Henryk Grossman - Böcker

This volume assembles several of the Galician Marxist's most important essays, and serves as an accessible introduction to his project of 'recovering' Marx. Grossman highlights distinctive features of Marx's economic theory through contrasting with his forerunners, from Adam Smith to Jean Charles Sismondi. He moves on to show how many Marxist economists import faulty assumptions from mainstream economics into their analyses, and in the process provides a unique overview of the major debates among Marxists over politics and economics between Marx's death and the rise of Fascism in Germany.

This volume includes essential texts—many available here in English for the first time; some available for the first time in any language—by the influential revolutionary Marxist Henryk Grossman. This collection pulls from monographs, articles, essays, letters, and manuscript material to assemble Grossman's most important contributions on economic theory. The first in four volumes of Grossman's works, this collection provides the basis for a deeper understanding of his contribution to Marxist economic theory and the critique of bourgeois economics. Rick Kuhn's essential introduction explains the contexts in which the pieces were written and establishes their contemporary relevance.

Henryk Grossman is best-known as a Marxist economist, but he also wrote valuable political interventions from his various positions within the workers' movement—first as a leader of the revolutionary organization of Jewish workers in the Polish province of Austria before the First World War, then as a member of the Communist Workers Party of Poland during the early 1920s, and later as a Marxist academic during the early 1930s. These writings deal with the political situation, tactics and strategy for the Jewish Social Democratic Party of Galicia, the initial reception of Marxism in Poland, and include substantial reflections on the left wing movements, organizations, and leading individuals of his time.This is the second volume in a substantial multi-volume reference work collecting and translating all of Grossman's writings.

The Law of Accumulation and Breakdown of the Capitalist System, Being also a Theory of Crisis was Henryk Grossman’s most important, influential, and also most denounced work. As official Communist economic thought was petrifying, to comply with the needs of the Stalinist state in Russia, Grossman’s book challenged the developing dogma. Combining Marx's method and insights with a comprehensive assessment of the very substantial literature on crisis theory, Grossman demonstrated how the capitalist system, even under supposedly ideal conditions, will break down economically. Grossman’s recovery of Marx’s explanations for capitalism’s crises and tendency to break down is as timely as ever, and thanks to Jairus Banaji and Rick Kuhn, this wonderful, first full English translation is now available. The Law of Accumulation is the third of four volumes of Grossman's works.

The pioneering and still relevant Marxist studies of the transition from feudalism to capitalism in this collection are, with one exception, published in English here for the first time. Before his better-known work on Marx’s theories, Henryk Grossman wrote about the economic history of Galicia, the Polish province annexed by the Habsburgs, drawing on very extensive primary research. His later, devastating critique of Weber argument about Protestantism and the rise of capitalism is also included in this volume.