Photograph © Barbara WolffClaudia Horn is a lecturer in political economy at the Department of European and International Studies at King's College London. Her research explores the politics of development, ecological transition, and global inequalities, particularly market-based conservation and nature-based solutions. Her book manuscript, Where Money Grows on Trees. European Carbon Politics in the Brazilian Amazon, under review, examines the impacts of environmental aid on land conflicts. Her book, Rosa Luxemburg’s Herbarium: Radical Ecology and the Global Plantation, published by OR Books, combines the first transcription and translation of Luxemburg’s original annotated botanic notebooks with a discussion of her critical ecology. 

From Luxemburg’s perspective, the environment of capitalist (re)production—its milieu, in her words—is essential but overlooked. She noted that the capitalist mode of production only occupies a fraction of global production. And that the buyers of surplus value had to be “third parties”—non-capitalist. Capital externalizes surplus value into non-capitalist countries through loans and consumer goods. Luxemburg argued that the accumulation of capital depends on the continuous absorption and transition of labor-power and natural resources like minerals from non-capitalist to capitalist societies. While Marx associated these transitions with ‘primitive accumulation’—the birth of capitalism and the demise of feudal society—and not with the mature capitalist system, Luxemburg argued that stable economic models hide the dynamism and the crises of capitalism, which are not merely internal in source and effect. The disruptive and violent accumulation of capital changes conditions, including the ratio between capital and consumption goods, and the relationships between the proletariat and capitalists, and between capitalist and non-capitalist societies.

Luxemburg’s critique is empirically rooted in her analysis of the surge of European colonization projects in the nineteenth century, particularly in Africa, driven by the demand for raw materials and new markets. The unification of Germany and its emergence as a new imperial power heightened tensions that would later escalate into WWI. At the Berlin Conference (1884-85), German Chancellor Otto von Bismarck hosted representatives from fourteen countries, including Great Britain, Portugal, France, Belgium, and Germany, to establish rules for the colonization of the African continent. France and Great Britain fought over control of Egypt and the Suez Canal trading route that was critical for trade with India and East Asia, while Germany and Great Britain had a conflict over access in Cameroon. The conference—without any representation from Africa—regulated free trade and navigation on the Niger and Congo rivers. European countries were reshaping the colonial territories’ environments through the construction of ports, railways, telegraph lines, rubber plantations, etc. that linked them to imperial economies. Calls for the protection of native tribes essentially reinforced ongoing European occupation and rule, which the conference accelerated. The agreements also formalized the ongoing expansion of colonial bureaucracies, including the collection of censuses, the mapping of territories and natural resources, and the conduct of ethnographic and botanic studies for scientific and commercial exploration.

In this context, Luxemburg’s analysis uniquely addresses the interconnectedness and interdependence in international capitalist development. She understood the notion of the capital metabolism as a constant conversion of the remaining peasant economies and handicraft production into capitalist production, both in Europe and on a global scale.

Photograph © Barbara WolffClaudia Horn is a lecturer in political economy at the Department of European and International Studies at King's College London. Her research explores the politics of development, ecological transition, and global inequalities, particularly market-based conservation and nature-based solutions. Her book manuscript, Where Money Grows on Trees. European Carbon Politics in the Brazilian Amazon, under review, examines the impacts of environmental aid on land conflicts. Her book, Rosa Luxemburg’s Herbarium: Radical Ecology and the Global Plantation, published by OR Books, combines the first transcription and translation of Luxemburg’s original annotated botanic notebooks with a discussion of her critical ecology. 

From Luxemburg’s perspective, the environment of capitalist (re)production—its milieu, in her words—is essential but overlooked. She noted that the capitalist mode of production only occupies a fraction of global production. And that the buyers of surplus value had to be “third parties”—non-capitalist. Capital externalizes surplus value into non-capitalist countries through loans and consumer goods. Luxemburg argued that the accumulation of capital depends on the continuous absorption and transition of labor-power and natural resources like minerals from non-capitalist to capitalist societies. While Marx associated these transitions with ‘primitive accumulation’—the birth of capitalism and the demise of feudal society—and not with the mature capitalist system, Luxemburg argued that stable economic models hide the dynamism and the crises of capitalism, which are not merely internal in source and effect. The disruptive and violent accumulation of capital changes conditions, including the ratio between capital and consumption goods, and the relationships between the proletariat and capitalists, and between capitalist and non-capitalist societies.

Luxemburg’s critique is empirically rooted in her analysis of the surge of European colonization projects in the nineteenth century, particularly in Africa, driven by the demand for raw materials and new markets. The unification of Germany and its emergence as a new imperial power heightened tensions that would later escalate into WWI. At the Berlin Conference (1884-85), German Chancellor Otto von Bismarck hosted representatives from fourteen countries, including Great Britain, Portugal, France, Belgium, and Germany, to establish rules for the colonization of the African continent. France and Great Britain fought over control of Egypt and the Suez Canal trading route that was critical for trade with India and East Asia, while Germany and Great Britain had a conflict over access in Cameroon. The conference—without any representation from Africa—regulated free trade and navigation on the Niger and Congo rivers. European countries were reshaping the colonial territories’ environments through the construction of ports, railways, telegraph lines, rubber plantations, etc. that linked them to imperial economies. Calls for the protection of native tribes essentially reinforced ongoing European occupation and rule, which the conference accelerated. The agreements also formalized the ongoing expansion of colonial bureaucracies, including the collection of censuses, the mapping of territories and natural resources, and the conduct of ethnographic and botanic studies for scientific and commercial exploration.

In this context, Luxemburg’s analysis uniquely addresses the interconnectedness and interdependence in international capitalist development. She understood the notion of the capital metabolism as a constant conversion of the remaining peasant economies and handicraft production into capitalist production, both in Europe and on a global scale.