Beyond Capital: Marx's Political Economy of the Working Class. - book reviews

Monthly Review, March, 1993 by James Devine

Michael A. Lebowitz. Beyond Capital: Marx's Political Economy of the Working Class. New York: St. Martin's, 1992. 157 pp. $16.95.

In recent years, many have come to see a crisis in the Marxian analysis of capitalism which has its source in Marx's own writings, especially Capital Advocates of the so-called "new social movements" attack Marxism as being one-dimensional, that is, as neglecting the gender, racial, and environmental dimensions of struggle. Further, even this one-dimensional Marxism often has two conflicting souls. The first is the "scientific" Marx of Capital, who wrote of "tendencies working with iron necessity toward inevitable results," with little role for human action. It is rare these days that Marxists understand capitalism in this way, but within academia this tradition surfaces when scholars understand human actions as the necessary results of social structures (structuralism) or attribute the origins of institutions and events to the needs of capitalists or of the capitalist system (functionalism). The other is the activist Marx who saw the working class as a conscious force capable of organizing its own liberation from below, embracing slogans such as "The emancipation of the working class must be won by the working class itself..1 Similar trends include the growing "new labor history," rounded by E.P. Thompson ,2 focusing on the everyday efforts by working people to deal with the exploitative conditions of capitalism, and the humanistic "young Marx" of the 1844 Manuscripts.

Michael Lebowitz's Beyond Capital provides an important insight into the origins of this crisis. He claims that one-dimensional and automatic Marxisms were able to develop a textual basis because Marx never wrote his planned book on wage labor. In 1858 Marx projected such a hook to be the third of six volumes in his Economics, with Capital as only the first of the series. Besides Wage Labor, the others planned were on Landed Property, The State, International Trade, and The World Market. Some scholars have argued that Marx later rejected this plan, instead incorporating elements of all the six books in Capital.3 Lebowitz, on the other hand, argues convincingly that Marx meant to write the missing book on wage labor, or at least something very much like it. But textual evidence is far from being the main point of his book, so he rightly does not dwell on it: it would be totally consistent with his thesis if someone were to find a letter indicating conclusively that Marx had decided to abandon the early outline.

Rather, Lebowitz's methodological claim is that Marx never completed his own epistemological project, i.e., his plan for understanding capitalism and its laws of motion. In other terms, Capital represents an incomplete totality by Marx's own dialectical standards. What does he mean by this? It is impossible to repeat Lebowitz's argument in a short review, but Hegel's Phenomenology of Spirit helps us. In it Hegel examines the complex relationship between the "servant" and the "master," arguing that neither of these two roles can exist independently, since the social role of each defines the role of the other. For Lebowitz, then, the central problem with Marx's Capitalis that it considers only the master, i.e., the capitalist, and not the servant, the proletarian. If, as Hegel said, the truth is the whole, then Marx's Capitalis untrue, since it is merely a partial vision. To be a true political economy of capitalism as a unified social system, it needs an analysis of the laws of motion of wage-labor to complement Marx's investigation of the laws of motion of capital.

Lebowitz shows that Marx used abstraction in a crucial way in Capital. To simplify matters, he isolated the master for analysis. For example, he explicitly assumed that the value of labor-power was constant, that the working class was paid this amount in wages, and that workers mostly acted as a passive mass, only sometimes reacting to the depredations of capital. Thus, the struggle between labor and capital so important in Marx's other works-is incompletely described. Workers are treated as produced means of production and mere passive victims, subject to the natural-seeming laws of capitalist accumulation and befuddled by the fetishism of commodities.

Since the laws of motion of capital are relatively reliable, Marx's simplifying assumptions encouraged "scientific" Marxism with its iron predictions: the Marxism of the Second and Third Internationals, or what Lebowitz calls "one-sided Marxism." Seeing class conflict without active participation of workers, this ends up sharing much of the capitalist perspective. Even the view that capitalism automatically and inevitably destroys itself shares this perspective, since rather than actively seizing power, workers end up receiving their liberation as a gift of history.

As Lebowitz points out, the partial coverage of the servant means that even the master, i.e., capital, is described incompletely and thus inaccurately. With the working class as an active force resisting capital's pressure toward immiseration and even going on the offensive, results change: capitalists must treat workers as something more than raw materials; they must be divided and conquered, controlled, and manipulated to serve profit. Further, the accumulation of capital can potentially be counteracted by the accumulation of workers' power. This critique does not reject Marx: instead, Lebowitz fills out Marx's epistemological project, in effect writing the missing book on wage labor--using Marx's letters, speeches, articles, and notes, especially his Grundrisse, the famous notes on economics.