Henryk Grossman's 'The Law of Accumulation and Breakdown of the Capitalist System: Re-encounter, Reception and Relevance'

Abstract

In his The Law of Accumulation and Breakdown of the Capitalist System, Being also a Theory of Crises, Henryk Grossman recovered Marx’s theory of economic crises. At the centre of his analysis was the tendency for the rate of profit to fall and its counter-tendencies, which give rise to recurrent crises and point towards capitalism’s economic breakdown. Although its arguments have been highly contested, the book has been a reference point in the Marxist economic literature ever since its publication in 1929. The present article locates The Law of Accumulation in the context of Grossman’s life and work; outlines its main arguments; provides a survey of its initial reception, translations, republications and later discussions of its content; and considers the substantive criticisms that have been made of it, and theoretical and empirical responses to them, by Grossman and others. The article is a modified version of the introduction to the forthcoming, first full translation of Grossman’s book Show more