Henryk Grossman on capitalist expansion and

imperialism 1

Rick Kuhn
Marx and Engels identified the process of capitalist globalization in the Communist manifesto
The need of a constantly expanding market for its products chases the bourgeoisie
over the entire surface of the globe. It must nestle everywhere, settle everywhere,
establish connections everywhere.
…
The bourgeoisie, by the rapid improvement of all instruments of production, by the
immensely facilitated means of communication, draws all, even the most barbarian,
nations into civilization. The cheap prices of commodities are the heavy artillery
with which it forces the barbarians’ intensely obstinate hatred of foreigners to
capitulate. It compels all nations, on pain of extinction, to adopt the bourgeois mode
of production…
To this account they linked economic crises.
For many a decade past, the history of industry and commerce is but the history of
the revolt of modern productive forces against modern conditions of production,
against the property relations that are the conditions for the existence of the
bourgeois and of its rule. It is enough to mention the commercial crises that, by their
periodical return, put the existence of the entire bourgeois society on its trial, each
time more threateningly… In these crises, there breaks out an epidemic that, in all
earlier epochs, would have seemed an absurdity—the epidemic of over-production…
And how does the bourgeoisie get over these crises? On the one hand, by enforced
destruction of a mass of productive forces; on the other, by the conquest of new
markets, and by the more thorough exploitation of the old ones. That is to say, by
paving the way for more extensive and more destructive crises, and by diminishing
the means whereby crises are prevented. 2
The theory of economic crises presented here was a very preliminary one, superseded by Marx’s
more systematic and detailed explanations in Capital, particularly volume three. For more than a
generation, however, Marxists failed to employ Marx’s mature approach to economic crises.
Karl Kautsky and Rosa Luxemburg, for example, relied on the argument in the Manifesto and
some passages in Capital compatible with it to attribute the late 19th century surge in
competition amongst the most powerful capitalist states and in their colonial activities to
capitalism’s crisis tendencies. Capitalism, they believed, lacked a mechanism which ensured
that all the commodities produced could be sold. In fact, the output of commodities tended to
expand more rapidly than the scope for their consumption, because of efforts by capitalists to
keep their workers’ wages down. If products could not be sold, then the surplus value embodied
in them could not be ‘realized’ in the form of money, and profits suffered. One way to solve this
problem was to export commodities and capital to undeveloped countries. 3 In making her case,
Luxemburg argued that Marx had misunderstood his own analysis of capitalist reproduction in
volume two of Capital. 4

Rick Kuhn is the author of Henryk Grossman and the recovery of Marxism (University of Illinois Press, 2007) and
the editor of Class and struggle in Australia (Pearson Australia, 2005). A member of Socialist Alternative, he
teaches at the Australian National University and was the convener of the anti-war coalition in Canberra before and
during the invasion of Iraq. Information and contact: www.anu.edu.au/polsci/rick, Rick.Kuhn@anu.edu.au.
This essay is a preprint, scheduled for publication in
International socialist review 56 November-December 2007.
Rick Kuhn Grossman on imperialism

Rudolf Hilferding, in his Finance capital, explained crises in terms of disproportional growth in
the output of different industries and departments of production, and made no particular
connection between them and imperialism. Nor did the Bolshevik leaders Nikolai Bukharin and
Vladimir Ilych Lenin, who drew on Hilferding’s discussion of imperialism. In his most
important work on imperialism, Lenin included little more than the following on the connection
between imperialism and capitalism’s crisis tendencies: ‘The need to export capital arises from
the fact that in a few countries capitalism has become “overripe” and (owing to the backward
state of agriculture and the poverty of the masses) capital cannot find a field for “profitable”
investment.’ 5
Henryk Grossman identified the importance of Marx’s mature arguments about economic crises
in Capital. He insisted that Luxemburg was correct in her insistence that Marx had developed a
theory of the tendency for capitalism to break down and that this tendency gave rise to
imperialism. But Grossman contested her specific explanation of capitalism’s breakdown
tendency and hence economic crises. Many of his insights into the spread of capitalism across
the planet and the forms this has taken emerged from his elaboration of Marx’s theory of
capitalist breakdown, recently examined at length elsewhere. 6 There has been no systematic
presentation or evaluation his contributions to the Marxist theory of capitalist expansion and
imperialism, the focus of the discussion below. 7
The first part deals with the consequences of imperial expansion into new areas during early
stages of the development of the capitalist mode of production. It starts by outlining how, before
the First World War, Grossman’s political activities and studies of the economic history and
political economy of Galicia influenced his approach. In later work, Grossman examined the
tendency for the rate of profit to fall and mechanisms that offset it, including capitalist trade and
particularly characteristics of imperialism from the late 19th century. The second part therefore
outlines and assesses his approach to imperialism under mature capitalism, including efforts to
correct and provide a more systematic theoretical foundation for Lenin’s analysis. The first sub-
section deals with trade. Those that follow address the role of monopoly, capital export and two
weaker concepts, ‘finance capital’ and ‘the aristocracy of labour’.

Early capitalist expansion

Well before he began to work on Marxist crisis theory, Grossman was concerned about issues
closely related to the development of imperialism: the ‘national question’ and racism. His first
published work, in 1905, stressed the importance of the self-organization of Jewish workers as
the best means to combat their exploitation as workers and their oppression as Jews. 8 This
argument drew on the positions of the General Jewish Workers Union of Lithuania, Poland, and
Russia (known as the Bund)—until the 1905 revolution easily the largest Marxist organization
in the Russian Empire.
As a leader of the Jewish Social Democratic Party of Galicia (JSDP), Grossman examined the
economic backwardness of Austria-Hungary’s Polish province. Galicia’s problems were
primarily due to the influence of the szlachta, the Polish nobility, which was an obstacle to
capitalist development. 9
Focusing on conflicting material interests, this analysis informed research for his higher doctoral
thesis. Grossman documented and assessed the trade policies adopted by the Habsburg
monarchs, Maria Theresia and Josef II, for their newly won Galician territories up to 1790, that
is during an early stage of the transition to capitalism in eastern Europe. The Habsburg Empire
was a major beneficiary of the partitions which dismembered the aristocratic Republic of Poland.
The results of Grossman’s studies were published in a long essay, in 1912, a shorter article on
Galician trade statistics, in 1913, and the thesis, in 1914. 10

