Luxemburg's 'Accumulation of Capital'

This article (which agrees with Luxemburg's basic approach) tries to situate her work in its historical context.
http://en.internationalism.org/ir/142/luxemburg. It's part of a longer series on the historical development, within the marxist movement, of the notion of the decline of capitalism. Luxemburg's theories come up in several places in the series: http://en.internationalism.org/series/779

Side note: volume 2 of The Complete Works of Rosa Luxemburg, published by Verso, contains a new translation of this text. I will try to locate a decent PDF of this.

Blood Diamond - you need to search around on this site for starters as there are numerous critiques of the specific elements of Rosa Luxemburg's crisis theory from a variety of reliable sources from Paul Mattick and the ICT/CWO through to Robert Kurz via the ex-ICC comrades of Internationalist Perspective. Might dig something out when I have more time. Personally I think Rosa got it wrong on this issue.

Briefly exiting retirement to make this post.

The theory is shit.

You're correct -- nothing today exists outside the capitalist mode of production and nothing about it is rapidly diminishing except the raw material and natural resources it blindly extracts at ever increasing levels. The ICC texts linked will only try to convince you otherwise.

Neither the ICC, nor it's internet debate chief Alf, can satisfactorily answer the question of how a decadent and decomposing system has managed to generate more wealth in the "developing" nations in the past forty years than had been generated up to that point in all of human history. For them capitalism broke around WWI and has never been able to "correct", so that equates to it's downfall being supposedly eminent.

Theses issues have been debated countless time here and most recently on the ICC forums themselves:

http://en.internationalism.org/forum/1056/hawkeye/14331/once-more-decadence-what-does-it-mean-say-capitalism-historically-transitor#comment-24110

Here's a few texts which critique her work on accumulation:

Nikolai Bukharin - Imperialism and the Accumulation of Capital (1924)

Henryk Grossman - Law of the Accumulation and Breakdown (1929)

Paul Mattick - Luxemburg versus Lenin (1935)

CWO/ICT - The Accumulation of Contradictions or The Economic Consequences of Rosa Luxemburg (1976)

I would also recommend Paul Mattick's Luxemburg in Retrospect as a good summary of his critique of Luxemburg's views on reproduction & imperialism.

Luxemburg was wrong about the reproduction schemas, but I think there are much bigger problems with Grossman and Mattick, who were basically arguing that capitalism would collapse by itself because of its inner logic. For a critique of that position (and to a lesser extent, that of Luxemburg), see this short article by Pannekoek. (Or if you want to read more, I thought the series on "decadence theory" in Aufheben was pretty decent.)

Also, while there may not be anywhere today that exists outside the capitalist mode of production, there are still hundreds of millions of peasants just waiting to be made into proletarians, so capital may still have some room for expansion.

I don't think Mattick believed that capitalism would collapse automatically. If I remember correctly, he saw Grossman's argument as applying to "pure capitalism", not to actually existing capitalist economies.

Can you source this claim? I believe you are mistaken. I can't imagine any living soul on Earth not being "semi-proletarianzed" by this point, much less fifty years from now.

Either way, I think capital definitely has "room for expansion".

Grossman responds to this accusation in a letter to Mattick:

"Obviously the idea that capitalism must break down ‘of itself’ or ‘automatically’, which Hilferding and other socialists (Braunthal) assert against my book, is far from being my position. It can only be overturned through the struggles of the working class.

But I wanted to show that the class struggle alone is not sufficient. The will to overturn capitalism is not enough. Such a will cannot even arise in the early phases of capitalism. It would also be [in]effective without a revolutionary situation. Only in the final phases of development do the objective conditions arise which bring about the preconditions for the successful, victorious intervention of the working class. Obviously, as a dialectical Marxist, I understand that both sides of the process, the objective and subjective elements influence each other reciprocally. In the class struggle these factors fuse. One cannot ‘wait’ until the ‘objective’ conditions are there and only then allow the ‘subjective’ factors to come into play. That would be an inadequate, mechanical view, which is alien to me. But, for the purposes of the analysis, I had to use the process of abstract isolation of individual elements in order to show the essential function of each element. Lenin often talks of the revolutionary situation which has to be objectively given, as the precondition for the active, victorious intervention of the proletariat. The purpose of my breakdown theory was not to exclude this active intervention, but rather to show when and under what circumstances such an objectively given revolutionary situation can and does arise."

This is from something he wrote in 1974, so it's possible he changed his view over his lifetime:

It seems to me from the context that he believed that capitalism would suffer crises periodically, or even potentially find itself in a state of permanent crisis, but that the presence or absence of revolutionary action would determine whether any given crisis was a 'final crisis'. This article from 1978 continues the same theme:

The framing of the debate in terms of a conflict between subjective and objective conditions is fascinating to me, since the conflict between 'subjective' and 'objective' epistemology was such a central topic of German Idealism from Kant to Hegel. Fichte's famous introduction to the Wissenschaftslehre makes it the central point of concern in beginning philosophical enquiry - Dogmatism or Idealism, Kant or Spinoza, Subject or Object.

