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Home > Henryk Grossmann

Grossmann's key contribution to political-economic theory was his book, The Law of Accumulation and Breakdown of the Capitalist System, a study in marxian crisis theory. It was published in Leipzig months before the Wall Street Crash of 1929.

1 Early life & Education

Grossmann was born into a relatively prosperous Jewish family in Kraków, then a part of Austrian Galicia. He went to Vienna to study, where his tutors included economist Eugen von Boehm-Bawerk and the "orthodox" marxian historian Carl Grunberg . With the destruction of the Austro-Hungarian empire at the end of World War I, Grossmann became an economist in Poland, with communist sympathies acquired during the war.

2 Career

From 1922 to 1925, Grossmann was Professor of economics at Warsaw University. He emigrated in 1925 to escape persecution at the hands of Pilsudski's regime. He was invited to join the marxian Institute for Social Research in Frankfurt by his former tutor, Grunberg. From 1930 onwards, after Max Horkheimer took the helm at the Institute, Grossmann rapidly became disenchanted with what appeared to him to be a degeneration into non-marxist or even anti-marxist projects of the Frankfurt School.

Though apparently never a member of the German Communist Party, Grossmann had remained a supporter of the USSR longer than his colleagues in Frankfurt. Hitler's accession to power in 1933 forced him first to Paris, and then via Britain to New York, where he remained in relative isolation from 1937 - 1945. He spent the last five years of his life in East GermanyFor the historical eastern German provinces, see Eastern Germany East Germany officially the German Democratic Republic GDR , German Deutsche Demokratische Republik DDR , was a Communist Party-led state that existed from 1949 to 1990 in the former Soviet.

Grossmann's work was finally made available in English translation in 1979 by Jairus Banaji, for an Indian Trotskyite organisation, the Platform Tendency. A recent edition is: BooksEnthsiast.com

3 Contribution to Theory

While at Frankfurt in the mid-1920s, Grossmann contended that a "general tendency to cling to the results" of Marx's theory, in ignorance of the subtleties of "the method underlying CapitalDas Kapital ("Capital") is a treatise of political economy written by Karl Marx. The book is a critical analysis of capitalism and of its economic practices. Marx bases his work on that of the classical economists like Adam Smith, David Ricardo, and even", was causing a catastrophic vulgarisation of marxian thought - a trend which was undermining the revolutionary possibilities of the moment.

The Law of Accumulation was his attempt to demonstrate that marxian political economy had been underestimated by its critics - and by extension that revolutionary critiques of capitalismCapitalism generally refers to a combination of economic practices that became institutionalized in Europe between the 16th and 19th centuries. Exactly which historic and current practices are considered part of "capitalism" varies among users of the term were still valid. Amongst other arguments, it sets forth the following demonstration (for a complete definition of the terms employed, the whole book is recommended):

3.1 The logical and mathematical basis of the law of breakdown

... Apart from the arithmetical and logical proofs that we have been given already, mathematicians may prefer the following more general form of presentation which avoids the purely arbitrary values of a concrete numerical example.

Meaning of the symbols

c = constant capital. Initial value = c_o. Value after j years = c_j
v = variable capital. Initial value = v_o. Value after j years = v_j
s = rate of surplus value (written as a percentage of v)
a_c = rate of accumulation of constant capital c
a_v = rate of accumulation of variable capital v
k = consumption share of capitalists
S = mass of surplus value, being:

Ω = organic composition of capital, or c:v
j = number of years

Further, let

and let

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Topics: Henryk Grossmann Capital Accumulation Rate Value Years Crisis...

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