Rosa Luxemburg Anticipated the Destructive Impact of Capitalist Globalization
Rosa Luxemburg’s work The Accumulation of Capital described the havoc that capitalism wreaked upon what we now call the Global South. Today’s socialist and environmental activists can draw valuable insights from Luxemburg’s understanding of the world system.
A portrait of Rosa Luxemburg at a demonstration against the Vietnam War in Berlin. (Rogge and ullstein bild / Getty Images)
Few issues have taken on greater importance in recent decades than the destructive impact of capitalist globalization on indigenous peoples, noncommodified social relations, and the natural environment. It therefore should come as no surprise that there has been a revival of interest in one of the outstanding analyses of this phenomenon: Rosa Luxemburg’s 1913 work The Accumulation of Capital: A Contribution to the Economic Theory of Imperialism.
Luxemburg’s book was published on the eve of World War I, but some of its themes are strikingly relevant to our own time. A new, much improved English translation has become available over the last decade as part of the project to publish her complete works. In this essay, I will give a short introduction to the key arguments Luxemburg made about the dynamics of capitalism and discuss how they might be applied to the system today.
Anti-Colonial Marxism
Rosa Luxemburg was an outstanding internationalist who was renowned for her groundbreaking critiques of colonialism and imperialism. As a Jewish woman growing up in Russian-occupied Poland, she was acutely aware that colonial domination is an offense to humanity.
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