Kuhn, Rick (2007) Henryk Grossman and the Recovery of Marxism. University of Illinois Press.
Henryk Grossman (1881-1950) was a Jewish Polish Marxist. Rick Kuhn has produced a very interesting biography of Henryk. Grossman was active as a young man in revolutionary organisations but is best known for his research into Marx's theories of economic crisis.
There is an awareness today that capitalism is an ecologically unsustainable economic system. Moral critique is not, however, a sufficient basis for serious action. If we see capitalism as unsustainable and destructive in other ways, perhaps it is worth returning to Marx's analysis of how it can be overcome and replaced.
Marx argued that capitalism was prone to cyclical crisis, suggesting that these were linked to a declining rate of profit and tended towards a final crisis.
Marx's interpretation of why crisis occurs is difficult to pin down precisely. This is because his life's work of studying capitalism was unfinished and also because the crisis is likely to be multi-sided.
Marx too worked at different levels of abstraction. Volume One of Capital, tries to show how a pure and abstract model of the capitalist economy would work. Volumes Two and Three add additional features to the model.
Grossman became a prominent student of Marx's crisis theory. He criticised Rosa Luxemburg's analysis in The Accumulation of Capital, where she argued that crisis was a product of under consumption and led to imperialism as a means of temporarily maintaining the system by finding new markets for unsold commodities.
Kuhn's book has whetted my appetite for reading more about and from Grossman. Capitalism for much of the late 20th century and, perhaps until, the financial crisis of 2008/2009 looked like the only game in town. A game that delivered prosperity, with the collapse of the Soviet Union and the introduction of Third Way politics from the likes of Tony Blair and Bill Clinton, the left, on economics, moved to the right.
Capitalism is looking less like a system that delivers today in 2023.
Kuhn, who comes, I think, from the International Socialist tradition of Tony Cliff, is some distance from my politics. I am also little mystified as to the the title 'the recovery of Marxism', I guess a reference to the reformism of the Second International. Kuhn, like Brecht and Lukács, made his peace with the Eastern Bloc rather than embrace the Trotskyism of those like Kuhn. These are small points and minor context, it is a great book.
It is a sweeping biography taking in Grossman's whole career including his work with the Frankfurt School, life in America and his last years in East Germany.
The economics probably requires a whole separate book but Kuhn useful shows that Grossman saw the contradiction between use values and exchange values as the source of crisis. Capitalism produces for exchange, it may produce too much or too little of what we find useful, so crisis is inherent. He also notes that Grossman suggested that moving between different models of different levels of abstraction is essential for understanding Marx's crisis theory. Grossman was not a mechanical or deterministic thinker, crisis was not alone sufficient to transform capitalism into communism, but economic crisis was part, a very important part of the picture.
A huge amount of archival work together with clear prose make this a book worth reading for all of us on the left.
