Beyond Capital: Marx's Political Economy of the Working Class

by Michael A. Lebowitz

Winner of The Deutscher Memorial Prize 2004. In a completely reworked edition of his classic (1991) volume, Michael A. Lebowitz explores the implications of the book on wage-labour that Marx originally intended to write. Focusing upon critical assumptions in Capital that were to be removed in Wage-Labour and upon Marx's methodology, Lebowitz stresses the one-sidedness of Marx's Capital and argues that the side of the workers, their goals and their struggles in capitalism have been ignored by a monolithic Marxism characterized by determinism, reductionism and a silence on human experience.

Genres: Economics, Philosophy, Politics

246 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 1991

About the author

Michael Lebowitz is professor emeritus of economics at Simon Fraser University in Vancouver, Canada, and the author of several books including The Socialist Imperative, The Contradictions of “Real Socialism,” and The Socialist Alternative. He was Director, Program in Transformative Practice and Human Development, Centro Internacional Miranda, in Caracas, Venezuela, from 2006-11.

Reviews

[Voyou · Rating 3 out of 5]

Some sound readings of passages in Marx, primarily in Capital, where Marx moves towards, but leaves unsaid, an analysis of wage labor, though I'm not sure there's much new here, especially for anyone familiar with Italian workerism. The big problem with the book, though, is that Lebowitz never really thinks about why Marx might have failed to write the book on wage labor that he promised; it seems to me, in fact, that the problems of Lebowitz's book give us a clue. Lebowitz attempts to give us a "political economy of wage labor," to supplement Marx's political economy of capital. But Marx wasn't writing political economy, he was writing a critique of political economy; and because political economy is silent on wage labor, so Marx's critique of political economy must likewise be silent. In attempting to construct a political economy of wage labor, Lebowitz does just what he accuses Marx of - he remains trapped in political economy (although here a political economy of a wage labor that is supposedly external to capital), rather than critical of, and able to move beyond, it.

[Daniel · Rating 5 out of 5]

Fantastic book, makes forcefully the argument that Marx's Capital is written about and from the perspective of capital - and hence that there are absences which would have been tackled in a later book about Labour. In trying to sketch out some answers to these absences, Lebowitz makes an important point with relevance to practice on the hetereogeneity of the working class and its construction (echoing Thompson).

[Melissa · Rating 4 out of 5]

Lebowitz basically argues that the strongest criticisms of Marxism are valid only because Marx's project was unfinished when he died. Lebowitz tries to fill in the blanks, writing a "political economy of the working class" that works as a (dialectical?) supplement to Marx's political economy of capital. it's a convincing argument that's readable and energizing. He also has some good jabs at "scientific Marxism."

[Goran Jankuloski · Rating 2 out of 5]

Knjiga pokušava da dokaže kako je Marx relevantan i u 21. veku, samo ako malo pretpostavite "šta je u stvari hteo da kaže". Čak i za levičare današnjice, sve što uspeva da dokaže je da nikada nije ni bilo razloga da bude relevantan. Ova knjiga je filozofski ekvivalent Lepoj Breni koja se udara nogom u glavu pred punim stadionom.

[Leonardo]

Sobre el volumen faltante sobre el salario ver Michael Lebowitz, Beyond Capital: Marx´s Political Economy of the Working Class (London: Macmillan, 1992).

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