Michael A. Lebowitz (November 27, 1937 – April 19, 2023) was a Marxist economist and Professor Emeritus of Economics at Simon Fraser University in Vancouver, Canada.
Early life
He was born in Newark, New Jersey, on 27 November 1937 to Louis Lebowitz (machinist) and Dora Lebowitz (bookkeeper). Ten years later, his family moved to Passaic, New Jersey, where he completed public school in 1955. He studied economics and marketing at the New York University School of Commerce at night while working days at Federal Pioneer Electric (FPE) as a statistical clerk and then market research analyst. Graduating cum laude with a BS in 1960, he went on to do graduate work in economics (with an emphasis upon economic history) at the University of Wisconsin–Madison, earning a master's degree in 1964.
Career
In 1965, without completing his doctoral thesis, he took a job to teach economics and economic history at the new university in British Columbia, Canada, Simon Fraser University, where he specialized in teaching Marxist Economics and Comparative Economic Systems until his retirement in 2000 as Professor Emeritus.
Work
Lebowitz worked at FPE during the day at a time when the electrical products industry was engaged in price fixing and allocation of market shares while at night at NYU he was taught all about how prices were determined by competition in the free market. 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 order to study economic institutions such as the corporation, Lebowitz applied to the University of Wisconsin, which had a reputation for Institutional Economics. Finding that description no longer accurate, he focused upon economic history. While in Madison (1960-5), he was active in the Wisconsin Socialist Club, Fair Play for Cuba, Friends of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC) and joined the editorial board of Studies on the Left, a journal of the New Left. He was invited to co-chair the economics workshop for the 1962 Port Huron meeting of the Students for a Democratic Society (SDS), which produced the Port Huron Statement of SDS. Subsequently, he was active in the Madison chapter of SDS and in antiwar activity.
Upon arriving at Simon Fraser in its first year of operation, he taught introductory economics and economic history but went on to teach the history of economic thought and comparative economic systems. He added a new course, Introduction to Marxist Economics plus periodic Selected Topics in Marxian Economics. Active in university politics, he was President of the Faculty Union (including many junior faculty) and on the University Senate, where he supported the Political Science, Sociology and Anthropology (PSA) department, which the university was determined to purge. After a failed strike of PSA faculty, he served as defense counsel for one of the suspended PSA faculty, who was acquitted.
Outside of the university, he was active in local community organizing and in the "Waffle Caucus'" of the New Democratic Party (NDP), was elected to the party executive in British Columbia and served as Party Policy Chair during the NDP government, 1972–5. Influenced by the Institute for Workers Control in the UK, he introduced party policies focused upon workers' control.
In 1978, he was invited to participate in the Socialism in the World Conference in Cavtat, Yugoslavia and was a regular participant until 1986 and used this opportunity to study self-management. Also, he joined the editorial board in 1980 of Studies in Political Economy. During this period, he used a sabbatical year to study Marx's newly translated Grundrisse and Hegel; this was followed by articles on Marx's theory of needs, the falling rate of profits, crisis theory, one-sided Capital and the first edition (1992) of Beyond Capital: Marx's Political Economy of the Working Class. In this book, Lebowitz introduced what would become a continuing theme in his work--- the focus upon the simultaneous changing of circumstances and self-change ("revolutionary practice").