Capital & Class

http://cnc.sagepub.com/ Beyond Capital, Marx's Political Economy of the Working Class

Capital & Class 1994 18: 127 DOI: 10.1177/030981689405200106 The online version of this article can be found at: http://cnc.sagepub.com/content/18/1/127

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Book reviews 127

Michael A Lebowitz Beyond Capital, Marxs Political Economy of the Working Class Macmillan, London, 1992 15.99 Reviewed by Massimo De Angelis This is essentially a rigorous, insightful and pleasantly readable book on the theme of class subjectivity, and this should give to any Marxistespecially any Marxist political economist sufficient reason for reading it. Another reason is that one of the main aims of the author is to interpret the struggles of the so-called new social movements of the last decades with a Marxist theoretical framework. Many are the themes and sub-themes explored or hinted at in the book. This is both an expression of the long process needed for its gestation and of the authors dedication to the problems of Marxist theory and of social emancipation. In this review it will not be possible to tackle all the issues dealt with in the book: for this the reader of this review is strongly invited to read the book itself. I will instead follow the thread of the authors argument which better enables me to point out some of what I think are the limitations in the authors use of

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categories and the case presented. In so doing I hope both to provide a summary of the authors argument as well as offering some constructive criticisms. In Chapter 1 the author acknowledges a critical silence in Marxs Capital, a silence identified with the proletariat as subject. It is a silence which permits the appearance that, for the scientist, the only subject (if there is an actual one at all) is capital, growing, transcending all barriers, developinguntil, finally, it runs out of steam and accordingly is replaced by scientists with a more efficient machine (p.11). One sided Marxism, that is that fatalist, determinist, reductionist Marxism has at its point of departure the limits and the limited object of Capital. Thus, to move beyond one-sided Marxism means to move beyond Capital. In which direction? In the direction pointed by what is missing in the final draft of Capital: the book on wage labour. This was the third of the six-book plan indicated in Marxs correspondence in 1858. Marxists have generally explained the absence of this book in terms of Marx changing his mind and incorporating the relevant material in Capital. Instead, Maximilian Rubel, with whom Lebowitz agrees, argues that the list of the six books acquired unforeseen dimensions, and therefore Marxs work must be seen as fragmentary and Marxists take up the task for their development in those directions which Marx was forced to abandon. The rest of the book is an attempt to provide analytical (more than bibliographical) evidence of this argumentation. Thus, the thriller-like question of the missing book on wage labour fades away in the background and becomes more an opportunity for raising the issue of class subjectivity. In chapter 2 Lebowitz, while making a case for a missing book on wage labour, begins to indicate some of the possible contents of such a volume. In so doing he points out that Marx assumed explicitly to treat the level of necessity as given (p.31) in order to determine necessary labour and therefore surplus labour. But this was precisely only an assumption made for the sake of explanation, while in other parts of his work he argues that the very expansion of capitalist production provides the foundation for the growth of workers needs (p.21). Thus, a key element of this missing book on wage labour could have been the abandonment of this assumption so as to show that just as the value of labour-power contains within it a tendency to decline as productivity increases, so also does it contain the aspect of rising necessity, of the production of needs which became second nature (p.34). However this production of needs is the recognition of the working classs own need for development and not merely capitals need for valorisation. After an insightful analysis of needs in capitalism (physiological, necessary and social), Lebowitz concludes that we are in presence of two oughts, between which force decides: after considering wage-labour we have before us not only the goals of capital but also those of wage-labourwhich implies the non-realisation of capitals goals (p.57). This means that we can no longer assume necessary needs, the level of needs customarily satisfied, constantthat working assumption in Capital which was to be removed in the book on wage-labour Rather, the level of necessary needs is itself revealed to be a product, a resultthe result of the class struggle (p.57). Having thus shown the inadequacy of Capital in chapter 3 (its own one-sidedness) which I will briefly discuss below, Lebowitz advocates the development of the side of wage labourthe side absent in Capitalso as to have an adequate basis for considering the struggle of workers to realise their own goals (p.57). Chapter 4 thus proposes a political economy of wage-labour. The methodological starting point for this political

