Rosa Luxemburg Essay Research Paper Rosa LuxemburgBefore

Rosa Luxemburg Essay, Research Paper

Rosa Luxemburg

Before one can even attempt to discuss the Marxists of the World, one must examine and define the meaning of the term itself. What is the definition of Marxism. How did it come about. How did it change through the years.

“ Marxism is the system established by Marx and Engles. The foundation of Marxism is based on Dialectical Materialism—-a way of understanding reality; whether thoughts emotions, or the material world. Through this Marx and Engles examined history, which led them to explain class struggle and the basis of social relations throughout economics”

Marx’s Communist Manifesto was the first systematic statement of modern socialist doctrine. Marx contributed the central propositions of the Manifesto, which embody the materialist conception of history. This theory was later formulated in Marx’s Critique of Political Economy (1859). Marx drew the conclusion that the capitalist class would inherently collapse. “The only class he believed which can assimilate the critique of political economy with out damage to itself is the proletariat.”

After Marx, there were many people who tried to re-model and interpret his philosophy; one of those people was Rosa Luxemburg. Born on March 5th, 1871 in Zamoshc of Congress Poland, Rosa Luxemburg was born into a Jewish family, the youngest of five children. “She was not good looking, she had a limp, a deformed shoulder, but she possessed a powerful intellect, and a strong, clear voice”. In 1889, at 18 years old, Luxemburg’s revolutionary agitation forced her to move to Z.rich, Switzerland, to escape imprisonment. While in Z.rich, Luxemburg continued her revolutionary activities from abroad, while studying political economy and law; receiving her doctorate in 1898.

Like everyone else, Rosa Luxemburg can only be understood in the context of the phase of the social-democratic movement of which she was a part. Whereas Marx’s critique of bourgeois society evolved in a period of rapid capitalistic development, Rosa Luxemburg was active in a time of increasing instability for capitalism, “wherein the formulated contradictions of capital production showed themselves in the concrete forms of imperialistic competition and in intensified class struggles”. While the actual proletarian critique of political economy, according to Marx, consisted at first in the workers’ fight for better working conditions and higher living standards, which would prepare the future struggles for the abolition of capitalism, in Rosa Luxemburg’s view this ‘final’ struggle could no longer be relegated to a distant future but was already present in the extending class struggles. The daily fight for social reforms was inseparably connected with the historical necessity of the proletarian revolution.

According to Marx, capitalism’s basic contradiction, from which spring all it’s other difficulties, is to be found in the value and surplus value relations of capital production. “It is the production of exchange-value in its monetary form, derived from the use-value form of labor-power, which produces, besides its own exchange-value equivalent, a surplus-value for the capitalists. The drive for exchange-value turns into the accumulation of capital, which manifests itself in a growth of capital invented in means of production relatively faster than that invested in labor-power”. While this process expands the capitalist system, through the increasing productivity of labor associated with it, it also tends to reduce the rate of profit on capital, as that part of capital invested in labor-power–which is the only source of surplus-value–diminishes relative to the total social capital. This long and complicated process cannot be dealt with satisfactorily in this short article, but must at least be mentioned in order to differentiate Marx’s theory of accumulation from that Rosa Luxemburg. In Marx’s abstract model of capital development, capitalist crises, as well as the inevitable end of the system, find their source in the temporary or, finally, total breakdown in the accumulation process due to a lack of surplus-value or profit.

For Marx, then, the limits of capitalism are given by the social production relations as value relations, while for Rosa Luxemburg capitalism cannot exist at all, except through the absorption of its surplus-value by pro-capitalist economies. “ Rosa Luxemburg’s theory was quite generally regarded as an aberration and an unjustified criticism of Marx”. Yet her critics were just as far removed from Marx’s position as was Rosa Luxemburg herself. Most of theme critics adhered either to a crude under consumption theory, a theory of disproportionality, or a combination of them. Lenin, for example, “saw the cause for crises in the disproportionalities due to the anarchic character of capitalist production, and merely added to Tagan-Baranowsky’s arguments that of the under consumption of the workers”.

She met with many Russian Social Democrats (at a time before the R.S.D.L.P. split); among them the leading members of the party: Gregory Plekhanov and Pavel Axelrod. It was not long before Luxemburg voiced sharp theoretical differences with the Russian party, primarily over the issue of Polish self-determination. Luxemburg believed that self-determination weakened the international Socialist movement, and helped only the bourgeoisie to strengthen