  To better explain this point it is important to emphasise that one of the core ideas in Marx’s analysis of accumulation was the explanation of the reproduction of capital with reference to the development of technology, competition among capitalists, and their thirst for maximizing profit. Luxemburg found that this analysis did not do justice to the distinctive structural constraints of capital reproduction. In particular, it did not take account of the necessity to access new markets in order to sell consumption goods that impoverished domestic workers could no longer afford. Without the guarantee of an ever-expanding market, in a depressed economy with low demand for consumption goods there would be no possibility of capital reinvestment and no outlet for accumulated capital stocks. More specifically, under conditions of pauperisation, inequality, and ongoing exploitation of workers by capitalists, the workers would not be able to generate the demand necessary to absorb the commodities produced by capitalists. The capitalists’ own patterns of consumption would not help to solve the problem of underconsumption since the capitalist class is driven by the imperative to accumulate capital and reinvest in order to keep up with the pressures of market competition, production, technological modernisation and so on. Given the tension between “the unlimited expansive capacity of the productive forces” and “the limited expansive capacity of social consumption” highlighted in volume 3 of Capital, Marx’s own analysis could not explain how the consumption necessary to increase profits could give rise to an “enlarged” rather than “simple” reproduction of capital. The decisive fact, Luxemburg argued, is that surplus value “cannot be realised by sale either to workers or to capitalists, but only if it is sold to such social organisations or strata whose own mode of production is not capitalistic”.