discussions which began in the Spring of 1968 among graduate students and junior faculty in a number of departments. The group was considering the formation of radical courses which would give more attention to problems like racism and poverty than these problems received in the standard curricula.

Eventually, the group split into two parts. One was made up of members of the Economics Department, who began Soc Sci 125. The other was made up of members of several other Departments, who began the controversial and short-lived course Soc Rel 148-149.

Soc Sci 125 was first given in the Spring of 1969. Its teachers held weekly planning seminars, which played a key role in the development of their radical approach. In their critique of the economic system, the group first relied on conventional theory, having no alternative to present in its place. However, many felt already that the conventional theory was inadequate for dealing with social problems that concerned them politically; eventually, all came to feel this.

In general, they realized, their values did not differ markedly from the values of most conventional economists. Both they and the conventional economists agreed that poverty and racism were bad and should be eliminated. The problem with conventional theory, they felt, was that it could not explain the problems they saw facing society.

The radicals saw these problems as inherent in the capitalist system. Influenced particularly by the writing of Marxists Paul Baran, Paul Sweezy, and Andre Gorz, they began to focus their attention on the basic institutions of capitalism, as they perceived them, and on how these institutions operate.

Among these institutions, they included the system of private property – in which some own land or capital and others own only labor, which they must sell to survive; the free market in labor, in which labor is a commodity sold to the highest bidder; capitalist control over the work process and the technologies employed within the firm; and the socialization system of school and family, which prepares the worker to function in the hierarchical capitalist system.

With this view of the economic system, they believed, they could explain the important social problems which concerned them, problems which conventional economics did not attempt to explain. Conventional economists leave it to sociologists and psychologists, for instance, to explain racism. As economists, though not necessarily as people, they are concerned mainly with the impact of racism on the allocation of resources within the economic system.

Radical economists see racism as a re-inforcement of the capitalist system. By dividing white from black workers, racism is seen to keep the two groups from uniting against those who own capital and, to a large extent, therefore control their lives.

Historically, of course, it may not be possible to prove any conspiracy on the part of the ruling class to encourage racism for this purpose. Nevertheless, if racism does support capitalist ownership of the means of production, this might be regarded as strong evidence that it is tied, to some extent, to capitalism.