Between Capitalism and Community (2020)

MORE PRAISE FOR BETWEEN CAPITALISM AND COMMUNITY
“For some time now Michael Lebowitz has been patiently and provocatively
remaking our conception of Marx’s Capital and the potential for human devel-
opment. In standing against a ‘one-sided’ reading of Marx for an insistence
on seeing workers struggling to make their own world, Lebowitz has pushed
to the side stale, top-down theses of social transformation through statist
planning set apart from workers’ organization and participation. Indeed, in
his essential new book it is the building of workers’ capacities and communi-
ties that transforms circumstances and contexts in a process of contested
reproduction against capital. This is a directive to think of community not
as a romanticized place standing against the storms of an outside world, but
community as a process of struggle to meet and self-govern over common
needs against the ceaseless demands of accumulation, alienated work, and
the vandalism of the earth. Could any text be more important to read, dis-
cuss, and debate in the harsh times we face today?”—GREG ALBO, Professor
of Political Economy, York University; coeditor, The Socialist Register
“Michael Lebowitz is certainly no faithful disciple of Marx. But he can claim

to incarnate the best type of ‘Marxist’ that we need to break the circle of
the capitalist rush to the destruction of the planet and the post-socialist
ideological paralysis: resuming the critique of the economy at the point of
Ricardo’s default, where Marx himself had backed, and pushing the dialectical
idea of ‘contested reproduction’ to the lively conflict of the two histories that
inhabit our world and our lives. A book as clear and straightforward as it is
radical.”—ETIENNE BALIBAR, coauthor, Reading Capital
“This book should be mandatory for all economics, political science, and
social philosophy classes. Comrades—especially younger ones—will find it
immensely helpful for years to come. The sweep of the work is truly impres-
sive; comprehensive and clear on everything essential for understanding the
horrors of capitalism and the paths toward a better world.”—TONY SMITH,
Professor of Philosophy and Political Science, Iowa State University
“In twelve concisely and clearly written chapters, Lebowitz, among the best
radical economists in the world, shows that in Capital, Marx failed to fully
appreciate that the accumulation of capital results in two products—com-
modities of all kinds and the workers themselves. The latter, the ‘second
product’ of capitalist production, is shaped by capital so that the working
class is both badly divided and not fully cognizant of an all-encompassing
alienation. Equally missing from Capital is a full grasp of how the collective
actions of workers not only improve their life circumstances but also radically
change them, preparing them to become society’s eventual protagonists,
those who will abolish capitalism and create the collective commonwealth,
which alone can overcome the multiple crises that now confront us, espe-
cially ecological disaster.”—MICHAEL D. YATES, author, Can the Working
Class Change the World?
“In this admirable and timely book, Michael Lebowitz deepens and extends
the understanding of capitalism that he developed in his prize-winning
Beyond Capital. He argues persuasively that building critically on Marx’s
conceptualisation of capitalism as an organic system is indispensable to diag-
nosing the ills of the contemporary world—in particular the growing ‘crisis
of the Earth System’ that threatens to overwhelm us.”—ALEX CALLINICOS,
former Professor of European Studies, King’s College London
“In this insightful contribution, Michael Lebowitz continues to rigorously

demonstrate the one sidedness of Marx’s understanding of capitalism in
Capital and shifts Marxism, as a dialectical and systems view of the world, to
new ground. It is essential reading to understand the importance of solidarity
in these times of senile and catastrophic capitalism.”—VISHWAS SATGAR,
Principal Investigator Emancipatory Futures Studies; Editor of the Democratic
Marxism series, University of the Witwatersrand, South Africa
“This book is a provocation, as much for traditional Marxists as for the vari-
ous schools of nontraditional Marxism. It puts the question on the table of
whether Marx’s Capital could be an obstacle for understanding class struggle
and revolutionary practice. Michael Lebowitz questions what is taken for
granted by the majority of Marxists. He draws conclusions from this critique,
which also influences the offered vision of a non-capitalist future.”
—MICHAEL HEINRICH, author, Karl Marx and the Birth of Modern Society
BETWEEN
CAPITALISM AND COMMUNITY
MICHAEL A. LEBOWITZ
MONT H LY R EV I EW PRESS
New York
Copyright © 2020 by Michael A. Lebowitz
All Rights Reserved
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

available from the publisher
ISBN paper 978-1-58367-886-2

ISBN cloth 978-1-58367-887-9
Typeset in Minion Pro and Brown
M O N T H LY R EV I EW P R E S S , N EW YO R K
monthlyreview.org
54321
Contents
Preface | 7
Introduction: Class Struggle and Capital | 11
Part I. In Praise of Dialectics | 17

1. The Atomism of Neoclassical Economics | 19
2. The Truth Is the Whole | 29
Part II. One-Sided Marxism | 41

3. Marx’s Conceptualization of Capitalism as
an Organic System | 43
4. Crises and Non-Reproduction | 54
Part III. The Second Product | 71

5. Never Forget the Second Product | 73
6. The Burden of Classical Political Economy | 84
7. Capital’s Need to Separate Workers | 96
Part IV. Contested Reproduction | 109

8. Beyond Atomism | 111
9. Between Organic Systems | 123
10. How to Find a Path to Community | 137
11. Taking a Path to Community | 150
12. The Political Instrument we Need | 161
Notes | 180
Index | 199
There are those that struggle all of their life.
They are the indispensable ones.
— Bertold Brecht, “In Praise of the Fighters”
For Marta Harnecker (1937–2019)

Popular Educator. Indispensable.
Preface
I am not a disciple of Marx. My goal is not to prove that Marx was

right. This, Marx knew, is how a theory disintegrates. Commenting
upon the disciples of Hegel and Ricardo, he argued that 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” and,
accordingly, when the disciples are driven to “explain away” the “often
paradoxical relationship of this theory to reality.”1 Unfortunately,
Marx’s disciples often have embraced the Two Whatevers: “Whatever
is in Capital is right, whatever is not in Capital is wrong.”
But the problem is not only what disciples do. Marx understood that
the master, for whom “the science was not something received, but
something in the process of becoming,” may “fall into one or another
apparent inconsistency through some sort of accommodation.” And
this, I demonstrate, is precisely what occurred in Capital—an accom-
modation that produced theoretical blindness.
Why does this matter? It matters if theoretical deficiencies hinder
what must be our goal, which is to end this destructive system of capi-
talism and to replace it with a new society based upon communality
and solidarity. It matters if Capital obscured capital’s “immanent
drive” and “constant tendency” to divide the working class. It matters
8 BETWEEN CAPITALISM AND COMMUNITY
if the centrality of revolutionary practice, that simultaneous changing

of circumstance and self-change that promotes the development of
the capacities of the working class, plays no apparent role in Capital.
It matters, in short, if we are to know how capitalism continues and
what can bring it to an end.
Between Capitalism and Community continues my exploration of the
continent that Marx discovered, a journey that began in 1982 with an
article, “The One-Sidedness of Capital,” which was followed by Beyond
Capital: Marx’s Political Economy of the Working Class (1992, 2003).2 At
the time, considering the logic of Marx’s discussion of capital, I attrib-
uted problems in Capital to the absence of the book on Wage-Labor
that he originally intended to write as part of his Economics.3
Between Capitalism and Community begins not with the logic of
capital but by considering the relation between a whole and its parts.
From this dialectical perspective, our critique is deeper. We conclude
that Marx’s intellectual construct of capitalism as an organic system,
a system of reproduction that produces its own premises, neither rep-
resents the logic of capital correctly nor reveals those elements in the
concrete whole of capitalism that point to a different organic system,
that of community.
Indeed, two diametrically opposed systems, capitalism and
community, coexist and interpenetrate in a process of contested
reproduction. The central question for revolutionaries, then, is how
to create the conditions in which the elements of capitalism can be
subordinated by the system of community, a matter that has become
urgent as the result of the crisis of the Earth system.
Two themes I have raised in previous books (Build It Now, The
Socialist Alternative, and The Socialist Imperative) are the necessity
for a vision for the future and for a revolutionary party.4 New in
Between Capitalism and Community is that (a) the vision offered here
is based explicitly upon the concept of the organic system of commu-
nity, a system that produces its own premises; and (b) it is precisely
the deformation of the elements of community within this process of
contested reproduction that underlies the necessity for a revolution-
ary party.
PrEfACE 9
What kind of party? This is not arbitrary, and it is definitely not the
disciplined vanguard party (or sect) that purports to change circum-
stances for people. Grasping the centrality of revolutionary practice,
the party that can go beyond capitalism, self-interest, and hierarchy to
develop relations of community is one that stresses protagonism and
the development of the capacities of people through all their activi-
ties. Rather than those who know, delivering their distilled knowledge
to those who do not know, this is a political instrument that listens
and learns. In this, I share the insistence of Marta Harnecker on the
profoundly democratic nature of the necessary political instrument.5
I am happy to be working again with Michael Yates of Monthly
Review Press because my experience with him on previous books has
been all that I could hope for in an editor. Sadly, though, due to her
extended battle against cancer and her death on 14 June 2019, I have
not been able to complete this part of the journey with Marta, my
comrade and partner. We have all lost one of the “indispensables”
who struggle all their lives to build a better world. In completing this
book, I miss not only her loving presence but also her wisdom in
commenting upon my work. If this book does not suffer significantly
as a result, it is because of all that I have already learned from her.
— 2 7 F E B R UA RY 2 0 2 0
INTrODUCTION
Class Struggle and Capital
In Beyond Capital: Marx’s Political Economy of the Working Class, I

argued that there is a fundamental problem in Capital—its one-sid-
edness. Missing from Capital is the side of the workers themselves;
absent is the struggle for the “worker’s own need for development,”
and precisely because this is missing from Capital, so too is the revo-
lutionary side.1
I noted that I was not alone in making this argument. In his Poverty
of Theory, for example, E. P. Thompson described Capital as “a study
of the logic of capital, not of capitalism, and the social and political
dimensions of the history, the wrath and the understanding of the
class struggle arising from a region independent of the closed system
of economic logic.”2 Missing from Capital, he argued, are “men and
women [who], in determinate productive relations, identify their
antagonistic interests, and come to struggle, to think, and to value
in class ways: thus the process of class formation is a process of self-
making, although under conditions which are ‘given.’ ” 3 Missing, in
short, is real class struggle.
Similarly, Cornelius Castoriadis proposed that class struggle is
outside the bounds of Capital. Marx presented, he argued, only capi-
tal’s side of the struggle within production there, “letting the worker
appear as a purely passive object of this activity.” Whereas Castoriadis

situated the problem of Capital in Marx’s treatment of labor-power
as a commodity (the faulty “cornerstone” that meant Capital was
“built on sand”), for Thompson the problem was that Marx pro-
ceeded from Political Economy to “capitalism . . . that is, the whole
society, conceived as an ‘organic system’”; he was “sucked into a theo-
retical whirlpool,” and the result was “not the overthrow of ‘Political
Economy’ but another ‘Political Economy.’ ” 4
From the time of the Grundrisse, Thompson insisted, “the postu-
lates ceased to be the self-interest of man and became the logic and
forms of capital.” And part of this “system of closure,” in which all is
subsumed within the circuits of capital where capital posits itself as
an “organic system,” is that capital’s “self-development is determined
by the innate logic inherent within the category.” In this concep-
tion, “capital has become Idea, which unfolds itself in history.” In
the Grundrisse, Thompson declares, “Not once or twice, but in the
whole mode of presentation—we have examples of unreconstructed
Hegelianism.”5
While I agreed that Capital lacked class struggle—or, more accu-
rately, class struggle from the side of the worker—I insisted in Beyond
Capital that the problem was not that capitalism was introduced as
an organic system but rather that it was not one. Characteristic of an
organic system, I argued, is that it produces all its necessary prem-
ises. However, while demonstrating that the reproduction of capital
has as its necessary condition the reproduction of the working class,
Marx left the latter to “the worker’s drives for self-preservation and
propagation.”6 Accordingly, I proposed that the system we observe in
Capital was “incomplete—incomplete at the very point that the repro-
duction of capital is revealed to require something outside of capital.”7
Outside the system was the side of the worker, the side where work-
ers struggle for their own goals, the side propelled by “the worker’s
own need for development.” This, and not a “closed system of eco-
nomic logic,” was the reason for the exclusion of “history, the wrath
and the understanding of the class struggle” from Capital.8 Indeed,
unless we incorporate that missing side (and, thus, two-sided class
INTrODUCTION 13
struggle), Beyond Capital concluded that our concept of capitalism

is infected.
Two basic arguments have been marshalled against this critique. In
one, the introduction of class struggle into Capital is declared to be
premature; in another, we are told that class struggle is already pres-
ent in the theory of Capital. Arguing the former position, a follower
of the Japanese Uno School in his review of Beyond Capital insisted
that discussion of class struggle belongs not “at the level of the theory
of capital’s inner logic” but at a later level of “stages” where matters of
contingency and complexity are appropriately addressed.
Class struggle is banned from Capital in this particular argument
because the unique Unoist distillation of Capital is “the theory of a
purely capitalist society,” a general equilibrium model in which the
market mechanism (the law of value) ensures the reproduction of cap-
italism as a “self-perpetuating entity.” From this perspective, Robert
Albritton’s dismissal of my argument as “old simplistic humanism”
and “class struggle functionalism” is appropriate because class strug-
gle is incompatible with this neoclassical reading of Capital. Indeed,
rather than a class struggle perspective, Unoism offers “unrecon-
structed Hegelianism.” As Tom Sekine, one of the guiding theorists of
Unoism, declared: “The exact correspondence between the dialectic
of capital and Hegel’s Logic can scarcely be doubted.”9
The argument that exploration of class struggle is premature, how-
ever, is not limited to this unique reading of Capital. Rejecting my
introduction of the concept of the “degree of separation of work-
ers,” a variable meant to reflect the relative strength of the respective
parties in struggle, Ben Fine insisted that “both the elements and
incidence of class struggle are too varied, numerous and complex
(multi-layered and impure)” to allow for the use of such a concept.10
Precisely because the structures and processes leading from develop-
ments in the sphere of production to division of output are so many
and complex, he argued that it was (and is) appropriate to put off
the question of class struggle. “The incorporation of class struggle as
a determinant,” Fine proposed, “presumes a structure and complex-
ity of analysis that goes far beyond that contained in Volume 1 of
Capital. No wonder, then, that the theory of wages is put off until a
later volume or so of Capital.”11
Class struggle in this view relates to distribution, and, before dis-
tribution can be considered, we must understand the production of
surplus value which “sets the parameters within which class strug-
gle can be located.” Indeed, for Fine, “The structures and processes
of accumulation have to be specified before the mode, nature and
impact of class struggle can be assessed.”12 Accordingly, given how
“varied, numerous and complex” are the elements relating to class
struggle, Fine concludes that I have been premature in insisting that
class struggle be considered sooner: “The degree of separation simply
leapfrogs from the abstract to the concrete.”13
There are two central problems in Fine’s argument.14 One is that
the variety, differentiation, and complexity he identifies at the level
of the concrete applies as well to the standard of necessity, the length
and intensity of the workday, and the level of productivity, all con-
cepts essential for developing the concept of surplus value. Contrary
to Fine, the existence of real complexity offers no special impediment
to the introduction of the concept of the degree of separation at the
level of Capital.
More significant, however, is Fine’s premise that class struggle
relates to distribution and not to the production of surplus value; that
is, it occurs post festum. For this premise to hold, class struggle must
be demonstrated to play no role in the determination of the work-
day, the standard of necessity, and the level of productivity. But this
is precisely the begged question. Unless class struggle is irrelevant
to the determination of the production of surplus value, then Fine’s
argument has no substance. Yet, as should be obvious from chapter
10 of Capital, Marx was unequivocal in insisting that class struggle
determines the normal workday and thus is central to the production
of surplus value.
Ironically, Marx’s discussion of the struggle over the workday
provides the basis for a different critique of my argument. Contrary
to “those who argue that there is no class struggle in Capital,” Alex
Callinicos proposes, “Chapter 10 is about class struggle.” Indeed, he
INTrODUCTION 15
declares that “the chapter on the working day is the clearest refuta-
tion of the claim put forward, for example, by Michael Lebowitz, that
‘Capital is one-sided precisely because the worker is not present as the
subject who acts herself against capital.’ ” 15
The point of chapter 10, though, was not to introduce the worker
as subject; rather, its focus was to emphasize capital’s drive to extend
the workday in search of absolute surplus value, a drive that physi-
cally and mentally destroys workers and threatens the reproduction
of the working class. Indeed, the “voracious appetite” of capital is
so destructive, Marx declares, that “the same necessity as forced the
manuring of English fields with guano” brings forth state laws to place
limits on capital’s drive. Summarizing his historical account of capi-
tal’s efforts to go beyond all limits to the workday, Marx noted that
“capital therefore takes no account of the health and length of life of
the worker, unless society forces it to do so.”16
Certainly, the workers immediately affected by capital’s effort to
grow in this manner were an essential (although not the only) part of
society’s opposition to this assault. Yes, of course, Callinicos is right:
Chapter 10 definitely introduces class struggle by workers. “Suddenly,”
Marx announces, “there arises the voice of the worker, which had pre-
viously been stifled in the sound and fury of the production process.”
And, suddenly, we do see that, in addition to the right of the capitalist,
there is also the right of the worker, and that “between equal rights,
force decides.”17
In chapter 10, Marx described how English workers developed as
a class in their struggles against capital’s drive for absolute surplus
value. We see there “the daily more threatening advance of the work-
ing-class movement,” how workers moved from “passive, though
inflexible and unceasing” resistance to begin open class protest; we
see their growing “power of attack” and how a “long class struggle”
shaped the new factory legislation. Indeed, Marx concluded that “the
establishment of a normal workday is therefore the product of a pro-
tracted and more or less concealed civil war between the capitalist
class and the working class.”18
So, what then happens with that working-class subject in Capital?
Gone! That voice of the worker, that right of the worker, that civil war
from the side of the worker suddenly disappears. Those working-class
subjects who struggle against capital enter left onto the stage in chap-
ter 10, but their bodies are snatched, and they are replaced in Capital
(as we will see) by workers who look upon the requirements of capital
as “self-evident natural laws,” workers who guarantee “in perpetuity”
the reproduction of capital.
Yes, there is that struggle over the workday, but why didn’t the
absence of wage struggles in Capital sound an alarm bell? We know, as
Callinicos does, that Marx was well aware of the struggles at the time
of the working class over wages. Indeed, Callinicos cites Value, Price
and Profit from this period, indicating that Marx stressed that “the
working man constantly presses in the opposite direction” to the capi-
talist over wages. Callinicos describes that work (rather than Capital)
as Marx’s “most developed discussion of the strictly economic strug-
gle.” Accordingly, doesn’t Callinicos’s proposal that this discussion
“may be seen as a complement” to Capital weaken his claim that the
worker is present in Capital as the subject who struggles for herself
against capital?19
If workers as subjects indeed did disappear from Capital after
chapter 10, did that reimposed silence have any implications with
respect to our understanding of the logic of capital? And was chapter
10 the result of a lapse on Marx’s part or did class struggle on the part
of workers not belong there? That is, as Albritton and Fine might sug-
gest, did chapter 10 introduce an alien element into Capital?
When we investigate the concept of capitalism as an organic system,
it returns us to these various critiques, especially that of Thompson,
and opens up questions that I did not pose before. In particular,
revisiting my earlier point about the one-sidedness of Capital is like
pulling on a loose thread and causing much to unravel, not the least
of which are the arguments of many Marxist theorists.
PA RT I
IN PRAISE OF
DIALECTICS
1
The Atomism of Neoclassical

Economics
How can we understand capitalism? Neoclassical economics, which

is to say, mainstream economics, rarely uses the name. Rather, it talks
about the “market system” or the free market, a system in which indi-
vidual property owners (both those who own material resources and
those who own merely their personal capacities) contract with each
other in their self-interest. And, as long as they are free to contract
and free to choose, we are assured that the result gives us the best of
all possible worlds.1
Neoclassical economics begins (and ends) with the individual.
And this individual is treated as an isolated individual atom: the iso-
lated individual consumer, the isolated individual capitalist owner,
the isolated worker. Further, this individual is assumed to be rational,
which the theory equates with self-interested. So, as a rational indi-
vidual, this person is always looking to maximize self-interest, that is,
to maximize profits or wages or the utility obtained from the goods
purchased. If not doing that, then by definition the individual is not
rational. In short, this individual always searches for the right point,
the optimum point, in his or her self-interest. Thorstein Veblen, at the
beginning of the twentieth century, described this as the view of the

individual as “a lightning calculator of pleasures and pains.”2
And that’s a very accurate picture of the starting point of this
theory, which is the idea of the individual as a calculator or, better yet,
as a computer. Certain information is fed into this computer: what
it wants to maximize, the resources at its disposal, the technologies
that are relevant, and the prices of things. And, on the basis of this
information, the computer turns out the correct solution, namely the
one that maximizes pleasure or minimizes pain. So, for example, the
computer, if a consumer, will decide how much it will purchase of
different products based upon the relative utility it receives from each
product and their relative prices. Pleasure versus pain.
Or the computer, if a worker, will decide how much it wants to
work based on its preferences for leisure versus work and the wage (or
alternative sources of income like welfare payments). And the com-
puter, if it is a capitalist, will determine whether to use a machine
or worker based on the relative prices of each and the nature of the
technology—and whether to use a skilled or unskilled worker based
upon the relative price and the relative efficiency of each, given the
technology. Or the computer may be a criminal. As a rational crimi-
nal, this computer considers the benefits and costs of various acts and
chooses those crimes for which the benefits are highest and the costs
(the likelihood of being caught and the extent of punishment) are
least. Or the computer will determine the best possible characteristics
of a potential spouse, weighing pleasure and pain.
It’s all about rational choice. In each case, the computer will gener-
ate a correct solution given the data. It will choose the optimum point
that maximizes pleasure relative to pain or minimizes pain relative
to pleasure. That’s the starting point and premise of neoclassical eco-
nomics—that the individual will be rational and will choose the best
solution possible in his self-interest. As Veblen put it, the individual
is presumed to be “in stable equilibrium except for the buffets of the
impinging forces that displace him in one direction or another.”
Now, the neoclassical economist doesn’t care what equilibrium the
computer has generated. What interests the neoclassical economist is
ThE ATOMISM Of NEOCL ASSICAL ECONOMICS 21
how the computer solution will change if one piece of data is changed.
It is obvious that if you change the data fed into that computer, it
will generate a different optimum solution. So, that is the principal
question neoclassical economists pose: let us change the value of one
variable and see what the new equilibrium will be. Significantly, neo-
classical economists do not pose this as a process that occurs in real
time. Rather, they just want to change one variable and to see what the
lightning calculator of pleasure and pain would do. But this is not a
process that occurs in time. Because in a real world if we did change
variable X, this could affect variable Y, and a change in variable Y
might affect variable Z or variable X itself (in other words, create a
feedback process). In real time, there are always processes of interac-
tion, but neoclassical economics is not considering a real process that
occurs in real time. That is why the critical phrase used is “all other
things equal” (or, in Latin, ceteris paribus). We change one bit of data
and nothing else.
So, with that in mind, let’s think like a neoclassical economist.
What happens if we raise the price of one consumer product? Well,
obviously that increases the pain of purchasing that product, so the
computer as consumer will generate a result in which less of that
product is purchased and more of another. A new optimum solution
is generated by the computer. Or let us raise the wage. The computer
as capitalist, in comparison to the original situation, would choose
to use a machine rather than a worker because the pain of hiring
the worker has increased. Or let’s increase payments for welfare. The
computer as worker chooses to go on welfare rather than to get a job.
It’s all very simple. In every case, the question asked by neoclassical
economic theory is what that individual, the instantaneous calculator
of pleasure and pain, will choose in the second case compared to the
first case. And the answer is self-evident. Given that the individual is
an instantaneous calculator of pleasure and pain, he would make a
different decision. If a potential particular pain is increased, choose
less; if a potential particular pleasure is increased, choose more.
In fact, the answer is so self-evident that it is not necessary to derive
the answer from any evidence. All the economists have to do is engage
in a process of deduction: self-examination, self-interrogation. They

ask, what would I do under the circumstances? Now, the economists
know that they are rational. In other words, they know that rational
persons like themselves act out of self-interest and only that. Indeed,
neoclassical economists are particularly rational in this sense; that is,
people who study neoclassical economics tend to be much more self-
oriented and selfish than people who study in other fields.
Here, then, you have the basic wisdom of neoclassical economics,
which serves as the basis and justification for neoliberal state poli-
cies. For example, if there’s unemployment insurance and the benefits
are increased, the logical conclusion of neoclassical economics is that
you’ll get more people who choose unemployment. So, the neoclassi-
cal economist says, “unemployment insurance causes unemployment.”
The same economists also tell us that having programs in support of
single mothers causes mothers to be single and need support. Or they’ll
tell us that having welfare payments based on the number of children
in a family—that is, the larger the number of children, the larger the
payment—leads to increases in the number of children on welfare. In
other words, increase the benefits and more people will choose to be
single mothers on welfare. Or if you reduce the cost to individuals of
healthcare and the cost of visits to doctors, people will go to the doc-
tors and use hospitals more and the result will be significant increases
in the cost of providing healthcare. Therefore, it is simple neoclassical
economics that the way to reduce the cost of healthcare is by charging
more for it. Clearly, the rational individual under these circumstances
will choose health over sickness. Or they’ll tell us that if you raise the
minimum wage, capitalists will hire fewer workers; so, raising the
minimum wage produces unemployment. The thinking is pervasive.
A neoclassical economist will tell you that seatbelt legislation is bad
because, by reducing the risk of serious injury, more people will drive
recklessly; thus,, seatbelt legislation causes accidents.
Look at the policies that flow from neoclassical economics. Do
you want to increase employment? Lower wages, reduce welfare pay-
ments, and reduce taxes on capital so it invests more? Do you want to
lower the number of children growing up dependent upon welfare?
Lower the payments to welfare mothers. Do you want to reduce the

cost of healthcare? Increase the charge for healthcare. And, most of
all, if you want anything good, reduce the interference of the state
in the economy—except, and this tells us something about the real
beliefs of the economists, the role of the police and the judiciary in
enforcing property rights.
Certainly, you don’t try to solve the problem of poverty through
state programs. For neoclassical economists, the way to solve pov-
erty is by removing the state and letting the market work. And it’s
by individuals making the right choices, for example, by investing in
their education (beginning around age six, one economist said in a
seminar at my university). If you try to help the poor, that will reduce
their incentive. And it is not appropriate to engage in redistribution
of income and wealth by taxing the rich to support the poor; this
will lead both the rich and the poor to reduce their incentive. A car-
toon on my office door for many years described this theory well. One
frame said, “The way to give the rich more incentive is to give them
more money”; the other frame said, “The way to give the poor more
incentive is to give them less money”!
The message is clear: leave everything to those rational individ-
uals. When you try to “do good” through the state, you just make
everything worse. Rent controls? Housing shortage. Price controls for
food? Starvation. In the strange world of “all other things equal,” by
definition, there is only one answer: hands off, laissez-faire. And it
is a strange world. Recall the proposition that unemployment insur-
ance causes unemployment. The premise is that unemployment is the
result of rational choice, that is, unemployment is voluntary. People
are choosing not to have jobs. They just look like they’re out of work
involuntarily. They may even think so themselves, but neoclassi-
cal economists know better. Unemployment is voluntary. If people
wanted to work, they could get jobs by working for lower wages. But
what if you’re a little skeptical and say, No, capitalists are firing and
laying off workers! That doesn’t look very voluntary on the part of
the workers. One neoclassical economist responded by saying that
the employer has anticipated the worker’s choice. He anticipates that
the worker would prefer to be fired than to work at a lower wage, and
so the employer fires the worker “to the mutual satisfaction of both
employee and employer.”3
But how do we go from those isolated individual computers to talk
about policy proposals at the level of a society? Well, those neoclassi-
cal economists just combine those computers, assuming that society
is simply the sum of the isolated individuals within it. That’s what
society is for them, the place where those computers can interact. It
is where those isolated self-interested individuals come together for
their mutual benefit. And that’s all society is! No one made this point
better than former British prime minister Margaret Thatcher: “There’s
no such thing as society. There are individual men and women and
there are families.”
So that’s what happens in society according to the neoclassical
economist. We move from a single rational computer to two ratio-
nal computers, each attempting to maximize its self-interest, and they
engage in exchange; they can specialize in a certain kind of activity
and exchange. Just start everyone off with an “initial endowment” and
let the trading begin (quickly, before there are any questions about the
inequality of those initial endowments!). Each person gets what he or
she wants from the other by showing that it is to the other’s advantage.
As Adam Smith stated, “It is not from the benevolence of the butcher,
the brewer or the baker that we expect our dinner, but from regard
to their own interest.” So each party to an exchange benefits or there
wouldn’t be an exchange.
Further, as long as people are free to engage in any exchange, they
will be able to make the best possible exchange. For example, if a par-
ticular capitalist won’t pay a worker what she is worth, the worker can
go elsewhere. So the result is that in a free market everyone will get
what each deserves. John Bates Clark, a leading U.S. economist early
in the last century, said it all very explicitly. He began his book, The
Distribution of Wealth, by announcing:
It is the purpose of this work to show that the distribution of the

income of society is controlled by a natural law, and that this
law, if it worked without friction, would give to every agent of

production the amount of wealth which that agent creates.4
You get what you deserve. So don’t complain. If you don’t get very
much, it’s because you are not worth very much. But it is the best you
can do.
The result of the combination of these rational, self-seeking indi-
viduals, thus, is that everyone benefits. This is what Adam Smith
called the “Invisible Hand.” It is the proposition that allows neoclas-
sical economists to move from the rational individual to the rational
society. It says, simply, that when an individual seeks his self-interest,
he promotes the public good: “He is in this, as in many other cases,
led by an invisible hand to promote an end which was no part of his
intention.” In other words, selfishness is good. Or, as Gordon Gecko
said in Oliver Stone’s classic movie Wall Street: “Greed is good.”
Where did the invisible hand come from? For Adam Smith and
many others at the time and after, the answer was clear: it came from
God. A familiar view in the eighteenth century was that God created
a world of economic harmony in which everyone benefits everyone
else by following his own self-interest. That particular religious faith
became economic faith, a secular religion, and a central part of that
secular faith is that as long as there is no interference by the state, all
will be well. As the U.S. economist John Kenneth Galbraith described
this view, “In a state of bliss, there is no place for a Ministry of Bliss.”5
Very simply, neoclassical economics is a justification of the exist-
ing society, with all of its inequality and injustice. Neoclassical
economics serves as a justification of capitalism. But not because it
talks about capitalism. Rather, that justification flows from its fun-
damental assumption that “if you can understand the smallest parts
of the system in isolation from one another, then all you have to do
is to put them together correctly in order to understand the whole.”6
Accordingly, since every unit acts rationally and maximizes self-
interest, so also does society, the sum of the many ones. As Frédéric
Bastiat, a nineteenth-century French economist, articulated this
premise, “That which is right with regard to one person is also right
with regard to society.”7 As long as all are free to choose, it is the best
of all possible worlds.
True, there is a problem with the way neoclassical theory moves
from the premise of a rational individual to the conclusion that the
society is rational. As Keynes pointed out in a famous example, there
is a significant fallacy in this inference. Any individual can decide
to increase his savings and improve his future position. However,
all individuals cannot. By lowering their consumption, they reduce
aggregate spending and that leads to lower production, lower employ-
ment, and lower income for all. This is called the “paradox of thrift,”
and it is a classic example of the “fallacy of composition,” the logical
flaw in saying that what is true for one is necessarily true for all.
When people act as if the properties of the individual parts can be
assumed to be the properties of the whole, the results can be quite dif-
ferent from their expectations. If one person stands up in a theater, he
can see better. But if all people stand up? If one country devalues its
currency, it can increase exports, reduce its imports and stimulate the
economy. But if all countries devalue their currency? What happens
if a country decides that it can be more competitive internationally
by destroying trade unions and driving down the wages of workers?
What happens if all competing countries do the same? One person
goes to university in order to improve his chance at getting a job, but
what if all people do? (Well, the answer is go to graduate school!) In
this case, one writer commented, the value of your education depends
not only on how much you have but also on how much the person
ahead of you in the job line has.
In short, we can’t just add up the individuals. Because they are
interdependent. And interdependence is pervasive in the real world,
as are its effects, which can be seen most obviously in the crisis of our
common home, the earth. In its theory, though, given that it begins
with each rational individual only taking into account the things he
has to pay for, neoclassical economics has some difficulty explaining
how the rational choices of individuals can lead to irrational social
outcomes. So, to the extent that it can, it sweeps results of interdepen-
dency offstage into a category called “externalities.” As it turns out,
externalities are everywhere, and they are an anomaly for a theory

that simply adds up individuals without taking into account their
interdependence and interaction. So, the way neoclassical theorists
deal with this in their work is by assuming that there are no interde-
pendencies, no externalities, and if there are, they are trivial—minor,
second-order effects that can be ignored without losing too much
explanatory power. Unfortunately for the theory, this increasingly
lacks any credibility, as we exist in a conjuncture marked by the crisis
of the earth system.
By not beginning with the recognition of interdependence, neo-
classical economics falsifies the nature of both parts and whole.
Consider the following example of interdependency, which relates
to the fallacy of composition. The idea comes from G. A. Cohen, a
British Marxist philosopher, but I liked it so much I revised it and
made it my own and introduced it in my first lectures for my Marxian
economics class:8
On the floor of a locked room in which there are ten people, there
is a single heavy key. Anyone can pick up the key, go to the door,
unlock it, and leave. But once that happens, no one else can get out. So,
the question Cohen posed is: Are these people free? Each individual
is free to pick up the key and leave. But it is a fallacy of composi-
tion to conclude from this that everyone can leave. Their freedom is
conditional; it depends upon no one else exercising their freedom.
Whatever happens, there will be nine people trapped in the room.
Cohen used this example to talk about what he called the “structural
unfreedom of the proletariat,” namely, how any worker could become
a capitalist, but all workers couldn’t become capitalists (a point that
Marx had earlier made in one of his many examples of the fallacy of
composition).
But why in this case is it wrong to assume that what is true of an
individual is true for the whole group? Because there is a constraint
on the whole. It is a structural constraint upon the whole that doesn’t
apply to any single individual. There is only one key. The particular
interdependence of these people is given by the particular structure
in which they exist, and their properties and characteristics flow from
being parts of that particular whole. To describe and define those

people accurately, they can’t be viewed as isolated atoms, as individual
computers that can be added up.
Can we talk about those individuals without first describing the
society of which they are part? All we know about the individuals in
the room at this point is that they are interdependent because of the
external constraint. But surely there is more to say. We don’t know the
particular structure in which they exist, that is, the society of which
they are part. Is this a society characterized by equality? Are these
individuals separate and self-seeking or do they know and care for
each other? If, for example, there is a limited quantity of water in this
locked room, surely the nature of social relations among those indi-
viduals matters. Are they atomistic individuals free to take what they
want or are they functioning as members of a community? How can
we understand anything without beginning with the whole and the
nature of relations within that whole?
This is one way Marxian political economy differs from neoclassi-
cal economics. Rather than starting with individuals and markets, it
begins with the nature of the system, a whole characterized by par-
ticular relations among parts of that whole. In particular, Capital’s
focus was upon exploring capitalism as a system, upon analyzing the
logic of capital and the dynamic tendencies that flow from the prop-
erties of that system.
2
The Truth Is the Whole
By beginning from abstract individuals, neoclassical economics

is one of the best examples of the “Cartesian reductionism” that
Richard Levins and Richard Lewontin described in The Dialectical
Biologist.1 This reductionism, which is characteristic of the dominant
approach in many sciences, “takes parts as given prior entities that
can be defined in isolation and can have their properties considered
in some ideal isolated prior state before these units become articu-
lated into wholes.”2
The alternative to this methodological perspective, Levins and
Lewontin argue, is a dialectical worldview. “The truth is the whole,”
Hegel insisted in his Phenomenology of Mind, and several inferences
flow from that dictum.3 For one, we need to recognize that parts
cannot be understood outside of the context of the particular whole
in which they are part. Further, the whole as such must be under-
stood as a particular combination of differing elements that mutually
interact. Identifying these and the nature of their interaction allows
us to explore the conditions for the reproduction of that whole or its
transcendence.
Parts and Wholes
How can we understand the individuals in the locked room without

examining the conditions in which they exist? For Marx, individuals
are the ensemble of their social relations. Accordingly, rather than
beginning with the particular interest of individuals, Marx insisted
that the content of individual interest “as well as the form and means
of its realization, is given by social conditions independent of all.”
In contrast to the doctrine of the economists that “each pursues his
private interest and only his private interest; and thereby serves the
private interests of all, the general interest, without willing or know-
ing it,” Marx declared that we need to begin with the whole, because
“private interest is itself already a socially determined interest, which
can be achieved only within the conditions laid down by society and
with the means provided by society.”4
This emphasis upon the priority of the whole, philosopher György
Lukács argued, was central to Marx’s dialectical perspective: “The cate-
gory of totality, the all-pervasive supremacy of the whole over the parts,
is the essence of the method which Marx took over from Hegel and
brilliantly transformed into the foundations of a wholly new science.”5
The concept of totality allows us to reject the premise that parts
have “intrinsic properties, which they possess in isolation and which
they lend to the whole.” By learning to think dialectically, we can
see that parts “acquire properties by virtue of being parts of a par-
ticular whole, properties they do not have in isolation or as parts of
another whole”; we understand that the particular properties of parts
only “come into existence in the interaction that makes the whole.”6
Interaction, the whole, makes the part.
Connect, connect! That is Marx and all dialectical thinkers! For
Lenin, the “necessity of connection” was central to a dialectical per-
spective. Reading Hegel’s Science of Logic, he declared: “The basic idea
is one of genius: that of the universal, allsided, vital connection of
everything with everything.” As Marx did before him, Lenin learned
from Hegel the need to grasp “the all-sidedness and all-embracing
character of the interconnection of the world”:
ThE TrUTh IS ThE WhOLE 31
A river and the drops in this river. The position of every drop,
its relation to the others; its connection with the others; the
direction of its movement; its speed; the line of the movement—
straight, curved, circular, etc.—upwards, downwards. The sum
of the movement. . . . There you have à peu près [approximately]
the picture of the world according to Hegel’s Logic—of course
minus God and the Absolute.7
In contrast to beginning with this explicit recognition of the “con-

nection of everything with everything,” in the Cartesian reductionism
identified by Levins and Lewontin, the parts spring fully grown from
the forehead of the analyst and “come together to make wholes.” In
sum, the difference between the reductionist and dialectical perspec-
tives was described well by philosopher Bertell Ollman:
Unlike non-dialectical research, where one starts with some

small part and through establishing its connections to other such
parts tries to reconstruct the larger whole, dialectical research
begins with the whole, the system, or as much of it as one under-
stands, and then proceeds to an examination of the part to see
where it fits and how it functions, leading eventually to a fuller
understanding of the whole from which one has begun.8
Of course, the reductionist perspective understands that we must

talk about the whole and that parts interact. Further, in its more
sophisticated variants (such as systems theory), it recognizes that
those interactions produce effects such that the whole is more than
the sum of its parts taken individually. But what are those parts that
are interacting and what is the effect of that interaction? Levins and
Lewontin argue that even the more sophisticated and large-scale ver-
sions of reductionism take as their “elements unitary variables that
are the ‘atoms’ of the system, prior to it, and qualitatively unchanging
as they ebb and flow.” The variables increase and decrease as the result
of their interaction. “But the wholes are not allowed to transform the
parts, except quantitatively.”9
Here, then, is the essential error of all reductionism: those given

