Henryk Grossman's Revolutionary Marxism

While a political activist organising Jewish workers in Galicia, before the First World War and in the Communist Workers' Party of Poland, between 1919 and 1925, Henryk Grossman wrote substantial Marxist works on the economic history of Galicia and Poland. His principal contributions to economic theory, from 1919 and into the 1940s, were the identification of Marx's method and the fundamental structure of Capital; the significance of the distinction between use value and value, at all levels of Marx’s economic analysis; and the elaboration of Marx's account of capitalism's tendency to break down and its consequent, unavoidable proneness to economic crises, grounded in the tendency for the rate of profit to fall and its counter-tendencies. While the reception of Grossman's analyses was generally hostile, they are of vital importance for those seeking to understand and overturn capitalism today.