Henryk Grossmann and the Breakdown of Capitalism

Abstract

In Chapter 14 we saw how the renewed dynamism and appparent stabilisation of the world capitalist economy influenced Marxian analysis in the 1920s. Orthodox social democrats like Kautsky and Hilferding stole the clothes of the earlier revisionists to argue that, in the epoch of ‘organised capitalism’, major economic crises had become improbable. Against them were ranged a handful of neo-Luxemburgists (most prominently Fritz Sternberg) who continued to assert the inevitability of a realisation crisis, and the Trotskyists, stridently insisted upon the impending necessity of further imperialist wars (see Chapters 14 and 15 above). One common strand unites these otherwise disparate schools of thought. This is their almost total neglect of volume III of Marx’s Capital, and in particular of the tendency identified there for the rate of profit to decline. An important element in modern Marxian discussions of crises was thus almost entirely lacking.¹ This chapter is concerned with the first serious attempt by a Marxist to develop the volume III analysis and apply it to crisis theory. Deeply flawed, it nevertheless proved to be (in the long run) extremely influential.