Romain Kroes writes:>Not only Marxists have no coherent theory of contemporary Imperialism, but they are prisoners of a contradiction between Lenin's theory and Rosa Luxemburg's.<
does this conclusion follow from a full search of the Marxist literature on imperialism? It seems to me that most Marxists follow Lenin, often with modifications, while there are other alternatives besides Luxemburg. The Monthly Review school springs to mind...
>For Lenin, imperialism is motivated by the race to a "superprofit". For Rosa Luxemburg, it is motivated by the accumulation process which needs relentless expansion. For the former, imperialism is the product of the behaviour of capitalists looking for ever more profit. For the latter, it is the product of an organic necessity. This contradiction has its origin in the problem of realizing the surplus-value. Trying to explain the "extended reproduction" of capital by the addition of an endogenous profit, Marx did not succeed. Rosa Luxemburg discovered this failure and resolved the problem by the exogenous surplus-value realization, that is by an expansion into geographical and sociological spaces. There is no doubt that the current "Globalization" [theory?] agrees with Rosa Luxemburg.<
I disagree. Marx showed very clearly that capitalism need not suffer from chronic realization problems, i.e., that it was _possible_ for surplus-value to be realized internal to the system. (There are lots of critiques of Luxemburg in the literature, so her school is very small.) The problem (for me, at least) is that this possibility is usually not realized. For example, in some eras (such as our own) wages are pushed down relative to labor productivity, so that realization problems due to under-consumption are always in the wings. However, there are short-term solutions to this (e.g., the US credit-based boom of the late 1990s and the US as the consumer of the last resort for the rest of the world). And other periods don't see the same kind of underconsumption undertow (e.g., the 1960s).
>Lenin's theory is reducible to the human-nature metaphysics, <
I don't think so: Lenin's theory (though somewhat crude, as one might expect from a pamphlet that he himself saw as inferior to Bukharin's contribution) is one of a structural tension, one of capitalists continuously being _pushed_ by circumstances to struggle with each other to attain monopoly. As with Marx, Lenin's vision of capitalism doesn't start with human-nature metaphysics (the maximizing consumer, etc.) but with the structure of the system.
A full Marxian analysis would include both the structural tensions that push individual capitalists to expand _and_ the conditions that allow the "organic" whole to engage in relatively harmonious expanded reproduction. When these clash -- as they regularly do -- we see economic (and sometimes social and political) crises. One solution to this kind of mess is geographical expansion, though that kind of solution (like others) doesn't solve the structural problems that produce capitalist crises.
>while Rosa Luxemburg's continues the scientific Marxism that have been ignored, even censored by both reformists and Leninists for almost
ninety years.<
while Luxemburg's analysis is scientific Marxism, I don't think it makes sense. (One thing about scientists is that they're often wrong.) Since it's easy to find a copy of her stuff -- it's published by Monthly Review Press -- I wouldn't call it "censored." It might be out of print, but that's because of low demand. I know that I have several of her books.
>It is besides noticeable that the belief in an endogenous realizing surplus value gathers, on the same side, the persisting social-democracts and the Marxist-Leninists (including Trotskysts). If surplus value realization is endogenous, capitalism does not need any expansion and it has no limit in accumulating within a closed area.<
See the above: we don't need Luxemburg's analysis to understand that capitalism often faced limits that cause profitability problems that are often solved via geographical expansion.
JD
