Abstract
This chapter reviews the work of Tadeusz Kowalik (1925–2012) in challenging the accepted interpretation among Marxists and others of Rosa Luxemburg’s The Accumulation of Capital. Luxemburg, like Karl Marx, has been widely interpreted as advancing an underconsumptionist view of capitalist crisis, arising out of low wages. Kowalik showed, however, that Luxemburg recognised the role played by capital accumulation (investment), as well as foreign trade and exports, in the realisation of surplus. This makes her work an important link between the analysis of Marx, in his schemes of reproduction in Volume II of Capital, and the theories of Michał Kalecki (and the Keynesian Revolution in general).
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Notes
- 1.
Translator’s note: Luxemburg (and others) spells the name Tugan-Baranovsky, not Baranowski, as the present author does.
- 2.
‘… I find myself in strong sympathy with the school of writers – Tugan Baranovski, Hull, Spiethoff and Schumpeter – of which Tugan-Baranovski was the first and the most original …’ (Keynes, 1971, pp. 89–90).
- 3.
Some scope of Michał Kalecki’s influence on Tadeusz Kowalik’s thinking on Rosa Luxemburg is provided by the paper Kowalik contributed to the Kalecki Festschrift, entitled ‘R. Luxemburg’s Theory of Accumulation and Imperialism (An Attempted Interpretation)’. Kowalik refers to this paper in this book as containing the essential conclusions of his habilitacja thesis (see note 17 at the end of the Introduction). But in the earlier paper, he merely states that Kalecki resolved problems in Rosa Luxemburg’s analysis, while the paper itself makes much more of Oskar Lange’s criticisms of Luxemburg’s theory. By the time that Kowalik’s book was published in 1971, Kalecki received a much more central role as the link between the Marxian political economy of Luxemburg, Tugan-Baranowski, Hilferding, and others and mid-20th-century Keynesian political economy, while Lange is reduced to expressing his view that realisation problems are purely monetary phenomena (see note 15 at the end of Chapter 4). A full list of Tadeusz Kowalik’s publications is given at the end of Bellofiore et al. 2014.
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Toporowski, J. (2016). Tadeusz Kowalik’s Interpretation of Accumulation. In: Dellheim, J., Wolf, F. (eds) Rosa Luxemburg: A Permanent Challenge for Political Economy. Luxemburg International Studies in Political Economy. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/978-1-137-60108-7_6
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