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Grossman argued against the Polish nationalist orthodoxy that the Habsburg Empire was
responsible for Galicia’s backwardness after its annexation, by preventing economic
development and turning the province into a colonial market for goods produced in the
heartlands of the Empire. In fact, the enlightened absolutist monarchs had pursued mercantilist
trade policies designed to promote Galicia’s trade and industry. Their regime contrasted
favorably with the feudal order of the old Polish Republic which had hindered the expansion of
industry and urban life for decades. 11
Drawing on complementary analyses by his contemporary Franciszek Bujak, Grossman rejected
any romanticization of the old Polish Republic ‘The principal cause of the lack of industrial
development and city life in Poland is the same as the reason for the tragic downfall of Polish
state life in general: 200 years of short sighted economic policy dictated by the class interests of
the Polish nobility!’ 12 After the first partition of Poland in 1772, the Austrian authorities in
Galicia were responsible for a very backward province, cut off from its previous markets. The
policies of Maria Theresia and Josef II sought to sustain the economy of their new Galician
possession and increase its value. They promoted production for the local market, attempted to
secure markets for the province’s exports and eliminated the tax-free status of enterprises run by
the szlachta. Their ‘reforms were… unavoidable for Galicia and beneficial for the majority of
the population. The Polish nobility was in the mass still too backward and spiritually decadent to
understand, still less to accommodate itself to the work of reform.’ 13
A Bundist insight that constituted a further attack on Polish national prejudices, Grossman
maintained that the main flaw in the Austrian economic policy for Galicia during this period was
discrimination against the Jews. In the 18th century, Jews had been a large proportion of the
urban population and, as merchants, were pioneering industrialization by promoting the putting-
out system in textile production and other sectors of manufacturing. The large fiscal burdens
placed on them by the Habsburgs impoverished an economically dynamic element in the
province. Galicia was still economically backward and Galician Jews were still oppressed more
a hundred years later. 14
The period of economic progress under Maria Theresia and particularly Josef was brief.
With the death of the great monarch, the epoch of industrialization in Austria and
Galicia came to a halt. At the time of the French revolution, into the Napoleonic
period and for many years to come, feudal, agrarian, conservative reaction, in
Austria as well as Galicia, choked embryonic industry. Fear of revolution, fear of big
capital, which supported the First Consul [Napoleon], fear of the spirit of unrest
which began to develop in industrial centers (unemployment!) led to an unceasing
fight against industry, especially big industry in Austria in the period to 1835. …
That ‘Austria should remain an agrarian country’ became the only aim of economic
policy during this period. 15
So, Grossman demonstrated, ‘during the 18th Century there was no conflict of economic
interests between Galicia and Austria, as has been so far asserted in the literature on this subject’.
His conclusion contradicted the Polish nationalist view that the nobility, committed to national
independence, had been a progressive force. Grossman drew on the work of the Kraków School
of historiography, associated with his former teacher Michał Bobrzyński, which apologized for
Austrian rule in Galicia, 16 But Grossman pointed out that
On the surface there were some conflicts, but in reality the industrial interests of
Galicia were strictly tied to Austrian industrial development. So long as the
dominant trends in Austria were progressive, in the period of reforms and
industrialization, the same trends were apparent in Galicia. The moment that
Austrian industry started to tremble, industrial development in Galicia was choked

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off. Both were victims of feudal, agrarian, conservative reaction not the industry of
other countries! 17
Paradoxically, the stance of nationalist Polish historiography in Galicia was commensurate with
the theoretical position of Rosa Luxemburg, a renowned and fierce opponent of Polish
nationalism. She explained capitalist expansion in terms of metropolitan industries’ need to find
markets in which their products could be sold, and hence surplus value realized. 18 On the
contrary, Grossman argued, colonialism was driven by the need to exploit labor and create
surplus value. This was even true of colonialism from the 15th century. 19
Only once we have recognize the ‘insatiable appetite for the labor of others’ 20 as the
driving force of the capitalist mode of production have we achieved the appropriate
theoretical foundation for assessing the individual phases of capitalism in its
historical form.
The question which concerns us here is the character of the policy of colonial
expansion under early capitalism. What was the driving force of this policy? Was it
actually a matter of the sale of commodities, of the ‘realization’ of surplus value
produced in Europe, which created the preconditions for capitalism and capital
accumulation in Europe? Did European capitalism with the help of its colonial
policy from the 16th to the 18th century actually seek and find consumers for
commodities that it could not otherwise sell? That is how it must have been, if Rosa
Luxemburg’s theory is correct. 21
Referring back to his own work on the development of official statistics in Austria, Grossman
pointed out that both the domestic mercantilist and colonial policies of early capitalism
recognized the importance of population as the foundation of power and expanded production. 22
The forced labor of the indigenous populations of Caribbean, Central and South America, and
especially the African slave trade made the plantations and mines in colonies of Portugal and
Spain tremendously lucrative. 23 The process of colonial expansion developed here not according
to Luxemburg’s formula. Surplus value produced under capitalist relations of production in
Europe was not ‘realized’ through colonial trade, rather surplus value squeezed out of
plantation slaves in the colonies was ‘realized in the developed capitalist countries of Europe.’ 24
Citing Marx (in a discussion of ground rent in the unfinished manuscript eventually published as
Theories of surplus value), Grossman maintained that ‘where commercial speculations figure
from the start and production is intended for the world market’, in plantation colonies ‘capitalist
production exists, although only in a formal sense, since the slavery of Negroes precludes free
wage-labor, which is the basis of capitalist production. But the business in which slaves are used
is conducted by capitalists. The method of production which they introduce has not arisen out of
slavery but is grafted on to it.’ 25 Certainly the extraction of a surplus from the labor of coerced
Native Americans and slaves from Africa were important in the expansion of the Portuguese and
Spanish colonial empires, and eventually played a role in the global process that resulted in the
emergence and then rapid expansion of capitalist mode of production in England and the
Netherlands. But Grossman’s account included early stages in Portugal’s and Spain’s overseas
imperial activities, from the late 15th century, when its dynamic was predominantly feudal. The
direct connections of colonial slave production were at the outset mainly with feudal relations in
the metropolitan states and a world market that was still essentially precapitalist, and had existed
for many centuries.
The argument of Marx/Grossman is much more convincing when applied to the later colonial
activities and the hugely profitable slave trade conducted by England, the Netherlands and
France, as well as slave production for international capitalist markets, by plantations in Latin
America and especially the south of the United States of America in the 19th century. 26 Invoking

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Marx, Grossman insisted that ‘Direct slavery is just as much the pivot of bourgeois industry as
machinery. Without slavery you have no cotton; without cotton you have no modern industry.’
But industrialization eventually undermined the advantages of slavery for capital accumulation.
The banning of the slave trade at the Congress of Vienna in 1815, the end of slave
labor in the United States of America in the 1860s… were the consequence of the
industrial revolution of the last third of the 18th century and the initial introduction of
machines. 27
The expansion of capitalism across the globe, primarily in the pursuit of surplus value as
(opposed to markets), was typical not only of early but also mature capitalism, as production by
slaves declined.

