Abstract
This chapter offers the first comprehensive account of Rosa Luxemburg’s critique of Marx and the impact it had on the development of Marxian economics. Luxemburg was actually the first to criticise Marx’s theory of accumulation as presented in the famous ‘reproduction schemes’ at the end of Volume II of Capital. Her critique triggered a long-lasting debate among Marxists (Bauer, Pannekoek, Bukharin, Sternberg and others) which eventually also attracted the attention of many non-Marxist economists. Krätke presents the course of this debate in a series of ‘rounds’ in which the defenders of Marx and critics of Rosa Luxemburg engaged in lively exchanges. Thanks to Luxemburg’s critique and in spite of its weaknesses, Marx’s ‘reproduction schemes’ were transformed into a cornerstone of Marxian macroeconomics.
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Notes
- 1.
- 2.
Otto Bauer had already devoted several chapters of his seminal book on The Question of Nationalities and the Social Democracy to the analysis of imperialism, and Rudolf Hilferding analysed imperialism as a specific kind of economic policy pursued by the new economic and political elites in the advanced capitalist countries under the rule of ‘finance capital’ in his book on Finance Capital, published in 1910 (Bauer [1907] (1975); Hilferding 1910).
- 3.
I have explained the status of the Grundrisse and its real place in the long story of the making of Marx’s Capital elsewhere (Krätke 2008). The now-prevailing view, which turns it into an exercise of applied Hegelianism, is completely misguided. The abuse of the text (its very poor translation into English notwithstanding) as a quarry for citations serving as starting points for all sorts of lofty ‘philosophical’ exercises is a disgrace and divorced from serious scholarship, Marxist or not.
- 4.
There is no reliable English translation of the Grundrisse text, another reason not to trust the Anglo-Saxon philosopher’s tales about it.
- 5.
These manuscripts were published for the first time in the second MEGA, more than a hundred years after the actual time of writing. Until today, there is no English translation of this very first draft of Capital, Volume II.
- 6.
This manuscript has been published for the first time, in MEGA2, volume II/11. In print, it is more than 500 pages long.
- 7.
This manuscript has been published for the first time, in MEGA2 II/11. In print, it is more than 300 pages long.
- 8.
Capitalists’ savings and investments (real or direct, not financial or portfolio) in today’s economic parlance. In the second section of Capital, Volume II, Marx shows in much detail why (not always how) capitalists are bound to save money, that is to say to ‘hoard’, to build up reserve funds of various kinds serving different functions, due to the very ‘mechanics’ of capital turnover.
- 9.
Marx sticks to the abstraction from credit in all his manuscripts for this volume. So, the only sources of ‘money’ are either gold production or hoards. As his analysis of the turnover of capital shows, hoarding is a necessity for every industrial capital.
- 10.
For a history of this debate, see Rosdolsky ([1969] (1992)). Luxemburg devoted two chapters of the second section of her book, the section dealing with the history of economic thought on the problem of capital accumulation, to the debates between various kinds of radical economists in Russia, including the Marxists.
- 11.
Marx had read Danielson’s articles on the development of capitalism in Russia, ‘Our Post-Reform Economy’, and had encouraged him to publish them as a book.
- 12.
During the debate on revisionism, when preparing her critique of Bernstein, she had already admitted in private correspondence that she found the issues of crisis and growth rather daunting.
- 13.
- 14.
It was followed by a response to her critics, at book length, the Anti-Critique, written in 1915, and published only after her death, in 1921 (Luxemburg 1925).
- 15.
Several lecture notes and further manuscripts by Rosa Luxemburg have been published recently or are about to be published soon. Until very recently, most of the text of Luxemburg’s introduction to political economy was not available in English (Luxemburg [1925] (2013)).
- 16.
That is what she emphasized in her short piece on Marx’ Capital, volume II and III, that she wrote at about the same time for Franz Mehring’s Karl Marx biography (cf. Mehring 1974).
- 17.
In a private letter, Rosa Luxemburg commented upon Kautsky’s proposal–which was actually quite an honour to her–and dismissed it as a trick to lure her into submission (Krätke 2010).
- 18.
Accounts of this debate by professed Marxists of some kind or the other have been distorted by the fatal habit of reading everybody’s contributions as open or clandestine statements of political views–right, centrist, harmonist, reformist, revolutionary. That is, of course, nonsense.
- 19.
