A brilliant new biography of Polish historian and economist Henryk Grossman shows us the man - complete with silk white gloves and cane - behind the cutting Marxist analysis.
James Heartfield
As a left-wing activist in the 1980s, one of the hardest arguments to win was that the economic recession that had set in was not just a minor problem, but was intrinsic to capitalist society. Of course there were lots of people who thought they were Marxists - but for the most part that just meant that they identified with the trade union movement. Their Marxism usually meant that they mixed up a lot of Marx's categories - 'exploitation', 'surplus value', the 'falling rate of profit' - with things they had read in the newspapers' financial pages, without really understanding Marx's theory of capitalism. They did not understand that Marx saw these things as a total system, with each of its terms interrelated; still less did they understand that he saw that system as historically redundant, and increasingly at odds with human development. Trade union officers certainly did not want to overthrow capitalism. They wanted to get it to work better, and to get rewarded for doing so.
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