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economy is Lukcss (1972) emphasis on the whole and the attempt to examine the unity and interconnection of elements within the structure of society from the point of view of the totality (p.2). Lebowitz therefore points out that in the young Marx capitalism as a whole is defined by capital and wage-labour understood as antitheses and the struggle between these two inseparable opposites, these elements in a two-sided and contradictory whole, constituted a dynamic relationship, class struggle, driving it inexorably to its resolution (p.60). But in the later Marx, the author continues, the wage-labourer is understood only as a mediator for capital, as the means by which capital grows. She is not, on the other hand, considered as subject (p.60). However, the side of wage-labour is present in Capital latently and the concept of capitalism as a whole as totality is always presentbut its presence has been obscured by a silence, the completion of only Capital (p.61). A political economy of wage labour is manifested in the struggle of the working class against capital as mediator in all the movements of its circuit MLp; P; and C'M'. Furthermore, the political economy of the working class stresses the combination of labour as the source of social productivity and the separation of workers on the condition of their exploitation. It is a political economy whose realisation is a communist society (p.70). Working class struggle contain inherently such a society as Marx stresses in various works. Thus, by explicitly recognising the side of the working class it is also possible to drop the separation posed by one-sided Marxism between the economic and the political and instead it is affirmed their integral relation as it is inherent in Marxs political Economy (p.83). Lebowitz returns on the theme of one-sided Marxism in chapter 5. The impression is that in this chapter the author abandons an earlier caution and now openly blames Marxs concepts in Capital, rather than its post-Marx Marxist interpretations as one-sided. It is clear that Marx himself is to be held responsible for the limits of his work, but not for the ontological onesidedness of his categories. In fact, the categories of Capital are two-sided, and here it would have been useful if the author engaged in discussion with those Marxists who support this point of view (Cleaver 1979). Only the presupposition of this twosidedness allows Marx to explore and to put emphasis on one of the sides so as to reveal the strategies andif you wantthe logic of the enemy vis--vis the working class. But yes, this is not enough. Only the existence of the presupposition of this two-sidedness in Marxs categories used in Capital allow us to regard Marxs work as an unfinished work as Lebowitz following Rubel stressesand to move beyond Marx and beyond Capital. Post-Marx marxists to use a term by Raya Dunayevskayahave understood Marxs approach as all there is to say. Therefore they portray this limited understanding in a purely objective, economic determinist way. By not recognising the other side which is necessarily present in Marxs categories, they have written the history of Marxism as one of pure representation of domination and control, while it is necessarily also one of struggle against that domination and control. Thus, Lebowitz is right: Without the worker pressing in the opposite direction to capital, the tendencies presented in Capital are necessarily one-sided (p.84). However the case is that the worker pressing in the opposite direction to capital is what forms the raison dtre of the tendencies. Lets take for example the tendency of the rate of profit to fallwhich Lebowitz does not deal with. This tendency is expressed in terms of the tendency of the organic composition of capital to rise. But the latter is not the result of a natural technological law (Panzieri 1961) as analytical Marxists would still claim (Roemer 1981; Cohen 1978), rather it is the product of the class antagonism at the point

