Henryk Grossman

Henryk Grossman (1881 to 1950) was a Polish-German Marxist economist and historian, born into an assimilated Jewish family in Krakow. Before the First World War he led the Jewish Social Democratic Party of Galicia and wrote its manifesto and theoretical pamphlets, then turned to academic economic history in Vienna. In the later 1920s he joined the Institute for Social Research in Frankfurt, where he published The Law of Accumulation and Breakdown of the Capitalist System in 1929, an argument that capitalism tends toward breakdown because rising capital intensity pushes the rate of profit down. After fleeing Nazi Germany he worked in Paris, London and New York, and in 1949 took a chair at Leipzig University. His crisis theory was largely rejected by both social democratic and communist orthodoxy in his lifetime and was rediscovered from the late 1960s, when it became a central reference in Marxist debates on economic crisis.