The importance of Vijay Prashad’s book, The Darker Nations: A People’s History of the Third World, lies in its ability to trace the trajectory of the “Third World Project” – its genesis, growth and crisis – amidst the cacophonous range of local political economic structures and their varied articulation with global capitalism and the metropolitan world. The book shows us that beyond the simplistic orientalist image of the Global South as just being on the receiving end and reactive, there has existed definite protagonism with all its contradictions grounded in the peoples’ struggle against domination, oppression and exploitation. The following discussion with the author of The Darker Nations is an attempt to retrieve some of the salient insights in this formidable work.
Radical Notes (RN): First of all, hearty congratulations to you from Radical Notes for having authored a masterly work on the history of peoples (and their interactions) less traveled to, and much less talked about. But how necessary do you think is it to write a history of peoples still alive? Considering that the developing world is still at a developing phase, will writing a history amount to writing off of some reverberating presence of the old elements?
Vijay Prashad: Thanks for asking me to do this. I appreciate it.
The book is a history of the Third World project. It is this project’s development that I trace from the 1920s to the 1980s. A
wide range of initiatives came together in a relatively coherent platform of demands that was pushed at various United Nations and international forums. That project was assassinated in the 1980s by a combination of the exhaustion of the way the various regimes operated in their societies, by the debt crisis (itself a product of a newly confident financial capitalism), the collapse of the Soviet Union, etc. The people who live in the societies that once adopted the Third World project of course live on, and certainly they are making history. But not on the same platform as they once were.
RN: You have pointed out the dangerous redundancy of “East-West” paradigm. By that stretch, how valid do you feel were the “First-Second-Third” worldist categorizations?
Prashad: Like all such categorizations, the division has its merits and demerits. It usefully captures at least one surface level division: between the states of the advanced industrial world who had once been major colonial powers and, after World War II, had retooled the methods to maintain primacy (the First World – and its military arm, NATO); the states of the formally non-capitalist bloc, mostly the vast Russian confederation and Eastern Europe, who had adopted Communism and attempted to create a path out of the strong undertow of capitalism (the Second World); and the states which had been either recently colonized or which had a longer history of non-colonial imperial domination (Latin America and China), that had a variety of political lines but yet were united in the breech through the Third World project. I develop the three lines at Bandung, for instance, where one can see the divisions. But these are to be expected. What is so interesting is the congruence of views, between, say, Manila and Accra.
RN: You say, the Third World was a project, more than being a place, and so you offer a historical appraisal of the making of this project. Can you please tell our readers, why would the project gain prominence over the places? If a project is meant to have common goals, how common were the goals sketched for the Third World? Would it be less apt to suggest that the Third World was (or/and is) perhaps comprising those wretched places of earth ravaged by colonialism to have a grounded commonality in their origin, than to have evolved as an organized project through their enlightened leaderships?
Prashad: In the 1980s, the “third world” was seen as failed states and famine, poverty and hopelessness. The places seemed to have come “third” if not last in the great race for progress. That was the broad tenor of the discourse on the post-colonial period. I found this tendentious. It meant that these places were fated to failure, and therefore to charity. The condescension erased the history of struggle and defeat. I am interested, partly, in looking at the richer history of the epoch, to uncover the struggles and their ideologies.
The anti-colonial struggles that produced the new nations schooled the vast mass of the population about the roots and resources of imperialism. The Third World project, therefore, comes not so much from the intellectuals alone, for if it did it would not have had so much popular support. It came from the wisdom of these movements, which was articulated by the intellectuals and what you call the “enlightened leaderships.”
The Third World, in my analysis, is not so much a commonality of condition as it is a unity of purpose by the regimes that, at least in the two decades after the 1950s, came with significant popular legitimacy. And, for a time, it posed a challenge to the post-World War II dispensation, particularly with its agenda for disarmament, for a more just economic order (use of subsidies and tariffs, and commodity cartels), and for a world without racism. This was something.
