Michael R. Krätke
Rosa Luxemburg as a political economist
– Her analysis of Imperialism and her contribution to the
critique of political economy
Summary
Rosa Luxemburg was one of the first women who graduated in economics and one of the very
few European socialists of her generation who ever had any formal training in economics..
Although she is first and foremost perceived and appreciated as a political writer she was an
outstanding political economist in the Marxist tradition, both as a teacher and as a researcher
at the frontiers of political economy. She deplored the stagnation of Marxist theory after the
publication of volume III of Capital which had not fared better than volume II: Both volumes,
notwithstanding their utmost importance for an adequate understanding of Marx’ theory, were
largely ignored and remained unread even within the ranks of the socialist intelligentsia. In
her contribution for Mehring’s biography of Marx, dealing with volume II and III of Capital,
she phrased her criticism with much caution, but already in her first articles dealing with
Marx’ and Engels’ legacy, she had made it very clear that the great work of a systematic and
comprehensive critique of political economy, indispensable for any understanding of modern
capitalism, had been left unfinished, many problems unresolved.
In her doctoral dissertation she had treated the problem of industrial development under
conditions of imperialist rule – regarding the case of Poland under the regime of Tsarist
Russia. In her view, it was the expansionist drive of the Tsarist regime that forced Russian
industrial capitalists to conquer the Asian markets, not the other way round. The young
industrial capitalism in Poland, however, was the best ally and strongest support of Tsarist
imperialism in the Far East. The “political economic reviews” she wrote in the 1890s were
dealing with the changing structure of the capitalist world market, the British decline and the
rise of rival industrial capitalisms in Germany and the USA, striving for the predominance on
the world market. As she pointed out in her polemic against Bernstein, the expansion and
restructuring of the capitalist world market was still in full sway, the capitalist world economy
was going through a period of transition – still far from the period of decay and final crises.
That would come – once the capitalist world market had been fully established, and the
imperialist race for the re-division of the world between the leading capitalist industrial states
was propelling the world economy in this direction.
For many years, she taught political economy at the party school of the SPD in Berlin. In her
lecture notes which she prepared and rewrote as an introductory textbook of political
economy, she stated the central problem of political economy: “How is capitalism possible,
how can this mode of production survive, all its inherent conflicts and contradictions
notwithstanding? Marxists should of course look further and ask the complementary question
– the question for the conditions of impossibility of capitalism: When, how and why the
capitalist mode of production becomes unviable? Unfortunately, some of the most important
parts of the manuscript, dealing with the theory of value and crisis, as well as those chapters
dealing with the dynamics of the capitalist world economy, are missing. However, the
remaining chapters clearly show the historically well informed and clearly political concept of
political economy that Rosa Luxemburg both supported and represented. What is more, some
of her lectures have survived: We have seven texts, four from Luxemburg herself and three
that have been written by her students following her lectures. Those texts have never been
published before, although there are two lengthy comments by Rosa Luxemburg on volume II
and III of Marx’s Capital which make her views rather clear (not to be confounded with the
short comments on Capital, volume II and III that she wrote for Mehring’s biography of
Marx). i
In her magnum opus on the theory of accumulation, she tried both: To show, going beyond
Marx’ incomplete analysis of the accumulation process, the conditions of the possibility of
capitalist reproduction at large, on a world scale – and to show, how, when and why that very
mode of reproduction will lead to a situation where it becomes not sustainable any more. The
answer to both questions lies in her highly original theory of imperialism. That theory of
imperialism remains relevant until this very day, even has gained importance recently while it
was not yet valid in her day. The reason simply is that only in recent decennia’s the capitalist
and industrial development of the former peripheries and semi-peripheries of the capitalist
world economy has actually started to prevail – thanks to decolonization and a radical change
of the dominant forms of imperialism. So in the end, Rosa Luxemburg, can be shown to be
quite right – not for the high times of classical imperialism but for our times.
i
These seven unpublished manuscripts by Rosa Luxemburg will be published in the original German
version in 2008 by the Karl Dietz Verlag in Berlin.