Henryk Grossman And The Recovery Of Marxism

The first comprehensive English-language Grossman biography

This volume contains Marxist economist Henryk Grossman’s valuable political texts written when he was a leader of a revolutionary organisation of Jewish workers, then a member of the Communist Workers Party of Poland and later a Marxist academic.

This collection includes texts by Henryk Grossman that are primarily concerned with economic theory: monographs, articles, essays, letters and manuscript material. Many have never been published in English before, some in any language. The first in four volumes of Grossman's works, it provides the basis for a deeper understanding of Grossman's contributions to Marxist economic theory and critique of bourgeois economics. Rick Kuhn's introduction explains the contexts in which the texts were written and establishes their contemporary relevance.

Henryk Grossman is best-known as a Marxist economist but he also wrote valuable political texts as a leader of the revolutionary organisation of Jewish workers in the Polish province of Austria, before the First World War, as a member of the Communist Workers Party of Poland, during the early 1920s, and as a Marxist academic during the early 1930s. These writings dealt with the political situation, tactics and strategy of Jewish Social Democratic Party of Galicia, the initial reception of Marxism in Poland and then substantial entries on left wing movements, organisations and individuals in a multi-volume reference work.00Translators: Dominika Balwin, Ben Fowkes, Joseph Fracchia, Floris Kalman, Rick Kuhn, Ken Todd, and Frank Wolff.

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.

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 the most denounced of the preeminent economist's works. In a moment when Marxist economic thinking was beginning to calificy around the needs of official Soviet political policy--with the Comintern uplifting theories that proved the possibility of stability and allowed for accommodation--Grossman's opus would come to be seen as a challenge to the developing orthodoxy. Through a careful analysis of classical political economy, combined with his own economic modelling and the rediscovery of Marx's method in Capital, Grossman illustrates how the capitalist system, even when operating under supposedly ideal conditions, will by its own logic run into economic breakdowns. Grossman's recovery of Marx's own explanations for capitalism's crises and breakdown tendency is as timely as ever, and thanks to the wonderful translation by Rick Kuhn, is now available for the first time to English readers. This is the third volume in a substantial multi-volume reference work collecting and translating all of Grossman's writings.

A classic work in the Marxist canon on political economy

Introduced and edited by Rick Kuhn.

Pioneering Marxist studies of the transition from feudalism to capitalism.

Reading fiction from high and low culture together, Fiction, Crime, and Empire skillfully sheds light on how crime fiction responded to the British and American experiences of empire, and how forms such as the detective novel, spy thrillers, and conspiracy fiction articulate powerful cultural responses to imperialism. Poe's Dupin stories, for example, are seen as embodying a highly critical vision of the social forces that were then transforming the United States into a modern, democratic industrialized nation; a century later, Le Carré employs the conventions of espionage fiction to critique the exhausted and morally compromised values of British imperialism. By exploring these works through the organizing figure of crime during and after the age of high imperialism, Thompson challenges and modifies commonplace definitions of modernism, postmodernism, and popular or mass culture.