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20/06/2011
Thesis 1: We are in the midst of secular crisis.
συγγραφέας: Harry Cleaver
We are writing and talking about crisis today, as we have been doing
έτος: 1993
for the last two decades, because we have been participating in a
global crisis of capitalism which can be dated from at least the late
πηγή: UTexas 1960s. In terms of duration, depth and scope, this crisis ranks with
that of the 1930s -which is understood to have lasted from before
μετάφραση από: Factory Yfanet
the crash of 1929 through World War II to the onset of the postwar
ανέβηκε από: gong
era of Pax Americana via the Marshall Plan in Western Europe, the
restructuring of Japan and the initiation of the Cold War. We are
ενότητες: Εργασία, Αγώνες writing and talking about secular crisis because neither the cyclical
business downturns nor the upturns, nor a whole series of capitalist
εμφανίσεις: 1329
counter-measures (local and international), have resolved the
Mεταφρασμένο κείμενο
underlying problems of the system in such a way as to lay the basis
for a renewal of stable accumulation. Thus, secular crisis means the
continuing threat to the existence of capitalism posed by
antagonistic forces and trends which are inherent in its social structure and which persist
through short term fluctuations and major restructurings.
Thesis 2: Secular crisis is crisis of the class relation.
The basic antagonistic forces which are inherent in the social structure of capitalism, which
endure through the ups and downs of fluctuations and restructurings, which have been
repeatedly internalized without ever losing their power of resurgence, are the negativity and
creativity of the working class. The working class persistently threatens the survival of
capitalism both because of its struggles against various aspects of the capitalist form of society
and because it tends to drive beyond that social form through its own inventiveness. As
opposed to all bourgeois ideologies of social contract, pluralism and democracy, Marxism has
shown that working class anatagonism derives from capitalism being a social order based on
domination, i.e., on the imposition of set of social rules through which, tendentially, all of life is
organized. Class antagonism is thus insurpassable by capitalism within its own order because
that antagonism is inseparable from the domination which defines the system.
Thesis 3: The class relation is the struggle over work.
Capitalist rules impose the generalized subordination of human life to work. Whereas all
previous class societies have involved the extraction of surplus labor, only in capitalism have all
human activities been reshaped as work, as commodity producing labor processes. Those
processes produce either use-values which can be sold and on which a profit can be realized or
they produce and reproduce human life itself as labor power. Antagonism, resistance and
opposition accompany this imposition because this way of organizing human life dramatically
restricts and confines its development. People struggle both against their reduction to "mere
worker" and for the elaboration of new ways of being that escape capitalist limits.(1)

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Thesis 4: The working class (waged and unwaged) struggles against work.
While "capital" can be thought of as monolithic in the sense that differences and conflicts
among capitalists are secondary to the rules of the game from the point of view of the
exploited, the "working class" is monolithic only as a class in-itself, i.e., as formed by capital
through the universal imposition of work. The working class only appears as a class for itself
Ñas a unified self-acting forceÑ through its negativity which is rooted in the commonality of its
opposition to the domination of capital, i.e., in its struggles to cease being defined as either a
working class or as any kind of one-dimensional class. The struggle against the imposition of
work has been central to the history of the making of the working class, from the initial
resistance to the original imposition of work in the period of primitive accumulation through the
long centuries of resisting and avoiding the expansion of work time (longer, harder hours) to the
more recent aggressive struggles to reduce work time and liberate more open-ended time for
self-determined activity.(2) Given the capitalist efforts to reinternalize time liberated from the
official working day (week, etc) by shaping it for the reproduction of life as labor power Ñand
thus reshaping all of life as one comprehensive social factory, the struggle over time has
become universal. Working class struggles today, therefore, must be understood as including
not only those of wage workers but also those of all who do not receive a wage but who are
trained and conditioned to do the work of reproducing the working class itself, e.g, housewives,
students, peasants, the "unemployed", and so on.(3)
Thesis 5: The working class struggles for an irreducible multiplicity of alternative
ways of being.
When looked at positively, in terms of their struggles for their own interests (beyond mere
resistance to the imposition of work), the interests of this complex "working class" are multiple
in the sense of not being universally shared. The interests of one group are not exactly the same
as those of another even if the realization of those of the one would facilitate the realization of
those of the others.(4) Thus there is a problematic relationship between the notion of a working
class for-itself and the multiplicity of interests for which different groups of people struggle.
"The" working class which struggles against capital, and whose antagonism threatens capital's
survival, is actually a multiplicity moving in a variety of directions made up of equally diverse
processes of self-valorization or self-constitution.
Thesis 6: Capitalist internalization of working class antagonism is the dialectic.
Therefore, the problem that capital faces in managing the antagonism of the working class is
that of managing not only a shared (though not necessarily allied or even complementary)
resistance but also diverse processes of self-constitution repeatedly escaping its rules and
precipitating crisis. Capital accumulation requires that capitalist command (thesis) internalize
the hostile self-activities of the working class (antithesis) and convert them into contradictions
(synthesis) capable of providing dynamism to what is basically a lifeless set of rules/constraints.
Thus the "logic" (or "laws")(5) of capital is, like all logics, a set of rules Ñin this case the set
which capital is able to impose on a resisting and self-acting human society. In other words, the
dialectical logic of class struggle involves the co-optation and domestication of mutagenic
activity into metamorphosis.(6) All the so-called immanent barriers within capital turn out to be
rooted in and moments of the class relations of struggle
. The number of such barriers is the number of moments (or sites) of the class relation.(7) The
development of these conflicts are "dialectical" only in so far as capital is able to internalize its
opposition, to achieve the conversion of antagonism into contradiction.
Thesis 7: To study crisis is to study class struggle.
The study of secular crisis, therefore, must be the study of the threats posed, ruptures achieved
and transformations wrought by this constantly changing constellation of antagonistic and
self-constituting forces.(8) The processes of capital accumulation, understood as those of the

