Is there any future for democracy?

Abstract

The critical situation that global capitalist societies find themselves in today has renewed concerns that once fired the imagination of great authors in the past. Just recently, we celebrated the centennial of The Accumulation of Capital (2013) by Rosa Luxemburg, which stoked considerable discussion regarding the possibilities of democracy and the role of development. It seems opportune to reflect on these insights in view of the situation we now find ourselves in. The writing of The Accumulation of Capital, like almost everything in Rosa’s life, had revolutionary roots. She sought to provide a scientific foundation for the socialist movement, something which she did not find, at least in the ways she was expecting, in the course of her efforts to popularize Marx’s work. She built a theory of the collapse of capitalism with which she was hoping to enrich existing criticism of this mode of production. No attempt to briefly summarize such a complex work can ever capture its richness but, in essence, Rosa sought to show that capitalism cannot on its own generate sufficient demand for part of its product, specifically the portion of surplus value intended to be capitalized. She thought that a non-capitalist environment was required to provide adequate demand for capitalist commodities while supplying the necessary manpower and means of production for capital accumulation. Contact with what she called ‘external markets’ should kick-start transformation of non-capitalist social forms and move to widespread adoption of the mainstream economy, whereby it would eliminate its external sources of commodity realization and create the conditions for its collapse. What Marx had called ‘primitive accumulation’ accompanied the entire historical period of capitalism, which served as a basis to suggest a theory of imperialism and, in the distinct rates of expansion of capitalist production and of external markets, she found an explanation for the constant crises of the system. The events of history, which she offers forceful accounts of, were constantly cited as confirmation of her rational narrative. We cannot fail to appreciate that subsequent history to the present has not been very kind to the claims of Rosa Luxemburg. Capitalism has spread around the globe and trade in capitalist products is concentrated in developed countries. It is in the context of these relationships that capitalism found the richest source of its dynamism. Of course, this system has never given up the plundering of resources it does not already control or establishing military hegemony over weaker territories. But the most crucial conflicts have taken place in more developed areas, in search of world hegemony and by means of control over riches accumulated in the hands of weaker capitalist countries. By expressing itself in industrial colonialism, imperialism managed to create an ingenious system of domination of some capitalist countries over others (Figueroa, 2013). Rosa built her theory based on a critique of the schemes of expanded reproduction that Marx had included in Volume II of Capital. She thought that such schemes ought to account for reality 570207 CRS0010.1177/0896920515570207Critical SociologySepulveda research-article2015