Get started

WorkRosa Luxemburg

Introduction to Political Economy

Her party-school lectures, half of them lost: why economics exists at all, and how people worked before capitalism.

by Rosa Luxemburg572 passages held

  • German, the original language
Sign in or subscribe to discuss this work See it in context
Original title
Einführung in die Nationalökonomie
First published
(published posthumously)
Original language
German

Report a rights issue

Overview

At the school that the German Social Democrats ran in Berlin for their own organisers and editors, Rosa Luxemburg taught political economy from 1 October 1907. The book is those lectures written up, and it works as a class does, from a question and from examples. The question is why a science of economics exists at all. She reads out the definitions given by the leading German professors of the day, Gustav Schmoller among them, shows that they explain little, and gives her own answer. Where a community plans its work, as in a peasant household, a medieval manor or a village that holds its land in common, everyone can see who produces what and for whom, and there is nothing to explain. Economic life becomes a puzzle that needs a science only when separate private producers supply a market that no one directs, and prices, crises and unemployment arrive without anyone having decided on them. Economics, on this view, is the study of one historical order, capitalism, and would end with it. Two chapters are historical. Drawing on the American anthropologist Lewis Henry Morgan and on studies of the Germanic village community, the Inca empire and the Indian village, she argues that common property was the rule through most of human history and was broken up by force, often by European conquest. Later chapters explain how exchange produces money and how a reserve of unemployed workers holds wages down. She began the book around 1908, put it aside in 1912 when one difficulty in it grew into The Accumulation of Capital, and returned to it in prison at Wronke in 1916 and 1917. A letter to her publisher in July 1916 lists ten chapters. After her death only five were found among her papers. Paul Levi, her lawyer and executor, published them in 1925; the chapters on profit and on crises were among the missing.

Key concepts

What does Luxemburg say political economy is the study of?

Political economy is, on her definition, the science of the laws of the capitalist economy. Where a community plans its work there are no hidden laws to find. In capitalism millions of private producers decide separately and are linked only by buying and selling, so results appear that nobody decided, such as a sudden slump. Economics arose to explain these results. She draws the conclusion that it loses its subject once society plans production.

What is primitive communism?

Primitive communism is the form in which the earliest societies lived: the land belonged to a group of kin, the work was organised jointly and its product was shared. Luxemburg stresses that this was no rare exception. Scholars had found it among Germans, Slavs, Indians, Peruvians and the peoples Morgan studied in North America. It lasted for thousands of years and proves, for her, that property in land is a late arrival in history.

What was a mark community?

A mark community was the village association of the early Germans, in which a kin group owned its whole territory together. Each household received a strip of arable land by lot, for a limited time, and the shares were strictly equal. Woods, pasture and water stayed undivided. An assembly of all members settled the community's affairs and chose its head. Luxemburg uses it as her nearest example, taken from German history, of an economy run by common decision.

What is commodity production?

Commodity production is making things in order to sell them. Each producer works privately, on his own account, and learns only on the market whether society needed his product. A shoemaker who finds no buyer has worked for nothing. Luxemburg sets this against the planned work of a commune, where the division of tasks is decided beforehand. Exchange now does the planning afterwards, through rising and falling prices, and money becomes the indispensable link.

What is labour power, and why is it a special commodity?

Labour power is a person's capacity to work, offered for sale by those who own no tools, land or workshop and so have nothing else to bring to market. It is special because using it creates more than it costs. In Luxemburg's example a worker needs six hours to produce the value of his wage and works eleven. The remaining five belong to the employer, although the contract was honest and the full price was paid.

Themes of the book

What this book returns to, gathered into themes and ordered by how much of the text each one occupies.

Why a science of economics exists at all

People have always worked and eaten, yet economics is barely two centuries old. Luxemburg asks what happened to economic life that it began to need explaining.

The professors' definitions, Luxemburg shows, say only that an economy satisfies a people's needs. Her answer starts from cases where nothing needs explaining: a peasant household, or the estates of Charlemagne, where a written order fixed what was grown and who received it. A riddle appears only when private producers work for a market that nobody directs. Then prices, unemployment and crises arrive that no one has willed. She lets a village lose its common property overnight and follows the shoemaker and the baker as they discover exchange, and with it money. Economics is the study of this one unplanned order, and would end with it.

  • political economy
  • capitalism
  • commodity production
  • exchange
  • commodity exchange
  • money
  • division of labor
  • international trade
  • production

Enter a dialogue

Common property, and how it was broken up

Was private property always there? Luxemburg spends two chapters on societies that held their land in common, and on what ended them.

