For some people, the Young Marx was a romantic, a pre-Marxist,

whereas Capital represents science, the highest development of Marx’s

thought. For others, Capital means the unfortunate displacement of the

Young Marx’s focus on human beings by the logic of capital and objective

laws. The absence of Marx’s intended book on wage-labour has

made it easy to set up such a divide between young and mature Marx

(although study of the Grundrisse really should be sufficient to dispel

this notion). The fact that the seemingly self-contained theory of Capital

permits such a conception of ‘two Marx’s’ is one particular reason why

this book was written (and why the critical arguments are drawn from the

mature Marx). Understanding the necessary contents of Wage-Labour

demonstrates the inappropriateness of that division between the Young

Marx and the mature Marx; it reveals that there is no gap between the

humanist/class struggle theorist and the scientist. To go beyond Capital

is to acknowledge the ‘two Marx’s’ as one.

 

Marx’s continuity is especially clear with respect to his understanding

of what, within the structure that is capitalism, drives beyond capitalism.

In their early collaboration, The Holy Family, Marx and Engels declared:

Proletariat and wealth are opposites; as such they form a single

whole. They are both creations of the world of private property.

The question is exactly what place each occupies in the antithesis.

 

It is not sufficient to declare them two sides of a single whole.

Recognizing the two sides as part of a single whole, sides that presuppose

each other, reciprocally foster and develop each other as two sides

of the same relation is critical. So too, however, is grasping which side

represents the reproduction of the system and which represents non-reproduction.

The worker, Marx and Engels argued, is ‘the negative side of the

antithesis, its restlessness within its very self’. In contrast to the ‘propertied

class’, which is at ease and strengthened within this relation, the

worker sees in it his ‘own powerlessness and the reality of an inhuman

existence’. Accordingly, within this relation, the propertied class is the

conservative side of the antithesis and ‘the proletarian the destructive

side. From the former arises the action of preserving the antithesis, from

the latter the action of annihilating it’ (Marx and Engels, 1845: 35–6).

 

All of Marx’s subsequent analysis of the side of capital did not change his

understanding of the place each side occupies in the antithesis. Capital, we see,

tends to reproduce its necessary premises in their capitalist economic

form. In particular, capital acts to produce a working class that looks

upon capital’s requirements as common sense (Marx, 1977: 899). It tends,

in short, to reproduce capitalism as an organic system (Marx, 1973: 278).

In contrast, workers transform themselves through their struggles into

other than capital’s products and thus into the historic presuppositions of a

new state of society.7 They do so not because of an abstract class mission

assigned to the proletariat  but,rather, because of their inherent situation within capitalism.

 

In the draft for Capital known as ‘Results of the Immediate Process of

Production’, Marx argued that capitalist production yields ‘the rule of

things over man, of dead labour over the living, of the product over the

producer’. Thus, at the level of ‘the life process in the realm of the social –

for that is what the process of production is – we find the same situation

that we find in religion at the ideological level, namely the inversion of

subject into object and vice versa’ (Marx, 1977: 990). As the result of this

‘alienation [Entfremdung] of man from his own labour’, the worker here

again represents the negative side of the relation:

 

To that extent the worker stands on a higher plane than the capitalist

from the outset, since the latter has his roots in the process

of alienation and finds absolute satisfaction in it whereas right

from the start the worker is a victim who confronts it as a rebel and

experiences it as a process of enslavement (Marx, 1977: 990).

 

Given the worker’s own need for development, inherent in the situation

of wage-labour is dissatisfaction with self, the inability to satisfy the

needs generated within capitalism. As rebel, as restlessness, the worker

struggles against capital and in the process transforms herself. At its

core, the thrust of the worker to go beyond capital results from the

‘indignation to which it is necessarily driven by the contradiction

between its human nature and its condition of life’ (Marx and Engels,

1845: 36).

 

Ultimately, then, both for the Young Marx and the mature Marx (the

‘scientist’), it is because workers are not merely wage-labourers but are

human beings that there is a tendency to drive beyond wage-labour.

Underlying the struggle against capital is that the worker ‘strives not to

remain something he has become, but is in the absolute movement of

his becoming’ (Marx, 1973: 488). In the end, we understand the contradiction

of capital and wage-labour as that of wage-labour and the human being.

Accordingly, it is not sufficient to identify the contradiction that

drives beyond capital as the opposition between capital and wage labour.

While that formulation is a real advance over an implicit conception

of capital’s self-destruction as the result of its own successes, it

(like Hegel’s ‘bad infinity’) is inadequate because wage-labour as such

does not transcend capital but is bounded inherently by capital (Hegel,

1961: I, 150–63).8 Thus, we proceed to the concept of the human being

which contains within it the human being as wage-labourer and the human being as non-wage-labourer, both the inhuman existence as well as the ought that goes beyond.

