One question remains to complete Rosa Luxemburg's analysis of the accumulation of capital. Assume we not only escape the ‘barbarism’ she so feared, but that somehow we also manage to achieve a true supersession of capitalism. That the Soviet Union is not a true supersession hardly requires argument. As early as 1932, in reviewing Marx's youthful 1844 Paris Manuscripts, Herbert Marcuse characterized the Soviet Union as a system that had only replaced private property with ‘universal’ private property, a crude form of communism that was “merely the simple ‘negation’ of capitalism and as such exists on the same level as capitalism.” In the terminology of the young Marx, Soviet labor is therefore just as ‘alienated’ and ‘estranged’ as capitalist labor; indeed, the Soviet Union is simply another form of capitalism. A more recent blast, along similar lines, came upon the promulgation, with much fanfare, of the Soviet Union's new Constitution on June 4, 1977. China referred to it as a “fig leaf” to cover the betrayal of the proletariat by “a handful of bureaucrat-monopolist capitalists,” a “cabal of revisionist renegades” who have usurped the proletariat and revived capitalism. From the Chinese point of view, the Soviet Union is a “bureaucrat-monopoly” version of the capitalist system where “the rich get richer and the poor poorer and class antagonism gets more pronounced than ever.” A few days later they reminded Brezhnev, who has a vast collection of capitalist cars, of the fate of Louis XVI.

Social reality is tragically misshapen, intractable, and untidy. Social theory is not. It imposes order and clarity by forcing the ‘facts’ of social existence into preconceived ideological boxes – all in the name of objective science. Superficially, it appears that what separates one social theory from another is the way in which the same ‘objective’ facts are arranged and combined. But it is the underlying ideology that determines what a social fact is to begin with and then proceeds to arrange the ones it finds to be theoretically relevant and compatible in a certain order. Different theories, being different constructions of ‘reality’, have different objectives. Some seek to eternalize and thereby justify whatever is, while others seek to depass it to what ought to be. One thing all social theories have in common, however, is that they all, in time, become obsolete as historical events unfold along lines no theory could have possibly anticipated.

In a sense, all social theories specialize in predicting the past and having done so, in accordance with their own ‘scientific’ canons and thus to their own satisfaction, they then turn their theoretical axes 180 degrees into the future, falsifying themselves in the act. Then comes the problem of reconstruction, after the patchwork attempts of the theoretical diehards repeatedly fail. And so the process goes on and on, though by no means smoothly.

It would be boring to the point of pain were we to replicate Marx's simple and expanded capitalist reproduction schemata from Volume II of Capital. Only a general outline will be given, along with the underlying assumptions of Marx's models, many of them implicit.

In Chapter XX of Volume II, Marx used a simple reproduction schema consisting of two Departments. Department I's output was restricted to the production of producers' goods (raw materials and fixed capital), and Department II specialized exclusively in the production of the means of subsistence (consumers' goods). Marx assumed that: (1) ‘normal’ prices prevail, that is, the market prices of goods reflect the amounts of labor value embodied in them, which in turn determine relative prices or rates of exchange embodying equivalent amounts of labor time; (2) real wages and real surplus value are constant on a per capita basis; (3) the stock of capital remains unchanged from one production time period to another, which implies that net investment is zero, meaning that there is no net addition to the existing stock of capital – gross investment in fixed capital is therefore equal to depreciation or the amount of wear and tear of the existing capital stock; and (4) the capital output ratio (c/o), the organic composition of capital (c/v), and the rate of surplus value (s/v) are the same for both Departments.

Man has always dreamed of utopian societies and, in a few instances, all of which failed, has even tried to implement these dreams in experimental societies. Despite Marx's denunciation of utopian socialism, there was nevertheless a utopian strain in his thinking, as demonstrated in his 1844 Paris Manuscripts. Utopianism, however, is not limited to socialist or Marxian schemas. In a real sense, the pure theory of competitive capitalism is the biggest utopian dream of them all.

Modern socialism, moreover, at least in the West, bases its ultimate hope for liberation on the technology pioneered by liberal and advanced capitalist societies. Early Russian anarchists, of course, would have none of this. They were “Believers without God, Heroes without phrases,” ever-prepared to leapfrog the dialectic into utopia. Even among confirmed Marxists there were those who, like Lenin and even Rosa Luxemburg, were at bottom hardheaded pragmatists quite prepared to trim their Marxian sails when the revolutionary potential suddenly and unexpectedly became a reality.

Beginning on a note of fancy, suppose you were born in Europe 100 years ago, in 1877, and subsequently moved in the radical circles of your time. Das Kapital would have been published 10 years earlier and would have sold only 1,000 copies by the time of your birth. Marx and Engels would still be alive. And the 1848 revolutions would still be in peoples' minds, having occurred 29 years earlier. As you grew up, you would no doubt have heard of them, despairingly, from those who had directly experienced and survived the triumph of the bourgeoisie. The slaughter of the 1871 Paris Commune, having taken place only 6 years before your birth, would have been, during your youth, a vivid topic of conversation and recrimination in all radical circles – Marxian and anarchist.

Although you would have been six years old when Marx died, and eighteen at the death of Engels, good old Wilhelm Liebknecht would be around to tell you, at first hand, what Marx and Engels were really like. And floating in the air would be the competing ideas of Proudhon, Blanqui, Fourier, Lassalle – and Bakunin, who would be handing out membership cards freely to imaginary revolutionary societies with the sinister Nechaev lurking in the shadows.

During all this time, capitalism would have been growing by leaps and bounds, simultaneously providing, for the convinced, evidence of the prophetic genius of Marx and grist for the disemboweling revisionism of Eduard Bernstein.

The constant refrain of Marxian and neo-Marxian analysis is that capital accumulation and growth are essential for the survival of capitalism. It was on this issue that the great debate broke out between Rosa Luxemburg and her critics. Growth was seen to be based not only on capital accumulation but also on technological change, which now serves as the major productive force of capitalism. If for any reason growth should not be possible, then capitalism would be faced with a deadly challenge leading ultimately to its destruction – or so it would seem on the basis of Marxian theory.

We should, however, step back and look at an earlier time when mercantilists were convinced that universal growth was an impossibility and acted accordingly. The strife and struggles of that time are relevant for the world of today, which is now entering its own phase of mercantilist power politics.

The earlier mercantilism of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries emerged, out of the economic chaos of feudalism, as the builder of the great nation-states. Its greatest development came in France under Louis XIV (1638–1715) and his brilliant finance minister, Jean-Baptiste Colbert (1619–83). Mercantilists were acute observers of the world they lived in.