The Complete Works of Rosa Luxemburg, Volume 2 by Rosa Luxemburg & Paul Le Blanc

Author:Rosa Luxemburg & Paul Le Blanc
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Verso Books

Chapter 27. The Struggle Against the Natural Economy

Capitalism comes into existence and develops itself historically in a noncapitalist social milieu. In the Western European countries, it is first surrounded by the feudal milieu, from whose womb it emerges (the corvée economy in the countryside, and the artisanal guilds in the towns) and then, after the stripping away of feudalism, by a predominantly peasant-artisanal milieu engaging in simple commodity production both in agriculture and in the handicraft enterprises. Further afield, European capitalism is surrounded by vast territories of non-European cultures that comprise the whole range of stages of development, from the most primitive communist hordes of nomadic hunter-gatherers right up to peasant and artisanal commodity production. This is the milieu within which the process of capital accumulation drives itself forward.

Within this process, there are three phases to be distinguished: the struggle between capital and the natural economy; the struggle between capital and the commodity economy; and capital’s competitive struggles on the world stage over the remaining conditions of accumulation.

Capitalism requires noncapitalist forms of production for its existence and further development. However, not all of these forms serve it in this way. It requires noncapitalist social strata as a market in which to realize its surplus value, as a source for its means of production and as a reservoir of labor-power for its wage system. Forms of production based on a natural economy are of no use to capital for any of these purposes. In all natural economic formations, whether these are primitive rural communes with common ownership of the land, or feudal relations of bondage and the like, the economy pivots around subsistence production, and there is therefore little or no need for external commodities, and as a rule no excess product, or at least no urgent need to dispose of an excess product. Most important, however, is the following: the fundamental characteristic of all forms of production based on a natural economy is that the means of production and labor-power are bound in one form or another. The economic organization of the communist rural commune, no less than that of the feudal estate based on corvée and the like, rests on the trammeling of the most important means of production—the land—as well as of labor-power through the rule of law and tradition. The requirements of capital thus come up against the rigid constraints of the natural economy in every respect. Therefore capitalism above all wages a constant war of annihilation everywhere against any historical form of natural economy that it encounters, whether this be the slave economy, feudalism, primitive communism, or the patriarchal peasant economy. Political violence (revolution, war), oppressive taxation by the state, and cheap commodities form the main methods by which this struggle is fought. These methods partly run in parallel, and partly succeed each other, and they act to mutually reinforce each other. If the violent struggle in Europe took the form of revolution against feudalism (as is ultimately the case in the bourgeois revolutions of the

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