fixed parts, which are the starting point, may be combined, may coex-
ist, may even interact—but they are not understood to interpenetrate!
Once you acknowledge interpenetration and thus transformation of
the parts in their interaction, you can no longer treat the parts as fixed
and independent. Parts make wholes but also wholes make parts. In
short, the relation of parts is “not mere ‘interconnection’ or ‘interac-
tion’ but a deeper interpenetration that transforms them so that the
‘same’ variable may have a very different significance in different con-
texts and the behavior of the system can alter its structure.”10
If interpenetration is central to a Marxian dialectical view, then we
must accept that the same particular part (for example, commodity
exchange) in two systems does not mean that the systems are identi-
cal or, indeed, that the properties of the parts themselves are identical
in these different wholes. Interpenetration means that parts are
always determined by the whole, that they are transformed qualita-
tively in their interactions. “The category of totality, the all-pervasive
supremacy of the whole over the parts,” as Lukács understood, is the
“essence” of dialectics.
The First Question: Reproduction
If the whole is not the sum of its isolated parts, what is the truth of
the whole? Lenin’s response was: “The totality of all sides of the phe-
nomenon, of reality and their reciprocal relations—that is what truth
is composed of.”11 Reciprocal relations, however, are not passive rela-
tions; rather, reciprocal interaction is the process described by Levins
and Lewontin in which “elements recreate each other by interacting
and are recreated by the wholes of which they are parts.” A central
dialectical principle, accordingly, is that “change is a characteristic of
all systems and all aspects of all systems.”12
The truth of the whole, in short, is constant movement and change
as the result of the interaction of the elements it contains. Whereas
“non-dialectical thinkers in every discipline,” Ollman comments, “are
involved in a nonstop search for the ‘outside agitator,’ for something
or someone that comes from outside the problem under examination

and is the cause for whatever occurs,” a dialectical thinker focuses
upon what is internal to the whole.13 As Marx put it, “mutual inter-
action takes place between the different moments. This [is] the case
with every organic whole.”14
From this perspective, change and development cannot be viewed
as a simple relationship of cause and effect, of constants and variables,
of independent and dependent variables. For example, cause becomes
effect, effect becomes cause in this reciprocal interaction. As Lenin
noted in his reading of Hegel, causality “is only a small particle of uni-
versal interconnection”; indeed, “the all-sidedness and all-embracing
character of the interconnection of the world . . . is only one-sidedly,
fragmentarily and incompletely expressed by causality.”15 Engels
made the same point in a response to critics:
What all these gentlemen lack is dialectics. All they ever see is
cause on the one hand and effect on the other. But what they fail
to see is that this is an empty abstraction, that in the real world
such metaphysically polar opposites exist only in a crisis, that
instead the whole great process takes place solely and entirely
in the form of interplay. . . . So far as they are concerned, Hegel
might never have existed.16
Precisely because of the constant interaction of its internal relations,

there is movement and self-movement within the whole, “internally-
necessary movement.” This was the point made by Hegel that Lenin
quoted and emphasized: “Contradiction is the root of all movement
and vitality, and it is only insofar as it contains a Contradiction that
anything moves and has impulse and activity.”17 And yet, this empha-
sis upon constant change raises a central question: How is it that
things do persist?
The first question of two that “Marxism encourages me to ask,”
Richard Levins notes, is “why are things the way they are instead of
a little bit different?” The non-dialectical answer is that “things are
the way they are because nothing much is happening to them.” It is
the belief that “stasis is the normal state of affairs, and change must
be accounted for.” In contrast, “A dialectical view begins from the
opposite end: change is universal and much is happening to change
everything. Therefore, equilibrium and stasis are special situations
that have to be explained.”18
The first question posed, in short, is “in the face of constantly dis-
placing influences, how do things remain recognizably what they
are?” The general answer offered as explanation is “homeostasis,
the self-regulation observed in physiology, ecology, climatology, the
economy and indeed all systems that show any persistence.” While
such system-stability is often modeled mathematically by starting
from a set of variables that are prior entities with intrinsic proper-
ties, thus remaining “vulnerable to the reproach of being large-scale
reductionism,” Levins and Lewontin articulate a specific dialectical
answer that we must keep before us: “Our answer is that things are the
way they are because of the actions of opposing processes.”19
Think about equilibrium and stasis in this context. “Homeostasis
takes place,” Levins and Lewontin indicate, “through the actions of
positive and negative feedback loops. If an initial impact sets pro-
cesses in motion that diminish that initial impact, we refer to it as
negative feedback, whereas if the processes magnify the original
change the feedback is positive.”20As biologists, Levins and Lewontin
draw upon many examples from the natural sciences to illustrate
how negative feedback can negate initial changes, for example, how
pesticides may increase pest population by killing off pest predators
and how rapidly falling blood sugar produces anxiety that is relieved
by rising glucose. However, their example of how rising food prices
stimulate increased agricultural production, which tends in turn to
lower food prices, indicates that the existence of negative feedback
as a support for reproduction of an existing system is not limited to
the natural world.21 Negative feedback is present in all homeostasis
and self-regulation, and the dialectical task is to explain why there is
stability and equilibrium, how “things are the way they are because of
the temporary balance of opposing forces.”22
When the opposing forces contained within a system are balanced,
then the system through its self-regulating processes produces and

reproduces its own conditions of existence. However, the joint action
of those opposing forces can be destabilizing rather than a basis for
the reproduction of the system. When positive feedback exceeds
negative feedback, when major changes occur (or even minor ones
if the system is in stress), “the original system can no longer persist
as it was. The system may go into wider and wider fluctuations and
breakdown, or the parts themselves, which have meaning only within
a particular whole, may lose their identity as parts and give rise to a
qualitatively new system.”23
Accordingly, the dialectical task is not only to understand the
stasis and equilibrium of a system but also its opposite, that is, what
can produce its instability. Whereas under normal conditions small
events tend to be subsumed by the system’s self-regulating processes,
under “severe or unusual general stress conditions” a tiny event may
produce major effects (as envisioned in the concept of the “butter-
fly effect”). The latter is possible, Levins and Lewontin note, “when
a system is poised on the brink of a qualitative change.” From this
perspective, “the task of promoting change is one of promoting the
conditions under which small, local events can precipitate the desired
restructuring.”24
Knowing the Whole
But how can we know the whole? Levins and Lewontin argue that
we can’t. “Despite Hegel’s dictum that ‘the truth is the whole,’ ” they
explain, “we cannot study ‘the whole.’” Nevertheless, they insist,
Hegel’s assertion has clear practical value. For one, understanding
that the truth is the whole means that we should always try to extend
the boundaries of the questions we are considering. Further, it directs
us to admit that “after we have defined a system in the broadest terms
we can at the time, there is always something more out there that
might intrude to change our conclusions.”25 But given that the con-
cept of the whole is implicit in their declaration (and obvious from
their work), what does it mean to say that we cannot know the whole?
Consider the critical distinction Marx made in the Introduction to

the Grundrisse between the concrete whole and its reproduction in the
mind. While the real whole is “the point of departure for observation
and conception,” Marx insisted that mere observation and empiri-
cal study cannot possibly grasp the interconnections of that concrete
totality. All that results from observation is a “chaotic conception of
the whole.”26 Accordingly, if we are to understand the concrete total-
ity, that “universal, all-sided, vital connection of everything with
everything,” then, as Lenin observed, we must develop concepts that
“likewise must be hewn, treated, flexible, mobile, relative, mutually
connected, united in opposites, in order to embrace the world.”27
How did Marx grasp the interconnections of that concrete whole?
In Beyond Capital: Marx’s Political Economy of the Working Class,
chapter 4, and in Following Marx: Method, Critique and Crisis (in par-
ticular chapters 5, 10, and 11), I offered an extended discussion of
Marx’s method.28 I explained that Marx argued that we begin with the
“simplest determinations” and concepts that are themselves the result
of analysis of the concrete. Then we proceed on a step-by-step basis
to deduce logically a conception of the whole “as a rich totality of
many determinations and relations.” This “method of rising from the
abstract to the concrete,” Marx stressed, is the “scientifically correct
method”; it is “the way in which thought appropriates the concrete,
reproduces it as the concrete in the mind.” In short, this totality of
thoughts is a product of “the working-up of observation and con-
ception into concepts.” It is “a product of a thinking head, which
appropriates the world in the only way it can.”29
That “thinking head” develops the connection between concepts by
asking always (as Hegel did in his Science of Logic) the essential ques-
tion: what does this concept imply, what is outside this concept but
intimately connected to it? To the extent that a concept can be shown
to imply a further concept, it demonstrates that it contains its nega-
tion, that it is not adequate in itself. Here is the “dialectical moment”
that philosopher and sociologist Henri Lefebvre defined as the “expe-
dient of the mind which finds itself obliged to move from a position it
had hoped was definitive and to take account of something further.”30
Armed by this dialectic of negativity, we can move to higher and

richer concepts, each “enriched by the negation or opposite of the
preceding concept.”31 Through this process, according to Hegel, “cog-
nition rolls forward from content to content. This progress determines
itself, first, in this manner, that it begins from simple determinate-
nesses and that each subsequent one is richer and more concrete.”
In this way, every step of the process is one of “dialectical progress
[that] not only loses nothing and leaves nothing behind, but carries
with it all that it has acquired, enriching and concentrating itself upon
itself.”32
A seemingly mystical adventure of concepts, but it is precisely
how Marx proceeded in Capital. There, we follow Marx as he inter-
rogates the commodity and discovers within it the concept of money.
(These two concepts are inextricably linked and cannot be externally
juxtaposed as the classical political economists did.) Considering
the relationship of commodity and money, in which each is in turn
mediator and end, we uncover the concept of capital in the sphere
of circulation, and from here that of capital in the sphere of produc-
tion, and then capital as a whole as a specific unity of production
and circulation. Thus, an advance to ever richer and more concrete
conceptions.33
As we might expect if we are thinking dialectically, our under-
standing of the parts changes as we advance in the direction of the
“rich totality of many determinations and relations.” The commod-
ity, for example, looks different after development of the concepts of
money, capitalist circulation, capitalist production, and capital as a
whole. And the same is true of money and, indeed, capital itself. They
must. Characteristic of dialectical reasoning, terms and moments are
introduced in a one-sided manner, revealing their all-sidedness in the
course of the construction of the totality. Only when we have success-
fully developed that “totality of thoughts” can we fully understand its
elements.
But does that hour of our understanding ever come? Reading
Hegel, Lenin remarked that truth should not be imagined “in the
form of a bare picture”; rather, “the coincidence of thought with the
object is a process.” Indeed, he stressed, “cognition is the eternal, end-

less approximation of thought to the object.”34 Absolutely central here
is the distinction between the “real concrete” and the “concrete in the
mind.” We do not know the whole, if we mean by that the concrete
totality. Rather, we have at any given point a more or less adequate
mental reproduction of the concrete, a more or less useful intellectual
construct.
As Ollman puts it, “Our knowledge of the real world is mediated
through the construction of concepts in which to think about it; our
contact with reality, insofar as we become aware of it, is contact with
the conceptualized reality.”35 Whereas “the real concrete is simply the
world in which we live, in all its complexity,” we construct our under-
standing of that world through a process of abstraction, which is “the
intellectual activity of breaking this whole down into the mental units
with which we think about it.”36
Insofar as we acknowledge that we do not know the whole but at
best can only endlessly approximate thought to the object, we must
admit that our intellectual construct may misrepresent the real con-
crete. Levins and Lewontin point to several possible reasons. One
may be the particular abstractions through which we have attempted
to reproduce the concrete in the mind:
Different abstractions from the same wholes capture different

aspects of the reality but also leave us with different blindnesses.
Thus it is always necessary to recognize that our abstractions are
intellectual constructs, that an “object” kicks and screams when
it is abstracted from its context and may take its revenge in lead-
ing us astray.37
But another potential problem may be premature closure, that is,

we may not have sufficiently developed the concrete in the mind.
Recognizing that only the whole is the truth, Levins and Lewontin
insist that “we always have to be aware that there is more out there
that might overwhelm our theories and thwart our best intentions.”38
What is excluded from our mental construct, indeed, may infect our
concept of the whole and its parts. In particular, failing to incorpo-

rate new sides of categories under investigation and “seizing upon one
side of a dichotomous pair or a contradiction as if it were the whole
thing” can infect our concept of the whole with “one-sidedness.”39
Finally, there may be a gap between the real whole and the mental
construct by which we attempt to grasp the concrete because the con-
crete is not static and has changed in such a way as to invalidate our
original concrete in the mind. As Levins and Lewontin argue, “We
need a permanent awareness of the model as a human intellectual
construct that is more or less useful within certain bounds and then
can become nonsense.”40
How, then, to proceed in studying capitalism? By building that
intellectual construct, that concrete in the mind, which approximates
the real concrete, and at the same time being open to the possibility
that the concept of the whole that Marx developed in Capital was
faulty and, indeed, one-sided. As Lukács insisted:
Orthodox Marxism . . . does not imply the uncritical acceptance

of the results of Marx’s investigations. It is not the “belief ” in
this or that thesis, nor the exegesis of a “sacred” book. On the
contrary, orthodoxy refers exclusively to method.41
PA RT I I
ONE-SIDED MARXISM
3
Marx’s Conceptualization of
Capitalism as an Organic System
What was the whole that Marx presented in Capital? Did that intel-
lectual construct truly represent the real concrete, or was there
“something else out there” that can infect our concept of the whole? To
understand capitalism and the relation of its parts, Marx introduced
the concept of capitalism as an organic system. This is a particular
conception of the whole. In capitalism as an organic system (“the
completed bourgeois system”), “every economic relation presupposes
every other in its bourgeois economic form, and everything posited is
thus also a presupposition; this is the case with every organic system.”1
In short, all the elements within this organic system are parts that
have been produced by the system; the completion of this system (“its
development to its totality”) “consists precisely in subordinating all
elements of society to itself, or in creating out of it the organs which
it still lacks. This is historically how it becomes a totality.” Thus, in
capitalism as an organic system, all the elements of capitalism have
been successfully subordinated within the system.
Characteristic of “every organic system” is that the premises of the
system are results that the system itself produces; this theme of the
reproduction of premises permeates Marx’s discussion in Capital.
For example, Marx pointed out that capital produces and reproduces
material products and social relations, which are themselves presup-
positions and premises of production. “Those conditions, like these
relations, are on the one hand the presuppositions of the capitalist
production process, on the other its results and creations; they are
both produced and reproduced by it.”2 Similarly, considering the
circuit of capital as a whole, Marx stressed that “all the premises of
the process appear as its result, as premises produced by the process
itself. Each moment appears as a point of departure, of transit, and
of return.” Indeed, all presuppositions, all preconditions, all premises
are themselves results: “In a constantly revolving orbit, every point is
simultaneously a starting point and a point of return.”3
Production and reproduction of premises implies incessant
renewal. As Marx opened his chapter on simple reproduction in
Volume I of Capital:
Whatever the social form of the production process, it has to

be continuous, it must periodically repeat the same phases. A
society can no more cease to produce than it can cease to con-
sume. When viewed, therefore, as a connected whole, and in
the constant flux of its incessant renewal, every social process of
production is at the same time a process of reproduction.4
There you have the point that Marx wanted to stress—the neces-
sity to recognize that capitalism is such a system of reproduction.
“Capitalist production therefore reproduces in the course of its own
process the separation between labour-power and the conditions of
labour. It thereby reproduces and perpetuates the conditions under
which the worker is exploited.”5 In this conception, capitalism is an
organic system because it reproduces its premises—the capitalist and
the wage-laborer:
The capitalist process of production, therefore, seen as a total,

connected process, i.e. a process of reproduction, produces not
only commodities, not only surplus-value, but it also produces
CAPITALISM AS AN OrgANIC SYSTEM 45
and reproduces the capital-relation itself; on the one hand the

capitalist, on the other the wage-labourer.6
Since capital and wage-labor, the premises of capitalist production,

are “both produced and reproduced by it,” to understand capitalism
as a system we must look at precisely how the system is reproduced.
We need to examine how it “creates its own presuppositions . . . by
means of its own production process,” how capital “no longer pro-
ceeds from presuppositions in order to become, but rather it is itself
presupposed, and proceeds from itself to create the conditions of its
maintenance and growth.”7
Thinking about a system that is “itself presupposed” permits us to
understand the nature of a system and why it persists; it explains “the
structure of society in which all relations coexist simultaneously and
support one another.”8 In short, by considering that “total, connected
process” in incessant renewal, Marx was answering the first question
of Levins and Lewontin—why things remain recognizably what they
are.
The Second Question
A system in the process of developing upon the basis of presupposi-

tions that it has not created itself, on the other hand, points to the
second essential question that “Marxism encourages me to ask”: How
did things get the way they are? To this, Levins and Lewontin answer
that “things are the way they are because they got that way, and not
because they have to be that way, or always were that way, or because
it’s the only way to be.” In short, in contrast to those necessary connec-
tions in an organic system, their answer to the question of “evolution,
history and development” is contingency, the many possible routes to
the development of a system that is presupposed and proceeds from
itself.9
This separation between the two questions is precisely the one that
Marx made in Capital by distinguishing between the reproduction
of capitalist relations of production, on the one hand, and “so-called
primitive accumulation of capital” on the other. Capitalist production

presupposes, he insisted, the “capital-relation” (capital and wage-
labor), that is, the “complete separation between the workers and the
ownership of the conditions for the realization of their labour.” In
contrast, his discussion of original accumulation considers a particu-
lar example of how things “got that way,” the historical process that
“creates the capital-relation,” namely, “the pre-history of capital, and
of the mode of production corresponding to capital.”10
With respect to the creation of the capital-relation, things indeed
did get that way “not because they have to be that way, or always were
that way, or because it’s the only way to be.” Enclosures, state regula-
tion of wages, bloody colonial barbarism, and speculation in state debt
were all elements that Marx described as part of that original creation
of presuppositions for England and the Western European countries
that followed that path. However, they were neither necessary in their
particulars, nor were they part of the historic presuppositions of the
capital-relation elsewhere (for example, in Japan).
This distinction between the reproduction of the system, on the
one hand, and its original creation, on the other, makes it obvious
why Marx first examined the conditions for the reproduction of the
system rather than following the historical order, that is, the prehis-
tory of capital. It demonstrates the serious error of proposing that
Marx’s discussion of original accumulation should be read first before
grasping capitalism as an organic system. If we don’t know what the
essential elements in capitalist relations of production are, how can
we identify the critical historical events that contributed to create that
system? Only after Marx had revealed capital and wage-labor as the
premises and results of capitalist production could he then focus upon
the preconditions for the initial emergence of each. Theory, in short,
guides the historical inquiry. Our method, Marx noted, “indicates the
points where historical investigation must enter in”; understanding
the nature of capitalism as an organic system “point[s] towards a past
lying behind this system.”11
What happens if you don’t distinguish clearly between an organic
system and a contingent set of historic presuppositions that create its
starting point? By failing to distinguish between “historic premises,”

those “past presuppositions” that belong to the history of the forma-
tion of capital “but in no way to its contemporary history, i.e. not to
the real system of the mode of production ruled by it,” it is easy to
obscure the specific nature of the system. That was Marx’s point with
respect to bourgeois economists who focused upon individual savings
as the source of capital. By “formulating the conditions of its becom-
ing as the conditions of its contemporary realization, i.e. presenting
the moments in which the capitalist still appropriates as not-capital-
ist—because he is still becoming—as the very conditions in which he
appropriates as capitalist,” they were masking exploitation of workers
as the condition of existence of capitalism.12 In contrast, by consider-
ing capitalism as an organic system, as a system of reproduction, we
understand that capital is the result of the exploitation of workers.13
Premises to Be Reproduced
“On the one hand the capitalist, on the other the wage-labourer.” On
the one hand, the owner of means of production and money who
is focused upon the growth of his capital; on the other, the worker
who lacks those means of production and accordingly must sell her
ability to perform labor in order to purchase the means of subsis-
tence. These, we see, are the specific premises of capitalist production,
premises that must be reproduced in capitalism.
Capitalist and wage-laborer, however, presuppose other premises.
Logically presupposed are commodity and money. Before capital can
exploit wage-laborers in the process of production, it must be able
to purchase labor-power as a commodity with money. The circuit of
capital, in short, requires commodities, money, and labor-power as a
commodity. Similarly, for the circuit of wage-labor, the worker must
be able to take the money received as wages, and “it is the worker
himself who converts the money into whatever use-values he desires;
it is he who buys commodities as he wishes.”14 Thus, commodity
and money are necessary premises for the circuits of capital and
wage-labor.15
Naturally, commodity and money also have their premises. They

imply a separation of producers such that their need for the products
of each other is not satisfied through a direct social relation between
the producers but, rather, only through a social relation between their
products, a social relation expressed as the exchange value of their
commodities. If the social relations among the producers were such
as to permit a direct exchange of “activities, determined by commu-
nal needs and communal purposes,” the conditions that require a
commodity-money economy—that is, “the market”—would not be
present; in short, atomization of the producers is a condition for com-
modity and money and thus capitalism.16
Further, for capitalist production and the exploitation of the wage-
laborer to occur, a particular commodity must be available for the
capitalist—labor-power as a commodity. And that, too, has its logical
premise: the owner of money must find the free worker available on
the commodity market, and that has a double condition: (1) as the
owner of her labor-capacity, she is free to sell that capacity as a com-
modity, and (2) she is free of the means of production that would
permit her to produce and sell commodities in which her labor has
been objectified. Thus, the logical condition for the existence of labor-
power as a commodity is that the worker is liberated from political
constraints upon her person and is separated from the means of
production.17
For capital to be reproduced, labor-power as a commodity must
be reproduced. Having purchased use-values with his wages, the
worker must be able to consume those (as well as private labor within
the household).18 “Now, as regards the worker’s consumption,” Marx
commented, “this reproduces one thing, namely himself, as living
labour capacity.” Precisely, though, because this process of consump-
tion is one that annihilates those use-values, it is a process that “simply
reproduces the needy individual.” 19 As a result, the worker must offer
himself again as the seller of labor-power to the owner of money in
order to obtain wages. Commodity and money in this respect are pro-
duced as labor-power and wages.
Capital as Premise
The reproduction of the side of capital requires two acts. Not only
must the capitalist be able to compel the production of capital through
the process of production, but he must be able to make that surplus
value real through the process of circulation. The first act flows from
the results of the worker’s sale of his labor-power to the capitalist:
“Firstly, the worker works under the control of the capitalist to whom
his labour belongs,” and “Secondly, the product is the property of the
capitalist and not that of the worker, its immediate producer.”20 As the
result of production within and through this particular set of prop-
erty rights, the capitalist is able to compel the performance of surplus
labor by workers and, as owner of the products of labor, that is, as the
residual claimant, is the beneficiary of the surplus value they latently
contain.
In the second act, however, reproduction of capital involves
more than the existence of commodities containing the products
of exploitation. In particular, “The capitalist must have contrived to
sell his commodities, and to reconvert into capital the greater part
of the money received from their sale.”21 In what Marx designated in
Volume 2 of Capital as the third stage of the circuit of capital (after
capital’s appearance as buyer and as producer of commodities con-
taining surplus value), “the capitalist returns to the market as seller.”
It is in Volume 2 that he explores what Volume 1 left “uninvestigated,”
the metamorphosis of capital through its different forms.22 Here, we
are shown the movement of capital from its commodity form to its
money form through the sale of commodities and through which
the surplus value latent in those commodities is made real (realized).
Further, we are able to follow the movement of this money-capital, as
it is used to purchase means of production and labor-power, arriving
back at capital in the sphere of production where, as productive capi-
tal, the capitalist exploitation of the worker occurs.
From money-capital to productive-capital to commodity-capital
and back to money-capital—there is the circuit of capital as a whole
that permits the reproduction of capital as the premise of capitalist

production. Commodity and money in this respect are produced as
commodity-capital and money-capital. Volume 2 ends with Marx’s
reproduction models, where he explores conditions for the successful
realization of the value and surplus value that emerge from the sphere
of production.
By understanding this continuing circuit of capital, we recognize
that the capital that appears as a premise for capitalist production
does not drop from the sky or otherwise from outside the circuit of
capital. Even, indeed, if capital were to come initially from another
source, Marx insisted that “the mere continuity” of this process of
production and circulation converts all capital into “capitalized sur-
plus-value.” That is, it is the result of the exploitation of workers.23
This is how the premise of capital is reproduced in capitalism as an
organic system: “It is itself presupposed, and proceeds from itself to
create the conditions of its maintenance and growth.”
Thus, not only does the successful sale of commodities permit the
capitalist to satisfy his own consumption desires and to replace the cap-
ital invested in the means of production (that is, simple reproduction),
but it also creates the conditions for the growth of his capital. In order
to drive beyond all barriers to this growth, Marx explained that capital
struggles to extend and intensify the workday and to increase produc-
tivity relative to wages through development of productive forces. By
increasing the rate of exploitation of workers and extracting increased
surplus value from them, expanded reproduction or accumulation of
capital is possible. Thus, the premise of the growth of capital is clear—
exploitation of wage-laborers within the sphere of capitalist production
and the realization of surplus value in the sphere of circulation.
The Wage-Laborer as Premise
In capitalism as an organic system, capital as premise is the product of

the system itself. So also is the other premise of the system, the wage-
laborer. In capitalism as an organic system, wage-laborers are not the
result of the disintegration of other, pre-capitalist systems. They are
not people formed outside of capitalism. Accordingly, “bloody disci-

pline,” “police methods,” and “state compulsion” are not required in
capitalism as an organic system to ensure their submission to capital.24
On the contrary, with the development of capitalism as an organic
system, they have already been subordinated to capital. Rather than
abstract wage-laborers, they are already the products of capital.
So what is the nature of the workers produced by capital? While
capital develops productive forces to achieve its preconceived goal
(the growth of profits and capital), Marx pointed out that “all means
for the development of production” under capitalism “distort the
worker into a fragment of a man,” degrade him, and “alienate him
from the intellectual potentialities of the labour process.”25 Capital
explains the mutilation, the impoverishment, the “crippling of body
and mind” of the worker “bound hand and foot for life to a single spe-
cialized operation” that occurs in the division of labor characteristic
of the capitalist process of manufacturing. But did the development
of machinery end that crippling of workers? Marx’s response was that
under capitalist relations such developments complete the “separation
of the intellectual faculties of the production process from manual
labour.”26 Thinking and doing become separate and hostile, and “every
atom of freedom, both in bodily and in intellectual activity,” is lost.
A particular type of person is produced in capitalism as an organic
system. Producing within capitalist relations is what Marx called a
process of a “complete emptying-out,” “total alienation,” the “sacrifice
of the human end-in-itself to an entirely external end.”27 Accordingly,
we need money, the true need that capitalism creates; we need money
in order to fill the vacuum of our lives with things. We are driven
to consume. In addition to producing commodities and capital itself,
capitalism thus produces a fragmented, crippled human being, whose
enjoyment consists in possessing and consuming things—more and
more things. Consumerism is not an accident within capitalism.
Capital constantly generates new needs for workers, and it is upon
this, Marx noted, that “the contemporary power of capital rests”; in
short, every new need for capitalist commodities is a new link in the
golden chain that links workers to capital.28
This is the other premise of capitalism as a system of reproduc-

tion—a particular person always available to be exploited by capital.
Is it likely that people crippled by the capitalist process of produc-
tion can spontaneously grasp the nature of this destructive system?
On the contrary, capitalism reproduces the worker’s dependence
upon capital. As the result of generations of workers having sold their
labor-power to the capitalist, “the social productivity of labour” has
been transposed “into the material attributes of capital”; the result is
that “the advantages of machinery, the use of science, invention, etc.
. . . are deemed to be the attributes of capital.”29 Accordingly, rather
than producing a working class that wants to put an end to capitalism,
capital tends to produce the working class it needs, workers who treat
capitalism as common sense. As Marx explained in Capital:
The advance of capitalist production develops a working class

which by education, tradition and habit looks upon the require-
ments of that mode of production as self-evident natural laws.
The organization of the capitalist process of production, once it
is fully developed, breaks down all resistance.30
To this Marx added that capital’s generation of a reserve army of

the unemployed “sets the seal on the domination of the capitalist over
the worker.” That constant generation of a relative surplus population
of workers means, he argued, that wages are “confined within limits
satisfactory to capitalist exploitation, and lastly, the social dependence
of the worker on the capitalist, which is indispensable, is secured.”31
Accordingly, Marx concluded that the capitalist can rely upon the
worker’s “dependence on capital, which springs from the conditions
of production themselves, and is guaranteed in perpetuity by them.”32
Things, we conclude, remain recognizably what they are because
in capitalism as an organic system every economic relation is repro-
duced “in its bourgeois economic form.” In capitalism as an organic
system, capital subordinates “all elements of society to itself.” Think
about the working class in this picture. Production under capital-
ist relation creates fragmented, crippled human beings. Capitalism
separates thinking and doing for the worker. It produces a working

class that looks upon capital’s requirements as “self-evident natural
laws.” It breaks down all resistance to capital. It reproduces the “indis-
pensable” social dependence of the worker on the capitalist. Who
could deny that Marx’s Capital maintains that capitalism as an organic
system produces and reproduces its essential premise of wage-labor
“in its bourgeois economic form” . . . in perpetuity?
In perpetuity? Surely something is missing when we consider
capitalism as an organic system. Actually, much is missing in this
intellectual construct. One obvious example is that in the con-
crete whole that is capitalism there is the continuing destruction
of pre-capitalist relations of production, the expropriation of peas-
ant producers, the extraction of surpluses from outside the organic
system of capitalism—indeed, all of the processes that were critical
in “so-called primitive accumulation of capital.” They are not part of
Marx’s conception of capitalism as an organic system.
And that points to the limited purpose of this intellectual construct,
which is the identification of the essential elements of capitalism as a
system of reproduction based upon the capitalist exploitation of the
wage-laborer. However, given this limited purpose, we need to ask
whether this conception of capitalism as an organic system contains
hidden problems, ones that obscure its premises and prevent us from
recognizing elements that point beyond capitalism to a new system.
4
Crises and Non-reproduction
Think about the picture of the reproduction of capitalism in perpetu-

ity. What about the promised inevitable crisis of capitalism? How can
we reconcile the idea that capitalism inevitably will be transcended,
that is, non-reproduced, with Capital’s powerful description of the
socially dependent working class that capital produces and repro-
duces in perpetuity?
Perhaps intuitively recognizing this paradox, or perhaps because
this is their proclivity, Marxist economists have focused upon the
other element in the capital-relation, the side of capital. Their chosen
task: to demonstrate that the non-reproduction of capitalism occurs
because capital cannot be reproduced in perpetuity. Because of its
internal contradictions that are reflected in its inherent tendency for
crisis, capital, and thus the capital-relation, comes to an end.
Crises are always possible in a commodity-money economy. In
contrast to a barter economy, sale and purchase are not immediately
linked in capitalism because of the existence of money as the inter-
mediary. Following a sale, the money received by the commodity
seller, whether it be the capitalist or the worker, need not be imme-
diately turned into purchase of a commodity. Because that seller can
“defer the retransformation of money into commodity,” therein lies
CrISES AND NON-rEPrODUCTION 55
the possibility of the general overproduction and crisis denied by J.

B. Say and the political economists who abstract from money. “At a
given moment, the supply of all commodities can be greater than the
demand for all commodities,” Marx pointed out, “since the demand
for the general commodity, money, exchange value, is greater than the
demand for all particular commodities.”1 In such a case, “the crisis
occurs not only because the commodity is unsaleable, but because it
is unsaleable within a particular period of time.”2 Demonstrating the
possibility of capitalist crisis was easy for Marx—and trivial.
Rather than a matter of mere contingency, the question that inter-
ested Marx was what makes crises in capitalism necessary. What leads
capitalists to defer purchase, what interrupts the accumulation of
capital (and, indeed, the simple reproduction of capital)? Two differ-
ent types of crisis theories have been favored explanations of Marxist
economists. One focuses upon the interaction of the production and
circulation of capital—in particular, the problem of realizing the sur-
plus value latently generated in the sphere of capitalist production,
that is, the phenomenon of overproduction. The other emphasizes the
difficulty of generating sufficient surplus value in production relative
to capital invested, and it stresses an inevitably falling rate of profit
as capitalism develops. For both theoretical arguments, inherent ten-
dencies for economic imbalances interfere with the reproduction of
capital, one of the premises of the capital-relation, and thus point
toward the non-reproduction of capitalism.
Overproduction
Successful completion of a circuit of capital, Marx demonstrated in

his reproduction exercises in Volume 2 of Capital, requires a par-
ticular balance between, on the one side, the value of commodities
produced in the two basic sectors—means of production and articles
of consumption—and, on the other side, the money intended for
purchase of those specific sets of commodities. Such a balance of pro-
duction and realization of surplus value is possible, Marx argued in
the Grundrisse, so long as specific proportions and internal relations
are respected. At any given point, he proposed, there is an “inner divi-

sion” of necessary and surplus labor and of direct labor and means of
production that mandates that “the exchange of capitals among one
another takes place in specific and restricted proportions.”3 In short,
there are structural requirements for that balance of production and
realization of surplus value.
However, capitalism is a commodity-money economy and not a
planned system that can ensure the necessary conditions for equilib-
rium. Individual capitalists act as if there are no structural conditions
(no locked room). This immediately introduces the possibility that
those specific and restricted proportions will be violated. Exchange
of commodities and money “does not change the inner character-
istics of realization,” but it gives those requirements “a reciprocally
independent form, and thereby lets their unity exist merely as an
inner necessity, which must therefore come forcibly to the surface in
crises.”4 Thus, it is the violation of those inner requirements inherent
in the “obscure” structure of the system that produces crisis: “There
would be no crisis without this inner unity of factors that are appar-
ently indifferent to each other.”5 Although in exchange the elements
appear indifferent and independent of each other, “their inner neces-
sity becomes manifest in the crisis, which puts a forcible end to their
seeming indifference towards each other.”6
What makes such a crisis predictable? Specific to capitalism is that
the conditions for the realization of surplus value differ significantly
from the conditions for the production of surplus value. While every
capitalist would like “the workers of other capitalists to be the great-
est consumers possible of his own commodity,” Marx explained that
each tries to restrict the consumption of his own worker, “his ability
to exchange, his wage, as much as possible.” And, the latter side, the
side of the production of surplus value, is the essence of the capital-
relation: “The relation of every capitalist to his own workers is the
relation as such of capital and labour, the essential relation.”7 Since
capital must sell commodities in order to realize surplus value, what
occurs in the sphere of production comes back to haunt capital in
the sphere of circulation. “Contradiction in the capitalist mode of
production,” Marx noted in Volume 2 of Capital. “The workers are

important for the market as buyers of commodities. But as sellers of
their commodity—labour-power—capitalist society has the tendency
to restrict them to their minimum price.”8
Accordingly, since the capitalist sphere of circulation is not an
abstract, externally juxtaposed sphere of circulation but, rather, one
determined by capitalist relations of production, its “antagonistic
conditions of distribution” produce a “constant tension between the
restricted dimensions of consumption on the capitalist basis, and a
production that is constantly striving to overcome these immanent
barriers.”9 When capital comes up against those barriers in the sphere
of circulation, capitalist production comes to a halt; this is because
capital “posits necessary labour only to the extent and in so far as it
is surplus labour and the latter is realizable as surplus value.”10 Thus,
the combination of capital’s drive to expand production as if there are
no limits and the limits to the market given by the restriction upon
workers generates “overproduction, the fundamental contradiction of
developed capital.”11
Nevertheless, limits upon workers’ consumption are not the proxi-
mate (as opposed to ultimate) cause of crises of overproduction
because such limits are always present. So what changes to produce
crises? Overproduction crises develop because of the victories of
capital in the sphere of production, that is, its success in increas-
ing the rate of exploitation and thereby altering the “inner division”
of necessary and surplus labor. The ability of capital “to reduce the
relation of this necessary labour to surplus labour to the minimum,”
Marx pointed out, posits “a new barrier to the sphere of exchange.”12
Overproduction arises precisely because the consumption of workers
“does not grow correspondingly with the productivity of labour.”13 All
other things equal, this change in the “inner division” of necessary
and surplus labor generates a tendency for overproduction to emerge
in the sector producing articles of consumption (Department II) and
to spread from there.
All other things, however, are not necessarily equal immediately. If
capitalist expenditures upon means of production rise sufficiently, the
“specific and restricted proportions” necessary for balance will not be

violated. Expanded production in Department I, in short, can sup-
port the realization of surplus value. Marx made this very point in his
reproduction models in Volume 2 of Capital: “The capitalist class as a
whole . . . must itself cast into circulation the money needed to realize
its surplus value.” Not only was this point not paradoxical, “it is in fact
a necessary condition of the entire mechanism.”14 Rather than crisis,
the immediate effect of an increase in the rate of exploitation may be
expansion and boom.
Ultimately, the apparent independence of the means of production
and the conditions for realizing surplus value proves to be illusory.
Continued investment in Department I must be validated by the lim-
itless growth of demand for articles of consumption. Although the
demand for new means of production may appear “adequate and suf-
ficient,” Marx indicated that “its inadequacy shows itself as soon as
the final product encounters its limit in direct and final consump-
tion.”15 As that occurs, the effects are multiplied in Department I:
“The overproduction of coal is implied in the overproduction of iron,
yarn etc. (even if coal was produced only in proportion to the produc-
tion of iron and yarn etc).”16 Under these conditions, “capital already
invested is in fact massively unemployed, since the reproduction pro-
cess is stagnant.” Then comes “the inevitable crash.”17
Thus, the initial boom is entirely consistent with the limits upon
workers’ consumption inherent in capitalism. As Marx indicated in
his Volume 2 comment on the contradiction of the capitalist mode
of production, “Further contradiction: the periods in which capital-
ist production exerts all its forces regularly show themselves to be
periods of over-production; because the limit to the application of
the productive powers is not simply the production of value, but also
its realization.”18 The consistent pattern, he insisted in Capital, was
one of “feverish production, a consequent glut on the market, then a
contraction of the market, which causes production to be crippled.” 19
Crises thus put “a forcible end” to the apparent separation of the
production and realization of surplus value. While they reveal the
existence of particular barriers inherent in the nature of capitalism,
“transitory over-abundance of capital, over-production and crises” in

themselves do not bring capitalism to an end.20 Rather, Marx viewed
crises as “momentary, violent solutions for the existing contradic-
tions, violent eruptions that re-establish the disturbed balance for
the time being.”21 And that is the point—overproduction crises are a
regular part of the process of reproduction. “Permanent crises,” Marx
indicated, “do not exist.”22 Rather, the emerging crisis acts “to restore
the correct relation between necessary and surplus labour, on which,
in the last analysis, everything rests.”23
The Falling Rate of Profit
In contrast to crises of overproduction that revolve around the ques-

tion of the realization of produced surplus value, emphasis upon
the falling rate of profit stresses the tendency of the value of capital
expended upon means of production to rise more rapidly than sur-
plus value extracted from workers—thus, inadequate production of
surplus value. Further, in contrast to a focus upon periodic crises of
overproduction, those who concentrate upon the falling rate of profit
(FROP) tend to stress a permanent crisis of capitalism.
It is well known that Marx was not the first to identify a tendency
for the rate of profit to fall “with the progress of capitalist produc-
tion.” Indeed, he described this as “the most important law of political
economy.”24 In the case of Adam Smith, this tendency was the result
of the growth in the quantity of capital, that is, the increase in the
supply of capital. For Ricardo, on the other hand, diminishing returns
in agriculture over time increased the level of necessary labor and
thereby reduced the rate of surplus value (which he identified as the
rate of profit). Here, for classical political economy, was the spectre
haunting capitalism: “What disturbs Ricardo,” Marx commented, “is
the way that the rate of profit, which is the stimulus of capitalist pro-
duction and both the condition for and driving force in accumulation,
is endangered by the development of production itself.”25 Indeed, “the
whole of the Ricardian and Malthusian school is a cry of woe over the
day of judgement this process would inevitably bring about.”26 Could
one wonder at “the terror which the law of the declining rate of profits
inspires in the economists”?27
However, what does it mean to speak about an “important law of
political economy”? For a student of Hegel “law” has a specific mean-
ing—it is what we postulate as we search for regularities in the chaos
and noise of appearance. Thus, Hegel asserted: “Appearance and law
have one and the same content.”28 Empiricism is its source, and what
is missing from law as such is an understanding of inner connections
and necessity. Lenin grasped this in his reading of the Science of Logic:
“Law is the enduring (the persisting) in appearances.” The concept of
law is one of the stages of cognition, but every law is “narrow, incom-
plete, approximate.”29 And this was explicitly the point Marx made in
one of his earliest works. Political economy, he proposed, has its laws
but “it does not comprehend these laws”; we have to go beyond exter-
nal appearances “to grasp the intrinsic connection.”30
FROP was one such law, a law that the economists formulated but
did not understand. Contrary to their explanations, Marx explained
that the real source of the pattern observed by political economy was
that central to the development of capitalism is the substitution of
means of production for direct living labor, that is, the growth in the
technical composition of capital. As capitalism develops, past labor
(dead labor) plays an increasingly important role in production rel-
ative to present, living labor. But since the source of surplus value,
Marx argued, is the exploitation of living workers, the rise in the tech-
nical composition of capital brings with it a relative reduction in that
portion of capital that yields surplus value.
Thus, the change in the value-composition of capital (the rise in
the organic composition of capital) was Marx’s inner explanation for
the law that classical political economy had identified. Through his
critique of political economy, Marx revealed what was hidden from
the political economists and explicitly rejected their explanations for
their law. However, Marx proceeded then to stress that there were
other tendencies in capitalism as it developed that counteracted and
weakened the tendency for the rate of profit to fall. In particular, two
such tendencies were (1) increases in the rate of surplus value; and
(2) economies in constant capital, with the former increasing surplus

value relative to capital expended and the latter, lowering constant
capital relative to surplus value. These, however, were not indepen-
dent and external factors disturbing the trajectory of the system.
Rather, they were negative feedbacks inherent in the system.
Consider the logic behind Marx’s inner explanation for the ten-
dency for the rate of profit to fall. With the substitution of a machine
for a given number of workers, past labor rises relative to present
labor both in the form of fixed capital and also with the increased
quantities of semi-manufactured inputs and “raw and ancillary mate-
rials to be transformed into products in the same time by the same
number of workers, i.e. with less labour.”31 Assuming the average
value of means of production and the average value of labor-power
constant, the organic composition of capital will mirror this increase
in the technical composition of capital while the rate of surplus value
is constant. Under these conditions, the capital required in the sphere
of production rises relative to the surplus value produced, and the
rate of profit must fall.
Yet the rise in the technical composition of capital is intrinsically
linked to increased productivity, an obvious point when we think
about the increased inputs that a given number of workers are able
to transform into finished products. So, consider the effect of this
increased productivity. Marx insisted in Volume 1 of Capital that
increases in productivity (both directly and indirectly) in the sector
producing articles of consumption have the effect of driving down
necessary labor and raising the rate of surplus value. This, after all,
is the central point of Marx’s theoretical exposition of the concept of
relative surplus value.
In short, the rise in the technical composition of capital gener-
ates a particular feedback from increased productivity—a tendency
for the rate of surplus value to increase.32 It would appear at first
sight, accordingly, that this “counter-tendency” would counteract
the tendency of the rate of profit to fall; that is, the combination of
an increase in the organic composition of capital and an increased
rate of surplus value would have an indeterminate effect on the rate
of profit. However, if the rise in the organic composition of capital

mirrors the rise in the technical composition of capital, no increase
in the rate of surplus value (even if it were to continue to the point
where almost all new value is captured by capital in the form of sur-
plus value) can counteract that increase in the organic composition
of capital. Here, though, is the begged question. For the movement
of the organic composition of capital to mirror that of the techni-
cal composition of capital, the average value of means of production
must be unchanged. But why should the average value of means of
production remain unchanged if increases in the technical composi-
tion of capital increase productivity?
Better than most of his disciples, Marx understood that the argu-
ment for an ultimately declining rate of profit involves ignoring the
feedback of productivity increases upon the value of constant capi-
tal. Writing in the Grundrisse, where the basic elements of his FROP
argument were first developed, Marx argued that the composition
of capital would remain the same if “productivity increases at the
same time not only in the given branch of production, but also in its
conditions.” On the other hand, a rise in the constant component of
capital emerges “if the objective conditions of production . . . remain
unchanged in value.”33 Marx’s argument for the growth in the com-
position of capital explicitly rested upon the uneven development of
productivity:
If the force of production increased simultaneously in the pro-

duction of the different conditions of production, raw material,
means of production and means of subsistence, and in the
[branches of production] determined [by them], then their
growth would bring about no change in the relation between the
different component parts of the capital.34
He returned to this same point several years later in his Economic