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accumulation of the class relations of capital, encompass all of this --including the repeatedly
present threat of total rupture and mutation whose staving off is the necessary condition of the
continuation of those processes.(9) Simultaneously, the study of secular crisis must be the study
of the struggles for liberation from the constraints of capitalism as a social system.
Thesis 8: Traditional Marxist crisis theory must be demystified.
By implication traditional Marxist approaches to the issue of secular crisis need to be explicitly
resituated within the fundamental class forces at work at the heart of the system. For example,
it is common in many Marxist theories of secular crisis (or of more cyclical crisis for that
matter) to treat class struggle as one force among others driving (overdetermining) the
development of the system toward crisis. They fail to see that if the self-activity of the working
class (both negative and positive) is the fundamental force opposing capital's set of
rules/constraints on social life, then avoiding fetishism means that the other, supposedly
distinct, forces can and must be rethought as particular moments or aspects of the class
conflict.
Thesis 9: Competition is not separate from, but a form of, the class relation.
One common, and supposedly parallel, force which is thought to drive capital into crisis is
"competition" among subunits of capital, e.g., firms, national blocks. For example, it has often
been argued that the long term tendency within capital for the organic composition of capital
and productivity to rise is driven by "both class conflict and by inter-capitalist
competition".(10) "Inter-capitalist competition" however, must be reinterpreted in terms of the
class struggle by recognizing that the most fundamental determinant of "who wins" the
competitive battle is determined by who has the most control over the relevant sector of the
working class. Price competition is won by lowering costs, i.e., by lowering wages or by getting
workers to work harder or better or to accept the introduction of productivity raising
technology. Competition through product differentiation is won by being able to solicit the
greatest imagination and creativity from workers. Competition through war is won by being
able to mobilize the greatest effort (in all its forms from hard work in war factories to creativity
and willingness to sacrifice on the battlefield) from workers. "Competition" has become a
prominent slogan of domination in this period of international capitalist restructuring Ñone used
to pit workers against workers. We need to defetishize its meaning by showing how it is merely
a particular way of organizing the class struggle. Within the context of Marxist crisis theory we
need to do the same and relocate competition within the class struggle rather than outside
it.(11)
Thesis 10: Marxist theoretical categories are those of the class struggle.
To demystify familiar theories of crisis, we must reinterpret their theoretical building blocks:
concepts of value, abstract labor, exchange value, value of labor power, surplus value, rates of
exploitation and profit, the organic composition of capital, and capital accumulation.(12) Value
must be rethought as a concept for talking about the work capital imposes to organize society
(against which workers elaborate a diversity of incomensurate "values"); abstract labor --the
substance of value-- as the universal role of all kinds of labor as capitalist command (against
which workers struggle by refusing and transforming work) ; exchange value as the reference
form of the imposition of work (against which workers struggle through rigidifying or bypassing
it ); the value of labor power as the cost to capital of reproducing people as workers (against
which workers pit the wage for self-valorization); surplus value as the imposition of enough
work to finance more work in the next period (which workers undermine by demanding that
work be subordinated to the meeting of their needs); the rate of exploitation and the rate of
profit as measures of the subordination of work to the needs of capital for more work (whose
fall measures workers power); the organic composition of capital as the technical conditions of
the imposition of work (around which workers recompose their own power); and capital