RN: We understand by analyzing the schemes and plans of the third world leadership and their internal relations you have over-grounded a much-neglected aspect of the history of international relations – the intra-third world relationship. How much do you think this is representative of the threads that the majority of peoples found among each other even before the nationalist leaders awakened themselves to an “internationalist nationalism”? If we count the peoples more than the leaders while describing the project, don’t you think that even though the project is dead, the conditions for the project still exist?
Prashad: The conditions for some kind of project certainly do exist in our times. I believe that the contours of the Third World project need to be totally rethought. For instance, the Third World project did not fully grapple with the problem posed by an energetic and “free” finance capital, whose own relations to the state changed in the 1960s and 1970s. Castro, at the 1983 NAM meeting, raised this problem, but it was generally discounted. He proposed, for instance, that there be a Third World debt servicing payments strike. This would have been a very powerful way to at least reveal the power of finance capital, and its stranglehold on sustainable development. It was not to be, as I recount. So, the conditions of exploitation continue, but these are also sharpened and transformed. We need to account for the new conditions, for the new struggles against them, and for the possibility of an inter-national, global platform capable of dealing with an aggressive U. S. military, with the Chinese and Indian economies humming, and with the creation of the “planet of slums,” etc. This was my interest in editing (with Teo Ballve) a book on Latin America, Dispatches from Latin America: On the Frontlines Against Neoliberalism (which was published in the US by South End Press and in India by Leftword). I am now trying to assemble such a book on Africa and on African struggles: one wonders what will happen to the African left forces if the South African Communist Party widens the gap with the African National Congress (there is a wonderful debate ongoing in the pages of the SACP’s Bua Komanisi and in Umsebenzi… worth following).
RN: When we look for a “peoples’ history”, we are primarily seeking the history of the oppressed – within the ambit of the history of that region. In fact, the peoples’ history is posited against the rulers’ history, especially when the ruling class interests vary from the peoples’. How much do you think the documents or conferences that you have analyzed in the book provide insight into and how much they obscure this history?
Prashad: A people’s history is not just the history of the oppressed, but it is history told from the standpoint of the “people.” The early people’s histories, including those of Geijer on the Swedes and Palacky on the Czech, as well as Morton on the English, were mainly attempts to bring other social classes into histories reserved for the elites (when Pushkin proposed to write a history of a peasant leader, the Tsar noted pointedly, “such a man has no history”). I am not of the view that there are special classes in the world who should be the subject of history, and that their views are somehow more authentic than that of others (such as the working class or the peasantry – there are also reactionary forces within these social classes). The subject of my narrative is the Third World project, and it therefore demands an engagement with the lives and labors of all social classes, in contradiction, in interaction. What makes it a people’s history is that it is written with an ear to the struggles for a type of egalitarian and libertarian justice, which means that the grievances and imaginations of the oppressed are central to the narrative.
RN: Talking of women, the Third World is special. Not just as the most oppressed half of the population, women have also been the most celebrated political figures. In the ‘Cairo’ chapter you dealt with some of the prominent women political figures in the Third World. What do you think about the roles and positions of women within various alternative political movements in the Third World – as comrades and as oppressed?
Prashad: From my point of view, the basic thesis of the national liberation women’s rights platform is this: that their societies are torn by sexist traditions; that their states are plagued by misogynist laws; but that their social and political histories demonstrate that women within these societies can challenge national liberation and the Third World project to extend itself in a positive direction. They rejected “humanitarian interventionism” at the same time as they called for an internationalist critique of sexist injustice. The women in these movements had no illusions that their were problems within their political parties and formations, that they needed to fight on many fronts – against allies and enemies. That is the basic point of “Cairo.” The UN dynamic that led to Beijing (1995) draws from this lineage.
RN: Talking about the character of struggles in the Third World, the history is replete with struggles against dual oppressions: one against direct/indirect colonialism itself, and two, against the remnants and local agencies entrenched within the worldwide intensification of capitalist accumulation. Why should the Third World get credit for only the former struggle in which its leaders were glorified, and not the latter – in which its peoples were shunned? What do you think about post-colonial militant movements aimed at destabilizing those very powers that defined the Third World institutionally, but have not quite succeeded to reclaim power yet? How much have they contributed in the making, or rather, unmaking of the Third World project?