Manuscripts of 1861–63. There, he extended calculations for the
rate of profit and demonstrated that, depending upon assumptions
about relative productivity changes, (a) the rate of profit falls, (b) is
constant or (c) rises.35 Of all the cases he considered there, the only
one that corresponds to the FROP story introduced in chapter 13 of
Volume 3 of Capital is where productivity in the sector producing
material inputs is explicitly assumed constant. Accordingly, Marx
concluded from these exercises that it would appear “that the rate of
profit cannot fall unless” (a) the value of labor-power rises (Ricardo’s
assertion); or (b) “there is a rise in the value of constant capital in
relation to variable. And the latter would appear to be restricted to
cases where the productive power of labour does not rise equally and
simultaneously in all the branches of production which contribute to
produce the commodity.”36 Finally, you can see the same point twice
in Marx’s exposition of FROP in Capital 3, where he admitted that the
rate of profit might remain the same (a) if “the productivity of labour
cheapens all the elements of constant and variable capital to the same
extent”; and (b) “if the increase in productivity affected all the ingre-
dients of the commodity uniformly and simultaneously.”37
Equal productivity changes in all sectors? No falling rate of profit.
Indeed, Marx explicitly added that “the rate of profit could even rise,
if the rise in the rate of surplus value was coupled with a significant
reduction in the value of the elements of constant capital, and fixed
capital in particular.”38 Once we consider capitalism as a system,
FROP appears as a tendency whose realization depends upon the
relative strength of feedback loops associated with productivity
changes, feedback that is internal to the system rather than an exter-
nal counterforce. In this respect, Marx proposed with respect to
FROP that “the law operates therefore simply as a tendency, whose
effect is decisive only under particular circumstances and over long
periods.”39
What are those “particular circumstances” and why only over long
periods? Significantly, Marx proposed that it was only in “isolated
cases” that cheapening of “all the elements of constant and variable
capital to the same extent” prevents the rise in the organic composi-
tion of capital and the fall in the rate of profit. Rather than affecting “all
ingredients of the commodity uniformly and simultaneously,” Marx
stressed that in practice “the development of labour productivity is far
from uniform in the various branches of industry and, besides being

uneven in degree, often takes place in opposite directions.”40
Is there a systemic reason, though, for productivity increases to
lag in the sector producing means of production? Not when it comes
to fixed capital (for example, machinery), and Marx offered none.
But consider the other side of constant capital. Raw material, Marx
pointed out, “forms a major component of constant capital,” and with
growing productivity, its value “forms an ever-growing component of
the value of the commodity produced.” For instance, if productivity in
wool spinning is tripled, “then, provided the conditions of production
of the wool remained the same … three times as much capital would
have to be expended in wool production.” Obviously, without “a cor-
responding decline in raw material’s value arising from the increasing
productivity of the labour applied in its own creation,” the result will
be a significant growth in constant capital.41
But would that corresponding growth in productivity be forthcom-
ing? Considering the growth in the technical composition of capital,
Marx asked if ten times as much cotton can be worked on by a spin-
ner as the result of technical change, why should not the cotton itself
also be produced ten times as productively, “that is, why should the
value ratio not remain the same?” His answer was unequivocal:
To this it is quite easy to answer that some kinds of raw materials,

such as wool, silk, leather, are produced by animal organic pro-
cesses, while cotton, linen, etc are produced by vegetable organic
processes and capitalist production has not yet succeeded, and
never will succeed in mastering these processes in the same way
as it has mastered purely mechanical or inorganic chemical pro-
cesses. . . . As far as coal and metal (wood) are concerned, they
will become much cheaper with the advance of production; this
will however become more difficult as mines are exhausted, etc.42
Very simply, Marx repeatedly noted that it was “easy to compre-

hend” lagging (and even declining) productivity in agriculture and
the extractive industries because in these cases “the productivity of
labour is also bound up with natural conditions, which are often less
favourable as productivity rises—as far as that depends on social con-
ditions.” Precisely because “we not only have the social productivity
of labour to consider but also its natural productivity which depends
on the natural conditions within which labour is carried on,” the feed-
back of productivity from increases in the technical composition of
capital in such cases (and thus also its effect as counter-tendency) is
weakened. 43
Was Marx, then, fleeing “from economics to seek refuge in organic
chemistry,” as he described Ricardo’s falling rate of profit theory?44
Hardly. Whereas Ricardo’s argument was based upon diminish-
ing productivity and a fall in the rate of surplus value, for Marx the
tendency of the rate of profit to fall was associated with rising pro-
ductivity and a rising rate of surplus value. Further, whereas Ricardo
“thinks that agriculture must become unproductive absolutely,”
for Marx the fall in the rate of profit would occur not, for example,
because “the yield of cotton cultivation had declined, but only that it
had not become more productive in the same ratio as cotton manufac-
turing. Therefore only a relative reduction in its productivity, despite
the absolute increase in it.”
Such a relative decline due to “the natural conditions within which
labour is carried on,” Marx proposed, only demonstrates “that indus-
try and agriculture do not develop to the same degree in bourgeois
production. If they do not do this, that alone is sufficient to explain
the decline in the rate of profit.”45 Is this, then, sufficient to explain
the ultimate and inevitable non-reproduction of capitalism? Perhaps.
“Over long periods,” this relative lag in productivity may mean that
the falling rate of profit will have a “decisive” effect.
Well before this lonely last hour, however, Marx stressed that natu-
ral conditions affect the course of capitalist development. “Plant and
animal products, whose growth and production are subject to cer-
tain organic laws involving naturally determined periods of time,
cannot suddenly be increased in the same degree as, say, machines
and other fixed capital, coal, ore, etc.” Thus, it is “indeed unavoidable
when capitalist production is fully developed, that the production
and increase in the portion of constant capital that consists of fixed

capital, machinery, etc. may run significantly ahead of the portion
consisting of organic raw materials, so that the demand for those raw
materials grows more rapidly than their supply and their price there-
fore rises.”46
In boom periods, accordingly, relative underproduction of raw
materials is predictable: “Although the raw material would have been
sufficient for the old level of production, it will be insufficient for the
new. . . . It is a case of overproduction of fixed capital.”47 Capital, which
develops “a capacity for sudden extension by leaps and bounds,”
comes up against barriers, not only in the sphere of circulation but
also in a barrier “presented by the availability of raw materials.”48 And
this brings with it a fall in the rate of profit: all other things equal, “the
rate of profit falls or rises in the opposite direction to the price of the
raw material.”49
But barriers are not limits. They can be transcended, and capital
responds in two ways to a crisis that is the result of the raw material
barrier. First, the crisis itself lowers the organic composition of capital
because of the destruction and devaluation of capital due to stagna-
tion and crisis brought about by the falling rate of profit. “Under all
circumstances,” Marx commented, “the balance will be restored by
capital’s lying idle or even by its destruction, to a greater or lesser
extent.”50 Second, capital is itself not passive when faced by the bar-
rier of the relative underproduction of raw materials. Thus Marx
noted that among the effects of rising raw material prices are that
(1) these raw materials are supplied from a greater distance; (2) their
production is expanded; (3) substitutes are now employed that were
previously unused; and (4) there is more economical use of waste
products.51 Precisely because relative underproduction of raw mate-
rials produces rising prices and relatively rising profit rates in those
sectors, capital inevitably flows to those sectors. Capital, in short,
responds to this barrier by seeking ways to posit its growth again:
Hence exploration of all of nature in order to discover new, useful

qualities in things . . . new (artificial) preparation of natural
objects, by which they are given new use values. The exploration
of the earth in all directions, to discover new things of use as well
as new useful qualities of the old; such as new qualities of them as
raw materials etc; the development of the natural sciences, hence,
to their highest point . . . is likewise a condition of production
founded on capital.52
To the extent capital succeeds in driving beyond the underpro-

duction of raw materials, it enters a phase characterized by relatively
declining raw material values, a lower value-composition of capi-
tal and a rising rate of profit. In short, cycles. or long waves. What
FROPists tend to forget is that capital responds to barriers to its
growth by finding ways to go beyond all barriers. Precisely because
capital is an actor, it has a tendency to restore the disturbed balances.
And that is the essential point to be grasped: capital has a tendency to
be self-correcting, self-regulating. Capitalism will not self-destruct as
the result of its economic contradictions (however clever the math-
ematical proof).
Economic Crises and Homeostasis
“In the face of constantly displacing influences,” Levins and Lewontin

asked, “how do things remain recognizably what they are?” Their
response was posed in terms of negative and positive feedback loops. A
positive feedback occurs if an initial event sets processes in motion that
magnify the original change; in contrast, negative feedback exists when
the opposite occurs, when the effect is to diminish that initial impact.
In considering the above crisis theories, I have pointed out the (often
ignored) negative feedbacks that generate the tendency for “homeosta-
sis, the self-regulation observed in physiology, ecology, climatology, the
economy and indeed all systems that show any persistence.”
The “dialectical task,” Levins and Lewontin argued, is to explain
how “things are the way they are because of the temporary balance
of opposing forces.”53 What is the relation, then, between these two
crisis arguments and the homeostasis of capitalism? If these crises
were strong enough or if circumstances were such as to generate

positive feedback, they could indeed intensify the initial effects and
pose the question of the non-reproduction of capitalism. However,
in the organic system of capitalism, Marx concluded that the capital-
ist can rely upon the worker’s “dependence on capital, which springs
from the conditions of production themselves, and is guaranteed in
perpetuity by them.”54 This is the negative feedback that ensures the
reproduction of capitalism as an organic system.
Rather than pointing to the nonreproduction of capitalism, capi-
tal’s tendency for crises that are self-correcting and the workers’
tendency to look upon capital as necessary may combine to strengthen
the reproduction of capitalism; they are opposing forces that act to
produce the homeostasis of the system. Whatever its source, every
crisis successfully navigated increases the acceptance of capital’s
requirements as common sense and reinforces what Lukács called the
“immaturity of the proletariat.” As Lukács commented:
This gives rise to the delusion that the “laws” of economics can
lead the way out of a crisis just as they lead into it. Whereas
what happened in reality was that—because of the passivity of
the proletariat—the capitalist class was in a position to break the
deadlock and start the machine going again.55
The Crisis of the Earth System
Let us consider, though, the real crisis that we face—the crisis of

the Earth System. You don’t need to be a Marxist to recognize that
humanity and all forms of life at this time face a crisis of existence.
But it helps. It helps because Marxist theory has always understood
that capitalism by its very nature contains within it the spectre of this
crisis and that there is no solution as long as capital prevails.
The work of John Bellamy Foster (and other writers especially
associated with Monthly Review) has highlighted what was always
present (but relatively ignored for so long) in Marx’s analysis of capi-
talism, namely, capital’s inherent tendency to destroy the earth and
its inhabitants. Whereas Marx hoped for a possible world in which

successive generations might inherit the earth “in an improved state,”
we have now approached the point where the idea of successive gen-
erations itself is in question.56
In “The Capitalist Nightmare and the Socialist Dream,” I described
nature as one of capital’s “waste products.”57 Whereas nature has its
own metabolic process through which it converts various inputs and
transforms them into the basis for its reproduction, the particular
metabolic process that occurs within capitalist production is one in
which human labor and nature are converted into surplus value for
capital’s reproduction. Labor and nature are mere means for capital,
and the result is that capitalist production undermines “the original
sources of all wealth—the soil and the worker.”58 Indeed, the very
nature of production under capitalist relations violates “the metabolic
interaction between man and the earth”; it produces “an irreparable
rift in the interdependent process of social metabolism, a metabolism
prescribed by the natural laws of life itself.”59
This irreparable rift, however, does not produce a crisis of capital.
The crisis of the Earth System does not in itself produce falling profit
rates. The deformed outputs of capital cost it nothing. Rather, a crisis
of human beings and nature affects capital as such only if society
attempts to shift some of the burden of the metabolic rift it creates to
capital. Unchecked, capital’s relation to the natural world is precisely
the same as its relation to workers: “Après moi le deluge! is the watch-
word of every capitalist and every capitalist nation. Capital therefore
takes no account of the health and the length of life of the worker,
unless society forces it to do so.”60
But can the society that capital produces, a society in which the
working class looks upon the requirements of capital as “self-evident
natural laws,” prevent the deluge? There are no self-correcting ten-
dencies with respect to the crisis of the Earth System. Rather than
the negative feedback generated by economic crises, the crisis of the
Earth System generates positive feedback. Things get worse. And the
result is that “the original system can no longer persist as it was. The
system may go into wider and wider fluctuations and break down.”61
As we have seen, the working class produced in capitalism as an

organic system tends to ensure the reproduction of capitalism in per-
petuity. In doing so, that working class ensures the non-reproduction
of humanity and the Earth System. To the extent that workers are the
products of capital, neither homeostasis nor an escape from the crisis
of the Earth System are options.
PA RT I I I
THE SECOND PRODUCT

5
Never forget the Second Product
Something significant is missing in Capital. Or, rather, someone. As

noted in my Introduction, “The worker is not present as the subject
who acts for herself against capital.” Present is the worker produced
by capital, the crippled worker who is the premise and result of capi-
talist production, the worker who looks upon capital’s requirements
as common sense … in perpetuity. Left out of the theory presented in
Capital, with the exception of that brief glimpse of the importance of
workers acting in common in chapter 10, is what was always central
to Marx’s revolutionary dynamics, namely “revolutionary practice,”
the simultaneous change in circumstances and self-change.
Hegel and Revolutionary Practice
Marx developed his concept of revolutionary practice in the course

of his comprehension and critique of Hegel. Hegel’s declaration that
“the truth is the whole” is well known; however, its continuation is
less so: “The whole, however, is merely the essential nature reach-
ing its completeness through the process of its own development.”1
Self-development, self-movement, self-activity, this was Hegel’s under-
standing of how the Idea (Spirit, Freedom) advances to its completion
through a process of acting upon itself.
Thus, as well as his focus upon an interconnected whole, at the

core of Hegel’s philosophical system was his emphasis upon a dia-
lectical process through which the Idea drives forward (ultimately
to God) by negation of each momentary form of its existence. “The
Concept forges ahead,” Hegel stressed, by means of the “negative
which it carries within itself.” This, indeed, was the particular focus
of his Phenomenology: “We have here modes of consciousness each
of which in realizing itself abolishes itself, has its own negation as its
result—and thus passes into a higher mode.”2
Through its activity, the Idea transforms itself and advances.
Nowhere is this clearer than in Phenomenology’s account of the
advance of self-consciousness through the activity of the slave
(bondsman) in producing something for his master: “In fashioning
the thing, self-existence comes to be felt explicitly as his own proper
being.” Precisely through his labor, “the bondsman becomes aware,
through this rediscovery of himself by himself, of having and being
a ‘mind of his own.’ ” The advance to freedom of self-consciousness
for Hegel, we see, occurs through “the formative activity of work,”
through labor.3
The idealism and mysticism of Hegel so apparent here was chal-
lenged by Feuerbach’s materialist reversal of subject and predicate,
his insistence that, rather than ideas and concepts, human beings
were the true subjects. In contrast to the philosophy of Hegel—and
characteristic of what Lenin called “Hegel materialistically turned
upside-down”—Feuerbach declared: “Man is self-consciousness.”4
And soon, following in Feuerbach’s stream, Marx applied that inver-
sion of Hegel’s subject and predicate in his Contribution to the Critique
of Hegel’s Philosophy of Law: “Hegel everywhere makes the idea the
subject and turns the proper, the actual subject, such as ‘political
conviction’ into a predicate.” Indeed, Marx pointed out, “the correct
method is stood on its head.”5
So what happens if Hegel’s account of the self-development and
self-movement of the Idea is “materialistically turned upside-down”?
While declaring that “Feuerbach is the only one who has a seri-
ous, critical attitude to the Hegelian dialectic and who has made
NEvEr fOrgET ThE SECOND PArT 75
genuine discoveries in this field,” Marx nevertheless saw genius in

Hegel’s Phenomenology.6 “The outstanding achievement of Hegel’s
Phenomenology and of its final outcome, the dialectic of negativity as
the moving and generating principle,” Marx proposed, “is thus first
that Hegel conceives the self-creation of man as a process.” He “grasps
the essence of labour and comprehends objective man—true, because
real man—as the outcome of man’s own labour.” Hegel “grasps labour
as the essence of man … [as] man’s coming-to-be for himself within
alienation, or as alienated man.” Since Hegel turns everything on its
head, though, “the only labour which Hegel knows and recognizes is
abstractly mental labour.” Thus, “Hegel conceives labour as man’s act
of self-genesis,” but only “within the sphere of abstraction.”7
While the mere reversal of subject and predicate could yield the
vision of abstract Man advancing to perfection through his activity,
Marx was aided in going beyond this simple negation by the empiri-
cal orientation of his fellow Feuerbachian, Frederick Engels. Political
agitator and author of reports on developing communist movements
and then of The Condition of the Working Class in England, where,
among other things, he introduced the concept of the reserve army of
the unemployed and described strikes as “the military school of the
working-men in which they prepare themselves for the great strug-
gle,” Engels began his collaboration with Marx in 1844 by working
with him on The Holy Family, a critique of the idealism of German
philosophers (but which also contained glimpses of the real struggles
of workers).8
In their joint work that followed, The German Ideology, the two
revolutionaries continued their critique of German speculative phi-
losophy for which ideas and concepts rule. In it they also proceeded
further to an explicit critique of Feuerbach’s substitution of abstract
“Man” for Hegel’s “Idea.” Rather than combating disembodied ideas
with better disembodied ideas, Marx and Engels focused upon real
living human beings formed on the basis of historically developed
productive forces and social relations. Rather than the independence
of ideas, they insisted that the producers of ideas and conceptions were
“real, active men, as they are conditioned by a definite development of
their productive forces and of the intercourse corresponding to these,

up to its highest forms.” 9 Thus, in place of an idealistic conception of
history, on the one hand, and a “contemplative materialism” without
history, on the other, Marx and Engels introduced a materialist con-
ception of history.
Given the central purpose of this work, The German Ideology
focused upon the definite conditions (productive forces and social
relations) that produce the ideas of definite human beings. But it was
never an argument that those real, active human beings were mere
bearers of particular productive forces and the social relations to
which they corresponded. On the contrary, Marx and Engels stressed
the importance of a revolution by the working class against the exist-
ing conditions of the time. This revolution was necessary “not only
because the ruling class cannot be overthrown in any other way, but
also because the class overthrowing it can only in a revolution succeed
in ridding itself of all the muck of ages and become fitted to found
society anew.”10 Through its revolutionary activity, in short, the work-
ing class transforms itself.
Can we conceive of revolution without a change in the work-
ing class itself? In The German Ideology, Marx and Engels stressed
an extended process in which the working class develops itself and
unites through its struggles: “The proletarians arrive at this unity only
through a long process of development in which the appeal to their
right also plays a part. Incidentally, this appeal to their right is only a
means of making them take shape as ‘they,’ as a revolutionary, united
mass.”11 Thus they rejected the argument of Max Stirner, one of the
German ideologists, who separated revolution on the one hand, and
change in the working class on the other. For Stirner, it was possible
that “the communist proletarians who revolutionize society and put
the relations of production and the forms of intercourse on a new
basis . . . remain ‘as of old.’” The idea that workers remain unchanged,
however, was contrary to their concept of the revolutionary process:
“In revolutionary activity,” Marx and Engels responded to Stirner, “the
changing of oneself coincides with the changing of circumstances.”12
This last phrase from The German Ideology recalls a central point
in Marx’s preparatory notes, his Theses on Feuerbach. These notes

provide useful insight into The German Ideology as well as Marx’s
subsequent work. In contrast to his earlier celebration of Feuerbach,
here Marx explicitly parted company with Feuerbach for failing to
consider the practical activity of real human beings. Feuerbach’s mate-
rialism, Marx proposed, was a contemplative materialism, one whose
concept of “the essence of man” was that of an individual abstracted
from society. But from what perspective was Marx’s critique? In the
very first of his theses, Marx made his point clearly: “in contradis-
tinction to materialism, the active side was set forth abstractly by
idealism—which, of course, does not know real, sensuous activity as
such.”13 Very simply, Marx’s critique of Feuerbach embraced Hegel’s
“outstanding achievement” in his Phenomenology—the grasp of “the
self-creation of man as a process,” the understanding that “real man”
is “the outcome of man’s own labour.” Hegel’s insight, in short, was the
thread that Marx would pursue: “labour as man’s act of self-genesis,”
but no longer “within the sphere of abstraction.”14
Thus, in contrast to Feuerbach’s understanding of the “essence
of man” as an abstract individual, Marx in his theses focused upon
the activity of real individuals who were the ensemble of the social
relations within a particular society. To escape idealism and various
forms of mysticism, Marx insisted that it was necessary to under-
stand the “inner strife and intrinsic contradictoriness” of this society.
The existing society must be “both understood and revolutionized in
practice,” that is, “destroyed in theory and in practice.” 15 And, as Marx
had learned from Hegel—“materialistically turned upside-down,” of
course—through their activity, those real human beings transform
themselves.
Obviously, if the self-creation of real human beings is a product
of their own activity, then people are not changed by changing cir-
cumstances for them. Despite the “materialist doctrine” that human
beings are the product of circumstances and that therefore changed
human beings are the product of changed circumstances, if changed
circumstances are presented as gifts from above, it leaves people “as
of old.” That doctrine of change from above, Marx declared in the
Theses, divides “society into two parts, one part of which is superior
to society.” Characteristic of Marx’s revolutionary materialism, in
contrast, was the key link of human development and practice: “The
coincidence of the changing of circumstances and of human activity
or self-change can be conceived and rationally understood only as
revolutionary practice.”
Understanding the Second Product
Human activity, self-change—the two cannot be separated. To refer to

one is to imply the other.16 From the concept of revolutionary practice
we learn that there are always two products of human activity—the
change in circumstances and the change in the human being. Every
act of production, every human activity, thus has as its result joint
products, both the change in the object of labor and the change in
the laborer himself. As Marx noted in the Grundrisse, in the very act
of producing, “The producers change, too, in that they bring out new
qualities in themselves, develop themselves in production, transform
themselves, develop new powers and new ideas, new modes of inter-
course, new needs and new language.”17 Similarly, the recognition of
the worker as outcome of his own labor is present in Capital’s dis-
cussion of the labor process—there the worker “acts upon external
nature and changes it, and in this way he simultaneously changes his
own nature.”18
In short, there is always a second product of human activity. Not
only the material product of activity but also the human product. But
that human product is not an abstract human being because human
activity always occurs under particular social relations, and this nec-
essarily affects the particular nature of the second product. Consider,
for example, the nature of the second product resulting from activity
under capitalist relations of production. Where “it is not the worker
who employs the conditions of his work, but rather the reverse, the
conditions of work employ the worker,” a particular second product
emerges. Head and hand become separate and hostile in this capitalist
inversion, “this distortion, which is peculiar to and characteristic of
capitalist production” in which “every atom of freedom, both in bodily

and in intellectual activity” is lost. Through the destruction of exist-
ing (and potential) capacities, capital produces the workers it needs. It
produces workers who are fragmented, degraded, and alienated from
“the intellectual potentialities of the labour process.” Those crippled
and deformed human beings are the second product of capital.19
Under a different set of productive relations, however, Marx envi-
sioned a quite different second product. In contrast to the society in
which the worker exists to satisfy the need of capital for its growth,
Marx in Capital explicitly evoked “the inverse situation, in which
objective wealth is there to satisfy the worker’s own need for devel-
opment.”20 In contrast to the worker under capitalist relations who
“actually treats the social character of his work, its combination with
the work of others for a common goal, as a power that is alien to him,”
here associated producers expend “their many different forms of
labour-power in full self-awareness as one single social labour force.”
In this “inverse situation,” rather than the crippling of workers, here
workers develop their capacities: “When the worker co-operates in a
planned way with others, he strips off the fetters of his individuality,
and develops the capabilities of his species.”21
Thus, if workers democratically decide upon a plan, work together
to achieve its realization, solve problems that emerge and shift in this
process from activity to activity, they engage in a constant succession
of acts that expand their capacities. For workers in this inverse situa-
tion, there is the “absolute working-out of his creative potentialities,”
the “complete working-out of the human content,” the “development
of all human powers as such the end in itself.”22 Collective activ-
ity under these relations produces “free individuality, based on the
universal development of individuals and on their subordination of
their communal, social productivity as their social wealth.”23 As Marx
concluded in the Critique of the Gotha Programme, with the devel-
opment of this new relation of associated producers, the productive
forces of people have “increased with the all-round development of
the individual, and all the springs of co-operative wealth flow more
abundantly.”24 Workers here satisfy their “own need for development.”
Class Struggle as Production
All other things equal, the people produced within particular rela-
tions of production tend to be premises for the reproduction of those
relations. As we saw, the second products of capital are people who
look upon the requirements of capital as “self-evident natural laws,”
common sense. However, work under capital is not the only relation
in which those workers produce themselves. The key link of human
development and practice points to another product within capital-
ism: through their struggles, workers change themselves and make
themselves fit to create a new world. Thus, Marx’s message to work-
ers in 1850 was that “you will have to go through 15, 20, 50 years of
civil wars and national struggles not only to bring about a change in
society but also to change yourselves, and prepare yourselves for the
exercise of political power.”25 Over two decades later (after the defeat
of the Paris Commune), he continued to stress the inseparability of
human activity and self-change: the working class knows that “they
will have to pass through long struggles, through a series of historic
processes, transforming circumstances and men.”26
Struggle, in short, is a process of production—one in which work-
ers produce themselves differently. Although capitalist relations of
production determine the working class as a class-in-itself, Marx in
The Poverty of Philosophy explained that through its struggles, “this
mass becomes united, and constitutes itself as a class for itself.”27
By informing themselves about their own interests and acting in
common, workers can emerge (as The German Ideology predicted)
“as a revolutionary, united mass.”28 And this is something only they
can do. Precisely because revolutionary practice is the way that work-
ers transform themselves, Marx criticized sects (which possess all the
answers in their pockets to the suffering of the masses): “Here [refer-
ring to Germany], where the worker is regulated bureaucratically
from childhood onwards, where he believes in authority, in those set
over him, the main thing is to teach him to walk by himself.”29
No one has described the intrinsic link between their activity and
their self-change better than Engels. Even though they had lost the
battle over the Ten Hours Bill, he argued that workers changed sig-
nificantly in the course of that struggle:
The working classes, in this agitation, found a mighty means

to get acquainted with each other, to come to a knowledge of
their social position and interests, to organise themselves and to
know their strength. The working man, who has passed through
such an agitation, is no longer the same as he was before; and the
whole working class, after passing through it, is a hundred times
stronger, more enlightened, and better organised than it was at
the outset.30
And, as noted in my Introduction, this is what Marx demonstrated

in Chapter 10 of Capital: developing from “passive, though inflexible
and unceasing” resistance, workers proceeded to engage in open class
struggle. Through continuous pressure by organized workers, it was
possible to achieve legislative limits upon the workday. Legislative vic-
tories, though, don’t bring the struggle over the workday to a close. Even
where the “latent power of the working classes of the United States” had
produced legislation for an eight-hour workday, in 1868 Marx pointed
out that “the resistance of rebellious capital” meant that workers in New
York were “engaged in a fierce struggle” to enforce that law. Indeed, as
the struggle in New York demonstrated, “even under the most favour-
able political conditions all serious success of the proletariat depends
upon an organisation that unites and concentrates its forces.”31
The second product of this struggle is that workers are no longer
the same as they were before. They are “stronger, more enlightened,
and better organised.” They learn in the process of struggle. The strug-
gle over the workday, Marx noted in chapter 10, proved “conclusively
that the isolated worker, the worker as ‘free’ seller of his labour-power,
succumbs without resistance once capitalist production has reached a
certain stage of maturity.” Accordingly, workers learn that they must
struggle against separation and isolation; they must transform their
relations and themselves if they are to make any gains in the pro-
tracted “civil war between the capitalist class and the working class.”32
The Ensemble of Acts and Capacities
Through their struggles against capital, workers develop their capaci-

ties. They make themselves fit to undertake new struggles. In this
dialectical relation of acts and capacities, acts create capacities,
capacities enable acts. The first of these sides was stated succinctly by
Lucien Sève: “Every developed personality appears to us straight away
as an enormous accumulation of the most varied acts through time.”33
In turn, he defined capacities as “the ensemble of actual potentiali-
ties, innate or acquired, to carry out any act whatever and whatever
its level.”34
It would be an error, however, to identify this dialectic of acts and
capacities by only considering the activity of workers as wage-labor-
ers. As I argued in Beyond Capital (in chapter 8, “The One-Sidedness
of Wage-Labour”), “To examine the human being only insofar as he
is wage-labourer is clearly one-sided.” It reproduces the error of the
political economy that Marx early criticized, that of treating the pro-
letarian “only as a worker” and not considering “him when he is not
working, as a human being.”35 As the “ensemble of social relations,”
workers are the product of all their relations and of their activity and
struggles within them. Sève, after all, refers to an “accumulation of the
most varied acts” in the development of capacity and to that capacity
as the potential to carry out any act whatever and whatever its level.
So what builds that capacity? We cannot ignore the effect of rela-
tions such as patriarchy, racism, ethnicity, sexual orientation, and
citizenship status in forming our existing capacities nor the effect of
struggles within those spheres in altering capacities.36 Rather than
privileging one side, we have to take into account all sides of work-
ers and all their struggles to satisfy their need for development. If
workers organize to fight for higher wages or against racism or within
their community to struggle against gentrification, they develop new
capacities. The worker is “no longer the same as he was before.” There
is an important political lesson here: social movements are multiple
sites for developing the capacities of the working class, and we forget
that at our peril.
Consider where the thread of Marx’s concept of revolutionary

practice has led us. With the focus upon acts and capacities, we put
flesh upon that insight that Marx found in Hegel’s Phenomenology:
“the self-creation of man as a process.” Capacity, we understand, is a
stock that is expanded (or contracted) as a result of particular acts,
and that stock is the basis for a flow of acts. Of course, the existence of
a large capacity, that is, a high potential for carrying out acts, doesn’t
mean that all of that capacity will be necessarily utilized. There is
always the potential of unutilized capacity. And if particular capaci-
ties are unutilized, they tend to atrophy, even if they have been built
up in the past.37 For capacity not to wither away, it must be continu-
ously renewed by acts.38 Revolutionary practice requires permanent
revolution.
The expanded reproduction of capacity can be utilized in many dif-
ferent ways.39 Those who struggle against sexism, for example, can
strengthen themselves to struggle against capital because they have
changed themselves, and those who do not struggle remain “as of
old.” Simultaneous changing of circumstances and self-change, that
concept of revolutionary practice, is absolutely central to under-
standing Marx. What, though, are the theoretical implications of its
disappearance from Capital? Our task is to understand first how that
disappearance occurred, and second, its effects upon Marxist theory.
6
The Burden of Classical Political

Economy
As we have seen, class struggle determines the length of the normal

workday and that in the process of struggle workers transform
themselves. Are the other critical elements in the determination of
the degree of exploitation—the real wage and productivity—simi-
larly determined by class struggle? On the contrary, the real wage is
assumed to be “given” in Capital: there are no wage struggles; there
is no civil war between the capitalist class and the working class to
determine the level of real wages.
In the absence of wage struggles, what is the nature of the work-
ing class that capital produces? Such struggles, Marx argued in 1853,
are the “indispensable means of holding up the spirit of the labour-
ing classes, of combining them into one great association against
the encroachments of the ruling class, and of preventing them from
becoming apathetic, thoughtless, more or less well-fed instruments of
production.” In their absence, he predicted, the working class “would
be a heart-broken, a weakminded, a worn-out, unresisting mass.”1
And he made the same point in 1865: workers who do not struggle
over wages are “degraded to one level mass of broken wretches past
ThE BUrDEN Of CL ASSICAL POLITICAL ECONOMY 85
salvation.” They thereby “disqualify themselves for the initiating of

any larger movement.”2 What Engels called “the military school of the
working-men in which they prepare themselves for the great strug-
gle” is obviously not present.
Insofar as the workers introduced in Capital do not transform
themselves through wage struggles, these “more or less well-fed
instruments of production” are the products of capital, the workers
that capital needs, workers who guarantee the reproduction of capital
“in perpetuity.” But what happened in Capital to the working class
that struggled over the workday and developed its capacity and orga-
nization in the process? Very simply, the voice of the worker that we
hear in chapter 10 of Capital was again “stifled,” this time by what
Marx took from classical political economy.
Hats and Men
Consider the value of the commodity that the worker sells to the
capitalist. What the worker sells, Marx argued in Capital, is his
labor-power (rather than labor), and (following in the footsteps
of classical political economy), its value is “determined, as in the
case of every other commodity, by the labour-time necessary for
the production, and consequently also the reproduction, of this
specific article.”3 Accordingly, “as in the case of every other com-
modity,” the value of this commodity will fall with reductions in
the labor-time necessary for its production, that is, with increases
in productivity.
There is, in short, symmetry in the treatment of labor-power and
other commodities, a symmetry in which Marx followed Ricardo,
whom he credited as the first to formulate accurately relations (laws)
that Marx elaborated in Capital.4 Ricardo expressed this symmetry in
his Principles of Political Economy as follows:
Diminish the cost of production of hats, and their price will

ultimately fall to their new natural price, although the demand
should be doubled, tripled or quadrupled. Diminish the cost of

subsistence of men, by diminishing the natural price of the food
and clothing by which life is sustained, and wages will ultimately
fall, notwithstanding that the demand for labourers may very
greatly increase.5
“The cynical Ricardo,” Marx called him in 1844. But he was not
commenting upon a personal characteristic of Ricardo; rather,
Ricardo’s teaching was the perspective of “English political economy,
i.e. the scientific reflection of English economic conditions.”6 That
political economy, Marx commented, viewed “man as worker, as a
commodity” and was indifferent to the production of man as “a men-
tally and physically dehumanised being.” Indeed, its only interest in
workers was with respect to their direct relation to capital.7 But the
cynicism of political economy, Marx explained in his Poverty of
Philosophy, was just a statement of “the facts” in capitalism. Quoting
the above passage from Ricardo, Marx commented:
Doubtless, Ricardo’s language is as cynical as can be. To put the

cost of manufacture of hats and the cost of maintenance of men
on the same plane is to turn men into hats. But do not make an
outcry at the cynicism of it. The cynicism is in the facts and not
in the words which express the facts.8
But what was that “cost of subsistence of men” that determined

the value of labor-power? It “can be resolved,” Marx indicated, “into
the value of a definite quantity of the means of subsistence,” and we
can assume that set of use-values to be constant: “The quantity of
the means of subsistence required is given at any particular epoch
in any particular society, and can therefore be treated as a constant
magnitude.”9 What precisely was that definite quantity of means of
subsistence? Irrelevant, Marx explained: “Whether one assumes the
level of workers’ needs to be higher or lower is completely irrelevant
to the end result. The only thing of importance is that it should be
viewed as given, determinate.”10
The Ricardian Default
This assumption of a given and determinate standard of necessity

underlies the “Ricardian Default.” For Ricardo, this assumption pro-
vided the direct link between productivity and profit and was the
source of the central tendency he identified—the falling rate of profit.
Falling productivity (the result of diminishing returns in agriculture),
given the constant standard of necessity, meant that more hours of
labor were necessary to produce the wage and thus an increase in
necessary labor, reduced surplus labor and thus the falling rate of
profit—or, more precisely, a falling rate of surplus value.
In the case of Marx, the Ricardian Default underlies his explana-
tion of relative surplus value in Capital. Specifically, in this case, if
we assume a given set of necessities, productivity increases for those
use-values mean that less labor is required to produce the worker and
thus, the value of labor-power “varies with the value of the means of
subsistence.”11 Further, as Marx explained in chapter 16, since “the
value of labour-power and surplus value vary in opposite directions,”
an increase or decrease in the productivity of labor means that “sur-
plus value moves in the same direction” as productivity.12
Marx’s acceptance of the Ricardian Default, however, does more
than determine his explanation of the development of relative surplus
value. It also led to his description of the central tendency of capi-
tal. “Capital,” he declared, “therefore has an immanent drive, and a
constant tendency, towards increasing the productivity of labour in
order to cheapen commodities and, by cheapening commodities, to
cheapen the worker himself.” 13
As we can see, characteristic of the Ricardian Default is that any
link between productivity and the standard of life of workers is pre-
cluded by assumption. As the result of the assumption of a given
standard of necessity, in the one case workers cannot lose as the result
of decreases in productivity and, in the other case, workers cannot
gain as the result of increases in productivity. In both cases, it is by
assumption, and only by assumption, that capital alone benefits or
loses as productivity changes.
That assumption underlying the Ricardian Default, Marx pro-

posed, can be traced back to the Physiocrats. Precisely because they
had made the “strict necessaire,” the “minimum of wages,” “the equiv-
alent of the necessary means of subsistence,” the pivotal point in their
theory, Marx declared them to be “the true fathers of modern politi-
cal economy.” By treating the minimum of wages as fixed and as a
given magnitude, “the Physiocrats transferred the inquiry into the
origin of surplus value from the sphere of circulation into the sphere
of direct production, and thereby laid the foundation for the analysis
of capitalist production.” And, this assumption of a fixed set of neces-
sities, of that given subsistence wage, he commented, was followed by
Adam Smith “like all economists worth speaking of.”14
“The Facts” and the Assumption
By the time Marx wrote Capital, he had come to understand that there
was a difference between this classical premise of a fixed set of neces-
sities and “the facts.” Certainly, he accepted the classical premise for
his presentation of the concept of relative surplus value in chapter 12
of Volume 1. However, outside of this theoretical chapter, Marx else-
where commented in Capital that workers are able to expand their
consumption of means of subsistence under the appropriate condi-
tions. The fixed character of workers’ needs, he indicated in Volume
3, “is mere illusion. If means of subsistence were cheaper or money-
wages higher, the workers would buy more of them.”15 Similarly, in
Volume 2, he explained that with rising real wages “the demand of the
workers for necessary means of subsistence will grow. Their demand
for luxury articles will increase to a smaller degree, or else a demand
will arise for articles that previously did not enter the area of their
consumption.”16 Further, he pointed out in Volume 1 that, with higher
wages, workers “can extend the circle of their enjoyments, make addi-
tions to their consumption fund of clothes, furniture, etc., and lay by
a small reserve fund of money.”17
We need, accordingly, to distinguish between the theoretical expo-
sition of relative surplus value and passing observations made in
the course of his historical illustration of capital’s “immanent drive.”

