Wednesday, July 30, 2014

On Rosa Luxemburg

by Ingo Scmidt (via Richard Singer):
"Indeed, reading Marx’ Capital today leaves the same impression as reading Luxemburg’s The Accumulation of Capital. One wonders whether Marx and Luxemburg really wrote their books more than one hundred years ago. If not for their historical references to English industrialization and nineteenth-century imperialism, one might think they were written as analyses of neoliberal globalization from the late twentieth century until today. The question, then, is what Luxemburg has to offer that Marx has not already given us. One issue is politics, or, more precisely, the relation between economics and politics. Marx deals with the latter in a separate stream of writings, notably his analyses of class struggles in France from 1848 to 18718, but he never outlines their connection with his economic writings that, as already mentioned, focus largely on England.


Contrary to the strange separation between economics and politics in Marx’ works, Luxemburg addresses the relations between them head on in The Accumulation of Capital. "

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