In 1903, twenty years after the death of Karl Marx, Rosa Luxemburg published an essay on the âStagnation and Progress of Marxismâ. This should serve as a guide to our return to The Accumulation of Capital on the centennial anniversary of its publication. In âStagnationâ, Luxemburg notes that despite the publication of the second and third volumes of Marxâs Capital, in 1885 and 1894 respectively, political agitation and Marxist doctrine in Germany and elsewhere had been popularised on the basis of the incomplete conclusions of Volume I. As she writes regarding the second and third volumes â and as we today might extend to her Accumulation of Capital â âthe splendid new weapon rusts unusedâ except amongst âthe restricted circles of the expertsâ. Rather than concluding that Marxâs last elaborations were inflexible, or that the movementâs intellectual talents were insufficient, Luxemburg argues that âour needs are not yet adequate for the utilization of Marxâs ideasâ and that only as proletarian struggle encounters new practical problems will we return to the rusting weaponry (Luxemburg 1903).
In one of his few prison notes on the writings of Luxemburg, Antonio Gramsci claims that these conclusions in the âStagnation and Progress of Marxismâ are a form of historical mysticism insofar as they âpresent an abstract formulation of the fact to be explained as an explanation of the fact itselfâ. Nonetheless, Gramsci acknowledges that there is a kernel of truth in them that must be dialectically developed. One articulation of this development is that the stagnation of Marxist theory comes from the historical necessity of Marxist orthodoxyâs alliance with undialectical â that is, positivist â materialisms âin order to combat the residues of the pre-capitalist world that still exist among the popular massesâ (Gramsci 1971, p. 392). And yet from the perspective of the totality, Gramsciâs development seems to merely elevate Luxemburgâs alleged abstraction to a higher level. For the claim that dialectical materialism expresses itself less dialectically out of the practical necessities of the ideological struggle to educate the masses reifies as necessary one set of mediations between proletarian class consciousness and so-called pre-capitalist consciousness. Admittedly, Gramsci poses his solution more concretely only a few pages later â the stagnation of Marxism, the dilution of the dialectical element of its materialism, would only ever be completely resolved when the petit bourgeois character of the Marxist intelligentsia was overcome by the emergence of an organically proletarian intelligentsia. Succinctly: âOnly after the creation of the new State does the cultural problem impose itself in all its complexity and tend towards a coherent solutionâ; prior to this solution, Marxism can at best be a âcritico-polemicalâ âromanticismâ (Gramsci 1971, pp. 397â8). Ironically, this is more or less the same solution that Luxemburg herself prescribes for the stagnation of Marxism: as she writes, âThe working class will not be in a position to create a science and an art of its own until it has been fully emancipated from its present class positionâ (Luxemburg 1903). Given the difference between the abstractions of Luxemburg and Gramsci and the nature of their concrete solutions, the mediation of their contradiction demands discovery.
If Luxemburgâs abstract formulation on the one hand is referring to the inadequacy of historical needs for Capital, Volumes II and III, and Gramsciâs on the other is affirming that dialectical materialism necessarily becomes diluted in order to win over the masses, then the historical intersection of the two explanations is the emergence of opportunistic socialism and its growing influence in the Second International. The classic text addressing the problem of opportunism is Luxemburgâs own Social Reform or Revolution, published in 1899. Already in her critique of Eduard Bernsteinâs articles on the âProblems of Socialismâ for German Social Democracy, Luxemburg outlines an historical tendency largely responsible for the stagnation of Marxism, and thereby indicates the conditions for its resolution. According to Luxemburg, opportunism emerges (with Bernstein as its flag bearer) as the ideology of the petit bourgeois elements of the party seeking to replace the struggle for social reforms from being the means of Social Democracy to being the goal itself â that is, abandoning the aim of social revolution. According to this ideology, the collapse of capitalism becomes improbable because of its increasing adaptability and variation â in other words, general crises tend to disappear and segments of the proletariat are integrated into the middle class, while the most egregious proletarian conditions are ameliorated by the trade-union struggle (Luxemburg 1899, pp. 129â31). Thus, the growth of opportunism in the Second International implies that only the Marxian problem of capitalist exploitation, formulated most rigorously in Capital, Volume I is of concern. The dialectical twists of surplus value on its path to realisation through expanded reproduction and into the tendency of the rate of profit to fall leading the totality toward greater and greater crises, as discussed in Volumes II and III, have little to offer for petit bourgeois socialism â as Luxemburg puts it, âBernsteinâs theory of adaptation is nothing but a theoretical generalization of the conception of the individual capitalistâ (Luxemburg 1899, p. 145). Furthermore, Bernsteinâs claim to popularise socialism by shifting its concern from the relations between capital and labour to those between rich and poor abandons the analysis of the structure of productive relations for the superstructure of property relations â moving from the dialectical basis of scientific socialism to that of utopian socialism (Luxemburg 1899, p. 148). Indeed, Bernstein attacks the dialectic itself (Luxemburg 1899, p. 162). But to consign the second and third volumes of Capital to the dustbin of history is to discard the scientific unity of theory and practice that transforms proletarian consciousness of the exploitative basis of capitalism and the tendency towards generalised crises into the necessity of social revolution. Thus opportunism teaches us that the nexus of Luxemburg and Gramsciâs abstract formulations concerning the stagnation of Marxism find the conditions of their concrete solution in the historical necessity of preserving the fundamentally proletarian revolutionary character of the socialist struggle even before the conquest of political power. What at first seemed like a question of Marxist theory was already coinciding with the necessities of proletarian revolutionary practice â of keeping particular social reformist means of struggle subordinate to the universal ends of revolution.