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accumulation as the expanded reproduction of the class struggle in all of its aspects.
Thesis 11: "Underconsumptionism" results from trying to impose work.
One of the oldest and most persistent theories of crisis, which can be found in Marx as well as
in Malthus, Hobson, Keynes, or Sweezy, is "underconsumptionism".(13) In each case, including
that of Marx, underconsumptionism is derived from the contradiction between the capitalist
tendency to maximize production, sales and profits while minimizing costs, expecially wages.
Capitalists want to produce for as large a market as possible but hold down wages and thus,
blindly, limit the size of the market --directly for the means of subsistence, indirectly for the
means of production. However, in class terms, the wage is not merely cost to capital but power
for the working class, and not merely power to buy the means of subsistence but power to
struggle against capitalist work and for its own needs. The tendency to underconsumptionism
therefore appears as the consequence of the contradiction between the need to deprive workers
(the club) in order to force them to work (the content of value) and the need for markets to
absorb the commodities they produce (the form of value). In the 20th Century, of course, Ford
and then Keynes recognized that wage was market as well as cost and sought to overcome the
old contradiction by using rising wages (the carrot) to obtain the same result (more work)
within a growing market. Nevertheless, rising wages (and the rising working class power it
financed) had to be limited to the growth of productivity, so the old contradiction persisted
within a more dynamic context. After workers ruptured this solution, capital (business and the
crisis-state) returned to a generalized attack on all forms of working class income ressusitating
older forms of the underconsumptionist contradiction.(14)
Thesis 12: The "tendency of the rate of profit to fall" is about the growing
difficulties of putting people to work.
Against theories of underconsumptionism, many Marxists have hurled the tendencies of the
organic composition of capital to rise and of the rate of profit to fall as more fundamental
causes of crisis.(15) We can also reinterpret this approach in terms of the way that capital's
attempts to accumulate the working class involves a growing conflict between the need to
impose work and the introduction of machines in order to do so. With the rise in the organic
composition of capital understood as occuring only with a capitalist reorganization of
technology that raises productivity and imposes "more work", we can recognize that this
always involves a change in the power relations between capital and the working class.(16)
Because the fundamental change involved in such reorganization of technology is the
substitution of embodied dead labor (whether in the form of machines or information) for living
labor, this tendentially undermines capital's ability to organize its society through the imposition
of work. Thus the key issue is not what is happening with the monetary rate of profit but the
growing amount of dead labor that has to be used to impose a given amount of living labor.
Tendentially, as Marx argued in the Grundrisse in the Fragment on Machines, the problem of
imposing work --and thus of maintaining control-- becomes more and more acute and the
amount of at least potentially free or "disposable" time rises with unemployment, i.e.,
wagelessness.(17)
Thesis 13: The "exhaustion" of a mode of regulation measures the efficacy of the
refusal of work.
In the 1970s structuralist Marxism was resurrected as regulation theory by the injection of a
dose of Gramsci and a drop of autonomist Marxism. The Althusserian structures rose from the
grave in the form of the concepts of a regime of accumulation and of a mode of regulation
which had to lurch along in a complementary manner to stay intact. Desynchronization (e.g.,
the crisis of Fordism), of course, could be cured by little restructuring (e.g., post-Fordism). The
regulation theorists sought to use a revitalized orthodoxy to confront the crisis of the Keynesian
era but wound up as observers of a crisis whose commentaries would bury the drama of the