Imperialism under mature capitalism

In The law of accumulation and breakdown of the capitalist system, published in 1929,
Grossman reconstructed Marx’s account of economic crises deriving from the tendency for the
rate of profit to fall. This provided a more solid foundation for Luxemburg’s insistence that
capitalism has a tendency to break down, compared with her underconsumptionist theory of
economic crises. The book can also be read as a sustained justification of her argument that
imperialism was a necessary consequence of capitalism’s proneness to economic crises and as a
positive critique of Lenin’s theory of imperialism.
For Grossman, as for Luxemburg, ‘the growing tendency to break down and the strengthening
of imperialism are merely two sides of the same empirical complex’. 28 ‘The modern imperialism
of capitalist states is the necessary effort, through economic expansion whose final stage is the
incorporation of foreign territories by the state, to overcome the tendency to breakdown, the
failure of valorization, by securing the flow of additional surplus value from outside.’ 29
The third chapter of The law of accumulation examined counter-tendencies to the tendency for
the rate of profit to fall, developing points Marx made on a couple of pages in Capital volume 3
and adding others. 30 The discussion below outlines Grossman’s treatment of countertendencies
that went beyond the domestic economy under the headings he employed: foreign trade,
monopoly, and capital export.
In assessing the implications of foreign trade, Grossman built on an analysis already apparent in
his first surviving work on economic crises. As against Luxemburg, he rejected the hypothesis
that ‘sees in the existence of non-capitalist foreign markets an indispensable condition for
realizing’ surplus value’. His implicit basis was Otto Bauer’s use of the production schemes in
Capital volume 2 to demonstrate that capital accumulation is possible without recourse to her
‘third persons’. 31 In a study of the thought of the 18th century Swiss economist Simonde de
Sismondi in 1923, and a demolition of Fritz Sternberg’s book on imperialism in 1928, Grossman
made a similar point. 32 The critique of Sternberg argued that the fundamental cause of economic
crises is that capital accumulation itself undermines the valorization of capital (the creation of
new value); foreign trade is only one of a series of factors which can, for a time, blunt this
contradiction. 33
Grossman’s 1919 paper had drawn attention to the importance of grasping the contradictory
unity of capitalist commodities as ‘use-values’, with particular material characteristics, and as
‘values’, the products of commodified human labor. 34 Now he stressed that ‘By increasing the
multiplicity of products foreign trade has the same impact as product diversification on the
home market. An increasing variety of use values facilitates accumulation and weakens the
breakdown tendency.’ 35 The production of new kinds of use values expands the scope for
creating surplus value.

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Foreign trade
By allowing greater economies in the scale of production and distribution, foreign trade also
raises profit rates. With increased output, a reduction of production costs through the use of
more specialized machinery and equipment on the one hand, and the training of more expert
workers, on the other, becomes possible. The same is true for both the transportation of greater
volumes of an industry’s raw materials and final products. An increased scale of distribution
makes it possible to eliminate intermediaries, who take their cut, and so to reduce unproductive
expenditure. 36
The transformation of values into prices of production, through the equalization of profit rates
across different industries, does not only occur within national economies. The formation of a
world rate of profit means that trade involves the transfer of surplus value from less to more
developed countries. Commodities produced with a lower organic composition of capital (the
ratio of outlays on wages to those on means of production and raw materials) sell below their
value, while those produced with a higher organic composition sell above theirs. If the rate of
profit is lower for commodities whose production involves a high organic composition of capital
(generally, in developed countries) capital would flow out of industries making them and their
output would decline, so that their prices are bidded up while the production of commodities
with a lower organic composition of capital (generally, in less developed countries) would rise
and their prices fall. This was a rigorous formulation of a theory of ‘unequal exchange’, a term
Grossman used long before the idea became fashionable in the 1970s. Already during the
Middle Ages, as Marx had pointed out, unequal exchange between town and country was a
primary source of accumulation of urban capital. ‘The further development and extension of the
capitalist mode of production from the urban to the world economy did not change the nature of
this kind of price formation but rather developed it fully.’ 37
In the phase of capital accumulation which has progressed further it becomes ever
harder to valorize the tremendously accumulated mass of capital, which means
nothing other than that the tendency to break down comes into play. Only then does
the question of the injection of supplementary profits from outside, by means of
foreign trade, become a life or death question for capitalism. It is precisely a
question of weakening, of neutralizing, the tendency to break down. Hence the
ferocity of imperialist expansion precisely in this late phase of capital accumulation.
As, in relation to the transfer of profits from outside, it does not matter whether the
exploited country is a capitalist or non-capitalist (agrarian) country, and as the
exploited country, for its part, can exploit other still less developed countries by
means of foreign trade, capital accumulation in its late phase leads to a sharpened
competition in the world market amongst all capitalist countries. For the weakening
of the tendency to break down through higher valorization or, what amounts to the
same thing, the extension of the existence of one capitalist state is achieved at the
expense of another. The technologically and economically more developed country
appropriates supplementary surplus value at the expense of the more backward
country. In addition to more acute pressure on wages and class struggle against the
working class, the accumulation of capital produces an ever more destructive
struggle among capitalist states, a continuous revolutionizing of technology,
‘rationalization’, Taylorization or Fordization of the leading capitalist powers, in
order, through technological and organizational advantage, to achieve superiority in
the world market… 38
Otto Bauer, as Grossman acknowledged, had identified this mechanism operating between
industrial and agrarian areas of the Austro-Hungarian Empire, without linking it to capitalism’s
crisis tendency. 39

