The Complete Works of Rosa Luxemburg, Volume II: Economic Writings 2

596 Pages·2015·4.1 MB·English

by  Rosa Luxemburg

The Complete Works of Rosa Luxemburg
The Complete Works
of Rosa Luxemburg
VOLUME II, ECONOMIC WRITINGS 2
Edited by Peter Hudis
and Paul Le Blanc
Translated by Nicholas Gray
and George Shriver
In memory of Abdirahim Hassan (1988–2013),
and all other fallen comrades.
Verso would like to express its gratitude to Rosa Luxemburg Stiftung for help in publishing this book
The publisher also gratefully acknowledges the assistance of Dietz Verlag, publisher of Rosa Luxemburg’s
Gesammelte Werke, the German source of all English translations herein First published by Verso 2015
Translation © Nicholas Gray (“The Accumulation of Capital” and “The Second and Third Volumes of
Capital”) George Shriver (“The Accumulation of Capital, Or, What the Epigones Have Made Out of
Marx’s Theory—An Anti-Critique”) 2015
Introduction © Paul Le Blanc 2015
All rights reserved
The moral rights of the authors have been asserted 1 3 5 7 9 10 8 6 4 2
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Contents
Introduction by Paul Le Blanc
The Accumulation of Capital: A Contribution to the Economic Theory of
Imperialism
Translator’s Note on Terminology
Foreword
SECTION I: THE PROBLEM OF REPRODUCTION
Chapter 1. The Object Under Investigation
Chapter 2. Analysis of the Process of Reproduction in Quesnay and Adam Smith
Chapter 3. The Critique of Smith’s Analysis
Chapter 4. Marx’s Schema of Simple Reproduction
Chapter 5. The Circulation of Money
Chapter 6. Expanded Reproduction
Chapter 7. Analysis of Marx’s Schema of Expanded Reproduction
Chapter 8. Marx’s Attempts to Solve the Problem
Chapter 9. The Problem from the Standpoint of the Circulation Process
SECTION II: HISTORICAL EXPOSITION OF THE PROBLEM
First Round—The Controversy Between Sismondi/Malthus and
Say/Ricardo/McCulloch
Chapter 10. Sismondi’s Theory of Reproduction
Chapter 11. McCulloch vs. Sismondi
Chapter 12. Ricardo vs. Sismondi
Chapter 13. Say vs. Sismondi
Chapter 14. Malthus
Second Round—The Controversy Between Rodbertus and von Kirchmann
Chapter 15. von Kirchmann’s Theory of Reproduction
Chapter 16. Rodbertus’s Critique of the Classical School
Chapter 17. Rodbertus’s Analysis of Reproduction
Third Round—Struve/Bulgakov/Tugan-Baranovsky vs. Vorontsov/Danielson
Chapter 18. A New Version of the Problem
Chapter 19. Vorontsov and His “Surplus”
Chapter 20. Danielson
Chapter 21. Struve’s “Third Parties” and “Three World Empires”
Chapter 22. Bulgakov and His Extension of Marx’s Analysis
Chapter 23. Tugan-Baranovsky’s “Disproportionality”
Chapter 24. The Outcome of Russian “Legal Marxism”
SECTION III: THE HISTORICAL CONDITIONS OF ACCUMULATION
Chapter 25. Contradictions Within the Schema of Expanded Reproduction
Chapter 26. The Reproduction of Capital and Its Milieu
Chapter 27. The Struggle Against the Natural Economy
Chapter 28. The Introduction of the Commodity Economy
Chapter 29. The Struggle Against the Peasant Economy
Chapter 30. International Credit
Chapter 31. Protective Tariffs and Accumulation
Chapter 32. Militarism in the Sphere of Capital Accumulation
The Accumulation of Capital, Or, What the Epigones Have Made Out of
Marx’s Theory—An Anti-Critique
Translator’s Note on Terminology
Part I
Part II
The Second and Third Volumes of Capital
Notes
A Glossary of Personal Names
Index
Introduction: Rosa Luxemburg and the Global Violence
of Capitalism
This second volume in the Complete Works of Rosa Luxemburg contains three
key writings in which a revolutionary theorist is seeking to understand the
vibrant complexities of the global economy. Luxemburg’s purpose, of course,
was to help a potentially revolutionary working-class majority to replace global
capitalism with a socialism in which economic resources and institutions would
be socially owned, democratically controlled, and utilized to allow for the free
and full development of all. Her idealistic aspiration to achieve what might be
was tempered with a tough-minded determination to comprehend what is.
In the preceding collection of Luxemburg’s economic writings, the first
volume of the Complete Works, we see a powerful intellect absorbing, applying,
and sharing the contributions developed by Karl Marx and his collaborator
Frederick Engels. Her lively intelligence compelled her to embark on a
considerable amount of research, engaging with new data and the studies of
other scholars, in order to bring Marx’s contributions up to date and connect
them with the ever-changing realities of the most dynamic economic system in
human history. Yet as the editor of that volume, Peter Hudis, has noted, by
1911–12, while working on her popular exposition Introduction to Political
Economy, Luxemburg found herself at loggerheads with Marx himself:
She became convinced that Marx failed to adequately explain the limits to capitalist expansion in his
formulae of expanded reproduction at the end of Volume 1 of Capital, which assumes a closed
capitalist society without foreign trade. Luxemburg viewed this as a very serious error, since she took it
to imply the possibility of infinite capitalist expansion—something that, if true, would reduce the effort
to create a socialist society to being a subjective, utopian wish instead of an objective, historical
necessity.*
The three works presented here, in new translations by Nicholas Gray and
George Shriver, flow from that challenge—the centerpiece of this volume being
