Fictitious Capital For Beginners: Imperialism, 'Anti-Imperialism', and the Continuing Relevance of Rosa Luxemburg
Oct 12 2007 21:00
#242
Mikus
Sorry for the delay in replying to your explanation of how Lenin did criticize Luxemburg's analysis ( I have had a hard week), it is necessary to accept that I was wrong. Where are Lenin's marginal comments on Luxemburg, are they in the vol of the Collected works on Imperialism?
Oct 13 2007 05:20
#243
ernie wrote:
MikusSorry for the delay in replying to your explanation of how Lenin did criticize Luxemburg's analysis ( I have had a hard week), it is necessary to accept that I was wrong. Where are Lenin's marginal comments on Luxemburg, are they in the vol of the Collected works on Imperialism?
Sorry, I have no idea. All the info I have was taken from the post that I linked to on that webpage.
Mike
Oct 13 2007 08:04
#244
Quote:
It would be interesting to hear what you (and also Mikus) think the role of the Schema were and why the revisionists/opportunists could not use them for their ends.
I think that they were rough calculations by Marx which have been blown up out of all proportion (to the extent of many books and articles being written on them), but at least they show that Marx, for one, did not make the elementary mistake Luxemburg did -- otherwise he'd have been a laughing stock -- of thinking that capitalism suffers from a chronic shortage of purchasing power. They have long since been replaced by "national accounts" which demonstrate more clearly that this is not the case.
You and Alf seem to think, Ernie, that Luxemburg wrote her book to refute those you call "the revisionists/opportunists". But in fact, Bernstein isn't mentioned once while Kautsky is treated with respect. Her main contemporary opponents were the "Russian Marxists" who she lists (end of Chapter XVIII) as "Professor Kablukov, Professor Manuilov, Professor Issayev, Professor Skvortsov, Vladimir Ilyin, Peter v. Struve, Bulgakov, and Professor Tugan Baranovski".
Lenin (the "Vladimir Ilyin" above) may or may not have criticised Luxemburg's theory of capitalism in public, but she criticised him. For example:
Quote:
"Yet, if later critics of Sismondi, e.g. the Russian Marxist Ilyin, think that pointing out this fundamental error in the analysis of the aggregate product can justify a cavalier dismissal of Sismondi's entire theory of accumulation as inadequate, as 'nonsense', they merely demonstrate their own obtuseness in respect of Sismondi's real concern, his ultimate problem".(chapter X)
Luxemburg was intervening in a dispute between "the Russian Marxists" and the Russian Narodniks. The Narodniks argued that capitalist development could not take place in Russia because of the problem of finding external markets. Lenin and the Professors argued that it could because it didn't necessarily need them. Luxemburg's contribution was to say that the Narodniks had a point.
Who were "the revisionists/opportunists": the Narodniks or the "Russian Legal Marxists"? The Professors turned out to be using "Marxism" to justify further developing capitalism in Russia. But, then, so once he got into power did Lenin.
Uncomfortable as I am to be in the same camp as Lenin, I have to admit that, in this argument, he was right and she was wrong.
Oct 13 2007 17:06
#245
I think the main point of Marx's schemas was to refute the idea, beginning with Adam Smith, that in the aggregate all capital was variable capital and that constant capital did not exist. I think he succeeded in this task.
Oct 14 2007 18:02
#246
Capricorn thanks for the reply. I see what you mean: the aim of the book was not a confrontation with the opportunists as such, but wiithin the wider context of the struggle with these tendencies the book does play a role. But they certainly took great exception to the Accumulation and it was mainly with them that she had to polemise in the Anti-Critique.
Capricorn and Mikus, you appear to downplay the importance of the schema. As Rosa points out they mark a leap forwards by economics understanding of social reproduction. Engel's in a letter to Viktor Adler 16th March 1895 (who had written to him to ask for advise on reading vols 2 and 3 whilst he was in prison) says of Vol 2 Sction 3:
Quote:
This is a quite excellent presentation of the entire circulation of commodities and money in capitalist society (the first since the days of the Physiocrats) -excellent in content, but fearfully heavy in form because 1. it is patched together from two treatments of the problems by two different methods, and 2. because treatment No2 was completed forcibly during a period of illness in which the brain was suffering from chronic insomnia. This section I would keep until the very end, adter the first reading of Volume 3
(taken from Letters on 'Capital')
Oct 14 2007 19:02
#247
ernie wrote:
Capricorn and Mikus, you appear to downplay the importance of the schema.
I only appear to downplay the importance of the schema if you downplay the importance of destroying Smith's dogma about constant capital.
I think destroying that dogma was a huge advance in political economy.
Mike
Oct 15 2007 20:24
#248
Point taken. Could you explain more about this?
Oct 16 2007 10:58
#249
This bloke would seem to have come up with a better way than Marx or the Physiocrats to show whether or not there's a built-in chronic shortage of purchasing power under capitalism:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Phillips_machine
Oct 18 2007 22:39
#250
Have started a thread on constant capital prompted by some of the stuff on this thread.
Capricorn, thanks for the above post it certainly clarifies one of the points we have been trying to clarify -though may be not in the clearest way at times-: where do you think Rosa stand in relation to the marxist tradition? It is extremely pleasing to see that you see her as being in the tradition, even if you do not think that she continued Marx on this question. Also that you see the Accumulation as an attempt to make an even more radical proposition about the nature of imperialism (though wrong). This places the whole discussion on a much more clearly defined foundations. It was the fear that revisionism/opportunism could use the schema to seek to undermine Marxism that as you say was the core of her concern.
It would be interesting to hear what you (and also Mikus) think the role of the Schema were and why the revisionists/opportunists could not use them for their ends.