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

Monthly Review, March, 1993 by James Devine

The role of needs is crucial in the political economy of wage-labor. Instead of a single value of labor-power representing a subsistence with an important "historical and moral" element, Lebowitz posits a range of needs, from the physiological to the fully social, whose fulfillment is necessary for the full flowering of humanity. He shows that increasing "necessary needs"--due to the normal process of capitalist accumulation --can lead to immiseration, even with real wages rising. Further, the process of class struggle itself can raise workers' necessary needs and thus increase the value of labor power. Thus class struggle has moved back to center stage and any characterization of the worker as mere victim or productive input becomes impossible.

But how does Lebowitz deal with the first aspect of the crisis of Marxism mentioned above? That is, how can the Marxist system be opened to feminism and other movements without becoming eclectic and empiricist? As before, he works on two levels. He produces evidence about Marx's attitude toward women's oppression, racism, and environmental degradation. For example, Marx tended to refer to women's status as "slavery" and saw capitalism as progressively destroying nature. But more importantly, he argues that to complete the totality, we must go beyond the "Abstract Proletarian," i.e., the consideration of workers solely in relationship to capitalists, responding in a mechanical way to capitalist depredations, without any role for community, family, and so forth. Just as the master was examined largely in isolation from the servant in Capital, we must at one level of abstraction examine the servant in isolation from the master--i.e., as a human being--in order to more fully understand the relationship between the two. This organically links the so-called "mature Marx" of Capital with the "young Marx" of the 1844Manuscripts. The understandings that arise from taking this perspective also allow the integration of feminist, anti-racist, and other progressive concerns into Marxism. This vision cannot be deterministic because of the impossibility of pinning down the active role of the "servant" in self-liberation to any deterministic laws of motion. People develop their own politics and understandings over time, through everyday experience within their communities. This links up with the new labor history.

The obvious question is why Marx made his simplifying assumptions. As Lebowitz writes, "He was less interested in the completion of his epistemological project than in his revolutionary project." (p. 141) Capital's critique of political economy and its expose of capitalism were intended to make workers conscious of their exploitation and collectively more able to liberate themselves. Marx took to heart his own dictum that the point is not simply to interpret the world but to change it. He was optimistic about the growth of proletarian self-organization and self-education. His intent was to give workers the theoretical tools they needed to succeed. But as the last century has shown, his optimism was not well founded.