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