In History and Class Consciousness (1971) Georg LukĂĄcs argues that Luxemburgâs The Accumulation of Capital is one of two books of its era that mark the âtheoretical rebirth of Marxismâ (p. 35). To understand this assertion in its fullness we must conceive of The Accumulation of Capital as depicting the concrete totality of capitalism from the proletarian revolutionary perspective of the conditions of its overthrow. In other words, not only does it scrape the rust off of the weaponry contained in volumes II and III of Capital, it puts them to use as historically necessary theoretical weapons for new historical conditions of the practice of class war. This rust removal has not been without controversy, neither in its time nor since then. The controversy has mostly centred on several aspects of two sides of the dialectic of the argument in Luxemburgâs book: on the one hand, that Marxâs scheme of expanded reproduction in Capital, Volume II, cannot explain the actual, historical accumulation of capital since it includes only capitalists and workers, neither of whom (as a class) can be the purchasers within the totality of capitalist society necessary to realise surplus value and thus accumulate it as capital. This necessitates the sale of surplus product to non-capitalist social strata, particularly in the form of imperialism. On the other hand, insofar as capitalism tends toward universality, while simultaneously depending on the destruction of non-capitalist social organisations, the elimination of this dependency is guaranteed, bringing its end all the more near (Luxemburg 1913, p. 332).
Ernest Mandel will be our first guide to these controversies. In his introduction to the second volume of Capital, Mandel addresses Luxemburgâs argument on three levels, moving from the most abstract to the most concrete. His first point is that it is methodologically incorrect to pose the matter of reproduction on an expanded scale in terms of the totality of capital, since it is really only a problem for the competitive relations of many capitals. The second level considers the discontinuity of accumulation as a process, that is, whether full realisation of surplus value can be modelled using the schemes in a purely capitalist context â a context that Luxemburg did not think possible. Nonetheless, the ridiculousness of those who claim that the scheme itself proves that there is no limit to capital accumulation is made clear by the regularity of crises throughout the history of capitalism. At the third level of actual historical capital accumulation, Mandel maintains the essential correctness of Luxemburg (Mandel 1978, pp. 66â8).
Luxemburgâs most important contemporary critic was Otto Bauer. By rewriting Marxâs reproduction schemes so as to include elements only elaborated in the third volume of Capital such as the comparatively faster development of Department I, the rising organic composition of capital, the falling rate of profit and the rising mass of profit, Bauer produces a formula that claims to economico-theoretically demonstrate Bernsteinâs earlier conclusions. As Luxemburg summarised in her Anti-Critique, Bauer depicts capitalist production as capable of acting âwithout restriction [schrankenlos] as its own consumerâ and thereby becomes â(objectively) unrestricted [schrankenlos] once capitalist production has built a sufficient market for itself.â Bauerâs conception thus renders the crises created by capitalismâs tendency to exceed the limits of its market incomprehensible, thereby eliminating an understanding of the objective tendencies out of which proletarian consciousness and class struggle emerges and grows â in other words eliminating the scientific basis of the necessity of socialist revolution (Luxemburg 1921, 374â5). LukĂĄcsâs defence of Luxemburg is particularly indicative with regard to Bauer, as LukĂĄcs points to the exclusively methodological usefulness of Marxâs schematised purely capitalist society. Marxâs positing of a society consisting of only capitalists and workers is an attempt to clarify, as he writes in Volume II, that the âconditions for the normal course of reproduction, whether simple or on an expanded scale⊠turn into an equal number of conditions for an abnormal courseâ and thus necessitate âpossibilities of crisis, since, on the basis of the spontaneous pattern of this production, this balance is itself an accidentâ (Marx 1885, p. 571). But Marxâs hypothetical society by no means serves to conceive accumulation as the concrete totality of the problem but rather, to quote LukĂĄcs (1971), âto see the problem more clearly, before pressing forward to the larger question of the place of this problem within society as a wholeâ (p. 31). Bauerâs attempt to demonstrate the opportunist claim that class antagonisms tend to weaken bases itself in a deeply undialectical or pseudo-dialectical method by bringing problems Marx addresses in Volume III into the accumulation schemes of Volume II.