Prashad: Certainly these are important struggles. I emphasize them at various points in the narrative, for instance in the sections on Indonesia and Iraq. The social movements that are alive today were incubated in this period, but they don’t begin to flower until the 1980s. The water wars and what not are a product of the collapse of the Third World project, as I hope to show in the next volume of this study: The Poorer Nations: A People’s history of the Global South (should be done in about five or six years).
RN: You evoke hopes for a successor to the Third World. What can possibly prevent any attempts to assassinate this? If measured by the institutionalization of the Third World, the project was perhaps doomed from the beginning, since the political elites could not have done without the help of the bourgeois class – who in turn would have worked hard to undermine the further struggles. However, if measured by peoples’ agitations against colonial powers, domestic capitalists and the current neo-liberalism, then the hope may well be still alive. In your opinion then, at this juncture of world history, what should be the weapons of strength for the people world over to combat neo-liberalism? With the apparent aspirations in the form of the United Nations (UN) or the Non-Aligned Movement (NAM) getting redundant, and any dependency on institutional projects producing no radical shift, what paths are open for the oppressed of the world?
Prashad: There are no guarantees. But, on the other hand, one of the lessons from this history is to ensure that the leadership not insulate itself from the people, that the people be the arbiters of the direction of social change, and that their delegates widen the responsibility as much as possible. That’s a fairly simple lesson, but also one that is easier to articulate than to put into practice; particularly when the regime is under attack from imperialism and from the old social classes. The constraints often paralyze the ability to broaden the democratic nature of the movement.
I don’t want to second-guess the form that the new internationalism will take. Chavez has begun to push for the creation of institutions of the South, and to revive NAM. He has become a pole for this refoundation (at the African Union meeting in June 2006 he was greeted as a savior, which might be more than we need right now!). There is also the World Social Forum, which is useful, but as yet unable to drive a wedge into the world system – it neither has the power of the nation-state nor of the international organizations at the inter-state level. This is a serious structural limitation for the articulation of a plausible short-term program. Farooq Tariq, the head of Pakistan’s Labour Party, has recently likened the WSF to “a peacock dancing in the jungle,” by which he means that the WSF is beautiful but its beauty is being showcased away from the masses of people, insulated from their eyes. All this needs to be remedied.
The grievances and hopes are many, and I hope that The Darker Nations will be part of a conversation that seeks to find a new project that might solve the problems of our world that the G-7 can only exacerbate and not even ameliorate.
Radical Notes 
On Henryk Grossman, A Revolutionary Marxist – An Interview with Rick Kuhn
Rick Kuhn’s Henryk Grossman and the Recovery of Marxism (University of Illinois Press/Amazon) is not just another biographical sketch of a Marxian economist. In fact, it is an authoritative attempt to understand and interpret Grossman’s contributions to the Marxist critique of political economy as realizations of his lifelong commitment to the working class and revolutionary politics. The book begins with a comprehensive and lucid survey of Grossman’s political activism at the turn of the twentieth century, when capitalist expansion, intensification and competition were increasingly met with a rise in the self-activity and organization of the working class against exploitation and national oppression. The biography shows how Grossman’s approach to Marxism and his theoretical agenda congealed against this backdrop. This entirely new approach to Grossman’s Marxism makes his complex theoretical insights equally accessible to political economists, activists and non-academic audience. The following discussion with Rick Kuhn touches upon some of the themes in Grossman’s life and work detailed in the book.
Radical Notes (RN): Let us begin by asking you about the meaning of the title that you chose for this tremendous biography, Henryk Grossman and the Recovery of Marxism. It seems it has a dual connotation. On the one hand, it may
signify that the book tries to detail Grossman’s role in the recovery of Marxism during his own time, while on the other, it might be an attempt to assess the importance of Grossman’s contributions for the “recovery of Marxism” in our times. Is this ‘ambiguity’ intended, or we are just reading between the lines?