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This mechanism is of particular relevance today. Between 1995 and 2005 the Chinese share of
global exports more than doubled to over eight per cent. 40 The commodities exported are less
and less confined to clothing, textiles and footwear; increasingly labor-intensive goods which
involve more sophisticated technologies, like consumer electronics or computer circuit boards,
are imported rather than produced in the developed capitalist world.
Against Luxemburg (and third-worldists today), Grossman pointed out that the industrialization
of agrarian countries does not intensify capitalism’s tendency to break down because surplus
value can no longer be realized. ‘On the contrary, industrialization signifies an increase in the
possibilities for exports’ from developed capitalist countries. 41 Industrialized, not agrarian
countries are the most important trade partners of other industrialized countries. This explains
the growing international synchronization of booms and slumps. 42 In his critique of Lenin’s
Imperialism, Michael Kidron pointed out that capital flows, too, ‘are increasingly made as
between developed countries themselves. 43
Monopoly
The growth of monopolies in developed countries and their extension abroad through global
cartels was a cornerstone of Lenin’s discussion of imperialism, by the late 1920s the orthodoxy
of the Communist International and its constituent national parties, with which Grossman
identified politically. In Imperialism, the highest stage of capitalism, Lenin had described
imperialism in terms of the rise of monopolies and their extension into international cartels; the
growing influence of banks, and their dominance in the fusion of bank and industrial capital into
‘finance capital’; capital export; the way powerful states carved up the globe in competition with
each other. He also asserted that imperialism had created a conservative ‘aristocracy of labor’ in
the metropolitan countries. 44 Grossman subsumed important elements of Lenin’s account into
his own, providing them with a more solid theoretical foundation. He explained monopoly, a
feature of capitalist markets, the export of capital and heightened international competition over
territory and markets in terms of the level of capital accumulation. In doing so, Grossman
accepted Lenin’s conception of imperialism as a stage in the development of capitalism. 45 He
rejected the idea that finance capital was a typical feature of advanced capital and, without
engaging in research of his own, accepted the flawed concept of a labor aristocracy.
Monopoly, Grossman agreed, was an important feature of imperialism. But where Lenin had
described its expansion and scope, Grossman systematically explained the economic
mechanisms through which monopoly, particularly in the form of control over colonial
territories, improved profit rates and hence counteracted capitalism’s tendency to break down.
While Britain was pre-eminent as the most industrialized country in the world market, it had a
monopoly of the benefits of foreign trade outlined above. As German and the United States
industry began to challenge Britain from the 1860s, ‘feverish competition broke out in the world
market to exclude opponents and to secure the transfer of value for one power alone’ by means
of world monopolies over raw materials. Instead of the price of a raw material falling as
productivity in an industry rises, a monopoly can keep the price high and extract super profits at
the expense of its customers. With the development of the productive forces a greater and
greater mass of raw materials is processed by each worker. For this reason and because the areas
in which many can be produced are limited while they have diverse applications, the
possibilities for world monopolies of raw materials are particularly great. When a raw material
monopoly is exercised by one country, customers in others have to pay more for vital inputs.
The country exercising the monopoly is therefore also in a better position to dominate industries
higher up the chain of production. 46
Through monopolistic rises in prices, supplementary surplus value is pumped from
outside into the economy of the country with the monopoly and consequently the

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breakdown tendency is weakened. For countries against which the monopoly is

exercised it is the other way round and the tendency is reinforced. On the basis of
this theory, imperialist expansion is directly understandable. Economic domination
and monopolistic management of large colonial territories secures important raw
materials for industry and at the same time weakens the monopolies of hostile
competitors. 47
‘Hence the tendency under capitalism to secure and dominate these sources of raw materials,
that are now collected for “stock”, as “reserves”, which can necessarily only occur in the form
of the division of the world.’ That is, the advantages of such monopolies can lead to pre-emptive
action to maintain or achieve them in the future. 48
Grossman’s main examples were drawn from the experience of the United States, the victim of
several British monopolies in raw material producing industries. Thus sugar was an important
element in the colonization of Cuba and Hawaii. 49 The oil industry was (and is) the pre-eminent
arena of conflict over raw materials amongst imperialist powers. 50
In 1937, Grossman identified the link between capitalism’s crisis tendency and other policies
designed to give local capital monopolistic advantages: the construction of tariff walls and
abandonment of the gold standard. By these means countries sought to exclude competitors
from their domestic markets and, through currency devaluation and regulation, to improve the
competitiveness of local products. Devaluations also served to undermine wages in countries
with strong trade unions and hence increase profit rates. 51
Capital export
‘The fact of capital export’, Grossman argued ‘is as old as modern capitalism itself. The
scientific task consists in explaining this fact, hence in demonstrating the role it plays in the
mechanism of capitalist production.’ 52 It was not enough to account for capital export in terms
of the lack of profitable investment opportunities at home, as the liberal economist and
pioneering critic of imperialism, John Hobson did. ‘[W]hy’, then, ‘are profitable investments not
to be found at home?’ The Marxists Jenö Varga, Bukharin, Hilferding and Bauer argued that
higher rates of profits could be made abroad than domestically. Again, they did not explain
why. 53 Bauer’s assertion that profit rates are higher in less developed countries forgot his own
recognition of the formation of a world rate of profit which entails unequal exchange in favor of
countries with a higher organic composition of capital. ‘For the tendency for profit rates to
equalize is a regular concomitant of the capitalist mechanism… But how can he [Bauer] explain
the fact that capital export has only set in with a powerful intensity in the past decades in all the
developed capitalist countries and that the struggle for investment spheres has taken on ever
more acute forms and belongs to the characteristic features of modern imperialism?’ 54
Nor is it always the case that the organic composition of capital is inevitably lower in the less
developed parts of the world. In such areas investment can take the form of ‘European capital in
the most mature forms it has already assumed in the advanced capitalist countries. They may
skip over a whole series of historical stages, with their peoples dragged straight into gold and
diamond mines dominated by trustified capital with its extremely sophisticated technological
and financial organization.’ This was also apparent in the oil industry. 55
Lenin did not, Grossman maintained, ‘sufficiently explain theoretically the problem of capital
export, even though he makes many acute observations on the topic’. Such observations
included the way, with the domination of monopolies, capital export, rather than the export of
commodities had recently become typical of capitalism; superfluity of wealth in the most
advanced countries; and close links among regimes, high finance and industry.

