Henryk Grossman

From Grokipedia

Henryk Grossman (14 April 1881 – 24 November 1950) was a Polish-Jewish Marxist economist and revolutionary activist who formulated a rigorous mathematical exposition of capitalism's inherent tendency toward breakdown, grounded in Karl Marx's laws of accumulation.

Born in Kraków, then part of Austrian Galicia, to a prosperous Jewish family, Grossman engaged early in socialist organizing against discrimination and exploitation, joining the Polish Social Democratic Party of Galicia and Silesia by age 17. He earned a doctorate in law and political economy from the Jagiellonian University in 1910, focusing on economic crises, and later worked as a statistician and academic in Polish Galicia while contributing to Marxist theory through opposition to reformist tendencies in social democracy.

Grossman's seminal contribution, The Law of Accumulation and Breakdown of the Capitalist System (1929), extended Marx's analysis by modeling the falling tendency of the profit rate through dynamic equations incorporating constant and variable capital growth, predicting periodic crises escalating to systemic collapse absent countervailing forces like rising organic composition limits. Exiled after World War I for anti-war activities and later fleeing Nazi persecution to the United States, he continued critiquing both Stalinist distortions of Marxism and Western reformism, influencing debates on crisis theory despite marginalization in orthodox circles. After the war, he briefly returned to East Germany, heading an economic planning institute in Leipzig until his death.

In brief

Henryk Grossman grew up in assimilated Kraków and chose the Jewish labor movement anyway. The JSDP and, later, Polish communism were his first public lives.

Exile delivered him to the Institute for Social Research, where he published the breakdown treatise that made his name. Paris, London, New York: the suitcases changed. The argument — that accumulation has a limit — did not.