Rick Kuhn: The history of Marxism is not simply a history of doctrines and debates. We have to apply historical materialism to Marxism itself. Marx’s insights were only possible once capitalist society and particularly working class struggle had reached a certain level of development, in the middle of the nineteenth century. Without the growth of capitalist production and hence an extensive working class, Marxism, the theory and practice of working class revolution, is inconceivable. Later insights into the nature of capitalist society, and even more broadly, human society and its relations with nature, emerged in the context of the growth and achievements of the working class and the engagement of Marxists with new problems.
But the curve of Marxist theory is not a monotonic, upward sweep of accumulating insights. Particularly during periods of working class defeat or the adaptation of working class institutions to capitalism, earlier insights have been lost, distorted and denied. Under new, more favorable circumstances, later Marxists rediscover or reinvent them. Thus struggles for women’s liberation and over the environment were the contexts for recoveries and extensions of Marx’s previously neglected, misunderstood or obscured analyses of women’s oppression and capitalism’s implications for the natural world. Hence the work of recovery, in the first case, by Hal Draper, Barbara Leacock, Karen Sacks during the late 1960s and 1970s, and in the second by Paul Burkett and John Bellamy Foster around the turn of the millennium.
Against the background of his experiences in the workers’ movement before and after the First World War, and particularly the upsurge in class struggle during the period of the Russian revolution, Henryk Grossman recovered and extended some fundamental aspects of Marx’s critique of political economy. But Grossman’s best known publications during the late 1920s and early 1930s appeared after the revolutionary wave had crested. He continued his work in Marxist economics through to the 1940s and also made important contributions to the history of science. As Victor Serge put it, the 1930s were ‘the midnight in the century’. As a consequence of Stalinism and fascism the workers’ movement suffered not only terrible physical but also theoretical setbacks.
Hence, as you correctly observe, the need to recover Grossman’s own analyses and to re-recover those of Marx. The German New Left rediscovered Grossman during the 1960s in the context of a massive, international revival of class and other social struggles. I have continued this process. The later stages of my project happily coincided with the movement against capitalist globalization and the largest anti-war movement in history.
RN: One aspect that strikes us most in the text is that you have devoted around one third of the biography to Grossman’s formative period – to his politics in Poland and his contributions to a Marxist theorization of the national and Jewish questions. One reason, which immediately comes to mind, might be an attempt to rebut the general image of Grossman as an academic economist, not as a communist revolutionary, which you have effectively portrayed him to be. What lessons do we get from his early political life and his contributions to direct political questions like the question of national self-determination and its relationship with the proletarian revolution?
Kuhn: Those aware of Grossman’s work in economics have generally had little awareness, to put it kindly, of his engagement with working class organizations and their struggles. Just reading his publications, it is not difficult to spot his identification with the interests of the working class and commitment to the goal of socialist revolution. But those who propound the dominant interpretation of his economics still ignore this and have not bothered to investigate the details of his non-academic life especially before the First World War.
Although Grossman’s family background was bourgeois, he became an organic intellectual of the working class. In other words, experiences in his twenties, with building the organizations of the Jewish workers in Galicia (Austria-Hungary’s Polish province) from about 1902, at the latest, until after 1908 shaped his outlook. Despite some political shifts, for the rest of his life his understanding of the world was Marxist.
Grossman was the theoretician and outstanding early leader of the Jewish Social Democratic Party of Galicia. Before the foundation of the Jewish Social Democratic Party (JSDP), in 1905, he provided assistance to Marxists in Russia’s Polish territories. They were members of the Social Democratic Party of the Kingdom of Poland and Lithuania, to which the exiled Rosa Luxemburg belonged, and particularly the Bund, the organization of Jewish workers and then the largest Marxist organization in the Russian empire. During the waves of demonstrations, strikes and protests that swept Austria-Hungary when the 1905 Revolution was convulsing Russia, Grossman was a full-time revolutionary and agitator.
