[A-List] Lenin and Luxemburg

["Charles Brown" <cbrown@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

Patrick,

I don't quite understand your claim that Lenin and Leninists note the
militarism and political violence of imperialism less than Luxemburg.

Charles

^^^^^^



*	From: "Patrick Bond"

By 1913, Rosa Luxemburg had developed a full-fledged theory of imperialism
from these insights:

Force, fraud, oppression, looting are openly displayed without any attempt
at concealment, and it requires an effort to discover within this tangle of
political violence and contests of power the stern laws of the economic
process. Bourgeois liberal theory takes into account only the former aspect:
'the realm of peaceful competition', the marvels of technology and pure
commodity exchange; it separates it strictly from the other aspect: the
realm of capital's blustering violence which is regarded as more or less
incidental to foreign policy and quite independent of the economic sphere of

capital.
   In reality, political power is nothing but a vehicle for the economic
process. The conditions for the reproduction of capital provide the organic
link between these two aspects of the accumulation of capital. The
historical career of capitalism can only be appreciated by taking them
together. 'Sweating blood and filth with every pore from head to toe'
characterizes not only the birth of capital but also its progress in the
world at every step, arid thus capitalism prepares its own downfall under
ever more violent contortions and convulsions.
   Militarism fulfils a quite definite function in the history of capital,
accompanying as it does every historical phase of accumulation. It plays a
decisive part in the first stages of European capitalism, in the period of
the so-called 'primitive accumulation', as a means of conquering the New
World and the spice-producing countries of India. Later, it is employed to
subject the modern colonies, to destroy the social organizations of
primitive societies so that their means of production may be appropriated,
forcibly to introduce commodity trade in countries where the social
structure had been unfavourable to it, and to turn the natives into a
proletariat by compelling them to work for wages in the colonies. It is
responsible for the creation and expansion of spheres of interest for
European capital in non-European regions, for extorting railway concessions
in backward countries, and for enforcing the claims of European capital as
international lender. Finally, militarism is a weapon in the competitive
struggle between capitalist countries for areas of non-capitalist
civilization.[7]