Rosa Luxemburg: Accumulation of Capital and the Perennial Crisis

Abstract

Luxemburg's economic writings have always been subject to misinterpretations. Bukharin accused her of being an under-consumptionist, while Bauer gave a profound critique of her misreading of the reproduction schema in Marx's Capital (vol. II). During the Stalinist era Luxemburg's writings were considered incompatible with the Leninist notion of monopoly capitalism. Russian economists like Varga were repeatedly accused of being adherents of ‘Luxemburgian revisionism’. On the other hand, the radical Cambridge Keynesian Robinson linked Luxemburg's analysis of conditions of capital expansion to the capitalist's expectation of the rate of profit as a means to retranslate Marxian economics into a heterodox paradigm. Some aspects of the Luxemburgian perspective were incorporated in the post-war theories of Sweezy, Baran and Steindl, with an emphasis on the notion of a realisation crisis. Recent scholarship on Marxian economics has been influenced by the value-form paradigm in which the functions of money are a central focal point. In some cases, this new perspective leads to the abandonment of value-theoretical categories. In this collection of new essays, money and wages play a central role in the extended reproduction scheme. An eclectic mix of Leontief input–output, von Neumann-Morishima and Domar growth models are implemented in order to close the gap between Luxemburg and contemporary heterodox economics. It is of the utmost importance to investigate whether this methodology is still compatible with Luxemburg's initial perspective. Furthermore, a great amount of research has been devoted to the comparison between Luxemburg and Kalecki, because the latter was heavily influenced by ‘The Accumulation of Capital’. Other topics are the concept of the third market in late capitalist imperialism, the connection between the value of labour power and real wages, and the role of investment and the rate of profit regarding military interventions to maintain an imperialist power configuration.