SOURCE: "Appendix I: Rosa Luxemburg as an Economist," in Rosa Luxemburg, Vol. I, Oxford University Press, London, 1966, pp. 828-41.

Nettl was a German-born English political scientist and novelist. In the following essay, he surveys the main ideas of Luxemburg's The Accumulation of Capital.

Rosa Luxemburg always said that, in so far as her talent lay in the field of the social sciences, it was in economics—and in mathematical economics at that. Mathematics may have been her violon d'Ingres—the thing at which she would rather have excelled than those in which she was in fact outstanding. It is quite a common nostalgia. The only evidence for her mathematical claim or wish are the recalculations of Marx's not very complicated compound reproduction formulae in Volume II of Capital. And here her calculations are capable both of fairly obvious refinement as well as fairly obvious contradiction. But what is...