Economic crisis and the responsibility of socialists

[inthebrain]

This is an interesting take on things. Not sure where folks stand on this but interested to read the responses. Please read the article before posting your reaction. Thanks!!!!

Economic crisis and the responsibility of socialists

HENRYK GROSSMAN is particularly relevant today and not only because of his explanation of economic and financial crises, which I will briefly recapitulate. That theory was formulated and can only be understood as an element in a broader, classically Marxist analysis of capitalist society and the way it can be superseded. The specifics of Grossman’s political outlook help explain the generally hostile reception of his work in the immediate wake of the publication of his best-known study, The Law of Accumulation and Breakdown of the Capitalist System, Being Also a Theory of Crises, and subsequently. Grossman expressed his revolutionary Marxism not only in his writings, but also in political activity. That was not always flawless, on the contrary. But his views about the responsibilities of socialists are superior to fashionable notions of the responsibilities of intellectuals. Furthermore, the continuities and discontinuities in his practice and, in some periods, the inconsistencies between it and his theoretical commitments are instructive.

Economic crisis

The purpose of Henryk Grossman’s economic researches was to advance the class struggle. From 1920, if not before, he subscribed to a particular, Leninist conception of Marxist politics that overlapped with views he had already put into practice well before the First World War, particularly by helping to build a revolutionary organization of Jewish workers in Galicia.

If Lenin recovered Marx’s revolutionary conception of politics, Grossman recovered the revolutionary content and implications of Marx’s economic analysis. Like Lukács, who also drew on Lenin and restored contradictory class interests and perspectives to the center of Marxist philosophy, he stressed capitalism’s crisis-prone logic and its mystification of that logic. By exploring the economic roots and implications of commodity fetishism and their relationship to capitalist crises and revolution, Grossman also complemented Lukács’s arguments in History and Class Consciousness, which focused on ideology and revolution but not economics.1

Marxist and other criticisms of the way capitalism generates oppression and alienation powerfully justify the struggle for socialism. As a young man, Grossman was himself actively involved in the Jewish working class’ fight against both oppression and exploitation. But, following Rosa Luxemburg and against those who thought that capitalism could be reformed into socialism, he insisted that Marx regarded the bourgeoisie as incapable of consistently sustaining workers’ lives.2 Capitalism has a tendency to break down economically, throwing a part of the working class out of work, and attacking the living standards of those who retain their jobs. Today that tendency is particularly apparent.

Grossman made two major contributions to our understanding of economic crises. The first was already outlined in 1919, developed in his 1929 The Law of Accumulation, and further elaborated in (semi-published) detail in 1941.3 Capitalist production, he pointed out following Marx, is at once a labor process creating use values with particular physical characteristics, and a process of self-expanding value creating new wealth through the exploitation of wage labor. This analysis provided

a means of eliminating what was deceptive in the pure categories of exchange-value, thus creating a foundation for further research into capitalist production and affording him the possibility of grasping the real interconnections of this mode of production behind the veil created by value.4

http://www.isreview.org/issues/68/feat-grossman.shtml