Henryk Grossman

Henryk Grossman (; born Chaskel Grossman; 14 April 1881 – 24 November 1950) was a Polish-German Marxist economist, historian, and political activist. Born in Kraków to an assimilated Jewish family, he became a leading figure in the Jewish socialist movement in Galicia before World War I, leading the Jewish Social Democratic Party (JSDP). After the war, he became a member of the Communist Party of Poland.

Forced into exile in the mid-1920s due to political persecution, Grossman joined the Institute for Social Research (the Frankfurt School) in Germany. There he published his most famous work, ''The Law of Accumulation and Breakdown of the Capitalist System'' (1929), a treatise that revived Karl Marx's theory of economic crisis. In this book, Grossman argued that capitalism has an inherent tendency towards breakdown, stemming from the rising organic composition of capital and the consequent fall in the rate of profit.

After fleeing Nazi Germany in 1933, Grossman lived in exile in Paris, London, and New York, continuing his association with the Frankfurt School until a falling out in the 1940s. He remained a committed, though not always orthodox, supporter of the Soviet Union. In 1949, he accepted a professorship at the University of Leipzig in East Germany, where he spent the final year of his life. His work, largely rejected by both social democratic and communist orthodoxy during his lifetime, was rediscovered in the late 1960s and has since become a central text in Marxist crisis theory. His analysis of capitalism's "final breakdown" has been seen by some modern scholars as "stunningly prescient". Provided by Wikipedia