Dialectical materialism undoubtedly demands determining not only the place of the partial problem within the totality of society, but also the discovery of the determination of the totality within each part. But Bauer only appears to do this by abstractly formulating his solution, or rather dissolution, of the problem of accumulation as the totality of capitalist society. Luxemburgâs Anti-Critique thus brings us back towards concrete totalisation by reminding us of Marxâs own placement of the schemes as a precursor to the elaboration of his theory of crises. Moreover, following the lines laid out in The Accumulation of Capital, Luxemburg argues contra Bauer not only that his formulae make the historical reality of crises incomprehensible, but that they also render the growth of imperialistic competition for foreign markets incomprehensible. On this point it might seem correct when LukĂĄcs asserts that the opportunists âsuppressed the fact that on this issue Capital is an incomplete fragment which stops short at the point where this problem should be opened upâ (1971, p. 31). But it appears that the perspective Luxemburg elaborates from the âStagnation and Progress of Marxismâ through The Accumulation of Capital to Anti-Critique that, at least in the case of Bernstein and Bauer, the opposite is true: the opportunists treat Capital as incomplete fragments to be sampled from and reorganised at will, while the hallmark of Luxemburgâs orthodoxy is that, as she writes in âStagnationâ, âMarx, in his scientific creation, has outstripped us as a party of practical fighters.â This is to say that today we can most adhere to Luxemburgâs conception by conceding Mandelâs second point â that Marxâs reproduction schemes work for a purely capitalist society â and arguing that the confusion of the methodological levels addressed in Mandelâs first point can be sorted out by considering the necessary presupposition that pure capitalism concerns the competition of many capitals as a formulation of the abstract totality of capitalist society. In LukĂĄcsâs terms and in Luxemburgâs in Social Reform or Revolution, this abstract totality is still the total conception of society belonging to the individual capitalist and the political economist â including opportunistic socialists. It is only from the proletarian revolutionary perspective on crises and imperialism that we can gain a concrete conception of the capitalist totality.
When (in the closing chapter of The Accumulation of Capital) Luxemburg introduces militarist production as the only sphere of accumulation that appears to be viable without limits and brings Marxâs schemes back into use in her analysis, this must be understood as an historical realisation of their place of in a capitalist totality. It is worth quoting her at some length:
Whereas the expansion of markets into other spheres as a basis on which capital can operate depends to a large extent on historical, social, and political factors beyond the control of capital, militaristic production constitutes a sphere whose regular surges of expansion appear to be determined in the first instance by the volition of capital itself.The historical exigencies of capitalâs intensified competition on a world scale for the conditions of its accumulation are thus transformed into a sphere of accumulation of the highest order for capital itself. The more forcefully capital uses militarism in order to assimilate the means of production and labor-power of noncapitalist countries and societies through foreign and colonial policy, the more powerfully the same militarism works progressively to wrest purchasing power at home, in the capitalist countries themselves, from the noncapitalist strata â i.e. from those engaged in simple commodity production, and from the working class. It does this by robbing the former of their forces of production on an increasing scale, and by reducing the standard of living of the latter, in order to increase the rate of the accumulation of capital enormously at the expense of both. From both sides, however, once a certain level has been reached, the conditions for the accumulation of capital turn into conditions for its demise.The more violently capital uses militarism to exterminate noncapitalist strata both at home and abroad, and to worsen living standards for all strata of workers, the more the day-to-day history of capital accumulation on the world stage is transformed into a continuous series of political and social catastrophes and convulsions, which, together with the periodic economic cataclysms in the form of crises, will make it impossible for accumulation to continue, and will turn the rebellion of the international working class against the rule of capital into a necessity, even before the latter has come up against its natural, selfcreated economic constraints. (Luxemburg 1921, p. 341)
Though it will undoubtedly be necessary to return to a discussion of the details of these conclusions on militarist production, imperialism and socialist revolution, it is with their introduction that we will for now shift attention to the matter of the historical conditions of their emergence as...