The End of Capitalism by Ted Reese

Author:Ted Reese [Reese, Ted]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9798554968730
Publisher: John Hunt Publishing
Published: 2022-04-02T00:00:00+00:00

Not wishing to make his Marxism explicit by the time of his promotion to the top of the IfS, Horkheimer wrote guardedly about the origins of ‘the dialectical theory of society’ and the ‘will for a more human existence’ in which ‘a higher spontaneity’ is possible. Citing Marx’s account of historical materialism in the preface and postscript to Capital, Grossman was clear that the laws of capitalist development determine human behaviour more than vice-versa. But, insisted Grossman, that ‘[does] not contradict activism’ and ‘should be dealt with in an essay like yours’.266

Horkheimer did not respond and his views became increasingly conservative. He and Theodore Adorno began to reject the working class as an emancipatory force along with the constructive (socialism-building) side of Marx’s analysis.267 Relations worsened when Horkheimer openly denounced the Soviet Union over the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact, a non-aggression pact between Nazi Germany and the Soviet Union that partitioned Poland. Grossman saw the pact – which lasted only 2 years of an agreed 10 – as necessary and defensive, buying the Soviet Union time to prepare for the Nazi invasion. What is often wilfully ignored is that Stalin had previously approached the US, Britain and France with an anti-Nazi pact that they turned down.

After the 1938 downturn in the US, the IfS’s finances worsened. Horkheimer and Pollock wanted Grossman off the payroll, but Grossman refused to resign. After repeated delays to the publication of Grossman’s 80-page study on Marx, Classical Political Economy and the Problem of Dynamics (see chapter 3), he threatened to publish the work elsewhere with a preface accusing the institute of 2 years of sabotage.268

When Horkheimer told him in April 1943 about an institute project on antisemitism funded by the conservative American Jewish Committee, Grossman replied that he did not know ‘if you are interested in the Jewish Project only in so far as several thousand dollars can be earned through it’.269

Horkheimer later called Grossman’s ‘The Evolutionist Revolt against Classical Economics’ (see chapter four) a ‘most rotten piece of work’.270 In March 1944, Horkheimer sacked Grossman, who had allegedly described the institute in private as ‘those swine at 429’, ‘the seat of capitalistic reaction’, and ‘those slanderers of the Soviet Union’.271

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