Criticizing Red Rosa’s Economic Crisis Theory in a Manner in Which she Would Have Appreciated

While the centrist and right-wing of the German Social Democratic Party was busy enshrining Marx, treating his work like a holy book, Rosa Luxemburg challenged Marx directly in her book, Accumulation of Capital. In this short tribute to her life, political economist Michael Roberts situated her economic writing relative to other Marxian theorists like Rudolf Hilferding and Henryk Grossman. Roberts’ claim for where Rosa went wrong in her crisis theory was in moving away from the tendency of the rate of profit to fall.