Around the turn of the 20th century, the belief that the world market was headed for eventual exhaustion was widely accepted among the left wing of the Social Democracy, especially in the German-speaking world. But the refutations of Rosa Luxemburg’s “Accumulation of Capital” and her “Anti-Critique,” based on Marx’s Volume II models of capitalist reproduction, pretty much discredited the idea that the world market could ever face a situation of permanent exhaustion.
The Historical Limits of Capital: From Stagflation to Artificial Intelligence
Recent media speculation has focused on whether 79-year-old President Donald Trump is experiencing cognitive decline, echoing similar coverage of his predecessor, Joseph Biden.
They’re the oldest men to have held the office. As people age, they become more vulnerable to the group of brain changes we call dementia. I’m not qualified to assess anyone’s health; what matters here is what these stories signal politically — confusion, factionalism, and instability at the top of the state.
At times, it seems that Trump has no coherent foreign policy. There are stories he’s pressuring Euromaidan Ukraine to settle the war with Russia on Russian terms. Then it seems that settlement talks go nowhere.
Otto Bauer’s Critique of Rosa Luxemburg’s ‘Accumulation of Capital’
Of all the Social Democrats who criticized Rosa Luxemburg’s “Accumulation of Capital,” the most important contribution was Otto Bauer’s. Bauer was a leader of the Austrian Social Democratic Party and became the party’s top leader in 1918.
The Struggle Against Revisionism in the German Social Democracy
At the time of the death of Engels in August 1895, the German Social Democratic Party (SPD) represented the highest expression of the class-conscious working class organized as a political party achieved up to that time. Not only did the SPD enjoy the support of a large and growing sector of the German working class, it was a party avowedly based on Marxist ideas. As a result, it was the leading party of the Socialist International, also known as the Second International.
Breakdown Theories
In the preface to his “Contribution to a Critique of Political Economy,” the only major economic work of his mature period other than Volume I of “Capital” that Marx published during his lifetime, Marx explained that the underlying cause of the replacement of one mode of production by another is to be found in the changes in the forces of production.
Gold, Overproduction, and the Emerging Monetary Crisis
On November 8, Senate Democrats made a deal with Republicans to end the government shutdown. The deal was attacked by many podcasters allied with the Democratic Party’s progressive wing.
Led by President Trump, Republicans threatened to cut or end funding for the SNAP (food stamps) program. In 2024, some 41 million people depended on the program.
In the face of court orders, they backed down, but the Supreme Court allowed them to go ahead with the cutoff. Hours before eight Democrats caved to Republican demands and announced they’d vote to end the government shutdown on Republican-Trump terms.
The Long Cycle — Summary and Conclusions
In the preceding chapters, we examined whether the capitalist economy experiences cycles considerably longer than the industrial cycles of approximately ten years. As we saw, it has been proposed by various economists — both bourgeois and Marxists — over the last 100 years that, in addition to the 10-year industrial cycles and shorter inventory cycles, there also exists a long cycle of approximately 50 years’ duration.
The ‘Great Moderation’ and Financialization
The “Great Moderation” brought with it only moderate economic growth. However, it was accompanied by a credit inflation that was anything but moderate. With the unprecedented growth of the credit system came a considerable increase in the role of interest-seeking loan capital.
Palestine
On October 9, a new ceasefire in Gaza was announced. The last one took effect in January 2025 as Donald Trump assumed office. Many hoped this was the end of the Gaza genocide.
In March, the genocide resumed as Trump and Zionist entity leaders made clear their aims included the complete removal of the Palestinian population from Gaza. Kept open was whether this process was through ethnic cleansing or physical annihilation (literal genocide).
Physical annihilation was achieved by killing through mass bombing, cutting off food and water, causing manufactured famine, and disease.
The Reagan Reaction and the Coming of the ‘Great Moderation’
After World War II, the Keynesian reformers took unjustified credit for the postwar economic upswing. During the reactionary 1980s, it was the turn of the extreme right-wing governments that had come to power in Britain in 1979 and the United States in 1981 to take unjustified credit for the end of the protracted economic crisis of 1968-1982.
A Critique of Crisis Theory 