Michael Lebowitz's Beyond Capital (2003)

Book Review from the December 2003 issue of the Socialist Standard

Beyond Capital. By Michael Lebowitz, (Palgrave Macmillan, 2003.)

Karl Marx originally planned to write six books under the project title “Economics”, but only the first book Capital was ever written. The other books in the planned series were: Landed Property, Wage Labour, State, International Trade, World Market. Because Marx never got beyond the first, claims Lebowitz, the theory is somewhat one-sided. Capital analyses in particular the laws of motion of capital and a detailed consideration of the other side of the social relationship, wage-labour, was to be left to the third book in the series. The resulting description of capitalism in Capital can be interpreted in a mechanical and determinist way, with capital having a “logic” of its own from which the class struggle of the workers is absent. Would anyone be so foolish as to read Capital that way? Well, yes, it’s surprisingly common. For instance, G.A. Cohen has built an academic career largely out of popularising a functionalist account of Marx’s theory in which, among other things, we learn that “high technology was not only necessary but also sufficient for socialism” (Karl Marx’s Theory of History: A Defence, 1978, p.206). For Lebowitz, on the other hand, the subject of Capital is capital and it explores that relation from the perspective of capital. However, an adequate understanding of capitalism as a whole requires us to recognise it as a totality, as a class struggle between capital and wage-labour.

From the point of view of capital, the value of labour-power (the worker’s ability to work which is sold for a wage or salary) is determined by the necessaries of life. This can imply that the process of establishing wage levels and the value of labour-power is more or less automatic, with the direction of causation going from the necessaries of life to the value of labour-power to wage levels. On the other hand, although Marx never wrote the planned book on wage-labour, he did a lecture that is written up as the pamphlet Value, Price and Profit. Here Marx explains that wage levels will vary with “the respective power of the combatants” and in the long run this will determine the value of labour-power and the necessaries of life. From the point of view of wage-labour then, wage levels and the value of labour-power depends on the balance of class forces, on what workers can actually get from their employers.

Of course socialists take the side of workers in the class struggle. However, the problem of a possible one-sided interpretation in Capital was first recognised by Maximilien Rubel, and he concluded that because of the “fragmentary state” of Marx’s “Economics” project, in particular the intended book on wage labour which remained unwritten, we do not have a rounded analysis of capitalism (Rubel on Marx: Five Essays, 1981). Lebowitz suggests that it is possible to get that rounded analysis scattered throughout Marx’s work and by including the class struggle in the analysis. So, for example, a rise in tax borne by workers should not be assumed to be automatically passed on to employers in the form of higher money wages. From the (one-sided) viewpoint of capital, workers are variable capital and, from this perspective, it may be thought that, because of the “law” of motion of capital, wages will rise in due course. But once the class struggle—pressure from the capitalist as well as the workers’ side—is factored in, this issue can only be answered empirically, depending on “the respective power of the combatants.”

Lew Higgins

Blogger's Note:

G. A. Cohen's Karl Marx’s Theory of History was reviewed in the August 1979 issue of the Socialist Standard.