Judith Dellheim: “The Accumulation of Capital” – A Pillar of the Concept of “Imperial Modes of (Production) and Living”

Let us begin by imagining a fictitious scene: Marx and his friend Engels applaud Rosa Luxemburg for her work The Accumulation of Capital. They engage in joint criticism, and then the three get into a heated debate. They point out to each other (and also to themselves) theoretical shortcomings in the line of argument. They co-operate with delight and through lively debate. More

Remarks of the Workshop Organizers

About one year ago we have started our workshop project with the call  “100th
Anniversary of ‘The Accumulation of Capital: A Contribution to an Economic
Explanation of Imperialism’: A Century-Old Work Remains Current, Provocative
and Seminal”. We have wanted to use this anniversary to honor Rosa Luxemburg as
one of the most fascinating characters in the struggle for freedom in equality,
to come together for a mutual learning process – i.e. in order to discuss our
political-economic analysis of historical reality and to improve our academic
methodology. More

Yiannis Tolios: The Capitalist Oligarchy in the Early 21st Century – The Greek Version

Over the last decades, the development of new technologies, the intensity of concentration and centralization of production and capital, the acceleration of the processes of regional integration and ‘globalization’ of economies and the implementation of the neoliberal governance “model” of the capitalist system, have led to significant changes in the composition of finance capital, the mechanisms of distribution and redistribution of income and wealth, all in favor of the capitalist oligarchy, at national and supranational level. More

Tina Schivatcheva: The Great Leap Westward – China and the Land Grabs in Ukraine and Bulgaria

The recent global rise of food prices has predicated the explosion of land-grab practices at a global geo-economic scale.  In Eastern Europe, although the post-socialist ‘great transformation’ entailed the commodification of the land, unsettled land ownership and undeveloped land market offered, at best, only a short-lived and tenuous protection from land-grabs.  The global financial crisis impacted particularly strongly the resource-dependent, export-oriented economies of Bulgaria and Ukraine. More

Michael Krätke: Rosa Luxemburg – Her Analysis of Imperialism, Her Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy

Like Antonio Gramsci, Rosa Luxemburg has mainly been perceived and praised as a political theorist.. That perception, dominant as it still is among her admirers on the Left in Europe and all over the world, is thoroughly misguided, as it is in the case of Gramsci (for the latter, see Krätke 2011a). Rosa Luxemburg was a trained economist, very well acquainted with political economy. What is more, she belonged to the relatively small group of people who actually had studied Marx’ Capital, all three volumes of it, and a lot more. Like Gramsci, Rosa Luxemburg did make several contributions to a critical and radical political economy in the Marxist tradition. More

Julian Francis Park: On the Historical Conditions of “The Accumulation of Capital: Imperialism, Militarism and the Mass Strike”

In 1903, twenty years after the death of Karl Marx, Rosa Luxemburg published an essay on the “Stagnation and Progress of Marxism” that ought to guide our centennial return to her volume “The Accumulation of Capital”. Luxemburg here notes that despite the publication of the second and third volumes of Marx’s Capital in 1885 and 1894 respectively, political agitation and Marxist doctrine in Germany and elsewhere had been popularized on the basis of the incomplete conclusions of volume 1. As she writes regarding the second and third volumes – and as we today might extend to her Accumulation of Capital – “the
splendid new weapon rusts unused” except amongst “the restricted circles of the experts.” More

Dominika Dinušová: To Some Inspirations of Rosa Luxemburg´s Revolutionary Thinking

The importancy of Marxian heritage and of the work of Rosa Luxemburg last but not least consists in assumption of philosophy and political theory as a practical matter, which has sence only in its aplicacions in reality. Aslo nowadays in this case are developing some cardinal issues. One of their is how to transform current socioeconomic relations and by this way to ostracize negative impacts of capitalist socioeconomic system; and how in this content to project in reality of 21th century the thinking of Marx, Engels and Luxemburg. In this short text I would like to aim on some general impulses in consideration and realisation of revolutionary activities. More

Jaya Mehta: Revolutionary Potential of Women Workers in Agriculture

On March 8th, on the occasion of International Women’s Day, the German Democratic Party began party’s ‘Red Week’ for the year 1914. On that occasion, Rosa Luxemburg said;

Proletarian Women’s Day inaugurates the ‘Week of Social Democracy’. The party of the disinherited places its female columns in the front lines by sending them into the heat of battle for eight days, in order to spread the seeds of socialism into new fields. And the call for political equality of women is the first one they make, as they prepare to win over new supporters for the working class as a whole. More

Ranabir Samaddar: A Post-Colonial Critique of Capital Accumulation Today

I seek to view here the debates and discussions on the question of accumulation from a post-colonial angle by which I mean the angle of a critical theory of post-colonial capitalism.  I do not however directly comment on the historical debates on the question of accumulation, because much of this debate will today appear as primarily of scholarly interest unless we situate the question of accumulation against the perspective of imperialism, or what can be called its other scene, the post-colonial capitalist reality of today’s world. From this standpoint I attempt to elucidate its features because such an attempt will help us to develop new insights relating to the enigma of accumulation. Such attempt will also mean locating if you like an absolute other of capital functioning as a determinant of latter’s accumulation in today’s context. More