New Perspectives on Rosa Luxemburg's Critique of Global Capitalism

摘要

The global economic-financial downturn has given new impetus to a re-examination of Rosa Luxemburg's writings on capitalist accumulation and economic crisis, which pinpointed the central contradiction of capitalism in its drive for global expansion. In this article 1 critically engage Luxemburg's theory of capital accumulation and crisis by evaluating it in comparison with the central categories of Volumes One and Two of Marx's Capital on the one hand, and the quest for an alternative to capitalism in the twenty-first century on the other. 1 argue that Marx's procedure in Volume Two of Capital, in which he abstracts from realization crises and foreign trade in order to discern the "law of motion" of capital freed from secondary and tertiary considerations, captures the internal dynamic of capitalist development and crises far better than its Keynesian and neo-Keynesian alternatives.