Jewish workers in Galicia, who overwhelmingly spoke Yiddish, experienced national oppression and exploitation. To mobilize them into the international workers movement they needed, Grossman argued, their own political party through which they could struggle for their own emancipation and that of the entire working class. The JSDP was a means of fighting oppression and exploitation and combating the politics of other left wing currents in Galicia. To neglect their national oppression, as the Polish nationalists of the Polish Social Democratic Party of Galicia did, left them open to the appeals of Jewish nationalists. Ignoring their exploitation and common interests with Polish and Ukrainian workers in Galicia and the international movement could only weaken their defense of their wages and conditions and the overall struggle for socialism.
So Grossman belonged to the very substantial tradition of opposition to Zionism amongst Jewish socialists. This is something I particularly identify with, as a Marxist with a Jewish upbringing whose political activity includes supporting Palestinian resistance against the intrinsically racist state of Israel. The relationship between racism and capitalist interests is also a focus in my current work on anti-Muslim racism in Australia.
RN: What are the major facets of Grossman’s rediscovery of the Marxist critique of political economy?
Kuhn: Key elements of Grossman’s economic work were already evident in his first publication on crisis theory, a lecture delivered in 1919. They were the relationship of economics to the class struggle, the importance of the distinction between use and exchange-value, Marx’s method in Capital and the inevitability of economic crises under capitalism.
The last is best known. Grossman argued that the tendency for the rate of profit to fall, discussed by Marx in volume three of Capital, constitutes a propensity for the system to break down. The tendency occurs because investment in improved labour-saving technology increases the ratio of capitalists’ outlays on machinery, equipment, buildings etc. compared with what they spend on purchasing labour power. It is only labour power, however, that creates new value, the basis of profits. Following and extending Marx, Grossman identified a variety of countervailing factors that can help maintain or improve profit rates. In fact he went into some detail about all the processes critics allege that he neglected. The offsetting mechanisms mean that the tendency to break down takes, in the longer term, the shape of successive crises rather than a single downward path to collapse.
Capitalist crises can also, Grossman pointed out, be understood in terms the impossibility of the outputs of different industries being consistently in the right proportions to maintain smooth growth. Both explanations of economic crises ultimately derive from the contradiction at the heart of capitalist production which is simultaneously the creation of use values, for the satisfaction of human needs, and of values, in the pursuit of profit.
RN: Throughout your work, not only in the book but also in other research articles, you have questioned the economistic and schematic interpretations of Grossman’s theory of crises. In fact you find the intersection between revolutionary politics and his classical Marxist theory of crises based on the decline in the rate of profit as “the core of Grossman’s major theoretical project in economics”. Could you elaborate on this?
Kuhn: I tried to make the biography of Grossman as accessible as possible. This included a style that is, hopefully, direct and engaging, and giving prominence to the story of Grossman’s life, the conflicts in which he was involved and the content of his writings. So references to subsequent evaluations of his ideas are relegated to the endnotes. With one exception. Giacomo Marramao observed that in ‘Lukács’s History and Class Consciousness that one finds the philosophical equivalent of Grossmann’s great attempt at a critical-revolutionary re-appropriation of Marxian categories.’ This is very important, although it needs to be extended because both Lukács and Grossman drew on Lenin’s recovery of Marxist politics and the inspiration of the Russian revolution. Both embraced Lenin’s theory of revolution and the revolutionary party.
Grossman explicitly stated that his best known work, The Law of Accumulation and Breakdown of the Capitalist System, was designed to supplement Marxist discussions about political revolution by examining the logic of economic crisis, which is an element in revolutionary situations. In relation to the dominant interpretation of Grossman-that he had a mechanical theory of economic breakdown-it is worth noting that he wrote this not in some obscure unpublished manuscript or letter, but in the book’s introduction.
