Henryk Grossman and the Recovery of Marxism: Rick Kuhn: Review

University of Illinois Press: £19.99: pp332: 2007

Henryk Grossman was a Polish Marxist and contemporary of Karl Radek, who wrote an interesting version of Marxist crisis theory. As such his life certainly warrants a biography...writes Bill Jefferies....

Unfortunately, Rick Kuhn is not happy with this Grossman, a bit part player in the history of Marxism before World War I and author of an interesting theory after it, instead Kuhn wants to raise Grossman alongside Lukacs and Lenin as someone who “recovered and developed” Marx’s “conception of the revolutionary process”. Leaving aside whether the twinning of Lukacs and Lenin could ever be justified, even then Kuhn is dissatisfied, not only does Kuhn want to portray Grossman as a Marxist theoretician of the first rank, he also wants him to have been a principled communist fighter devoted to the cause of the proletariat. Unfortunately, the facts, as described in Kuhn’s own book, speak rather differently.

Henryk Grossman was the son of pre-WWI Galician Jews. His family were rich and their sinecures ensured that throughout his life Grossman never had to work for a living. He did work but without the whip of objective economic necessity, his restless soul flitted between whichever occupation grabbed his attention at any given moment.

Pre-war Galicia was one of “the least industrialized territories of the Austro-Hungarian Empire” (p4) but it had a growing socialist movement, which recruited the student Grossman in 1899.

On moving to university in Krakow, Grossman was able to devote more of his time to the socialist movement, ignoring his mother’s wish that he took responsibility for the family’s business, Grossman in this period did some useful work in organising the Polish Jewish working class.

According to Kuhn; “For him, capitalism was not a means to personal well-being but a system based on the exploitation of workers that oppressed, among others, Ukrainians and Jews.” (p8) A theme which Kuhn attempts to sustain throughout this book and which accords with his description of Grossman as an “organic intellectual of the working class” (p8), just how this description applies to a bourgeois student is unclear.

But as part of Ruch working alongside Karl Radek, Grossman organised various student protests and from 1902 until 1905 undertook the only really productive period of political activity of his entire life.

Grossman went to the Jewish workers who were neglected/ignored by the leadership of the Polish Social Democratic Party (PPSD) and played a key part in building the Jewish Social Democratic Party (JSDP), a party of Jewish workers organised along similar lines to the Russian Bund. The party grew rapidly, reflecting the chauvinist failure of Austrian Social Democracy to organise socialist activity amongst oppressed nationalities.

Grossman's criticism of the Austrian SPD leadership was over its refusal to apply its theory of national cultural autonomy consistently and its certainly anti-Semitic opposition to Jewish national organisations. The key difference between Grossman and the Austrian SPD leaders was his championing of the rights of an oppressed nationality.

In October 1905 the Russian Bund incorporated the demand for “national cultural autonomy” into its programme. Grossman ensured the JSPD soon followed suit.

Kuhn writes; “The motion on the national question that Grossman proposed to the Congress drew on the approaches of Renner and the Bund. Once democratised, through the introduction of universal suffrage, parliament’s competence in the area of national cultural affairs – essential educational matters – should be passed to democratic national institutions. “However, far this idea is from being realised,” he (Grossman) asserted, reproducing the General Party’s positive attitude to the empire, “everyone knows it has to be realized if Austria is not to fall apart.” Grossman also thought that, “freed from national conflict, the central parliament will become a field of utterly unobscured class struggle.”

Grossman was no Leninist or even a supporter of the revolutionary left within the SPD. Grossman endorsed the opportunist wing of Austrian Social Democracy and its attempts to resolve the national question within the framework of the Austro-Hungarian empire.

Strangely at no point does Kuhn refer to the struggle between the revolutionaries and revisionists in the pre-war social democracy.

But 1905 was significant for another reason - it was the high point of the pre-war left in Galicia and the defeat of the Russian revolution in 1905 hit the movement hard. “By the middle of October, Grossman realized that his recent conclusion – that there would soon be a very rapid and qualitative increase in the JSDP’s influence – had been wrong.” So “he was confident that the JSDP could manage without him for a while” (p57) and promptly left with his new wife for Vienna. Some organic intellectual of the working class.

Grossman flirted with the left in Vienna, but seeking to develop a legal career, departed for Paris in 1910.

According to Kuhn “Despite the distractions of parenthood, academic work and all that Paris had to offer politically and culturally, Grossman maintained his political connections with the Jewish working class in Galicia.” (p77)

Although what this connections consisted of Kuhn is never really clear, not least because a mere two paragraphs later he notes;

“Following his departure from the JSDP Executive, there was hardly any sign of political activity by Grossman for a decade and few indications of his political views.” (p77)

Not that much happened in the decade after 1911.

