From: michael a. lebowitz (mlebowit@SFU.CA)
Date: Sun Jun 08 2003 - 17:01:04 EDT
Here, as warned, is the new preface.
in solidarity,
michael
>MICHAEL A. LEBOWITZ, BEYOND CAPITAL: MARX’S POLITICAL ECONOMY OF THE
>WORKING CLASS (Second Edition)
>
>Preface to the Second Edition (forthcoming in June 2003 from Palgrave
>Macmillan)
>
> 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 utilise the narrow stereotype of
> the Abstract Proletarian.
> 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 recognise 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, ‘modernisation’ 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 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 11 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 strengthened points made earlier (drawing now, e.g., upon the
> publication of Marx’s 1861-63 Economic Manuscripts). However, this
> edition also reflects the further development of my thinking on the
> questions raised.
> One of the most significant changes involves the division of the
> original concluding chapter (‘Beyond Political Economy’) into two
> separate chapters (‘From Political Economy to Class Struggle’ and ‘From
> Capital to the Collective Worker’). This allowed me to expand in
> particular upon the concepts of the Workers’ State and of the collective
> worker, respectively--- areas I have been exploring in the context of
> recent papers and a book in progress on the theory of socialist
> economies. While this elaboration had been intended from the outset of
> plans for a new edition, two other new chapters emerged in the course of
> the revision. The new Chapter 6 (‘Wages’) explicitly considers the effect
> upon the theory of wages of relaxing Marx’s assumption in Capital that
> workers receive a ‘definite quantity of the means of subsistence’; in the
> course of this investigation, the degree of separation among workers (a
> variable noted in the first edition) takes on significantly more importance.
> Finally, there is a completely new opening chapter (‘Why Marx? A
> Story of Capital’). In the course of writing a chapter on Marx recently
> for a collection on the views of economists on capitalism, it occurred to
> me that Beyond Capital was missing an introduction to Marx’s analysis of
> capital. It wasn’t there originally because I had conceived of the book
> as a supplement to Capital; however, given the way this new chapter opens
> up questions to which I subsequently return, it is hard for me to believe
> now that the chapter wasn’t always there.
> I am extremely grateful to the many people who have encouraged me
> in this work since its original publication. Among those I want
> especially to thank are Gibin Hong, translator of the Korean language
> edition, Jesus Garcia Brigos and Ernesto Molina (who told me Che would
> have liked the book). At this point, though, I am especially appreciative
> for the critical feedback on new material for this edition that I’ve
> received from various readers. Some of this feedback has saved me from
> serious errors; so, thank you to Greg Albo, Jim Devine, Alfredo
> Saad-Filho, Sam Gindin, Marta Harnecker, Leo Panitch, Sid Shniad and Tony
> Smith.
> At the time of the writing of this Preface, chronologically the
> final part of this edition, capitalism’s triumph is not as unproblematic
> as it may have seemed at the time of the first edition. Strong protest
> movements have emerged in opposition to the forms of capitalist
> globalisation, and the development of new international links in the
> struggle against global capital proceeds. Further, capital appears to be
> undergoing one of its characteristic crises, and the contest as to which
> particular capitals and locations is to bear the burden of excess global
> capacity as well as the depth of the crisis are yet to determined.
> If there is one important message from this book, however, it is
> that economic crises do not bring about an end to capitalism. Once we
> consider the worker as subject, then the conditions within which workers
> themselves are produced (and produce themselves) emerge as an obvious
> part of the explanation for the continued existence of capitalism. Beyond
> Capital stresses the manner in which the worker’s dependence upon
> capital, within existing relations, is reproduced under normal
> circumstances; and, thus, it points to the critical importance not only
> of that demystification of capital upon which Marx himself laboured but
> also of the process of struggle by which workers produce themselves as
> subjects capable of altering their world.
> This essential point about the centrality of revolutionary
> practice for going beyond capital affords me the opportunity to close
> with the quotation from George Sand with which Marx concluded his Poverty
> of Philosophy (Marx, 1847a: 212). (In the context of capital’s
> demonstrated tendency to destroy both human beings and Nature, the
> statement has taken on added meaning.) Until ‘there are no more classes
> and class antagonisms …, the last word of social science will always be…
> Combat or death, bloody struggle or extinction. Thus the question is
> inexorably put.’
>
>September 2002
---------------------
Michael A. Lebowitz
Professor Emeritus
Economics Department
Simon Fraser University
Burnaby, B.C., Canada V5A 1S6
Office: Phone (604) 291-4669
Fax (604) 291-5944
Home: Phone (604) 689-9510 [NOTE CHANGE]
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