Not only was Marx clear that there is not a fixed set of necessities in
practice, but he also observed in chapter 16 of Volume 1 that rising
productivity did not necessarily lead to the development of relative
surplus value.18 This was not a new revelation: this important caveat,
in fact, had been developed at length in his 1861–63 Economic
Manuscripts. There, Marx revealed that his theoretical presentation
in Capital with respect to the effect of productivity increases was only
one of three possible cases. In the first case, the worker “receives same
quantity of use values as before. In this case there is a fall in the value
of his labour capacity or his wage. For there has been a fall in the
value of this quantity, which has remained constant.” In the second
case, “There is a rise in the amount, the quantity, of the means of
subsistence . . . but not in the same proportion as in the worker’s pro-
ductivity.” Accordingly, the real wage rises but its value falls. That is,
there is both rising real wages and relative surplus value.
“Finally the third CASE,” where productivity and the standard of
necessity rise at the same rate:
The worker continues to receive the same value—or the objecti-

fication of the same part of the working day—as before. In this
case, because the productivity of labour has risen, the quantity
of use-values he receives, his real wage, has risen, but its value
has remained constant, since it continues to represent the same
quantity of realised labour time as before. In this case, however,
the surplus value too remains unchanged, there is no change in
the ratio between the wage and the surplus value, hence the pro-
portion [of surplus value] to the wage remains unchanged.19
In this third case, Marx explained, “there would be no CHANGE

in surplus value, although the latter would represent, just as wages
would, a greater quantity of use values than before.” Three possibili-
ties! Yet, only the first case where workers were limited to a fixed set of
use-values entered into Marx’s explanation of the concept of relative
surplus value. Marx’s assumption of the given standard of necessity
in Capital was contrary to “the facts” he knew so well, that workers

within capitalism can obtain more means of subsistence and thus can
be the beneficiaries of productivity increases.
So, now we need to explain the mystery. Why did Marx accept
the classical assumption in Capital that the worker “receives same
quantity of use values as before”? Unlike so many of his disciples,
Marx understood this was an explicit assumption, one that must be
removed. As he explained to Engels at the very point he formulated
his projected six-book plan for his Economics, “Wages are invariably
assumed to be at their minimum.”20 Similarly, he was explicit in the
Grundrisse: “For the time being, necessary labour supposed as such;
that the worker always obtains only the minimum of wages.” 21 This,
he indicated in his letter to Engels, was a temporary assumption: “the
rise or fall of that minimum will be considered under wage labour.”
Further, in the Grundrisse he explained that the standard of neces-
sary labor, while treated as fixed, may change and that “to consider
those changes themselves belongs altogether to the chapter treating
of wage labour.”
Was Marx’s intent to explore such matters subsequently in a sepa-
rate study of wage-labor part of an obsolete or superseded plan? In
his subsequent Economic Manuscript of 1861–63, for example, Marx
indicated that the question of “movements in the level of the work-
ers’ needs” was not to be explored here “but in the doctrine of the
wages of labour.” For now, he insisted that it was essential that the
level of workers’ needs be viewed as “given, determinate. All ques-
tions relating to it as not a given but a variable magnitude belong
to the investigation of wage labour in particular.”22 Further in that
manuscript, Marx noted that his investigation proceeded from the
assumption that wages are “only reduced by the DEPRECIATION of
that labour capacity, or what is the same thing, by the cheapening
of the means of subsistence entering into the workers’ consumption”
and that any other reason for a reduction in wages was “not part of
our task” and “belongs to the theory of wages.”23
A few years later, Marx repeated the same point. In “The Results of
the Immediate Process of Production,” he explained: “The level of the
necessaries of life whose total value constitutes the value of labour-

power can itself rise or fall. The analysis of these variations, however,
belongs not here but in the theory of wages.”24 Nor was this his last
reference to the book on wage labor. In Chapter 20 of Volume 1 of
Capital, Marx noted that “the special study of wage-labour, and not,
therefore, to this work” is where an exposition of the forms of the
wage belongs.25 In short, over and over again, Marx insisted that it
was necessary to remove that assumption and to do so in his separate
study of wage-labor.
But why wait? Why did he postpone the removal of this assump-
tion? His answer was based upon methodological considerations: first
the “general capital-relation” had to be developed. Since variations
in the standard of necessity “do not touch its general relationship to
capital,” to understand the nature of capital and the capital-relation,
“the only thing of importance” was to treat the standard of neces-
sity “as given, determinate.” Variations in the standard of necessity,
he insisted, do not “alter anything in the general relationship.”26
Accordingly, as he had indicated in the Grundrisse, in his letter to
Engels and in his comments on the Physiocrats, all that was needed
for the study of capital was to assume that “the worker always obtains
only the minimum of wages.” It followed that changes in the standard
of necessity are not part of the study of capital and “belong to the
investigation of wage labour in particular.”
“Only by this procedure,” Marx explained to Engels, “is it possible
to discuss one relation without discussing all the rest.” He elaborated
this approach in the Grundrisse: “All of these fixed suppositions them-
selves become fluid in the further course of development. But only
by holding them fast at the beginning is their development possible
without confounding everything.” What appears fixed and static, in
short, is revealed in a dialectical presentation to be fluid and chang-
ing. Only “for the time being” was it assumed that “the worker always
obtains only the minimum of wages”; and this fixed supposition was
only held “fast at the beginning.”
Unfortunately, while seeming plausible methodologically, Marx’s
justification for maintaining his assumption loses credibility given
that he had already assumed the standard of necessity given in the

Poverty of Philosophy, the Communist Manifesto, and Wage-Labour
and Capital—all before reacquainting himself with Hegel’s Science
of Logic (the source of his methodological renewal). To postpone
relaxation of the classical assumption to a later “special study of wage-
labour” meant that Capital remained at the level of classical political
economy with its symmetry of hats and men.
Whereas Beyond Capital stressed the “missing book on wage-
labour,” I am now convinced that I was mistaken in thinking that it
was the failure of subsequent Marxists to recognize the importance
of that missing book that produced a one-sided Marxism. The prob-
lem was deeper. Marx himself was wrong to think that retaining the
assumptions of classical political economy did not “alter anything in
the general relationship.” By accepting the Ricardian Default and the
symmetry of hats and men for his theoretical exposition of relative
surplus value, Marx reverted to a “pre-Marxian” perspective and dis-
torted the “general capital-relation.”
Money and Wage-Labor
Think about the critique of political economy with which Capital

begins. At its core is the question of money. For classical political
economists, money didn’t matter. It was a mere veil for the real, con-
crete economy. This was why they could embrace the quantity theory
of money (with money determining only nominal price levels), why
they effectively treated a commodity-money economy as a barter
economy (thereby precluding the possibility of crises), and why they
were able to move directly from coefficients of production (how many
men to make a hat, how many hats to make a man) to profits without
passing money.
In contrast, Marx solved what he called “the riddle of money.”
He demonstrated that, rather than being juxtaposed externally to
commodities, money was inherent in the concept of the commod-
ity. Developed logically from the commodity and unleashing more
of its qualities, money did not supersede the commodity but existed
alongside and interacted with it. Money, Marx revealed, was essential
for the “metamorphosis of commodities,” the movement from one
commodity in the hands of its owner via the medium of money to a
second commodity that could be a use-value for the owner of the first.
Without stressing the distinct existence and centrality of money, like
the classical political economists we do not understand the inherent
possibility of crisis or the nature of capital as a social relation.
But there is more. The place of money in Marx’s analysis points
to the error in treating the production of hats and men symmetri-
cally. Money doesn’t matter for the production of hats, a vertically
integrated process of production extending from primary products,
which contingently may be interrupted by the equivalent exchange of
intermediary inputs, to the completed use-value. But we cannot talk
about the production and reproduction of the wage-laborer without
incorporating the place of money.
Rather than existing solely within a sphere of production, the pro-
duction of labor-power involves a complex sequence encompassing
(a) the moment of production of articles of consumption; (b) the
payment of money-wages to the worker; (c) a moment of circula-
tion in which the worker exchanges his or her money for articles of
consumption; (d) a second moment of production in which those
use-values (as well as concrete, uncounted labor) are consumed in
order to prepare labor-power for exchange; and (e) the sale of labor-
power to the capitalist.27 By treating the two processes symmetrically,
only the first of these moments in the production of labor-power is
considered. In classical political economy, the cost of production of
the consumption bundle leapfrogs over several moments to become
the cost of production of the worker (leaving the latter a mere foot-
note to the former).
In contrast, as we have seen, Marx understood the importance of
money with respect to workers. The suggestion of a fixed standard of
necessity, he insisted, is “mere illusion. If means of subsistence were
cheaper or money-wages higher, the workers would buy more of
them.”28 Again, the higher money-wages are relative to money-prices,
the more that workers “can extend the circle of their enjoyments,
make additions to their consumption fund of clothes, furniture, etc.,

and lay by a small reserve fund of money” and the more the worker is
able to participate in “higher, even cultural satisfactions . . . widening
the sphere of his pleasures” and gaining “his only share of civilization
which distinguishes him from the slave.”29 For Marx, unlike the clas-
sical economists, money obviously mattered.
But it did not when it came to the theoretical exposition of relative
surplus value in Capital. By following classical political economy in
precluding gains for workers from productivity increases, the cru-
cial difference between a wage-laborer and a slave was obscured.
The slave, Marx explained in the “Results of the Immediate Process
of Production,” receives the means of subsistence he requires,
“which are fixed both in kind and quantity—i.e. he receives use-
value.” But that is not true for the wage-laborer. In contrast to the
slave, the wage-laborer receives means of subsistence in the shape
of money, and “it is the worker himself who converts the money
into whatever use-values he desires; it is he who buys commodities
as he wishes and, as the owner of money, as the buyer of goods, he
stands in precisely the same relationship to the sellers of goods as
any other buyer.”30 Rather than the product of a fixed set of use-
values, the wage-laborer here appears as a subject with money and
with his own goals. Rather than turning men into hats, the theoreti-
cal discussion of relative surplus value in Capital turns the relation
of wage-laborer into that of a slave.
Of course, the slave does not benefit from increased productivity.
Only his owner does. And, given Marx’s acceptance of the Ricardian
Default, in Capital only the capitalist does. The conceptual symme-
try of hats and men leads us far astray. Yes, increased productivity
at any stage in the production of hats will disrupt the equivalence of
embodied social labor and money and will lead to a fall in value of
hats: “Diminish the cost of production of hats, and their price will
ultimately fall to their new natural price.” Similarly, increased pro-
ductivity in the production of means of subsistence in general leads
to a reduction in their value. However. rather than the fall in “the
cost of subsistence of men” leading to a fall in wages, “workers would
buy more” means of subsistence. With money-values falling, all other

things equal, real wages rise!
Here, however, is the problem. If wage-laborers (unlike slaves) are
the immediate beneficiaries of productivity increases, how is relative
surplus value possible? Capital cannot rely upon the assumptions of
classical political economy and never has. What is to be done?
7
Capital’s Need to Separate Workers
Marx’s acceptance of the Ricardian Default explains why the worker

disappeared as a subject after chapter 10. In place of workers who
develop their strength by struggling in common, we have the “apa-
thetic, thoughtless, more or less well-fed instruments of production”
about which Marx despaired. But we need to think about this dis-
appearance not simply as a deficiency but as a sign that there is
something important outside Marx’s logical construct of capitalism
as an organic system.
If there is indeed something outside that organic system from
which we gained our understanding of capital and its logic, then that
system is itself merely a part of the whole, and our understanding
of it and its elements is potentially faulty. As I explained in chapter
2, our intellectual construct in that case may misrepresent the real
concrete:
Recognizing that only the whole is the truth, Levins and

Lewontin insist that “we always have to be aware that there is
more out there that might overwhelm our theories and thwart
our best intentions.” What is excluded from our mental con-
struct, indeed, may infect our concept of the whole and its parts.
CAPITAL'S NEED TO SEPArATE WOrkErS 97
In particular, failing to incorporate new sides of categories under

investigation and “seizing upon one side of a dichotomous pair
or a contradiction as if it were the whole thing” can infect our
concept of the whole with “one-sidedness.”
Relative and Absolute Surplus Value
In chapter 12 of Capital, relative surplus value is revealed through

a simple arithmetical exercise. Given the length of the workday
(determined by class struggle) and the standard of necessity (fixed
by assumption), a rise in productivity reduces the hours of necessary
labor and thus increases the relative portion of surplus labor. The
social relations underlying the emergence of relative surplus value are
not immediately apparent, no more than they were for Ricardo. But
the same cannot be said with respect to absolute surplus value.
We have seen that Marx followed “all economists worth speaking
of,” that is, classical political economy, with respect to the standard of
necessity. However, he did not do so when it came to determination
of the workday. There was nothing to follow: classical political econ-
omy did not recognize the workday as a variable. Accordingly, Marx
was free to forge his own important path, a path that immediately
revealed the coercion at the core of capitalist relations of production.
In developing the concept of absolute surplus value, Marx intro-
duced the essential characteristic of capitalist production—the
coercive relationship of “supremacy and subordination” of capi-
tal over wage-laborers.1 We cannot think about capitalist relations
without understanding the centrality of this supremacy and subordi-
nation. Does that coercive relation disappear when we leave absolute
surplus value to consider relative surplus value? Does the worker’s
rebellion against that coercion really disappear?
Why doesn’t the “antinomy of right against right” essential to the
determination of the normal workday apply as well to the determi-
nation of the standard of necessity? It would if the working-class
subject revealed in chapter 10 had not been yanked off the stage. And
it should apply if Marx’s critique of political economy is to reflect the
now open, now hidden “struggle between collective capital and col-
lective labour, i.e. the class of capitalists, and collective labour, i.e. the
working class.”2
Without classical political economy’s stifling assumption, we
would recognize that capital faces a working class that develops its
capacity and organization through its struggles, a working class that
is transforming social relations among its members. And that raises
the question as to whether the absence of that particular part infects
our theoretical conception of the whole.
Reproducing Supremacy and Subordination
We know that it is inherent in capital to attempt to grow. But the

accumulation of capital generates particular types of feedback. In
“the historical genesis of capitalist production,” accumulation of capi-
tal drove up money-wages. As a result, “the consumption-fund of the
workers” expanded, and this negative feedback checked the ability
of capital to grow. Under these conditions, for capital to obtain the
funds for further accumulation, it had to defeat the working class.
How did it do that when “the subordination of labour to capital was
only formal, i.e. the mode of production itself had as yet no spe-
cifically capitalist character”? By using the state to reduce and keep
money-wages down. Through “state compulsion” and “police meth-
ods” limiting wages and banning the combination of workers, capital
was able to confine “the struggle between capital and labour within
limits convenient for capital.”3
Feedback from the accumulation of capital takes different forms
with the development of a mode of production with a “specifically
capitalist character.” Here, rather than rising money-wages expand-
ing “the consumption-fund of the workers,” increases in productivity
brought about by manufacture and then machinery and the factory
system cheapen the means of subsistence. There is here the pos-
sibility that the reduced value of commodities would expand that
consumption fund as workers struggle to secure the benefits of
rising productivity through increased real wages. There is here the
possibility, in short, of negative feedback that prevents the emergence

of relative surplus value.
Yet characteristic of the specifically capitalist mode of production
is that it generates positive feedback that tends to separate workers
and to check a rise in real wages. Within the workplace, this mode
of production destroys the capacities of workers and increases the
antagonism of head and hand; within society, it expands the reserve
army of labor both by incorporating workers with a lower historic
standard of necessity and by displacing workers through the substitu-
tion of machinery for direct labor. Increased separation of workers
by the “constant generation of a relative surplus population keeps the
law of the supply and demand of labour, and therefore wages, within
narrow limits which correspond to capital’s valorization require-
ments.” Accordingly, Marx concluded that, rather than requiring
state compulsion, in this case “the movement of the law of supply and
demand of labour on this basis completes the despotism of capital.”
The coercive relation of supremacy and subordination thus is pre-
served through the market within the organic system of capitalism.
The market does this by reconciling the actions of individuals with
the logic of capital. Through individual actors, the inner laws of capi-
tal are made real.4 For example, when an individual capitalist lowers
his cost of production relative to competitors by increasing produc-
tivity, Marx noted, “he contributes towards increasing the general rate
of surplus value” even though this is no part of his intention.5 His
action, too, “forces his competitors to adopt the new method.” Thus,
“the seemingly independent influences of the individuals, and their
chaotic collisions,” is how the inner laws of capital appear “as external
necessity” imposed by the market.6
Through their individual attempts to grow, Marx argued that “the
many capitals force the inherent determinants of capital upon one
another and upon themselves.” In short, the market, that is, competi-
tion, “executes the inner laws of capital; makes them into compulsory
laws toward the individual capital, but it does not invent them. It
realizes them.” Competition is what is apparent on the surface. But
what is the inner law that is realized? If we are to understand “the
way in which the immanent laws of capitalist production manifest

themselves in the external movement of the individual capitals [and]
assert themselves as themselves as the coercive laws of competition,”
we need to “grasp the inner nature of capital.”7
Yet it is not only the actions of individual capitalists that execute
the “general and necessary tendencies” of capital. The same is true of
the actions of individual workers. As the General Council of the First
International declared, “What the lot of the labouring population
would be if everything were left to isolated, individual bargaining,
may be easily foreseen. The iron rule of supply and demand, if left
unchecked, would speedily reduce the producers of all wealth to a
starvation level.”8
The reasoning was quite clear: competition between workers
“allows the capitalist to force down the price of labour”; it brings with
it an increase in the length and intensity of the workday of employed
workers, forcing them “to submit to overwork.”9 In contrast to the side
of capital, the efforts of wage-laborers as individuals to act in their
self-interest run counter to the interests of wage-labor as a whole. In
piece-work, for example:
The wider scope that piece-wages give to individuality tends to

develop both that individuality, and with it the worker’s sense of
liberty, independence and self-control, and also the competition
of workers with each other. The piece-wage therefore has a ten-
dency, while raising the wages of individuals above the average,
to lower this average itself.10
Further, the self-interest of the individual wage-laborer engaged in

piece-work similarly leads to the intensification of labor: “Given the
system of piece-wages, it is naturally in the personal interest of the
worker that he should strain his labour-power as intensely as possible;
this in turn enables the capitalist to raise the normal degree of inten-
sity of labour more easily.”11 Thus, acting in their individual interest
and competing among themselves, workers do not express the inner
tendencies of wage-labor but, rather, the inner tendencies of capital.
Insofar as workers are atomized and compete, they act in the interest
of capital. Accordingly, Marx concluded that “the competition among
workers is only another form of the competition among capitals.”12
The Blind Rule of the Supply-and-Demand Laws
Neither individual capitalists nor individual workers grasp the “gen-

eral and necessary tendencies of capital.” Instead they see the “forms
of appearance” of the inner laws, and they are conscious that they are
driven by the market and must obey it if they are to survive.13 These
everyday notions, the common consciousness of the agents of pro-
duction themselves, are the starting point for the political economists
of capital. Those economists, Marx argued, do “nothing more than
to translate the peculiar notions of the competition-enslaved capital-
ist into an ostensibly more theoretical and generalized language, and
attempt to demonstrate the validity of these notions.”14 For the politi-
cal economy of capital, markets rule. “The blind rule of the supply
and demand laws,” Marx declared, forms “the political economy of
the middle class.”15
That blindness means that the political economy of capital cannot
grasp central characteristics of capitalism. With its stress upon mar-
kets—the “realm of Freedom, Equality, Property and Bentham”—it
does not see the supremacy and subordination inherent in capitalist
production since it views capitalist and worker as contractors who
freely exchange equivalents.16 Further, since individual capitals com-
pete with each other by lowering all their costs (raw materials, labor,
interest, rent, etc.), nothing privileges the exploitation of workers.
Accordingly, the political economy of capital necessarily is also blind
with respect to the centrality of the exploitation of workers.
Precisely because the political economy of capital is based upon the
everyday consciousness of capitalists, it also does not understand the
inevitability of crises. Atomistic capitals do not proceed from con-
sciousness of “the interconnection of the reproduction process”; they
think only of their own actions and not of the structural requirements
for the reproduction of the system. Accordingly, without a grasp of
the inner requirements of the system as a whole—for example, the

characteristics of the “locked room”—the political economists of cap-
ital are blind to the underlying general and necessary tendencies of
capital.
Insofar as the political economy of capital expresses the perspec-
tive of capital, it aids in the reproduction of capitalism as an organic
system. It supports the reproduction of that “working class which by
education, tradition and habit looks upon the requirements of that
mode of production as self-evident natural laws.”17 Left to “the blind
rule of the supply and demand laws,” the despotism of capital over
workers is completed, now and forever.
Divide, Divide
Recall, however, the workers of chapter 10 who subsequently dis-

appeared. As soon as workers learn the secret of the market and
competition and begin to act in common against its effects, “the
more does their very function as a means for the valorization of capi-
tal become precarious.”18 We see here the unstated condition of the
reproduction of the organic system of capital, namely, the atomization
of the working class. That (and only that) is what permits “the blind
rule of the supply and demand laws” to ensure the reproduction of
capitalism.
Accordingly, once the working class begins to transform itself from
a class in itself into a class for itself through its struggles, “the blind
rule of the supply and demand laws which form the political economy
of the middle class” is revealed as capital’s class view. Opposing that
political economy is “social production controlled by social foresight,
which forms the political economy of the working class.”19 In con-
trast to the political economy of capital that is based upon atomistic
individuals, implicit in the political economy of the working class
is conscious activity based upon a conception of the whole, that is,
where associated producers expend “their many different forms of
labour-power in full self-awareness as one single social labour force.”20
Workers must combine for that political economy of the working
class to be made real. Through their struggles over the workday,

workers clearly learned this critical lesson, the necessity to organize
and to negate competition among themselves. Organized workers,
Marx understood, do not permit wages “to be reduced to the absolute
minimum; on the contrary, they achieve a certain quantitative partic-
ipation in the general growth of wealth.”21 That, Engels commented,
was the great merit of the trade unions: “They tend to keep up and to
raise the standard of life.”22
Just as important as achieving this result is the transformation of
workers in the course of struggling. “Everyday struggles” are essen-
tial in preventing workers, Marx stressed, from being “downgraded to
one level of broken wretches past salvation.” They make possible “the
initiating of any larger movement.” There are limits to such “guerrilla
fights.” Marx concluded, in Value, Price and Profit, that “Trade Unions
work well as centres of resistance,” but they need to use “their orga-
nized forces as a lever for the final emancipation of the working class.”
That, after all, was the goal. As the First International declared
in its “Provisional Rules,” the aim was “the economical emancipa-
tion of the working classes.” Achievement of that goal “had hitherto
failed from the want of solidarity between the manifold divisions of
labour in each country, and from the absence of a fraternal bond of
union between the working classes of different countries.” Thus, while
workers were learning the necessity for combining to fight against the
“never-ceasing encroachments of capital or changes in the market,”
they needed further to learn the unequivocal need for solidarity of
the class as a whole.23
But capital was also learning a lesson from the struggles of workers;
it learned the need to consciously separate and atomize the work-
ing class. As soon as workers organize trade unions, as soon as “they
try to organize planned cooperation between the employed and the
unemployed . . . so soon does capital and its sycophant, political
economy, cry out at the infringement of the ‘eternal’ and so to speak
‘sacred’ law of supply and demand.”24 Challenged by workers is the
view that the requirements of capital are “self-evident natural laws,”
that is, common sense. Accordingly, capital draws upon its political
economists for ideological support. However, capital has never lim-

ited itself to the ideological level nor relied solely upon the blind rule
of supply and demand.
The ruling classes are “unwilling to be without the weapons of
the old arsenal in case some emergency should arise.” Capital, we
know, does not hesitate to use the state to “take away from the work-
ers the right of association.” The 1791 decree in France preventing
every combination of workers, for example, was a clear effort to use
“state compulsion to confine the struggle between capital and labour
within limits convenient for capital.” And so too a subsequent act of
legislation in France intended to ensure that workers “not be per-
mitted to inform themselves about their own interests nor to act in
common” and thereby lessen their dependence upon capital.25 To “act
in common” is precisely what workers must not be permitted to do.
In the “struggle between collective capital and collective labour, i.e.
the class of capitalists, and collective labour, i.e. the working class,”
capital actively searches for ways to prevent workers from acting in
common. How better than to foster differences (real and imagined)
such as race, ethnicity, nation, and gender and to convert difference
into antagonism! Marx certainly understood how capital thrives upon
divisions within the working class. That, he declared, is the “secret” of
capital’s rule. Describing the antagonism between English and Irish
workers at the time, Marx explained this is “the secret of the impotence
of the English working class, despite its organization. It is the secret by
which the capitalist class maintains its power. And that class is fully
aware of it.”26
Divide, divide the working class! Capital knows that “the workers’
power of resistance declines with their dispersal.”27 However, the need
to divide workers is not part of the logic of capital that Marx presented
in Capital. When Marx says that capital has “an immanent drive, and
a constant tendency, towards increasing the productivity of labour
in order to cheapen commodities and, by cheapening commodities,
to cheapen the worker himself,” where is there any consideration of
capital’s “immanent drive, and a constant tendency” to divide the
working class? It remains a secret, albeit one that the capitalist class
“is fully aware of.” And, as long as that is a secret, it means you do not
understand the enemy.
If you do not understand the centrality of capital’s need to sepa-
rate workers, you will not grasp that such characteristics as racism,
patriarchy, and xenophobia do not drop from the sky, and you will
suggest that we obscure relations of class exploitation by emphasizing
these. On the contrary, these characteristics are produced and repro-
duced within a capitalism that must divide the working class if it is to
be reproduced. Silence about “the secret by which the capitalist class
maintains its power” disarms the working class and, indeed, betrays
it. Rejecting the tendency of some Marxists to treat race and gender
oppression as outside the logic of capital, David Roediger correctly
argues that “Marx left the production of difference untheorized in a
way that we cannot afford to.”28
Was the theoretical silence about capital’s absolute necessity to
divide workers a matter of incompleteness rather than a serious flaw
of Capital? Recall the point from Levins and Lewontin: “Seizing upon
one side of a dichotomous pair or a contradiction as if it were the
whole thing,” can infect our concept of the whole with “one-sided-
ness.”29 When an element is excluded from our concept of the whole,
they predicted, it “may take its revenge in leading us astray.”30 This is
precisely what occurred.
The Non-Neutrality of Productive Forces
If capital does not need to divide workers because the standard of

necessity is given, this leaves Capital with only one explanation of
relative surplus value—productivity increases. Once capital’s need
to divide and separate workers is recognized explicitly as part of its
logic, however, you understand that the productive forces that capital
introduces are not arbitrary or ad hoc; rather, they are particular to
capitalist relations of production, to the necessity to reproduce the
supremacy and subordination of capital over workers. Marx under-
stood that within the capitalist system, “all means for the development
of production undergo a dialectical inversion so that they become
means of domination and exploitation of the producers.” He certainly

did not view as neutral productive forces that degrade the worker “to
the level of an appendage of a machine.”
If your premise is that all that matters is the growth of productive
forces, relations of production disappear from consideration. This is
a deformation of Marxism, one that easily fosters the view that the
advance of productive forces combined with juridical ownership of
the means of production is the basis for the advance of socialism and
that we need not concern ourselves with the kinds of people produced
under particular relations of production. Indeed, as I proposed in
The Contradictions of “Real Socialism,” the theoretical inference as to
the neutrality of productive forces provides ideological support for a
society divided into conductors and the conducted.31 That theoretical
inference is one of the most grievous effects of Marx’s discussion of
relative surplus value.
Once we understand that inherent in capitalist production is capi-
tal’s “immanent drive, and a constant tendency” to divide workers,
several propositions follow:
If there is a way to divide the working class, capital will find it and
use it. Changes in the organization of production and in the tech-
nical composition of capital introduced by capital must be seen in
this light.
When capital initiates such changes in the organization of produc-
tion, it does so on the premise that it will be the beneficiary, either
because of the existing atomism of the working class or the expec-
tation that the change will have that effect.
If the benefits of productivity increases are to be captured by an
organized working class, capital has no interest in developing pro-
ductive forces. The expanded reproduction of capital has as its
premise the separation of the working class.
The separation of the working class is also the premise of the oper-
ation of the blind laws of supply and demand. Marx’s statement that
“the movement of the law of supply and demand of labour” as the
result of the replacement of workers by machinery “completes the des-

potism of capital” has as its premise the atomism of the working class.
Given workers who are isolated, atomistic competitors, the “sacred”
law of supply and demand ensures that workers are produced in their
bourgeois economic form, that is, as the products of capital.32
Every combination of the working class, however, “disturbs the
‘pure’ action of this law.”33 Indeed, it disturbs the “pure” organic system
of capitalism and points beyond that mental construct to “social
production controlled by social foresight, which forms the political
economy of the working class.” It points to that society (indeed, that
organic system) in which associated producers expend “their many
different forms of labour-power in full self-awareness as one single
social labor force.”
PA RT I V
CONTESTED
REPRODUCTION
8
Beyond Atomism
The Tragedy of Atomism
Given that the immanent drive and constant tendency of capital is

to atomize the working class, what are the effects of this tendency?
For the atomized worker, all other workers are competitors; all other
workers are enemies insofar as they are competing for the same jobs.
All other workers potentially stand between them and the satisfaction
of their needs.
Atomized workers may see a logic in joining together with others
in the same situation against a “greater enemy,” perhaps against
workers of other races and ethnicities. Further, in seeking “their
immediate, everyday interests,” they may even identify their inter-
ests with those of their capitalist employers. As Engels pointed out,
atomization “restricts the workers to seeing their interest in that of
their employers, thus making every single section of workers into an
auxiliary army for the class employing them.” For example, “The fac-
tory worker lets himself be used by the factory owner in the agitation
for protective tariffs.” The basis for viewing workers from different
countries as the enemy is obvious.1
Underlying all the behavior of wage-laborers within capitalism is that
they do not have an alternative means by which to maintain themselves
except by selling their labor-power. Accordingly, for the atomized

worker, the “worker’s dilemma” within capitalism becomes “do I take
a job for lower wages and longer and more intense working conditions
or does someone else get it?” Preventing the cooperation of workers is
their “division and dispersal,“ which, Engels commented, “renders it
impossible for them to realise that their interests are common, to reach
understanding, to constitute themselves into one class.”2
Left to “isolated, individual bargaining,“ the atomistic wage-laborer
thus acts like the homo economicus of neoclassical theory, calculat-
ing pleasure and pain (as transmitted by price) and considering only
that which is rational for him or her as an individual. This is one way
in which the real atomism of wage-laborers (which capital strives to
produce and reproduce) is reflected in neoclassical theory. Also pres-
ent is the real counterpart of the logical fallacy of composition: each
individual worker attempts to advance his or her individual interest,
as if what is true for that worker is all that matters; the result, as the
General Council of the First International declared, is that workers as
a whole lose.
This is the tragedy of atomism, which is familiar to some in the
garb of the so-called tragedy of the commons. As is well known,
the latter is intended as a cautionary tale to explain why common
property theoretically leads to disaster. Thinking that if I don’t take
advantage someone else will, each individual peasant chooses to
graze an additional animal on the common fields, and the result is
destruction of the quality of the land. The preferred solution for the
advocates of this tale is private ownership of the resource in ques-
tion so that the self-interest of each individual owner is to preserve
and improve its productivity (in the case of the parable, the land,
but also, among other resources, the buffalo herd, whales, fish, and
presumably water and air). However, the focus upon the commons
misidentifies and thus masks the tragedy. Rather than from common
property, the concept of the tragedy of atomism reveals that the
destruction of human beings and nature has its roots in particular
social relations.
BEYOND ATOMISM 113
While the concept of the tragedy of atomism theoretically chal-

lenges the so-called tragedy of the commons, the latter has been
refuted concretely by the history of communities with respect to
common property. Focusing in particular on the experience with
natural resources to which all members of a community have access
(fisheries, irrigation systems, forests, and the like), many studies have
stressed the norms, conventions, and working rules by which such
communities, for example, indigenous communities, have success-
fully managed the commons.3
The key is the existence of communal institutions, formal or infor-
mal arrangements by which common property is monitored and
respected. As Elinor Ostrom and others who have worked on the ques-
tion of common property have explained, the absence of a community
determined and able to monitor the utilization of the commons turns
the latter into “open-access property.” It means that there are no con-
straints upon atomistic behavior in which individuals, from inside or
outside, act as if their private interests are isolated from one another.
The result is excess grazing, fishing, hunting, land-clearing, chemical-
fertilizing, mineral-extracting, carbon-emitting, water-using—excess
relative to what Marx called “the whole gamut of permanent condi-
tions of life required by the chain of human generations.”4
Consistent with neoclassical theory, some communities avoid the
tragedy of atomism by introducing sanctions and fines for violations
of the interest of the whole; however, the constraint characteristic in
many communities flows from the existence of norms with respect
to fairness and appropriate behavior and morals. In contrast to the
anonymous actors who populate neoclassical theory, individuals in
these communities “have shared a past and expect to share a future.
It is important,” Elinor Ostrom accordingly notes, “for individuals to
maintain their reputations as reliable members of the community.”5
In short, rather than a “connection of mutually indifferent persons,“
the links of people in such cases go beyond the atomistic premises of
homo economicus.6 Implicit here is a conception of fairness that goes
beyond the results of markets.
“Fairness” and Experimental Economics
The concept of fairness (and, thus, unfairness) can be a real moment

of economic life. As E. P. Thompson revealed in his classic arti-
cle, “The Moral Economy of the English Crowd in the Eighteenth
Century,” the food riots of that period reflected a broad and passion-
ate consensus that price increases were unfair and unjust.7 Similarly,
James Scott, in his work on “the moral economy of the peasant,”
focused upon the notion of economic justice among peasants and
pointed to revolts and rebellions that erupted when notions of fair-
ness were violated.8 As I discussed in “The Concept of ‘Fairness’:
Possibilities, Limitations, Possibilities,“ there were also protests and
various forms of resistance within “real socialism” on the part of
workers when what they considered to be tacit social contracts and
existing norms were violated.9
The underlying concept here is one of an equilibrium, a concept
that Thompson employed explicitly in talking about “a particular
set of social relations, a particular equilibrium between paternalist
authority and the crowd.”10 When that equilibrium is disturbed, there
can be a feedback mechanism in which masses (peasants, the crowd,
workers) react to restore the previous conditions. That was precisely
what Marx described in Value, Price and Profit, where he pointed out
that 99 percent of wage struggles followed changes that had produced
falling wages. “In one word,” he noted, they were “reactions of labour
against the previous action of capital” and were an attempt to restore
the “traditional standard of life” that was under attack.11 The sponta-
neous impulse of workers was to struggle for “fairness” against the
violations of existing norms, indeed, to fight a guerilla war against
effects initiated by capital. The explicit goal of workers was to struggle
for “a fair day’s wage for a fair day’s work.”
This, as Marx pointed out, was a “conservative demand,” an attempt
to turn the clock back. 12 Rather than a call for an end to exploitation,
it is the demand for the fair exploitation of the past. Indeed, the stan-
dard of fairness in much of what has been called “moral economy”
involves looking backward to a better time. Is there not, though, a
BEYOND ATOMISM 115
concept of fairness (and unfairness) that can lead in a revolutionary

direction?
In recent years, the subject of fairness has surfaced in mainstream
economics as the result of questions posed by experimental and
behavioral economists about the neoclassical assumption of homo
economicus. Through extensive empirical studies of select groups,
supported by real life experiences, these economists and psycholo-
gists have concluded that predictions of that model are regularly
falsified by the behavior of real subjects. Contrary to the premise that
rational individuals by definition always act to maximize their per-
sonal self-interest, these writers argue that concepts of fairness are
part of the preference functions of individuals and, accordingly, they
act differently from homo economicus.
For example, Kahneman, Knetsch, and Thaler argue that the
“Ultimatum Game,” where one individual offers a particular division
of a sum to a second individual on a “take-it-or leave-it basis” (“leave
it” meaning that neither gets any part of that sum) reveals that peo-
ple’s preferences for being treated fairly and for treating others fairly
lead them to act contrary to theoretical predictions. According to the
theory, the first party (the allocator) rationally will offer as little above
zero as possible and the second (the recipient) will accept this offer
(ultimatum) rather than get nothing.13 In this exercise a clear pat-
tern emerges: the recipients often tend to reject any offer they don’t
consider fair even though this means they would get nothing, and
the allocators often make an offer well above zero, and sometimes an
equal division, rather than make a blatantly unfair offer.
An apparent preference for fairness is also demonstrated when
those surveyed via telephone interviews and classroom tests con-
sider a scenario in which an employer or landlord takes advantage
of changing market conditions to alter an existing agreement (for
example, raise rents or lower wages). Respondents tend to view such
actions as unfair, except in the case where the employer/landlord
himself faces additional costs. In contrast, new contracts with new
parties that reflect those new conditions are viewed as fair. What
leads the survey subjects to view the latter case as fair? The unstated
premise is that the market yields fair results; as for the former case,
the presumed unfairness flows from the violation of the implicit con-
tract in a “reference transaction” that occurred under previous (and
fair) market conditions.
Of course, the limited information these atomistic subjects are pro-
vided surely reflects their particular judgments as to fairness. If, for
instance, they were informed that workers were super-exploited (in
the reference transaction) as the result of racism and sexism, would
they still conclude that it is fair for the employer to lower wages if his
raw material costs rise? As Kahneman, Knetsch, and Thaler admit,
justice is not to be confused with this conception of fairness: “The
reference transaction provides a basis for fairness judgments because
it is normal, not necessarily because it is just” and “Terms of exchange
that are initially seen as unfair may in time acquire the status of a
reference transaction.”14 As in the “moral economy” examples cited
above, the concept of fairness here involves looking backward. In
short, super-exploitation may come in time to be viewed as “self-evi-
dent natural laws.”
Although the particular judgments of these survey respondents
certainly may be questioned, a concept of fairness clearly appears to
be part of their preference function. For Kahneman, Knetsch, and
Thaler, incorporation of fairness enriches the standard model and
helps to explain what appear to be anomalies for the model of homo
economicus.15 But does it challenge the standard neoclassical model?
Fairness simply becomes here an additional element in the deter-
mination of the optimal position of atomistic individuals. A more
realistic homo economicus that permits better predictions, perhaps,
but still the same model.
Yet some behavioral economics studies point in a quite differ-
ent direction, alerting us to contradictions between the self-interest
characteristic of homo economicus and matters of fairness, morals, or
what economist Sam Bowles calls “social preferences.” In his book The
Moral Economy Bowles defines social preferences as encompassing
“motives such as altruism, reciprocity, intrinsic pleasure in helping
others, aversion to inequity, ethical commitment, and other motives
BEYOND ATOMISM 117
that induce people to help others more than is consistent with maxi-
mizing their own wealth or material payoff.”16 Not only do many
studies demonstrate that self-interest and social preferences coex-
ist, but they also reveal particular characteristics of their interaction.
Bowles illustrates this phenomenon at the outset of his book:
In Haifa, at six day care centers, a fine was imposed on parents