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This interesting account does not, however, go beyond empirically identifiable

connections. In particular, we find in Lenin, which may be explained in terms of the
popular character of his text…, no theoretical analysis of the facts which would
demonstrate to us the necessity of capital export under high capitalism. Lenin limits
himself to the bare intimation that ‘The need to export capital arises from the fact
that in a few countries capitalism has become “overripe” and (owing to the
backward state of agriculture and the poverty of the masses) capital cannot find a
field for “profitable” investment’. What this over ripeness consists of and how it is
expressed, that Lenin has not demonstrated to us. 56
According to Grossman, the cause of the surge in the export of capital from the late 19th century
was ‘absolute overaccumulation’ at home. This occurs when increased investment produces the
same or less surplus value than before, and hence there is a lower rate of profit on the whole
capital. Profits are still made, but additional investment is pointless. 57 This is the key argument
of the second chapter of The law of accumulation. 58 A model of capital accumulation, derived
from Bauer, leads to the conclusion that, when further capital accumulation leads to a reduction
in the capitalists’ own consumption ‘instead of accumulating the surplus value…—that is,
incorporating it into the original capital—they will earmark it for capital export.’ In this ‘state of
capital saturation’, ‘[w]ith no chance in production, capital is either exported or switched to
speculation’, which can itself be understood as ‘inner capital export’.
There is a further reason why the tendency for the rate of profit to fall reaches a limit when
investment stalls, above a zero rate of profit. The scale of investment cannot be reduced to ever
smaller increments. Investments can only be made in concrete means of production, which are
not only values but also use values, and are not, therefore, infinitely divisible. 59 Contrary to the
arguments of Varga, Bukharin, Hilferding and Bauer, ‘Not higher profits abroad, but a shortage
of investment outlets at home is the basic underlying cause of capital export.’ 60
A few figures suggest the scale of contemporary speculative activity and speculative capital
flows. Foreign exchange transactions in 2004 were more than sixty times greater than the value
of all the world’s exports. 61 In 2005, the notional amount of over-the-counter foreign exchange
derivatives was almost two and a half times greater than the value of global exports. The
amounts of all derivatives, tracked by the Bank for International Settlements, that year was
almost seven times the value of global gross domestic product. 62 Other indices of the flow of
capital into speculative rather than productive investment are the scale of private
equity/leveraged buyouts and over $1.1 trillion managed by hedge funds in 2006. 63
Capital exports can, however, raise profit rates at home in several ways that are predatory rather
than speculative. By tying trade to loans, local industry can gain orders for exported
commodities at high prices and exclude competitors backed by other states or financial
institutions. This is a logic behind many ‘aid’ programs today. Capital exports are also part of
the process of securing sources of raw materials and a means of extracting tribute from states
which have borrowed in order to deal with economic problems. 64 Grossman concentrated his
subsequent analysis on foreign loans as a means by which lenders get a cut of surplus value
produced abroad.
‘In the course of the history of capitalist development the “condition of saturation” described
above was not reached by individual states at the same time.’ Consequently the timing of their
recourse to capital export and wild speculation differed, according to the level of capital
accumulation reached, in the framework of the existing forces of production, the extent of the
states’ territory and the business cycle. The rapid expansion of capital export in the form of
loans was a consequence of the high levels of capital accumulation reached by the Netherlands
in the 18th century, Britain in the 1820s, France in the 1860s Germany in the 1880s and the
United States in the 1920s. 65

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As early as 1805, according to Grossman, William Playfair had identified the process at work in
England. Playfair argued that countries reach a point in their development from poor agricultural
producers to rich industrial nations when more capital is available than can be profitably
invested. This, he maintained, was typical for modern nations at a particular stage of
development and ushered in a period of moral and economic decline. By drawing attention to
counteracting tendencies in capitalism which might, particularly when promoted by government,
postpone the primary tendency to suffer disintegration and decay, Playfair reconciled this
conclusion with his conservative political inclinations. His counteracting tendencies were
‘export of commodities and of capital, decentralization of capital, further various forms of
unproductive expenditure and waste’. The most effective was the export of capital. Alternatively,
if capital was invested at home, the resulting products had to be exported. 66
‘Only at the beginning of the twentieth century was the problem raised again by J. A. Hobson,
whose work gave rise to a whole literature.’ 67 For, during the late 19th century, the proliferation
of developed countries had created a new situation.
Lenin was quite correct in supposing that contemporary capitalism, based on the
domination of monopoly, is typically characterized by the export of capital. Holland
had already evolved into a capital exporter by the close of the seventeenth century.
Britain reached this stage early in the nineteenth century, France in the 1860s. Yet
there is a big difference between the capital exports of today’s monopoly capitalism
and those of early capitalism. Export of capital was not typical of the capitalism of
that epoch. It was a transient, periodic phenomenon which was always sooner or
later interrupted and replaced by a new boom. Today things are different. The most
important capitalist countries have already reached an advanced stage of
accumulation at which the valorization of the accumulated capital encounters
increasingly severe obstacles. Overaccumulation ceases to be a merely passing
phenomenon and starts more and more to dominate the whole of economic life. 68
For Grossman, then, the overaccumulation of capital arising from the nature of the capitalist
production process, was the defining aspect of the imperialist stage of capitalism.
Overaccumulation and the resulting decline in profit rates and economic crises explain
increasingly desperate attempts by corporations and states to secure additional sources of profits,
by means of monopolies (especially over raw materials), new outlets for foreign investment,
currency manipulations, speculation, and, ultimately arms spending that ‘opens the way to the
settlement of economic rivalries by means of violence’. 69 While this was a result of inter-
imperialist rivalry and applied to all the imperialist powers, at the end of the 1930s Grossman
identified factors that made German capitalism particularly vulnerable and German imperialism
therefore particularly aggressive. These included the limited scope German monopolies had for
extracting additional profits from the unmonopolized sectors of the economy because of the high
degree of concentration of industry; and Germany’s lack of colonies and high degree of
dependence on the rest of the world for raw materials. 70
‘Finance capital’ and the ‘aristocracy of labor’
The subsumption of Lenin’s position to Grossman’s own did not include the category of
‘finance capital’. This Grossman criticized through an attack on one of Lenin’s key sources,
Hilferding’s Finance capital. As Eduard Bernstein had also observed in response to the
publication of Hilferding’s book, 71 its argument that finance capital was an historical tendency
of capitalism was mistaken. Rather, the preponderance of banks was only true of a particular
phase of capitalist development. At low levels of accumulation industry did rely on funds from
outside, mobilized by banks. But, at higher levels of accumulation, industry tends to become
self-financing. ‘Finally in a third phase industry finds it progressively more difficult to secure a
profitable investment, even of its own resources, in the original enterprise. The latter uses its

