Beyond Capital: Marx’s Political Economy of the Working Class

247 Pages·2003·0.705 MB·English

by  Michael A. Lebowitz (auth.)

Beyond Capital
Marx’s Political Economy of the
Working Class
Second Edition
Michael A. Lebowitz
Beyond Capital

Beyond Capital
Marx’s Political Economy of the
Working Class
Second Edition
Michael A. Lebowitz
Professor Emeritus of Economics,
Simon Fraser University, Canada
© Michael A.Lebowitz 1992,2003
Softcover reprint of the hardcover 1st edition 2003 978-0-333-96429-3
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First edition published by Macmillan 1992
Second edition published 2003 by
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Contents
List of Figures vi
Preface to the Second Edition vii
Preface to the First Edition xii
Acknowledgements xv
1 Why Marx? A Story of Capital 1
2 Why Beyond Capital? 16
3 The Missing Book on Wage-Labour 27
4 The One-Sidedness of Capital 51
5 The Political Economy of Wage-Labour 77
6 Wages 101
7 One-Sided Marxism 120
8 The One-Sidedness of Wage-Labour 139
9 Beyond Capital? 161
10 From Political Economy to Class Struggle 178
11 From Capital to the Collective Worker 197
Notes 211
Bibliography 222
Name Index 229
Subject Index 230
v
List of Figures
3.1 The degree of immiseration 43
4.1 The construction of capital as a totality 61
4.2 The circuit of capital as a whole 61
4.3 The circuit of capital and wage-labour 65
4.4 Capitalism as a whole as a totality 76
5.1 Capitalism as a whole 78, 141
8.1 Capitalism as a whole (II) 143
11.1 The worker in capitalism 207
11.2 The contradiction of capitalism 208
vi
Preface to the Second Edition
A reviewer of the first edition of this book wrote that it might be the
worst possible time to publish a book about Marx. And it was.
Capitalism was triumphant (with little apparent opposition) and its
putative alternative, ‘Actually Existing Socialism’ (AES), appeared to
have ended in a miserable fit of the blues.
For those on the Right, that combination was sufficient to prove the
error of Marxism. Many wondered – how could you still talk about Marx?
Are you still teaching Marxist economics? (Of course, in one of those
ironies that Marx would have appreciated, it was possible to find conser-
vatives of various hues quoting scriptures and declaring that capitalism’s
successes and the failures of AES confirmed that Marx was right.) Some on
the Left concluded, simply, that capitalist relations of production do not
yetfetter the development of productive forces. What can you do against
History? And so it was that, rather than socialism, for some the only
feasible alternative to barbarism became barbarism with a human face.
Others on the Left responded to the absence of the ‘revolt of the working
class’ that Marx projected by concluding that Marx had it all wrong – that
his privileging of workers as the subjects of social change constituted the
sins of class reductionism and essentialism. For these ‘post-Marxists’, the
multiplicity of modern democratic struggles counts as a critique of
Marx’s theory; in place of an analysis centred upon capitalist relations of
production, they offer the heterogeneity of political and social relations,
the equality and autonomy of all struggles, and the market-place of
competing discourses.
Beyond Capital should be understood as a challenge to this retreat
from Marx. It argues that the only way that they can separate struggles
such as those over health and living conditions, air and water quality,
women’s rights, government social programmes, the costs and condi-
tions of higher education, and democratic struggles in general from
workers is by beginning with the theoretical reduction of workers to
one-sided opposites of capital. Only by limiting the needs of workers to
wages, hours and conditions of work can the ‘post-Marxists’ theoreti-
cally posit new social movements as the basis for a critique of class
analysis; rather than considering the worker as a socially developed
human being within modern capitalist society, they utilize the narrow
stereotype of the Abstract Proletarian.
vii
viii Preface to the Second Edition
Yet, the ‘post-Marxists’ did not invent that stereotype. BeyondCapital
argues that the concept of the Abstract Proletarian is the product of a
one-sided Marxism that has distorted Marx’s own conception of workers
as subjects. It situates the roots of this one-sided Marxism in the failure
to recognize that Marx’s Capital was never intended as the complete
analysis of capitalism but, rather, as an explanation and demystification
for workers of the nature of capital.
For one-sided Marxists, Capital explains why capitalism will come to
an end. Inexorable forces make history. It is a world of things and inhu-
man forces, of one-sided subjects (if, indeed, there are any subjects) –
rather than living, struggling beings attempting to shape their lives.
