CANBERRA SOCIALIST, Rick Kuhn, has won the 2007 Isaac and Tamara Deutscher Prize for his book, Henryk Grossman and the recovery of Marxism. The prize is given for a book that exemplifies the best and most innovative new writing in or about the Marxist tradition.

It is the most prestigious award of its kind. Past winners include Eric Hobsbawm, Mike Davis, Ellen Meiksins Wood and Robin Blackburn.

Henryk Grossman, 1881-1950, was a Polish/Jewish revolutionary activist and author of a major work on Marx's theory of crisis, which argued that much Marxist economic writing had missed Marx's argument that the central limitation of capitalism and the central dynamic behind a long-term tendency to economic crisis was the tendency of the rate of profit to fall as capital was successfully accumulated.

Grossman's work was buried for decades during the long years of Stalin, Hitler and the cold war until a new generation of German socialists rediscovered it in the late 1960s.

Rick Kuhn lectures in political economy at the Australian National University and is a member of Socialist Alternative.

Socialist Worker congratulates him on his book, and on winning the Deutscher Prize.