Economic Crisis and Socialist Revolution: Henryk Grossman’s Law of accumulation, Its First Critics and His Responses
Henryk Grossman was the first person to systematically explore Marx’s explanation of capitalist crises in terms of the tendency for the rate of profit to fall and to place it in the context of the distinction between use and exchange value. His The law of accumulation and breakdown of the capitalist system remains an important reference point in the Marxist literature on economic crises. That literature has been plagued by distortions of Grossman’s position which derive from early hostile reviews of his book. These accused Grossman of a mechanical approach to the end of capitalism and of neglecting factors which boost profit rates. Grossman, in fact, contributed a complementary economic element to the recovery of Marxism undertaken by Lenin (particularly in the area of Marxist politics) and Lukacs (in philosophy). In both published and unpublished work, Grossman also dealt with and even anticipated criticisms of his methodology and treatment of countertendencies to the tendency for the rate of profit to fall. Far from being mechanical, his economic analysis can still assist the struggle for working class self-emancipation.
Economía y política en el debate marxista clásico sobre el 'derrumbe' del capitalismo. Una crítica a partir del reconocimiento del capital como el sujeto de la sociedad capitalista
El proposito de este trabajo es examinar el debate marxista clasico sobre el llamado ´derrumbe´ del capitalismo a la luz del enfoque que reconoce al capital como el sujeto enajenado del proceso de reproduccion de la vida social. En particular, este examen se focaliza en el papel que juegan las relaciones economicas y politicas en el curso de la superacion del modo de produccion capitalista y, mas precisamente, del vinculo existente entre ambos tipos de relaciones. Para tal fin, en la primera parte del trabajo se reconstruye el debate en cuestion a traves de un analisis critico de las contribuciones que van desde las criticas fundantes de Bernstein (1899) y Tugan-Baranovski (1901) hasta las respuestas marxistas de Korsch (1933), Pannekoek (1934) y Mattick (1934). De esta reconstruccion se concluye que tanto las posiciones llamadas ´economicistas´ como las ´politicistas´ recaen en la misma concepcion respecto del vinculo entre las relaciones economicas y politicas: no reconocen a este vinculo como inmanente a la reproduccion de ambas relaciones sino como uno de naturaleza esencialmente exterior a las mismas. En consecuencia, el debate acaba forzosamente en un callejon sin salida respecto de la determinacion de la accion revolucionaria de la clase obrera. Sobre esta base, en la segunda parte del trabajo se propone un analisis alternativo de la superacion del capitalismo en base a una lectura metodologicamente fundada de la critica marxiana de la economia politica que se distingue por reconocer al capital como el sujeto enajenado de la organizacion de la vida social y, por tanto, a las relaciones politicas como las formas concretas en que se realizan las relaciones economicas. A su vez, esta lectura reconduce la cuestion de la superacion del capitalismo al examen de las transformaciones en la materialidad el proceso de trabajo determinadas por la produccion de plusvalor relativo.
The uprising of the marginalised: a socio-economic perspective of the Syrian uprising
More than three years after the outbreak of protests in a number of Arab countries, the role of socio-economic factors in these events is attracting more attention. One of the cases that needs more research is Syria. More than three years into the Syrian uprising, the socio-economic roots of the protest movement that became one of the bloodiest civil conflicts in the history of the Middle East need to be examined. While it has been observed that the Syrian uprising, contrary to some ‘Arab Spring’ countries, has been an uprising of more marginalised social groups with a strong role played by poorer segments in the society, particularly rural and rural-to-urban migrants, the socio-economic explanation for this is still underdeveloped. This paper aims at contributing to a better understanding of this issue by examining the political and socio-economic compromise that underlined the rule of the Ba’th party in Syria for four decades and unpacking how a combination of internal and external shifts that started in the 1990s and intensified in the 2000s led to the erosion of this compromise, providing the background to the events that began in 2011.