Kuhn seeks to make much of the Grossman’s letter in support of Radek during the pre-war witch hunt, but this hardly amounts to lining up with “the Bolsheviks in the conflict between the SDKPil, Russian Social Democracy and the International.” (p78)

As was demonstrated absolutely clearly by Grossman’s war time activities. Grossman became part of a “high powered military think tank” (p87) in the Austrian war ministry, Kuhn notes; “There is no evidence that he was politically active during he Austrian revolution.” But Kuhn still claims that, “In Warsaw, however, he not only pursued his professional career but also returned to active politics as a Communist.”

Supposedly “Luxemburg and Grossman were both committed to a fundamentally revolutionary, Marxist perspective.” (p94)

Certainly Luxemburg was but how so Grossman? Promoted to the job of “senior specialist” in the Austrian statistical bureau. (p96)

Kuhn claims that “The dominance of revisionism in Galicia and Vienna had limited the scope for his involvement in the socialist movement before the war.” (p97) Ignoring his own explanation of how Grossman supported the revisionists on the right wing of the Austrian SPD and dropped out of politics to pursue a legal and military career.

The sole evidence to the contrary seems to be his decision to join the Communist Workers Party of Poland (KPRP), but that is hardly evidence of any principled move to the left. Countless thousands of opportunists flooded into the newly founded Communist parties after World War I.

And indeed Grossman left his job, not because of an anti-communist witchunt but because he “was not prepared to accept the fudging of the census results….” (p99)

In 1922 Grossman found employment at the Free University of Poland, Kuhn notes that, “As repression eased somewhat after the Polish-Soviet War, the scope for radical political activity expanded.” (p101) (!)

In fact quite the opposite, the counter-revolutionary conclusion of the post-war revolutionary wave, meant that opportunities for revolutionaries were more limited and Grossman was arrested and imprisoned five times between 1922 to 1925 (p108).

There is “no evidence” (p110) as to Grossman’s attitude to the Stalinisation of the Comintern or the removal of the leadership of the Polish party. Forced to flea Poland to escape the repression, his political positions were no barrier to him gaining a new job at the Institute for Social Research in Berlin in 1925 an organisation which in Kuhn's words;

"...brought together a group of brilliant Marxists, not in an organization dedicated to the overthrow of captialism but in one integrated into the conservative and elitist German university system and financed by the profits from international grain dealing, the meat trade and proeprty speculation." (p113)

He published nothing between 1925 and 1928 and Kuhn makes no reference to any political activity in the revolutionary crises which gripped Germany in the mid-1920s. Rather Grossman spent his time researching political economy, before eventually producing “The Law of Accumulation and Collapse of the Capitalist System” in 1929.

And if Grossman has any claim to a contribution to Marxist thought then it is in this work that his claim lies. Grossman intended to rehabilitate the idea of the inevitable breakdown of the capitalist system, according to Kuhn, Grossman had “embraced Lenin’s renovation of Marx’s politics and Lukacs’s recovery of Marxist philosophy.” (p125)

He continues;

“The book’s key thesis is therefore only intelligible in the context of Grossman’s commitment to a conception of Marxism shaped by his own experience in the labour movement, the Russian revolution and Lenin’s political theory.” (p126)

Presumably Kuhn is referring to Grossman’s role as a statistical advisor to the German high command during the Brest Litovsk Treaty. (p90)

Grossman’s theory is a variation of the schemes of reproduction elaborated by Bauer in his refutation of Luxemburg’s Accumulation of Capital, before WWI (p128).

Bauer showed that as the cycles of capitalist accumulation progressed the organic composition of capital would rise causing a fall in the rate of profit. Grossman demonstrated that if Bauer’s model continued for 36 cycles, then based on this steady decline all profits would disappear and capitalist production collapse. This was Grossman’s theory of breakdown. But if each cycle takes around 10 years, then it might as well be never.

Grossman pointed out some counter-veiling tendencies to the falling rate of profit, as “the process of capital accumulation itself lowers the value of both variable and constant capital. A consequence of the introduction of new technology and superior mans of production is that commodities can be produced with the expenditure of less labor.” (p132)

And Grossman wanted to avoid accusations that his theory was mechanical;

“But I wanted to show that the class struggle alone is not sufficient. The will to overturn capitalism is not enough…only in the final phases of development do the objective conditions arise which bring about the preconditions for the successful, victorious intervention of the working class.” (p144)

Whatever his objections however, Grossman did nothing. Aloof to the debates in the international, he left Germany after Hitler’s accession to power. Kuhn claims that “He participated in the German antifascist movement in exile.” (p163)

But again the evidence is pretty thin on the ground. Perhaps Kuhn is referring to Grossman’s work producing a critique of Borkenau (p165), around “Capitalism in the period of the renaissance” or could it be his assertion that “Sadly the political situation is hopeless…But despite all this I am an optimist because the objective economic situation is hopeless.” (p169)

Grossman left for the new world before the outbreak of WWII, before returning to East Germany after the Stalinist take over in 1949.

Without a hint of irony Kuhn concludes; “since his youth, Grossman had held fast to the fundamental Marxist idea that socialism means the revolutionary self-emancipation of the working class.” (p220)

What’s not at all clear from his book is just how.

Sat 23, June 2007 @ 15:52