Ep. 61 – Rosa Luxemburg, The Accumulation of Capital Part II

Always Already Podcast, a critical theory podcast

Join Rachel, John, and Sid as they tackle Part II of Rosa Luxemburg’s The Accumulation of Capital. Picking up where Part I left off, the team waste no time in connecting Luxemburg’s analyses of nineteenth-century economic debates to the neoliberal present. Spurred by Luxemburg’s witty inquiry into the ways vulgar economists, classical and Marxist alike, understood capitalist crises (spoiler: they didn’t quite get it), we try to think with Luxemburg about the crises of late capitalism. Should we be hopeful in moments of crisis? What’s the relation between socialist theory and practice? How are the political forms available to us different from Luxemburg’s time? From the Amazon model to Bernie Sanders’s declaration to run in 2020 to the tension between determinism/teleology and contingency in Marxist thought, the team shuttle back-and-forth across two hundred years of history.

In other words, you don’t want to miss the second installment of the first ever AAP podcast mini-series.

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https://alwaysalreadypodcast.files.wordpress.com/2019/02/luxemburgii.mp3

Links:

• On Luxemburg’s life, at Jacobin
• David Harvey on accumulation by dispossession
• Short biography and useful resources for further reading on Luxemburg
• A brief history of the Social Democratic Party of Germany (SPD)
• Marxists.org on the Spartacus League (founded by Luxemburg, among others)

Image via https://urpe.wordpress.com/2018/04/10/call-for-papers-karl-marx-and-rosa-luxemburg-thought-legacy-and-contemporary-value/