The argument in Marx’s Capital, Grossman demonstrated, moves from discussion of fundamental, abstract features of capitalism through a series of steps to the everyday appearance of capitalist reality. The structure of Grossman’s book is similar. The final chapter, which is sadly not included in the abridged English translation, operated at a concrete level of analysis, focusing on the implications of the preceding analysis of crises for the class struggle. The purpose of the entire argument was to explore the objective preconditions for successful revolutionary action by the working class.
RN: Can you tell us briefly about Grossman’s understanding of imperialism? To what extent do his theorizations in this regard converge with and diverge from other major theorists of imperialism, especially, Lenin and Luxemburg?
Kuhn: This is one of my current areas of research. Like Luxemburg, Grossman argued that modern imperialism was a consequence of the advanced stage of capital accumulation and consequently the intensification of capitalism’s tendency to break down. But he rejected Luxemburg’s assertion that capital’s survival depends on finding non-capitalist markets in which to realize surplus value. For Grossman, the problem lies not in inadequate sales of commodities, but the system’s inability to create enough surplus value. Unequal exchange and monopoly control of key resources, imperialism, are responses to this problem of securing additional surplus value for metropolitan capitals. Meanwhile, the speculative export of capital and domestic economic speculation are consequences of the inability of capital to find profitable outlets for productive investment.
Grossman regarded Lenin’s Imperialism, the Highest Stage of Capitalism as containing descriptive insights, but as deficient when it came to providing an explanation of the logic of imperialism. He also refuted Hilferding’s emphasis, which Lenin took over, on the dominance of ‘finance capital’ as an ongoing feature of contemporary capitalism.
RN: You mention in the book that Sweezy in his survey of Marxist economic theory criticized Grossman’s crisis theory and Grossman in turn termed his criticism as “distortions”. Can you briefly tell us about these claims and counter-claims?
Kuhn: Paul Sweezy’s The Theory of Capitalist Development, published in the early 1940s, has had a massive influence on radical economics in the United States. Its systematic and accessible introduction to Marxist economics was a major achievement. The book also introduced Grossman’s work, most of which was not available in English, to a large audience and included some favorable comments about some of his secondary arguments. But it simply ignored Grossman’s explanation of why crises will occur as the rate of profit declines, but well before it reaches zero. To justify his verdict that Grossman had a ‘mechanistic’ approach, Sweezy caricatured the role played by Otto Bauer’s reproduction schemes in Grossman’s analysis. In Research in Political Economy (preprint), I synthesized Grossman’s various published and unpublished replies to his critics, most written before 1942, which nevertheless deal with Sweezy’s unoriginal objections.
Interestingly, Sweezy takes the structure of his own explanation of crises, the balance between tendency and countertendencies, from Marx’s and Grossman’s discussions of the tendency for the rate of profit to fall. Both Luxemburg’s and Sweezy’s approaches were underconsumptionist. Luxemburg insisted that capitalism tends to break down. Sweezy, like Keynes, argued that ‘the deliberate action of the state’-expanded government spending-could theoretically prevent ‘chronic depression’.
RN: How relevant is Grossman’s approach today?
Kuhn: Grossman provides a framework for understanding fundamental contemporary developments. It highlights the ongoing crisis-prone nature of capitalism and developments that help restore profit rates. Neo-liberal policies-attacks on wages and conditions, dismantling of the welfare state, knocking down barriers to trade with less developed parts of the world-are not the result of the fevered imaginings of delusional politicians, but efforts to restore profits rates. The same is true of the United States’ current imperialist adventures in Iraq and Afghanistan. Grossman’s discussion of speculative activity as a response to capitalism’s crisis tendencies provides insights into the phenomenal growth in global financial flows over recent decades.
RN: As you note, “Changes in the level of population, through the availability of labor power, influence capitalism’s breakdown tendency. Capital accumulation increases the need for workers to valorize capital. Eventually the impossibility of this valorization, because population growth is too slow, gives rise to crisis and unemployment: ‘Unemployment was a consequence of insufficient population!’ The need for labor power pushes capitalists to attempt to extend the length of the working day, to seek supplementary sources of surplus value and labor on the world market. The mercantilist preoccupation with population … and early colonial policy were not about finding markets. They were concerned with capitalist production and hence the need for labor. As much of the labor used in colonial capitalist production was extracted from slaves, Grossman developed, for the first time, Marx’s comments on the importance of the slave trade for the emergence of capitalism in an account of the trade’s origins and significance from the fifteenth century.” (133)
Can you tell us more about Grossman’s analyses in this regard?
