Download Raqs Media Collective’s The Capital of Accumulation at →. This viewing copy places the two screens of the video in one, in order to be played on a laptop and listened to on headphones.
Karl Marx, Capital: A Critique of Political Economy, Vol. I (1867) (Moscow: Progress Publishers), Ch. 26. For online edition, see →.
“Capitalism needs non-capitalist social strata as a market for its surplus value, as a source of supply for its means of production and as a reservoir of labor power for its wage system … Capitalism must therefore always and everywhere fight a battle of annihilation against every historical form of natural economy that it encounters.” Rosa Luxemburg, The Accumulation of Capital, trans. Agnes Schwarzchild (New York: Routledge, 2003), 348–349.
Ibid., 447.
Rosa Luxemburg, The Accumulation of Capital. (An Abridged Version) (Delhi: Kamunist Kranti, 1990). Kamunist Kranti (KK) was a left-wing worker-student group located in Faridabad (an industrial suburb of Delhi). KK included Jeebesh Bagchi amongst its members, who two years later, in 1992, together with Monica Narula and Shuddhabrata Sengupta, formed the Raqs Media Collective.
“Prologue” in The Capital of Accumulation.
Ibid.
For a concise narrative of the case, see Emily Witt, “The Mystery of Rosa Luxemburg’s Corpse,” March 1, 2011, The Observer, →.
As Hannah Arendt put it: “Since this early crime had been aided and abetted by the government, it initiated the death dance in postwar Germany … Thus Rosa Luxemburg’s death became the watershed between two eras in Germany.” Hannah Arendt, Men in Dark Times (New York: Harvest Books, 1993), 36.
Ibid.
I borrow the idea from journalist Emily Witt: “The most romanticized Marxists, though, are the ones that got away, the locations of their bodies not verified for decades: Che Guevara, who was shot in the jungles of Bolivia; Patrice Lumumba, who was shot in the jungles of the Congo; Salvador Allende, who was shot (or shot himself) in the Chilean presidential palace and dumped in an unmarked grave in Valparaíso for the length of Augusto Pinochet’s dictatorship. And finally there is one whose corpse remains officially missing: Rosa Luxemburg, who was also shot, in a car in Berlin, and dumped in a canal.” Witt, “The Mystery of Rosa Luxemburg’s Corpse”
From “Antagonism” in The Capital of Accumulation.
Rosa Luxemburg, “Order Prevails in Berlin,” January 1919. See → .
Arendt, Men in Dark Times, 40.
O. R. Walkey, “The Sidereal Center: Considerations Tending to Indicate that Canopus Occupies this Position,” Scientific American Supplement, 2111 (June, 17 1916): 386.
Rosa Luxemburg: Reflections and Writings, ed. Paul Le Blanc (Amherst, NY: Humanity Books, 1999), 216.
Immanuel Kant, Critique of Practical Reason and Other Works on the Theory of Ethics, trans. Thomas Kingsmill Abbott, (New York: Barnes and Noble, 2004), 260.
There is a facsimile of them: Rosa Luxemburg/Ròza Luksemburg, Herbarium/Zielnik (Warsaw: Fundacja im. Rozy Luksemburg, 2009). The book reproduces the whole of the document but adds a mocked-up frame to the pages that alters the simplicity of the notebook to suggest the idea of a collection of independent images.
Instigated by the implications of the work of the Raqs Media Collective on Rosa Luxemburg, I unsuccessfully tried to borrow the herbarium for Manifesta 9 in Genk in 2012. Reasons of conservation made this project impossible. This text is, however, inspired by the smell of those fragile plants I had the privilege of browsing through in Warsaw.
Victor Serge, Memoirs of a Revolutionary, trans. Peter Sedgwick (Iowa City: University of Iowa Press, 2002), 375.
Rosa Luxemburg, Letters from Prison, trans. Eden and Cedar Paul (Berlin: Publishing House of the Young International, 1923), 11.
Rosa Luxemburg, The Essential Rosa Luxemburg: Reform or Revolution and The Mass Strike, ed. Helen Scott (Chicago: Haymarket Books, 2008), 157.
Ibid.
Rosa Luxemburg, The Russian Revolution, 1918. See → .
Luxemburg, Letters from Prison, 48–49.
Luxemburg, The Accumulation of Capital, 338.
Ibid., 398.
Luxemburg, Letters from Prison, 67.
Luxemburg, Letters from Prison, 68–69.
From “The Protagonist” in The Capital of Accumulation.
Rosa Luxemburg, “Order Prevails in Berlin.”