The first is the notion of the reproduction of capital, developed from Marx’s writing by Rosa Luxembourg and others. Luxemburg (2003), like Lenin (1948) and other early 20th-century Marxist thinkers, was attempting to understand the tense and conflicted class composition of her day, notably the struggle against nationalism within socalist and labour movements and the rise of an increasingly monopolistic corporate imperialism predicated on colonialism and imperialist warfare. Drawing on Marx’s crisis theory, which (basically) holds that capitalism is based on fundamental contradictions which can never be resolved, only elevated to a higher level of abstraction and violence, Luxemburg sought to show how the inherent limits of capital manifest themselves in destructive wars (notably the First World War), colonial relations of seemingly non-capitalist exploitation (slavery, unfree labour, etc.) and inter-capitalist rivalry.

Max Haiven, Cultures of Financialization, loc. 115