Luxemburg’s critique of capital accumulation, reapplied in Africa

Rosa Luxemburg’s Accumulation of Capital provided Africa’s first known Marxist account of class, race, gender, society-nature and regional oppressions. She was far ahead of her time in grappling with the theory and practice of capitalist/non-capitalist relations that today not only characterise Western multinational corporate extraction but also that of firms from several contemporary ‘emerging’ economies. This article contends that in her tradition, two recent areas of analysis now stand out, even if they have not yet received sufficient attention by critics of underdevelopment: the expanded understanding of value transfers from Africa based on natural resource depletion; and the ways that collaborations between imperial and subimperial national powers (and power blocs) contribute to Africa’s poverty. Using these two newly-revived areas of enquiry, several aspects of Luxemburg’s Accumulation of Capital stand out for their continuing relevance to the current conjuncture in contemporary Africa: capitalist/non-capitalist relations; natural resource value transfer; capitalist crisis tendencies and displacements; imperialism then and imperialism/subimperialism now; and the need to evolve from protests to solidarities through socialist ideology.