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Henryk Grossman Works, Volume 3. The Law of Accumulation and Breakdown of the Capitalist System, Being also a Theory of Crises

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Published Nov 2021

Henryk Grossman

Author: Henryk Grossman
Editor: Rick Kuhn
Translators: Jairus Banaji and Rick Kuhn
Long awaited, the first full translation of Henryk Grossman’s The Law of Accumulation and Breakdown of the Capitalist System, Being also a Theory of Crisis has been published in English. It was the most important, influential and yet most denounced of Grossman’s works and recovers not only Marx’s primary explanation of capitalism’s economic crises and breakdown tendency but also his method in Capital.

Biographical Note

Henryk Grossman (1881–1950) was the preeminent Marxist economist of the twentieth century. He was the founding theoretician and secretary of the Jewish Socialist Party of Galicia; a Professor at the Free University of Warsaw; then, as a member of the Institute for Social Research, at the University of Frankfurt; and later at the University of Leipzig.

Rick Kuhn is a member of Socialist Alternative in Australia. In addition to numerous other publications, he wrote the Deutscher Prize winning biography Henryk Grossman and the Recovery of Marxism (University of Illinois Press, 2008), co-authored Labor’s Conflict: Big Business, Workers and the Politics of Class (Cambridge, 2011) and edited Class and Struggle in Australia (Pearson, 2005).

Readership

Those interested in economic crises, the future of capitalism, the role of class struggle in social development or the history of Marxist theory.

Table of Contents

Acknowledgements
List of Figures and Tables

Editor’s Introduction
Rick Kuhn
Context
Grossman’s Argument
Initial Reception, Translations, Republications and Later Literature
Criticisms and Responses
Conventions

Introduction

1 The Downfall of Capitalism in Previous Discussions
1 The Points at Issue
2 The Conception of Breakdown in Previous Literature
3 The Final Abandonment of Marx’s Theory of Accumulation and Breakdown by Karl Kautsky

2 The Law of Capitalist Breakdown
1 Is There a Theory of Breakdown in Marx?
2 Preliminary Methodological Remarks. Economic Coordinate System: The Necessity of Simplifying Assumptions; The Assumption of Constant Prices as the Starting Point for the Analysis (Constant Value of Money; Equilibrium State of the Capitalist Mechanism, under Which Prices Coincide with Values; Exclusion of Competition)
3 The Equilibrium Theory of the Neo-harmonists. Otto Bauer’s Reproduction Schema
4 The Conditions and Tasks of the Analysis Using the Schema
5 Why Were the Classical Economists Disquieted by the Fall in the Rate of Profit. Despite Growth in the Mass of Profit?
6 The Views of the Classical Economists on the Future of Capitalism, Ricardo. and John Stuart Mill
7 Marx’s Theory of Accumulation and Breakdown
8 Marx’s Theory of Breakdown Is Simultaneously a Theory of Crisis
9 An Anti-Critical Interlude
10 The Logical and Mathematical Basis of the Law of Breakdown
11 Causes of the Misunderstanding of Marx’s Theory of Accumulation and Breakdown
12 The Factors of the Breakdown Tendency. The Problem of the Periodicity of Crises. The Course of the Cycle and the Problem of Establishing the Duration of Its Phases – The Cycle Research Institutes’ Symptomatology. – The Provisional Exclusion of Credit. – The Tempo of Capital Accumulation (in the Upswing) and the Extent of Population Growth
13 The Crisis and Underconsumption Theory. – Incorporating Credit into the Analysis. – The Cycle within the ‘Three Markets’: The Impetus to the Boom within the Sphere of Production (Business). The Spillover of the Wave Movement from Production into the Money Market (Money), Finally to the Stock Exchange (Speculation)
14 The Elasticity of Accumulation. The Problem of Sudden Leaps and One-Sided Development in Individual Branches of Production. The Relationship between the Extent of the Apparatus of Production and the Extent of Sales Turnover
15 Fetters on the Development of the Productive Forces under Capitalism
16 Marx’s Theory of Insufficient Valorisation Due to Overaccumulation and Luxemburg’s Theory of the Impossibility of ‘Realising Surplus Value’ under Capitalism

3 Modifying Countertendencies
Verification of the Abstract Theoretical Analysis by Concrete Appearances of Capitalist Reality
1 Restoring Profitability through Internal Structural Changes in the Mechanism of Capitalist Countries
2 The World Market

Concluding Observations
1 The Breakdown Tendency and the Class Struggle (Marx’s Theory of Wages. The Factors That Determine the Wages. The Historical Tendency of Wage Levels. The Class Struggle and the Final Goal)
2 The Collapse of Capitalism and the General Cartel

Appendix: Corrections of Grossman’s Calculations
References
Index, including Abbreviations and Micro Biographies