Rakesh, I was suggesting that you (or others who wish to rely on it) may wind up finding Grossman's work a sand castle, more so than the bourgeois order which hasn't done badly for itself in its persistence well beyond what Marx would have suspected. Your sentence "Luxemburg's heroic theoretical effort failed" mirrors Howard and King "her theory was wrong." This is the problem. Luxemburg's *Accumulation of Capital* is almost 450 pages of dense theory plus she wrote a long *Anti-critique*. This is a MAJOR piece of work and, understandably, few have the energy to really deal with it line by line. In fact, if we could just write "she failed", relying on a third party to do the job on her (Grossman, for example) we do simplify our theoretical lives. I am not proud of the fact that it took me personally a quarter of a century after I first became interested in accumulation of capital, along with the luxury of sabbaticcal year of research, to finally struggle with her work. Since I brought up Howard and King, I note they describe Luxemburg at the turn of the century as "young, aggressive and very ambitious" (p.78). Is there something special about being a woman? Neither Bernstein, Kautsky, nor Lenin are so described, nor do others get personality typing. Luxemburg's criticism of Bernstein, for Howard and King, is a "diatribe" (p. 80), but not Lenin's on Kautsky during WW1. After summarizing Bauer's answer to Luxemburg's *Accumulation*, they claim her work "an easy target" (p. 120). And Luxemburg's *Anti-Critique* is "distinctly ill-tempered". But Bukharin's (1924) style of rebutting her is unchallenged (p. 114). So you get an idea of what we are dealing with when we wish to turn around the weight of a century condemning her. Grossman was part of an effective machine to break Luxemburg's sword drawn against the bourgeoies order and both Stalinism (an accomplice to her theoretical murder) and socialism democracy (an accomplice to her personal murder) had good reasons for doing so. It was one of many factors preserving the bourgeois order you suggest is a sand castle. Paul Z. *********************************************************************** Paul Zarembka, editor, RESEARCH IN POLITICAL ECONOMY at ******************** http://ourworld.compuserve.com/homepages/PZarembka Rakesh Narpat Bhandari <rakeshb@Stanford.EDU> said, on 11/04/00: >the apparently stable and resilient bourgeois order is a sand castle. >The ones who have understood theoretically why this is so are Grossman, >Blake and Mattick Sr. Luxemburg's heroic theoretical effort failed. >Grossmann however drew the wrong political implications from this >breakthrough reconstruction of Marx's work. Mattick avers this case in >Anti Bolshevik Communism. I look forward to Rick Kuhn's work on the >political trajectory of Grossman, but in all honesty, I understand him >to have been rejected by Stalinists and the Frankfurt School >intellectuals alike. But Rick will tell the true story, I >suppose.
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