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class struggle in a deluge of structuralist jargon. But we can rethink the concept of a regime of
accumulation as a particular manner of organizing the class struggle, and that of a mode of
regulation in terms of capitalist strategies and tactics for managing it. From this point of view,
the exhaustion of a mode of regulation reappears as a collapse in the ability of capital to sustain
a particular form of the imposition of work in the face of the self-activity of the working class.
The drama of so-called post-Fordism can be seen as the struggle between a rapidly evolving,
highly socialized working class subject and capital's desperate and brutal efforts to find new
ways of dominating it.(18)
Thesis 14: Crisis for capital is the freedom of revolutionary subjectivity.
As the struggle, or struggles, of the working class repeatedly escape the logic of capital, the
threat is revolution, i.e., mutation, the liberation of alternative, self-determined social "logics"
outside and beyond that of capital in a way that destroys the dialectic.(19) As Marxists our role
in the crisis, including our analysis and discussion of the theory of secular crisis, should
contribute to the deepening of crisis rather than its resolution. As opposed to the work of
bourgeois theorists, we should neither be helping to figure out how to "solve" the crisis by
restoring accumulation nor simply seeking to develop a better "scientific" understanding.
Instead, our work should be elaborated from within and as a contribution to the forces which
have precipitated the crisis, which resist capitalist attempts to overcome it, and which tend to
drive through it to the transcendence not merely of crisis but of capitalism as a whole. What we
really need to do, is not merely to recognize the antagonistic subject s driving the "secular
crisis" but to explore the "logics" of these emergent and diverse subjectivities. Such exploration
can help us go beyond the appreciation of how they rupture capital to that of articulating and
strengthening their development.
Thesis 15: The path to revolution lies through the circulation of struggle.
All of the above adds up not only to a systematic rethinking of well-known Marxist theories of
secular crisis, but also to a very untraditional recasting of the politics of working class struggle.
In the place of attempts to organize the homogenization of workers' struggles through
institutions such as trade unions or political parties which push a unified vision of the future
(socialism) against capitalist domination, we should substitute the politics of alliance for the
replacement of capitalism by a diversity of social projects. A politics of alliance against capital
to be conducted not only to accelerate the circulation of struggle from sector to sector of the
class, but to do so in such a manner as to build a post-capitalist politics of difference without
antagonism. It has been the circulation of struggle which has thrown capitalist command into
crisis; it is only through the circulation of struggle that the divisions which continue to weaken
us can be overcome. Such circulation, however, is not a matter of propagating anti-capitalist
ideology but involves the fabrication and utilization of material connections and
communications that destroy isolation and permit people to struggle in complementary ways
--both against the constraints which limit them and for the alternatives they construct,
separately and together.
Austin, Texas
May 1993
FOOTNOTES
* This is a reworked version of a set of notes presented to the session on "Secular Crisis in Capitalism: Attempts at Theorization" at the Rethinking Marxism

Conference, Amherst Massachusetts, November 13, 1992. Several of the footnotes refer to the two other papers presented at that session: Hans G. Ehrbar,

"Crisis of Capitalism: A Realist Perspective" Draft, September 22, 1992 and David Laibman, "Immanent Critical Tendencies: Toward a Comprehensive

Theory", Draft, September 1992.

1 This analysis of capitalism as a social system based on the endless imposition of work through
the commodity form was first worked out in the summer of 1975 and subsequently published in

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my READING CAPITAL POLITICALLY, Austin: University of Texas Press, 1979. As Marx