Research of the nineteenth century had found the same institution in one place after another: the Germanic mark with its fields shared out by lot, the Russian village, the Indian commune, the kin groups described by the American Lewis Morgan. Luxemburg draws the conclusion that common ownership of land was the rule through most of human history. She does not idealise it. People held together because they were helpless before nature. The Inca empire shows that conquerors could leave the communes standing and make them work extra fields for rulers and priests. What finally dissolved them, she argues, was force from outside, above all European conquest.

  • primitive communism
  • communal property
  • kinship
  • agrarian history
  • economic history
  • colonialism
  • feudalism
  • slavery
  • social organization
  • property
  • private property
  • agriculture

Enter a dialogue

The elastic law of wages

A worker is free, signs a contract and is paid what was agreed. Luxemburg asks where, in so fair an exchange, the exploitation is, and why wages never rise far above what a family needs.

What the worker sells, in Luxemburg's account, is his capacity to work, and it produces more in a day than it costs to maintain. A serf could count the days he owed his lord. In a factory the paid and the unpaid hours cannot be told apart. Against Lassalle's iron law she sets an elastic one: wages are held near the minimum because a reserve of unemployed is kept, in her phrase, dangling between being and not being. Unions make a decent standard of living count as a social necessity. The worker's share of what he produces still falls with every advance in technique.

  • wages
  • wage labor
  • labor power
  • exploitation
  • poverty
  • labor
  • industrialization

Enter a dialogue

Within this work

passages held
572
distinct concepts
609
by passages held, corpus-wide
#126

What this book thinks together

The wheel takes this book’s leading concepts and shows how often they come up together. The wider the band between two, the more of its passages speak of both. Among them, most often together: “capitalism” and “colonialism”.
Concept co-occurrence, strongest first 8 concepts, joined by 22 pairings. 94 pairings reach beyond these concepts and are not drawn.
ConceptPaired conceptShared passages
capitalismcolonialism13
capitalismhistorical materialism6
colonialismexploitation6
capitalismeconomic history5
capitalismexploitation5
division of laborinternational trade4
colonialismeconomic history3
division of laboreconomic history3
economic historymoney3
capitalismdivision of labor2
colonialisminternational trade2
division of laborexploitation2
division of laborhistorical materialism2
economic historyhistorical materialism2
economic historyinternational trade2
exploitationhistorical materialism2
historical materialismmoney2
capitalismmoney1
colonialismhistorical materialism1
division of labormoney1
economic historyexploitation1
international trademoney1

Works held

The author's work in order, this book marked in place. Your-language title first, the original beneath it where the two differ; side chips show which full texts are held.

  1. 1899 Reform or Revolution (Sozialreform oder Revolution?)

    Within a year of her arrival in Berlin she had written the newspaper articles gathered here. Their case about where reform stops is the ground she argues from in everything later.

     DE
  2. 1904 Organizational Questions of Russian Social Democracy (Organisationsfragen der russischen Sozialdemokratie)

    Written against Lenin's plan for a party, this is her sustained piece on how one should be organised. The prison manuscript on the Russian Revolution took the argument up again fourteen years later.

     DE
  3. 1905 Socialism and the Churches (Kościół a socjalizm)

    The Polish side of her work: a pamphlet for the party she helped to lead in Russian Poland, written in the revolutionary year that she analysed afterwards in The Mass Strike.

     DE
  4. 1906 The Mass Strike, the Political Party and the Trade Unions (Massenstreik, Partei und Gewerkschaften)

    The fullest statement of her view that mass action cannot be scheduled by leaders. The dispute it opened with the trade unions came back in 1910 as her break with Karl Kautsky, the party's leading theorist.

     DE
  5. 1913 The Accumulation of Capital (Die Akkumulation des Kapitals)

    Among pamphlets and articles, this is the one full-length treatise she finished. It supplies the economic basis for the account of war she gave three years later in the Junius Pamphlet.

     DE
  6. 1916 The Crisis in the German Social-Democracy (The “Junius” Pamphlet) (Die Krise der Sozialdemokratie)

    The account of imperialism from The Accumulation of Capital, applied three years later to an actual war and to the party that had voted for it.

     DE
  7. 1919 Aufsätze und Artikel

    Newspaper and journal pieces from 1893 to 1919, the running record beside the books. They include the 1910 polemics against Karl Kautsky and her last articles for Die Rote Fahne.

     DE
  8. 1919 Reden

    What she said aloud, on the questions her articles and pamphlets argue in print, from her first months in Germany in 1898 to the last weeks of her life.

     DE
  9. 1922 The Russian Revolution (Die russische Revolution)

    She left it unfinished in Breslau prison in 1918, and Paul Levi printed it four years later. It returns to the objection she had made to Lenin in 1904, now that his party held a state.

     DE
  10. 1925 Introduction to Political Economy (Einführung in die Nationalökonomie) you are here DE
Sign in or subscribe to discuss this work

— or open another of their works