posts with the Austrian administration in Lublin until the collapse of the Hapsburg Empire in 1918. Choosing to remain in the newly reconstituted Poland after the war, Grossmann was asked to supervise the first statistical survey of its national wealth and was appointed chief of the first Polish census in 1921. In the following year he became professor of economics at Warsaw, a post he held until the Pilsudski government’s dislike of his socialism persuaded him to leave in 1925. Grünberg, who had known him in prewar Vienna, then invited him to Frankfurt, where an assistant professorship at the university and an assistantship at the Institut as aide to Grünberg were awaiting him.
An enormously learned man with a prodigious knowledge of economic history, Grossmann is remembered by many who knew him48 as the embodiment of the Central European academic: proper, meticulous, and gentlemanly. He had, however, absorbed his Marxism in the years when Engels’s and Kautsky’s monistic materialistic views prevailed. He remained firmly committed to this interpretation and thus largely unsympathetic to the dialectical, neo-Hegelian materialism of the younger Institut members.
One ought not, however, overemphasize Grossmann’s insensitivity to Horkheimer’s work. On July 18, 1937, for example, he wrote to Paul Mattick that:
In the last number of the Zeitschrift there appeared an especially successful essay of Horkheimer with a sharp, fundamental critique of new (logical) empiricism. Very worthy of being read, because in various socialist circles, Marxist materialism is confused with empiricism, because one shows sympathy for this empiricism as an allegedly antimetaphysical tendency.49
Like Wittfogel’s and Borkenau’s, Grossmann’s politics were grounded in a relatively unreflective enthusiasm for the Soviet Union, but although he had been a member of the Polish Communist Party, it seems unlikely that he ever became an actual member of its German counterpart after coming to Frankfurt. Unlike them, he did not experience a later disillusionment with communism, even during his decade or so of exile in America, when many others with similar backgrounds repudiated their past.
Grossmann’s quarrel with Borkenau in his Zeitschrift article on Borkenau’s book was over the timing of the transition from the feudal to the bourgeois ideology—he put it one hundred fifty years before Borkenau—and the importance of technology in effecting the change—Leonardo rather than Descartes was his paradigmatic figure. Nonetheless, Grossmann never questioned the fundamental causal relationship between substructure and superstructure. In his article of 1935 in the Zeitschrift, he thus continued to express his allegiance to the orthodoxies of Marxism as he understood them; but this was not totally without variation, as demonstrated by his stress on the technological impetus to change, in opposition to Borkenau’s emphasis on capitalist forms of production. A much more important expression of his adherence to the tenets of orthodox Marxism can be found in the series of lectures he gave at the Institut in 1926–1927, which were collected in 1929 as The Law of Accumulation and Collapse in the Capitalist System,50 the first volume of the Institu’s Schriften.
The question of capitalism’s inevitable collapse from within had been the center of controversy in socialist circles, ever since Eduard Bernstein’s articles in Die Neue Zeit in the 1890’s had raised empirical objections to the prophecy of increasing proletarian pauperization. During the next three decades, Rosa Luxemburg, Heinrich Cunow, Otto Bauer, M. J. Tugan-Baranovski, Rudolf Hilferding, and others wrestled with the issue-from a theoretical as well as an empirical vantage point. Fritz Sternberg’s Der Imperialismus, which modified in a more pessimistic direction the Luxemburg thesis that imperialism was only a delaying factor in capitalism’s demise, was the last major contribution before Grossmann’s. The Law of Accumulation and Collapse begins with an excellent analysis of the previous literature on the question. Then, following an exposition of Marx’s own views culled from his various writings, Grossmann attempted to build on Otto Bauer’s mathematical models a deductive system to prove the correctness of Marx’s predictions. The pauperization he pointed to was not that of the proletariat, but that of the capitalists, whose tendency to overaccumulation would produce an unavoidable decline in the profit rate over a certain fixed period of time. Although admitting countertendencies such as the more efficient use of capital, Grossmann confidently asserted that they might mitigate but not forestall the terminal crisis of the capitalist system. The full ramifications of his argument, whose predictions have obviously failed to come true, need not detain us here.51 Let it be said, however, that the essentially quietistic implications of his thesis, similar to those of all Marxist interpretations that stress objective forces over subjective revolutionary praxis, were not lost on some of his contemporaries.52
Pollock, the other leading economist in the Institut, was quick to challenge Grossmann on other grounds. Stressing the inadequacy of Marx’s concept of productive labor because of its neglect of non-manual labor, Pollock pointed to the service industries,53 which were becoming increasingly important in the twentieth century. Surplus value might be extracted from workers in these industries as well as from those producing commodities, he argued, which would prolong the life of the system. Grossmann’s stand continued basically unchanged, however, and he and Pollock remained at odds on economic questions until Grossmann left the Institut after the Second World War. Carefully read between the lines, Pollock’s Experiments in Economic Planning in the Soviet Union (1917–1927),54 the second volume of the Institut’s Schriften, gives further evidence of the dispute.
Pollock was invited to the Soviet Union during its tenth anniversary celebrations by David Ryazanov, who had spent some time in Frankfurt in the early 1920’s and who continued his relationship by contributing an occasional article to the Grünberg Archiv.55 In the Soviet Union, although admired for his scholarly work as director of the Marx-Engels Institute, Ryazanov was regarded politically as a rather eccentric throwback to the days of pre-Bolshevik social democracy. Despite his frequent criticism of party policy,56 he survived until Stalin sent him into exile with the Volga Germans a few years after Pollock’s visit, a move that has been facetiously described as Stalin’s only real “contribution” to Marxist scholarship. Through Ryazanov’s friendship, Pollock was able to speak with members of the dwindling opposition within the Bolshevik Party during his trip, in addition to his actual field studies of Soviet planning. The impressions he brought back to Frankfurt after several months were thus not entirely favorable. His book carefully avoided commenting on the political consequences of the Revolution and the forced collectivizations of the 1920’s. On the central question he treated—the transition from a market to a planned economy—Pollock was less the enthusiastic supporter than the detached and prudent analyst unwilling to pass judgments prematurely. Here, too, he and Grossmann had cause for disagreement.
Nevertheless, it would be wrong to characterize the general attitude of Institut members in 1927 towards the Soviet experiment as closer to Pollock’s skepticism than to Grossmann’s enthusiasm. Wittfogel remained as firm as ever in his support, Borkenau had not yet reached his decision to repudiate the Party, and even Horkheimer retained an optimistic hope that humanist socialism might yet be realized in post-Lenin Russia. One of the aphorisms published in Dämmerung a few years later expresses Horkheimer’s feelings during this period:
He who has eyes for the meaningless injustice of the imperialist world, which in no way is to be explained by technical impotence, will regard the events in Russia as the progressive, painful attempt to overcome this injustice, or he will at least question with a beating heart whether this attempt still persists. If appearances speak against it, he clings to the hope the way a cancer victim does to the questionable news that a cure for cancer has probably been found.57
Heated sub rosa discussions of Pollock’s findings did take place, but never broke into print. In fact, after his book was published in 1929, the Institut maintained an almost complete official silence about events in the USSR, broken only by an occasional survey of recent literature by Rudolf Schlesinger, who had been one of Grünberg’s students in the twenties.58 It was really not until a decade later,
