In his Preface to this book, Jan Toporowski tells us that its original Polish version – which he describes as its author’s ‘master-work’ – was published ‘in an obscure … edition in 1971’ (p. ix). This was some 3 years after its author’s expulsion from the Polish Communist Party (along with other Polish Jews and ‘revisionists’ such as Wlodzimierz Brus and Leszek Kolakowski) and some 9 years before Kowalik’s re-entry into Polish politics as an adviser to the Solidarity Movement.
Along with this – briefest possible – historical contextualization, Toporowski provides a few pages of analytical remarks relating the book to Michal Kalecki’s pioneering contributions to economic theory, and in particular, to Kalecki’s conviction that some late 19th-century Marxist debates on problems of capitalist reproduction were important intellectual forerunners of his own work and of the so-called ‘Keynesian Revolution’ in economics. According to Toporowski, Kalecki derived this conviction from some 1960s ‘discussions’ with Kowalik, (p. xi) and in particular, from Kowalik’s account of an early 20th-century debate on Marx’s ‘reproduction schema’ between Rosa Luxemburg and Mikhail Tugan-Baranovskii. And this debate does indeed figure prominently in the early chapters of Kowalik’s book (pp. 25–56).
But for this reviewer at least, Toporowski’s situating of Rosa Luxemburg: Theory of Accumulation and Imperialism, though suggestive, leaves a lot of questions unanswered. For as both a reader and writer of books, I simply take it as axiomatic that understanding why a book is written at a particular moment – how it came to appear then and there as it were – is absolutely essential to its full appreciation. After all, Kowalik wrote this book nearly 60 years after the publication of the original German edition of Accumulation of Capital. And though it is true that a Polish edition appeared only in 1963 (a full 12 years after the English translation, for example), it is clear, from the book’s endnotes alone, that Kowalik could read German. So he certainly did not need the Polish edition in order to write this analysis of Luxemburg’s famous work (although I suppose it may have provided an additional stimulus to his doing so).
So why did Kowalik publish this book in 1971? And, even more importantly, what were the connections, if any, between those 1960s ‘discussions’ with Kalecki and Kowalik’s subsequent expulsion from the party?
There are two possible clues in the text. The first is that, according to Kowalik,
Rosa Luxemburg was the only economist … who recognized the universal, common, supra-capitalist character and significance of … [Marx’s reproduction schema] … before the First World War and … that these schemes would also be applicable to the socialist economy. She developed this idea repeatedly and in detail. (p. 90)
It is true that, on Kowalik’s own account, Luxemburg’s understanding of how Marx’s reproduction schemas would apply under socialism, can be seen, with hindsight, to be distinctly over-optimistic. (She thought, for example, that since, under socialism, there would be no need for technical progress in the capital goods sector to be constrained by profitability considerations it would occur much more easily and quickly, and – unlike under capitalism – with a primary regard to the improvement of mass consumption – pp. 92–93.)
However, if we connect this aspect of Luxemburg’s analysis to a second – her insight into the problems posed for the expanded reproduction of the capitalist system deriving from the problem of expectations – then we may get a glimpse of what those explosive 1960s ‘discussions’ were about. For according to Kowalik at least, Luxemburg did grasp – however imperfectly and fleetingly – that capitalists cannot know, when they make their investment decisions, that future demand for their output (whether of the capital goods sector or of the consumption goods sector) will be sufficient to absorb additional output profitably (pp. 45–51). In other words, she was a pioneer analyst of the twin problems of expectations and effective demand that formed the revolutionary core of both Keynes’ and Kalecki’s analysis of capitalism.
According to Kowalik then, Rosa Luxemburg grasped that expanded reproduction of its production and consumption system in a stable and ‘sector proportionate’ way was a profound, multi-dimensional and endemic problem for capitalism.
However, and contrary to her expectations, it was to prove an even more endemic problem for socialism, albeit for very different reasons. For while, under capitalism, investment decisions are profoundly affected by capitalists’ expectations of a necessarily uncertain future, under socialism (or at least under ‘actually existing socialism’ as it was practised in the Union of Soviet Socialist Republic (USSR) and Eastern Europe – including Poland) they depended on (a) the ‘the planners’ making correct technical projections of the amounts and types of capital goods required to produce a desired quantum of ‘future’ consumption and capital goods, and also (b) on their identifying a future ‘basket’ of consumer goods output that does, in fact (and not merely theoretically), improve levels of mass consumption quantitatively and qualitatively.
