Henryk Grossman - Early Life and Education

Early Life and Education

Grossman was born, as Chaskel Grossman, into a relatively prosperous Jewish family in Kraków, then a part of Austrian Galicia. He joined the socialist movement around 1898, becoming a member of the Social Democratic Party of Galicia (GPSD), an affiliate of the Social Democratic Workers' Party of Austria. The GPSD, led by Ignacy Daszyński, was formally Marxist, but dominated by Polish nationalists close to the Polish Socialist Party (PPS). When the Ukrainian Social Democratic Party in Galicia (USPD) was formed in 1899, the GSPD became the Polish Social Democratic Party (PPSD) and the Polish nationalist current was strengthened. Grossman led the resistance of orthodox Marxists to this current. Along with Karl Radek, he was active in the socialist student movement, particularly in Ruch (Movement), which included members of the PPSD as well as of the two socialist parties in the Kingdom of Poland, the PPS and the Social Democracy of the Kingdom of Poland and Lithuania (SDKPiL - led by Rosa Luxemburg and Leo Jogiches). He was the main figure in the newspaper Zjednoczenie (Unification), which took a line close to the SDKPiL, against the pro-PPS politics of Ruchs main organ, Promień for which he was censured by the PPSD and its newspaper Naprzód.

During this period, Grossman learned Yiddish and became involved in the Jewish workers movement in Kraków. Grossman was the founding secretary and theoretician of the Jewish Social Democratic Party of Galicia (JSDP) in 1905. The JSDP broke with the PPSD over the latter's belief that the Jewish workers should assimilate to Polish culture. It took a position close to the Bund, and was critical of the labour Zionism of the Poale Zion as well to assimilationist forms of socialism. The JSDP sought to affiliate to the Social Democratic Workers' Party of Austria (the General Party), but this was refused. However, the JSDP was active alongside the General Party, for example for universal suffrage.

At the end of 1908, Grossman went to Vienna to study the Marxian economic historian Carl Grünberg, withdrawing from his leadership role in the JSDP (although he remained on its executive until 1911 and had contact with the small JSDP group in Vienna, the Ferdinand Lassalle Club). With the destruction of the Austro-Hungarian empire at the end of World War I, Grossman became an economist in Poland, and joined the Communist Party of Poland.