Fw: Liberalism (Locke, Mill) (fwd)

Patrick Bond pbond at wn.apc.org
Sat Oct 31 22:48:45 PST 1998


Ken, on Grossmann, can you provide some citations perhaps? Did the FS and HM in particular have a serious economic critique of their colleague Grossmann?

I've been most interested in Grossmann's debate with the then SPD finance minister Hilferding, in the late 1920s, which takes on great force in the 1929 book predicting the great depression. I understood this debate to be one between a fascination with rising financial power/concentration (Hilferding) versus financial vulnerability due to K's underlying overaccumulation tendency (Grossmann) -- and neither really getting to the point made a moment ago (by Tom?, can't remember) about the ability of global economic managers to *move the crisis around* through space and time (and psychological bluster). The latter phenomenon -- space-time displacement of capitalist crisis, only to find overaccumulation/financial speculation bubbling up somewhere else -- is, for me, at least, the late 20th century innovation that both H and G should have been capable of reading out of deep Marxist theory, but didn't. Both had monocentric understandings of the accumulation process, in rather different ways. No?


> Date: Sat, 31 Oct 1998 22:44:13 PST
> From: ken <kenneth.mackendrick at utoronto.ca>
> I usually don't say this but I don't believe what is written
> below - particularly about Grossmann. ...
> 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?
>
> Horkheimer and Marcuse's critique of Grossmann is
> consistent throughout the work of the FS.
Patrick Bond email: pbond at wn.apc.org * phone: 2711-614-8088 51 Somerset Road, Kensington 2094 South Africa work: University of the Witwatersrand Graduate School of Public and Development Management PO Box 601, Wits 2050, South Africa email: bondp at zeus.mgmt.wits.ac.za phone: 2711-488-5917 * fax: 2711-484-2729



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