Rosa Luxemburg

“ This mirror, held up to capitalist society almost a century before the time of writing, is clear and comprehensive enough in all conscience. Sismondi put his finger on every one of the sore spots of bourgeois economics: the ruin of small enterprise; the drift from the country; the proletarisation of the middle classes; the impoverishment of the workers; the displacement of the worker by the machine; unemployment; the dangers of the credit system; social antagonisms; the insecurity of existence; crises and anarchy. ”

“ The aim and incentive of capitalist production is not a surplus value pure and simple, to be appropriated in any desired quantity, but a surplus value ever growing into larger quantities, surplus value ad infinitum. But to achieve this aim, the same magic means must be used over and over again, the means of capitalist production—the ever repeated appropriation of the proceeds of unpaid wage labour in the process of commodity manufacture, and the subsequent realisation of the commodities so produced. ”

“ Capitalism needs the medium of commodity production for its development, as a market for its surplus value. But as soon as simple commodity production has superseded natural economy, capital must turn against it. No sooner has capital called it to life, than the two must compete for means of production, labour power, and markets. The first aim of capitalism is to isolate the producer, to sever the community ties which protect him, and the next task is to take the means of production away from the small manufacturer. ”

“ It must never be forgotten, that the production of this surplus-value—and the re-conversion of a portion of it into capital, or accumulation, forms an indispensable part of this production of surplus-value—is the immediate purpose and the compelling motive of capitalist production. It will not do to represent capitalist production as something which it is not, that is to say, as a production having for its immediate purpose the consumption of goods, or the production of means of enjoyment for the capitalists. ”

“ Thus it seems that the capitalists as a class ought to buy their own surplus value with their own money. As the capitalist class has possession of this money resulting from previous periods of production, even prior to the realisation of the product of each working period, the appropriation of surplus value at first sight does not seem to be based upon the unpaid labour of the wage labourer—as it in fact is—but merely the result of an exchange of commodities against an equivalent quantity of money both supplied by the capitalist class itself. ”

“ The upshot of it all is that the limits of capitalism are set by the increasing poverty born of its own development, by the increasing number of redundant workers deficient in all purchasing power. Increasing labour productivity which can rapidly satisfy every effective demand of society corresponds to the increasing incapacity of ever broader masses of the population to satisfy their most vital needs; on the one hand, a glut of goods that cannot be sold—and on the other, large masses who lack the bare necessities. ”

“ Not the first act, that of exchanging labour power for variable capital, but the second, the realisation of the wage received from the variable capital is put at the centre of the whole machinery, the entire commodity exchange of capitalist society being in turn reduced to this realisation of the labour-wage. And the crowning glory is that this exchange between workers and entrepreneurs, the king-pin of all economic life, dissolves into nothing on a closer scrutiny—it does not take place at all. ”

“ Surely it was no disgrace to admit oneself frankly powerless to envisage a future beyond capitalism in the year 1820—at a time when capitalism had only just begun to establish its domination over the big industries, and when the idea of socialism was only possible in a most Utopian form. But, as Sismondi could neither advance beyond capitalism nor go back to a previous stage, the only course open to his criticism was a petty-bourgeois compromise. ”

“ If capitalism forms a ‘closed circle’ in every country from the very beginning, if, chasing its tail like a puppy and in complete ‘self-sufficiency’, it is able of itself to create an unlimited market for its products and can spur itself on to ever greater expansion, then every capitalist country as such must also be a closed and self-sufficient economic whole. In but a single respect would foreign commerce appear reasonable: to compensate, by imports from abroad, for certain deficiencies due to the soil and the climate, i.e. the import of raw materials or foodstuffs from sheer necessity. ”

“ Thus profit becomes an end in itself, the decisive factor which determines not only production but also reproduction. Not only does it decide in each case what work is to be undertaken, how it is to be carried out, and how the products are to be distributed; what is more, profit decides, also, at the end of every working period, whether the labour process is to be resumed, and, if so, to what extent and in what direction it should be made to operate. ”

“ What the individual capitalist considers nobody else’s business becomes a matter of grave concern for the totality of capitalists. Whereas it does not make the slightest difference to the individual capitalist whether he produces machinery, sugar, artificial manure or a progressive newspaper—provided only that he can find a buyer for his commodity so that he can get back his capital plus surplus value—it matters infinitely to the ‘total capitalist’ that his total product should have a definite use-form. ”

