Date: Mon, 3 Jun 96 14:42:12 GMT
Subject: Re: Rosa Luxemburg



> 
> One should recall that V3 was published many years after V2 in 1894 (even 
> though the drafts edited by Engels of what became V3 were written many 
> years before most of the drafts for what became V2). In general, most of 
> the Marxists of this period  (including the German and Austrian 
> Social Democrats and the Bolsheviks) built their analysis of accumulation 
> and crisis (and imperialism) on the foundations of the V2 reproduction 
> schemes. This reflected the fact that most adhered to either 
> underconsumptionist and/or disproportionality theories of crisis.
> 

Doesn't surprise me - why would Luxembourg have ignored Vol III otherwise ?
She'd have at least said somewhere why she prefered one type of analysis 
to the other.

> > The stuff about the permanent arms economy is, I'm proud to say, quite
> > distinctive to the International Socialist tendency ! :-).
> 
> Didn't Seymour Melman, a left Keynesian professor at Columbia University, 
> first coin the term?
> 

Quite probably. I meant among Marxists. Even then, it was around as a theory
before Cliff picked up on it. Mike Kidron was in our tendency ( but quite
probably wasn't when he first thought about it ? ). Apparently they drew
on someone whose pseudonym at least was T.E.Vance ? Never heard of him
appart from that - I believe he was American.

What distinguished Luxembourg's theory from Kautsky's, and the IS version
of the permanent arms economy from any left Keynesian one, was that the
marxist theory explains the expansion, and why crisis may have been postponed,
but also shows why the boom contains within itself a return to crisis at a
higher level.


Adam.



Adam Rose
SWP
Manchester
UK


---------------------------------------------------------------


     --- from list marxism2-AT-lists.village.virginia.edu ---