Socialist Outlook : SO/12 - Summer 2007

Review

Beyond Capital

By Michael A. Lebowitz, 2nd Edition, published by Palgrave Macmillan, 2003
David Coen

When Primark recently opened its flagship store in Oxford St. London, so enthusiastic were the shoppers for its low price cotton clothing that the long queue stampeded into the shop injuring several. The Irish owned group (it trades under the name of Pennys across the water) trades off low cost cotton goods produced in slave-like conditions in places like Uzbekistan and sweatshop labour in SE Asia.

Canadian Marxist, Michael Lebowitz’s book, first published in 1992 but only widely recognised after it was awarded the Deutscher Memorial Prize in 2004, seeks to rectify what he sees as the ‘one-sidedness’ of Marx’s analysis of capital by writing the book on wage labour which was either unwritten or, according to some, included in the section on ‘Wages’ in Volume 1 of Capital.

Lebowitz’s purpose is directly political in seeking to explain why the working class – the ‘gravediggers of capital’ in Marx’s phrase - have so far failed to go beyond capital. The durability of capitalism and the passivity of the working class, at least in the sense of its inability to overthrow capital, have led to claims about the ‘disappearance of the working class’ and a focus on new social movements as the agents of political change. At the same time, the collapse of what was called ‘actually existing socialism’ and the retreats of the workers movement since the late 1970’s have led to a questioning of whether Marxism can lead to an emancipatory politics or to the potential of class solidarity.

Lebowitz begins with two key criticisms of Marxism. The first is about agency – whether the working class as conceived in Marx’s theory is really the agent of revolutionary change or whether the revolutionary subject has been replaced by ‘new social movements’ based on ‘universalistic’ principles such as ecology, feminism, or anti-War. Though these movements typically operate on a politics of class, they are not on behalf of a class.

The second key criticism is the perceived ‘scientism’ of Marx: if capitalism operates according to objective laws, and Capital (as argued by E P Thompson, among others) is a ‘study of the logic of Capital, not of Capitalism’, then there is no place for class struggle or indeed history. The later Marx of the ‘scientific’ period (as opposed to the Hegelian idealism of his youth) falls into the trap of classical political economy in treating workers as a mere factor of production alongside Land and Capital.

Lebowitz attempts to solve these problems from an ‘orthodox Marxist’ standpoint focussing on the method and approach of Marx rather than treating his texts as dogma. Making the case for a ‘missing book on wage labour’, he attempts to deal with what he considers to be a theoretical hole in Marx’s analysis of capital that leaves out of account the reproduction of labour. In analysing capital and to explain how surplus value is extracted from workers, Marx made the assumption that the average quantity of necessary means of subsistence could not grow.

In fact, as Lebowitz argues, Marx only held the necessities of life for the workers as a constant for purposes of explanation: he well recognised that human needs would grow alongside the development of the forces of production. Indeed capitalism requires this very growth of needs – ‘to each capitalist, the total mass of all workers, with the exception of his own workers, appears, not as workers, but consumers’. (p.35) So capitalism fosters the growth of new needs among workers. From the workers’ point of view however, these growing needs feed the requirement to work – ‘each new need becomes a new link in the golden chain that secures workers to capital.’ (p.39)

Nonetheless, because he omitted to write the planned book on Wage Labour, Capital is one sided because it, ‘looks upon workers from the perspective of capital and not as subjects for themselves’ (p.119) and it is this deficiency that Lebowitz seeks to remedy in Beyond Capital. Beginning with Marx’s method, derived from Hegel, he attempts to write a political economy of wage labour. This leads into a critique of one-sided Marxism that focuses purely on the scientific logic of capitalism rather than a more totalising view, which would include an examination of class struggle. The political implications of this are clear: the need for a rounded critique of capitalism which understands that its crises are not simply derived from its ‘logical’ contradictions but its contradictory social relationships and the struggle of its two main contending classes: capital and labour.

Wage labour and unpaid labour

The section on the ‘one-sidedness of wage labour’ is the most controversial. In looking at how the working class reproduces itself within the orbit of the capital–labour relationship, and at ‘unproductive labour’, Lebowitz uses the analogy of slavery to explain relationships in patriarchal households. The reproduction of labour requires unpaid labour in the household usually performed by women and children and this leads to a divergence of interests between workers of differing age and sex. Lebowitz comments that even if he had written the book on wage labour, it was unlikely that Marx would have been able to go, ‘beyond Victorian conventions’ in order to recognise such patriarchal relationships which are deeply embedded in capitalism.

Furthermore, a focus on workers as ‘non-wage labourers’ goes beyond the tendency to think about an abstract ‘working class’ but to focus on them as a product of other sets of relationships, structured by gender or race, nationality and so on. Recognising that capital produces workers who are not simply bound together as workers but also that it produces workers who are separated, (using the example of the ways in which the ruling class used divisions between English and Irish workers in the latter half of the 19th century) is not to fall into despair about the potential of the working class to combine and overthrow capitalism, but instead to understand concretely and historically these divisions, the better to overcome them.

Needs then are historically determined. Undoubtedly there is a debate to be had about the way in which capitalism produces ‘needs’ but more important is the focus on the contradictions between the ability of the collective worker to produce and the limits to the enjoyment or development of the truly human by the vast majority of humanity, which is characteristic of capitalism. In contrast to the competitive individualism that prevails under capitalism, Marx foresaw a future, ‘in which the free development of each is the condition for the free development of all’.

The Oxford St shoppers feasting on the bargains from sweated labour in Asia may find some of their needs easier to satisfy. However, unless they take measures to unite against such exploitation they may find their own wages will follow the cotton prices down.

The current climate in Britain is one where some of those sections of the revolutionary left, despairing of the possibilities of the ‘political’ terrain, throw themselves into the ‘real’ activity of the working class, the trade unions, or into single-issue campaigns, conceding the political to the right.

This book (and the debates which it fomented, for example, in the journal Historical Materialism) is a valuable corrective to such economism, the sometime mystifications of academic Marxism and the abandonment of class as the crucial political category.

David Coen is a member of Socialist Outlook’s editorial board.

back to top