John Weeks, Emeritus Professor of Economics at the School or Oriental and African Studies (SOAS), has died aged 79 from leukaemia.
In the almost fifteen years since retiring, he focused on popularising radical economics, achieving it with considerable aplomb, through the (social) media and publishing ‘Economics of the 1%’ (2014) and ‘The Debt Delusion: Living Within Our Means and Other Fallacies’ (2020). His journey to this success sheds light both on the challenges facing revolutionaries of his generation, and contemporary capitalist economies, developing as well as developed.
Born in Texas of an accountant father and shop assistant mother, the seeds of radicalism were sewn by virtue of the blacklisting of his father for blowing the whistle on corruption in the state government’s relationship with the powerful oil industry. Such perspectives on the abuse of power (and sleaze) within his immediate locale were reinforced by direct experience of overt racism in the segregated US south where Weeks joined campaigns to break colour bars and promote civil rights whilst still an undergraduate at the University of Texas.