“ Tugan Baranovski’s most important general conclusion from Marx’s principles, the pivot of his whole theory, is that, contrary to the assumptions of the sceptics, capitalist accumulation is not only possible under the capitalist forms of revenue and consumption, but is, in fact, completely independent of both. It is not consumption, he says, but production itself which makes for the best market. Production and the market are therefore the same, and since the expansion of production is unlimited in itself, the market, the capacity to absorb its products, has no limits either. ”

“ We may go back as far as we choose, we may twist and turn the problem as much as we like, yet we shall find no element in the value of any commodity—and therefore none in the price—which cannot be resolved purely in terms of human labour. We can distinguish, however, two parts in all labour: one part repays the wages and the other accrues to the capitalist and landlord. There seems nothing left but wages and profits—and yet, there is capital, individual and social capital. ”

“ Thus quite a new incentive is given to constantly renewed production, to the process of reproduction as a regular phenomenon in capitalist society, an incentive unknown to any other system of production. In every other economic system known to history, reproduction is determined by the unceasing need of society for consumer goods, whether they are the needs of all the workers determined in a democratic manner as in an agrarian and communist market community, or the despotically determined needs of an antagonistic class society, as in an economy of slave labour or corvée and the like. ”

“ If you will insist that over-production is possible, how can it happen that there are so many people in our society who are naked, hungry and in want? Pray, explain this contradiction if you can. Say, whose own position excels by contriving blithely to shrug off the circulation of money altogether by operating with a system of barter, now censures his critic for speaking of an over-abundance of products in relation not only to purchasing power but to the real needs of society, and that although Sismondi had left no doubt at all about this very salient point of his deductions. ”

“ More than that: the ‘declining wage rate’ is only another expression of the rising rate of surplus value which forms the most powerful and effective means of checking a decline of the profit rate, and which therefore represents the prime incentive for capitalist production in general, and for technical progress within this system of production in particular. Doing away with the ‘declining wage rate’ by way of legislation would be as much as to do away with the raison d’être of capitalist society, to deal a crippling blow to its entire system. ”

“ Thus one capitalist may win what another or many others who have been shouldered from the market must write off as a loss. This process will enable one capitalist to increase his reproduction by the amount that it compels others by losses to restrict their own. One capitalist will be able to engage in enlarged reproduction because others cannot even achieve simple reproduction. In the same way, one capitalist may enlarge his reproduction by using labour power and means of production which another’s bankruptcy, that is his partial or complete retirement from reproduction, has set free. ”

“ Their labours begin at dawn and end at dusk, continuing even after night has fallen—but no exertion can change this fate; they cannot raise their income, and only lose that little leisure which ought to remain nowadays for the improvement of their minds. Hitherto it might have seemed as if all this suffering were necessary to the progress of civilisation, but now that a series of the most wonderful discoveries and inventions have increased human labour power more than a hundredfold, new prospects of changing these grim conditions are suddenly revealed. ”

“ But then capitalist production does not aim at its products being enjoyed, but at the accumulation of surplus value. There had been no demand for the surplus product within the country, so capital had lain idle without the possibility of accumulating. But abroad, where capitalist production has not yet developed, there has come about, voluntarily or by force, a new demand of the non-capitalist strata. The consumption of the capitalist and working classes at home is irrelevant for the purposes of accumulation, and what matters to capital is the very fact that its products are ‘used’ by others. ”

“ How could the entrepreneurs of the world recognise the limits beyond which the market would cease to be healthy? They engage in production without knowing the one of the other, they are producing in the most distant corners of the earth for a market hundreds of miles away, they produce with such vast forces that a month’s production may already overstep the limit. ”

“ If the capitalist pays wages to the workers, he does not abandon his variable capital and let it stray into the workers’ hands, to become their income. He only exchanges the value-form of his variable capital against its natural form, labour power. The variable capital remains always in the hand of the capitalist, first as money, and then as labour power, to revert to him later together with the surplus value as the cash proceeds from the commodities. The worker, on the other hand, never gains possession of the variable capital. ”

“ The realisation and capitalisation of surplus value become impossible to accomplish. Just as soon as reality begins to correspond to Marx’s diagram of enlarged reproduction, the end of accumulation is in sight, it has reached its limits, and capitalist production is in extremis. For capital, the standstill of accumulation means that the development of the productive forces is arrested, and the collapse of capitalism follows inevitably, as an objective historical necessity. ”

“ Since capitalist production can develop fully only with complete access to all territories and climes, it can no more confine itself to the natural resources and productive forces of the temperate zone than it can manage with white labour alone. Capital needs other races to exploit territories where the white man cannot work. It must be able to mobilise world labour power without restriction in order to utilise all productive forces of the globe—up to the limits imposed by a system of producing surplus value. ”