Production to an ever greater extent for production's sake is, from the capitalist point of view, absurd because in this way it is impossible for the entire capitalist class to realise a profit and therefore to accumulate.48
Bukharin's reply, in essence, amounted to pointing out that it was precisely such apparently absurd accumulation for the sake of accumulation that characterised capitalism for Marx.49 Capitalism did not need a goal outside itself. It could be added that it is precisely this which epitomises the extreme alienation of human activity in the system: it is driven forward not by the satisfaction of human need, not even by the human need of the capitalist, but by its own dynamic.
Bukharin did not deny that discrepancies arise in the course of capitalist development between production and consumption. He insisted in his comments on Luxemburg that they are inevitablebut it is precisely the capitalist crisis that overcomes them. Over-accumulation and overproduction occur, but not all the time. They arise in the course of the crisis and are liquidated by its further development. And Bukharin quoted Marx: "There is no permanent crisis" .5° For him imperialism was not to be explained by the problems of overproduction, but by the way in which it aids the capitalist pursuit of higher profits.
Bukharin's argument against Luxemburg cannot be faulted. But he and Lenin do leave something unexplained: why the export of capital during the high tide of imperialist expansion was able to lead capitalism out of the Great Depression. For all its problems, Rosa Luxemburg's theory did attempt to find a link between imperialism and the temporary mitigation of crisis, which Lenin and Bukharin failed to.
Writing in the 1 920s, Henryk Grossman, critical both of Rosa Luxemburg and her detractors,51 did point to a way of making the link. The flow of capital from existing centres of accumulation to new ones overseas could ease the pressure leading to a rising organic composition of capital and a falling rate of profit, even if such a solution would "only have a short time effect" .51
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