who were late in picking up their children at the end of the day.
It did not work. Parents responded to the fine by doubling the
fraction of time they arrived late. After twelve weeks, the fine
was revoked, but the parents’ enhanced tardiness persisted.17
Similarly, Bowles notes that Boston firemen responded to penalties

for going over a limit for their sick days by substantially increasing
the sick days they claimed and ultimately taking more than twice as
many in the next year. Further, he points out that attempts to shorten
hospital stays in Norway by imposing fines had the opposite effect.
Contrary, then, to the predictions as to how homo economicus acts, the
effect of monetary incentives in these cases appears counterintuitive.
But Bowles’s point is that they are not anomalies. When you
introduce concrete rewards or penalties where they are not hitherto
present, something is occurring that the theory of homo economicus is
not capturing. We can see that too in experiments with children who
are offered a reward for doing what they were happy to do without
the reward; for example, in the case of children happy to help an adult
retrieve a lost object, with the introduction of a reward “the helping
rate fell off by 40 percent.” In another case where children enjoyed
drawing, those who accepted the idea of rewards reduced their deci-
sion to choose drawing in the course of time.18
We can identify two takeaways from these examples, and from
the many experiments that Bowles reports. First, “incentives crowd
out social preferences.” We cannot assume, as the literature on homo
economicus does, the compartmentalization or separation of the two
spheres. Rather, “incentives and social preferences are substitutes:
the effect of each on the targeted activity declines as the level of the
other increases.”19 Thus, the fine for tardiness at the childcare center
“appears to have undermined the parents’ sense of ethical obligation
to avoid inconveniencing the teachers, leading them to think of late-
ness as just another commodity they could purchase,” and the fines
placed on the Boston firemen went counter to their pride in serving
the public.20
The second takeaway from Bowles’s review of the various studies
demonstrates the importance of the second product. Our emphasis
upon the second product predicts that acting in response to material
incentives tends to produce a different person than one who acts in
accordance with social preferences. And that is precisely the lesson
stressed by Bowles. Considering the long-term effects of material
incentives, Bowles argues that “the economy is a great teacher, and its
lessons are neither fleeting nor confined within its boundaries.” Material
incentives, he proposes, may “affect the long-term learning process
whose results persist over decades, even entire lifetimes.” Indeed, “the
incentive alters the long term, not easily reversed preference-learning
process.” Very simply, “economies structured by differing incentives
are likely to produce people with differing preferences,” or, as Bowles
declares in a subhead, “The Economy Produces People.”21
What kinds of people are produced by the use of material incen-
tives? Exactly what you would expect as the result of what Bowles
calls “the corrosive effect of markets and incentives on social prefer-
ences.”22 Not only do incentives “crowd out” social preferences in the
short run, but they also “constitute part of a learning environment
in which preferences are durably modified.”23 More than mere sub-
stitutes for social preferences, material incentives shape people. As a
result, the people produced by markets and incentives are substitutes
for people characterized by motives such as altruism, opposition to
inequity, and intrinsic pleasure in helping others. How Bowles feels
about this is clear from the subtitle of his book: Why Good Incentives
Are No Substitute for Good Citizens.
Nevertheless, despite his own obvious social preferences, Bowles
sees the necessity to utilize material incentives in the hope of achiev-
ing desirable goals. Perhaps because of his understanding of how
BEYOND ATOMISM 119
markets and material incentives have already shaped the preferences

of people within capitalism, his purpose is to stress the importance
of developing “public policies that would allow incentives and con-
straints to work synergistically rather than at cross purposes with
people’s ethical and other-regarding dispositions.”24 Rather than com-
promising the “ethical and other-regarding motives that are essential
to a well-governed society,” Bowles hopes for the development of a
mechanism design that would include “a wise combination of positive
incentives and punishments with moral lessons.”25 Combining incen-
tives and social preferences in a way that fosters the latter would be
for him the best of all possible worlds.
Having identified the essential contradiction between material
incentives and social preferences, however, it is not enough to search
for the golden mean, the “wise combination” that can dampen that
contradiction and can offer an incremental feasible path toward
a society that would produce better people. We can’t stop there. If
material incentives and social preferences are so obviously in opposi-
tion, it is because they are elements of two different organic systems.
Analytically, we need to go beneath the surface to understand those
systems that not only coexist but also interpenetrate and mutually
deform each other.
Capitalism and Community
Material incentives are common sense in a system that starts from a

relation of separated atomistic self-seekers, a system based not upon
“the association of man with man, but on the separation of man from
man.”26 What brings these “mutually indifferent persons” together,
“putting them in relation with each other, is the selfishness, and the
private interest of each. Each pays heed to himself only, and no one
worries about the others.”27 Such atomistic self-seekers and their con-
nection, the market, are “historic premises” of capitalism. Central to
capitalism, however, is that it produces and reproduces a particular
atomism, that of workers, as its premise.28
Consider our discussion in chapter 3 of capitalism as an organic
system. Once capital has developed upon its own foundation (once “it
is itself presupposed, and proceeds from itself to create the conditions
of its maintenance and growth”), it produces its own premises in their
“bourgeois economic form.”29 Commodities, money, markets, labor-
power as a commodity, and the separation of workers are produced
and reproduced as are the seemingly independent self-seekers who
respond to the compulsion of the market, which is “external to the
individuals and independent of them.” That apparent external com-
pulsion, which ensures the reproduction of capitalism as an organic
system, is precisely why Marx stressed the importance of the “sacred”
law of supply and demand in maintaining the despotism of capital
and why he identified the political economy of capital as grounded in
“the blind rule of the supply and demand laws.”
Let us consider, on the other hand, the system that produces indi-
viduals who collectively are guided by “motives such as altruism,
reciprocity, intrinsic pleasure in helping others, aversion to inequity,
ethical commitment, and other motives that induce people to help
others.” In contrast to a concept of fairness that rests upon the market
and only rejects as unfair those violations of existing norms developed
as the result of the interactions of atomistic actors, focus upon social
preferences implies the view that selfishness, inequality, and insensi-
tivity to the needs of others are unfair and unjust behavior for people
within society. We are pointing here to an alternative organic system
in which social preferences are common sense. As Ostrom indicated,
in a system based explicitly upon the association of people, people
take pride in being viewed “as reliable members of the community.”
Whether labeled the solidarian society, the solidarity economy, the
communal society, or communism, the starting point of this system
is community, the recognition of the needs of others within society.30
Begin with communality, Marx proposed, and “instead of a divi-
sion of labour . . . there would take place an organization of labour.”
There, the producers, “working with the means of production held
in common,“ combine their capacities “in full self-awareness as one
single social labour force.”31 In this system, Marx explained in the
Grundrisse, “communal production, communality, is presupposed as
BEYOND ATOMISM 121
the basis of production,“ and the activities undertaken by the associ-

ated producers are “determined by communal needs and communal
purposes.”32 In short, here the producers have informed themselves of
their common interests and accordingly “act in common.”
In this system of communality, rather than “the blind rule of the
supply and demand laws” inherent in the atomism of producers, we
see the realization of “the political economy of the working class,”
which is “social production controlled by social foresight.” Production
for social needs, organized by associated workers, based upon social
ownership of the means of production (three sides of what Hugo
Chávez called “the elementary triangle of socialism”) are parts of an
organic system, a “structure in which all the elements coexist simul-
taneously and support one another.” It is a system of reproduction
whose results are premises of the system as “is the case with every
organic system.”33
One of the essential products of this system is a particular type
of human being characterized by “solidarity, cooperation, care,
reciprocity, mutualism, altruism, compassion, and love.”34 Homo
solidaricus (as named by Emily Kawano) develops her capacities by
relating to others out of solidarity. If I produce consciously for your
need, the young Marx commented, I know my work is valuable: “in
my individual activity,” he proposed, “I would have directly con-
firmed and realised my true nature, my human nature, my communal
nature.” Thus, the second product of our activity in communal soci-
ety is the development of rich human beings who realize themselves
by consciously producing for others.35 With “free exchange among
individuals who are associated on the basis of common appropria-
tion and control of the means of production,” Marx envisioned the
production of “free individuality, based on the universal development
of individuals and on their subordination of their communal, social
productivity as their social wealth.”36
Two organic systems. Each is separate and compartmentalized.
Each produces a particular type of human being. Actually existing
capitalism contains elements of both systems, and that poses the
question of how they interact. Bowles recognizes that incentives and
social preferences are substitutes, that they tend to “crowd out” each
other and that the people produced by each are substitutes. Given his
chosen audience, he seeks to convince the wise legislator to search for
the mechanism that will produce the most salutary combination of
the two motives. But that does not abolish the contradictions between
the two systems.
Capital, we know, is constantly attempting to separate producers in
order to weaken them. It gains always by turning workers against each
other and to see each other as competitors, as usurpers, as threats, as
enemies. It does whatever it can to foster atomism and to turn every-
thing into market relations; capital’s goal in this respect is complete
commodification, what Marx described as a “time when everything,
moral or physical, having become a marketable value, is brought to
the market,” a time of “universal venality.”37 Capital, in short, con-
stantly drives to crowd out all traces of the system of community. To
think that a wise mechanism design is sufficient to withstand this
impulse is utopianism.
Material incentive versus social preferences, atomism versus com-
munity, separation versus solidarity, homo economicus versus homo
solidaricus, the political economy of capital versus the political
economy of the working class—these are sides of the class struggle
within existing capitalism.38 Rather than hoping for “a wise combina-
tion” of each, the wise revolutionary understands that it is essential to
struggle by all means possible to defeat capitalism, to decommodify
everything, to build the system of community where producers act
in common. And, simultaneously in that process, how they produce
themselves as the working class the system of community needs.
9
Between Organic Systems
In chapter 3 we discussed Marx’s conceptualization of capitalism as

an organic system. There we see commodities, money, means of pro-
duction, workers, all in their “bourgeois economic form,” all as parts
of a “structure of society in which all relations coexist simultaneously
and support one another.” This organic system, we understand, pro-
duces its own premises and, accordingly, is a system of reproduction:
“Every economic relation presupposes every other in its bourgeois
economic form, and everything posited is thus also a presupposition;
this is the case with every organic system.”1
Capitalism as an organic system would be a success story, one of
capital’s victory in subordinating all society to itself. The completion
of an organic system, “its development to its totality,” Marx indi-
cated, “consists precisely in subordinating all elements of society to
itself, or in creating out of it the organs which it still lacks. This is
historically how it becomes a totality.”2 Here, capital no longer relies
upon “historic premises”; its premises, including the working class
that looks upon its requirements as common sense, are produced
organically. It “proceeds from itself to create the conditions of its
maintenance and growth.”3
Actually existing capitalism, however, is not an organic system. As
we have seen, existing capitalism contains elements that are alien to

the organic system of capitalism, not only those social preferences
that point directly to an alternative organic system of community but
also the struggles and organization of workers who act in common to
challenge “the blind rule of the supply and demand laws.” Whereas
capitalism as an organic system corresponds to the neoclassical ideal
of atomistic actors functioning in a pure market system, actually
existing capitalism contains elements of a different system, one in
which “social production [is] controlled by social foresight.”4
Lack of correspondence to the concept of an organic system is
not unique for real capitalism. An organic system, by definition, is
a particular combination of elements that produce and support one
another and exist in harmony. However, in actual historical devel-
opment, we find few such periods. Rather, as Hegel proposed, such
periods are “blank pages” in history because “they are periods of har-
mony—periods when the antithesis is in abeyance.”5 On the contrary,
the pages of history record a process of becoming, a process of struggle
between old and new.
If organic systems have at best a fleeting real existence in which
contradictions are suspended, it is reasonable to ask what is the point
of focusing upon this concept? As we have seen, it is an intellectual
construct that permits us to analyze a system in its purity and to
identify its central premises. The concept of capitalism as an organic
system allows us to identify the premises of capitalism that must be
reproduced, namely capital and wage labor. How can we understand
capitalism without recognizing how capital is reproduced and how
wage labor is reproduced? Indeed, what is necessary for the reproduc-
tion of capitalist relations of production?
Further, as Marx noted, this method is a guide to historical inves-
tigation. Without identifying the premises of capitalism as an organic
system, how do we know what to focus on in terms of the history of
its emergence? With an understanding of those premises, we can read
history backwards; we are able to ask where did capital initially come
from and where did wage labor initially come from. But this guide is
not only a guide to history; it is also a guide to revolutionary necessity.
BETWEEN OrgANIC SYSTEMS 125
That is, what is necessary to prevent those particular premises from

being reproduced.
Contested Reproduction and the Whole
Given that existing capitalism contains elements that are alien to

the organic system of capitalism, it is obvious that the latter is not
the whole. Rather than a “structure of society in which all relations
coexist simultaneously and support one another,” existing capitalism
contains elements that represent a potential rupture of that structure,
a process of becoming that would negate capitalism. How, then, does
a new system that is emerging subordinate all elements to itself, how
does it wrest away from the old system those elements and create ele-
ments of its own? Conversely, how does the old system succeed in
reproducing itself despite the inroads of the new? All history is a his-
tory of contested reproduction.
This concept of contested reproduction provides insight into the
struggle over the state in the interregnum between the organic system
of capitalism and the organic system of community. In capitalism as
an organic system, there is no place for the state because the repro-
duction of capitalist relations occurs through the actions of atomistic
capitals and atomistic workers, through, in short, the blind rule of
the supply and demand laws. Similarly, in community as an organic
system, there is no place for a state standing over and above civil soci-
ety since the actions of associated self-governing communities and
workplaces ensure the reproduction of communal relations. In con-
tested reproduction between capitalism and community, however,
the state is a site of struggle, to determine whether and to what extent
it serves to support the reproduction of capitalism or the society of
associated producers.
Within the whole that contains elements of capitalism and commu-
nity, those parts do not merely coexist as independent and opposite.
As indicated in chapter 2’s discussion of parts and wholes, a dialec-
tical worldview recognizes that parts interpenetrate. They “acquire
properties by virtue of being parts of a particular whole, properties
they do not have in isolation or as parts of another whole.” In con-

tested reproduction, the elements characteristic of particular organic
systems are not present in their purity but are transformed by their
interactions within the particular whole.
In both The Socialist Alternative and also The Contradictions of
“Real Socialism,” I credited Evgeny Preobrazhensky as the theorist
who made the most important contribution to an understanding of
contested reproduction.6 Preobrazhensky recognized that the becom-
ing of a new organic system is a process of struggle in which the new
must subordinate the elements of the old. “Not a single economic for-
mation,” he argued, “can develop in a pure form, on the basis merely
of the immanent laws which are inherent to the particular formation.
This would be in contradiction to the very idea of development. The
development of any economic form means its ousting of other eco-
nomic forms, the subordination of these forms to the new form, and
their gradual elimination.”7 This is how the “pure” system, the new
organic system, develops.
Discussing the particular challenges in the USSR in the 1920s,
Preobrazhensky argued that that there was a “struggle between two
mutually hostile systems” and, accordingly, a struggle between their
regulating principles. On the one hand, there was “the law of the
spontaneous equilibrium of commodity-capitalist society” (the law
of value); on the other hand, there was the “law of primitive socialist
accumulation” that involved “the conscious decisions of the regula-
tory organs of the state.”8 Each of these regulating principles reflected
particular relations of production and pointed to a particular organic
system. “If each principle is fighting for supremacy in the whole
system,” he noted, “it is thereby fighting for the type of regulation
which is organically characteristic of the particular system of produc-
tion-relations, taken in its pure form.”9
Yet, neither the law of value nor that of primitive socialist accu-
mulation regulated the Soviet economy in this period. Rather,
Preobrazhensky argued, the two regulating principles interpen-
etrated—coexisting, limiting, deforming each other—and their
combination generated dysfunction in the economy.10 If the regulating
principle of primitive socialist accumulation existed by itself, the pat-

tern in the Soviet economy would be rapid accumulation in the sphere
of heavy industry (Department I) because of the need for mechani-
zation and rapid industrialization.11 On the other hand, if only the
regulating principle of the law of value were present in its pure form,
then the free movement of prices and of capital between different
branches of production would direct production to light industry in
order to satisfy consumer demand.12 With the combination of the two
principles (one tending to foster the growth of Department II and the
other the growth of Department I), the result was the emergence of a
“goods famine,” a “disproportion between industrial production and
the country’s effective demand.”
In this situation, Preobrazhensky argued, the operation of the law
of value was “quite deformed and distorted” because it could not
produce the distribution of the country’s productive forces consis-
tent with it.13 On the other hand, the attempt to plan and coordinate
the state economy was subject to “continual blows struck by market
spontaneity against the entire state economy as a unified whole.”14 The
problem was that the old was dying but the new could not yet be
born. It is the consequence of a “situation when the working of one
fundamental law, in this case the law of value, is paralysed or, to speak
more precisely, is half-abolished, but the working of the other law,
which historically succeeds the law of value, cannot develop for one
reason or another proportionately to the stage and rate of abolition of
the law of value.”15
Who will win? In contested reproduction, the outcome of the
struggle to subordinate the elements of each other is not predeter-
mined. In the case of the Soviet Union, Preobrazhensky stated that
“the enormous preponderance of petty commodity production com-
bined with the relative weakness of the state sector forces the state
economy into an uninterrupted economic war with the tendencies of
capitalist development, with the tendencies of capitalist restoration.”16
For socialism to advance, he argued that it was essential that primi-
tive socialist accumulation replace the law of value, that the latter be
subordinated and gradually eliminated.
The whole that Preobrazhensky described, in short, contained

within it the struggle between two systems.17 And, characteristic of
wholes marked by contested reproduction, there is always the pos-
sibility that neither system will prevail over the other for significant
periods of time. Accordingly, stability and equilibrium, that is,
homeostasis, will appear to characterize the whole. Even when—
indeed, especially when—the whole appears stable, it is essential to
recognize that the whole contains opposing forces, that it is charac-
terized by contested reproduction. As Levins and Lewontin noted, in
such cases, “Things are the way they are because of the temporary
balance of opposing forces.”18
The Strength of Opposing Forces
Marx certainly understood the concept of contested reproduction.

“Two diametrically opposed economic systems,” Marx proposed in
Capital, coexisted and were in contradiction. One, he noted, “rests
on the labour of the producer himself, and the other on the exploita-
tion of the labour of others.” What distinguished those diametrically
opposed systems was the beneficiary of the producer’s labor. In the
first, the producer, “as owner of his own conditions of labour, employs
that labour to enrich himself instead of the capitalist.”19 In the second,
capital grows by exploiting workers.
Contested reproduction in this case was thus characterized by the
attempt of capital to subordinate the elements of the system of pro-
ducer-owned production and the attempt of that system to resist and
reverse any inroads made by capital. Of course, this was a process
and not something that occurred overnight. It involved many inter-
mediate steps before the victory of capitalist relations of production
(the relation of capitalist and wage-labor) could be complete: “The
process, therefore, which creates the capital-relation can be nothing
other than the process which divorces the worker from the owner-
ship of the conditions of his own labour.”20 This was the victory of one
economic system.
Viewed from the other side, separation of producer and conditions
of production represented the destruction of the system of producer-

owned production. “Where the worker is the free proprietor of the
conditions of his labour, and sets them in motion himself: where the
peasant owns the land he cultivates, or the artisan owns the tools with
which he is an accomplished performer,” a particular mode of pro-
duction, small-scale production, “flourishes, unleashes the whole of
its energy, attains its adequate classical form.” In place, accordingly, of
a system that permitted “the free individuality of the worker himself,”
there emerged the system that destroyed producers. 21
How in general did capital make inroads into the system of
producer-owned production? Through money, by successively subor-
dinating every element of the existing system to money, the germ of
capital. As Marxist historian Jairus Banaji stressed, independent pro-
ducers often were increasingly subordinated to capital as the result
of bad harvests and growing difficulties in reproducing themselves
and their conditions of production. In this situation, interest-bearing
loans, advances, and the putting-out of raw materials were means by
which money-capital and merchant-capital came to dominate those
independent producers.22 From selling their products in order to
buy particular use-values to selling commodities to secure money to
repay debts, those producers were increasingly driven by the market
rather than by their reproduction requirements.
Yet bad years could be succeeded by good years and low com-
modity prices by high prices. And, in those latter circumstances,
producers could extract themselves from dependence upon capital.
Those producers, after all, were the owners of their output and the
immediate beneficiaries of their own labor. As residual claimants of
the returns from their production, in good years they were able to
pay off debts and avoid incurring new ones. Indeed, insofar as they
produced to maintain their families (effectively a fixed cost), high
prices for their output reduced the necessity to sell and could be
accompanied by reduced marketing. These independent producers
were not capitalist firms.
Even when the inroads made by money-capital extended to the point
where producers were separated from the conditions of production,
and it was capitalist employers who were now the residual claimants
of production, producers struggled to extract themselves from wage-
labor. Indeed, as Marx pointed out, “centuries are required before the
‘free’ worker . . . makes a voluntary agreement” to sell “the whole of
his active life, his capacity for labour in return for the price of his cus-
tomary means of subsistence.”23 Accordingly, as noted earlier, in “the
historical genesis of capitalist production,” accumulation of capital
drove up money-wages; where possible, this allowed workers to meet
their monetary requirements and to spend more time on other activ-
ity. Negative feedback following the growth of capital at such times
tended to generate the non-reproduction of the wage-labor relation.24
And that is precisely why capital drew upon the state through “bloody
discipline,” “police methods,” and “state compulsion” to ensure the
submission of workers to the needs of capital.25
Though this negative feedback that tended to check the reproduc-
tion of capitalism was present in the Old World, nowhere was it more
obvious than in the New World, the “colonies.” There, the high wages
generated by the accumulation of capital provided an opportunity
for workers to save in order to extract themselves from wage labor.
As a result, Marx explained, “Today’s wage-labourer is tomorrow’s
independent peasant or artisan, working for himself.” In short, in the
colonies the relative supply and demand for workers meant that the
relationship of wage labor was not automatically reproduced: where
“the worker receives more than is required for the reproduction of his
labour capacity and very soon becomes a peasant farming indepen-
dently, etc., the original relation is not constantly reproduced.”26 And
that meant that the reproduction of capital was threatened because the
reproduction of the worker as wage laborer “is the absolutely neces-
sary condition for capitalist production.”27 The answer to this problem,
accordingly, was state legislation to impose a price upon land (as pre-
scribed by E. G. Wakefield, the English theorist of colonization). Here
was “the secret discovered in the New World by the political economy
of the Old World”—capitalism has as its “fundamental condition the
annihilation of that private property which rests on the labour of the
individual himself; in other words, the expropriation of the worker.”28
Contested Reproduction and One-Sidedness
Every whole is characterized by “diametrically opposed economic

systems” whose relative force is contingent upon particular concrete
conditions. In the struggle between producer-owned and capitalist-
owned productive forces, for example, the strength of each may vary
between time, place, and particular sectors. This was the case of the
contrast between the Old World and the New World with respect to
the force of the respective systems. So, too, with the relative strength
of opposing forces between peasant agriculture and state-directed
industry during NEP and in the struggle between capitalism and
community now—all are affected by concrete circumstances.
When there is contested reproduction, how do we classify the
whole? As the new struggling to be born or as the old struggling to
be reproduced? Unfortunately, there is a tendency to consider the
struggle between systems one-sidedly. This tendency is present when
contested reproduction is equated with the concept of transition. In
place of a concept of “becoming” (which encompasses both an arising
and a declining), “transition” introduces more than a hint of teleol-
ogy—the presupposed victory of the new. Further, it can lead to the
view of historical development as the result of “the immanent laws
which are inherent to the particular formation.”
Contested reproduction between capitalist and pre-capitalist rela-
tions of production is particularly susceptible to a view of the whole
from the side of capital. Banaji, for example, explicitly classifies slave
plantations, sharecropping, putting out systems, Indian and Russian
peasant agriculture, etc., as capitalist production even though they
lack the differentia specifica of capitalist production, namely, exploi-
tation of wage-laborers by capitalists.29 But that is his central point,
that it is an error, “bad theory,” to define capitalist relations of pro-
duction by the exploitation of wage-laborers. Wage-labor, he insists,
“cannot be an essential moment of capital, not if the self-expansion
of value is intrinsically indifferent to the forms in which it dominates
labour.30” Indeed, for Banaji, “the naïve conception of ‘relations of
production’ as forms of exploitation of labour” retains characteristics
of “vulgar historical materialism,” and “the ossified pseudo-Marxism

of the Stalinists.”31
Given Marx’s consistency in describing capitalist relations of pro-
duction (“the capital-relation”) as the production relation between
capitalist and wage-laborer, and given his understanding that “what
distinguishes the various economic formations of society—the dis-
tinction between for example a society based on slave labour and
a society based on wage labour—is the form in which the surplus
labour is in each case extorted from the immediate producer, the
worker,” then it should be obvious that, by insisting that we must not
identify “the specific economic form in which unpaid surplus labor
is pumped out of the direct producers” with relations of production,
Banaji’s critique is not of “ossified pseudo-Marxism” but of Marx
himself.32
But how does this difference with Marx come about? Very simply,
because Banaji’s definition of capitalist relations of production does
not include capitalist production. Rather, he delimits capitalist rela-
tions of production to M-C-M’, the impulse of capital to grow: “the
self-expansion of capital,” “the accumulation of capital,” “the accumu-
lation and competition of capitals.”33 With this truncated definition,
he has the degree of freedom sufficient to declare capitalist relations
of production compatible with peasant communities, slavery, feudal-
ism, and a wide range of forms of exploitation. Banaji thus assures
us, “Relations of production are simply not reducible to forms of
exploitation.” In particular, once merchant-capital and money-capital
are able to extract surplus value from various forms of production,
he argues that the latter should be understood as differing forms of
exploitation under capitalist relations.34
Given Banaji’s determination to explore the role of merchant-
capital and money-capital in what have been traditionally viewed as
pre-capitalist relations of production, he has contributed considerable
insights into the nature of those social formations. Indeed, much of
his impressive literature survey and commentary demonstrates the
existence of contested reproduction throughout the ages. But not for
Banaji. Unfortunately, contested reproduction between capitalism and
pre-capitalism is present in his work only negatively and one-sidedly. It

is revealed in barriers to the ought of capital, barriers that are the result
of “feudally dominated habits of consumption and display” (slave
plantations), “the social-consumption needs of the owners” (feudal-
ism), and “the patriarchal logic of the subsistence mode of production”
(peasant-economy). It’s all capitalism, despite the “relatively slow and
mainly sporadic” advance where the labor process is not determined
and ruled by capital.35
Absent a focus upon contested reproduction as two-sided, Banaji
offers a picture of a long march through transitional forms of capi-
talism, a long stage of “commercial capitalism” that encompasses
centuries of the relations of money-capital with differing forms of
exploitation. In place of the old schema of slavery, feudalism, capi-
talism, he describes “initial stages of capitalism,” extending from the
twelfth to the late eighteenth centuries. Here, “the history of com-
mercial capitalism is no longer simply a prelude to industrial capital”;
rather, it is “best seen as a totality, a narrative with its own coher-
ence, forms, internal periodisation, and conceptions of empire.”36 In
his theoretical reading, “the immanent laws which are inherent to the
particular formation” explains the history of capitalism.
Commercial capitalism is, indeed, distinct from the organic system
of capitalism that Marx analyzed, one in which merchant and money
capital were subordinate to the results of capitalist exploitation. By
contrast, in Banaji’s whole, “circulation dominates production,” and
commercial capitalism develops as the result of its immanent laws.
Lost is the understanding of Preobrazhensky (to whom Banaji dedi-
cated his book) that the process of development involves the “struggle
between two mutually hostile systems.”37
Classification and Change
Classification often brings with it the tendency to emphasize the static

characteristics of one particular organic system within the whole. For
example, is today’s China capitalist, socialist, or producer-owned
peasant production? Was the “Pink Tide” in Latin America capitalist,
twenty-first century socialist or something else? And how to classify

the Soviet NEP period and Yugoslav self-management?
In contrast, the concept of contested reproduction guides us to
focus upon the process of becoming, a process of struggle in which
each system is attempting to subordinate the other. Accordingly,
rather than planting our flag on one or another static category, we
examine a whole in motion. We are stimulated to evaluate every event
or policy as strengthening or weakening one or another system. What
was the effect, for example, of the Civil War upon potentially contest-
ing systems in the Soviet Union? Or the effect of imperialist actions or
global capitalism upon the correlation of forces in China, Vietnam, or
Venezuela? What logic is strengthened by current reforms in Cuba?38
Focusing upon contested reproduction, however, does not exclude
the need to identify the dominant characteristics of a society at a
given time. Without assuming that any particular point is static and
frozen, as Marxists we ask what “specific economic form” of exploita-
tion (or non-exploitation) of the direct producers dominates? As noted
above, for Marx, what distinguished societies (for example between
one based on slavery and one based upon wage labor) was “the form
in which the surplus labour is in each case extorted from the imme-
diate producer, the worker.” Accordingly, when we describe a system
as capitalism, we mean that capitalist exploitation of wage laborers is
dominant within this whole marked by contested reproduction.
But that brings us back to Banaji, who rejects a distinction between
economic formations based upon forms of exploitation. Since in his
whole, capitalist circulation dominates production, he gets everything
backwards. Rather than privileging capitalist circulation, from Marx’s
perspective, the exploitation of the slave is the premise for the circula-
tion of money capital (as is the exploitation of the serf). Privileging
capitalist circulation obscures the differences between “the various
economic formations of society.”
On the other hand, if we classify the whole simply as slavery or feu-
dalism, respectively, we miss the importance of the interaction with
money-capital in each case and the ensuing process of change. That is
the problem with classification, and it is the rational core of Banaji’s
critique. The motion and change characteristic of contested repro-

duction are not easily captured by classification.
Perhaps this is why Levins and Lewontin propose that, as Marxists,
there are two separate questions. One, discussed in chapter 2, relates to
the reproduction of a system that contains interacting and interpen-
etrating parts. We speak of homeostasis in this case when the system
is characterized by a balance of opposing forces, when the generation
of positive and negative feedback tends to produce an equilibrium
state. We understand that whole by analyzing how its parts interact.
In this context, we ask what are the various forms of exploitation,
what is their relative size and strength within the whole, and how they
interact. This is the matter addressed by their first question, why are
things the way they are.
The second question focuses upon how things change, how things
get the way they are; this is the question that considers development,
evolution, and the non-equilibrium processes that tend to produce
qualitative change in systems. It is this second question that concerns
us for our discussion of contested reproduction, and it is where we
need to be sensitive to the problem of one-sidedness. In the struggle
between old and new, if you focus only upon the new (by stressing,
for example, the effect of the growth of money-capital within pre-
capitalist formations), then the story told is one of inroads which the
new makes into the old, the encroachment that produces a growing
subordination of the elements of the old.
On the other hand, if the side of the old is the starting point, we
can see that changes in the whole may be initiated by changes within
the old—for example, where negative feedbacks that fostered homeo-
stasis are weakened or reverse their sign entirely and become positive
feedbacks.39 Such factors as soil erosion, declining sources of slave
supplies, invasions, climate change, overpopulation (relative to the
supply of land), economic crises, war, as well as state actions, may
tend to produce disequilibrium in the existing system. In those cases,
rather than inroads into the old, we focus upon openings produced
by changes within the old that are the immediate source of potential
qualitative changes of the whole.
Between organic systems, openings and inroads interact, just as the

old and new do in the process of contested reproduction. How that
can allow the new society to subordinate the elements of the old, in
particular, how the system of community can subordinate capitalism,
remains to be explored.
10
how to find a Path to Community

Writing History Backwards
How can we understand the process by which a new system emerges?

In his essay “When Should History Be Written Backwards?” econo-
mist Wassily Leontiev argued that the appropriate approach to writing
“analytical history” is determined by the equilibrium properties of the
particular dynamic system in question.1 If there is a stable dynamic
system, the trajectory of the system will be insensitive to a particular
starting point because the tendency in any event will be for the system
to converge at a given equilibrium point. Accordingly, writing history
forward, following chronological time, is unproblematic in this case
because differing historical observations at the starting point will not
affect the ultimate outcome.
In contrast, with an unstable dynamic system, the starting point is
critical as a slight difference at the outset will produce significantly
divergent historical outcomes. “A small, hardly perceptible mistake
in the description of the original base-year position of an unstable
dynamic system is bound to bring about a major error in the predic-
tion, that is, explanation of its later states.” Accordingly, “A historian
who sets out to explain the development of such a system by trac-
ing the sequence of events in time,” Leontiev commented, “is indeed
embarking on a very exacting, not to say practically impossible,

enterprise.”2 Where there is an unstable dynamic system, we should
begin from the known in the present and to write analytical history
backwards “with the help of theoretical weapons step by step toward
the more and more distant path.”3
Although not focusing upon the dynamic properties of systems,
philosopher Bertell Ollman comes to the same conclusion because of
his understanding of dialectics. In “Why Dialectics?” Ollman argued
that the correct order of inquiry with respect to history is to begin
with the present, not the past. With that starting point, he argued,
we can decide what to look for as well as how far back to go in look-
ing for it. In that way, we ask “what had to happen in the past for the
present to become what it did.”4 Ollman expanded on this point in an
essay specially focused upon writing history backwards: “Necessity
read backward into the past is of an altogether different order than
the necessity that begins in the past and follows a predetermined path
into the future.”5
If the dynamic properties of a system are such that the historical
process is one in which a germ is necessarily realized over time, then
writing history forward would be appropriate. “Directionality” here
is built in, and following from that, Levins and Lewontin comment,
is “a succession of ordered phases through which each entity must
pass, the successful passage through one stage being the condition for
passing on to the next.”6 However, if the combination of parts and the
re-creation of both parts and whole through their interaction makes
the historical trajectory of the whole highly sensitive to those interac-
tions, then how can there be “a predetermined path into the future”?
As Victor Serge commented, in the Soviet Union there were many
germs. Where there is contested reproduction (that is, class struggle
between systems), no outcome is inevitable.
In Capital, history was written forward (without teleological neces-
sity) once the elements of the capital relation were assembled. Having
set out the capital relation, Marx traced the trajectory of capital as it
attempted to drive beyond all barriers to its growth in the context of
contested reproduction. However, he did not write history forward
hOW TO fIND A PATh TO COMMUNITY 139
in order to identify the original emergence of the essential premises

of capitalism, capital, and wage-labor. He did not analyze feudalism
in order to explain how its disintegration and decomposition created
the elements for the construction of capitalism. Given the multiplicity
of elements present at the time when feudal relations imploded, how
could anyone identify the “historic premises” of capitalism without
first understanding capitalism?
As we have seen, Marx’s analysis of capitalism as a stable system
of reproduction was the condition for reading necessity “backward
into the past.” By writing history backwards from the known present,
Marx developed a method by which we are able to identify, despite
the vast differences of experiences in different countries, what led to
capitalism in each case. That method, we saw in chapter 3, “indicates
the points where historical investigation must enter in”; understand-
ing the nature of capitalism as an organic system “point[s] towards a
past lying behind this system.”7
Imagine, though, that we began with the contradictions of feu-
dalism in Western Europe and attempted to write history forward.
How could we identify a path to capitalism as opposed to something
else? Historical paths are inherently unstable; given the sensitivity of
outcomes to the interaction of parts and wholes, any slight deviation
in the starting point (for example, the disintegration of feudalism)
might lead to someplace other than capitalism. The point is critical. If
you write history forward, how can you understand the next system?
If capitalism disintegrates, what system emerges in its place?
There’s no problem if teleology trumps dialectics. Then, history
follows that “predetermined path into the future.” Slavery begets feu-
dalism, which begets capitalism, which begets socialism, which begets
communism. It is all inevitable, sooner or later. From a dialectical
standpoint, however, things are not so simple. Once we understand
that change is the result of the interaction of parts and wholes and
that particular events and interactions, internal or external, may pro-
duce quite divergent outcomes, we acknowledge that there is no royal
road to the future.
The problematic relation between the disintegration of feudalism
and the emergence of capitalism is reproduced if we consider con-

tested reproduction between the organic system of capitalism and
the organic system of community. If we write history forwards, it is
assumed that the contradictions of capitalism that we have analyzed
are sufficient to yield the movement to community. But are they?
History from Capitalism to Community
With the development of the contradictions of capitalism, there are

openings and inroads with potential for going beyond capitalism. In
chapter 4 we saw that capitalism creates regular openings through its
periodic short-term and long-term crises. It is, in short, constantly
put on trial by its inherent tendencies for crisis. However, in capital-
ism as an organic system those openings in the form of crises tend to
be self-correcting, not simply because of the negative feedbacks gen-
erated by particular crises but because of the nature of the working
class that capital produces, a working class that looks upon the needs
of capitalism as self-evident natural laws. Given the second product
of capital, crises in and of themselves are not sufficient to lead in the
direction of a new system.
Here, however, we are not considering capitalism as an organic
system. Rather, before us is a whole that contains elements that are
from outside that organic system. We have seen, for example, how
struggles of the working class over the workday transformed workers.
They come out of such struggles, victorious or not, more conscious
of their strength, as their own second products with the potential
of becoming “the self-conscious, independent movement of the
immense majority, in the interest of the immense majority.”8
Accordingly, it is possible that workers who have developed their
capacities and instruments for struggle will not only respond to capi-
talism’s crises by taking advantage of those openings but will make
inroads into capitalism on their own. If we consider only the side of
workers, we see in the Communist Manifesto that once the working
class is successful in winning “the battle of democracy,” it will use
“its political supremacy to wrest, by degrees, all capital from the
bourgeoisie.” Of course, it cannot do this all at once. “Despotic inroads

on the right of property, and on the conditions of bourgeois produc-
tion” are not in themselves sufficient but, as the movement proceeds,
would “outstrip themselves, [and] necessitate further inroads upon
the old social order.”9
It must not be forgotten, though, that capital is still there, and it
does not passively allow for such inroads to be made. Capital resists.
It treats all inroads as barriers to its own growth, barriers that must be
transcended. We are one-sided if we forget that we are talking about
capitalism in contested reproduction. When a working-class govern-
ment takes measures that make inroads into capitalist reproduction,
capital goes on strike. It ceases investment and/or moves elsewhere
where such inroads are not occurring. The results can be crises, crises
as a response to inroads, and a government that has been elected to
advance the interests of the working class under these circumstances
may retreat. As noted in chapter 4, what Lukács called the “immatu-
rity of the proletariat” may mean that capital continues to lead the
way out of crises.
However, let’s assume that the government does not retreat but
seizes the opportunity given by capitalist reaction to make “further
inroads upon the old social order.” How does this lead to community
rather than to something else? Is the disarticulation of the elements
of capitalism sufficient to produce the particular combination charac-
teristic of the organic system of community? Or will the result be state
capitalism, market self-management of socially owned enterprises, a
system based upon vanguard relations of production, or something
else? Precisely which elements of capitalism must the system of com-
munity subordinate and what, if any, new organs must it create?
Writing history forward fails at the very point when we want to con-
sider the passage from one system to another.
Writing History Backwards from the Future
If we write history backwards, on the other hand, we would be assert-

ing that the characteristics of community permit us to identify what
must be subordinated for the system of community to emerge, or,