Hegel frequently characterises his 'absolute' standpoint as one which resolves the apparent opposition:

The fact that such a rift should re-emerge in later Marxist commentary is the kind of thing that could probably produce endless philosophically reflective accounts. I'm sure some contemporary Hegelians could have a field day.

That's not quite how he put it back in the 30s when he was convinced that capitalism was already entering its "death-crisis". In a presentation of Grossman's theories from 1934 he writes:

Mattick does grant a role for the workers movement in overthrowing capitalism, but this is subordinated to the "objective" circumstances. In the period of the rise of capitalism, when capital can still afford to pay off workers, the workers movement is pushed into reformism:

Once capitalism has reached is final stage, however, the workers movement is pushed into forms that must lead to the overthrow of the system, and its inactivity can only prolong a permanent crisis of capitalism, with ever increasing misery for the working class:

Despite Mattick's "ultra-left" critique of Leninism, on economic theory he is continuing the same orthodox views that you find in the Second and Third International: The working class is a prisoner of objective economic circumstances, and can only bide its time until the right crisis appears that pushes them the onto the path of revolution.

Besides, the fact that Grossman's theories limit itself to an abstract "pure capitalism" is part of the problem: You simply can't draw the conclusions he does from that level of abstraction. Despite her errors, Luxemburg at least points in the right direction by looking at the external limits of capitalist expansion, rather than its internal logical structure.

I think it's exactly how he put it, because it's what he actually says in this very article (just do a search for "pure" in the text). What you originally wrote seemed as if you were saying that Mattick believed in an automatic (or automattick) collapse (which is not even a correct description of Grossman's views), and I was responding to that.

I agree that Mattick's position is problematic. So is Luxemburg's. They (and most other crisis theorists before WW2?) were all looking for inherent, definite limits to the system that could be exploited politically, and could explain what was going on around them and what it meant (in the context of an important global cycle of struggles and the following brutal repression, which killed Luxemburg, and then downturn, which isolated Mattick). I think this search for definite limits, whether they were seen as the rate of profit or the shrinking non-capitalist world, was in vain and led to some rather millenarian-sounding theories from all sides.

BTW, insofar as Mattick's/Grossman's analysis can be said to be looking at the "internal logical structure" of whatever, the same applies to Luxemburg, since her point of departure were reproduction schemes and the alleged impossibility of accumulation without a non-capitalist "outside".

Yes, Mattick writes that Grossman describes a "pure" capitalism, but I think it's clear that he thought the theory also applied to actually existing capitalist economies. He just allows for some temporary counteracting tendencies, which however can only slow down the process, but not stop it:

Also, Mattick writes that the collapse isn't automatic, but that a permanent crisis is inevitable, and that pretty much amounts to the same thing...

Well, I would agree with that as far as her point of departure with the reproduction schemes is concerned, and indeed she also reaches the same conclusion that the collapse (or permanent crisis?) of capitalism is inevitable once it runs out of non-capitalist areas to extract surplus value from. I still find some of her discussion useful. While she is wrong on a theoretical level that accumulation is impossible in an exclusively capitalist environment, on a practical level, expansion to less developed areas has been one of the main ways that capitalism has historically solved its accumulation problem.

In terms of the initial list of critics I briefly mentioned in my post no 5 I should also point out that Robert Kurz is critical at a pretty fundamental level of the crisis or breakdown theories of Grossman, Mattick, and Bukharin as well as Rosa Luxemburg in Part 2 of his 'The Substance of Capital' which I've just managed to struggle through. Haven't read Heinrich's works which seems to form much of the focus of Kurz critique there so I'm not able to make a clear judgement on it all, but I did eventually get to grips with the main repeated argument of Kurz opposition to all those common theories which reduce the concept of 'abstract labour' to the sphere of circulation and the market mechanism. I have found some of the shorter Kurz texts on libcom useful even if I don't draw all the same conclusions as he (or the former Krisis and EXIT) groups that he was previously associated with).

I just got done reading Heinrich's introduction to Captial; he has a chapter on theories of collapse and briefly mentions Luxemburg.

Yakov Piletsky (Яков Ананьевич Пилецкий) in 1924 wrote a book whose second half is sympathetic to Luxemburg's theory (its first half was very critical of Hilferding's): Две теории империализма (Марксистская легенда и возврат к Марксу) – "Two Theories of Imperialism (a Marxist Fable and a Return to Marx)". Downloadable at: http://search.rsl.ru/ru/record/01007516978

Also, I translated the soviet introduction to her works, written by a former-Luxemburgist turned critic: https://libcom.org/library/critical-introduction-rosa-luxemburgs-economic-works-wolf-motylev