44. ‘Rosa Luxemburg’s The Accumulation of Capital: A Critique’ (16 February 1913)

In capitalist society, the value of a commodity is determined by the labour socially necessary to produce it. How large, however, is that social need for a certain kind of commodity, and on what does its extent depend? This is one of the fundamental questions of political economy. It is one of the most brilliant achievements of Karl Marx not only to have clarified this question for the first time, but also to have answered it in the most ingenious way. The third section of the second volume of Rosa Luxemburg's The Accumulation of Capital , in which that occurs, is one of the deepest but also most difficult parts of the entire work. Marx's diagrams show how capitalist production must proceed if equilibrium is maintained, and how great is the actual social need for different kinds of products. Keywords:capitalist production; Karl Marx; political economy; Rosa Luxemburg; The Accumulation of Capital