Rosa Luxemburg - Her Life and Work by Paul Frolich

Author:Paul Frolich [Frolich, Paul]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Communism; Post-Communism & Socialism, Historical, Leadership, Political Ideologies, Biography & Autobiography, Political Science, Political Process, History, Revolutionary, Political
ISBN: 9781528761369
Google: gr71DwAAQBAJ
Goodreads: 54981206
Publisher: Read Books Ltd
Published: 2020-08-06T00:00:00+00:00

3. “THE ACCUMULATION OF CAPITAL”

Rosa Luxemburg worked on economic problems for a number of years. Her teaching activity at the party school, her ordinary work of agitation and propaganda, long discussions on tactics with her opponents, and a tremendous amount of work for the Polish and Russian movements, postponed the conclusion of her “Introduction to Political Economy” again and again, and when, at the beginning of 1912, she was about to conclude the basic draft she met with an unexpected difficulty:

“I could not succeed in depicting the total process of capitalist production in all its practical relations and with its objective historical limitations with sufficient clarity. Closer examination of the matter then convinced me that it was a question of rather more than the mere art of representation, and that a problem remained to be solved which is connected with the theoretical matter of Vol. II of Marx’s ‘Capital’ and at the same time closely connected with present-day imperialist politics and their economic roots.”

And in this way Rosa Luxemburg came to write her chief work, “The Accumulation of Capital”,1 the second product of her activity at the party school.

The theoretical problem which she had to master demands a very considerable knowledge of Marxist economic theories for its understanding, and it is not possible to set it down briefly. All that can be done here is to make some attempt to give a general idea of the point at issue, and in this respect the times in which we are now living will assist our understanding. In 1929 the capitalist world economic system was shaken by an economic crisis unparalleled in history. It broke out after the chief damage caused by the World War to the economic system had been made good, after the world market relations broken off and destroyed during the World War had gradually been re-established, and after a short but vigorous boom period had awakened high hopes everywhere in the capitalist world. However, for the expert even the boom period of 1924–28 had many disturbing features which marked it off from former, pre-war, boom periods, and, in particular, in all the most important capitalist countries—in the U.S.A., Great Britain, Germany, etc.—unemployment was several times greater at the peak point of the boom period than it had been at the lowest point of the crisis periods before the World War, and the productive capacity of industry was no longer being fully utilised. The crisis which broke out in 1929 lasted as many years as a crisis formerly lasted months, and it led to unemployment figures ten and twenty times in excess of pre-war figures, and to the closing down of whole branches of industry. Over-production reached such dimensions that public opinion everywhere adopted the phrase “Starvation in the midst of plenty”. At the same time the drop in production and capital which followed, enormous though it was, no longer proved sufficient (as it had always done in former crises) to clear the way for recovery, and the authorities had to adopt the desperate remedy of destroying vast quantities of commodities of all sorts.

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