Rosa Luxemburg Note

I never paid close attention to Rosa Luxemburg other than noting in passing that she was among the many Marxist/Communist figures that lost their lives in the development years of Communism. But until I came across this Twitter link I didn't appreciate that she was actually anti-war and cherished a really critical attitude about Marx and the Communist legacy.

Video via Twitter.

This clip at the Wikipedia article was all I needed to find.

She was an anti-war activist which put her at odds with the notion of a violent revolution. I'm by no means any expert on Marxist history (and this late in life I'm not tempted to become one) but I have found enough about Luxemburg to resonate with this part of her thinking. She was instrumental in the formation of The Spartacus League in 1918.

The question today is not democracy or dictatorship. The question that history has put on the agenda reads: bourgeois democracy or socialist democracy. For the dictatorship of the proletariat does not mean bombs, putsches, riots and anarchy, as the agents of capitalist profits deliberately and falsely claim. Rather, it means using all instruments of political power to achieve socialism, to expropriate the capitalist class, through and in accordance with the will of the revolutionary majority of the proletariat.

This Wikipedia article caught my attention. 

Since the more primitive times in which Rosa Luxemburg lived, the exploitation of workers by big companies and bosses, has been displaced. Those "workers" are now small countries exploited by big ones. The old global order produced a power arrangement called colonialism which has since grown into a modern economic system of trade and commerce, supported by a global economic arrangement. Modern economics now involves a more reliable banking system which coexists with an elaborate complex of trans-national quasi-banking arrangements. These include organized legal, quasi-legal and outright illegal operations, cobbled together by whatever means possible according to which among them wields the greatest power. This arrangement is cobbled together in ways transcending geo-political boundaries as well as outright military might. The Al Capone rubric covers it: You can get so much farther with a kind word and a gun than with a kind word alone.

The Accumulation of Capital was the only work Luxemburg published on economics during her lifetime. In the polemic, she argued that capitalism needs to constantly expand into non-capitalist areas in order to access new supply sources, markets for surplus value and reservoirs of labor.[44] According to Luxemburg, Marx had made an error in Das Kapital in that the proletariat could not afford to buy the commodities they produced and by his own criteria it was impossible for capitalists to make a profit in a closed-capitalist system since the demand for commodities would be too low and therefore much of the value of commodities could not be transformed into money. According to Luxemburg, capitalists sought to realize profits through offloading surplus commodities onto non-capitalist economies, hence the phenomenon of imperialism as capitalist states sought to dominate weaker economies. However, this was leading to the destruction of non-capitalist economies as they were increasingly absorbed into the capitalist system. With the destruction of non-capitalist economies, there would be no more markets to offload surplus commodities onto and capitalism would break down.[45]