Social Sciences in China (Chinese Edition)

No.3, 2019

 

The Methodological Significance of the Dialectic of the Self-Negation of Capital—Based on Questions in Rosa Luxemburg’s The Accumulation of Capital

(Abstract)

 

He Ping

 

As heir to the tradition of Marxist historical dialectics and the Marxist theory of the crisis of capitalism, Rosa Luxemburg created the dialectics of capital’s selfnegation after exploring the character of capital accumulation in the age of imperialism and its relationship to the global crisis of capitalism. The dialectics of capital’s selfnegation was a form of historical dialectics that developed in response to the new issues confronting the age of imperialism at the turn of the 20th century. They reveal the roots and the internal mechanism of the crisis of capitalism at the level of capital accumulation. This has great methodological significance for our recognition and analysis of world-historical trends since the global financial crisis of 2007-2008 and calls for us to create a dialectic of capital’s self-negation for the 21st century that links up with changes in world history since the crisis. The new historical dialectic revolves around capital accumulation, exploring the struggles between monopoly and trust-busting, hegemony and anti-hegemony, and globalization and anti-globalization to construct a theoretical framework for discerning the unpredictable nature and diversity of world-historical development. The Chinese path affords a classic experiential prototype for the construction of the new dialectic.