her magnum opus of 1913, The Accumulation of Capital: A Contribution to the
Economic Theory of Imperialism, complemented by two shorter works.
The shortest of these, a critical-minded summary of the second and third
volumes of Capital, was written at the request of her friend Franz Mehring for
inclusion in his major biography Karl Marx, published in 1918. Here
Luxemburg offers clear, succinct, appreciative summaries, while also indicating
what she felt were the limitations of the two volumes. As she put it in her
concluding sentence, “As incomplete as these volumes are, they provide
something infinitely more valuable than any supposed final truth: a spur to
reflection, to critique and self-critique, which is the most distinctive element of
the theory that was Marx’s legacy.”* This very notion also concludes the third
work presented here, The Accumulation of Capital, Or, What the Epigones Have
Made Out of Marx’s Theory—An Anti-Critique: “Marxism is a revolutionary
outlook on the world, which must always strive toward new knowledge and new
discoveries. Nothing is so abhorrent to it as to grow rigid in forms that were once
appropriate but no longer are.Ӡ
________________
* Peter Hudis, “Introduction: The Multidimensionality of Rosa Luxemburg,” The Complete Works of
Rosa Luxemburg, Vol. 1 (London: Verso, 2013), p. xiv.
Luxemburg notes that in the first volume of Capital “it was the workshop,
the deep shaft of labor within society, in which the source of capitalist
enrichment was detected”; while in the second and third (unfinished) volumes of
Marx’s masterwork the focus is quite different: “Warehouses, banks, the stock
market, financial transactions, ‘distressed landowners’ and their concerns are
foregrounded here. Here, the worker plays no part.” She comments that the
circulation of capital, the world of commerce, the actual realization of surplus
value (which is created through the exploitation of the workers examined in
Volume I), these processes “take place behind his back, after his hide has
already been tanned,” as she words it with dark humor. She adds eloquently,
“Amid the noisy hustle and bustle of the throng as it conducts its business, the
workers are only encountered at dawn as they trudge in droves to their factories,
and at dusk when they are once again spewed out in long columns.”‡
This different focus of volumes 2 and 3 is seen by Luxemburg as providing
workers with a much-needed understanding that will assist in overcoming the
reformist illusions common among too many trade unionists. Within the labor
movement, she noted, there has been a strong inclination to argue that there is “a
harmony of interests between capital and labor,” which businessmen
“myopically” fail to recognize, with reformist spokesmen advancing the “hope
of a palliative patching-up of economic anarchy.” In fact, she argues, the three
volumes of Capital, taken together, demonstrate the system’s “insatiable drive to
accumulate, [which] tends to immediately surpass any constraint posed by
consumption, no matter how much this consumption is expanded through the
increased purchasing power of a particular social stratum or by the conquest of
new markets.Ӥ
One aspect of her own economic masterwork of 1913, The Accumulation of
Capital: A Contribution to the Economic Theory of Imperialism, is meant to be a
correction of Marx and a necessary fine-tuning of the Marxist understanding of
how capitalism actually works—reflecting, as Tadeusz Kowalik has noted, her
passage “from being an orthodox Marxist to a creative one.” Yet as the subtitle
suggests, Luxemburg also saw her work as an explanation of capitalism’s
economic expansionism that other Marxist theorists were analyzing and
debating, and which was more and more shaping the foreign policies of the
world’s most powerful nations. (Many of these contending analyses are collected
and discussed by Richard B. Day and Daniel Gaido in their scholarly
compilation Discovering Imperialism.)*
________________
* See p. 461
† See p. 448.
‡ See p. 459.
§ See p. 460.
In the same year that saw the publication of her book, one finds, embedded
in celebratory comments about the working-class holiday of May Day,
Luxemburg’s anticipation of World War I’s bloody explosion, only one year
away:
The whole development, the whole tendency of imperialism in the last decade leads the international
working class to see more clearly and more tangibly that only the personal stepping forward of the
broadest masses, their personal political action, mass demonstrations, and mass strikes which must
sooner or later open into a period of revolutionary struggles for the power in the state, can give the
correct answer of the proletariat to the immense oppression of imperialistic policy. In this moment of
armament lunacy and war orgies, only the resolute will to struggle of the working masses, their capacity
and readiness for powerful mass actions, can maintain world peace and push away the menacing world
conflagration … The more the struggle for peace and socialism takes root in the strongest troops of the
International, the German working class, the greater is our guarantee that out of the world war which,
sooner or later, is unavoidable, will come forth a definite and victorious struggle between the world of
labor and that of capital.†
At the same time, Luxemburg’s great work on imperialism clearly demonstrated
that the world capitalist system—even in “peacetime”—naturally and
consistently visited a horrific violence, what one might call a violence of the