The Dialectic of the Spatial Determination of Capital: Rosa Luxemburg'sAccumulation of CapitalReconsidered
Rosa Luxemburg's The Accumulation of Capital sought to re-think the work of Marx for the era of imperialism by focusing on capitalism's spatial determination—its inherent drive to consume non-capitalist strata in order to realize surplus value. Although Luxemburg's approach has given rise to intense debates over the past century, the availability of numerous texts of Marx that were unknown in her lifetime—from the Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts of 1844 to his Ethnological Notebooks on pre-capitalist societies—makes it possible for us to finally determine the extent to which her theory of expanded reproduction extended Marx's insights or departed from them. A critical analysis of Luxemburg's work, this paper argues, can enable us to better appreciate the essence of Marx's critique of capitalism—the domination of “dead” labor (capital) over “living” labor as well as its meaning for today.