ABSTRACT
As Lenin said, disproportion between productive power and consuming power is only one, if a very important one, of the many-sided contradictions of capitalist development; and to a considerable extent accumulation can (and does) take on the basis of an expanding ‘internal market’. It is interesting to note that the standpoint of Rosa Luxemburg bears a striking analogy with that of the Russian Narodniks whom Lenin had criticised nearly fifteen years earlier in the first chapter of his Development of Capitalism in Russia. Thus, the growth of an internal market for capitalism is to a certain extent “independent” of the growth of personal consumption, being accomplished rather at the expense of productive consumption’ (i.e. investment in constant capital). Thus ‘colonies’ are not incidental adjuncts of capitalism, but essential to its very being; and predatory expansion, battening on petty commodity production and eventually destroying it, is part of capitalism’s very nature.
