II. What Is the Dialectic of Marxs Capital?

It is impossible completely grasp Marxs Capital, and especially its first chapter, if you have not studied through and understood the whole of Hegels Logic. Consequently, none of the Marxists for the past half a century have understood Marx!! Lenin, Notes on Hegels Science of Logic, section on book 3, Doctrine of the Notion Lenins comment on the relation between Hegels Logic and Marxs Capital came well into his notes on the Doctrine of the Notion, after he had already studied the Doctrines of Being and Essence. These notes were in fact more extensive than both his notes on Being and Essence combined. Thus Lenins vantage point was the whole of Hegels Logic. He writes: Marx applied Hegels dialectics in its rational form to political economy. And notes NB Hegels analysis of the Syllogism (I-P-U), individual, particular universal, P-I-U, etc) is reminiscent of Marxs imitation of Hegel in Chapter I. Individual, particular and universal are the central categories of the Notion. Lenin thus saw Marxs Capital as a philosophic text. A near century of commentary on Marxs Capital by Marxists postLenins remarks on the dialectic and Capital has passed. It is beyond the scope of this study to conduct a survey of these many works. I want to limit myself to three interpretations which expressly take up the question of dialectics in relation to Capital. [4] Coming from very different positions, and certainly with very different interpretations of its meaning, Michael Lebowitz and Moshe Postoneindependently studying Capital with Hegels Science of Logic in hand, that is, with the Hegelian dialectic as crucial background arrive at the conclusion that Marxs Capital traces a dialectic of capital, its development, and not a dialectic of the laborer in resistance. They thereby separate, or deny, what the third interpreter of Capital, Raya Dunayevskaya, saw as integral to a full comprehension of Marxs greatest work: The Humanism and Dialectic of Marxs Capital, Volume I. (Dunayevskaya, 2000)

A. Michael Lebowitz: The [so-called] Silences of Marx Principally in his Beyond CapitalMarxs Political Economy of the Working Class (1992), and reaffirmed in his Following MarxMethod, Critique, and Crisis (2009), Lebowitz states his claim that Capital is deficient, one-sided as it lacks the missing book on wage-labor; that there is a silence in Capital: the worker as subject is absent from Capital, and that the worker is not present as the subject who acts for himself against capital, that the only subject [of Capital] is capital. Many other quotes from his works focus on this same theme. Furthermore, proclaims Lebowitz, that silence in Capital . . . is at the root of the deficiencies of Actual Existing Marxism. Thus the source of the twists and turns, the betrayals and vulgarizations of Marxism post-Marx, the barbarism of what we have witnessed in the 20th centuries monstrosities calling themselves Communist, seem to lie at the doorstep of these alleged deficiencies of Marxs Capital! These charges have been levied not by an anti-Marxist, nor former Marxist. Rather, they are put forth and seriously developed by a Marxist economist, who though from academia, is a practicing Marxist revolutionary, and not just an armchair theorist. Without doubt, Lebowitzs purpose is not to attack Marx. It is instead to re-interpret Marx in light of the experience of Marxism, and the further development of capitalism in the 20th century. How to have a new beginning in relation to a critique of capitalism and a new development of Marxism is surely his purpose. Such a necessary task, has had a long, though problematic history, beginning almost with the first appearance of Capital. Among its most famous practitioners was the great revolutionary and theoretician Rosa Luxemburg with her justly famous Accumulation of Capital and Anti-Critique. Her best intentions did not save her from revising Marx in a decidedly un-revolutionary manner as she sought to analyze the economic significance of the phenomenon of imperialism. Here, however, is not the place to analyze her labors, nor to follow in detail

the long contradictory, history of interpretations of Capital by 20th century Marxists. Rather, we which to take up Lebowitz, precisely because he, unlike many a Marxist economist, has sought to incorporate dialectics into his view of Marxs Capital, and yet, I would argue, ends up with an undialectical view of the Dialectic of Marxs Capital. How does he arrive at such a view? What are we to think of Lebowitzs important efforts to read Marxs Capital via some of Hegels philosophic categories, while at the same time failing to grasp the deeply humanistic-dialectical thrust of the totality of Capital, Volume I? How are we to understand on the one hand, his serious appreciation/commentary in relation to examining Capital through philosophic as well as economic eyes, and on the other, his commentaries on what he sees as missing in Volume I? We raise these questions not to challenge Lebowitz's efforts to locate particular Hegelian philosophic categories within Capital. They surely do exist there, and Lenin in his Philosophic Notebooks makes mention of Hegelian categories within Capital. Rather the difficulty with Lebowitz's view lies elsewhere. The question is not which Hegelian philosophic categories we can find in Capital, but, what is the nature of the dialectic as a totality in Vol. I? That is, do we see Vol. I not so much as an application of Hegelian categories in the study of capital and capitalism, but as a re-creation of the dialectic in Marxs hands, so that the humanism of the dialectic in terms of proletarian struggles is decidedly within the Volume? I would argue that we can see that dialectic without needing additions of this or that missing books not written, nor is it necessary to add important Marx works and activities outside of Capital Vol. I to make it complete. There can be no doubt that Lebowitz has seriously sought to read Capital with certain categories of Hegels Science of Logic at hand. One can see the results of his labors in Following MarxMethod, Critique, and Crisis, particularly in a section entitled The Logic of Capital. There, in the chapters Following Hegel: The Science of Marx and Explorations of the Logic of

