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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 All rights reserved. No reproduction, copy or transmission of this publication may be made without written permission. No paragraph of this publication may be reproduced, copied or transmitted save with written permission or in accordance with the provisions of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988, or under the terms of any licence permitting limited copying issued by the Copyright Licensing Agency, 90 Tottenham Court Road, London W1T 4LP. Any person who does any unauthorized act in relation to this publication may be liable to criminal prosecution and civil claims for damages. The author has asserted his right to be identified as the author of this work in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988. First edition published by Macmillan 1992 Second edition published 2003 by PALGRAVE MACMILLAN Houndmills, Basingstoke, Hampshire RG21 6XS and 175 Fifth Avenue, New York, N.Y. 10010 Companies and representatives throughout the world PALGRAVE MACMILLAN is the global academic imprint of the Palgrave Macmillan division of St. Martin’s Press, LLC and of Palgrave Macmillan Ltd. Macmillan® is a registered trademark in the United States, United Kingdom and other countries. Palgrave is a registered trademark in the European Union and other countries. ISBN 0–333–96429–2 hardback ISBN 0–333–96430–6 paperback This book is printed on paper suitable for recycling and made from fully managed and sustained forest sources. A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library. A catalog record for this book is available from the Library of Congress. 10 12 9 11 8 10 7 6 5 4 09 08 07 06 3 2 05 04 1 03 Printed and bound in Great Britain by Antony Rowe Ltd, Chippenham and Eastbourne 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 4.1 4.2 4.3 4.4 5.1 8.1 11.1 11.2 The degree of immiseration The construction of capital as a totality The circuit of capital as a whole The circuit of capital and wage-labour Capitalism as a whole as a totality Capitalism as a whole Capitalism as a whole (II) The worker in capitalism The contradiction of capitalism vi 43 61 61 65 76 78, 141 143 207 208 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 conservatives 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 yet fetter 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 conditions 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’ theoretically 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. Beyond Capital 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 inhuman 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 capitalist 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 eclecticism 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 eclectic 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 endless 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 conception. 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 displacement of the understanding of Marx’s method by the exegesis of sacred texts. Beyond Capital should 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 political 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 from Capital or 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 systematic 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 development. This edition, written eleven years later, demonstrates this point well. In fact, in preparing this edition, I came to look upon the first edition as a first draft. Every chapter from the original edition was changed. Some alterations were relatively minor and merely updated and