[ show plain text ]
Paul, Rakesh, all:
What do you think about the following piece:
"Rosa Luxemburg, whose mistakes the Trotskyist contrabandists adopted when
they attempted to foist their ideas on the world under the guise of
idealizing Luxemburgism, made *mistakes* of a clearly Kautskyist type on
the question of imperialism. She considered imperialism not as a separate
stage in the development of capitalism, but as a definite policy on the new
period. In her principal theoretical work, The Accumulation of Capital,
Luxemburg proves the inevitability of a collapse not because the inner
contradictions of capitalism become extremely acute in the epoch of
imperialism, but because of the conflict of capitalism with its external
surroundings, because of the impossibility of realizing surplus value under
de so called "pure" capitalism (i.e., a capitalist society consisting only
of capitalists and workers without any "non-capitalist mass" in the form of
small producers). Basing herself thus on semi-Menshevik positions,
Luxemburg could not rise to the Leninist conception of imperialism, to a
correct understanding of its fundamental peculiarities and distinguishing
attributes. Luxemburg's mistakes in the conception of imperialism are
closely allied to her erroneous positions on a number of important
political questions: the question of the split in Social-Democracy, the
agrarian and national questions, the role of the Party and spontaneous
elements in the movement, etc. The theory of the automatic collapse of
capitalism ensuing from Luxemburg's erroneous theory of reproduction, which
the "Left" Social-Democrats gladly utilize no to hold the working class
back from revolutionary activity by means of supposedly revolutionary
phraseology, in practice disarms the working class, spreads a mood of
*passivity* and *fatalism* in its midst, stultifying its will to struggle."
A. Leontiev, Political Economy -- A Beginners's Course, Cooperative
Publishing Society of Foreign Workers in the USSR, Moscow-Leningrad, 1935,
pp. 222-3.
This archive was generated by hypermail 2b29 : Sun Apr 30 2000 - 19:59:43 EDT