paraphrasing Ollman, what has to happen in the present for the
future to become what it must. Of course, the system of community is
not the known present from which we can read backwards. But does
the method nevertheless permit us to gain insight into the path to
community?
Yes, Marx answered. There is no better example of writing history
backwards from a possible future than Marx’s Critique of the Gotha
Programme. The future described there is “a communist society . . .
as it has developed on its own foundations.” In this society where “the
instruments of labour are common property and the total labour
is co-operatively regulated,” the basis of production is what Marx
called “communal production, communality,” where production is
“determined by communal needs and communal purposes.” In this
“completed” society that produces its own premises, the “all-round
development of the individual”—based upon ending “the enslaving
subordination of the individual to the division of labour” and “the
antithesis between mental and physical labour”—ensures that “all
the springs of cooperative wealth flow more abundantly.” The organic
system of community is here complete.
Of course, this new system, like all systems, does not emerge fully
developed from the preceding one. It does not immediately produce
its own premises but is dependent upon “historic premises,” elements
from the old system, elements that it must subordinate in order to
stand upon its own foundations. Even though the working class may
have successfully wrested “all capital from the bourgeoisie” and cen-
tralized “all instruments of production in the hands of the State,”
the new system as it emerges is necessarily defective. It is “in every
respect, economically, morally, and intellectually, still stamped with
the birthmarks of the old society from whose womb it emerges.”
Consider those birthmarks. One defect that Marx explicitly iden-
tified was the continuation of “bourgeois right.” Despite common
ownership of the means of production, private ownership of labor-
power brings with it the insistence upon an exchange in which the
producer is entitled to an equivalent for his own individual labor.10 As
Marx stressed, this emphasis upon exchange of equivalents (subse-

quently labelled “the socialist principle”) produces inequality, in that
the individual owner of labor power considers “unequal individual
endowment and thus productive capacity as natural privileges.” Not
only is this a source of inequality, but this birthmark of the old society
infects the development of the new society. The combination of pri-
vate ownership of labor-power and common ownership of the means
of production brings with it dysfunctional tendencies.
If the individual producer is entitled to an equivalent for his pres-
ent labor, why not for his past labor (an obvious phenomenon in
the case of Yugoslav self-management)? And if the producer does
not consider that the equivalent he is offered is a true equivalent, to
what extent would he offer less labor, thus, lower his contribution?
Or to what extent might he engage in theft of the means of produc-
tion in order to increase his own income (to “get his own back”)?
The self-interest that flows from the private ownership of labor-power
constantly undermines the new society.
That is why bourgeois right must be subordinated. Unfortunately,
generations of Marx’s disciples have distorted his explanation of how
the new society can succeed in subordinating the elements of the
old. Rather than writing history backwards from the fully developed
system, they have insisted on building upon the new society’s defects.
In this whole marked by contested reproduction, insistence upon the
“socialist principle” is the ideological weapon that tilts the whole back
in the direction of capitalism. Indeed, whenever contradictions in
the emerging society produce crises, that principle has been invoked
from above to fight against the concepts of community. “Serious
infractions of the socialist principle of distribution according to
work,” in Mikhail Gorbachev’s words, are blamed for the egalitarian-
ism and leveling that prevent private initiative and advance.11 Behind
“reforms” determined to free the “socialist principle” lurks the specter
of capitalism.
Marx, however, did not make this mistake. Starting from his con-
ception of the communist society developed upon its own foundations,
he identified what was necessary to subordinate the inherited defects
from the old society. At the very outset of his Critique, he pointed
to two immediate changes that occur in the new society and that
develop further “in proportion as the new society develops.” Those
two changes are introduced in his discussion of deductions from the
total product of labor, deductions to be made before there is to be
any consideration of distribution of the residual among individuals.
One deduction concerns production “intended for the common sat-
isfaction of needs.” “From the outset,” Marx insisted, “this part grows
considerably in comparison with present-day society, and it grows in
proportion as the new society develops.”
So, from the outset, a new principle of distribution begins to crowd
out the old. There is increased production for the commons and a
diminishing residual for distribution in accordance with contribu-
tion. “What the producer is deprived of in his capacity as a private
individual benefits him directly or indirectly in his capacity as a
member of society.” As the new society develops, we no longer regard
the producers one-sidedly, that is, “only as workers and nothing more
is seen in them, everything else being ignored.” Rather, the producers
are understood as a whole, as members of society.
There are other deductions from the total social product, and
these include “replacement of means of production used up” and a
“portion for expansion of production.” Those deductions are “an eco-
nomic necessity and their magnitude is to be determined according
to available means and forces.” But there was one other deduction
particularly relevant to building the new society upon its own founda-
tions, and that concerns the state—“the general costs of administration
not belonging to production.” That deduction would fall: “This part
will, from the outset, be very considerably restricted in comparison
with present-day society and it diminishes in proportion as the new
society develops.”
But why the “very considerably restricted” deduction for the state
from the outset? Observation of subsequent socialist experiments
would suggest precisely the opposite course, namely, growing bureau-
cracy and petty tutelage over all aspects of the society! For Marx,
however, the point was self-evident. As he had learned from the
Paris Commune four years earlier, from the very outset, state func-
tions are to be “wrested from an authority usurping pre-eminence
over society itself and restored to the responsible agents of society.”12
If the Commune had succeeded, Marx proposed, in place of the old
centralized government, “all France would have been organized into
self-working and self-governing communes.” And the result would
be “state functions reduced to a few functions for general national
purposes.”13 In the words of the Critique, the state would be converted
more and more “from an organ superimposed upon society into one
completely subordinate to it.”
Underlying his stress upon a “very considerably restricted” state,
Marx obviously had in mind a different kind of state, one that involved
new organs, those self-working and self-governing communes. As the
new system developed, gone would be another defect—the old state
inherited from capitalism with its “systematic and hierarchic divi-
sion of labour” and where state administration and governing are
treated as “mysteries, transcendent functions only to be trusted to
the hands of a trained caste—state parasites, richly paid sycophants
and sinecurists.”14 The new state from below, “the political form at last
discovered under which to work out the economical emancipation
of Labour,” immediately makes despotic inroads and increasingly
crowds out the old state as a measure of the development of the new
society.15
Following Marx in writing history backwards from communism,
we can identify what has to happen for the future to become what it
must. As the new system develops, it must increasingly produce its
own premises. By producing consciously for common needs and pur-
poses and directing society through self-working and self-governing
communes, the associated producers transform society and transform
themselves. They produce communist society as it has developed on
its own foundations.
But what if the system that emerges from capitalism, infected “in
every respect, economically, morally, and intellectually,” does not
remove the defects it has inherited? If the system were dynamically
stable such that any initial deviations nevertheless would converge,
that clearly would not affect the preordained outcome. However, if

the system is dynamically unstable, the failure to subordinate these
defects leads to someplace else, and you cannot say where with any
certainty if you are trying to write history forwards. Perhaps we can
gain insights into the implications of the missing premises by writing
history backwards from a different system, one often referred to as
“real socialism.”
Writing “Real Socialism” Backwards
In Contradictions of “Real Socialism”: The Conductor and the

Conducted, I attempted to analyze “real socialism” as a particular
organic system, a system of reproduction that more or less consoli-
dated in the second half of the twentieth century in several countries.16
Though it contained elements of competing logics, characteristic of
this system was, on the one hand, a particular form of state ownership
and central planning permeated by enforced hierarchy in both the
economy and social organizations, so that institutions functioned as
transmission belts from the state. On the other hand, “real socialism”
tended to provide workers with full employment, job security, free
and widely accessible healthcare and education, subsidized necessi-
ties, and a relative degree of income equality.
Though these latter benefits were appreciated by workers, given
their contrast to previous experiences and capitalist patterns of
unemployment, insecurity, and deprivation of essential services, they
came at a definite cost. Decisions in workplaces and society came
from above, and attempts to organize from below or even to express
publicly the desire to do so were viewed as threats to stability and
harmony by those above and, accordingly, were marginalized and/
or penalized. This combination of benefits and prohibitions in “real
socialism” may be considered a “social contract,” although, as Boris
Kagarlitsky explained, it was an “obligatory social contract” in that
“the population was forced into it.”17 The result was an atomized yet
secure working class that was not able to develop its capacities through
its practice. Insofar as the benefits (to the extent they continued) were
apparent and the costs of challenging the relation obvious, mainte-

nance of this social contract ensured the reproduction of the system.
In the same way that Marx analyzed capital and wage-labor as
the essential premises of capitalism, I identified the premise of “real
socialism” as the vanguard party and its relation to the working
class.18 Characteristic of the vanguard party, I proposed, is a commit-
ment to system change (replacing capitalism with socialism) and the
insistence upon a disciplined, centralized party to achieve this goal.19
I summed up the character of the vanguard party as follows:
The goal of system change distinguishes the concept of the

vanguard party from a body of self-interested bureaucrats or
would-be capitalists. It begins from a clear rejection of capi-
talism and the belief in the necessity of socialism. Given that
essential goal, the question is: What is to be done? Characteristic
for the supporters of the vanguard party is the conviction that
the achievement of this goal will not happen spontaneously; it
requires leadership. The orchestra needs a conductor. And since
the conductor alone can see the whole picture and has the whole
score before him, there is no place for spontaneity and impro-
visation. Discipline and hierarchy are essential. Within the
workplace and community, it is only appropriate that all parts,
all instruments, follow a predetermined plan determined by the
vanguard party. Socialism in this perspective is a gift to those
below by those above, who are the only ones who know how to
create socialism.20
There are two hierarchical relations here. One is the internal rela-
tion within the party. “Democratic centralism,” in principle, ensures
that there is the greatest possible democracy in arriving at decisions
and the greatest possible centralization and discipline in executing
those decisions. The two aspects, democracy and discipline, may vary
in their weight in practice: democracy is often episodic, confined to
party congresses and collective decision-making occasions, whereas
discipline is meant to be part of daily life. The potential for imbalance
is very high: those toward the top in the hierarchy may want confi-
dence that their subordinates will carry out party policy faithfully; in
this respect, rather than the bottom selecting the top, as democratic
centralism would suggest, the top selects the bottom.21 Implicit in the
vanguard party are the acceptance of discipline and the reluctance to
engage in “individualistic behavior,” characteristics of internal party
life within “real socialism.”22
The other hierarchical relation is that between the party and soci-
ety. The party takes on the role of educator to pupil, leader to the led,
conductor to the conducted. From this perspective, social movements
are considered below the party as such and are viewed as bodies from
which to recruit potential party cadres and to subordinate to the party
completely, as occurs especially in “real socialism.” The presumed
superiority of the party, following from its “banked knowledge” in the
form of “Marxism-Leninism,” gives it the license to work to change
circumstances for people, irrespective of Marx’s comment that such a
doctrine divides “society into two parts, one part of which is superior
to society.”
Identification of the roots of “real socialism” with the vanguard
party is not at all a critique of the role of any party in providing
leadership to go beyond capitalism and to build the system of com-
munity. Consider a party instead that stresses the process by which
people transform themselves and develop their capacities. Envision
a party that rejects a focus upon delivering “banked knowledge” to
the underlying population, one that rejects the conception, described
by Paulo Freire, in which “knowledge is a gift bestowed by those who
consider themselves knowledgeable upon those who they consider to
know nothing.”23
In contrast to the vanguard party, a party focused upon the cen-
trality of the concept of revolutionary practice, that simultaneous
changing of circumstance and self-change, is not likely to converge at
“real socialism.” As Leontiev argued, “A small, hardly perceptible mis-
take in the description of the original base-year position of an unstable
dynamic system is bound to bring about a major error in the predic-
tion, that is, explanation of its later states.” The difference between the
classic vanguard party and a party that is guided by the concept of the
second product, though, is hardly small and imperceptible.
11
Taking a Path to Community
If you don’t know where you want to go, no path will take you there.
But we do know where we want to go. We want a society in which the
relation between its members is guided by “motives such as altruism,
reciprocity, intrinsic pleasure in helping others, aversion to inequity,
ethical commitment, and other motives that induce people to help
others.” In communal society, the self-evident natural law for homo
solidaricus would be that “the free development of each is the con-
dition for the free development of all.”1 And that means we want a
society based upon protagonism in all aspects of life and solidar-
ity. In this society characterized by “free individuality, based on the
universal development of individuals and on their subordination of
their communal, social productivity as their social wealth,” the pro-
ducers combine their capacities “in full self-awareness as one single
social labour force” and “all the springs of cooperative wealth flow
more abundantly.”
Premises of the System of Community
Communal society, like all organic systems, produces its own premises.
As discussed in chapter 8, communal society has as its premise the end
TAkINg A PATh TO COMMUNITY 151
to private ownership of the means of production and the establishment

of social ownership of the means of production. Presupposed is that
those socially owned means of production are directed by the associ-
ated producers for the purpose of satisfying social needs. “Working
with the means of production held in common,” the producers are
moved not by self-interest but by “communal needs and communal
purposes.”2 In the organic system of community, the three sides of “the
elementary triangle of socialism” are both premises and results of the
system.
However, though social ownership of the means of production and
social production organized by workers for the satisfaction of social
needs are necessary, they are not sufficient for the reproduction of com-
munal society. In particular, central to and permeating all aspects of
this system is solidarity (communality) among the producers, and the
system must reproduce this premise. If, for some reason, an empha-
sis upon “social preferences” is crowded out by material self-interest,
communal society will not be a system of reproduction. Accordingly,
to produce homo solidaricus, the system requires institutions and prac-
tices that reproduce solidarity, that provide negative feedback to any
disturbances and thereby ensure homeostasis of the system.
These are not the only premises that must be reproduced. Marx
explicitly indicated that the system must be sustainable. Just as he
envisioned the all-round development of the producers in the system
of community, so also did Marx stress that “the earth continuously
improves, so long as it is treated correctly.”3 That requires under-
standing the “metabolism prescribed by the natural laws of life itself ”
and recognition of the “regulative law” of “systematic restoration” as
the “inalienable condition for the existence and reproduction of the
chain of human generations.”4 Essential for community as an organic
system, in short, is that we grasp “the whole gamut of permanent con-
ditions of life required by the chain of human generations.”5
For this there is a specific premise. Viewing history backwards,
Marx explained that “from the standpoint of a higher socio-economic
formation,” one premise of communal society would be the end to
private ownership of portions of the earth:
Even an entire society, a nation, or all simultaneously existing

societies taken together, are not the owners of the earth. They
are simply its possessors, its beneficiaries, and have to bequeath
it in an improved state to succeeding generations, as boni patres
familias.6
The necessary premise for the “conscious and rational treatment of

the land” that permits “the existence and reproduction of the chain
of human generations” is that the land is “permanent communal
property.”7
As is the case for all the premises of community, the reproduction
of sustainability is not a given, not a static state that, once achieved,
rests. Rather, there is constant movement, constant tendencies that
threaten reproduction. The first question of Levins and Lewontin was
“in the face of constantly displacing influences, how do things remain
recognizably what they are?” Their general answer was that “things are
the way they are because of the actions of opposing processes,” that is,
that there is stability and equilibrium insofar as potential disruption
is countered by negative feedback that permits the reproduction of
the system. In the case of the system of community, homo solidaricus
must act to ensure that the premises of community are reproduced if
the system is to remain what it is.
The Original Development of the Premises of Community
But what has to happen in the present for the future to become what
it must? From the vantage point of community, we ask the second
question of Levins and Lewontin, “How did things get the way they
are?”8 How were the premises of community constructed? For Levins
and Lewontin, “Things are the way they are because they got that way,
and not because they have to be that way, or always were that way, or
because it’s the only way to be.”
As we have seen, the movement from capitalism to community is
not inevitable. True, capitalism constantly generates crises, but these
contain within themselves self-correcting tendencies, including the
power of capital’s ideological hegemony. Further, even where a com-

bination of crises and increased opposition to the system creates
conditions in which “the original system can no longer persist as it
was [and] the system may go into wider and wider fluctuations and
breakdown,” nothing ensures that its parts will be reassembled in a
system of community as opposed to something else (for example,
fascism).9 This, as we have noted, is one of the limits of attempting
to write history forward. The system of community does not emerge
“because it’s the only way to be.”
When we write history backwards from community, we begin by
identifying the central premises whose history we must attempt to
trace. And here we need to emphasize that it is not social owner-
ship of the means of production, nor organization of production by
the producers, nor production for social needs that are the essential
premises. Rather, as indicated above, solidarity among fully devel-
oped producers is the social relation that characterizes community
as an organic system, and it is the development of this relation that
must guide us.
Many elements may be assembled that point away from capital-
ism. We have seen, for example, that when workers act in common
to struggle directly against capital over wages and working condi-
tions, they change and make themselves increasingly fit to build a
new society. And, as the struggle over the Ten Hours Bill indicated,
this transformative process is not limited to battles with individual
capitalists. In that political agitation, Engels wrote, workers became
acquainted with one another and came “to a knowledge of their social
position and interests” and were no longer the same as they were
before. Surely, the same might be said of current political struggles
for rent control, free transit, minimum wages, climate action, and,
indeed, struggles against divisions, racial profiling by police, patri-
archy, and, in general, for dignity. All of these transform people and
build solidarity.
All such struggles—against oppression in the workplace, inequal-
ity, and the inability to satisfy needs—could be put in the framework
of a struggle against the elementary triangle of capitalism. But in this
path of negation there is something important missing: a vision of

the future society. In themselves, nothing in these struggles points
clearly to the qualities of communal society. Our first critical question
is: What is the path to community if saying “no” is insufficient?
In contrast, there definitely are activities that provide glimpses of
a society based upon solidarity and respect for the needs of others.
People develop new qualities and capacities when they act in common
based upon social preferences. New practices and institutions such
as co-operatives, free stores, community gardens, participatory bud-
geting, and local planning do contribute to the formation of homo
solidaricus. But how are these prefigurative activities to be connected
to the struggles of negation described above? This is our second criti-
cal question. Further, these solidaristic activities in themselves tend to
be dwarfish, much like Marx described the co-operatives of his time.
Is the answer quantitative, that is, to accumulate (in size and extent)
experiences of communal relations until a tipping point is reached?
The Path to Community Is No Royal Road
If the path to community involved the accumulation of one act

of communal relations after another until they reached a critical
mass, that path would be long but relatively smooth. However, as
Preobrazhensky insisted about all new systems, the system of com-
munity does not develop “on the basis merely of the immanent laws
which are inherent to the particular formation.” It develops within
contested reproduction. Rather than the unfolding of a germ increas-
ingly realized, those glimpses of a future society are perceived by the
working class that capital actively produces, a working class that is
alienated, separated, self-interested, consumerist, and that looks upon
the requirements of capital as “self-evident natural laws.”
Workers produced concretely by capital are not a Platonic Idea but
a historical product, the effect of capital’s specific initiatives to divide
the working class, initiatives both unique to its mode of production
and those reflecting its ability to take advantage of all differences
within the working class. Of course, those workers, as we have seen,
are not only the product of capital. Once engaged in struggle, work-
ers transform circumstances and themselves. And they do so through
all their struggles because they are not defined solely by their direct
relation to capital but are the ensemble of all their social relations.10
Yet the changes in people as the result of their various struggles
do not automatically make them fit for communality. In the process
of contested reproduction, there is interaction and interpenetration.
Accordingly, the path to community cannot be “pure” but inevitably is
“in every respect, economically, morally, and intellectually” infected
by the old society, a whole in which the side of capital deforms the
side of community. What is the result of that infection?
Every collective struggle of people for their common needs, how-
ever it may transform them, occurs in the context of the atomism
and separation characteristic of capitalism. Because those engaged in
struggle have a dual nature, both as people transforming themselves
through their practice and as hosts of the second product of capital,
their separation does not miraculously disappear. Accordingly, instead
of a leap from individual atomism to community, the immediate result
of their activity may be the development of collective atomism, a pro-
cess in which differences within are reduced while differences outside
the group are increased. As noted earlier, Engels pointed out that sepa-
ration in different units “restricts the workers to seeing their interest
in that of their employers, thus making every single section of workers
into an auxiliary army for the class employing them.”11
This tendency to view competitors as the Other was present in the
market-self-managed enterprises of Yugoslavia. Solidarity among
members of the collective was present because of their common
interest in maximizing income per worker; however, there was soli-
darity neither with the workers of other enterprises, with which they
competed or bargained, nor with the members of society as a whole.
Loyalty to their own particular enterprise was demonstrated when 70
percent of self-managing agreements between enterprises (developed
because the Yugoslav state was attempting to replace the anarchy of
market forces with a medium-term process of planning from below)
were abandoned unilaterally when inflation altered relative prices.
Thus, even in the case of workers’ councils, essential for creating

the space in which workers can develop their capacities through their
activity, there is no automatic process by which those cells of a new
socialist state will be linked. Rather, while they can build a unity of
purpose within a worker-managed unit, they are isolated and self-ori-
ented cells, and that collective atomism can make them indifferent, as
in Yugoslavia, to the existence of inequality in society. In short, there
is no spontaneous tendency for workers to identify their individual
interests with those of the working class as a whole.12
There is a parallel here to the communal councils described by
Chávez as cells of the new state. Here, too, solidarity develops among
those who have learned to act in common; however, that solidarity
does not necessarily extend beyond the geographical bounds of the
community in question nor to individuals who are not viewed as
members of the community. Establishing the boundaries of the com-
munity is seen as ensuring that the common property or commons
that are the result of collective activity is not open-access property
and thus subject to exhaustion by outsiders. Again, we see neither a
stress upon ending inequality among communities nor an automatic
process by which separate communities are linked.
There is, in short, a paradox of protagonism—a spontane-
ous tendency for increased solidarity within the given group to be
accompanied by increased separation from those outside. How, then,
can struggles be linked if the spontaneous tendency is toward col-
lective atomism? When workers struggle against various aspects of
their oppression, they develop capacities and solidarity among those
in struggle, but they do not spontaneously generate links between
their struggles. For example, what connects collective struggles over
rent, climate justice, racism, healthcare, or police oppression? What
counters the tendency for collective atomism, a tendency to insist
upon walls between struggles? This is a third critical question. In the
absence of a connection between struggles, these are separate islands
in a capitalist sea, a sea characterized by the tendency to view the
general requirements of capitalism (apart from the particular objects
of struggle) as “self-evident natural laws.”
Déjà Vu All Over Again?
Separation is not only horizontal. Capital produces and reproduces

vertical separation, that between mental and manual labor, between
those who think and those who do. It produces those who think they
know and those who think they do not know. And this separation
of the products of capital does not automatically disappear when
workers begin to struggle against capital, because those workers are
themselves “in every respect, economically, morally, and intellectu-
ally” infected by capital.
If you don’t know where you’ve been, you may end up there again.
It therefore would be a mistake to ignore the extent to which previ-
ous efforts to move along the path to community have reproduced
characteristics inherited from capital. Consider, for example, the
trade unions that Marx and Engels viewed as critical for achieving
the immediate goals of workers.13 That these organs created by the
working class have proved inadequate for developing the capacities
of workers early was stated succinctly by Rosa Luxemburg in her
description of the internal structure of trade unions, where “the ini-
tiative and the power of making decisions thereby devolve upon trade
union specialists, so to speak, and the more passive virtue of disci-
pline upon the mass of members.” Trade union preoccupation, then
and now, with the goal of achieving that fair wage for a fair day’s work
that capital would deny has prevented the development of a second
product that would challenge the rule of capital.14
A similar pattern may be seen in cooperatives and worker-man-
aged enterprises. Although Marx praised the development of the
cooperative movement as a great victory of the political economy
of the working class (“social production controlled by social fore-
sight”), he understood that these “first examples of the emergence of
a new form” emerged “within the old form” and were reproducing
“all the defects of the existing system.” While he was concerned in
particular by the way in which the cooperatives were based upon
self-interest—indeed, “individual and antagonistic interests”—Marx
did not explore the way in which their focus upon self-interest
tended to foster hierarchical patterns once they went beyond “dwarf-

ish forms.”15
We can see that pattern clearly, however, in the experience of self-
managed enterprises in Yugoslavia. Although juridically these firms
were socially owned and under the control of workers’ councils, the
focus upon self-interest (maximizing income per worker) led work-
ers to accept the recommendations of the managers, “the experts,”
as to how best to achieve these goals. As one Yugoslav writer com-
mented twenty-five years after the law on workers’ management, the
worker had “only meagre opportunity for developing, in performing
his duties, any substantial measure of freedom of thought, imagina-
tion and inventiveness.”16 In Mondragon as well, a pattern of activated
managers and “passivity among workers” apparently has character-
ized the cooperative experience. “Far from generating ekintza [taking
action],” argues Sharryn Kasmir in her study of Mondragon, the large
multinational corporation and federation of worker cooperatives,
which originated in the Basque Country in Spain, “cooperativism
appears to engender apathy.”17 In such cases, the capacity-producing
potential inherent in cooperative production was clearly not realized.
Add to this the tendency in parliamentary parties of the working
class for the development of a gap between rank-and-file members
and their parliamentary representatives and organizational func-
tionaries. Based in particular upon his study of the German Social
Democratic Party, sociologist Robert Michels in 1911 attributed the
emergence of an oligarchy, indeed a “hierarchical bureaucracy,” to the
need and effect of organization. The impossibility of direct democracy
with the growth of an organization and therefore the necessity of the
mass to delegate responsibility to responsible and dedicated leaders,
Michels argued, inevitably produces a professional leadership and the
disempowering of the masses. Originating in technical requirements
but reinforced by the transformation (in terms of life experience and
psychology) of both leaders and the led, he insisted upon the opera-
tion of an “iron law of oligarchy” even in socialist parties dedicated
to internal democracy.18 That tendency, it must be admitted, has been
reproduced repeatedly in parliamentary socialist parties.
As we saw in chapter 10, that which is unintentional, or at least

unarticulated, in the above cases is for the vanguard party model the
explicit principle of organization. Given its conviction that system
change requires a disciplined, centralized, and united revolutionary
vanguard to organize, guide, and orient the working class, the van-
guard party opposes spontaneity and initiative both from below and
outside its bounds.19 Since the vanguard party, and it alone, knows
how to build socialism, its perspective is characteristic of “the bank-
ing concept of education” described by Paulo Freire: “(a) the teacher
teaches and the students are taught; (b) the teacher knows every-
thing and the students know nothing; (c) the teacher thinks and the
students are thought about.” Substitute party for “teacher” and work-
ing class for “student,” and you have a picture of the one-way street
implicit in the vanguard party as it has existed in practice.20
In “real socialism,” when the expression of the vanguard relation is
armed with state power, the results have been predictable. The work-
ing class there is prevented from making decisions in the workplace
and communities and is expected to follow directives from above.
In return for accepting this subordinate position, the working class
receives definite benefits such as secure employment, stable prices,
subsidized necessities, and relative egalitarianism in a type of social
contract. And, the result? As Freire commented, “The more com-
pletely they [students] accept the passive role imposed on them, the
more they tend simply to adapt to the world as it is and to the frag-
mented view of reality deposited in them.” The nature of the second
product of “real socialism” was demonstrated by the passive accep-
tance by the working class of the restoration of capitalism.21
Is hierarchy as such the problem? If so, it would follow that any
departure from pure horizontalism (including the election of repre-
sentatives) must be avoided. That, however, would confuse the form
of the problem for its content. The problem is not representation as
such but rather the absence of revolutionary practice, the absence
of the protagonism that builds capacities. And that brings us to our
fourth critical question: given the tendency for the reproduction of
hierarchy, how is it possible to proceed along the path to community?
Thus the four critical questions are: how to link struggles of nega-
tion to community, how to link prefigurative activities to struggles
of negation, how to link separate struggles, and how to fight the ten-
dency for hierarchy. They all pose the same problem: in contested
reproduction between capitalism and community, there is no spon-
taneous path to community. To advance along that path, a political
instrument is essential.
12
The Political Instrument We Need

Two Streams from Hegel/Marx
The first stream we have followed from Hegel/Marx stresses the

importance of understanding the whole. The truth is the whole, we
learned from Hegel. And as Levins and Lewontin emphasize, the
parts of a whole are not autonomous and independent but interpen-
etrate within the whole. On the other hand, changes in parts and new
parts alter the whole and accordingly affect other parts within the
whole. Thus, wholes make parts and parts make wholes.
We see that Marx employed the concept of an organic system, a
whole in which all elements are both premises and results. This is
how he presented capitalism as a system of reproduction in Capital.
However, actually existing capitalism is not an organic system but con-
tains elements not compatible with capitalism as an organic system.
Marx understood that wholes are not necessarily organic systems. We
see this, for example, in his description of so-called primitive accu-
mulation of capital, which is a process of developing capitalism based
not upon premises it produces but rather upon historic premises.
This is quite distinct from capitalism once it has developed on its own
foundations. Similarly, in his Critique of the Gotha Programme, we see
the same distinction between communism as an organic system and
that system as it emerges, where it is based upon premises that it has

not itself developed (its “defects”).
To explore a whole that is not characterized by an organic system,
we introduced the concept of contested reproduction, where wholes
contain elements of different organic systems that struggle to sub-
ordinate each other. This, as Marx noted, is how an organic system
develops by successfully subordinating all elements of society to itself.
In preceding chapters, we explored actually existing capitalism as a
whole marked by contested reproduction between capitalism and
community. Accordingly, the essential question for all revolutionaries
is how can we succeed in making the system of community subordi-
nate the capitalist system.
A second stream flowing from Hegel/Marx stresses self-develop-
ment through activity. We saw very clearly Marx’s embrace of Hegel’s
“outstanding achievement” in his conception of “the self-creation of
man as a process,” that is, of labor/activity “as man’s act of self-gene-
sis.” That stream yields Marx’s concept of revolutionary practice the
simultaneous changing of circumstances and human activity or self-
change. This is the basis for the recognition of a second product, the
human product of activity, and thus the importance of protagonism
in the development of human capacity.
Here was a consistent thread for Marx. We see his repeated argu-
ment that, by struggling in common, the working class makes itself
fit to build a new society. Rather than as more or less well-fed instru-
ments of production, the working class transforms “circumstances
and men” through its struggles. Considered by itself, it goes beyond
barriers to its development and posits a new society, a society of asso-
ciated producers, a relation among producers that is characterized by
community.
And yet, following Preobrazhensky, we know that the protagonism
of the producers cannot be considered by itself because it occurs
not in abstraction but in a whole marked by contested reproduction
between capitalism and community. The two streams we have been
reviewing, when joined, bring us to a significant result both theoreti-
cally and politically. Since parts are always shaped by their relations
ThE POLITICAL INSTrUMENT WE NEED 163
within the whole and are the product of interpenetration, in this con-
tested reproduction the working class does not stand outside capital
but is contained within it.
What are the implications of understanding the working class
within this whole as the product of the interpenetration of capital?
As we saw in the preceding chapter, the struggle of the working class
against capital and for community is also a struggle within the work-
ing class against capital—a struggle versus atomism and separation,
a struggle for solidarity and equality, a struggle against hierarchy and
domination.
Against Spontaneity
To believe that the battle against capitalism and for community will
succeed without a conscious struggle against inherent tendencies
produced by capitalism is a comforting fairy tale. The hegemony
of capital is not an accident nor is it the result of an inherited cul-
ture. Rather, the tendency within the working class to accept the
rules of life under capitalism is reproduced spontaneously every day.
Accordingly, to build the society of community we are left with the
challenges with which we ended the last chapter: the need to link
struggles of negation to community, to link prefigurative activities
to struggles of negation, to link separate struggles, and to fight the
tendency for hierarchy. Once we understand the interpenetration
characteristic of contested reproduction, the necessity for the politi-
cal instrument to combat spontaneity is obvious.
That has always been the tenet of the vanguard party. But you do
not need to be a self-described Marxist-Leninist to insist upon the
need for a political instrument to struggle to replace capitalism with
community.1 Decrying “the myth of the purely spontaneous revolu-
tion,” Murray Bookchin, a self-described ex-anarchist, insisted that a
revolutionary Left “must resolutely confront the problem of organi-
zation.” Can we conceive, he asks, of “a popular movement gaining
power without an agency that can provide it with guidance?” On
the contrary, what is required is the “creation and maintenance of
an organization that is enduring, structured, and broadly program-

matic.” Further, Bookchin stressed that this revolutionary agency
“must contain a responsible membership that firmly and knowledge-
ably adheres to its ideals; and it must advance a sweeping program for
social change that can be translated into everyday practice.”2
Similarly, Marta Harnecker consistently argued that overcoming
the hegemony of capital and constructing a new popular hegemony
“will not occur spontaneously; we need a political instrument, a polit-
ical organization to help us to construct it.” 3 To change the correlation
of forces, it is essential to construct the social and political forces that
will “make possible in the future what today appears impossible.
. . . But this construction of forces cannot occur spontaneously. It
requires a political instrument that is capable of consciously building
the required forces.”4
In particular, the political instrument we need is one that
recognizes, as did Marx, that “where the worker is regulated bureau-
cratically from childhood onwards, where he believes in authority, in
those set over him, the main thing is to teach him to walk by himself.”5
It is one that stresses the critical necessity to build the capacities of the
working class. That means a focus upon the human product of revolu-
tionary practice. Accordingly, in A World to Build, Harnecker argued
that this was the most important task of the political instrument:
Finally, we have the most important task, because without it

we will never be able to build socialism. What is needed is a
political instrument that encourages popular protagonism in
the most varied social and political milieus in the country,
one that puts itself at the service of that participation so that it
is the people themselves who build the new society. . . . Only
thus will we be true to the thesis that revolutionary practice
is essential for workers’ emancipation and that of the popular
movement in general. It is through practice that full human
development is reached, this being the most important goal we
are aiming for.6
Revolutionary Practice
Recall the dialectical relation of acts and capacities in which acts create
capacities, capacities enable acts. Capacity, Lucien Sève indicated, is
“the ensemble of actual potentialities, innate or acquired, to carry out
any act whatever and whatever its level.”7 Accordingly, by stressing
a “political instrument that encourages popular protagonism in the
most varied social and political milieus in the country,” Harnecker
communicates that, by struggling with respect to all aspects of its
social relations, the working class develops the capacities that will
permit it to defeat capital.
We have already seen how direct struggles against the capital rela-
tion help the working class to transform itself. But revolutionary
practice is not limited to this sphere nor is the role of the political
instrument. The struggles against racism and patriarchy, for example,
transform people so they can enter into all their relations with this
new potentiality. They change circumstances—for example, through
victories in battles—and simultaneously invest in the development of
their capacities.
Once we start from the centrality of revolutionary practice, we
understand that organizational forms matter. The large mass meeting
inspires and communicates a sense of strength. In itself, however, it
does not build capacity. Rather, as Harnecker argued, you need spaces
small enough both to facilitate “the protagonism of those attending by
making them feel comfortable and encouraging them to speak freely”
and also to allow them to engage in the multiplicity of acts that can
build their capacities.8 You need, in short, to create spaces that allow
people to take those steps through which they transform themselves.
Yet small spaces for protagonism are not the goal; nor is it a con-
federation of freely associated communities that for anarchists is the
alternative to a “state.” Rather, when you “decentralize all that you can
decentralize,” the principle that Harnecker identifies as “subsidiarity,”
the central point is to build the capacities of people.9 As Harnecker and
economist José Bartolomé say in Planning from Below, decentralized
participatory planning contributes to “the process of building the

capacities of the citizens through their own concrete experiences and
practice.” and “those who involve themselves are transformed; they
are no longer the same persons they were at the start of the process.”10
In everyday life, there are many opportunities to create the spaces
in which the protagonism of people is fostered. Consider in this con-
text the municipality or city as an important site in which people can
act in common. Struggles for tenant rights, free public transit, support
for public and co-op housing, increasing citywide minimum wages,
initiating community gardens, climate action at the neighborhood
and community level, immigrant support, and opposition to racial
profiling and police oppression—all have the potential for people to
develop their capacities and a sense of strength.
Further, the municipality is a space where electoral activity based
upon a combination of such struggles can support the development
of new spaces for protagonism. Such a combination of the state and
protagonism is proposed at the local level by Bookchin, who makes
“libertarian municipalism” the core of his perspective and explicitly
argues that elected officials at the municipal level should use their
power “to legislate popular assemblies into existence.”11
Small spaces, however, do not mean small struggles. Rather, they
are the form that allows for the combination of nationwide struggles
with the process of building capacities. Thus struggles to end capital-
ist ownership of particular sectors or to end the destruction of the
environment, for example, are strengthened by being rooted in local
organization that simultaneously builds a basis for further advances.
To stress this point is to recognize the necessity to walk on two legs,
in order to (a) take the old state away from capital; and (b) to build a
new state through institutions such as workers’ and communal coun-
cils that develop the capacities of the working class. As I argued in
The Socialist Imperative, for successful struggle to build the new soci-
ety through a combination of the nurturing of the new state and the
withering away of the old, the party that is needed is one that learns
to walk on two legs.12
Traditional Models
Unfortunately, the classic political instruments we know have not

emphasized the centrality of protagonism because they have focused
upon one leg, the necessity to capture the existing state from capital.
Some have approached this by stressing particular inadequacies of
capitalist governments such as government austerity measures. In this
tradition, socialist Vivek Chibber argued in 2017 that popular move-
ments at the time demonstrated that “what is in crisis right now is the
neoliberal model of capitalism, not capitalism itself.” Indeed, Chibber
stressed that the Left must accept that any belief in the possibility of
a revolutionary rupture with capitalism at this time is “entirely hal-
lucinatory.” Why? Because, in contrast with the past, the state has
“infinitely greater legitimacy with the population.” That is, we must
acknowledge “the political stability of the state” and therefore must
forget about the “centrality of a revolutionary rupture and navigate a
more gradualist approach.” 13
While Chibber’s more gradualist approach has two wings: (1)
a “mass cadre-based party” rooted in the working class; and (2) an
electoral strategy that builds upon mobilization at the base to make
inroads in the state in order to weaken capital and strengthen the
working class, he admits that the first simply does not exist. Rather,
“at this moment, the parliamentary dimension seems to be opening
up faster than the one at the base.” Accordingly, Chibber is one of
many who seized upon the importance of the electoral path through
the Democratic Party: “The Left should jump in, capitalize on it, and
then use its gains to build the base.”14 Every crisis, he notes, finds a
resolution, and the current crisis of the neoliberal model provides an
opportunity “if we play our cards right.” Given that perspective, his
conclusion follows: “We must start down the road of social democ-
racy and then to democratic socialism.”
That road to social democracy starts with support for “good” capi-
talism versus “bad” capitalism. Whether it identifies the conjuncture
as one marked by a crisis of neoliberalism or whether it submerges a
critique of capitalism as such for electoral purposes, its organizational