pointed out in Section 2, of chapter 10 of Volume I of Capital, capitalism did not invent surplus
labor; what it did invent was the endlessness of its imposition together with the
commodification of all of life.
2 The centrality of the struggle against work in the genesis of the current crisis was perceived
by the Italian New Left in the late 1960s and in France and the U.S. in the 1970s. This analysis
was spelled out in the journals such as: Lavoro Zero (Venice), Camarades (Paris) and Zerowork
(New York). As Roediger and Foner have recently shown with regard to the waged working
class in the United States, the struggle for less work has been central to the ability of American
workers to unite across gender, race, skill and ethnicity throughout the history of the American
labor movement. As they also amply demonstrate, the struggle against work has been intimately
connected to virtually every other issue raised in American labor struggles, including wages, job
control, unemployment, education, participation in politics, religious freedom, the protection of
children, health, alienation, women's rights, and so on. See David Roediger and Philip Foner,
OUR OWN TIME: A History of American Labor and the Working Day, New York: Verso,
1989. The more recent book by Juliet Schor, THE OVERWORKED AMERICAN, New York:
Basic Books, 1991, shows that this antagonism remains at the center of the class struggle today.
3 The women's movement in the early 1970s was responsible for the development of a Marxist
analysis of unwaged labor. See especially Mariarosa Dalla Costa and Selma James, THE
POWER OF WOMEN AND THE SUBVERSION OF THE COMMUNITY, 1972 and the
subsequent Marxist debate on "domestic labor". Unfortunately in their otherwise valuable
book, Roediger and Foner mostly neglect the struggles of unwaged labor (other than the
"unemployed"). Schor does better including unwaged housework in her study. Unfortunately,
her focus is more on recent capitalist success at imposing more housework than on the prior
and continuing struggle against it.
4 Marxist recognition of this diversity has been demanded not only by the women's movement,
but also by the Black, Brown and other "new social movements". The appeal of
post-modernist, post-marxist analyses can be found, in part, in the refusal by many Marxists of
just this recognition.
5 Whereas Laibman speaks in terms of the "logic" of capitalism, Hans Ehrbar in his paper for
this session prefers to speak in terms of the "laws" of capitalism. Both terms refer to regularities
that characterize capitalism over and beyond the actions of individuals (including individual
capitalists) --beyond "individual agency" in Ehrbar's paper. My argument is simply that such
regularities are the outcome of confrontation between the collective (not just individual) efforts
on the part of some Ñacting as what Marx called functionaries of capital-- and the (multiple)
collective efforts on the part of others (the working class). It is true enough, as Ehrbar states
that individual capitalists in their competitive struggles "do not determine these laws" (see
Thesis 9 above) but neither are they metaphysical; they are regularities of the class struggle
over the content and form of social life.
6 As these comments should make apparent "the" dialectic is not being treated here as a
transcendent historical or cosmological principle but rather as the logic of the class struggle that
constitutes capitalism.
7 I would agree that Laibman's attempt to locate, without creating a hierarchy, a variety of such
"sites", and their interrelationships is, as he suggests, a healthy antidote to "sectarianism and
isolation" among Marxists at work on the theory of crisis. (p. 20) This is what Peter Bell argued
for in his contribution "Marxist Theory, Class Struggle and the Crisis of Capitalism," in Jesse
Schwartz (ed) THE SUBTLE ANATOMY OF CAPITALISM, Santa Monica: Goodyear, 1977,
pp. 170-194 and to which he and I sought to contribute in Harry Cleaver and Peter Bell,
"Marx's Crisis Theory as a Theory of Class Stuggle" in RESEARCH IN POLITICAL

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ECONOMY, Vol. 5, 1982, pp. 189-261 and Harry Cleaver, "Karl Marx: Economist or
Revolutionary?" in Suzanne Helburn and David Bramhall (eds) MARX, SCHUMPTER AND
KEYNES: A Centenary Celebration of Dissent, New York: M.E. Sharpe, 1986, pp. 126-129.
The differences between Laibman's approach and ours is less in the overall intent than in the
execution.
8 We thus need to reinterpret such statements as Erhbar's when he says Marx emphasizes
"those crises in which there are intrinsic tendencies in capitalism which can no longer work".
The "intrinsic tendencies" which "no longer work" concern the "mechanism" (to use his term)
of capitalist command. They no longer work because the working class has achieved the power
to rupture them. The problem, it seems to me, is first to recognize the existence of such power
and then to understand how it has been achieved. 9 Thus to see class struggle as the "mode of
existence of capitalism", does not imply, as David Laibman suggests in his paper , either the
"eschewing" of the analysis of accumulation or a static as opposed to a dynamic approach. On
the contrary, it means that the analysis of accumulation must grasp it as the accumulation of the
classes with all their conflicts in all their dynamism. It means to recognize that "inherent
instability" is not exterior to the class struggle but a part of it. And finally it means that the
"increasing severity" of capitalist crisis is rooted in the increasing autonomy of the antagonism
to capital. (compare with his pp. 2-3)
10 The quote is from Laibman, p. 10, but it is a position widely shared by Marxist theoreticians.
11 This argument was laid out in greater length in Harry Cleaver, "Competition or
Cooperation?" COMMON SENSE (Edinburgh), No. 9, April 1990, pp. 20-23.
12 This kind of reinterpretation has been underway for a long time and can be found in the
writings of what I call "autonomist Marxists". See for example: Mario Tronti, OPERAI E
CAPITALE, Torino: Einaudi, 1964 (parts published in RADICAL AMERICA and TELOS),
Harry Cleaver, READING CAPITAL POLITICALLY, op.cit., Antonio Negri, MARX OLTRA
MARX, Milano: Feltrinelli, 1979 (available in English as MARX BEYOND MARX, Brooklyn:
Autonomedia, 1991), and the periodicals ZEROWORK (1970s), MIDNIGHT NOTES (Boston,
current), NEWS & LETTERS (Chicago, current), FUTUR ANTERIUR (Paris, current),
AUTONOMIA (Padova, current) and COMMON SENSE (Edinburgh, current).
13 Strictly speaking neither Marx nor Keynes were underconsumptionists because they both
recognized that consumption was only one component of aggregate demand and knew better
than to discuss its limits in isolation from other components. However, both understood the
centrality of the wage/consumption and analysed forces which tend to constrain consumption
and thus limit the size of the market.
14 For a reinterpretation of underconsumptionist arguments, such as those of Paul Sweezy, in
class terms see Harry Cleaver, "Karl Marx: Economist or Revolutionary?" in Suzanne Helburn
and David Bramhall (eds) op.cit.
15 Early on C.L.R. James, Raya Dunayevskaya and Grace Lee attacked both Eugene Varga
and Paul Sweezy's Marxist circulationist theories of underconsumptionism with the production
centered tendency of the rate of profit to fall. See their book STATE CAPITALISM AND
WORLD REVOLUTION, Chicago: Charles H. Kerr, 1986 (originally published in 1950), pp.
13-17. Later, when Sweezy published MONOPOLY CAPITAL, New York: Monthly Review,
1966, which he had written with Paul Baran, his neo-Keynesian underconsumptionism was
again attacked, this time by Paul Mattick, e.g., "Marxism and Monopoly Capital",
PROGRESSIVE LABOR 7 and 8, 1966, David Yaffe and others, again weilding the club of the
tendency of the rate of profit to fall.
16 Although it is theoretically possible for a change in technology to raise productivity without
increasing either the hours or intensity of labor (indeed at the micro level, labor displacing
technological change may reduce the amount of work), Marx showed how capital generally

