Beyond Capital: Marx's Political Economy of the Working Class
By Michael Lebowitz
MacMillan, 1992. 187 pp. $30
Reviewed by Roger Clarke
This book is an attempt by an "orthodox Marxist" to confront "actually existing Marxism". Michael Lebowitz acknowledges "the inadequacies of Marxism as a received doctrine not only to explain the absence of socialist revolution and the continued hegemony of capital in advanced capitalist countries but also with respect to its silence on matters relevant to the concerns of feminists, environmentalists, national minorities, or even rank and file workers".
Rather than conclude that Marxism is inherently flawed, Lebowitz argues that a "political economy of the working class" needs to be constructed consistently with Marx's own method.
Marx originally intended Capital to be the first book in a six-volume work on the bourgeois economic system. The other books were to be entitled: Landed Property, Wage Labour, The State, Foreign Trade, and The World Market. Opinions differ about whether Marx kept to this plan but was unable to complete it, or modified his plan — setting aside the last three books and absorbing the second and third into Capital. Lebowitz argues that the second (majority) view is dubious, because Marx attempted to analyse society as an organic whole, whereas Capital contains significant omissions.
For example, at first sight, capital is presented as a "totality": a circuit between money, commodities for production (means of production and labour power) and commodities for sale. However, the "production" of labour power is necessary for the circuit of capital, but is not part of it. The renewal of the worker's labour power takes place at home, not at work. Yet Capital contains only a few words to the effect that the maintenance and reproduction of the working class may safely be left (by the capitalists) to "the worker's drives for self-preservation and propagation".
The logical place to discuss workers' lives outside of work would have been in the unwritten book on Wage Labour. The young Marx criticised political economy for considering the proletarian "only as a worker": "It does not consider him when he is not working, as a human being". "One-sided Marxism" takes Capital to be a self-contained presentation of capitalist society as a whole, rejecting the young Marx for a mature "scientist" who accepted the premises of political economy. Once Capital is understood to be book one of a larger work, its omissions can be seen to be assumptions that could later be modified.
In Capital Marx "accepts" that workers are commodities, not to capitulate to the class outlook of bourgeois political economy, but to develop an analysis of capital from this starting point.
From the labour theory of value it follows that the value of labour power is determined by the labour time necessary to produce the commodities needed to sustain the worker. The "historical and moral element" in workers' needs is acknowledged in Capital, but at any given time the value of labour power is assumed to be a constant quantity, around which its price fluctuates.
In reality, unlike other commodities whose price adjusts to value, the value of labour power adjusts to its price. Workers who receive higher or lower wages for an extended period of time become accustomed to a higher or lower standard of life. In his refutation of Weston, Marx points out that the outcome of the wages struggle depends on "the respective powers of the combatants".
At the same time as he was writing Capital, where wages appear to be determined by the law of value, Marx was insisting that workers are unique "commodities" who can change their "value" by class struggle. The concept of a fixed "value of labour power" represents workers who are completely dominated by capital, and the "laws of motion" developed from this starting point indicate the development of capital in the absence of class struggle.
The total dominion of capital over workers would imply that the laws of capitalism are just the laws of competition between capitals. This was indeed the viewpoint of Adam Smith and Ricardo, who developed bourgeois political economy. Many Marxists believe it was Marx's view as well. Lebowitz impressively demonstrates that the mature Marx (of the Grundrisse and Capital) had come to reject this view.
The mature Marx regards competition as a "surface phenomenon" which mystifies the human relationships of capitalism. The point of Volume 1 of Capital is to demystify the relationship between workers and capitalists, by revealing the exploitation of the working class. This was the urgent revolutionary task in Marx's time; thus Marx referred to Volume 1 of Capital as his "book", and published it separately. Ignorance of Marx's method had the consequence, noted by Lenin, that "half a century later, none of the Marxists understood Marx".
One-sided Marxism ignores Marx's "inner laws" of capital and attributes all change in capitalist society to the "external coercive power of competition". Thus mechanisation, piecework and Taylorism are seen just as methods of producing more cheaply, instead of primarily as methods of struggle by capital against labour for control of production.