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of production (Bell and Cleaver 1982). It is the struggle of the working class at the point of production which forces capital to shift from an absolute surplus value to a relative surplus value strategy (Marx 1867: part four), thus undermining historically the basis of its own despotism (that is by increasing its difficulty to extract surplus labour at the social level). Thus, even by assuming that the standard of necessities remains the same, or the value of labour-power decreases when ceteris paribus productivity increasesand here Lebowitz is correct to point out that this is just an assumption in Marxeven if we allow in principle this to be the case, working class subjectivity is still presupposed. Capitals reaction to working class struggle against work at the point of production that is capitals difficulty at the level of one industryis displaced through capitalist society as a whole as capitals difficulty to impose work upon society increases, as expressed by the falling rate of profit tendency. The limit of capitals accumulation is capital itself, that is the capitalist class relation of struggle. The effort of the author to represent the correct method as one of the representation of the totality, encounters a limitation in chapter 6 where he deals with the one-sidedness of wage-labour. Let me first note that the emphasis on the whole, on totality, which defines the dialectical method, is rooted in the fact that the whole is the class relation. But the historical substance of the class relation is capitalist imposition of work. Our attempt to grasp and come to terms with the totalitywhat people refer to as dialectical methodpresupposes capitals attempt to reduce our lifean end in itself process, a multi dimensional activityto the totality of capital. If we want to keep referring to this method then, we must consistently refer to the fact that our aim is the smashing of totality, the smashing of dialectics (Negri 1984) as capitalist ability of coming up with always new syntheses out of our negations of its rule. Our cognitive process of the capitalist realitythe one based on the priority of totalities is obviously consistent with the recognition of our class position, the recognition that our life is been reduced by capital to a qualitative finite totality whose substance is work. But this recognition should not go without the statement that the recognition of our being part of the capitalist whole is only one moment in the struggle to get rid of that same whole. The intention of the author, however, is to point out that even though we have risen above a conception of political economy which considers the worker as just as much an appendage of capital as the lifeless instrument of labour are, the totality developed here still appears to exclude from its field of enquiry anything other than the immediate class struggle between capital and wagelabour. Measured by the real concrete totality, the representation of capitalism as a whole is defective (p.106). Thus, as in the case of necessary labour, Marx assumed in Capital that the individuals considered were only the bearers of a particular class relation, only the personifications of economic categories. There is more to life, Lebowitz seems to say, than the fact of being only part of a class. What is left out is the theoretical silence (and practical irrelevance) with respect to struggles for emancipation, struggles of women against patriarchy in all its manifestations, struggles over the quality of life and cultural identityall these point to a theory not entirely successful (p.106). This is correct: many Marxist interpretations including often Marx himselfhave left at the margin of the theoretical understanding and of the formulation of political projects a large numbers of struggles which did not immediately identify with the traditional blue collar waged working class. The question is, however, how do those struggles which are not contemplated in the standard Marxist discourse of classthat is that

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Marxism which bases its understanding of class on the form represented by the wagelabour rather than on the substance represented by the nature of the capitalist imposition of workcan be understood as struggles against capital. And here there is a point of disagreement. Lebowitz correctly stresses the need to shift from the perspective of capital to that of the wage-labourer (I would use the term working class). Because as long as our subject is capital, it may be appropriate to consider these human beings only in their characteristic as wage-labourer. Yet, as soon as the subject becomes wagelabour, it is necessary to consider the other relations in which people exist (p.116). In other words, non-wage labourers are not discussed as workers vis--vis capital mediated by, say, the man as head of the household in the case of the traditional patriarchal family, but as a form of exploited work which stands outside the realm of capital. The problem is to what extent these other relations in which people exist become important for capital, to what extent they become the object of capitals strategy, to what extent every aspect of life becomes a moment of the capitalist imposition of work. This is not to negate the fact that there is other than what is actually subsumed by capital; it is simply to assert that every aspect of life becomes the target of capitalist subsumption. This seems to me the basis from which we can start to answer the key political question: on what ground are we able to build forms of organisation and to promote circulation of struggles, which, by accepting the distinctiveness and autonomy of the needs of the different sections of the class, at the same time are able to weave an antagonist and constitutive web against capital? In Chapters 7 and 8 Lebowitz stresses the primacy of needsand therefore of working class subjectivity, in contraposition to onesided Marxisms stress on the autonomous development of the forces of production as the motor of historyand tackles the idea of capitalist transcendence. Yet again, although his point is in general well taken, it shows some limitations. Borrowing from Lenins conception of working class spontaneous consciousness as merely trade unionist consciousness, Lebowitz claims that rather than pointing beyond capital, the inability to satisfy their needs in itself leads workers not beyond capital but to class struggle within capitalism (p.131). However, the process of struggling within capitalismthe struggle for material needsis the process of producing new people with new, radical needs (p.143), that is those needsfollowing Heller (1976)that can be compatible only with the transcendence of capitalism. As distinct from Heller however, the development of these radical needs are correctly seen as one with the class struggle which assumes a central character in both shaping reality and informing the development of revolutionary theory. The latter is thus acquiring its central role as a moment of the class struggleand not as academic contemplation. Lebowitz here quotes Marx about the relation between thought and struggle: it is not enough for thought to strive for realisation, reality must itself strive towards thought, and about the role of theory when he says that the role of theorists of the working class have only to take note of what is happening before their eyes and to become its mouthpiece. But although theory may include the pedagogic role assumed in Lenins What has to be done assertion and subscribed by Lebowitz (Marx wrote Capital to explain to workers why they were struggling (p.144)), its revolutionary role, that is to say, its power to become a moment of the process toward the transcendence of capitalism, is also far beyond it. In other words, counter-informationthat is the outlying of arguments against capitals argumentsis a moment, a necessary moment still just a moment, of a wider movement from theory to practice and from