A logic that was not unfamiliar to Rosa Luxemburg, as her lectures on Capital, Volume II clearly show (Luxemburg [1925] (2013), pp. 421ff.).
- 20.
Anton Pannekoek was a journalist working for German socialist newspapers at the time. He had come to Germany to teach at the SPD’s party school in Berlin. By training, he was an astronomer (he later wrote a very remarkable history of astronomy after he had become chair of Astronomy at the University of Amsterdam) and a very well-versed mathematician.
- 21.
Lenin never finished his critique of Luxemburg’s book. There have been various publications of publications of his notes and first drafts for his Luxemburg-critique in Russian, the last and most complete in the 1980s edition of his works (Lenin 1985).
- 22.
With the remarkable exception of Rudolf Hilferding. He was urged by Otto Bauer to write a review of Luxemburg’s book for the Austro-Marxist journal Der Kampf, but did not do so. Curiously enough, Rosa Luxemburg also kept silent about Rudolf Hilferding’s widely discussed and highly influential book on Finance Capital, published a few years before, in 1910.
- 23.
Otto Bauer’s article is one of the few contributions to the debate which has been translated to English by John E. King in 1986 (King 1986).
- 24.
Bauer was and remained quite critical of Tugan-Baranowsky’s attempt to prove that unlimited industrial growth was possible.
- 25.
He did so in his later writings on the theory of crisis (Bauer 2015). Actually, the preceding section II of Capital, Volume II dealing with the turnover of capital had already shown the sources of an ever increasing ‘accumulation funds’ for capital–while still maintaining the abstraction from credit.
- 26.
Perhaps with the exception of Charasoff’s study of 1910 which Otto Bauer had reviewed in the theoretical journal of the Austrian Social Democratic Party, Der Kampf (Bauer 1911). Bauer’s first contribution to the debate, his article on ‘Marx’s theory of economic crises’ (Marx’s Theorie der Wirtschaftskrisen) in 1904, already showed some of the elements of a mathematical treatment of macroeconomic dynamics that he was to develop further in later writings.
- 27.
Her extremely unfair attacks on the Austro-Marxists, the group of young scholars and intellectuals to which Gustav Eckstein also belonged, is a rather strange phenomenon. Rosa Luxemburg hated Rudolf Hilferding, and she despised the Vienna Marxist crowd, although she should have been aware of the fact that these young theorists were as hostile to revisionism as she was. Bernstein, for one, immediately understood the meaning of the Austro-Marxist school in the making.
- 28.
In a footnote, she dismissed the famous ‘law’ of the general rate of profit to fall, today the shibboleth of all true Marxist believers, as irrelevant (Luxemburg 1915, p. 449, fn. 4).
- 29.
Actually, the polemic between Sternberg and Grossmann raged on. When Grossmann’s book on the Law of Accumulation was published in 1929, Sternberg replied with a book-length critique (Sternberg 1930).
- 30.
Another scathing critique of Grossmann’s book came from Anton Pannekoek, who started with a brief review of the Luxemburg debate to date, defending both Luxemburg and Bauer against Grossmann (Pannekoek 1934).
- 31.
Bauer (1936, 1976, pp. 327–31). In this appendix, Bauer did briefly mention, but not explain some of the conceptual innovations that he had made in his much larger manuscript, written in 1934–5.
- 32.
It has now been published last year in the original German version (Bauer 2015).
- 33.
Sweezy had spent a year studying at the London School of Economics. It is here that he made acquaintance with Bauer’s work, probably thanks to Harold Laski, himself an admirer of the Austro-Marxists’ work.
- 34.
There is a whole array of unpublished theoretical and empirical works on the crisis by Marxist economists that were stimulated by the Great Crisis of the 1930s, among them the doctoral dissertation by Richard Löwenthal of 1935, still unpublished, and a large study on the crisis by Louis B. Boudin, written in 1937, and still unpublished as well. For details see my introduction to Bauer (2015).
- 35.
Otto Bauer was, of course, well aware of Keynes’ work and made several references to it in his book on the great crisis.
- 36.
For the relationship between Robinson and Kalecki see Asimakopoulos (1989).
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Krätke, M.R. (2016). On the Beginnings of Marxian Macroeconomics. In: Dellheim, J., Wolf, F. (eds) Rosa Luxemburg: A Permanent Challenge for Political Economy. Luxemburg International Studies in Political Economy. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/978-1-137-60108-7_5
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