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tries to obtain higher productivity and more work. Moreover, the increase in relative surplus
value consequent upon increased productivity makes possible more investment and thus more
work (including more employment) in the future.
17 Ehrbar is right (p. 3) to say Marx "latched on" to the contradiction "that production whose
only purpose is valorization, develops productivity . . . [such that] production becomes more
and more heavily laden with use value, and the factor labor becomes more and more
irrelevent." But what this means socially is that in the attempt to impose work (value) endlessly
(surplus value) it becomes harder and harder to impose work at all. Yes, the "development of
the productive forces . . . makes capitalism obsolete", but the fundamental "productive force" is
living labor power, i.e., the creative power of the working class. This is the kind of
defetishization that we have to do: figure out how to see the social relationships represented by
Marxist concepts and thus the social dynamics analyzed by Marxist theory. It should also be
noted that "wagelessness", as indicated in Thesis 4, does not automatically mean no, or even
less, work. On the contrary, where capital has the power to limit workers access to the earth
and tools (to sustain or intensify primitive accumulation) the dearth of jobs can mean more
work --the work of survival. See Midnight Notes, THE NEW ENCLOSURES, Fall 1990.
However, it is also true that where the unwaged are able to expand their ability to live on their
own, self-valorization can expand at the expense of valorization. Thus while the displacement
of waged labor by automation may lead to crisis and opportunities, it by no means guarantees a
"Path to Paradise", as Andre Gorz would have us believe.
18 Those fascinated with the latest, most sophisticated forms of capitalist management
sometimes forget that IMF imposed starvation in Africa, massive bombing in the Persian Gulf,
ethnic cleansing in ex-Yugoslavia, the bombing of abortion centers and the accentuated
exploitation of children in factories and brothels are also integral moments of the attempts by
capital to reestablish its command in this period. For a class critique of regulation theory see:
Giuseppe Cocco et Carlo Vercelone, "Les paradigmes sociaux du post-fordisme",FUTUR
ANTERIEUR, No. 4, hiver 90, pp. 71-94 and Werner Bonefeld and John Holloway (eds)
POST-FORDISM AND SOCIAL FORM: A Marxist Debate on the Post-Fordist State, London:
Macmillan and CSE, 1991.
19 If the dialectic is the logic of class stuggle within capital, there is no A PRIORI reason to expect that understanding the "logic" of those antagonistic but

constitutive forces of self-valorization which drive beyond capital are "dialectical" in the Marxian sense. On this subject see my "Marxian Categories, the

Crisis of Capital and the Constitution of Social Subjectivity Today" in this volume.

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