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practice to theory which enable us to formulate political hypotheses, projects and strategies to circulate our struggles and to move beyond capitalism. These already include the awareness if not in a formal theoretical way, at least as lived experience of the working class subordinate role vis--vis capital. References
Bell, Peter F. and Harry Cleaver (1982) Marxs Crisis Theory as a Theory of Class Struggle, Research in Political Economy, Vol. 5, JAI Press, pp.189261. Cleaver Harry (1979) Reading Capital Politically. University of Texas Press, Austin. Cohen G.A. (1978) Karl Marxs theory of History: A Defence. Princeton University Press, Princeton NJ. Heller Agnes (1976) The Theory of Needs in Marx. Allison and Busby in association with Spokesman Books, London. Lukcs Georg (1972) History and Class Consciousness: Studies in Marxist Dialectics, translated by Rodney Livingstone, MIT Press, Cambridge. Marx Karl (1867) Capital, Vol.1. Penguin Books, London, New York 1976. Negri Antonio (1984) Marx beyond Marx. Lessons on the Grundrisse. Bergin & Garvey Publishers, Inc., Mass. Panzieri Raniero (1961) The Capitalist Use of Machinery: Marx Versus the Objectivists in Phil Slater [ed], Outlines of a Critique of Technology. Atlantic Highlands: Humanities Press, 1980, pp. 3968. Originally published as Sulluso capitalistico delle macchine nel neocapitalismo, Quaderni Rossi, No.1, 1961. Roemer J.E. (1981) Analytical foundations of Marxian Economic Theory. Cambridge University Press, Cambridge. ____________________

Perry Anderson English Questions (pb. 370pp.) A Zone of Engagement (pb. xiv + 384pp.) Verso, London 1992, 12.95 each Reviewed by David Byrne These two books together constitute a sort of statement of position by one of the key figures associated with New Left Review over the life of that journal, and from the point of view of the themes and issues which make up the agenda of Capital&Class it is rather an odd position. English Questions takes the form of a confrontation between two of the sixties pieces which were Andersons contribution to the Nairn-Anderson Theses Origins of the present Crisis and Components of the National Culture, and two more recent pieces which reflect on the themes raised then in the light of subsequent developments, concluding with a survey of the post Thatcher context, which considers the prospects of the Labour Party within the context of the wider changes that have reshaped European social democracy in these years. A Zone of Engagement comprises twelve essays or extended reviews dealing with the work of leading figures in contemporary intellectual life, who are in different ways thinkers at the intersection of history and politics, and a concluding chapter examining the idea of the end of history as expressed in work from the nineteenth century to Fukuyamas recent contribution on this theme. Reviewing these tomes was no great pleasure, although it had its moments both of enlightenment and irritation. Certainly Anderson has an irritating style. He expostulates with a combined pomposity and eruditionjust what is going on in a saut de lange? We are informed that Perry Anderson teaches history at UCLA but there are times when I felt that I was dealing with the work of a specialist in cultural archae-