Pathways to social development: Rosa Luxemburg’s studies on the anthropology and sociology of imperialism

ABSTRACT

While Rosa Luxemburg is widely known for her critique of reformism and political authoritarianism, less attention has been paid to her anthropological and ethnographic studies of non-Western and precapitalist societies. This chapter examines Luxemburg’s work on this in her Introduction to Political Economy and writings composed between 1907 and 1914 at the school of the German Social-Democratic Party in Berlin. In doing so, it compares and contrasts Luxemburg’s studies on the non-Western world with the late writing of Marx (1872–1883), especially concerning “the so-called primitive accumulation of capital.”

KEYWORDS:

• Marx
• Luxemburg
• precapitalist societies
• peasantry
• communal forms
• socialism
• capital
• colonialism
• imperialism

Notes

1 Following the conventions of the time, Luxemburg refers to them as the Iroquois, which is not what the Haudenosaunee (“people of the long house”) called themselves.

2 As Ian Angus has pointed out, the French edition of Capital translated ursprüngliche as primitive, since at the time the latter was generally a synonym for original. However, since no English edition of Capital is based on the French edition—despite Marx’s insistence that it should serve as the basis of all future translations of the book—it is doubtful that this explains why “primitive” accumulation has been preferred by its English-language translators. See 2022.

3 For my critique of Luxemburg’s dispute with Marx’s theory of expanded reproduction in The Accumulation of Capital, see Hudis (2014, 2021).

4 Marx’s letter to Mikhailovsky—which he never sent and which was found among his papers after his death, in 1888—was actually published three times prior to 1908. It first appeared in Danielson’s book Ocherki nashego poreformennago obshchestvennago khoziaistva (St. Petersburg: Tip. A. Benke, 1893), in a German edition of the book, Die Volkswirtschaft in Russland nach der Bauern-Emancipation (München: Verlag von Hermann Lukaschik, 1899), 506–508, and in French in Histoire du Développement Economique de la Russie Depuis L’Affranchissment des Serfs (Paris: V. Giard & E. Drière, 1902), 528–530. It is inconceivable that Luxemburg—as well as other Russian Marxists that she collaborated with—could have been unaware of this letter in which Marx warned against treating his chapters on primitive accumulation as a universal. I wish to thank David Norman Smith for bringing this to my attention in private correspondence.

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Notes on contributors

Peter Hudis

Peter Hudis is a Distinguished Professor of Philosophy at Oakton College (USA) and General Editor of The Complete Works of Rosa Luxemburg—a 17-volume collection of which four volumes have appeared so far. He is the author of Marx’s Concept of the Alternative to Capitalism and Frantz Fanon, Philosopher of the Barricades.