Rick Kuhn

Research Project

The following overview of my work on Grossman and the Jewish Social Democratic Party of Galicia is extracted from my article: ‘Henryk Grossman and the recovery of Marxism’, Historical materialism 13 (3) 2005 pp. 57-100.

Who was Henryk Grossman?

Henryk Grossman’s background was bourgeois and he was trained to be a traditional intellectual, serving the established order. He was born on 14 April 1881 in Kraków, to an upwardly mobile Jewish family, rapidly assimilating to the Polish high culture of Galicia, the Austrian-occupied sector of partitioned Poland. Although he gained an academic education and pursued a successful and conventional career, Grossman did not become a traditional intellectual. His outlook was not only sympathetic to the working class, it was formed through his involvement in the organised labour movement and engagement in working class struggles.

At school, he joined the Polish Social Democratic Party of Galicia (PPSD) and began to organise fellow students. At Kraków’s Jagiellonian University, he continued to assist the political activities of high school students and was soon prominent amongst socialist university students. He became a leader of the radical student group Movement (Ruch) and was involved in smuggling socialist literature into the Russian Empire for the Social Democratic Party of the Kingdom of Poland and Lithuania , led by Rosa Luxemburg and Leo Jogiches, and the General Jewish Workers Union of Lithuania, Poland and Russia—the Bund. In late 1904 and early 1905, Grossman was the founding editor of Zjednoczenie (Unification), established by young socialists, most of them aligned with organisations in Russian Poland to express more radical positions than those of the nationalist leadership of the PPSD and its close ally on the Tsar’s Polish territory, the Polish Socialist Party (PPS).

From about 1901, Grossman led efforts to rebuild social democratic organisations amongst Kraków’s Jewish workers. When the nationalist and assimilationist PPSD moved to liquidate the general associations of Jewish workers affiliated to it across Galicia, Grossman and their other leaders set up a new Jewish workers’ party. He developed a theoretical rationale for such a party and led the practical preparations for its establishment. The Jewish Social Democratic Party of Galicia (JSDP) was proclaimed on May Day 1905 and soon had 2,000 members. On behalf of the new Party, its secretary, Grossman, and seven other members of its organising committee immediately applied for affiliation to the federal General Austrian Social Democratic Party. The General Party, dominated by an alliance between its largest component, the German-Austrian Party, and the PPSD, rejected the application, although the JSDP had announced its adherence to the General Party’s program. Like the Bund, Grossman and the majority of the JSDP favoured a federal approach to the national question within social democracy and national cultural autonomy as the means to resolve national conflicts at the level of the Austrian state. The JSDP was formed in the course of massive class struggles in Austria-Hungary, triggered by the Russian revolution of 1905. Working class militancy in successful campaigns for improved wages and hours resulted in the rapid growth of the union branches and associations which were the basic units of the social democratic movement. From September the General Party conducted a campaign for universal suffrage that mobilised hundreds of thousands in militant demonstrations and marches across the Austrian half of the Empire. The involvement of Jewish workers in Galicia was largely a consequence of the activities of the JSDP.

At the end of 1908, during a downturn in the class struggle, Grossman left Kraków to pursue legal and academic careers in Vienna. Although he remained a member of the JSDP’s Executive Committee until 1911, he was not involved in the day to day politics and management of the Party back in Galicia. Between 1912 and 1919, there is no evidence that Grossman was actively involved in politics. But his publications during this period expounded views compatible with a Marxist analysis, carefully phrased to avoid destroying the prospect of an academic post.

As befitted a member of his class, Grossman became an officer during the First World War. From 1917, he served in an elite research organisation, alongside many of the most prominent Austrian economists of his own and the previous generation. This experience was important when, in 1919, he moved to Warsaw and a senior position with the Central Statistical Office. He was in charge of the conduct of Poland’s first national population census. Differences over the treatment of ethnic minorities in the reports of the census led him to leave the Office in 1921, for a post at the Free University of Poland (Wolna Wrzechnica Polska), teaching economic policy.

It is clear that Grossman’s politics were profoundly influenced by the Bolshevik revolution. He joined the Communist Workers Party of Poland in 1919. His main contribution to the Party’s work was as the secretary and soon the chairperson of the People’s University (PU) from early 1922 until 1925. The PU was a large adult education institution under Communist leadership. Given the Party’s illegal status, the PU provided not only a vehicle for legal cultural and educational work but also a means for bringing together a range of militants from different sectors—workers, students, intellectuals, peasants—in a way that trade unions, for example, could not.

The Polish secret police harassed Grossman, like thousands of other Polish Communists. So he left the country, in late 1925, to take up a job offer from his academic patron in Vienna, Carl Grünberg, by then the Director of the Institute for Social Research in Frankfurt am Main. In order to retain access to his family and friends in Poland, Grossman seems to have made an unofficial deal with the Polish authorities for a kind of qualified exile. He would leave Poland but could return for two weeks a year, so long as he only saw his family and did not engage in political activity. As the pair had planned, Grossman was awarded a higher doctorate (Habilitation), a prerequisite for a university post, primarily for the research project Grünberg had supervised in Vienna, before the War. In 1929, the University of Frankfurt appointed him to a professorship (ausserordentlicher Professor).

In Frankfurt he played it safe politically. As a Polish national whose situation in Poland was precarious, he decided not to join the German Communist Party (KPD), although he was a close sympathiser. As a consequence, he was not subject to the full blast of Stalinisation, as the counter-revolution in Russia imposed centralised bureaucratic structures and doctrines concocted in Moscow on the international Communist movement. From 1927, Grossman combined his well-paid and permanent post at the Institute with university teaching. Financially secure and outside the discipline of a political party, he had far greater freedom than the vast majority of Marxists at that time to elaborate, advocate and defend, publicly and without major apparent risks, economic theories that did not accord with social democratic, Communist or conservative academic orthodoxies.