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Rick Kuhn Grossman on imperialism

profits to draw other industries into its sphere of influence’, by means of the money market.
Industry dominates the banks. 72
Hilferding’s later arguments, when he was for periods Germany’s finance minister during the
1920s, that capitalism could be ‘organized’ to avoid economic crises through state control of
banking were inimical to the fundamental conception of capitalism and the struggle for
socialism which Grossman and Lenin shared. For ‘[t]he historical tendency of capital is not the
creation of a central bank which dominates the whole economy through a general cartel, but
industrial concentration and growing accumulation of capital leading to the final breakdown due
to overaccumulation’: 73
The more free competition is replaced by monopoly organization on the domestic
market, the more competition sharpens in the world market. If a river’s flow is
artificially blocked with a dam on one side of the stream, it presses on with even less
restraint on the side that is still open. Whether accumulation of capital within the
capitalist mechanism occurs on the basis of competition amongst individual
entrepreneurs or a series of cartelized, capitalist production associations struggling
against each other is irrelevant for the emergence of the tendency to break down or
crisis. 74
While Grossman identified the flaws in the concept of finance capital, he endorsed Lenin’s
contention that the material basis of reformism was the emergence of a small ‘labor aristocracy’,
bought off with spoils from imperialism. 75 The mechanisms through which imperialism can
improve the living standards of the most prosperous sections of working classes in metropolitan
states, however, tend to benefit the entire working class. In 1957, Tony Cliff argued that the
export markets for consumer and capital goods opened up by imperialism will tend to reduce
unemployment, buoy up economic activity in general and hence improve the ability of wide
layers of workers to win wage increases. Cheap raw materials and food from the colonies
facilitate increased living standards for metropolitan workers, without reducing the rate or mass
of profit. 76 His main point, that the benefits of empire, through its contribution to overall
economic prosperity, flow on to the working class as a whole rather than a thin but political
influential ‘aristocracy’ is valid whether one explains capitalist stagnation in terms of
underconsumption or the tendency for the rate of profit to fall. As originally formulated, the
argument about an aristocracy of labor is not sustainable. It carries even less weight when
extended into the proposition that entire metropolitan working classes are complicit in
imperialism. By virtue of the higher value of the means of production and raw materials set in
motion, on average, by workers in developed countries, they are more exploited, despite their
higher living standards, than those who use less sophisticated technologies. 77

During the long boom from the 1950s to the early 1970s countervailing factors clearly
overwhelmed capitalism’s breakdown tendency. It was a period of rapid investment both at
home and abroad. But the domestic programs of neo-liberalism during the subsequent period fits
the pattern Grossman described in 1929, when he anticipated a severe global crisis. He argued
that capitalism’s breakdown tendency leads increasingly desperate ruling classes to initiate
struggles to restore profit rates at the expense of the working class. At the same time the
revalorization of capital through crises—like those that afflicted eastern Europe after the
collapse of the Stalinist regimes, the Asian economic meltdown of the late 1990s and
Argentina’s collapse in 2002—can for a time revitalized profit rates. The role of cheap Chinese
commodities; US efforts to monopolize oil supplies and, more broadly, to use its military power
to secure economic advantages; the phenomenal scale of global financial flows; and conflicts
over exchange rates suggest that Grossman’s analysis of imperialism and political conclusions
he drew are relevant again:

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Rick Kuhn Grossman on imperialism

It is also, therefore, clear that the struggle over spheres for investment is also the
greatest danger to world peace. That this does not involve prediction of the future
should be clear to anyone who studies the methods of ‘Dollar Diplomacy’ with the
appropriate attention. 78

1 I am grateful to Pete Green for his insights and comments on my work.

2 Karl Marx and Frederick Engels, Manifesto of the Communist Party (Moscow: Progress Publishers 1970
[1848]) , my emphasis. All emphasis in quotations is in the original, unless otherwise indicated.
3 Karl Kautsky, ‘Socialism and Colonial Policy’ 1975 [1907], available at
http://marxists.anu.edu.au/archive/kautsky/1907/colonial/; Rosa Luxemburg, The Accumulation of Capital,
(London: Routledge 1963 [1913]). Kautsky wrote about imperialism over a period of more than 40 years.
Even before he shifted his position, shortly before World War I, to argue that there was no necessary
connection between imperialism and war, his accounts of imperialism were not always consistent.
4 Luxemburg The Accumulation of Capital, 329-367.
5 Rudolf Hilferding, Finance Capital: A Study of the Latest Phase of Capitalist Development (London:
Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1981 [1910]); Nikolai Bukharin, Imperialism and World Economy (New York:
Monthly Review Press 1973 [1917, written 1915]); Vladimir Ilych Lenin, Imperialism: The Highest Stage of
capitalism, Selected Works Volume 1 (Moscow: Progress Publishers, 1977 [1916]), 679.
6 Rick Kuhn, ‘Economic Crisis and Socialist Revolution: Henryk Grossman’s Law of accumulation, its first
critics and his responses’, Research in Political Economy, 21, 2004, 181-221; and Rick Kuhn, Henryk
Grossman and the recovery of Marxism (Urbana and Chicago: University of Illinois Press 2007).
7 E. M. Winslow, The pattern of imperialism: a study in the theories of economic power (New York: Columbia
University Press, 1948), 183; Paul Sweezy, The theory of capitalist development (New York: Monthly
Review Press, 1970 [1942]), 303; and Rocco Buttiglione, ‘Prefazione’ in Henryk Grossmann Il crollo del
capitalismo: La legge dell’ accumulazione e del crollo del sistema capitalista (Milano: Jaca Book, 1977), xv,
note Grossman’s discussion of imperialism.
8 Henryk Grossman, Proletariat wobec kwestii żydowskiej z powodu niedyskutowanej dyskusyi w “Krytyce”,
(Kraków, 1905); Henryk Grossman, Der Bundizm in Galitsien (Krakow: Ferlag der Sotsial-democrat, 1907).
Henryk Grossman was mainly known as ‘Grossmann’ in German, but always signed his name ‘Grossman’,
which he used for the work whose publication in English he supervised.
9 Henryk Grossman, ‘Vegn unzere agitatsie un propaganda’ Sotsial-demokrat, August 24 1906, 22.
10 Henryk Grossman, ‘Polityka przemysłowa i handlowa rządu Terezynansko-Józefińskiego w Galicyi 1772-
1790: Referat na V. Zjazd prawników i ekonomistów polskich’, Przegląd prawa i administracyi 1912;
Henryk Grossmann, Österreichs Handelspolitik mit Bezug auf Galizien in der Reformperiode 1772-1790,
(Konegen: Wien 1914).
11 Grossman, ‘Vegn unzere agitatsie un propaganda’; Henryk Grossman, ‘Polityka przemysłowa’; Henryk
Grossmann, ‘Die amtliche Statistik des galizischen Aussenhandels 1772-1792’. Statistische Monatshrift, new
series 18, 1913, 222-233; Grossmann, Österreichs Handelspolitik.
12 Grossmann, Österreichs Handelspolitik, 63, 476-488.
13 Grossmann, Österreichs Handelspolitik, 226-227, 291-297, 488-490; quotation p.483.
14 Grossman, ‘Polityka przemysłowa’, 37-38.
15 ibid. p. 41.
16 ibid. pp. 1-8, 13-19.
17 ibid. pp. 41-42.
18 Luxemburg The Accumulation of Capital, 348-367
19 Henryk Grossmann, The Law of Accumulation and Breakdown of the Capitalist System: Being also a Theory
of Crises (London: Pluto Press 1992 [1929]), 162-163. The full text is available on the web at
www.marxists.org/archive/grossman/1929/breakdown/. Note that it is an abridged translation of Henryk
Grossmann, Das Akkumulations- und Zusammenbruchsgetz des kapitalistischen Systems (zugleich eine

