The Dialectic of the Spatial Determination of Capital: Rosa Luxemburg's Accumulation of Capital Reconsidered

Abstract

Rosa Luxemburg's The Accumulation of Capital sought to re-think the work of Marx for the era of imperialism by focusing on capitalism's spatial determination—its inherent drive to consume non-capitalist strata in order to realize surplus value. Although Luxemburg's approach has given rise to intense debates over the past century, the availability of numerous texts of Marx that were unknown in her lifetime—from the Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts of 1844 to his Ethnological Notebooks on pre-capitalist societies—makes it possible for us to finally determine the extent to which her theory of expanded reproduction extended Marx's insights or departed from them. A critical analysis of Luxemburg's work, this paper argues, can enable us to better appreciate the essence of Marx's critique of capitalism—the domination of “dead” labor (capital) over “living” labor as well as its meaning for today.

Keywords:

• Marx
• political economy
• reproduction
• value production
• capitalism

Notes on Contributor

Peter Hudis is a professor of philosophy at Oakton Community College in Illinois, USA. He has written widely on Hegelian philosophy, Marxist theory, and contemporary politics. His most recent book is Marx's Concept of the Alternative to Capitalism (Brill, 2012). He is general editor of The Complete Works of Rosa Luxemburg, a forthcoming 14-volume project that will present all of her writings in English.

Notes

¹For the recently published first English translation of the whole of Introduction to Political Economy, see Luxemburg (2013).

²Schwarzschild's 1951 translation, while adequate in some respects, left out a number of passages from the original German edition and her translation of parts of the text is inaccurate. A new translation, by Nick Gray, is currently being prepared for publication. Since it is not yet in print, all quotations from The Accumulation of Capital will be the Schwarzschild translation (Luxemburg 1968).

³According to Marx, this applies not only to a higher phase of communism—in which the principle “From each according to their ability, to each according to their needs” prevails—but also to its initial phase, as it is emerging from the womb of capitalist society. For more on this, see Hudis (2012, 187–206).

⁴Luxemburg surely understood that Marx's theory of primitive accumulation was integral to his understanding of the spatial determination of capital. However, she tended to downplay the significance of his theory of “so-called primitive accumulation” on the grounds that Marx tied it to the origins of capitalism—whereas she was interested in how capitalism in its full maturity depends on non-capitalist strata. She also held that Marx's theory of primitive accumulation primarily deals with the destruction of pre-capitalist relations within a developing capitalist economy, whereas she was interested in the destruction of pre-capitalist relations that are outside of the developed capitalist world.

⁵For more on this, see Anderson (2010).

⁶Marx does so because such revolutions do not alter the proportions of the elements of value in terms of its various components so long as they are universally distributed.

⁷It is no accident that those Marxists who insist upon posing a direct connection between class relations and economic formations in a reductionist sense tend to dismiss Volume Two of Capital as “economistic.” For a striking expression of this position, see Negri (1991).

⁸This is not to suggest that Marx merely copies or applies Hegelian categories in a one-to-one manner. There are also major differences between Hegel's delineation of the syllogism and Marx's circuit of capital—not the least being that there the latter does not exhibit as smooth and fluid a transition from one component part to another as do the terms in Hegelian logic. As Marx puts it in Volume Two,

The circuit of capital is a constant process of interruption; one stage is left behind, the next stage embarked upon; one form is cast aside, and the capital exists in another; each of these stages not only conditions the other, but at the same time excludes it. (Marx 1978, 182)

⁹Much of the reason for this revolves around Luxemburg's generalized disdain for Hegelian philosophy and indeed for philosophy as a whole. It is only with Lenin's encounter with Hegel in 1914–15 that any Marxist finally discovered that (in Lenin's words) it is “impossible to understand Marx's Capital without comprehending the whole of Hegel's Science of Logic.” For more on this, see Kevin Anderson (1995).

¹⁰For more on this, see Desai (2002).