 

In this opposition, we understand that what underlies the struggle

against capital and drives beyond capital is the contradiction between the

worker’s self and her conditions of life. (The opposition of capital and

wage-labour remains – because insofar as wage-labour is only wage-labour,

it is identical with capital.) Thus, the exploration that began with the commodity

concludes with the contradiction within the human being that is already latent

within the commodity as use-value and value.

 

Our study of the side of capitalism which was not developed in Capital

thus brings us back to Marx’s starting point – socially developed human

beings and their struggle against relations which do not correspond

to their requirements. Rather than the determinism and economism

that flow from one-sided Marxism, the Marx who emerges here is

a revolutionary whose optimism was based on the assumption that

human beings will struggle against inhuman conditions. That struggle

against an inhuman existence is what for Marx drove beyond capital.

Should we not, then, take as the real beginning the collective worker –

that aggregate worker (some of whom ‘work better with their hands,

others with their heads, one as a manager, engineer, technologist, etc.’)

whose cooperation and combination of labour is the fundamental condition

of social productivity? In a society organized to allow for the full

development of human potential, that collective worker would produce

for communal needs and purposes, driven by the worker’s need for selfd evelopment.

 

From the vantage point of the concept of the collective worker, we can

see that capitalism inverts everything. The ‘actual process’ whereby the

collective worker uses means of production to produce things of use for

human beings ‘looks quite different in the valorization process. Here it

is not the worker who makes use of means of production, but the means

of production that make use of the worker’ (Marx, 1977: 988). Subjects

become objects, means become ends in ‘this inversion, indeed this distortion,

which is peculiar to and characteristic of capitalist production,

of the relation between dead labour and living labour, between value

and the force that creates value’ (Marx, 1977: 425).9

 

Starting from the concept of the collective worker and of the society

of the collective worker for itself, what emerges as logical discovery in

Capital now can be seen as self-evident: the power of capital is, in fact, the

power of the collective worker. The transparency of this point demonstrates

that underlying Capital all along is the implicit perspective of a

‘counterfactual’ alternative – the ‘society of free individuality, based on

the universal development of individuals and on their subordination of

their communal, social productivity as their social wealth’ (Marx, 1973:

158). Where, after all, does that concept of ‘the inverse situation in

which objective wealth is there to satisfy the worker’s own need for

development’ come from? It doesn’t come from anything in Capital.

Rather, it is Capital’s premise!10

 

The ‘silence’ that E.P. Thompson identified in Capital is indeed in

Capital. But, it is not limited to the ‘missing term’ of human experience.

11 Marx’s vision of an alternative to capitalism is also missing –

even though the society that the collective worker will construct for

itself was his premise, his ‘self-supporting positive, positively based on

itself’ (Marx, 1844c: 328).12 There was a reason for this.

When Marx wrote Capital, he wrote at a time when utopian visions

were commonplace. Given his belief that workers would develop the

elements of the new society in the course of their struggles, Marx was

reluctant to write recipes for future cooks (Marx, 1977: 99). Yet, after the

experience of the last century with ‘Actually Existing Socialism’, it is

essential to resurrect the vision of a new society, the society of associated

producers. But, not for the cooks of the future. Today’s cooks need that

vision because the recognition that their social productivity can be their

own social wealth rather than ‘the wealth of an alien subject indifferently

and independently standing over against labour capacity’ is critical

for going beyond capitalism:

 

The recognition [Erkennung] of the products as its own, and the judgement

that its separation from the conditions of its realization is

improper – forcibly imposed – is an enormous [advance in] awareness

[Bewusstsein], itself the product of the mode of production resting on

capital, and as much the knell to its doom as, with the slave’s awareness

that he cannot be the property of another, with his consciousness of

himself as a person, the existence of slavery becomes a merely artificial,

vegetative existence, and ceases to be able to prevail as the basis

of production (Marx, 1973: 462–3).

 

Today, we understand so much more clearly that capitalism does not

beget ‘with the inexorability of a natural process, its own negation’

(Marx, 1977: 929). The elements that concerned Marx are there even

more strongly than before – in particular, the overwhelming mystification

of the nature of capital and the separation and competition of

workers internationally. If there is no inevitability, however, there is

always possibility – inherent in capital is that it regularly produces a terrain

in which the struggle against capital can be pursued.