Kuhn: Grossman had a long term interest in slavery as an institution under different modes of production. In a manuscript, probably written in the early 1920s, he dealt with slavery among Christian peoples to the ninth century. During the 1930s, he noted that the development of machinery in the ancient world was in response to problems that could not be solved by the application of human labor because slavery could be regarded as a natural perpetuum mobile, a machine that continues to operate without the expenditure of additional energy. In a letter to Horkheimer he offered a critique of the depiction of slavery in Margaret Mitchell’s bestselling novel, Gone with the Wind. The Law of Accumulation examines the role of slavery during the early period of Spanish and Portuguese colonialism, and also identifies forms of tribute labor imposed on native populations of Central and South America. The account of slavery also deals with French and English colonial expansion and the institution’s economic significance in the Americas into the 19th century. He was making an historical case against Luxemburg’s explanation of imperialism, in terms of the realization of surplus value. So, rather than offering a history of colonial economies, Grossman explicitly confined himself to demonstrating that the underlying logic of capitalist territorial expansion was the creation of surplus value.
RN: Grossman’s The Law of Accumulation and other major works were conceived during his association with the Institute for Social Research which gave rise to the Frankfurt School. However, it seems that after Carl Grünberg’s death, Grossman distanced himself from the mainstream activities and engagements of the Institute. One can understand the political and organizational reasons for his disillusionment, but were there theoretical and methodological reasons too?
Kuhn: In Frankfurt am Main and exile, through to the end of the 1930s, Grossman was dedicated to the Institute and valued collaboration with his colleagues. In New York, however, the core of the Institute around Max Horkheimer moved away from Marxism, particularly its stress on the role of the working class in liberating humanity. In theoretical terms, this culminated in Horkheimer and Theodor Adorno’s The Dialectic of Enlightenment of 1944, which rejected the concept of scientific explanation. Grossman remained a Marxist. He stood by and developed his own earlier analyses. But the desperation of the midnight in the century affected him and led to a massive contradiction in his thinking. After being very hostile to Stalinism for a couple of years, he became an uncritical supporter of the Soviet Union around 1936. So distinct differences at the levels of high theory and more concrete political analysis emerged between Grossman and the Horkheimer clique. In addition, because of a financial crisis, Horkheimer and Friedrich Pollock tried to drive as many members of the Institute as possible off the payroll during the early 1940s. This led to personal stresses and hostilities.
RN: In Chapter 5, the section that discusses the reception of The Law of Accumulation is titled, “An Economic Theory without a Political Home”. Can you please give our readers a glimpse of this ‘homelessness’ of Grossman’s theory?
Kuhn: The roots of the widespread misinterpretation of Grossman’s arguments lie in the initial reception ofThe Law of Accumulation. Bourgeois economists, social democrats and orthodox Communists were all hostile. Conservatives and social democrats obviously disliked the argument that capitalism is inherently crisis-prone and that the solution is workers’ revolution.
The defeat of the Russian revolution and the victory of state capitalism-personified in Stalin-led to the establishment of dogmas in all areas of Soviet intellectual life, including genetics. The explanation of economic crises which Grossman advocated did not comply with the views of Stalin’s man in economics. Jenö Varga explained crises in particularly crude underconsumptionist terms. Grossman therefore had to be wrong.
By the 1930s, social democracy and Stalinism dominated working class organizations around the world. Representatives of both currents accused Grossman of believing that capitalism would mechanically break down and that organized working class action was therefore superfluous. So no significant section of the labour movement took up his analysis.
