The Realisation Problem: A Reappraisal of the Kalecki and Luxemburg Discussion on the Schemes of Reproduction

Noemi Levy-Orlik
Additional contact information
Noemi Levy-Orlik: Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México

Chapter 2 in The Legacy of Rosa Luxemburg, Oskar Lange and Michał Kalecki, 2014, pp 19-35 from Palgrave Macmillan

Abstract: Abstract Rosa Luxemburg and Michał Kalecki are two outstanding economists from the first half of the 20th century (although Kalecki published until the end of 1960s) that had several factors in common. First, they shared similar backgrounds; both were Polish-Jewish academics not widely recognised in their countries nor in their schools of thought. Second, they were knowledgeable on Marx’s writings which, following the critical tradition, they used to understand and transform the capitalist economic system. Kalecki’s particular idea is a development of the effective demand theory that, unlike Keynes’s, was based on imperfect competition and non-neoclassical theories of value and price. It employed these in order to highlight that direct cost adjustments (wages and raw materials) and mark-up (capitalist returns) remain relatively constant to price changes; wages are the accommodative variable. Meanwhile Luxemburg introduced the concept of imperialism as a means of showing the unequal relations between countries in which imperialist countries export capital to colonial countries as a way of realising their surplus, provoking social rebellions that can limit the capital reproduction of the entire capitalist system.1

Keywords: Budget Deficit; Capitalist Economy; Capitalist System; Capitalist Spending; Effective Demand (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2014
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations:

There are no downloads for this item, see the EconPapers FAQ for hints about obtaining it.

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:pal:pshchp:978-1-137-33560-9_3

Ordering information: This item can be ordered from
http://www.palgrave.com/9781137335609

DOI: 10.1057/9781137335609_3

Access Statistics for this chapter

More chapters in Palgrave Studies in the History of Economic Thought from Palgrave Macmillan
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Sonal Shukla () and Springer Nature Abstracting and Indexing ().