“The schemes of reproduction of Marx are a remarkable attempt at posing a new problem for investigation. They sustain the political economy of economists such as Kalecki, whom Kowalik (1990) argues is the main continuity from Marx and Luxemburg. They have even influenced ‘mainstream’ economics. But they do not help much, at least in Marx’s own formulation, in addressing a fundamental problem, the possibility of realizing surplus value within a fully capitalist system. Nor do they suggest that Marx was incorporating within his last theoretical work the issue of penetration of capitalism into non-capitalist modes of production. White (1996), whom we have already discussed, considers Marx’s problem in drafting Volume 2. He argues that we have the first draft, begun by Marx in 1865, failed ‘to establish any necessary connection between expanded reproduction of capital and the extension of capitalist relations’ – the introduction of time and space as he puts it. Accumulation of capital, for Marx (White, 1996: 196) was to be «a process which would reproduce its presuppositions, the capitalists and workers on an extended scale… To be unable to show that capital created its own presuppositions, that it created Civil Society, was a serious difficulty for Marx’s overall scheme of capitalist development». Marx never came close to resolving this problem. And he could not resolve it as long as he separated theoretical questions regarding accumulation of capital from penetration of non-capitalist forms of production (‘primitive accumulation of capital’ is another matter altogether; see Zarembka , 2002a). Luxemburg on accumulation. Marx’ study of the history of capital’s penetration, including its difficulties, had a successor in Luxemburg’s interest in the question of penetration of non-capitalist forms of production. Luxemburg’s interest is evidenced particularly in her ‘Introduction to Political Economy’, published posthumously (only half of it found after her murder). In fact, her work used many of the same sources Marx had studied. But she also integrated these questions into her own theoretical work. Marx’s ‘Capital’ and Luxemburg’s ‘Introduction to Political Economy’ have distinct beginning points. Marx begins with ‘Commodities’. Luxemburg does not get to that until her sixth chapter, after ‘What is Political Economy?’, ‘Social Labour’, and then three chapters on economic history, including primitive communism, the feudal system, and the medieval city and guilds. In other words, for Luxemburg, the capitalist mode of production arises in a historical context. Luxemburg’s conclusions concerning primitive communism’s longevity are indicative. While the last form of primitive communism – the Russian commune – had survived because of its adaptability, «there is only one contact that it cannot tolerate or overcome; this is the contact with European civilization, i.e. with capitalism… [The contact] accomplishes what centuries and the most savage Oriental conquerors could not…» (Luxemburg, 1925: 103). To determine the comparative power of capital to rip these people from all means of production and to thrust these societies into value-producing ones, we cannot just look at capital. We also have to look at the weakness of the primitive societies, including, as she does, developments in their specific practices of warfare (3). The capitalist mode arising in an historical context indicates that theoretical categories are not only socially conditioned, but socially conditioned ‘within the developing historical setting'” (pag 68-69) [Paul Zarembka, ‘Late Marx and Luxemburg’] [(in) Riccardo Bellofiore a cura, ‘Rosa Luxemburg and the critique of political economy’, New York, 2009] [(3) Marx, judging by a number of his interventions on this issue, seemed the think that primitive communism resisted capital more than Luxemburg argued. Examining this disparity is unnecessary for our purposes]