1. Michael Heinrich is best known for his 1991 study of the theoretical field of classical political economy The Science of Value, his introductory text to the critique of political economy An Introduction to the Three Volumes of Karl Marx's Capital, and his ongoing project to produce a multi-volume biography of Marx, of which the first volume of a projected four was published in 2020.
Michael Heinrich was a research assistant at the Department of Political Science at Free University of Berlin from 1987 to 1993, where he received his PhD.
Michael Heinrich's dissertation was published as The Science of Value in 1991, and is in its eighth edition in Germany.
Michael Heinrich was later appointed as lecturer at Free University Berlin, and returned to HTW Berlin as lecturer from 2005 to 2016.
Michael Heinrich is presently working on a four-volume biography of Marx's life.
Michael Heinrich is an outspoken critic of what he calls "worldview Marxism", for which Karl Kautsky was the dominant figure.
For Michael Heinrich, fetishism is not an impenetrable context of deception, but one cannot speak of a "privileged position of perception occupied by the working class", nor can one speak of a conscious instrumentalization by capital, making moral criticisms of behaviors of individuals unproductive.
Michael Heinrich argues against giving a central place to the tendency of the rate of profit to fall, stating that Marx did not include the argument in his published theoretical work.
Further, Michael Heinrich is sceptical of the suggestion that crisis for Marx necessarily begets collapse, arguing that the collapse theory "has historically always had an excusatory function: regardless of how bad contemporary defeats were, the opponent's end was a certainty".
Michael Heinrich argues that such a theory is not found in Marx beyond a possible trace of one in the Grundrisse, one which is not taken up in Marx's later work.