¹¹There is something distinctively non-Marxist about the insistence of some “Marxists”—such as the critics of The Accumulation of Capital that Luxemburg responded to in her Anti-critique—that Marx had essentially resolved all the issues without them needing any further re-thinking and analysis. Marx surely produced a formidable body of ideas, but it was hardly a completed one, let alone some closed ontology. Luxemburg was not wrong to question Marx or try to improve upon his work; the issue is the extent to which that was successful.

¹²See Fred Moseley:

None of the participants in the debate [such as Tugan-Baranowski, Hilferding, Otto Bauer, et al.] mentioned Smith's dogma. . . . The main issue in the debate was whether there would be sufficient demand to realize the surplus value produced in the case of expanded reproduction. Therefore the participants in this debate used Marx's reproduction tables for purposes quite different from Marx's own purposes. (Moseley 1999, 184)

¹³Critics of Luxemburg's The Accumulation of Capital during her lifetime included such figures as Max Schipple, who openly supported German imperialist intervention in Africa and China. The Austro-Marxist Otto Bauer, her most famous critic, argued that imperialism was not a necessary component of capitalism but rather a political policy that could be readily reversed. The refusal of the reformist “Marxists” of her time to recognize the inseparability of capitalism and imperialism had much to do with why her allies on the revolutionary left (such as Frantz Mehring) strongly endorsed her position. The exceptions to this were Lenin and Anton Pannekoek, who sharply differed from her approach while affirming the integral connection between capitalism and imperialism. For more on this, see Gaido and Quiroga (2013).

¹⁴It should be noted that it was not only her reformist opponents who suffered from such Eurocentric defects. One will find hardly a single mention of sub-Sahara Africa in the innumerable writings of the revolutionary Marxists of the period, Lenin and Trotsky included; it would seem that European radicals of the time presumed that Africa stopped at the southern borders of Egypt—despite the massive amount of material wealth being expropriated at the time by the British, French, Germans and Belgians from sub-Sahara Africa. Luxemburg was a notable exception, as especially seen in her detailed discussions of pre-capitalist communal forms in Africa in both the Introduction to Political Economy and The Accumulation of Capital. For the former, see Luxemburg (2013).

¹⁵For more on this, see Hudis (2006).

¹⁶See Marx ([1881] 1989, 536–37): “In my investigation of value I have dealt with bourgeois relations, not with the application of this theory of value to a ‘social state.’”

¹⁷At least part of the reason for this is that so many of Marx's major works—such as the Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts of 1844 and the Grundrisse—were unknown to Luxemburg's generation. It was largely in response to the transformation of the Russian Revolution into a state-capitalist tyranny under Stalin that scholars begin to pry these and other invaluable writings by Marx from the archives.

¹⁸I would like to thank Paul Le Blanc for drawing my attention to this passage.

¹⁹A number of commentators have argued that Luxemburg's theory of accumulation can be salvaged for the contemporary world by relating it to the drive to consume non-capitalist or not-yet commodified strata within the existing, developed capitalist world. But this strikes me as a rather questionable application of her ideas. Luxemburg herself emphasized that,

. . . there should be buyers outside capitalist society. Buyers, it should be noted, not consumers, since the material form of the surplus value is quite irrelevant to its realization. The decisive fact is that the surplus value cannot be realized by sale either to workers or to capitalists, but only if it is sold to such social organization or strata whose own mode of production is not capitalism. (Luxemburg 1968, 351–52)

Clearly, the key is not simply being a consumer of non-capitalist strata, but of being a buyer who is neither a capitalist nor a worker. Otherwise, the surplus value that is capitalized has to come out of the consumption within the capitalist home market—which is precisely what her theory of accumulation argues is not possible. Such efforts to “apply” Luxemburg's theory to a context other than the one discussed by her hardly do justice to her seriousness as a thinker.

²⁰The perspective that governs this analysis is that the putatively “socialist” or “communist” regimes of the twentieth century failed to transcend capitalism and were instead state-capitalist formations. As I argue in Marx's Concept of the Alternative to Capitalism (Hudis 2012), the horizon of capitalism cannot be left behind so long as the law of value and surplus value continues to govern social reproduction.