In the Imperialist Era, the foreign loan played an outstanding part as a means for young capitalist countries to acquire independence.
Interpretation
Foreign loans helped young capitalist countries gain independence during the Imperialist Era.
Rosa Luxemburg's quote highlights the role of foreign loans during the Imperialist Era as crucial instruments for young and emerging capitalist nations seeking to assert their independence. These financial resources often acted as double-edged swords, facilitating development while also entangling countries in foreign influences and dependencies.
In practice
In a lecture about economic history, one could use this quote to illustrate the impact of foreign investment.
Our scribblings are usually not lyrics but whirrings, without colour or resonance, like the tone of an engine-wheel. I believe that the cause lies in the fact that when people write, they forget for the most part to dig deeply into themselves and to feel the whole import and truth of what they are writing.
The working classes in every country only learn to fight in the course of their struggles...Social democracy...is only the advance guard of the proletariat, a small piece of the total working masses; blood from their blood, and flesh from their flesh. Social democracy seeks and finds the ways, and particular slogans, of the workers' struggle only in the course of the development of this struggle, and gains directions for the way forward through this struggle alone.
Freedom for supporters of the government only, for members of one party only no matter how big its membership may be is no freedom at all. Freedom is always freedom for the man who thinks differently.
Social democracy seeks and finds the ways, and particular slogans, of the workers' struggle only in the course of the development of this struggle, and gains directions for the way forward through this struggle alone.
The existing legal constitution is nothing but the product of a revolution. Revolution is the act of political creation in the history of classes, while constitutional legislation is the expression of the continual political vegetation of a society.
Freedom is always and exclusively freedom for the one who thinks differently.
Regulating and taxing marijuana would simultaneously save taxpayers billions of dollars in enforcement and incarceration costs, while providing many billions of dollars in revenue annually.
Unlimited economic growth has the marvelous quality of stilling discontent while maintaining privilege, a fact that has not gone unnoticed among liberal economists.
Governments don't reduce deficits by raising taxes on the people; governments reduce deficits by controlling spending and stimulating new wealth.
The gap between rich and poor is widening dramatically. There's a hangar at the Cairo airport for private jets, billionaires are on the Forbes list, and Egypt's annual per-capita income is two thousand dollars. How can you sustain that?
Globalisation, for me, seems to be not first-order harm, and I find it very hard not to think about the billion people who have been dragged out of poverty as a result.
If you go back to the really long-run questions that interested me, the big question was why, over the centuries, the millennia, has growth been speeding up?
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