Trend and Cycle: On the Timeliness of Grossman’s Breakdown Theory

Abstract

Marx’s theory of capitalist accumulation, as Henryk Grossmann was the first 20th-century writer to point out, both proposes an explana- tion of the business cycle as a normal feature of capitalism and predicts an inherent limit to this social system’s development — a ‘breakdown,’ in Grossmann’s words. On the one hand, thanks to factors counter- acting the tendency of the rate of profit to fall that Marx put at the centre of his theory of capitalist dynamics, every crisis is a means to producing a new prosperity. On the other, Marx clearly suggests that the ‘historical tendency of capitalist production’ points to an end of the system and its replacement by a new form of society. While stressing that the abolition of capitalism would have to be the conscious act of a revolutionary working class, Grossmann claimed to be maintaining an essential element of Marxian theory when he insisted that the work of revolution cannot be expected from the spontaneous appearance of a conscious rejection of capitalism on ethical or rational grounds, but is comprehensible only as a response to the actual difficulty of capitalism’s self-reproduction — its breakdown. But how can this idea coexist within one consistent theory with that of regular alternation of prosperity and depression?