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International Socialism, February 1973

 

David Turner

The Breakdown Theory of Rosa Luxemburg

 

From International Socialism, No.55, February 1973, p.24.
Transcribed & marked up by Einde O’Callaghan for ETOL.

 

Imperialism and the Accumulation of Capital
Luxemburg and Bukharin
Allen Lane: The Penguin Press £4.25

This book performs the valuable service of making available in English, for the first time, two works of considerable significance in the development of Marxist economics. The first is Rosa Luxemburg’s Anti-Critique, a polemical restatement of her unusual views on the economic roots of imperialism. Rosa believed that in a purely capitalist society it would not be possible for the aggregate social capital to grow. Marx’s analysis of extended reproduction in vol.II of Capital she held to be in error.

She argued that in a society in which only capitalists and workers existed, purchasers could not be found for one vital component of the total social product: namely, the goods which incorporate the part of the surplus value which is destined to be accumulated as new capital. The total social capital could not therefore be reproduced on an extended scale [part of the text is missing here] purchasers of this portion of the social product.

These ‘third persons’ would have to be neither capitalists nor workers, but persons living in the context of pre-capitalist relations – e.g. freeholding peasants or slave-owners or feudals or whatever. Thus, argued Rosa, capitalism depended for its continued existence on commercial intercourse with the as yet pre-capitalist portions of the globe – hence the necessity of imperialism.

But the very logic of imperialism is progressively to destroy all pre-capitalist formations and conscript the ‘third persons’ into the army of wage labour. Expanding capitalism is racked by economic convulsions as the portion of the globe which remains outside it shrinks. Hence the sharpening struggle for markets and eventual outbreaks of military conflict between the capitalist powers that characterised her epoch.

She concluded further that when the insatiable maw of capital has swallowed down the last surviving ‘third person’ then the continued existence of capitalism becomes impossible. These views she had originally set out in The Accumulation of Capital (1913), a work which met a storm of criticism and abuse, by both the revisionist and the ‘orthodox’ wings of German socialism. In 1915, writing in prison, Rosa struck back at her critics with the Anti-Critique, a trenchant restatement of her position. This is a more concise, and in many ways clearer, exposition than her original work. It should definitely be read by everyone who wishes fully to understand Luxemburg’s theory of imperialism.

The second essay in this book is a refutation of Rosa Luxemburg’s breakdown thesis by Bukharin. First Bukharin gives a very clear account of Marx’s analysis of extended reproduction. He shows exactly how the surplus value is realised, including the portion destined for accumulation, by means of exchanges between the capitalists and between the capitalists and the workers. No ‘third persons’ are necessary. He then deals lucidly and decisively with each of Rosa’s objections to Marx’s analysis, showing that none of them holds water.

In a preface to the two essays, the editor, Kenneth Tarbuck, dismisses the argument of Bukharin as follows:

‘But as Ernest Mandel points out, exchanges with non-capitalist markets need not imply exchanges of commodities: they can be exchanges for non-capitalist monetary incomes.’

But on what, pray, will the capitalists spend this ‘non-capitalist’ money that they have received from the third persons? They cannot spend it at home for they have just disposed of precisely the last remaining portion of the home product. Nor can they spend it abroad, for then they would get the wretched goods back again. They are in fact stuck with a useless pile of money which they cannot spend on anything. Mandel’s suggestion has caused them, not to turn their surplus product into capital, but to throw it away!

If this piece of economic illiteracy reflects no credit on Mandel, it reflects even less on Tarbuck. For if he took the trouble to read the work he is prefacing he would have observed that Luxemburg anticipates and ridicules precisely this error. The preface is altogether of very low quality. The editor does not understand Luxemburg’s argument at all, for he informs the reader that she is arguing about the effects of a rising organic composition of capital on Marx’s scheme – a matter that is nowhere even mentioned in the Anti-Critique. He then goes on to dismiss Bukharin out of hand by telling the reader that Rosa’s objection to Marx’s analysis is ‘real and not imagined’, thus begging the whole point at issue.

Bukharin’s essay is emphatically recommended, even if the reader is not concerned with Luxemburg’s third-person thesis. For only the first two chapters are devoted to this. In the remainder Bukharin gives an extremely lucid treatment of the Marxist theory of crisis, sharply differentiating the correct position from various mistaken ones including the crude ‘lack of markets’ thesis that is so often conflated with the Marxist position.

He then goes on to give a short but clear account of the economic roots of imperialism, which lie not in the quest for third persons but in the search for profits. And it is the falling rate of profit, not the demise of third persons, that drives capitalism to ever greater imperialist frenzy. Most of his political conclusions, however, are identical to those of Rosa Luxemburg, as he emphasises. For Rosa’s theory, despite its incorrect economic premise, shares with the Leninist theory a belief in the necessity of imperialism, in contradiction to the miserable chatter of reformists about the possibility of a ‘peaceful’ capitalism.

In summary this book is recommended with the exception of an unhappy preface. Unfortunately the price of £4.25 places it beyond the grasp of most revolutionaries – it is to be hoped that it will appear in paper-back in the near future.

 
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