Recovering Marx: Past and Present

Abstract

Rick Kuhn's Henryk Grossman and the Recovery of Marxism sets out to bring Grossman's work to a modern audience. Grossman's most famous work The Law of Accumulation and Collapse of the Capitalist System (also a Theory of Crisis) stresses how Marx's prediction of a tendency for the profit rate to fall in boom leads to inevitable recurrent crises, which represent potential revolutionary situations/ breakdown points for capitalism. However Kuhn does not address how Grossman's work has been neglected by ‘Marxist’ economists. Kliman's Reclaiming Marx's ‘Capital’ explains how in the 20th century ‘Marxist’ economists have disputed the internal consistency of Marx's value theory and rejected his tendency for the profit rate to fall. Kliman explains how the Temporal Single System Interpretation of Marx reconfirms the consistency of Marx's value theory and his prediction of the tendency for the profit rate to fall. This article shall argue that both Marx and Grossman have much more to offer us in our current time of crisis than any modern ‘Marxist’ economist.