vehicle is the same, an electoral party that attempts to take advan-
tage of popular discontent with neoliberalism. 15 While it is possible
that a combination of contingent factors under these circumstances
might allow a Left (or Left coalition) to win an election and become a
governing power, I argued in Build It Now that any government that
seriously would challenge neoliberalism would immediately face the
assorted weapons of capital such as capital strikes; accordingly, the
choice before it would be to give in or move in. For the latter, it would
have to break ideologically and politically with capital. If it failed to
do so, “the policies of such a government inevitably will disappoint
and demobilize all those looking for an alternative to neoliberalism;
and, once again, its immediate product will be the conclusion that
there is no alternative.”16
That, unfortunately, is the familiar story of social democracy as a
political instrument. “Starting down the road of social democracy”
can produce a path dependency that leads to support of capitalism at
best and, at worst, the stimulation of fascist alternatives. The relatively
recent case of Syriza, the coalition of the radical Left in Greece, offers
a dramatic negative example. 17 Growing because of its support for the
struggles of people in the streets, Syriza declared at its founding con-
gress as a unitary party in July 2013 that its goal was socialism for the
twenty-first century. It would break with capital, on the one hand, by
cancelling the policy memoranda between international finance capi-
tal and the Greek neoliberal government and, among other things,
would place the banking system under public ownership and audit
the national debt to cancel its onerous terms.
On the other hand, having learned from the struggles in the streets
of the social and political movements, a Syriza government would
introduce the concept and practice of democratic planning and
social control at all levels of central and local government and would
promote democracy in the workplace through workers’ councils com-
posed of representatives elected by and recallable by workers. Syriza’s
explicit goal, in short, was not social democracy. Syriza understood
that building socialism for the twenty-first century requires you to
walk on two legs, both to capture the existing state in order to reverse
policies supportive of capital and also to build and nurture the ele-
ments of a new socialist state based upon self-government from
below.18
But the desire for electoral success based upon the existing correla-
tion of forces proved too strong. Syriza’s electoral program presented
in September 2014 contained no pledge to cancel the memoranda,
no call for public ownership of the banks, and, in place of any
anti-capitalist (let alone socialist) measures, proposed a National
Reconstruction Plan, a Keynesian program of public investment and
tax reduction for the middle class. Further, there was little sign of the
earlier determination to use the state to foster development of the
cells of a new state, nothing that challenged capital as the demand
for workers’ councils and workers’ control would have. Everything
in the electoral program was consistent with support for capital. The
proposal contained in that program was to walk on two legs along the
road to social democracy.
As so often, going down the road to social democracy led not
to democratic socialism but to the reinforcement of capitalism.
Following its successful election, Syriza proceeded from initial
retreats in post-electoral negotiations with finance capital to succes-
sive surrenders to ultimate rout and capitulation. Every illusion in
social democracy should have been dispelled by the Syriza govern-
ment’s refusal to accept the verdict of the population when it rejected
the popular referendum in July 2015 against austerity proposals.
The debacle of Syriza did not come as a surprise in Greece to those
who were always suspicious of its social democracy. But not only
them. For those who view the crisis as not one of neoliberalism but
rather as that of the capitalist economy as such, the accommoda-
tions of social democracy everywhere ultimately support capitalism.
In this alternative view of the conjuncture, capitalism has entered
(or is on the threshold of) an economic crisis that will demonstrate
to all that the economic system is no longer viable and must be
replaced. Rather than periodic crises of overaccumulation and of the
underproduction of surplus value (both considered in chapter 4),
capitalism now faces the “Big One,” the apocalypse promised accord-
ing to this reading of Capital.
Accordingly, from this perspective, the political instrument
required is a disciplined and centralized organization that can lead
the working class through the ensuing chaos produced by the coming
crisis. That is the logic underlying the classical vanguard party dis-
cussed in chapter 10. As I argued in The Contradictions of “Real
Socialism, given its understanding of the need for a political instru-
ment to defeat the enemies of the working class in order to replace
capitalism with socialism, this perspective insists upon “a disciplined,
centralized and united revolutionary party—our party.”19 To prepare
the vanguard party is thus the principal task of organization.
Two problems with this perspective, however, were identified in
earlier chapters. One, discussed in chapter 4, is that its certainty about
the existing or pending ultimate crisis forgets that capital is not pas-
sive and continually searches for means to go beyond all barriers to its
growth, barriers manifested in falling profit rates. Those who empha-
size the coming capitalist crisis forget the negative feedback in the
system that reverses extended crises. Indeed, alternating phases of
boom tend to be seen as mere aberrations, epiphenomena that pave
the way for ever-greater future collapses. Theory rules, impervious to
all developments that may challenge it.
The second problem, as we have stressed, is the working class
this theory presumes. Rather than recognizing that capitalism
tends to produce a working class that looks upon capital’s require-
ments as “self-evident natural laws,” the militance of their idealized
working class needs merely a kiss at the appropriate time to awaken
to its appointed tasks. However, in the absence of a working class
that has developed its capacities through its protagonism, the exist-
ing working class is the product of capital. What Lukàcs called the
immaturity of the working class ensures that capitalist crises will
be resolved through capital’s initiatives. Unfortunately, rather than
addressing this problem, those with this perspective often look
upon social movements as fertile ground for the recruitment of
cadres for the disciplined phalanxes with which they can celebrate
the distilled purity of their brands and their preparedness for the
next October.
Obviously, there are major differences between those who reject
a revolutionary rupture and stress electoral gains versus those dedi-
cated to building the vanguard party. However, neither identifies the
capacity of the working class as the central problem. For one, the
working class as it exists needs an electoral program consistent with
its consciousness (and of a coalition with other sectors of society).
For the other, the working class as it exists will be transformed by
a crisis external to it that makes it the working class that it must be
and thus receptive to the revolutionary program. Missing in both is a
focus upon building the working class as a process. However, in the
absence of a working class that has developed its capacity, dignity,
and strength through its protagonism and practice, the immediate
response of workers to crises is to accept the necessity for the repro-
duction of capitalism.
The Political Instrument as Revolutionary Pedagogue
As we have seen, encouraging the development of the capacities of the

working class is the most important task of the political instrument.
But how is this to be done? Drawing upon her observation and anal-
ysis of the practice of Latin American parties, Harnecker identified
serious problems with respect to their relations with social and politi-
cal movements as well as their internal governance. Those problems,
it will be recognized, are not unique to Latin America.
In proposition after proposition in “Ideas for the Struggle,”
Harnecker stresses the need to correct bad practices. She points, for
example, to the tendencies of political instruments with respect to
social movements to instruct, manipulate, impose leadership from
above, and, in general, to disrespect their autonomy. Indeed, her
criticisms are crystallized in the titles of two of her propositions:
“Convince, not impose” and “Be at the service of popular movements,
not replace them.”20
These undesirable practices correspond to what Paulo Freire called
the “banking concept” of education where the teacher (leader) depos-

its knowledge into the minds of the students whose role is to receive,
memorize, and repeat that knowledge. A conception of education in
which it is presumed that the students are ignorant and remain pas-
sive, this is education that supports oppression because it encourages
students to adapt to the world as it is.21 But that conception is not lim-
ited to those who consciously or unconsciously support the oppressor;
it is retained by many who “truly desire to transform the unjust order”
but “believe that they must be the executors of the transformation.
They talk about the people, but they do not trust them.”22
In contrast to this approach, marked by manipulation, propaganda,
sloganizing, communiqués from above and outside, Freire offers the
concept of “problem-posing education” in which there is dialogue
between teacher and student such that the student teaches and the
teacher learns. Rather than treating people “as objects which must be
saved from a burning building,” he insists that “the correct method
for a revolutionary leadership … lies in dialogue. The conviction
of the oppressed that they must fight for their liberation is not a gift
bestowed by the revolutionary leadership, but the result of their own
conscientizacao [critical consciousness].” 23 Rather than treating people
as depositories of someone else’s knowledge, revolutionary leadership
puts trust in people that through their own practice they can develop
their capacity (and they do). At its core, Freire’s revolutionary pedagogy
is based upon Marx’s concept of revolutionary practice.
Rather than the vertical relation characteristic of the banking con-
cept of education, the revolutionary political instrument requires a
horizontal relationship between the political instrument and social
movements. That political instrument is a space, Harnecker argued,
that respects the autonomy of the social movements instead of

manipulating them. And whose militants and leaders are true
popular pedagogues capable of stimulating the knowledge
that exists within the people . . . and through the fusion of this
knowledge with the most all-encompassing knowledge that the
political organization can offer.24
The relation between the political instrument and social move-

ments, Harnecker stressed, must be “a two-way circuit: from the
political organization to the social movement and vice versa.
Unfortunately, the tendency continues to be that it only functions in
the first direction.” In this respect, “it is important to learn to listen
and to engage in dialogue with the people.” Political instruments are
not the only ones “capable of generating creative, new, revolution-
ary and transformative ideas.” Accordingly, their role is “not only to
echo the demands of the social movements, but also to gather ideas
and concepts from these movements to enrich their own conceptual
arsenal.”25
It should be clear, she insisted, that “the type of political cadres
we need cannot be cadres with a military mentality.” On the con-
trary, “Political cadres should fundamentally be popular pedagogues,
capable of fostering the ideas and initiatives that emerge from within
the grassroots movement.” When it is not preestablished schemes but
“their own ideas and initiatives [that] are being put into action, they
will see themselves as the protagonists of change and their capacity to
struggle will enormously increase.” 26
What the political instrument brings to this dialogue is an under-
standing of the necessity for linking separate struggles and of the
need to fight against the attempt of the enemy to divide and weaken
the working class. Further, the all-encompassing knowledge that the
political instrument as popular pedagogue has to offer the social
movements is its grasp of the relation between the elements of com-
munity (such as acting in common and social preferences) and their
current struggles. In this respect, the political instrument represents
in the movement of the present “the future of that movement.”27
Both with respect to the relation between the political instru-
ment and social movements and also within the political movement
itself, Harnecker’s “Ideas for the Struggle” insists upon the need to
“eliminate all verticalism that stifles the initiative of the people.” Thus,
within the political instrument, she insists upon the necessity of real
democratization and tolerance. “Minorities can be right” is the topic
of one “Idea,” where she argues that minorities should be respected
and that they have a duty to continue fighting to defend their ideas
precisely because they may be right. Further, it is necessary to respect
differences and to avoid attempting to homogenize militants accord-
ing to a single norm. In this respect, she proposes that we must avoid
rigidity and “create a type of organization that can house the widest
range of militants, allowing for diverse levels of membership.”28
We need to say more about the internal characteristics of the
political instrument that can foster the ideas of people in social move-
ments. How, for example, do you foster the development of political
cadres as popular pedagogues rather than as those having a military
mentality? The relation of cadres to movements cannot be separated
from the way they are formed internally. Verticalism, however, is built
into a structure in which discipline and acceptance of the decisions
of higher bodies are characteristics of daily life in between policy
conventions. As discussed in the section “Finally, the Party” in The
Socialist Alternative:
Further, understanding the way in which hierarchical struc-

tures can sap the creative energy and enthusiasm of those
committed to the struggle to put an end to capital points to
the need to make the base of any party structure the space for
initiatives. Rather than the insistence upon uniform forms of
participation (in the workplace or community), the possibility
of autonomous collectives and affinity groups organized accord-
ing to their interests. Rather than information and instructions
passing vertically, the sharing and emulation of ideas and expe-
riences horizontally. Rather than a single line of march in this
asymmetrical warfare against capital, guerrilla units function-
ing under a general line and understanding the need for unity
in struggle for major battles—how else to unleash creative
energy and foster the revolutionary practice that can produce
the people who can defeat capital?29
If political cadres are to come to social movements not with

“banked knowledge” but with a deep understanding of the centrality
of protagonism, it is because they themselves are its product and are

reproduced daily as such by their practice within the political instru-
ment itself.
The Crisis of the Earth System Revisited
But do we have the time for revolutionary pedagogy? The gradualness

implicit in the focus upon the development of capacities appears in
stark contrast to the immediacy that the crisis of the Earth System
demands. Storms, drought, floods, pollution, disease, disappearing
species, pandemics—all manifest this crisis that now threatens the
original source of all wealth (human beings and nature) with extinc-
tion. Things, we are coming to understand, cannot go on as they have.
In contrast to crises of capital as such, the crisis of the Earth System
does not contain within itself negative feedback that can mitigate the
crisis. Rather, this crisis is qualitatively different. The crisis of the
Earth System demonstrates that there was always something outside
the social sphere, something outside of but necessary for it, namely,
the natural sphere. Very simply, the whole that we have thought of as
the combination of elements of capitalism and community never was
the true whole. Rather, the whole is the Earth System, which contains
both the social sphere and the natural sphere. In focusing only upon
the former, we consider the Earth System one-sidedly.
Of course, the signs of something more were always there. Marx
posed the possibility of lagging productivity in agriculture and extrac-
tive industries because “the productivity of labour is also bound up
with natural conditions, which are often less favourable as produc-
tivity rises—as far as that depends on social conditions.” Similarly,
he identified the significance of “animal organic processes” and “veg-
etable organic processes,” cases where “certain organic laws” were
operative. Marx was pointing here to the separate metabolic process
by which nature converts various inputs and transforms them into
the basis for its reproduction. What are the implications of treating
the existence of this natural side only through a collection of concrete
observations?
If we fail to incorporate the side of nature explicitly, we are consider-

ing the Earth System one-sidedly and as an afterthought theoretically.
Recall that Levins and Lewontin pointed out that Hegel’s declaration
that “the truth is the whole” is an aspiration and a guide: “We always
have to be aware that there is more out there that might overwhelm
our theories and thwart our best intentions.” Indeed, failing to incor-
porate new sides of categories under investigation and “seizing upon
one side of a dichotomous pair or a contradiction as if it were the
whole thing,” can infect our concept of the whole with “one-sided-
ness.” Accordingly, they noted that “it is always necessary to recognize
. . . that an ‘object’ kicks and screams when it is abstracted from its
context and may take its revenge in leading us astray.”30
The crisis of the Earth System today is the product of the particular
interaction between a social sphere dominated by capital and the nat-
ural sphere. That interaction and interpenetration of parts produces
a particular whole, one in which each side is shaped by that interac-
tion. With different parts, there is a different Earth System. Consider
a whole in which there is interaction between the sphere of nature
and a social sphere dominated instead by community. In this case,
society focuses upon understanding nature’s own metabolism and
recognizing “systematic restoration” as “the inalienable condition for
the existence and reproduction of the chain of human generations.”
What community draws upon from nature, it attempts to restore.
Characteristic of this “inverse situation” based upon the needs of
human beings is a social metabolism in which “the earth continu-
ously improves, so long as it is treated correctly,” an Earth System
marked by harmony between society and nature.
The social metabolism of capitalism, in contrast, is propelled
by the drive for surplus value, a drive that produces the metabolic
rift between society and nature characteristic of the existing Earth
System. Always inherent in this particular whole has been the exhaus-
tion and deformation of nature, an exhaustion that capital assumed
could never happen but that now has come to characterize the current
conjuncture with a vengeance. The imperative at this time, accord-
ingly, is to put an end to capital and to attempt to repair the Earth
System; it is to move decisively to replace capitalism with community

in the social sphere.
Contested Reproduction and the Rupture We Need
In the interregnum between capitalism and community, contested

reproduction takes the form (as indicated in chapter 8) of material
incentive versus social preferences, atomism versus community, sep-
aration versus solidarity, homo economicus versus homo solidaricus,
and the political economy of capital versus the political economy
of the working class. Into this mix, the crisis of the Earth System
brings with it a struggle over who will bear the burden of this crisis.
Capital, of course, has its usual weapons. It can attempt to intensify
the separation of workers by encouraging racism and anti-immigrant
mobilization, and it can use its state to enforce separation, austerity,
and new forms of domination of the working class.
In their defense, workers organize to avoid bearing the burden
of the crisis. However, to the extent that workers are the product of
capital, even if they come to recognize the succession of discrete and
often geographically separate events (floods, drought, disease, etc.)
as indicators of a crisis of the Earth System, nothing inherently leads
them to an understanding of that crisis as the result of capitalism as
such rather than of short-sighted policies that can be corrected. In
this respect, the solutions they tend to support are wholly consistent
with the reproduction of capitalism.
Nevertheless, as in the case of the struggle over the working day,
the protagonism of people produces them differently. There is a
further element that points beyond capitalism. Manifestations of
the crisis of the Earth System spontaneously may foster elements
of community such as “solidarity, cooperation, care, reciprocity,
mutualism, altruism, compassion, and love” (as in the response to
the current Covid-19 pandemic).31 This potential, however, is not
necessarily realized. Just as no temperature will turn a stone into a
chicken, global warming in itself will not turn workers into the rev-
olutionary subjects needed to prevent extinction. As stressed above,
to link the various threads of an alternative to capitalism requires a

political instrument.
The crisis of the Earth System corresponds to a system breakdown
as described by Levins and Lewontin:
The stability or persistence of a system depends on a particu-

lar balance of positive and negative feedbacks, on parameters
governing the rates of processes falling within certain limits.
But these parameters, although treated in mathematical models
as constants, are real-world objects that are themselves sub-
ject to change. Eventually some of those parameters will cross
the threshold beyond which the original system can no longer
persist as it was. The equilibrium is broken. The system may go
into wider and wider fluctuations and break down, or the parts
themselves, which have meaning only within a particular whole,
may lose their identity as parts and give rise to a qualitatively
new system.32
The Earth System as it exists faces such a rupture. But what kind
of rupture? One centered in the natural sphere or one centered in the
social sphere? An end to capitalist domination of the social sphere
would point beyond the destruction of the natural sphere. Although
it is possible that the severity of the crisis at a given time may create
conditions in which an anti-capitalist party is able to become the gov-
erning power, to avoid repeating the experience of social democracy,
“it must not only use that opportunity to defeat the logic of capital
and to reduce capital’s power over the state but also to use the power
it has to foster the accelerated development of the sprouts of the new
state.”33
While there may be days, as Marx commented, “into which 20
years are compressed,” building the capacities of the working class
and the constituent elements of the new state from below generally
does not occur overnight.34 That apparent gradualness, though, is
not the antithesis of a revolutionary rupture. The crisis of the Earth
System creates the opportunity for the political instrument to build
spaces for protagonism; and the resulting development of capacities

changes the correlation of forces within the whole and provides the
basis for a revolutionary rupture. “When a system is poised on the
brink of a qualitative change,” Levins and Lewontin point out, small
events may produce major effects. Accordingly, “The task of promot-
ing change is one of promoting the conditions under which small,
local events can precipitate the desired restructuring.”35
What must we do in the present for the future to become what
it must? Obviously, given the existing crisis of the Earth System, we
must try to put an end to capitalism by all means possible and as soon
as possible. Every manifestation of that crisis such as the current pan-
demic provides an opportunity to educate, organize, and build the
capacities of the working class. Through the development of a politi-
cal instrument focused upon the centrality of human capacity, we can
promote the conditions for the revolutionary rupture in which the
system of community can replace capitalism.
Notes
Preface
1. Marx noted that characteristic of these efforts to prove the theory
correct was “crass empiricism,” “phrases in a scholastic way,” and
“cunning argument.” See the discussion of Marx’s disciples in “Why
Beyond Capital?,” in chap. 2 of Michael A. Lebowitz, Beyond Capital:
Marx’s Political Economy of the Working Class, 2nd ed. (New York:
Palgrave Macmillan, 2003), esp. 20–21.
2. Michael A. Lebowitz, “The One-Sidedness of Capital,” Review of
Radical Political Economics 14/ 4 (1982); Lebowitz, 2003.
3. More recently, the study of Marx’s late notebooks on ecological matters
has revealed another critical silence in Capital as handed down. See
in particular Kohei Saito, Karl Marx’s Ecosocialism: Capital, Nature
and the Unfinished Critique of Political Economy (New York: Monthly
Review Press, 2017).
4. Michael A. Lebowitz, Build It Now: Socialism for the Twenty-First
Century (New York: Monthly Review Press, 2006); The Socialist
Alternative: Real Human Development (New York: Monthly Review
Press, 2010); The Socialist Imperative: From Gotha to Now (New York:
Monthly Review Press, 2015).
5. See “A New Political Instrument for a New Hegemony,” Part 3 in Marta
Harnecker, A World to Build: New Paths toward Twenty-First Century
Socialism (New York: Monthly Review Press, 2015).
Introduction
1. Michael A. Lebowitz, Beyond Capital: Marx’s Political Economy of the
Working Class (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2003).
NOTES TO PAgES 11–20 181
2. E. P. Thompson, The Poverty of Theory (New York: Monthly Review

Press, 1978), 65.
3. Ibid.,106–7.
4. Cornelius Castoriadis, “On the History of the Workers’ Movement,”
Telos 30 (Winter 1976–77): 33, n33; “An Interview,” Telos 23 (Spring
1975): 144–45; Thompson, The Poverty of Theory, 59–62. As will be
seen in the chapters that follow, my consideration of wage-labor as
premise and result of capitalism as an organic system has brought me
much closer to Thompson’s position.
5. Thompson, The Poverty of Theory, 163–64, 167, 61.
6. Karl Marx, Capital, vol. 1 (New York: Vintage Books, 1977), 718.
7. Lebowitz, Beyond Capital, 2003, 63.
8. Ibid., 65.
9. Robert Albritton, “Returning to Marx’s Capital: A Critique of
Lebowitz’s Beyond Capital: History of Economic Ideas 11, 2009:95–107.
All citations can be found in “Beyond the Capital of Uno-ism,” chap. 17
in Michael A. Lebowitz, Following Marx: Method, Critique, and Crisis
(Chicago: Haymarket Books, 2009).
10. Ben Fine, “Debating Lebowitz: Is Class Conflict the Moral and Historical
Element in the Value of Labour-Power?,” Historical Materialism 16
(2008): 107. On “the degree of separation of workers,” see Lebowitz,
Beyond Capital, 2003, “Wages,” chap. 6, 115–17, 216.
11. Fine, “Debating Lebowitz,” 110.
12. Ibid., 108.
13. Ibid.
14. See my extended response to Fine in Michael A. Lebowitz, “Trapped
Inside the Box? Five Questions for Ben Fine,” Historical Materialism
18/1 (March 2010).
15. Alex Callinicos, Deciphering Capital: Marx’s Capital and Its Destiny
(London: Bookmarks, 2014), 304, 309.
16. Marx, Capital, vol. 1, 344, 348, 381.
17. Ibid., 342, 344.
18. Ibid., 348, 390, 395, 405, 409, 412–13.
19. Callinicos, Deciphering Capital, 309–10.
1. The Atomism of Neoclassical Economics

1. This chapter draws upon a talk presented to IAEDEN (Instituto de
Altos Estudios de la Defensa Nacional), the Institute for Higher Studies
of the Venezuelan Military, May 25, 2010. in Caracas, Venezuela.
2. Thorstein Veblen, “Why Is Economics Not an Evolutionary Science?” in
Veblen on Marx, Race, Science and Economics (New York: Capricorn,
1969), 73.
182 NOTES TO PAgES 24–34
3. Armen Alchian, “Information Costs, Pricing and Resource

Unemployment,” Western Economic Journal (June 1969).
4. E. K. Hunt, History of Economic Thought: A Critical Perspective
(Belmont, CA: Wadsworth, 1979), 288.
5. J. K. Galbraith, American Capitalism (Boston: Houghton Mifflin,
1952), 52.
6. Richard Lewontin and Richard Levins, Biology Under the Influence:
Dialectical Essays on Ecology, Agriculture and Health (New York:
Monthly Review Press, 2007), 65.
7. Nikolai Bukharin, Economic Theory of the Leisure Class (New York:
Monthly Review Press, 1972), 41.
8. See my discussion in “Analytical Marxism and the Marxian Theory of
Crisis,” in Lebowitz, Following Marx.
2. The Truth Is the Whole

1. Richard Levins and Richard Lewontin, The Dialectical Biologist
(Harvard University Press, 1985).
2. Richard Lewontin and Richard Levins, Biology Under the Influence,
131.
3. G. W. F. Hegel, The Phenomenology of Mind (New York: Harper
Torchbooks, 1967), 81–82.
4. Karl Marx, Grundrisse (New York: Vintage Books, 1973), 156.
5. Georg Lukács, History and Class Consciousness: Studies in Marxist
Dialectics (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1972), 27.
6. Levins and Lewontin, The Dialectical Biologist, 3, 269, 273.
7. V. I. Lenin, Collected Works, vol. 38: Philosophical Notebooks (Moscow:
Foreign Languages Publishing House, 1961), 97,146–47, 159.
8. Bertell Ollman, Dance of the Dialectic: Steps in Marx’s Method (Chicago:
University of Illinois Press, 2003), 14.
9. Lewontin and Levins, Biology Under the Influence, 109, 131.
10. Ibid., 109.
11. Lenin, Philosophical Notebooks, 196.
12. Levins and Lewontin, The Dialectical Biologist, 275.
13. Ollman, Dance of the Dialectic, 18.
14. Marx, Grundrisse, 100.
16. Engels to Schmidt, October 27, 1890, in Marx and Engels, Collected
Works, vol. 49, 63.
17. Lenin, Philosophical Notebooks, 139–41.
18. Lewontin and Levins, Biology Under the Influence, 86, 94, 115.
19. Ibid., 94–95, 109, 116.
20. Ibid., 116.
21. Ibid., 69, 138, 157.

23. Ibid., 282
25. Ibid., 85, 108.
26. Marx, Grundrisse, 100–101.
28. Lebowitz, Beyond Capital; Lebowitz, Following Marx.
30. Henri Lefebvre, Dialectical Materialism (London: Jonathan Cape,
1968), 31.
31. G. W. F. Hegel, Hegel’s Science of Logic, vol. 1 (London: Allen & Unwin,
1929), 65.
32. Ibid., 2:482–83.
33. See Lebowitz, Beyond Capital, for a complete discussion.
36. Ibid., 60.
37. Lewontin and Levins, Biology Under the Influence, 150–51.
38. Ibid., 150.
39. Ibid., 108.
40. Ibid., 123.
41. Lukács, History and Class Consciousness, 1; Lebowitz, Beyond Capital,
16, 25–26.
3. Marx’s Conceptualization of Capitalism as an Organic System

1. Karl Marx, Grundrisse, 278.
2. Karl Marx, Capital, vol. 3 (New York: Vintage Books, 957.
3. Karl Marx, Capital, vol. 2 (New York: Vintage Books, 180–81.
4. Marx, Capital, 1:711.
8. Karl Marx, Poverty of Philosophy, in Marx and Engels, Collected Works,
vol. 6, 166–67.
10. Marx, Capital, 1:873–75.
12. Ibid., 459–460.
13. Questions related to actually existing capitalism when it is not an
organic system are explored below in chapter 9, “Between Organic
Systems.”

15. See Lebowitz, Beyond Capital, chapter 4 for a discussion of the two
circuits, in particular, the error in not recognizing the necessary circuit
of wage-labor.
17. Marx, Capital, 1:270–74.
18. See consideration of social relations within the household, including
exploration of patriarchy as a slave relation, in chapter 8, “The One-
Sidedness of Wage-Labour,” Lebowitz, Beyond Capital.
19. Marx, Capital, 1:718–9, 290; Marx, Grundrisse, 676; Lebowitz, Beyond
Capital: 63–74.
20. Marx, Capital, 1:291–2.
23. Marx, Capital, 1:715–16.
24. Marx, Capital, 1:899, 904–5.
25. Marx, Capital, 1:548, 643, 799.
26. Marx, Capital, 1:482–84, 548, 607–8, 614.
28. Ibid., 287; Lebowitz, Beyond Capital, 32–44.
29. Marx, Grundrisse, 694; Marx, Capital, 1: 1058. Further, the real
existence of capital as many capitals in competition tends to produce
the dependence of workers upon the particular capitals that employ
them. Lebowitz, Beyond Capital, 157–58.
31. Marx, Capital, 1:899, 935.
4. Crises and Non-Reproduction

1. Karl Marx, Theories of Surplus Value, vol. 2 (Moscow: Progress
Publishers, 1968), 394, 504–5, 509.
2. Ibid., 2:514.
3. Karl Marx, Grundrisse, 443. Emphasis added.
4. Marx, Grundrisse, 447. Marx made the same point in Theories of Surplus
Value, vol. 3 (Moscow: Progress Publishers, 1971): “It is crises that put
an end to this apparent independence of the various elements of which
the production process continually consists and which it continually
reproduces” (518).
5. Marx, Theories of Surplus Value, 2:165, 500.
8. Karl Marx, Capital, vol. 2, n391.
9. Karl Marx, Capital, vol. 3, 352, 365.

11. Marx: Grundrisse, 415; Marx, Theories of Surplus Value, 2:528.
13. Marx,Theories of Surplus Value, 2:468.
15. Marx, Grundrisse, 421n.
16. Marx, Theories of Surplus Value, 2:505, 531.
17. Marx, Capital, 3:614; Marx, Capital, 2:391.
18. Marx, Capital, 2:391n.
20. Marx, Theories of Surplus Value, 2:497.
22. Marx, Theories of Surplus Value, 2:497n.
24. Karl Marx, Economic Manuscript of 1861–63 (Conclusion) in Marx and
Engels, Collected Works, vol. 34 (New York: International Publishers
1994), 104.
26. Marx, Economic Manuscripts of 1861–63 (Conclusion), 104–5.
27. Marx, Theories of Surplus Value, 3:447. Note also Marx’s comment
about McCulloch giving “vent to a veritable jeremiad about the fall in
the rate of profit” (186).
28. Hegel, Science of Logic, 2:134–35.
29. Lenin, Philosophical Notebooks, 150–51.
30. Karl Marx, Economic and Philosophical Manuscripts of 1844, in Marx
and Engels, Collected Works, vol. 3, 270–71.
32. Marx’s theoretical exposition of relative surplus value is questioned in
Part III of this book.
33. Marx, Grundrisse, 773, 771.
35. Karl Marx, Economic Manuscripts of 1861–63 (Continuation), in
Marx and Engels, Collected Works, vol. 33 (New York: International
Publishers, 1991), 26–29.
36. Ibid., 33–34.
37. Marx, Capital, 3:333, 336.
38. Capital immediately added that “in practice, however, the rate of profit
will fall in the long run.” This statement was inserted not by Marx but
by Engels. Marx, Capital, 3:337; Fred Moseley, “Introduction” to Marx’s
Economic Manuscripts of 1864–5 (Boston: Brill, 2016), 20.
40. Marx, Capital, 3:333, 368.

41. Marx, Capital, 3:201, 203–4; Marx, Theories of Surplus Value, 2:28.
42. Marx, Theories of Surplus Value, 3: 368.
44. Marx, Grundrisse, 754, 752; Theories of Surplus Value,2:18.
45. Marx, Economic Manuscripts of 1861–63 (Continuation), 34.
46. Marx, Capital, 3:213–14.
47. Marx, Theories of Surplus Value, 2:516–17.
55. Lukács, History and Class Consciousness, 244.
57. Lebowitz, The Socialist Imperative, chap. 1.
61. Levins and Lewontin, The Dialectical Biologist, 282. See the discussion
in chapter 2 of this book.
5. Never Forget the Second Part

1. Hegel, Phenomenology, 81.
2. Hegel, Science of Logic, vol. 1: Introduction, 64–66.
3. Hegel, Phenomenology, 238–39, 242.
4. Lenin, Philosophical Notebooks, 146–47; Ludwig Feuerbach,
Preliminary Theses on the Reform of Philosophy (1842), in The Fiery
Brook: Selected Writings of Ludwig Feuerbach (New York: Anchor
Books, 1972), 171.
5. Karl Marx, Contribution to the Critique of Hegel’s Philosophy of Law,
in Marx and Engels, Collected Works, vol. 3 (New York: International
Publishers, 1975), 11, 40.
6. Karl Marx, 1844, 328.
7. Ibid., 329, 332–33, 342.
8. For example, they note that “English and French workers have formed
associations in which they exchange opinions not only on their
immediate needs as workers, but on their needs as human beings.”
Further, those workers are conscious of the “power which arises from
their cooperation” and “know that property, capital, money, wage–
labour and the like” will not be abolished by “pure thinking” but only
“in a practical, objective way.” Marx and Engels, The Holy Family, in
9. Marx and Engels, German Ideology, in Marx and Engels, Collected
Works, vol. 5 (New York: International Publishers, 1976), 36.
10. Ibid., 53.
11. Ibid., 323.
12. Ibid., 214.
13. Marx, Theses on Feuerbach, in Marx and Engels, Collected Works, vol. 5
(New York: International Publishers, 1976), 3.
14. Marx, 1844 mss, 329, 332–33, 342.
15. Marx, Theses on Feuerbach, 4.
16. We may not grasp the centrality of this point because the third thesis
in Engels’s widely read edit of Marx’s Theses on Feuerbach reads: “The
coincidence of the changing of circumstances and of human activity
can be conceived and rationally understood only as revolutionising
practice.” That is, it strangely deletes “or self-change” from Marx’s text.
Publishers, 1976), 7.
19. Marx, Capital, 1:548, 643, 799.
20. Marx, Capital, vol. 1, 772.
21. Karl Marx, Capital, 3:178; Marx, Capital, 1:447.
22. Marx, Grundrisse, 488, 541, 708.
24. Karl Marx, Critique of the Gotha Programme, in Marx and Engels,
Selected Works, vol. 2 (Moscow: Foreign Languages Press, 1962), 24.
25. Karl Marx, “Revelations Concerning the Communist Trial in Cologne,”
in Marx and Engels, Collected Works, vol. 11 (New York: International
26. Marx, The Civil War in France, in Marx and Engels, On the Paris
Commune (Moscow: Progress Publishers, 1971), 76.
27. Marx, Poverty of Philosophy, 211.
29. Marx to Schweitzer, 1 October 13, 1868, in Marx and Engels, Collected
Works, vol. 43 (New York: International Publishers, 1988), 133–34.
Emphasis in the original.
30. Friedrich Engels, “The Ten Hours’ Question,” in Marx and Engels,
Collected Works, vol. 10 ((New York: International Publishers, 1978),
275.
31. Marx, Theories of Surplus Value, 2:329; Lebowitz, Beyond Capital, 185.
33. Lucien Sève, Man in Marxist Theory and the Psychology of Personality
(Sussex: Harvester Press, 1978), 304.
34. Ibid., 313.
35. Lebowitz, Beyond Capital, 142.
36. In chapter 8 of Beyond Capital, “The One-Sidedness of Wage-Labour,”
I posited patriarchy as rooted in a slave relation within the household
with the result that male and female wage-laborers are produced
differently (144–54).
37. I stressed this point, noting the problem of education that could not be
utilized, in a talk I presented at the University of Havana in November
2016, subsequently published as Michael A. Lebowitz, “Protagonism
and Productivity” in Monthly Review 69/6 (November 2017).
38. Just as Marx spoke metaphorically of the renewal of the worker in his
free time as “the production of fixed capital, this fixed capital being
man himself,” one might speak of a tendency for moral depreciation of
human capacity that has been built up, all other things equal, if it is not
used. Marx, Grundrisse, 711–12.
39. See the discussion of simple, contracted, and expanded reproduction of
capacity in Lebowitz, “Protagonism and Productivity,”
6. The Burden of Classical Political Economy

1. Karl Marx, “Russian Policy Against Turkey—Chartism” (1853), in
2. Karl Marx, Value, Price and Profit, 148.
3. Karl Marx, Capital, 1:274.
4. Ibid., 1:660.
5. David Ricardo, The Principles of Political Economy and Taxation
(London: Dent. Everyman’s Library, No. 590, 1969), 260.
6. Karl Marx, “Critical Marginal Notes on the Article by a Prussian,” in
7. Karl Marx, 1844 Manuscripts, 283–84.
8. Karl Marx, Poverty of Philosophy, 125.
9. Marx, Capital, 1:275–76, 655.
10. Karl Marx, Economic Manuscripts of 1861–63, in Marx and Engels,
Collected Works, vol. 30 (New York: International Publishers, 1988), 45–6.
11. See the discussion of the Ricardian Default in Michael A. Lebowitz,
“Trapped Inside the Box? Five Questions for Ben Fine,” Historical
Materialism, 18/1 (March 2010).
12. Marx, Capital, 1:276, 656.

13. Ibid., 436–37.
14. Karl Marx, Theories of Surplus Value, vol. 1 (Moscow: Foreign
Languages Publishing House, n.d.), 44–45, 68, 296. See the discussion
of Marx’s assumption and his intention to remove it in Lebowitz,
Beyond Capital.
15. Karl Marx, Capital, vol. 3, 289–90.
16. Karl Marx, Capital, vol. 2, 414.
19. Karl Marx, Economic Manuscripts of 1861–63 (Conclusion), 65–66.
20. Marx and Engels, Collected Works, vol. 40 (New York: International
21. Karl Marx, Grundrisse, 817. By this “minimum,” Marx explained, he
meant “not the extreme limit of physical necessity but the average daily
wage over e.g. one year.” Marx, Economic Manuscripts of 1861–63, 52.
22. Karl Marx, Economic Manuscripts of 1861–63, 44–45.
23. Marx, Economic Manuscripts of 1861–63 (Conclusion), 23.
24. Marx, Capital, 1:1068–9.
25. Ibid., 1:683. See also “The Missing Book on Wage–Labour,” in Lebowitz,
Beyond Capital, chap. 3.
26. Marx, Economic Manuscripts of 1861–63, 44–47.
27. See the discussion of the second moment of production and the
household sphere in in Lebowitz, Beyond Capital.
28. Marx, Capital, 3:289–90.
29. Marx, Capital, 1:769. Marx, Grundrisse: 287. In such cases, the quality
of the workers increases, in contrast to the case where real wages are
driven down, tending to “degrade” the worker “to the level of the
Irish, the level of wage–labour where the most animal minimum of
needs and subsistence appears to him as the sole object and purpose
of his exchange with capital” (Marx, Grundrisse: 285–7). See Lebowitz,
Beyond Capital, “One–Sided Marxism,” chap. 7.
7. Capital’s Need to Separate Workers

1. Marx, Capital, vol. 1, 424, 1026.
2. Ibid., 344.
3. Ibid., 899–901, 903–4.
4. For an extended discussion, see chapter 11, “What Is Competition?” in
Lebowitz, Following Marx.
6. Ibid., 436; Marx, Grundrisse, 657, 414.
7. Marx, Grundrisse, 752; Marx, Capital, 1: 433.

8. Karl Marx, “Address of the General Council of the International
Working Men’s Association to the Members and Associated Societies,”
July 9, 1867, Minutes of the General Council of the First International,
1866–68 (Moscow: Progress Publishers, n.d.), 137.
9. Marx, Capital, 1:689, 789, 793.
10. Ibid., 1:697.
11. Ibid., 1:695.
13. Marx, Grundrisse, 414, 657, 752.
14. Marx, Capital, vol. 3, 338. See “The Fallacy of Everyday Notions,” in
Lebowitz, Following Marx, chap. 3.
15. Karl Marx, “Inaugural Address of the Working Men’s International
Association,” in Marx and Engels, Collected Works, vol. 20 (New York:
International Publishers,1985; Levins and Lewontin, The Dialectical
Biologist, 11. See Lebowitz, Beyond Capital, “The Political Economy of
Wage–Labour,” chap. 4.
17. Ibid., 1:899.
18. Ibid., 1:793, 899.
19. Marx, “Inaugural Address,” 11.
21. Marx, Grundrisse, 597; Marx, Theories of Surplus Value, Vol. 3:312.
22. Engels, “The Wages System, “ in W. O. Henderson, ed., Engels: Selected
Writings (London: Penguin, 1967), 102.
23. Marx, Value, Price and Profit, in Marx and Engels, Collected Works, vol.
20; Levins and Lewontin, The Dialectical Biologist, 148–49, 14; Marx,
“Provisional Rules of the Association,” in Marx and Engels, Collected
Works, Vol. 20.
25. Ibid.,1:902–4.
26. Lebowitz, Beyond Capital, 159–60.
28. David R. Roediger, Class, Race, and Marxism (New York: Verso, 2017),
25–26. Roediger criticizes the distinction that David Harvey “makes
between capital, whose logic is said to exclude racial divisions, and
capitalism.”
31. Marx, Capital, 1:799. See “Good-bye to Vanguard Marxism,” chap.
8 in Michael A. Lebowitz, The Contradictions of “Real Socialism”: The
Conductor and the Conducted (New York: Monthly Review Press, 2012).
32. The political economy of the working class “stresses the combination of
labour as the source of social productivity and the separation of workers
as the condition for their exploitation.” Lebowitz, Beyond Capital: 87.
33. Marx, Capital, 1:793–94.
8. Beyond Atomism
1. Frederick Engels, “The Constitutional Question in Germany” (1847),
in Marx and Engels, Collected Works, vol. 6 (New York, International
2. Ibid.
3. For example, see Elinor Ostrom, Governing the Commons: The Evolution
of Institutions for Collective Action (Cambridge: Cambridge University
Press, 1990); and Daniel W. Bromley, ed., Making the Commons Work:
Theory, Practice, Policy (San Francisco: ICS Press, 1992).
4. Marx, Capital, 3:754n. See Lebowitz, The Socialist Imperative, 22–26,
32–34, esp. “Expanding the Commons,” 146–48.
5. Ostrom, Governing the Commons, 88.
6. Lebowitz, The Socialist Alternative, 66–68; Lebowitz, The Socialist
Imperative, 26–27. See also Marx, Grundrisse, 158, 171–72.
7. E. P. Thompson, “The Moral Economy of the English Crowd in the
Eighteenth Century,” Past and Present 50 (1971).
8. James C. Scott, The Moral Economy of the Peasant: Rebellion and Subsistence
in Southeast Asia (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1976), 4–5, 7.
9. Lebowitz, The Socialist Imperative, chap. 9.
10. Thompson, “The Moral Economy of the English Crowd in the
Eighteenth Century,” 129.
11. Marx, Value, Price and Profit, 143–45.
12. Ibid., 148–49.
13. Daniel Kahneman, Jack L. Knetsch, Richard H. Thaler, “Fairness and
the Assumptions of Economics,” Journal of Business, 59/4 (October
1986).
14. Daniel Kahneman, Jack L. Knetsch, Richard H. Thaler, “Fairness as a
Constraint on Profit Seeking: Entitlements in the Market,” American
Economic Review 76/4 (September 1986): 730–31.
15. Kahneman, Knetsch, Thaler, “Fairness and the Assumptions of
Economics,” S299.
16. Samuel Bowles, The Moral Economy: Why Good Incentives Are No
Substitute for Good Citizens (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2016).
17. Ibid., 4. Bowles refers to 51 studies, involving 26,000 subjects in 36
countries.
18. Ibid., 5, 9, 98–9.
19. Ibid., 50.
20. Ibid., 5, 9–10.

