  In the manuscript on the Introduction to the Critique of Political Economy based on her lectures at the SPD school and published postuhumously, Luxemburg examined at length primitive communism in societies as diverse as Germanic tribes, the Inca empire, British India, French Algeria, and Russia. She illustrated how collective forms of land ownership had an extraordinary capacity for tenacity and adaptation to changing historical circumstances, showing enduring resilience towards despotism, foreign rule, outside conquest and exploitation. There was only one contact, Luxemburg pointed out, that those societies could not withstand: “the contact with European civilisation, i.e. with capitalism”. This encounter, she wrote, is “deadly, universally and without exception and it accomplishes what centuries of the most savage Oriental conquerors could not: the dissolution of the whole social structure from the inside, tearing apart all traditional bonds and transforming the society in a short period of time into a shapeless pile of rubble” (Luxemburg 1910 [CW: 227]).