"In this work, (The accumulation of capital,1913) Luxemburg sought to investigate the systemic conditions which made capitalist accumulation possible in the first place. Goods obviously had to be sold, to accumulate the profit that capitalists would reinvest to perpetuate the system. But, given the claims by Marx that capitalist production necessarily outstrips demand, she noticed that no incentive existed for capitalists to reinvest. Without reinvestment the system would collapse, so that an outlet for the profitable disposition of excess goods had to exist. That outlet she saw in terms of exports to pre- capitalist territories: in short, imperialism.
Imperialism is subsequently neither a mere aberration of an otherwise healthy system, as reformers wished to believe, nor “the highest stage of capitalism” (Lenin). Luxemburg saw it as intrinsically connected with capitalism from the beginning. And yet, since the flow of capitalist goods into pre-capitalist areas would eventually transform them into industrial ones, it was also obvious to her that capitalism must create its own historical limit beyond which looms the spectre of “breakdown.” As for the interim, it will become marked by increasingly ferocious competition between advanced states for those steadily diminishing pre-capitalist territories. Militarism and nationalism will therefore grow in conjunction with the imperialism that capitalism engenders."
https://jwa.org/encyclopedia/article/luxemburg-rosa
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