Some of the most decisive moments in the neoliberal era were implanted first as major changes to the United States and world financial system during the early 1980s. As an inside observer at the ...Federal Reserve briefly during the time, learning a bourgeois mode of economic theory and description—especially applied to the global recession, financial failures, and worsening inequality of that era—was unsatisfying. The ideological and applied power configuration was shifting from Keynesianism to Monetarism and with it came irresponsible banking deregulation. Seeing this from the Fed, and beginning to grasp the formidable implications for low-income people of the Global South—from redlined West Philadelphia to debt-riddled Southern Africa—meant that instead of social-democratic nostalgia, I sought an antidote in Marxist theory and anti-apartheid solidarity activism. With the help of Johns Hopkins University geographers, the financial frothiness that was washing over sites I was learning about in detail, suddenly became explicable in terms of underlying capitalist crisis tendencies. As I saw how they applied to uneven development, race, gender, ecological, and other super-exploitative relations in Zimbabwe and South Africa, especially using Rosa Luxemburg’s capitalist/non-capitalist framing in her theory of imperialism, not only analysis but praxis became all the more urgent. Those overaccumulation tendencies, their spatial and temporal displacement, and accumulation by dispossession have been central categories for analysis and strategy ever since.
Breaking all stereotypes and restrictions of gendered boundaries, Rosa Luxemburg, (1871-1919) whose life spanned a tumultuous period in the history of Europe and the world, remains an iconic figure. ...Luxemburg's understanding and commitment to the process of revolutionary social transformation was so deep that she refused to allow herself to be confined to activism that focused only on the 'women's rights' agenda, even as she consistently engaged with the organized movement for women's emancipation. Hailing from Poland, she came to occupy a significant position among the revolutionaries in Germany and the leaders of the Social Democratic Party of Germany, who were working for the advancement of the socialist revolution across Europe. This included Russia, which experienced the first Socialist Revolution in 1917. Known for her polemics, Luxemburg wrote consistently in the left publications of the time, often highlighting her disagreement and differences with the top political leaders of the socialist movement. Pushing for a mass strike and people's uprising with a working-class leadership, Luxemburg, on occasions, differed with Lenin, envisaging alternate modes of organizing.
Rosa Luxemburg was one of the most significant political theorists within the Socialist International movement during the turn of the nineteenth century. Her career included writings addressing ...various political issues such as nationalism and Marxist orthodoxy. One of her more significant approaches to revolutionary strategy was the use of mass strikes to attack both political and economic national institutions as a means for bringing down imperialistic capitalism. This article examines, from a transnational perspective, the development of her acclaimed The Mass Strike, the Political Party and Trade Unions (1906). Specifically, four "geo-moments" were used to analyse how her conception of mass strikes evolved from her early roles as a strike organiser in Warsaw to participation and assessment of the 1905 Russian Revolution that resulted in her Mass Strike pamphlet.
The presidential elections in Cuba in March 2018 has raised again the question of the country’s survival. How can Cuba hold up and develop against the economic, cultural, and military encirclement of ...U.S. imperialism in particular and the capitalist system in general? An answer can be sought in the history of Cuba’s socialist transition, the unique role played by Che Guevara, and the emergence of ideas regarding the possibility (and impossibility) of achieving socialism in one country alone.
Notes from the Editors
Monthly review (New York. 1949),
02/2018, Letnik:
69, Številka:
9
Magazine Article
Recenzirano
Other important works by Bellofiore that we are aware of include three essays with Joseph Halevi: "Deconstructing Labor: What is 'New' in Contemporary Capitalism and Economic Policies: A ...Marxian-Kaleckian Perspective," MR Online, April 9, 2009; "Magdoff-Sweezy, Minsky and the Real Subsumption of Labour to Finance," in Daniela Tavasci and Jan Toporowski, eds., Minsky, Crisis and Development (Palgrave Macmillan, 2010); and "The Global Crisis and the Crisis of European Neomercantilism," in Leo Panitch, Greg Albo, and Vivek Chibber, eds., Socialist Register 2011 (Monthly Review Press, 2010).Bellofiore focuses the greater part of "Between Schumpeter and Keynes" on the work of Sweezy, including a discussion of his arguments in support of Marxian value theory, a scrutiny of the famous Sweezy-Schumpeter debate in the 1940s, and a consideration of Paul Baran and Sweezy's analysis of wages in "Some Theoretical Implications," a missing chapter of their 1966 book Monopoly Capital published in the July-August 2012 issue of MR. Particularly significant is Bellofiore's treatment of Sweezy's dynamic theory of monopoly capital....what is at stake by now are the conditions of existence and reproduction of human beings in their entirety.
