  To illustrate the latter, her analysis combined economic and political arguments and focused on the structure of globalization and the role of nation-states in a financialized economic system. The conclusions reached however were opposite to those of Bernstein. While Bernstein had interpreted the development of the credit and debit system as stabilising mechanisms within a capitalist order, for Luxemburg the concentration of economic power by monopoly holders, corporations, banks and other financial institutions were symptoms of vulnerability rather than an asset. In response to Bernstein’s remarks on the role of credit in avoiding capitalist collapse, she emphasized that financial capitalism and the availability of loans aggravates crisis rather than providing a solution to it. Credit, Luxemburg argued, encourages speculation and widens the gap between what might be called the real and the fictitious economy. Indeed, while credit initially stimulates the development of productive forces, it can also lead to errors of calculation and overproduction, therefore ceasing to be helpful in the exchange process at the first symptom of stagnation. Likewise, cartels and trusts, and the other regulatory mechanisms designed to increase coordination among the holders of capital can only succeed by eliminating internal competition in isolated industries, something that cannot be extended to all sectors of production. Moreover, cartels succeed at increasing the rate of profit in internal markets only in virtue of expansion outwards, by selling abroad the products that cannot be absorbed by domestic demand. In other words, Luxemburg explained, these companies are only able to sell abroad, at lower rates of profit, the product that cannot be absorbed by domestic markets. The other face of apparent market stability in Europe is sharpened competition abroad and anarchy on the world market – the opposite of what cartels intended to achieve. When the global market begins to shrink because it has been exhausted by competition between capitalist countries, the capital that has been socialised through organisation reverts to private capital and employers organisations “burst like soap bubbles and give way to free competition in aggravated form” (Luxemburg 1900 [RLR: 137]). 