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Rick Kuhn Grossman on imperialism

Krisentheorie) (Frankfurt am Main: Verlag Neue Kritik, 1970 [1929]), which also lacks the important final
chapter.
20 Karl Marx, Capital Volume 1 (Harmonsworth: Penguin, 1976 [1867]), 526.
21 Grossmann, Das Akkumulations- und Zusammenbruchsgetz, 396-398. Grossman’s entire discussion of early
capitalist colonialism, 396-415, is missing from the English translation, Grossmann The law of accumulation.
22 Grossmann, Das Akkumulations- und Zusammenbruchsgetz, 397-398; Henryk Grossmann, ‘Die Anfänge und
geschichtliche Entwicklung der amtlichen Statistik in Österreich’. Statistische Monatschrift , new series 21, ,
1916, 9, 85.
23 Grossmann, Das Akkumulations- und Zusammenbruchsgetz, 399-407.
24 ibid. 407-408.
25 ibid. 408-414. The quote from Marx is on p. 400 and comes from Karl Marx, Theories of surplus value: Part
2 (Moscow: Progress Publishers, 1963 [1863]), 302-303. I have corrected the text from the English edition,
which inaccurately, includes ‘mode of’ between ‘capitalist’ and ‘production exists’.
26 Chris Harman, ‘The rise of capitalism’ International Socialism 102, Spring 2004, 57, 65, 82; Justin Rosenberg,
The empire of civil society: a critique of the realist theory of international relations (London: Verso 1994),
91-122; Eric R. Wolf, Europe and the people without history (Berkeley: University Of California Press 1982),
87-88.
27 Karl Marx, The poverty of philosophy (Moscow: Progress Publishers 1975 [1847]), 104 Grossman omitted ‘,
no credit’, after ‘as machinery’ from the Marx quotation; Grossmann, Das Akkumulations- und
Zusammenbruchsgetz, 414-415. Both Marx and Grossman were aware of the increasingly powerful anti-
slavery movements that emerged in this context. For a particularly concrete expression of Marx’s awareness
of participation in the movement against slavery see Karl Marx, ‘Address of the International Working Men’s
Association to Abraham Lincoln, President of the United States of America’ 1865, available at
www.marxists.org/history/international/iwma/documents/1864/lincoln-letter.htm; and Henryk Grossmann,
Review of Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels The Civil War in the United States (New York, 1937), Zeitschrift
für Sozialforschung 7 (1/2) 1938, 261 where his application of Marx’s argument about the capitalist nature of
American plantation slavery is applied specifically and thus more convincingly to the United States.
28 Grossmann, Das Akkumulations- und Zusammenbruchsgetz, 296-297.
29 ibid. 300, Grossman’s emphasis.
30 Karl Marx, Capital Volume 3 (Harmonsworth: Penguin, 1981 [1894]), 344-346.
31 Henryk Grossman, ‘The Theory of Economic Crises’ Research in Political Economy, 21, 2000 [1922], 175.
32 Henryk Grossman, Simonde de Sismondi et ses théories économiques. Une nouvelle interprétation de sa
pensée (Warsaw: Bibliotheca Universitatis Liberae Polniae, fasc. 119-10, 13, 1924), 15-17; Henryk
Grossmann, , ‘Eine neue Theorie über Imperialismus und die soziale Revolution’ Archiv für die Geschichte
des Sozialismus und der Arbeiterbewegung 13, 1928, 141-192.
33 Grossmann 1928, p. 185.
34 Grossman 2000.
35 Grossmann, The Law of Accumulation, 165-166.
36 ibid. 166-168.
37 Grossmann, Das Akkumulations- und Zusammenbruchsgetz, 434.
38 ibid. 437-438; condensed translation in Grossmann, The Law of Accumulation, 172.
39 Otto Bauer, The question of nationalities (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2000 [1907]), 200-
201; Grossmann, Das Akkumulations- und Zusammenbruchsgetz, 430.
40 World Trade Organization, International trade statistics 2006, 2006, appendices A6 and A8, available at
www.wto.org/english/res_e/statis_e/its2006_e/its06_toc_e.htm.
41 Grossmann, Das Akkumulations- und Zusammenbruchsgetz, 443.
42 ibid. 441-449; Grossmann, The Law of Accumulation, 173-174.

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Rick Kuhn Grossman on imperialism

