Marxist crisis theory to 1932 and to the present: reflections on Henryk Grossman’s ‘Fifty years of struggle over Marxism’

Rick Kuhn Australian National University [email protected] Henryk Grossman’s article and pamphlet ‘Fifty years of struggle over Marxism, 1883‐1932’ provided a survey of Marxism and particularly Marxist crisis theory since Marx’s death. He identified both innovations in and major departures from Marx's own approach amongst those who called themselves Marxists. The processes of innovation and departure have both continued over the period since. This paper explores Grossman's assessments of Marxist crisis theories up to 1932, subsequent theoretical developments and grounds these in an account of the material circumstances of their production. In 1932, Henryk Grossman wrote a substantial survey (over 20,000 words in my translation, which is an appendix to this paper) of Marxism over the 50 years since Marx’s death, for a very widely used dictionary of economics; it was also published as a pamphlet, ‘Fifty years of struggle over Marxism, 1883‐1932’ (Grossman 2013). He concentrated on economic analyses, though he also dealt with politics and, to a more limited extent, philosophy. It stands up well, particularly the discussions of Marxist economics. In his treatment of Marxism in general, however, there are two particularly noticeable gaps compared with contemporary assessments of the classical Marxist canon. A supporter of the Communist International, which at this stage regarded Trotsky as a dangerous heretic, Grossman was close to the German Communist Party that toed the line from Moscow. Grossman, nevertheless, acknowledged Trotsky’s theoretical work. But the survey does not mention Trotsky’s theory of permanent revolution with its important implications for political and economic analysis. The theory is, moreover, discussed in works by Trotsky in Grossman’s bibliography (Trotsky 1970 and Trotsky 1977). Parvus’s responses to revisionism, before his political apostasy, are also mentioned favourably, but not his contribution to the theory of permanent revolution (Parvus 19). The absence of Antonio Gramsci from Grossman’s survey can be explained by the Italian Communist leader’s focus on Italian developments in works published during his lifetime, very few of which appeared in languages other than Italian. Gramsci’s prison notebooks were still being written in 1932 and were only smuggled out of Gramsci’s hospital room after his death in 1937, many years before any of the texts were published.