File spoon-archives/marxism2.archive/marxism2_1996/96-06-08.010, message 192


Date: Wed, 05 Jun 1996 17:47:20 +0000
From: lisa rogers <lrogers-AT-burgoyne.com>
Subject: Re: Rosa Luxemburg


Well Jerry, just because I learned about her economics first doesn't 
mean she's remembered as an economist, it's just that Hunt's book and 
course are about economic thought, and from a left point of view at 
that.

When at first some of you denied that Luxemburg said anything about the 
role of militarism in the economy, I was willing to doubt my own memory. 
 After retrieving Hunt's book from one of my local followers, I found 
that I am not that absent-minded after all, it's in there.  Hunt said it 
is one of the under-appreciated aspects of her work on imperialism and 
economics in general.  So if Keynes or Vance or anybody else is 
credited, she should be also, and she did it in the 19teens.

Walter Daum wrote:
> I'm pretty sure Cliff acknowledged his debt to Vance. The theory is
> bascically underconsumptionist: arms spending sops up surplus value
> and raises wages through state-induced production, thereby dampening
> the crisis cycle. 

LR asks: Is "underconsumption" basically the same thing as a "glut of 
capital" ?  I haven't read Lux. in the original, but that's how Hunt 
describes her theory, in terms of relieving the glut of capital at home. 
 It is capital looking for a more profitable outlet that leads to 
imperialism and [related] militarism. 


AdamR: >What distinguished Luxembourg's theory from Kautsky's, and the 
IS version >of the permanent arms economy from any left Keynesian one, 
was that the >marxist theory explains the expansion, and why crisis may 
have been postponed, >but also shows why the boom contains within itself 
a return to crisis at a >higher level.
 
WalterD: Well, whether (or rather how) the permanent arms economy theory 
foresaw the return to crisis is a matter of interpretation at least. 
Cliff at one point argued that the competing powers would be forced to 
reduce their arms spending because it is a drain on accumulation and 
productivity. So arms would be less of a stabilizer and therefore crisis 
would return.

Lisa: According to the way I read Hunt, Lux. argument was that the 
higher rates of profit that result from expansion, including the profits 
realized by supplying the military, that actually fueled further 
accumulation - thereby resulting in another glut of capital, looking for 
still further outlet.

Is this about right?

The part of her analysis of imperialism that is better known than the 
insight into the role of the military economy is indeed the constant 
expansion of capitalism into non-capitalist economies, so that she saw 
imperialism as not a new thing but a continuation of the process of 
primitive accumulation.

Did I get that about right too?

Lisa
still not an economist, but maybe I learned something in that class


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