But as is now extremely well known, in the complete absence of market-based price signals, it proved effectively impossible for the planners under socialism to do either of these things effectively. The net result was that, on the one hand, expanded reproduction under socialism involved the massively ‘disproportionate’ growth of the capital goods sector, while growth of consumer goods output was both insufficient in quantity and poor in quality. In Marx’s terms ‘expanded socialist reproduction’ involved far too much of society’s raw materials, energy and labour being spent on the production of capital goods (so-called ‘Department I’ industries) while a significant part of those capital goods made no contribution to increasing the size or quality of the consumption goods output (the so-called ‘Department II’ industries). Moreover, and for a variety of related reasons, technical progress in both capital and consumption goods industries under socialism tended to be notably slower and inferior to that under capitalism.
Now the reproduction problems of actually existing socialism do not get a single explicit mention in Kowalik’s Rosa Luxemburg – not a word. But then they hardly could. This is Poland in 1971. Nevertheless the difficulties of investment-driven expansion of any industrial system under conditions of uncertainty get plenty of attention, (although, for the most part, these are identified as problems of capitalism rather than socialism), and Luxemburg is consistently hailed for her unprecedented insight into these problems – insights far richer (Kowalik suggests) than possessed by other Marxists of her time except – perhaps and predictably – Lenin (pp. 143–158).
And yet Kowalik’s arguments for her originality are hardly decisive. The textual evidence he adduces (from Accumulation of Capital and from a related text, Anti-Critique) for her grasp on the problem of investor expectations is sketchy and ambiguous at best (pp. 45–51). Moreover, although Luxemburg did see the importance of the reproduction schema for socialism as well as capitalism, it turned out, as already noted, that their ‘importance’ for her was simply that socialism would be able to carry out the tasks they necessitated infinitely better than capitalism!
In fact, the only thing which emerges clearly from Kowalik’s lengthy discussion of Luxemburg’s use of reproduction schema (pp. 57–77) is that, if she was possessed, in 1913, of some of the Kaleckian insights with which he credits her, they constituted an entirely marginal and ancillary aspect of her central concerns at that time. And those concerns were, as any reader of Accumulation of Capital knows, the supposed need for turn-of-the-century capitalism to conquer and subordinate forms of so-called ‘natural economy’ for its expanded reproduction to continue – its need for imperialism in a word.
In addition, in his Preface, Jan Toporowski claims that ‘Kowalik challenged the under-consumptionist interpretation of Luxemburg’s theory and identified himself with Kalecki’s interpretation that under-investment is the key problem of modern capitalism’ (p. xi). But Kowalik’s book gives no direct attention to the under-consumptionist thesis at all,Footnote 1 and the nearest it comes to refuting it is to say that Luxemburg’s view that the mass of capital goods tends to expand faster than the mass of consumption goods does not entail (and she explicitly says that it does not entail) that per capita consumption of the latter need fall (pp. 106–108). And indeed that is so. But it does not entail that it need rise either. Everything depends on the rate of expansion of the labour force relative to the rate of expansion of the mass of consumption goods.
In short then, the elliptical and tentative tone of this book, the less than resounding textual evidence or persuasive argument for, some of its central claims, and the absolute conventionality of others (Kowalik’s whole analysis, in his closing chapters, of Luxemburg’s account of imperialism and the relation of her ideas to those of Hilferding, Bukharin, Lenin and Hobson is more or less orthodox and certainly unsurprising) suggest to this reviewer that the tacit point and purpose of this book is rather different from its overt aims. This is a book written in and for a particular moment in the history of Communist Poland, and in coded address to a quite specific and restricted audience of ‘heterodox’ or ‘sceptical’ socialists and communists. As such it is interesting, but as an elucidatory text on Rosa Luxemburg’s political economy, its merit is much more doubtful. And certainly one wonders what purpose is served, in 2015, by its publication in English.
