Background
Erwin Marquit was born in 1926 in New York City.
Erwin Marquit was born in 1926 in New York City.
Marquit studied electrical engineering at the College of the City of New York (1942-1948—interrupted by 22 months in the United States Navy (1944-1946).
In 1931, his family moved to the United Workers Cooperative Colony in the East Bronx. He was blacklisted as an engineer and barred from completing a master"s degree dissertation in physics at New York University in 1950 due to his Communist Party affiliation and he emigrated to Poland. He returned to the United States in 1963 upon completing the degree of Doctor of Mathematical and Physical Sciences at the University of Warsaw.
After a research appointment at the University of Michigan (1963-1965) in particle physics and an assistant professorship at the University of Colorado (1965-1966), he was appointed Associate Professor of Physics at the University of Minnesota in 1966.
In 1974, he was the Communist Party candidate for Governor of Minnesota, coming in sixth with 3,570 votes. In 1994, Marquit was finally awarded the title Professor of Physics after the Encyclopedia of Applied Physics commissioned him to write a 13-page entry on Philosophy of Technology.
He was awarded the title Professor Emeritus of Physics in 1999. In the Communist Party, Marquit strongly opposed what he saw as undemocratic and Stalinist tendencies by its leader Gus Hall.
The chapter dissolved after a few months because of conflict caused by the chapter"s Marxist orientation.
He died at the age of 88 in 2015.
Also that year, he initiated a course entitled Introduction to Marxism, while continuing to teach courses in physics. The combination of a nationwide campaign against a Communist Party member teaching a course on Marxism and the change in the direction of his research from governmentfunded research to unfunded research with a Marxist orientation, led to an eight-year effort by the University of Minnesota administration to force his removal from the university despite his having tenure. In 1992, Marquit briefly led the Minnesota chapter of the Committees of Correspondence for Democracy and Socialism.
Marquit later reconciled with the party and as a member of its Economics Commission, initiated discussions on the socialist market economies in China and Vietnam. Marquit continued his association with the Marxist Educational Press until its dissolution in 2011, and contributes articles to Political Affairs and People"s World on past and present problems of socialist political and economic development in light of economic globalization.
That same year, he changed his research interests from experimental particle physics to application of dialectical materialism to the study of the conceptual foundations of physics. A selection of his papers on dialectical materialism and philosophy of the natural sciences can be found on his university home page.