ROSA LUXEMBURG AND FINANCE
Jan Toporowski
https://debt-issues.blog.rosalux.de/files/2012/10/LUXEMBURGFINANCE.pdf
Rosa Luxemburg is best known for her attempt in her book The Accumulation of
Capital to show that capitalist accumulation requires external markets in order to
overcome a tendency to stagnation. These external markets formed the basis of her
theory of imperialism, which was taken over by Lenin and subsequent Marxists.
However, in chapter xxx of that book, on ‘International Loans’, Rosa Luxemburg
examined the role of finance in capital accumulation. This analysis was perhaps
peripheral to her argument. But it has sufficient critical elements to warrant a place
for Luxemburg among the pioneers of critical finance, while the fate of that analysis
among Marxists reveals how the most important school of radical political economy
in the twentieth century came to an attenuated view of finance as a factor in capitalist
crisis. In this paper, it is argued that Luxemburg put forward an analysis of
international finance that not only allows for a disturbing character of finance, but
also looks forward to important aspects of Minsky’s analysis in the second half of the
twentieth century