Luxemburg and Global Development

Abstract

Rosa Luxemburg was, above all, a fierce critic of the lack of socialist democracy in post-revolutionary Russia. She was also a pioneer in the development of a Marxist theory of imperialism in a way which was quite distinct from the dominant Marxist model of Hilferding/Bukharin/Lenin. Essentially, it prioritised the impact of imperialism on the non-European world in a way that was practically unique at the time and also acts as a bridge to the Third Worldist and ‘dependentista’ positions of the 1960 and 1970s. We start in this chapter with Luxemburg’s Critique of Marx insofar as her pioneering 1916 work on ‘The Accumulation of Capital’ was based around a critique of Marx’s reproduction schemes in Capital Volume 2. Luxemburg argued that Marx had failed to recognise the inherent necessity of the capitalist mode of production to find external markets and thus exploit the non-capitalist world on an ongoing basis. This leads us on to a consideration of Luxemburg’s understanding of Permanent Primitive Accumulation that she sees as structural and not just a feature of its original formation as Marx according to her saw it. This points towards a Marxist engagement with the ‘developing world’ that is quite distinctive, and sets it apart from the metropolitan focus of Western Marxism. Finally, we turn to a contemporary rendering of this debate and the emergence of the concept of Accumulation by Dispossession that seeks to account for present-day features of capitalist development based on force and dispossession. While Luxemburg’s original thinking is not always acknowledged in this emerging paradigm, it is a certain ‘spirit of Luxemburg’ speaking to us and renewing our link to the period of classical Marxism.