>As for 'spiking' the career of Grossmann - Marcuse *liked*
>Grossmann as a friend - Grossmann was, after all, one
>of the founders of the FS. Marcuse disagree with his
>orthodoxy. Remember - Grossmann predicted to the day when
>the revolution would take place - not unlike the medieval
>church fathers predictions about the second coming. How well
>would most people work with this kind of dogmatism today?
We will leave aside the real theological turn of Horkheimer himself here, and we will leave aside Grossmann's clarifications that a model of breakdown or catastrophe (as William J Blake translates it) is only formal and that the actual subjective readiness to revolutionary action cannot be derived therefrom. We won't mention Grossmann's much repeated argument that no system ever collapses by itself, though its overthrow requires a certain objective weakening of the system. We will leave aside Mattick's argument that a value theoretic model of breakdown cannot be subsituted for the reality of that model.
But you wouldn't have made such a dismissive comment without having chewed over what they actually wrote, right?
And since it will be impossible for you to cite a passage in which such a prediction is made, this characterization reduces to an unsubstantiated attack on Grossmann as dogmatic. But what could be more dogmatic than an argument by such means?
Ken, you may fancy yourself some kind of expert on the Frankfurt School and this is doubtless why your seemingly total ignorance of Grossmann's argument has forced you into slander. It seems to me that you are just saying that your ignornance is without consequence since Grossmann must have been dogmatic to have had his career spiked by Horkheimer. Or perhaps you believe that Grossmann must have been dogmatic because he went to Leipzig to teach after the War, but then don't forget to mention how Horkheimer made it impossible for Grossmann to teach at Columbia. Nor forget that Grossmann held the Soviet Union responsible for strangling the German Communists and preventing them from making a revolution.
In Grossmann's work, I read a theoretical critique of Hilderding's thesis of the possibility of stabilization (of which Marcuse is a heir) and political strategy of legal bank nationalization through parliamentary majority; an *empirical* and theoretical analysis of the increasing weakness of counter-tendencies in several different countries; an argument that the US stock market boom was not built on real foundations; an explanation for why capital had begun to intensify the labor process to the detriment of the working class; an arugment to why national competition would heighten and probably lead to war.
In other theoretical work, I read an attempt to demonstrate why capitalism has to be simultaneously understood as a technical and value process or as a developing contradiction between use value and value; why there is no tendency towards equilibrium; why Marx's main contribution was not to historicize or economics (rather he argues that Marx developed 1. a general theory of transitions in the mode of production, 2. a theory of the objective developmental tendencies of capitalism, 3. the theory of class struggle as the lever of historical change--to which Marcuse's Great Refusal is oppposed); an explanation of why the value price problem should not be analyzed on the basis of the equilibrium conditions of simple reproduction in vol II ( a point made by many Marxists today without mention of Grossmann's critique of Bortkiewicz on this matter).
You have to fathom the tragedy that while the bourgeoisie took care of their Schumpeters, Hayeks and Keynes, the left acceded to the marginalization of its Grossmanns and Matticks.
At any rate, why not refute Grossmann on the grounds attempted by Helene Bauer, Hans Neisser or Martin Trottmann? Why not critique his wage theory on the grounds recently attempted by Kenneth Lapides?
If you want to defend Pollock's theory of state capitalism, then respond to Neumann's critique in Behemoth and the continuation of that argument by Postone in Time, Labor and Social Domination. But it's sad that in all those critical theory readers, Pollock's theory is not juxtaposed to Neumann's refutation. I think this makes for a good debate. But it's a debate dogmatic followers of "Critical Theory" don't have the stomach for.
best, rakesh