Abstract
Marxist political economy quite often refers to the “accumulation of capital” as if it were a transparent concept, easily understood from Marx’s work. The problem is that the concept has not broken from Marx’s predecessors when mentioning accumulation, even though it must be understood with class clearly in mind, not means of production, not constant capital. Further, Marx had stated in Capital that he was offering an understanding of a world that is fully capitalist. Yet his discussion of accumulation suggests that more wage-laborers would be involved, in addition to more constant capital. And Luxemburg discussed the implications of expansion of wage-labor employment being fundamentally involved in the accumulation of capital. Thus, there are contradictions in Marx needing to be examined. For example, how does value as a concept work in a theoretical environment in which non-capitalist environments are being penetrated by capital.
This chapter is a refinement of “Late Marx and Luxemburg : Opening a Development Within Political Economy”, Bellofiore, R. (Ed.). (2009). Rosa Luxemburg and the Critique of Political Economy (pp. 64–80). Routledge.
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- 1.
This passage is from the draft ‘Results of the Immediate Process of Production,’ which Marx deleted from Volume 1 before publication. ‘Results’ can be considered part of the third, next to last, draft of Volume 1. No other material from this third draft has survived, perhaps because the remainder was rolled into the final draft. Why third draft? Consider the Grundrisse as a first draft of Marx’s life work. Then the second draft can be considered to have been drafted between 1861 and 1863, and includes his work on the history of theories of surplus value. The third, not yet final, draft was begun in 1863 and completed in 1865, including the only draft ever made of what became Volume 3 under Engels’ editorship.
- 2.
After pulling ‘Results’ from Volume 1, there is also no record that Marx later returned to the issue of ‘subsumption’.
- 3.
Marx, judging by a number of his interventions on this issue, seemed to think that primitive communism resisted capital more than Luxemburg argued. Examining this disparity is unnecessary for our purposes.
- 4.
We are at a loss how Bukharin could so distort Luxemburg’s position by skipping over the sentence reproduced here. He even plays with the words salto mortale in his own text, getting into the reader’s subconscious that he, Bukharin, has read her: the reader is expected to take his word for the fact that, yes, she really does define accumulation as the amassing of money capital.
- 5.
It should be noted that Weeks, in his introductory paragraph and last footnote, favorably cites Lenin’s economic work of the 1890s on such questions, Lenin being one to criticize Luxemburg’s The Accumulation of Capital (Zarembka 2000: 221–222, 225–235).
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Zarembka, P. (2020). Late Marx and the Conception of “Accumulation of Capital”. In: Silver, M. (eds) Confronting Capitalism in the 21st Century. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-13639-0_4
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