HIMA 14,2_f8_113-134II 6/16/06 5:16 PM Page 113

Leo Panitch and Bringing the In: Michael Lebowitz’s Beyond ‘Capital’

Capitalist production begets, with the inexorability of a natural process, its own negation.1

If there is one important message from this book, it is that economic crises do not bring about an end to .2

Introduction In Beyond ‘Capital’, Michael Lebowitz makes a rather startling claim. Capital, he contends, failed to posit and integrate a ‘ of the working class’ into its theorisation.3 For anyone first drawn to by the exciting discovery of alienation, surplus-value, and the self-emancipation of the working class, this eyebrow-raising allegation is bewildering. What can this possibly mean when Capital abounds in insights about work and wage- labour, and when Engels’s preface to the English edition already noted that, ‘Capital is often called...

1 Marx 1990, p. 929. 2 Lebowitz 2003, p. xi. 3 Lebowitz 2003, p. ix.

Historical Materialism, volume 14:2 (113–134) © Koninklijke Brill NV, Leiden, 2006 Also available online – www.brill.nl HIMA 14,2_f8_113-134II 6/16/06 5:16 PM Page 114

114 • Leo Panitch and Sam Gindin

“the Bible” of the working class’?4 That Lebowitz makes his claim as a proudly ‘orthodox Marxist’ only adds to the perplexity. Yet Lebowitz has come to praise and build on Marx, not to bury him. Beyond ‘Capital’ first arrived in 1992, by then already over a decade in the making. The trajectory of capitalism and the working class since then, as well as the substantive additions to the 2003 edition, make its argument all the more compelling. Lebowitz offers a sympathetic explanation for why Marx intended but never got to write the crucial missing book on wage-labour. But that exegesis of Marx, however much it is where Lebowitz’s own expertise rests, is not the main point. The significance of Beyond ‘Capital’ lies in its establishing a critical inadequacy in Marxism and then pointing us in the right directions to develop our thinking about how to really get beyond capitalism. Taking his cue from Michael Buroway’s 1989 claim that ‘two anomalies confront Marxism as its refutation: the durability of capitalism and the passivity of its working class’, Lebowitz asserts that Marxism shoulders some of the responsibility for both of these ‘facts’.5

Not only the absence of socialist revolution and the continued hegemony of capital over workers . . . but also the theoretical silence (and practical irrelevance) with respect to struggles for emancipation, struggles of women against patriarchy... struggles over the quality of life and cultural identity – all these point to a theory not entirely successful.6

The problem, Lebowitz shows, does not lie in Marx’s method nor in his overall political and theoretical perspective, both of which went beyond a narrow conception of labour and stressed ‘all human relations and functions, however and in whatever form they may appear’.7 The problem lies, rather, with the limitations inherent in the theoretical project of writing the political economy of capital as it came to be embodied in the three volumes of Capital. Lebowitz agrees with E.P. Thompson that the problem with Marx’s critique of political economy is that its ‘postulates ceased to be the self-interest of man and became the logic and forms of capital’ with the result that Capital became

a study in the logic of capital, not of capitalism, and the social and political dimensions of the history, the wrath and the understanding of the class

4 Marx 1990, p. 112. 5 Burawoy cited in Lebowitz 2003, p. 20. 6 Lebowitz 2003, p. 20. 7 Marx cited in Lebowitz 2003, p. 142.