IIRC, Sternberg was associated with "liberal" anti-communism in the 1950s. His work had some appeal in cold warrior circles, just like Kautsky.

Here is Kuhn's summary of Grossman's critique.

The expelled leader of the Dutch communist party W. Van Ravesteyn was a proper Luxemburgist (a stance which was fueled by his conflict with Pannekoek), but I think without adding Fritz's underconsumptionist vulgarization of her.

Only the idea of decline caused by the drying up of non-capitalist areas (petty-commodity producers) is not particularly Luxemburg's idea (in fact some Luxemburgians argue that the decline subject can be dropped entirely from her book - and I kind of agree that it's tacked on at the end). This idea was wide-spread even in the rightwing of Social-democracy, as was the under-consumptionist idea (even Radek and Parvus before the war made this mistake, as Kautsky pointed out).

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Alf is right that Sternberg and Grossman’s politics do not negate their contributions. However, we need a theory to explain how figures with these types of politics are able to make contributions to Marxism. One could argue—as Ernie does—that Grossman’s work was carried out in a transitional period, before he was completely swallowed up by Stalinism. But this is not so easy to do for Sternberg, who was a pretty consistent Social Democrat. Is it possible for people with such politics to make a contribution to Marxism today? What about the work that is carried out in academia from a supposed Marxist perspective—the so-called British Marxist historians, etc. (Hobsbawn, Thompson, Hill, etc.)? This question has implications for the entire “Marxism and Science” debate.

The phenomenon of figures from the revolutionary wave, like Grossman, making a contribution to Marxism and then going on to reconcile with Stalinism is interesting and calls out for further historical investigation. What explains this phenomenon? The case of Lukacs comes to mind. Were any of his later works of any value at all?

To Mikhail’s point, there was definitely a community of interest between many Social Democrats and liberal Cold Warriors. There is also a well-known phenomenon of Trotskyists transforming from left critics of the Soviet Union to proponents of Western imperialism. The case of James Burnham comes to mind, as does Castoriadis—although with a much different flavor.

Sternberg seems also to have written a long critique of Grossmann according to the German wiki-entry. But when all is said, what contribution did he make? The drying up of markets idea was made by Heinrich Cunow in 1898. And a similar idea is found in Max Nordau's Conventional Lies of our Civilization (1883), which Kautsky reviewed in Die Neue Zeit (finding him nothing special, a republican with gutsy writing style, who took some ideas from Lafargue without crediting the source).

Nordau wrote:

Already, the world over, man is laboring beyond all reason and producing beyond all demand. Almost every civilized country is trying to export manufactured articles and import provisions. The markets for the former are beginning to fail. We can say without fear of exaggeration, that the great manufacturing industries of the principal countries in Europe have found all the markets they ever will find. These conditions can only grow worse, never better. The countries which are not yet developed as regards manufactures are gradually becoming so. Processes of labor will be still more improved, machines still further increased and perfected, and then? Then each country will be able to supply its own demand for manufactured articles and have an abundance left over that it will try to dispose of to its neighbor, but in vain, for the latter will have no use for them. The very last naked negro on the upper Congo will have his fifty yards of cotton cloth and his gun, the very last Papuan his boots and his paper collars. The European will have then reached the point of buying a new suit of clothes every week, and having a machine to turn over the leaves of his magazine. This will be the Golden Age of the political economists who are so captivated by unrestricted production, unbounded consumption and an unlimited development of manufactures. And in this Golden Age, when the entire country will be set as thick with factory chimneys as it is now with trees, the people will live on chemical substitutes for food instead of bread and meat they will toil eighteen hours out of the twenty four and die without knowing that they have ever lived. Perhaps it will not be necessary to wait until this Golden Age arrives, for the fact to dawn upon certain enlightened minds or circles, that this excessive, one-sided industrialism is a wholesale suicide of the human race, and that everything which the science of political economy alleges in its favor is a lie and a fraud. We have already become convinced of the fact that a country which exports bread-stuffs, if it exhausts the soil and does not return to it in some way or other, the matter of which it is deprived by the growing grain, is gradually growing poorer, although untold millions may be pouring into it from other countries. We will become convinced of another fact sooner or later, that the exportation of labor, of muscle and nerve, in the shape of manufactured articles, will make a people grow poorer and poorer, no matter how much gold it receives in exchange for them.

Mikail, I thought I read somewhere that Sternberg was critical of Lenin's workers aristocracy. And the armaments production as a safety valve is rejected by the ICC. And Braverman's comments suggest Sternberg thought American capitalism would collapse and not last the 20th century. Thus I think we have either bad accounts of Sternberg's ideas or he was a very eclectic thinker.

For what its relevancy, here is a roughly translated critique by a member of the Russian democratic centralists of Bukharin (who the decists nicknamed the jabberer - in Russian it sounds similar), which talks a bit about decadence:

http://libcom.org/library/critique-comintern-program-vladimir-smirnov