Michael Heinrich (born 1957, Heidelberg) is a German historian of philosophy and political scientist, specialising in the critical study of the development of Karl Marx's thought.

In this period, Heinrich was involved in preparatory work on the Marx-Engels-Gesamtausgabe, and until 2014 served as managing editor of PROKLA: Journal for Critical Social Science [de].

[3] The first volume, Karl Marx and the Birth of Modern Society, was published in 2018, and appeared in English the next year on Monthly Review Press, with Portuguese, French and Spanish translations following suit.

This form of Marxism is characterized by "a crudely knitted materialism, a bourgeois belief in progress, and a few strongly simplified elements of Hegelian philosophy and modular pieces of Marxian terminology combined into simple formulas and explanations".

[8]: 55 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.

[9] Instead, Heinrich suggests we ought to follow the direction of Marx's remarks on the role of crisis in mediating breakdowns of relationships between production and consumption, and extend these arguments through more careful attention to a theory of money and credit.