And, in this world, the Abstract Proletariat finally rises to its appointed
task and unlocks the productive forces that have outgrown their capital-
ist shell. If the facts do not appear to support Capital, so much the worse
for the facts. As Marx commented about disciples (see Chapter 2), the
disintegration of a theory begins when the point of departure is ‘no
longer reality, but the new theoretical form in which the master had
sublimated it’.
But this is not the only aspect of the disintegration of Marxist theory.
Both in theory and practice, Marxism has attempted to free itself from
the constraints imposed by the one-sidedness inherent in the exegesis of
the sacred text – and it has done so through eclecticism. In practice, it
has attempted to extend beyond narrow economistic appeals to its
Abstract Proletariat; and, in theory, it engages in methodological eclecti-
cism to modify the doctrine underlying practice. Both in theory and
practice, ‘modernization’ becomes the rallying-cry and the latest fad.
Nothing, of course, is easier than eclecticism.
Yet, the freedom attained through such sophistication is neither
absolute nor without a price. For, the text remains, unsullied by its eclec-
tic accretions; and the one-sided reading it permits provides a standing
rebuke and never lacks for potential bearers of its position. Thus, not
freedom but a vulnerability to fundamentalist criticism; and, not new
directions but swings, more or less violent, between the poles of the real
subject and the reified text. There is, in short, fertile ground for an end-
less dispute between fundamentalism and faddism.
Nor is it self-evident what precisely is saved by eclecticism – whether
Marxism as a theory ‘sufficient unto itself’ survives the addition of alien
elements, whether the new combinations may still be called Marxism. It
has been the basic insight of fundamentalists that eclectic and syncretic
combinations threaten the very core of Marxism as an integral concep-
tion. In short, neither the purveyors of the Abstract Proletariat of Capital
Preface to the Second Edition ix
nor the eclectic dissidents traverse the gap between the pure theory of
Capital and the reality of capitalism. Both are forms of one-sided
Marxism, different aspects of the disintegration of Marxist theory. They
are the result, on the one hand, of the failure of Marx to complete his
epistemological project in Capital and, on the other hand, of the dis-
placement of the understanding of Marx’s method by the exegesis of
sacred texts.
BeyondCapitalshould be understood as a call for the continuation of
Marx’s project. By stressing the centrality of Marx’s method and using it
to explore the subject matter of Marx’s unfinished work – in particular,
his projected book on Wage-Labour, it focuses on the missing side in
Capital – the side of workers. Beyond Capital restores human beings
(and class struggle) to the hub of Marxian analysis by tracing out the
implications of that missing book. It challenges not only the economic
determinism and reductionism of one-sided Marxism but also the
accommodations of the ‘post-Marxists’. Marx’s conception of the politi-
cal economy of the working class comes to the fore; next to its focus
upon the collective producer (which contains implicit within it the
vision of an alternative society), the ‘post-Marxist’ view of human
beings as consumers (with, of course, heterogeneous needs) stands
revealed as so many empty abstractions.
This is not at all an argument, however, that class struggle is absent
fromCapitalor that references to class struggle by workers are missing.
But, Capital is essentially about capital – its goals and its struggles to
achieve those goals. Its theme is not workers (except insofar as capital
does something to workers), not workers’ goals (except to mention that
they differ from those of capital) and not workers’ class struggle (except
insofar as workers react against capital’s offensives). Even where Marx
made sporadic comments in Capital about workers as subjects, those
comments hang in mid-air without anything comparable to the system-
atic logical development he provides for the side of capital. The result,
I argue, is that some quite significant aspects of capitalism are missing
and not developed in Capital and, indeed, that there are problematic
aspects of the latter. Those who think that ‘it’s all in Capital’ should
explain the continuing reproduction of a one-sided Marxism.
In the Preface to the first edition, I noted that this book took a long
time to come together and that it was still in the process of develop-
ment. This edition, written eleven years later, demonstrates this point
well. In fact, in preparing this edition, I came to look upon the first edi-
tion as a first draft. Every chapter from the original edition was changed.
Some alterations were relatively minor and merely updated and