ABSTRACT
The third controversy about capitalist accumulation takes place in an
historical setting quite different from that of the two earlier ones. The
time now is the period from the beginning of the eighties to the
middle of the nineties, the scene Russia. In Western Europe, capitalism
had already attained maturity. The rose-coloured classical view of
Smith and Ricardo in a budding bourgeois economy had long since
vanished . . . the self-interested optimism of the vulgarian Manchester
doctrine of harmony had been silenced by the devastating impact of
the world collapse in the seventies, and under the heavy blows of a
violent class struggle that blazed up in all capitalist countries after the
sixties. Even that harmony patched up with social reformism which
had its hey-day after the early eighties, especially in Germany, soon
ended in a hangover. The trial of twelve years’ special legislation
against the Social Democratic Party had brought about bitter disil-
lusionment, and ultimately destroyed all the veils of harmony, reveal-
ing the cruel capitalist contradictions in their naked reality. Since then,
optimism had only been possible in the camp of the rising working
class and its theorists. This was admittedly not optimism about a nat-
ural, or artificially established equilibrium of capitalist economy, or
about the eternal duration of capitalism, but rather the conviction that
capitalism, by mightily furthering the development of the productive
forces, and in virtue of its inherent contradictions, would provide an
excellent soil for the historical progress of society towards new eco-
nomic and social forms. The negative, depressing tendency of the first
stage of capitalism, at the time realised by Sismondi alone and still
observed by Rodbertus as late as the forties and fifties, is compensated
by a tendency towards elation: the hopeful and victorious striving of
the workers for ascendancy in their trade-union movement and by
political action.
