Fifty years of struggle over Marxism 1883‐1932
Henryk Grossman

Translated from German by Rick Kuhn and Einde O’Callaghan
https://openresearch-repository.anu.edu.au/bitstream/1885/11086/2/Grossman_FiftyYearsMarxism2013.pdf
Appendix to Rick Kuhn ‘Marxist crisis theory to 1932 and to the present: reflections on Henryk Grossman’s Fifty years of struggle over Marxism’ presented at the Society of Heterodox Economists Conference, University of New South Wales, Sydney, 2-3 December 2013
Henryk Grossmann, Fünfzig Jahre Kampf um den Marxismus 1883‐1932, Fischer, Jena, 1932,
and as Part 7, ‘The further development of Marxism to the present’, of the essay
Sozialistische Ideen und Lehren I in Ludwig Elster (ed.), Wörterbuch der Volkswirtschaft. Band
3, 4th edition, Fischer, Jena 1933, pp. 272‐341.

Introduction to Henryk Grossman

 ‘The value-price transformation in Marx and the problem of crisis’ Rick Kuhn, 
Historical Materialism, Volume 24, Issue 1, 2016 

The transformation of values into prices of production, in volume 3 of Capital, was a vital step in Marx’s exposure of the anatomy of capitalism and the laws of capital accumulation. In ‘The value-price transformation in Marx and the problem of crisis’, Henryk Grossman dealt with the fundamental context and significance of the transformation and its implications for theories of economic crisis. While the issue at stake has been the coherence of Marx’s entire analysis of capitalism, almost all of the controversy over the transformation has been preoccupied with the narrower questio of the theoretical adequacy of his mathematics. This was the case both before Grossman’s essay, as he pointed out, and over the subsequent eighty years.1 The starting point in Grossman’s discussion was the method that underpinned the structure of Capital and the procedure of successive approximation [Annäherungsverfahren]. After dealing with capitalism’s most basic features at a very abstract level, achieved by means of a series of simplifying assumptions, Marx progressively lifted them to explain further aspects of concrete reality. Grossman had dealt with this procedure in a series of earlier works, paying particular attention to its implications for Marx’s account of how crises, arising from the growing organic composition of capital were intrinsic to capitalism production, and the division of surplus value into its phenomenal forms.2 In this essay, he focussed on the place of the reproduction schemas in Capital volume 2 and the discussion of the general (or ‘average’) rate of profit and prices of production, that is the value-price transformation, in volume 3. 

Introduction to Henryk Grossman, 
‘The Value-Price Transformation in Marx and the Problem of Crisis’
Rick Kuhn
School of Sociology, Australian National University
http://pinguet.free.fr/kuhngross.pdf

Abstract
Whereas most previous and later discussions of Marx’s transformation of values
into prices of production have focused on his mathematical procedure, Henryk
Grossman addressed the logic of its place in the structure of Capital. On this basis
he criticised underconsumptionist and disproportionality theorists of economic crises
for inappropriately basing their accounts on the level of analysis of the value schemas
in the second volume of Capital. Such a criticism cannot be made of Grossman’s and
Marx’s explanation of systemic crises in terms of the tendency for the rate of profit to
fall. Grossman’s article still provides insights into Marx’s analysis of capitalism and his
theory of economic crises, unsurpassed in the subsequent literature.
Keywords
Capitalism – transformation problem – economic crisis – Henryk Grossman – Henryk
Grossmann – Karl Marx – Marxism – method