[ show plain text ]
Are Leontiev's viterupative comments against Luxemburg completely
politically motivated as (as Richard Day has shown) the Stalinists
themselves had under the guidance of Varga adopted an underconsumptionist
theory of crisis which was closer to Luxemburg's than Bukharin's
disproportionality theory or Preobrazhensky's excess fixed capital theory
or Grossmann's frop/mass of profit theory? At any rate, Paul Z, I am not
convinced that Grossmann's critque of Luxemburg is off base. For example,
what about his empirically based criticisms--that it is absurd to
understand the history of imperialism as a quest for the realization of
surplus value (for example, his history of plantation slavery is meant to
show that capitalist expansion had always attended to the production of
surplus value) or that Luxemburg's theory cannot explain the international
business cycle. I also think it is true as Grossmann's very good friend
William J Blake points out somewhere in Marxian Economic Theory and Its
Criticism (1939)that Luxemburg's theory does have fatalist implications,
though of course splendid rebel that she was, she did not herself accept
them.
Yours, Rakesh
This archive was generated by hypermail 2b29 : Sun Apr 30 2000 - 19:59:43 EDT