One-sided Marxism also creates the illusion that the transformation of capitalism into socialism can be predicted "with the precision of natural science", forgetting Marx's warning that the class struggle has "legal, political, religious, aesthetic or philosophic — in short ideological forms". The human and moral dimensions of the struggle for socialism disappear from sight, and the class struggle is reduced to what Gramsci called "class competition" over wages.
From this point of view, it cannot be understood why workers would ever aspire to go beyond capitalism — provided they are, in Marx's words, "more or less well-fed instruments of production". At this point many Marxists claim there is a tendency towards absolute impoverishment that will eventually force workers to revolt. But absolute impoverishment would imply that capital had broken the resistance of the workers — would these defeated workers then be capable of a revolution? Nor will economic crises automatically lead to revolt; in the absence of a revolutionary movement, the ruling class will always have a way out.
A political economy of the working class is needed to provide an adequate theory for a movement to go beyond capital. Lebowitz discusses many themes that give a fuller view of the class struggle, from the side of the worker. For example, the human needs of workers include social interaction, recreation, fresh air and sunlight. Thus workers are "immiserated" by lack of community facilities and environmental destruction as well as by unsatisfied needs for commodities. The struggle against the mediation of capital between nature and the collective worker is just as much a "class" struggle as is the struggle for higher wages.
Lebowitz also comments on feminism by considering the possibility that a worker has a slave to do domestic labour. The labour of the slave is "unproductive", i.e. does not produce surplus value, but it is still forced labour for the benefit of another person. For "slave" substitute "wife", and the point is made that there can be exploitation of women by men, as well as exploitation of workers by capitalists. This cannot be seen if the analysis is confined to the workplace; yet Marx did comment that members of the family were "exploited by the head of the family". Lebowitz confirms his point that there are omissions in Capital, and shows the banality of counterposing a feminist to a "class" analysis of the family.
Lenin and Gramsci are prominent examples of Marxists who rejected economism and determinism, without the benefit of a book on wage-labour (and even without knowledge of the Grundrisse).
Beyond Capital should be carefully read by contemporary Marxists who imagine that an economic crisis automatically leads to the radicalisation of the working class. Lukacs stated: "History is at its least automatic when it is the consciousness of the proletariat that is at issue". Lebowitz quotes this statement to make the point that the outcome of any crisis depends critically on how it is interpreted by the working class.
The struggle against capital is therefore theoretical as well as economic and political. The focus of the theoretical struggle was indicated by Marx when he wrote: "The advance of capitalist production develops a working class which by education, tradition and habit looks upon the requirements of that mode as self-evident natural laws". Lebowitz also quotes Lenin's famous argument that theory could be "brought to the workers only from without, that is, only from outside the sphere of relations between workers and their employers". However, in the absence of struggle, revolutionary theory will appear to be abstract and irrelevant.
By focusing on workers as human beings with human needs, Lebowitz demonstrates that capitalism must produce class struggle. The power of capital over wage workers is based on the needs of the workers, and the lack of opportunity for workers to satisfy their needs — except by working for capital. Capital must continually create workers with new needs, in order for their dependence on capital to be recreated; thus capitalism continually produces struggle over workers' needs.
The struggle itself produces the need of solidarity between different groups of workers. A working class that can overcome divisions imposed by capital, for example by winning a struggle against racism, comes to desire unity for its own sake and to see capital as an obstacle to its achievement. Workers who are changing themselves in this way through "revolutionary practice" will have a use for a theory that shows how to do without capital altogether.
The "orthodox" Marxism of Lebowitz therefore places working-class struggle at the core of the movement to go beyond capital. It integrates theory and practice, humanism and science, and rejects the false opposition between the young and the mature Marx.
Lebowitz's book is a powerful rebuttal of the tradition he dubs "one-sided Marxism". One-sided Marxism is inadequate for the struggle of human beings against inhuman conditions. Workers struggling to assert their humanity will not accept a theory that declares only the economic struggle to be "real". Denial of their non-economic needs will (rightly) be seen as the theory of the capitalist class.
Lebowitz believes what is required is a Marxist orthodoxy that conforms with Gramsci's conception that it should "contain in itself the fundamental elements needed to construct a total and integral conception of the world". Lebowitz ends his brilliant book with a call for "the continuation of Marx's project to reproduce the concrete as the concrete in the mind" — which, he says, "implies an abandonment of one-sided Marxism in all its forms".