Like a candle burning at both ends. Rosa Luxemburg and the critique of political economy

The paper reconstructs Luxemburg’s arguments about the tendency to the ‘final’ breakdown of capitalism and her criticism of Lenin, and shows how her economic theory and political perspective are different and much richer than usually recognized. The paper shows that: (i) Luxemburg saw the internal link between value, abstract labour and money; (ii) she emphasized the connection between dynamic competition, relative surplus value extraction, and the ‘law’ of the tendential fall of the ‘relative wage’; (iii) her theory of the crisis is not underconsumptionist. The shortage of effective demand is seen as ultimately due to a fall of autonomous investment caused by inter-sectoral disequilibria springing from the revolution in the methods of production and the consequent relative reduction of workers’ consumption. ‘Disproportionalities’, as soon as they affect important branches of production, ends up in a general glut of commodities.