TY - JOUR
T1 - Henryk Grossman's 'The Law of Accumulation and Breakdown of the Capitalist System: Re-encounter, Reception and Relevance'
AU - Kuhn, Rick
PY - 2020
Y1 - 2020
N2 - In his The Law of Accumulation and Breakdown of the Capitalist System, Being also a Theory of Crises, Henryk Grossman recovered Marx’s theory of economic crises. At the centre of his analysis was the tendency for the rate of profit to fall and its counter-tendencies, which give rise to recurrent crises and point towards capitalism’s economic breakdown. Although its arguments have been highly contested, the book has been a reference point in the Marxist economic literature ever since its publication in 1929. The present article locates The Law of Accumulation in the context of Grossman’s life and work; outlines its main arguments; provides a survey of its initial reception, translations, republications and later discussions of its content; and considers the substantive criticisms that have been made of it, and theoretical and empirical responses to them, by Grossman and others. The article is a modified version of the introduction to the forthcoming, first full translation of Grossman’s book.
AB - In his The Law of Accumulation and Breakdown of the Capitalist System, Being also a Theory of Crises, Henryk Grossman recovered Marx’s theory of economic crises. At the centre of his analysis was the tendency for the rate of profit to fall and its counter-tendencies, which give rise to recurrent crises and point towards capitalism’s economic breakdown. Although its arguments have been highly contested, the book has been a reference point in the Marxist economic literature ever since its publication in 1929. The present article locates The Law of Accumulation in the context of Grossman’s life and work; outlines its main arguments; provides a survey of its initial reception, translations, republications and later discussions of its content; and considers the substantive criticisms that have been made of it, and theoretical and empirical responses to them, by Grossman and others. The article is a modified version of the introduction to the forthcoming, first full translation of Grossman’s book.
U2 - 10.26587/marx.17.3.202008.011
DO - 10.26587/marx.17.3.202008.011
M3 - Article
VL - 17
SP - 285
EP - 359
JO - Marxism 21
JF - Marxism 21
IS - 3
ER -