21. Ibid., 115–18.
22. Ibid., 111.
23. Ibid.; Bowles, The Moral Economy, 122. Note that his arguments about
the corrosive effects of markets and material incentives upon people are
not specific to capitalism but would apply as well to market socialism
and, in general, to societies trying to build socialism using material
incentives.
24. Ibid., 150.
25. Ibid., 221.
26. See the discussion of separated producers in chapter 3, “The Solidarian
Society,” in Lebowitz, The Socialist Alternative.
28. Only in capitalism does everything have a price, including, Marx
mocked, “virtue, love, conviction, knowledge, conscience, etc.” Karl
Marx, The Poverty of Philosophy, 113.
29. Marx, Grundrisse, 278, 459–60.
30. In contrast to “communism,” designation as “community” highlights
relations among people.
31. Marx, Grundrisse, 172; Marx, Capital, 1:171.
33. Lebowitz, The Socialist Alternative, 85–89; Marx, Grundrisse, 278.
34. Emily Kawano, Solidarity Economy: Building an Economy for People &
Planet, https://thenextsystem.org/learn/stories/solidarity–economy–
building–economy–people–planet.
35. Marx, “Comments on James Mill,” in Marx and Engels, Collected
Works, vol. 3 (New York: International Publishers, 1975), 227–28; Karl
Marx, Economic and Philosophical Manuscripts of 1844, 302, 304.
36. Lebowitz, The Socialist Alternative, 78–81; Marx, Grundrisse, 158–59.
37. Marx, The Poverty of Philosophy; 113. Note that Bowles cites this
discussion in The Moral Economy, 113.
38. Marx’s Critique of the Gotha Programme should be understood in
this context. See chapter 2, “Understanding the Critique of the Gotha
Programme,” in Lebowitz, The Socialist Imperative.
9. Between Organic Systems

2. Ibid.
3. Ibid., 459–60.
4. For example, in capitalism as an organic system, capital does not need
to divide workers because they already are divided; they are atomistic
individuals competing with one another.
5. George Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel, The Philosophy of History (New York:

Dover Publications, 1956), 26.
6. Lebowitz, The Socialist Alternative; Lebowitz, The Contradictions of
“Real” Socialism.
7. Evgeny Preobrazhensky, The New Economics (Oxford: Clarendon Press,
1965), 77.
8. Ibid., 102–3, 147–48, 62–65.
9. Ibid., 64.
10. Ibid., 176–77.
11. Evgeny Preobrazhensky, “The Crisis of Soviet Industrialization”: Selected
Essays (White Plains, NY: M. E. Sharpe, 1979), 68.
12. Preobrazhensky,The New Economics, 53.
13. Ibid., 176–77.
14. Ibid., 161–62.
15. Ibid., 178.
16. Preobrazhensky, “The Crisis of Soviet Industrialization,” 173.
17. A more complex description of relations in that period might identify
producer-owned production (within the mir, the peasant commune),
money-capital, socialism, and state capitalism.
22. Jairus Banaji, Theory as History: Essays on Modes of Production and
Exploitation (Chicago: Haymarket Books, 2011).
24. Lebowitz, The Socialist Alternative, 96–98. Those methods are not
required in capitalism as an organic system.
25. Marx, Capital, 1:899, 904–5.
26. Karl Marx, Economic Manuscripts of 1861–63, 116; Lebowitz, Beyond
Capital, 124–30.
27. Marx, Capital, 1:716, 718.
28. Italics added. Here is the point that Marx considered so central that
he made it in the closing chapter of Volume 1 of Capital. Indeed, this
quotation is from the closing sentence of the volume!
29. Banaji, Theory as History.
30. Ibid., 11.
31. Ibid., 8, 61.
32. Review chapter 3 to see how consistent “pseudo-Marx” is in describing
wage-labor as the premise and result of capitalism. Marx, Capital,
1:325, 723–24, 874; Marx, Capital, vol 3, 927.
33. Banaji, Theory as History, 11, 9, 41.
34. Ibid., 41.

35. Ibid., 69–70, 93, 94–96.
36. Ibid., 45, 357–58.
37. Ibid., 273; Preobrazhensky, The New Economics, 77.
38. Note that the systems in struggle are not necessarily limited to two.
In “Contested Reproduction and the Contradictions of Socialism”
(chapter 4 of The Socialist Imperative), I described the interaction of
three logics in Yugoslav Self-Management: the logic of the vanguard,
the logic of capital, and the logic of the working class.
10. How to Find a Path to Community

1. Wassily Leontiev, Essays in Economics: Theories and Theorizing (New
York: Oxford University Press, 1966), 14.
2. Ibid., 15.
3. Ibid.,16.
5. Ibid., 119.
6. Lewontin and Levin, Biology Under the Influence, 279.
8. Marx and Engels, Communist Manifesto, in Marx and Engels, Collected
Works, vol. 6 (New York: International Publishers, 1976), 495.
9. Ibid., 504.
10. Lebowitz, “Understanding the Critique of the Gotha Programme,”
chapter 2 in The Socialist Imperative.
11. Lebowitz, The Contradictions of “Real Socialism,” 135–38; see also chap. 5
in that book, “The Conductor and the Battle of Ideas in the Soviet Union.”
12. Karl Marx, The Civil War in France, in Marx and Engels, On the Paris
Commune (Moscow: Progress Publishers, 1971), 68–73.
13. Karl Marx, “First Outline of The Civil War in France,” in Marx and
Engels, On the Paris Commune, 155–56.
14. Ibid., 154–55.
15. Marx, Civil War in France, 75.
16. Lebowitz, The Contradictions of “Real Socialism.”
17. Ibid., 63–65.
18. See, in particular, “The Nature and Reproduction of Vanguard
Relations of Production,” chapter 3 in Lebowitz, The Contradictions of
“Real Socialism.”
19. I am describing the vanguard party here as generally understood in its
“purity,” not how it may have been transformed by its inner logic and
interactions with other relations (nor how it could be different). See
Lebowitz, The Contradictions of “Real Socialism,” for a full analysis.
20. “Contested Reproduction and the Contradictions of Socialism,” in

Lebowitz, The Socialist Imperative.
21. This scenario is at the core of the nomenklatura and the effort by some
to display exemplary behavior with respect to carrying out the line on
“real socialism.”
22. Lebowitz, The Contradictions of “Real Socialism,” 72–74.
23. See the discussion in Lebowitz, The Socialist Alternative, 48–50.
11. Taking a Path to Community

1. Marx and Engels, Communist Manifesto, 506.
2. Marx, Grundrisse, 172; Marx, Capital, 1:171.
3. Marx, Capital, 3:911, 916.
5. Marx, Capital, 3:754n.
8. “How did we win?” is a question posed in strategic workshops by the
U.S. socialist group LeftRoots, https://leftroots.net/.
10. A Marxist who believes that the struggle against capital and for
community really is only to be found in the capitalist workplace
reflects the one-sided perspective of capital, for which only the direct
challenges initiated by workers to the expanded reproduction of capital
matter.
11. Engels, “The Constitutional Question. . . .”
12. A question I posed to Venezuelan workers in a 2005 talk about worker
management was: “In a system of worker self-management, who looks
after the interests of the working class as a whole?” See “Seven Difficult
Questions,” in Lebowitz, Build It Now, and my discussion of Marx’s
views of the cooperative factories of his time in Beyond Capital, 88–89.
13. Lebowitz, Beyond Capital, 90–98, 111–12.
14. Ibid., 188–89.
15. Marx, “Inaugural Address of the Working Men’s International
Association,” 11–12; Lebowitz, Beyond Capital, 88–89.
16. See Michael A, Lebowitz, “Seven Difficult Questions,” in Build It
Now, chap. 6. See also Lebowitz, The Socialist Alternative, chap. 3; and
“Contested Reproduction and the Contradictions of Socialism,” in
Lebowitz, The Socialist Imperative, chap. 4.
17. Sharryn Kasmir, The Myth of Mondragon: Cooperatives, Politics, and
Working-Class Life in a Basque Town (Albany: State University of New
York Press, 1996), 195–99.
18. Robert Michels, Political Parties: A Sociological Study of the Oligarchic
Tendencies of Modern Democracy (New York: Collier Books, 1962),

70–77, 87–91, 350–53.
19. Michael A. Lebowitz, “The Nature and Reproduction of Vanguard
Relations of Production,” in The Contradictions of “Real Socialism,”
chap. 3.
20. Paulo Freire, Pedagogy of the Oppressed, 72–73.
21. Lebowitz, Contradictions of “Real Socialism”; Lebowitz, The Socialist
Imperative, chapter 4, “Contested Reproduction and the Contra-
dictions of Socialism.”
12. The Political Instrument We Need

1. Lazy Leninists doubtless feel that authoritative quotes and citations
from Lenin are sufficient to make the point.
2. Murray Bookchin, The Next Revolution: Popular Assemblies and
the Promise of Direct Democracy (New York: Verso, 2015), 180–81.
Bookchin’s influence on developments in Rojava via Abdullah Öcalan
provides a reason to look back at him for those unfamiliar with his work.
See Debbie Bookchin, “How My Father’s Ideas Helped the Kurds Create
a New Democracy,” https://www.nybooks.com/daily/2018/06/15/
how-my-fathers-ideas-helped-the-kurds-create-a-new-democracy/
nybooks.com.
3. Marta Harnecker, A World to Build: New Paths toward Twenty-First
Century Socialism (New York: Monthly Review Press, 2015), 165–66.
4. Marta Harnecker, “Ideas for the Struggle,” 2016, http://www.
oldandnewproject.net/Essays/Harnecker_Ideas.html.
5. Marx to Schweitzer, 13 October 1868, in Marx and Engels, Collected
Works, vol. 43 (New York: International Publishers, 1988), 133–34.
Emphasis in the original.
6. This perspective clearly accepts the premise in Article 62 of the Bolivarian
Constitution that the protagonism of people is “the necessary way of
achieving the involvement to ensure their complete development, both
individual and collective.” Harnecker, A World to Build, 179.
7. Lucien Sève, Man in Marxist Theory and the Psychology of Personality,
313.
8. Harnecker, A World to Build, 72. See the extended development of
this perspective with respect to communities in Marta Harnecker and
José Bartolomé, Planning from Below: A Decentralized Participatory
Planning Proposal (New York: Monthly Review Press, 2019).
9. Harnecker, A World to Build, 154.
10. Harnecker and Bartolomé, Planning from Below, 18, 25.
11. Bookchin, The Next Revolution, 158 and passim.
12. Lebowitz, The Socialist Imperative: chap. 10, 201, 218–199. Though there
are obvious parallels with respect to the importance of “walking on two

legs,” Bookchin’s horizon is the municipality; he rejects Marxism for
its emphasis on the working class and accordingly also rejects the idea
of workers as such making decisions. Reflecting his anarchist history,
further, he refuses to call what Chávez described as these “cells of a new
socialist state” a state.
13. Vivek Chibber, “Our Path to Power, “ Jacobin, December 5, 2017.
14. To provide theoretical justification for what might otherwise be seen
as opportunism or a transitory tactic, the pre-renegade Kautsky has
been exhumed (especially in Jacobin magazine) in order to marshal
theoretical authority for the electoral struggle. True, Kautsky was an
advocate of electoralism by a separate working-class party rather than
supporting a party of capital but it might be argued that this simply
reflects the vast difference between the current conjuncture and the
one in which Kautsky wrote The Road to Power.
15. Of course, discontent with change does not necessarily look forward
to a future path. Characteristic of moral economy is a tendency to
look backward to real or imagined (and idealized) previous states of
society, and this very circumstance is fertile ground for the Far Right,
fertile ground for the emergence of scapegoating (for example, of
immigrants), demagoguery, and national chauvinism.
16. Lebowitz, Build It Now, chap. 2.
17. In “Social Democracy or Revolutionary Democracy: Syriza and Us,”
https://socialistproject.ca/2015 /08/b1149/, I argued: “There are always
choices. We can take the path of ‘defeats without glory’ (Badiou)
characteristic of social democracy or we can move in the direction of
the revolutionary democracy that builds the capacities of the working
class. At the core of the latter is that it embraces the centrality of the
concept of revolutionary practice—‘the coincidence of the changing of
circumstances and human activity or self–change.’ ”
18. See the discussion of the old state and the new state in Michael
Lebowitz, Building Socialism for the 21st Century: The Logic of the State,
the Fourth Annual Nicos Poulantzas Memorial Lecture, 8 December
2010 (published by the Poulantzas Institute in 2011). This talk appeared
in an expanded version as “The State and the Future of Socialism” in
the Socialist Register 2013 and is included as chapter 10 of The Socialist
Imperative.
19. Lebowitz, Contradictions of “Real Socialism,” 69.
20. Harnecker, “Ideas for the Struggle.”
21. Freire, Pedagogy of the Oppressed, 71–73.
22. Ibid., 60.
23. Ibid., 65, 67.
24. Idea #1, Harnecker, “Ideas for the Struggle.”

25. Idea #3, ”To be at the service of popular movements, not to displace
them.” Ibid.
26. Ibid.
27. Marx and Engels, The Communist Manifesto, 518.
28. Harnecker, “Ideas for the Struggle.”
29. Lebowitz, The Socialist Alternative, 160–62.
30. Lewontin and Levins, Biology Under the Influence, 150–51, 108.
31. Kawano, Solidarity Economy: Building an Economy for People & Planet.
33. Lebowitz, The Socialist Imperative, 202.
34. Karl Marx to Frederick Engels, 9 April 1863, in Marx and Engels,
Collected Works, vol. 41 (New York: International Publishers, 1985),
468. Harnecker cites Lenin, too, with respect to the lessons of the
February Revolution, that there can be events when “millions and
tens of millions of people learn in a week more than they do in a year
of ordinary somnolent life.” Marta Harnecker, Rebuilding the Left
(London: Zed Books, 2007), 58.
Index
abstract surplus value, 97–98 boom periods, 66

accumulation, 14, 46, 50, 82; feed- bourgeois system, 43, 47, 53, 120,
back from, 98–99; production 140–43
and, 132; regulation of, 126–27 Bowles, Sam, 116–19, 122
agriculture, 64–65
analysis, 36, 137, 139 Callinicos, Alex, 14–16
anarchy, 163–64 capacity, 82–83
atomism, 192n4; fairness and, capital: see specific topics
114–19; individual, 155; of Capital (Marx), 11–15, 54, 73,
neoclassical economics, 19–28; 78, 81; class in, 58; history in,
separation compared to, 163; 138–39; production in, 37, 44,
for working-class, 111–13, 56–57; reproduction in, 43–44;
119–22 surplus value in, 87; systems in,
28; working-class in, 52
bad theory, 131 capitalism: see specific topics
Banaji, Jairus, 129, 131–35 capital-relation, 46
banking concept of education, Cartesian reductionism, 29
171–72 Castoriadis, Cornelius, 11–12
Bartolomé, José, 165–66 causality, 33
Bastiat, Frédéric, 25–26 change, 197n15; crisis and, 178–
behavioral economics, 115 79, 184n4; from feedback, 35;
Bolivia, 196n6 for individuals, 36; in markets,
Bookchin, Murray, 163–64, 166, 115–16; for Marx, 57, 77–78;
196n12 in Marxism, 106; observation
200 INDEx
of, 45; in organic systems, communal society: history of,

133–36; potential of, 140–41; 152–54; ideology of, 157–60;
self-change, 80–81; in society, struggle for, 154–56; systems
172–73; spontaneity in, 163–64; for, 150–52
in working-class, 76, 167–68, communism, 142–46; see also real
177 socialism
Chavez, Hugo, 121 Communist Manifesto (Marx and
Chibber, Vivek, 167 Engels), 140–41
China, 133–34 community: see specific topics
choice, 23–26, 186n8, 197n17 competition, 99–100, 111, 184n20
circulation, 49–50, 55–57 The Condition of the Working Class
Clark, John Bates, 24–25 in England (Engels), 75
class, 14, 23, 52, 58, 75; exploita- consumerism, 20–21, 51, 56–57,
tion of, 105; ruling, 76, 104, 133
144–45; struggle, 12–13, contemplative materialism, 76
15; war, 15, 81–82; see also contested reproduction, 125–28,
working-class 131–34, 160, 162–63, 177–79
classical political economy: com- contradiction, 33–34, 38–39,
modities in, 85–86; for Marx, 56–59, 67, 105, 140
97; for Ricardo, 87–88; social Contribution to the Critique of
relations in, 98; surplus value Hegel’s Philosophy of Law
in, 88–92; wage-laborers in, (Feuerbach), 74
92–95 crashes, 58
classification, 133–36 criminals, 20
cognition, 36–37 crisis, 54–58, 140, 184n4; change
Cohen, G. A., 27 after, 178–79, 184n4; of Earth
collective capital, 104 system, 68–70, 175–79; in
collective labor, 104 economics, 67–68, 169–70; in
colonization, 130–31 profit, 59–67
commercial capitalism, 133 Critique of the Gotha Programme
commodities: in bourgeois system, (Marx), 79–80, 142
120; circulation of, 56–57; in currency, 26
classical political economy,
85–86; economics of, 56, 92–93; decentralization, 165–66
exploitation and, 49; labor- deduction, 21–22, 36, 144–45
power as, 12, 48, 120; for Marx, dehumanization, 86
55, 120–21; metamorphosis of, democratic centralism, 147–48
93; raw material for, 64; surplus dialectic thinking, 29–30; equi-
value and, 44–45; transactions librium and, 33–34, 67–68;
with, 54–55; wage-laborers and, interdependency and, 31; nega-
47–48 tivity in, 37; parts for, 32–33;
INDEx 201
struggle and, 82; teleology and, surplus value and, 55–56; for
139; “Why Dialectics?,” 138 working-class, 70
The Dialectical Biologist (Levins exchange, 24, 48, 55
and Lewontin), 29 experimental economics, 114–19
directionality, 138 exploitation: of class, 105; com-
distribution, 144 modities and, 49; fairness and,
The Distribution of Wealth (Clark), 114–15; production and, 106,
24–25 131–32; reproduction and,
dynamic systems, 137–38 52–53, 134; of workers, 47, 60,
154–55
Earth system, 68–70, 175–79 expropriation, 130–31
Economic Manuscripts (Marx), externalities, 26–27
62–63
economics: behavioral, 115; of fairness, 113–19, 146, 157
boom periods, 66; of bourgeois fallacy of composition, 26
system, 47; of commodities, falling rate of profit (FROP),
56, 92–93; contradiction in, 67; 59–60, 62–63, 65, 67
of crashes, 58; crisis in, 67–68, families, 22–23, 75
169–70; economists, 21–22; of feedback: from accumulation,
equilibrium, 20–21; experimen- 98–99; change from, 35;
tal, 114–19; of markets, 101; for equilibrium, 114, 135;
of money, 92–95; neoclassical, non-reproduction and, 130;
19–28, 113; political economy, productivity and, 62; reduction-
55, 59–60; Principles of Political ism and, 34; for systems, 61,
Economy, 85–86; of supply-and- 63, 178; wages and, 98; workers
demand law, 104; theory and, and, 68–70
25–26 feudalism, 133, 139–40
education, 26 Feurbach, Ludwig, 74, 77
egalitarianism, 159 Fine, Ben, 13–14, 16
employment, 22–23, 129–30, 146 First International, 103, 112
Engels, Friedrich, 33; atomism for, fixed capital, 66, 188n38
111; Marx and, 75–77, 90, 157, Foster, John Bellamy, 68
187n16; self-change for, Freire, Paolo, 148, 159, 171–72
80–81; separation for, 155;
struggle for, 85; trade unions Galbraith, John Kenneth, 25
for, 103 General Council (First
equal rights, 15 International), 112
equilibrium: dialectic thinking German Ideology (Engels and
and, 33–34, 67–68; economics Marx), 75–77
of, 20–21; feedback for, 114, Gorbachev, Mikhail, 143
135; production and, 57–58, 63; Greece, 168–69
202 INDEx
Grundrisse (Marx), 12, 36, 55–56, immanent law, 126, 131

62, 78, 90–91 incentives, 117–22
income taxes, 23
Harnecker, Marta, 164–66, 172–73 individuals: activity of, 121;
Harvey, David, 190n28 change for, 36; choice for,
Hegel, Georg Wilhelm Friedrich, 25–26; health of, 22; individual
12–13, 29–31, 35–37; causality atomism, 155; markets and, 28;
for, 33; history for, 124; Marx for Marx, 30, 79; rational
and, 161–63; revolutionary choice of, 20, 23–24, 26–27;
practice and, 73–78; the whole reputation of, 113; self-interest
for, 176; see also specific works of, 19–20; society and, 24,
hierarchies, 145, 147–48, 157–60 27–28, 142; struggle of, 156;
history: in Capital, 138–39; coloni- systems for, 56; wage-laborers
zation, 130–31; of commercial as, 100–101, 189n29; workers
capitalism, 133; of communal and, 100
society, 152–54; for Hegel, 124; industry, 64–65
historical materialism, 131–32; interconnection, 36, 101–2
of human-activity, 77–78; Latin interdependency, 26–28, 31–32
America, 171–72; of markets, internal relations, 55–56
114; for Marx, 151–52; of interpenetration, 32
production, 193n17; of prop- investments, 55
erty, 113; of systems, 46–47, “Invisible Hand” theory, 25
137–46; of USSR, 126–27; of
wage-laborers, 124–25; “When Japan, 46
Should History Be Written
Backwards?,” 137 Kagarlitsky, Boris, 146
The Holy Family (Marx and Kasmir, Sharryn, 158
Engels), 75 Kautsky, Karl, 197n14
homeostasis, 135 Keynes, John Maynard, 26
homo economicus, 115–17, 177 knowledge, 35–39, 148
homo solidaricus, 121–22, 150–52,
154, 157, 177 labor: capacity, 90; collective, 104;
horizontalism, 159 concepts of, 75; in Grundrisse,
households, 184n18 78; hierarchies in, 145; machin-
human-activity, 9, 77–79, 116–17 ery for, 99; for Marx, 64–65;
nature and, 68–70; price of, 100;
the Idea, 74–75 production and, 79, 120–21;
idealism, 74, 77 productivity from, 52, 57,
“Ideas for the Struggle” 62–64; regulation and, 57; for
(Harnecker), 173–75 Ricardo, 63; standard of neces-
ideology, 96–97, 152–53, 157–60 sity for, 97–98; surplus value
INDEx 203
from, 57; wages and, 48–49; see machinery, 65–66, 99

also wage-laborers markets: change in, 115–16; com-
labor-power: as commodities, petition in, 99–100; contested
12, 48, 120; money for, 47; in reproduction for, 127; econom-
organic systems, 61; production ics of, 101; history of, 114;
of, 93; property and, 143; value incentives in, 192n23; individu-
of, 63, 86–87, 90–91; for wage- als and, 28; production for, 48
laborers, 111–12; for workers, Marx, Karl, 11–16, 36; analysis
49, 52, 81, 85, 111–12 by, 139; bourgeois system for,
laissez-faire policy, 23 142–43; change for, 57, 77–78;
Latin America, 171–72 circulation for, 50, 55–56; clas-
law: concepts of, 60; for human- sical political economy for, 97;
activity, 116–17; immanent, commodities for, 55, 120–21;
126, 131; law of value, 126–27; communism for, 142–44; con-
natural, 80, 140, 150–51; in sumerism for, 51; Engels and,
neoclassical economics, 113; 75–77, 90, 157, 187n16; FROP
in New York, 81; for regula- for, 62; Hegel, 161–63; hierar-
tion, 15; supply-and-demand, chies for, 157–58; history for,
99–102, 104, 120 151–52; individuals for, 30, 79;
Lefebvre, Henri, 36 labor for, 64–65; methodology
leisure, 20 of, 91–92; mutual interaction
Lenin, Vladmir, 30–33, 36–38, 74, for, 33; natural law for, 80, 151;
196n1, 198n34 organic systems for, 43–45;
Leontiev, Wassily, 137–38 Phenomenology of Mind for,
Levins, Richard, 29–31, 33–35, 75, 83; production for, 45–47;
38–39; change for, 179; con- productivity for, 175; profit for,
tradictions for, 105; dialectic 60–61, 185n38; rational choice
thinking for, 67–68; direction- for, 59–60; reproduction for,
ality for, 138; Hegel for, 176; 45–46; Ricardo and, 85–86;
history for, 152; opposing forces supply-and-demand law for,
for, 128; systems for, 178; theory 120; systems for, 128; theory
for, 96–97 for, 180n1; universal venality
Lewontin, Richard, 29–31, 34–35, for, 122; value for, 66–67; wages
38–39; change for, 179; con- for, 114, 189n21; working-class
tradictions for, 105; dialectic for, 84–85, 104–5, 178; see also
thinking for, 67–68; direction- specific works
ality for, 138; Hegel for, 176; Marxism: change in, 106; con-
history for, 152; opposing forces cepts in, 39; contradiction in,
for, 128; systems for, 178; theory 33–34; interpenetration in, 32;
for, 96–97 Marxism-Leninism, 148, 163–
Lukács, György, 30, 32, 39, 68, 141 64; politics of, 27–28; Ricardian
204 INDEx
Default and, 92; struggle in, 43–45; one-sidedness in, 131–

195n10; theory of, 45–46, 33; opposing forces in, 128–30;
68–69, 83, 89, 134; working- profit in, 63–64; separation of,
class in, 196n12 121–22; state programs and,
materialism, 74, 76–78, 119–20, 141; theory of, 16, 119, 161–62;
122, 131–32, 192n23 value in, 61–62; wage-laborers
minorities, 173–74 in, 50–53, 181n4
Mondragon (corporation), 158 Ostrom, Elinor, 113, 120
money: currency, 26; econom- overproduction, 55–59, 66
ics of, 92–95; for labor-power,
47; money-capital, 129–30; for paradox of thrift, 26
reproduction, 49–50; reserves parts, 29–33, 125–26, 162–63
of, 88–89; value of, 94–95 patriarchy, 105, 184n18, 188n36
The Moral Economy (Bowles), permanent crises, 59
116–17 Phenomenology of Mind (Hegel),
“The Moral Economy of the 29, 74–75, 77, 83
English Crowd” (Thompson), physiocrats, 88
114 Planning from Below (Bartolomé),
municipality, 166, 196n12 165–66
mutual interaction, 33 policy, 22–23, 77, 79–80, 167–68
political instruments: of con-
natural law, 80, 140, 150–51 tested reproduction, 177–79;
nature, 68–70, 176–77 revolutionary agency, 163–64;
neoclassical economics, 19–28, revolutionary pedagogue, 171–
113 75; revolutionary practice, 162,
neoliberal state policies, 22, 165–66; theory and, 161–63;
167–68 traditional models of, 167–71
New York, 81 politics: in Communist Manifesto,
nomenklatura, 195n21 140–41; hierarchies in, 159–60;
non-neutrality, 105–7 of Marxism, 27–28; politi-
non-reproduction, 54–55, 68, 130 cal cadres, 173–75; political
economy, 55, 59–60, 84–85,
observation, 36–37, 45 101–3; Principles of Political
old society, 155 Economy, 85–86; of production,
Ollman, Bertell, 31–33, 38, 138, 48; society and, 148; of struggle,
142 153–54; of working-class, 158,
opposing forces, 128–30 191n32; see also classical politi-
organic systems: of accumulation, cal economy
46; atomism and, 192n4; change poverty, 23, 80
in, 133–36; concepts of, 123–28; The Poverty of Philosophy (Marx),
labor-power in, 61; for Marx, 80
INDEx 205
Poverty of Theory (Thompson), 11 production and, 150–51; social

pre-capitalist systems, 50–51 relations and, 112
Preobrazhensky, Evgeny, 126–28, protagonism, 165–67, 196n6;
133, 162–63 human-activity and, 9; paradox
Principles of Political Economy of, 156; revolutionary practice
(Ricardo), 85–86 and, 159–60; for society, 150;
production: accumulation and, theory of, 174–75
132; in Capital, 37, 44, 56–57; Provisional Rules (First
employment and, 129–30; International), 103
equilibrium and, 57–58, 63; punishment, 20, 116–17
exploitation and, 106, 131–32;
after feudalism, 139–40; his- racism, 105
tory of, 193n17; investments rational choice, 20, 23–24, 26–27,
and, 55; labor and, 79, 120–21; 59–60
of labor-power, 93; for mar- raw material, 64–67
kets, 48; for Marx, 45–47; for real socialism, 146–49, 159,
materialism, 77–78; organiza- 168–69
tion of, 106; politics of, 48; reciprocal interaction, 32–33
productive forces, 105–7, 127; reductionism, 31–32, 34
property and, 150–51; rela- reference transactions, 116
tions of, 124; separation in, regulation: of accumulation, 126–
128–29; as slavery, 94; social, 27; distribution and, 144; labor
121; for society, 24–25; stan- and, 57; law for, 15; self-regula-
dard of necessity and, 89–90; tion, 35, 67; state programs for,
supply-and-demand law for, 46; systems and, 34–35
102; surplus value from, 14–15; relative surplus value, 61, 97–99
systems for, 123–24; value and, religion, 25
64–65; by wage-laborers, 44–45; reproduction, 45–46, 93; of
of workers, 51–53; see also spe- capacity, 83; in Capital, 43–44;
cific topics contested, 125–28, 131–34, 160,
productivity: in agriculture, 64–65; 162–63, 177–79; exploitation
feedback and, 62; from labor, and, 52–53, 134; intercon-
52, 57, 62–64; for Marx, 175; nection of, 101–2; money for,
social, 79; surplus value from, 49–50; non-reproduction,
14–15; wages and, 84; of work- 54–55; subordination for, 162;
ers, 61 systems and, 34, 147; theory of,
profit, 16, 59–67, 92, 185n38 32–35; the whole and, 32–35,
proletariat, 68, 141 125–28; workers for, 49
propaganda, 172 reserves, of money, 88–89
property: concepts of, 152; history revolutionary agency, 163–64
of, 113; labor-power and, 143; revolutionary pedagogue, 171–75
206 INDEx
revolutionary practice, 73–78, 83, and, 148; production for, 24–25;

148–49; choice and, 197n17; productive forces of, 127;
politics of, 162, 165–66; pro- protagonism for, 150; slavery
tagonism and, 159–60 for, 132; social preferences,
Ricardian Default, 87–88, 92, 94, 96 117–19, 122; social production,
Ricardo, David, 59, 63, 65, 85–88 121; social productivity, 79;
The Road to Power (Kautsky), social relations, 44, 48, 51, 98,
197n14 112, 184n18; structure of, 125;
ruling class, 76, 104, 144–45 struggle for, 166; systems and,
45; Why Good Incentives Are
Say, J. B., 55 No Substitute for Good Citizens,
Science of Logic (Hegel), 30, 36 118–19; workers for, 69, 94,
second product: revolutionary 119–22; working-class and, 81,
practice and, 73–78; theory of, 102
78–81; for workers, 82–83 Spain, 158
second-order effects, 27 spontaneity, 163–64
self-change, 80–81 standard of necessity, 89–92,
self-interest, 19–20, 24–25 97–98
self-management: theory of, stasis: see equilibrium
195n12; in Yugoslavia, 134, 141, state programs, 23, 46, 104, 141,
143, 155–56, 158, 194n38 144–45, 165–68
self-regulation, 35, 67 Stirner, Max, 76
separation: atomism compared to, Stone, Oliver, 25
163; for Engels, 155; of organic struggle: for alternatives, 177–78;
systems, 121–22; in produc- in Capital, 14–15; class, 12–13,
tion, 128–29; of workers, 96–98, 15; for communal society,
102–5 154–56; contested reproduction
Sève, Lucien, 82, 165 and, 160; dialectic thinking and,
slavery, 94–95, 132, 184n18, 82; for Engels, 85; “Ideas for the
188n36 Struggle,” 173–75; of individu-
small spaces, 165–66 als, 156; in Marxism, 195n10;
Smith, Adam, 24–25, 59 of minorities, 173–74; politics
social contract theory, 146–47 of, 153–54; poverty and, 80;
social democracy, 167–69 for real socialism, 168–69; for
social ownership, 151 society, 166; systems in, 194n38;
society: change in, 172–73; deduc- over Ten Hours Bill, 153; wages
tion for, 144–45; education for, and, 16, 84; workers and, 103–4,
26; goals for, 150; individuals 166; for working-class, 163, 165
and, 24, 27–28, 142; The Moral subordination, 97–101, 143, 162
Economy about, 116–17; old, supply-and-demand law, 99–102,
155; policy and, 77; politics 104, 120
INDEx 207
supremacy, 97–101 Union of Soviet Socialist Republics

surplus value: abstract, 97–98; in (USSR), 126–27, 134
Capital, 87; from circulation, universal venality, 122
50; in classical political econ- Unoism, 13
omy, 88–92; commodities and, unreconstructed Hegelianism,
44–45; equilibrium and, 55–56; 12–13
from labor, 57; for nature, 176– unutilized capacity, 83
77; from productivity, 14–15; use-values, 47–48, 66–67, 89
profit and, 60–62; relative, 61,
97–99; from workers, 49 value, 44–45; of currency, 26;
Syriza party, 168–69 exchange, 48, 55; of labor-
systems: anarchy, 163–64; bour- power, 63, 86–87, 90–91; law of
geois, 43, 47, 53, 120, 142–43; in value, 126–27; for Marx, 66–67;
Capital, 28; for communal soci- of money, 94–95; in organic sys-
ety, 150–52; dynamic, 137–38; tems, 61–62; production and,
Earth system, 68–70, 175–79; 64–65; profit and, 16; theory of,
feedback for, 61, 63, 178; hier- 13; use-values, 47–48, 66–67,
archies in, 147–48; history of, 89; see also surplus value
46–47, 137–46; for individuals, Value, Price, and Profit (Marx), 16,
56; interdependency and, 28; for 103, 114
Marx, 128; pre-capitalist, 50–51; vanguard party, 147–49, 159, 171,
for production, 123–24; regula- 194n19
tion and, 34–35; reproduction Veblen, Thorstin, 19–20
and, 34, 147; society and, 45; verticalism, 173–74
in struggle, 194n38; theory, 31;
the whole in, 135–36; see also wage-laborers: in classical political
organic systems economy, 92–95; commodities
and, 47–48; history of, 124–25;
teleology, 139 as individuals, 100–101,
Ten Hours Bill, 153 189n29; labor-power for, 111–
Thompson, E. P., 11–12, 114 12; in organic systems, 50–53,
totality of thoughts, 37 181n4; production by, 44–45;
trade unions, 103 study of, 91; as workers, 82
traditional models, of politics, wages: in bourgeois system, 53; in
167–71 Capital, 13–14; capital-relation,
traditional standard of life, 114 46; consumerism and, 21; fair-
transactions, 54–55, 116 ness in, 157; feedback and, 98;
in Grundrisse, 90–91; labor and,
the ultimatum game, 115 48–49; for Marx, 114, 189n21;
underproduction, 66–67 minimum of, 88, 91; productiv-
unemployment, 22–24 ity and, 84; struggle and, 16, 84;
208 INDEx
welfare and, 22–23; for work- of, 12–13; human-activity

ers, 189n29; for working-class, and, 78–79; individuals and,
47–50 100; labor-power for, 49, 52,
Wakefield, E. G., 130–31 81, 85, 111–12; leisure for, 20;
Wall Street (film), 25 policy by, 79–80; production
welfare, 22–23 by, 51–53; productive forces
Western Europe, 139 and, 105–7; productivity of, 61;
“When Should History Be Written for reproduction, 49; second
Backwards?” (Leontiev), 137 product for, 82–83; separation
the whole: classification of, 134– of, 96–98, 102–5; for society, 69,
35; contested reproduction and, 94, 119–22; struggle and, 103–4,
162–63; contradiction and, 105; 166; subordination of, 97–101;
for Hegel, 176; knowing, 35–39; supply-and-demand for, 101–2;
parts and, 29–32; reproduction surplus value from, 49; as wage-
and, 32–35, 125–28; in sys- laborers, 82; wages for, 189n29
tems, 135–36; theory of, 73–74, working-class: atomism for,
161–62 111–13, 119–22; in Capital,
“Why Dialectics?” (Ollman), 138 52; change in, 76, 167–68, 177;
Why Good Incentives Are No concepts of, 154–55; division
Substitute for Good Citizens of, 102–7; equilibrium for, 70;
(Bowles), 118–19 for Marx, 84–85, 104–5, 178; in
workers: in accumulation, 50; Marxism, 196n12; organization
in Capital, 11–12, 54, 78, 81; of, 170; politics of, 158, 191n32;
choice for, 23–24, 186n8; society and, 81, 102; struggle
competition for, 111, 184n20; for, 163, 165; theory of, 170–71;
The Condition of the Working wages for, 47–50
Class in England, 75; councils, A World to Build (Harnecker),
156; dehumanization of, 86; 164–65
dilemma, 112; equal rights
for, 15; exploitation of, 47, xenophobia, 105
60, 154–55; expropriation of,
130–31; feedback and, 68–70; Yugoslavia, 134, 143, 155–56, 158,
fixed capital for, 188n38; goals 194n38

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MORE PRAISE FOR BETWEEN CAPITALISM AND COMMUNITY

“Michael Lebowitz is certainly no faithful disciple of Marx. But he can claim

“In this insightful contribution, Michael Lebowitz continues to rigorously

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

ISBN paper 978-1-58367-886-2

Typeset in Minion Pro and Brown

Part I. In Praise of Dialectics | 17

Part II. One-Sided Marxism | 41

Part III. The Second Product | 71

Part IV. Contested Reproduction | 109

For Marta Harnecker (1937–2019)

I am not a disciple of Marx. My goal is not to prove that Marx was

if the centrality of revolutionary practice, that simultaneous changing

Class Struggle and Capital

In Beyond Capital: Marx’s Political Economy of the Working Class, I

appear as a purely passive object of this activity.” Whereas Castoriadis

struggle), Beyond Capital concluded that our concept of capitalism

The Atomism of Neoclassical

How can we understand capitalism? Neoclassical economics, which

beginning of the twentieth century, described this as the view of the

in a process of deduction: self-examination, self-interrogation. They

Lower the payments to welfare mothers. Do you want to reduce the

It is the purpose of this work to show that the distribution of the

law, if it worked without friction, would give to every agent of

externalities are everywhere, and they are an anomaly for a theory

being parts of that particular whole. To describe and define those

The Truth Is the Whole

By beginning from abstract individuals, neoclassical economics

Parts and Wholes

How can we understand the individuals in the locked room without

In contrast to beginning with this explicit recognition of the “con-

Unlike non-dialectical research, where one starts with some

Of course, the reductionist perspective understands that we must

Here, then, is the essential error of all reductionism: those given

The First Question: Reproduction

or someone that comes from outside the problem under examination

Precisely because of the constant interaction of its internal relations,

then the system through its self-regulating processes produces and

Knowing the Whole

Consider the critical distinction Marx made in the Introduction to

Armed by this dialectic of negativity, we can move to higher and

object is a process.” Indeed, he stressed, “cognition is the eternal, end-

Different abstractions from the same wholes capture different

But another potential problem may be premature closure, that is,

concept of the whole and its parts. In particular, failing to incorpo-

Orthodox Marxism . . . does not imply the uncritical acceptance

Whatever the social form of the production process, it has to

The capitalist process of production, therefore, seen as a total,

and reproduces the capital-relation itself; on the one hand the

Since capital and wage-labor, the premises of capitalist production,

The Second Question

A system in the process of developing upon the basis of presupposi-

primitive accumulation of capital” on the other. Capitalist production

starting point? By failing to distinguish between “historic premises,”

Naturally, commodity and money also have their premises. They

that permits the reproduction of capital as the premise of capitalist

The Wage-Laborer as Premise

In capitalism as an organic system, capital as premise is the product of

not people formed outside of capitalism. Accordingly, “bloody disci-

This is the other premise of capitalism as a system of reproduc-