 

The continuation of Marx’s project means much more than writing the

missing books. Marx’s project was to do whatever he could to help to

bring about that ‘inverse situation’ – that ‘association, in which the free

development of each is the condition for the free development of all’. As

can be seen in his work, there are many sides to that project. Revealing

capital as the workers’ own product turned against them, working for

unity in struggle, stressing the centrality of revolutionary practice for the

self-development of the collective worker and setting out the vision of a

feasible alternative – all these now are essential ingredients to the

demonstration that A Better World is Possible. Build it Now.

By Michael A. Lebowitz

Above is the slightly abridged version of the original write-up {m.lab]

Notes

 

1. Agreement with Lenin’s recognition of the need for theoretical struggle is not

to make the argument for the classical Leninist party. The focus on ‘revolutionary

practice’ here is more consistent with Rosa Luxemburg’s famous

injunction that ‘historically, the errors committed by a truly revolutionary

movement are infinitely more fruitful than the infallibility of the cleverest

Central Committee’. The point is clear: ‘The working class demands the right

to make its mistakes and learn in the dialectic of history’ (Luxemburg, 1962:

108). For some possible implications of reliance upon that Central

Committee, see Lebowitz (2000a).

2. Although there are many glimpses from isolated phrases that indicate that

Marx’s thinking went beyond Capital, it would be wrong to assume that he

had indeed developed his thoughts adequately on the subject matter of Wage-

Labour. Marx did not hesitate to offer a few hints in advance of his theoretical

presentation when it came to matters such as the competition or centralization

of capitals. For example, see Marx (1977: 433–6, 578–80, 777–9).

3. Marx introduces the concept of the collective worker as ‘the living mechanism

of manufacture’ and as composed of one-sidedly specialized workers who are

part of a particular productive organism (Marx, 1977: 458, 481). The concept

here is extended to the living mechanism of the productive organism within

society.

220 Notes

4. This concept of an alternative in which workers are their own mediator was

not advanced by the nature of the Stalinist model forged in the struggle

against backwardness. The experience of ‘actually existing socialism’ is

explored in a work in progress, Studies in the Development of Communism: the

Socialist Economy and the Vanguard Mode of Production. For some aspects of

that work, see Lebowitz (1985a, 1986, 1987a, 1991, 2000a).

5. ‘Bear in mind’, Engels had argued a few years earlier about creation of a

communist society, ‘that what is involved is to create for all people such

a condition that everyone can freely develop his human nature and live in a

human relationship with his neighbours’ (Marx and Engels, 1975c: 263).

This focus on the development of human potential was characteristic of the

socialist thought of the period. The goal, as Henri Saint-Simon argued, is ‘to

afford to all members of society the greatest possible opportunity for the

development of their faculties’ (Manuel, 1962: 126). Similarly, real freedom,

Louis Blanc proposed, involves not only the rights achieved but also ‘the

POWER given men to develop and exercise their faculties’ (Fried and Sanders,

1964: 235).

6. Sève explores the question of human development on the individual level,

referring to ‘the most important problem in the whole of the psychology of

personality, from the point of view of Marxist humanism, i.e., that of

expanded reproduction, in short, of the maximum flowering of every personality’

(Sève, 1978: 358).

7. Similar themes are raised by Shortall (1994), but see Lebowitz (1998, 2000b).

8. While capital may appear to be the destructive side of capitalism, may appear

to drive towards its own dissolution, for Marx and Engels, capital drives to its

end ‘only insomuch as it produces the proletariat as proletariat, poverty

which is conscious of its spiritual and physical poverty, dehumanisation

which is conscious of its dehumanisation, and therefore self-abolishing. The

proletariat executes the sentence that private property pronounces on itself

by producing the proletariat’ (Marx and Engels, 1845: 36).

9. This inversion, of course, is ‘not a merely supposed one existing merely in the

imagination of the workers and the capitalists’ (Marx, 1973: 831). Rather, it

is a real inversion – one that flows from the surrender of the creative power

of workers for a mess of pottage, that ‘deceptive illusion of a transaction’

(Marx, 1977: 730, 1064).

10. Understanding the importance of Marx’s premises suggests that, before reading

Capital, one should begin with his discussions of human wealth from the

Grundrisse, etc. Having firmly grasped Marx’s conception of real wealth, the

implication of the opening sentence of Capital is inescapable.

11. See the discussion in Chapter 2.

12. One of Negri’s important insights (in Negri, 1991) is the significance that the

concept of communism has in Marx’s analysis of capitalism. As noted in

Lebowitz (2000b), however, I have serious problems with much of his argument,

including his assertion that Capital serves ‘to subject the subversive

capacity of the proletariat to the reorganizing and repressive intelligence of

capitalist power’ (Negri, 1991: 18–19).

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