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bhandari@Princeton.EDU (Rakesh Bhandari) said, on 04/05/00 at 12:39 PM:
>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?
I'm not sure of this one way or another. Stalinist political practice
flip-flopped around so that often you can find some period where it agrees
with an issue at stake and at another point it does not. Wage theory is
another example. I'm not sure how seriously to take it all.
>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.
Rakesh, I don't think I know what is being asked of me. Grossmann's
breakdown theory followed Bauer and we have had an interchange on Bauer.
So, I think you mean something else. I have a paragraph on Grossmann on
Luxemburg in my paper (which is quite critical of his attacking Luxemburg
in a context regarding Tugan-Baranowksy in which Lenin would deserve more
criticism but was not even mentioned), but I think you are referrring to
something not covered there. I had to get Grossmann through inter-library
(now returned) and the English translation is very incomplete. Can you
tell me more precisely what portion of Grossmann you are referring to and,
if necessary, I'll re-ask for the book. As to Blake, I know nothing.
Paul
P.S. Thanks, Andrew, for the citation in 2693 to Raya Dunayevskaya's *Rosa
Luxemburg, Women's Liberation, and Marx's Philosophy of Revolution*. I
realize you were quoting her remark on Hegel, but her chapter on Luxemburg
was not covered in my paper but certainly deserves to be (and now will
be).
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