J une 1917. A world is at war. Empires—in Europe, Eurasia, Asia, the Middle East and North Africa— are crumbling. Rosa Luxemburg, the Polish-German revolutionary Marxist, had anticipated the ...destruction in her prescient “Junius Pamphlet”: “This world war is a regression into barbarism. The triumph of imperialism leads to the annihilation of civilization. At first, this happens sporadically for the duration of a modern war, but then when the period of unlimited wars begins it progresses toward its inevitable consequences. Today, we face the choice exactly as Friedrich Engels foresaw it a generation ago: either the triumph of imperialism and the collapse of all civilization as in ancient Rome, depopulation, desolation, degeneration— a great cemetery. Or the victory of socialism, that means the conscious active struggle of the international proletariat against imperialism and its method of war. This is a dilemma of world history, an either/or; the scales are wavering before the decision of the class-conscious proletariat. The future of civilization and humanity depends on whether or not the proletariat resolves manfully to throw its revolutionary broadsword into the scales. In this war imperialism has won. Its bloody sword of genocide has brutally tilted the scale toward the abyss of misery. The only compensation for all the misery and all the shame would be if we learn from the war how the proletariat can seize mastery of its own destiny and escape the role of the lackey to the ruling classes.”
Menozzi cites that in a 1894 essay originally published in Polish in Sprawa Robotnicza, entitled 'What are the Origins of May Day?', Marxist intellectual and activist Rosa Luxemburg made some ...thoughtful comments on the significance of International Workers' Day. She explained how the origins of the celebrations dated back to 1889, when the International Workers' Congress decided that 'the workers of all lands would demonstrate together for the eight-hour day on May 1, 1890'.1 That decision would play a very important role in subsequent history, even though the delegates who agreed on that demonstration, at that time, could not predict the future resonance of their undertaking.
This essay considers the significance of Rosa Luxemburg's thought in relation to discourses on the materialist conception of history. Luxemburg engaged extensively with Marx's method in order to ...understand the consequences of capitalism and socialism as a concrete possibility. In
The Accumulation of Capital (1913), she deals with the problem of economic reproduction and the material conditions for the global expansion of capital. Yet, her writings have sparked a long tradition of debate concerning her contribution to Marxist theory. Within this tradition, Michael
Löwy and Norman Geras have discussed Luxemburg's idea of history, giving divergent interpretations of her influential phrase, 'socialism or barbarism'. Building on the key terms of their argument, this essay proposes to read The Accumulation of Capital as a compelling reflection
on the contingency of capitalism. Luxemburg's analysis of the drive to accumulation shows capitalism's manipulation of the process of social transmission and urges a reappropriation of history against capitalism's teleology of perpetual expansion.
Rosa Luxemburg's classic work The Accumulation of Capital reveals, with a great degree of clarity, the function of imperialism in determining the global movement and accumulation of capital. Her ...attention to the constitutive role of international credit, tariffs and militarism,
not just as manifestations of imperialism but as methods integral to the project of capital accumulation, continues to have a significant bearing on our own time, offering us valuable insights for disrupting current theories of globalisation and the postcolonial. The reason for highlighting
the inadequacies of these particular theories is because over the last three decades, they have become the predominant analytical lens through which asymmetrical global relations have been viewed. While acknowledging the gaps in Luxemburg's analysis of imperialist practices, I will, nevertheless,
consider how her fiery critique of imperial activities of her time hold tremendous possibilities for investigating the vexed dialectic between capitalist and non-capitalist organisations as reflected in existing global arrangements, even as I specify ways to trouble those categories. Indeed,
what may Luxemburg's categorisation of a non-capitalist space look like in the current conjuncture, where it is almost impossible to escape the centrality of capitalist relations? Moreover, if postcolonial theory in its many formations remains the predominant mode of analysing global asymmetries,
how might its uncovering of these asymmetries be strengthened by an attention to Luxemburg's work?
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