Henryk Grossman: The Best Defender of Marx and Capital
Ted Reese
Abstract
This article reassesses the significance of Henryk Grossman’s The Law of Accumulation and the Breakdown of the Capitalist System (1929) as the most rigorous and systematic defense of Marx’s crisis theory produced after the deaths of Marx and Engels. Ted Reese argues that Grossman restored the revolutionary core of Capital at a moment when leading social democrats, notably Karl Kautsky, had renounced the idea that capitalism tends toward its own breakdown. Grossman demonstrated, through a reconstruction and extension of Marx’s method, that capitalist accumulation is inherently self-undermining: profit-driven expansion raises productivity but simultaneously depresses the rate of profit, generating a persistent tendency toward overaccumulation. Reese highlights Grossman’s demonstration that prior “harmonious” models of accumulation, particularly Otto Bauer’s reproduction schema, collapse once carried forward over time, thereby exposing the analytical limits of reformist interpretations. The article further examines Grossman’s account of crisis as the root of underconsumption, disproportionality, imperialism, and war, rather than a result of these phenomena. By tracing how counter-tendencies — such as wage reductions, capital devaluation, and imperialist expansion — only delay but never eliminate the breakdown tendency, Reese argues that Grossman provides the most coherent explanation for capitalism’s cycles of stagnation, destruction, and renewal. Grossman’s critics, both social democratic and communist, mischaracterized his work as deterministic, yet Reese shows that Grossman consistently insisted on the indispensable role of conscious working-class struggle in transforming crisis into socialist revolution. Reese concludes that Grossman’s theory is more relevant than ever in an era marked by rampant financialization, historically high levels of debt, automation, and deepening global overaccumulation. Grossman’s work, still marginalized within much of the Marxist movement, remains essential for understanding capitalism’s structural limits and for rebuilding a revolutionary critique capable of confronting what may be the system’s most advanced and potentially terminal crisis.
Keywords
Marxism, Henryk Grossman, Marxist crisis theory, overaccumulation, falling rate of profit, Otto Bauer, Karl Kautsky, imperialism, automation, scientific socialism, Ted Reese