43 Michael Kidron, ‘Imperialism: highest stage but one’ in Michael Kidron, Capitalism and theory (London:
Pluto , 1974 [1962]), 132.
44 Lenin Imperialism, 700, for Lenin’s summary description of imperialism.
45 Terrence McDonough, ‘Lenin, imperialism, and the stages of capitalist development’ Science & society 59 (3),
Fall 1995, 355-356.
46 Grossmann, Das Akkumulations- und Zusammenbruchsgetz, 450-454; Grossmann, The Law of Accumulation,
174-176.
47 Grossmann, Das Akkumulations- und Zusammenbruchsgetz, pp. 466-467.
48 Grossmann, Das Akkumulations- und Zusammenbruchsgetz, 454. Grossman gave the example of French and
Swedish efforts to control iron ore mines around the world, despite their contemporary production beyond
domestic needs, 478-479. Sweezy highlighted this insight of Grossman 1970, p. 303.
49 Grossmann, Das Akkumulations- und Zusammenbruchsgetz, 462-470.
50 Grossmann, The Law of Accumulation, 176-178. On the contemporary significance of oil see Alex Callinicos,
‘The grand strategy of the American empire’ International socialism 97, Winter 2002, 22-27.
51 Henryk Grossmann, ‘Diskussion aus einem Seminar über Monopolkapitalismus (1937)’, in Max Horkheimer
Gesammelte Schriften 12 Nachgelassene Schriften 1931-1949 (Frankfurt am Main: Fischer, 1985), 417-420. I
am grateful to Tobias ten Brink for pointing this out to me. Also see letter from Grossman to Max Horkheimer,
November 6 1936, in Max Horkheimer, Gesammelte Schiften 15: Briefwechsel 1913-1936, Frankfurt am
Main: Fischer, 1995), 713-714; and Henryk Grossman manuscript starting ‘Will man das Phaenomen des
deutschen Imperialismus’ written between 1939 and 1941, in 1996 in Folder 34, ‘Henryk Grossman’ III 155,
Archive of the Polish Academy of Science, Warsaw.
52 Grossmann, Das Akkumulations- und Zusammenbruchsgetz, 490-491.
53 Grossmann, Das Akkumulations- und Zusammenbruchsgetz, 497-516; the abbreviated English translation does
not mention Bukharin, Grossmann, The Law of Accumulation, 180-185.
54 Grossmann, Das Akkumulations- und Zusammenbruchsgetz, 503; abbreviated in Grossmann, The Law of
Accumulation, 182.
55 Grossmann, The Law of Accumulation, 183; Grossmann, Das Akkumulations- und Zusammenbruchsgetz, 506.
For a discussion of the concept of uneven development, see Neil Davidson, ‘From uneven to combined
development’ in Bill Dunn and Hugo K. Radice (eds), 100 years of permanent revolution: results and
prospects (London: Pluto Press, 2006), 10-20.
56 Grossmann, Das Akkumulations- und Zusammenbruchsgetz, 520. Aware of the Communist movement’s
canonization of the Russian leader, Grossman was diplomatic in his remarks about Lenin’s work. Later, the
total Stalinist deification of Lenin that placed him above any criticism at all led Grossman (by then himself
again a dedicated supporter of the Soviet Union) to caution Bill Blake, then working on his own account of
imperialism, that ‘In your book you should avoid any direct criticism of Lenin. You can make your different
view clear, without attacking him—otherwise your book will be doomed as heretic. You can say “older
Marxian theorist told this that. Today situation is changed” [sic], etc.’ letter from Grossman to Blake, 10 July
1947, Box 17 Folder 125, Christina Stead Collection, National Library of Australia.
57 Grossmann, The Law of Accumulation, 187.
58 See ibid. 74-82; and the exposition of Grossman’s argument in published and unpublished works in Kuhn,
‘Economic Crisis and Socialist Revolution’ and Kuhn, Henryk Grossman and the recovery of Marxism.
59 Henryk Grossmann, ‘Die Fortentwicklung des Marxismus bis zur Gegenwart’, in Henryk Grossmann and Carl
Grünberg, Anarchismus, Bolschewismus, Sozialismus: Aufsätze aus dem Wörterbuch der Volkswirtschaft,
(Frankfurt am Main: Europäische Verlagsanstalt, 1971 [1933]), 332-333; Henryk Grossmann, ‘Marx, classical
political economy and the problem of dynamics’ Capital and class, 3, Autumn 1977 [1941], 88.
60 Grossmann, The Law of Accumulation, 189, 191, 193; Grossmann, Das Akkumulations- und
Zusammenbruchsgetz, 531, 536-537. Grossman was particularly critical of Hilferding’s account of speculation,
which did not place it in the context of the business cycle, see Grossmann, The Law of Accumulation, 191-192.
61 World Trade Organization, International trade statistics 2005, 2005, 1, available at
www.wto.org/english/res_e/statis_e/its2005_e/its05_toc_e.htm; Bank for International Settlements, Triennial

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Rick Kuhn Grossman on imperialism

central bank survey of foreign exchange and derivatives market activity 2005, 1, available at
www.bis.org/publ/rpfx05t.pdf. This understates the discrepancy because large volumes of trade within the
European Monetary Union involved no foreign exchange at all.
62 International Monetary Fund 2007, Global financial stability report 2007 2007, Statistical appendix tables 3
and 4, available at www.imf.org/external/pubs/ft/gfsr/2007/01; and World Trade Organization International
trade statistics 2006, pp. 3, 195-198, 203-205. The foreign exchange to exports figure substantially
understates the situation as the exports figure includes intra-European Union trade in Euros, for which no
foreign exchange was required.
63 The economist, ‘Capitals of capital—hedge funds’ 2 September 2006.
64 Grossmann, Das Akkumulations- und Zusammenbruchsgetz, 527-529.
65 Grossmann, Das Akkumulations- und Zusammenbruchsgetz, 531-562. The English edition does not deal with
the history of capital export, only giving the example of the USA, Grossmann, The Law of Accumulation,
192-193.
66 Henryk Grossman, ‘William Playfair, the earliest theorist of capitalist development’ The Economic History
Review, 18, 1, 1948, 79-81.
67 ibid. 75-76.
68 Grossmann, The Law of Accumulation, 194, 197; also see Grossmann 1970, p. 527.
69 Grossman ‘Will man das Phaenomen des deutschen Imperialismus’.
70 ibid.
71 M. C. Howard and J. E. King, A history of Marxian economics: volume 1, 1883-1929 (Princeton: Princeton
University Press, 1989), 101.
72 Grossmann, Das Akkumulations- und Zusammenbruchsgetz, 574; Grossmann, The Law of Accumulation, 199-
200.
73 Grossmann, The Law of Accumulation, 200; see Rudolf Hilferding, ‘Die Aufgaben der Sozialdemokratie in
der Republik’, in Rudolf Hilferding Zwischen den Stühlen oder über die Unvereinbarkeit von Theorie und
Praxis: Schriften Rudolf Hilferdings 1904 bis 1940 (Bonn: J. H. W. Dietz, 1982 [1927]), 214-36.
74 Grossmann, Das Akkumulations- und Zusammenbruchsgetz, p. 606.
75 Lenin Imperialism, 714-715; Vladimir Ilych Lenin, Imperialism and the split in socialism 1996 [1916], 306,
available at www.marxists.org/archive/lenin/works/1916/oct/x01.htm; Grossmann, ‘Die Fortentwicklung des
Marxismus’, 306.
76 Tony Cliff, ‘The economic roots of reformism’ in Tony Cliff Neither Washington nor Moscow: essays on
revolutionary socialism (London: Bookmarks, 1982 [1957]), 108-113.
77 Nigel Harris, ‘Theories of unequal exchange’ International Socialism 2 (33), 1986, 119-120.
78 Grossmann, Das Akkumulations- und Zusammenbruchsgetz, 572; an abbreviated discussion of the issue is in
Grossmann, The Law of Accumulation, 197.

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