RN: Despite a rediscovery of Grossman’s works in the late 1960s, till now his major book has been translated in English only in an abridged form, and your standard biography has only just appeared. Does this not show that this ‘homelessness’ continues? What could possibly be the reason behind this?
Kuhn: Yes, to some extent. But today the nature of the homelessness is different and less absolute. From the 1920s to the 1960s, the influence of Stalinism and social democracy meant that the space for classical Marxist politics and theory in the labor movement was very restricted. That has changed. The 1960s and 1970s saw the emergence of a new or revitalized revolutionary left. Then the downturn in the levels of class struggle around the world during the late 1970s through to the 1990s, coupled with many defeats weakened the organized labor movement. The end of state capitalism in Russia demoralized the Stalinist left, old and new, and led to the collapse or final embrace of reformism by many organizations which had illusions in the USSR. In many countries, the neo-liberal trajectory of social democratic parties since the end of the long boom, in the mid 1970s, weakened their leftist pretensions and eroded their memberships.
Of course this is a generalization, there have been ups and downs. The Brazilian Workers Party, for example, emerged out of working class mobilizations before emulating the neo-liberal behavior of its older social democratic siblings. In South Korea, Italy and France there have been some periods of quite sustained class struggles. And there have been important social movements, especially against the USA’s wars.
Overall, then, the left has declined drastically in size. But there is somewhat more space for currents, like that of the unorthodox Trotskyist tradition, to which I belong, which are open to Grossman’s analysis.
RN: Since for several years now you have been working on Henryk Grossman, can you tell our readers about your initial motivation? Also, what went into making the book? What are your hopes for the book regarding its contributions and achievements, politically and within Marxist circles?
Kuhn: Through Anwar Shaikh’s excellent 1978 essay on the history of Marxist crisis theory I became aware of Grossman. The fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989 prompted me to start learning German again. Before that my research was mainly on Australian politics and political economy, an area which I continue to explore. This, however, does not provide much scope for international travel. I wanted to do some work on Germany andAustria. Once I had a certain proficiency in German, around 1993, I began the Grossman research.
Studying Grossman was, in part, a search for my own roots. Not only because my parents were Jewish refugees from Vienna-Grossman’s home for several years-and my mother’s mother was, I discovered as a bi-product of my project, even born in a Galician shtetl (Jewish village) where there was a JSDP branch. Tracing Grossman’s story was also an investigation of my heritage as a socialist: the history of the institutions and struggles of the labor movement.
The research has taken me on many journeys through time, space and different cultures. A couple of examples. To grasp Grossman’s experiences in Galicia it was necessary not only to understand the institutions of the Austro-Hungarian empire and the history of eastern European Jewry but also to trace the activities of the JSDP, which led me to learn to read Yiddish and to add an appreciation of klezmer to my musical tastes. Grossman participated in or was affected by Marxist debates about the best way to organize and the national question, the zig-zags in the line of the Communist International, particularly as they impacted on the Polish and German Communist Parties. I stalked primary material from Kraków and Warsaw to Boston and Berlin, from Vienna and New York to Frankfurt am Main and the village of Tellow in the north-eastern German state of Mecklenburg-Vorpommern. In New York, the Australian novelist Christina Stead and her partner, the banker, writer and economist, William Blake were amongst Grossman’s closest friends. This led me into their biographies and a key source, Stead’s papers in the National Library of Australia back in Canberra, my hometown.
Hopefully my detailed and sympathetic account of Grossman’s life and work will disrupt the cycle of distortion of his ideas that social democrats and Stalinists began in 1929. Grossman vindicated the Marxist synthesis of theory with practice, analysis of objective realities and constraints with strategy and tactics designed to realize the working class’s capacity to be an historical, revolutionary subject. He provided useful tools for people who not only want to understand but also want to change the world. But I have no illusions about the impact of my publications on the level of the class struggle, the fundamental driver of socialist politics. There is no substitute for practical activity: building campaigns against the immediate consequences of capitalist exploitation and oppression, and constructing an organization capable of merging them in the struggle for socialism.