Capital. he focuses on the Hegelian categories essence and appearance, and what he calls Marxs sensitivity to the gap between essence and appearance. Lebowitz delves into the relation of the concrete and abstract as he sees them in Hegel and how he views Marx putting them to use in his critique of political economy. Not many a Marxist economist in the post WW II world has been willing to labor in such a manner. Certainly much of Lebowitzs observations and commentary are on target, such as when he singles out that for Marx it is not the form private property which is key; that that is not the source of the alienation. Rather, it is alienated labor that produces private property, something which much of 20th century Marxism managed to obscure. It is not that Lebowitz thinks that Marx is blind to the self-activity, the creative actions of works. Far from it. He is an excellent researcher, thoroughly knowledgeable of the scope of Marxs writings and activities. Again and again he cites Marxs writing about rich human beings and is familiar with Marxs activities as a revolutionary in concert with the working class of Europe. However, he believes that all this is missing in the content and the focus of Capital. Thus his conclusion is the following: There is no place in Capital for living, changing, striving, enjoying, struggling and developing human beings. People who produce themselves through their own activities, who change their nature as they produce, being of praxis, are not the subjects of Capital. Furthermore, Lebowitz believes he has the explanation for this. In the Grundrisse and elsewhere Marx cites his plan for future studyand one of the topics is the missing, never written book on Wage-Labor. It is here, Lebowitz argues, where Marx would have put all the material on the activity of the proletariat, a dialectic of labor/laborer. This is what Marx never had a chance to write, never took-up in Capital, and thus the silences of Capital. But does such an explanation really hold up? I would argue not. First, Lebowitz does not seem to grasp the significance of the great changes that the drafts of Capital underwent from the 1857-58 notes entitled

the Grundrisse, through the first publication of some of his ongoing economic studies in his 1859 Critique of Political Economy, to the further need to begin anew, arriving at the first edition of Capital in 1867, and then the many additions Marx made to the French 1872-1875 edition of Capital, which came post the great working class uprising of the Paris Commune. Second, Lebowitz does not link the working class activity Marx was carrying out in founding and being the principle motor for the First Workingmens International, and the form of the manuscript for Capital that Marx was writing in the midst of all this activity. Third, Lebowitz in his discussion of the dialectic in Marx's Capital limits his commentary to the question of appearance and essence. However, the profound re-creation of the dialectic in Marxs hands in his working out of Capital, encompassed not alone moving from appearance to essence, that is from the market to production. Crucially the Notion, the Doctrine of the Notion from Hegels Science of Logic, was central of Marx's Capital. Is not the fetishism of commodities the very Notion, (a contradictory one for certain), of capitalist society? This was no mere application of categories from Hegel, but their re-creation in the hands of Marx. Without sensing the meaning of Notionnot only the spirit of capitalism, but of the Idea and movement toward human liberation as Marx posed it in Volume Ithe fullness of Marxs Capital, that is the dialectic of Marxs Capital cannot be grasped. We will examine these three strands in more detail below by bringing in Dunayevskayas concept of The Humanism and Dialectic of Marxs Capital Vol. I. First, however we need to turn to Moishe Postone's view of the dialectic in Capital. B. Postone: Capital as the Dialectical Subject of Marxs Capital As we have noted above, How to Read Marxs Capital? has a long history. What (Who) is the subject of Marxs Capital, has been a crucial dimension to the ongoing debate. What is the dialectic of Marxs Capital, remains a key question. In Time, Labor, and Social Domination, Postone seeks to provide a

reinterpretation of Marxs critical theory in answering these questions. Arguing that freeing production from direct human labor is the ongoing logic, the dialectic of capital, Postone proceeds to read Capital from this point of departure. In pointing to capitalism's logic of developing production with less and less human labor Postone has of course caught a part of the development of capital/capitalism that Marx's Capital demonstrated. There is no need here to rehearse Marx's arguments on the organic composition of capital, or the domination of dead labor or living labor. However, in catching the essence of capitalist production has Postone expressed the fullness of where Marx was headed? That fullness is not exhausted in revealing the essence of capitalism, as crucial as that is. In dialectical terms, Marx moved from the appearance in the marketthe vast collection or abundance of commodities--to the essence: production, where labor, or rather the laborer was the embodiment of both concrete labor and abstract labor (labor power). This was the secret of commodities having both a use value and a value. Furthermore, instead of stopping with a finally-detailed and meticulous explanation of this essence of capital, Marx wove into his analysis the dialectical dimension of the Notion. One sees this beginning in Chapter One on Commodities with its famous section on Fetishism of Commodities. This fetishism, the worship of things, is the true spirit of capitalism. This fetishism, together with what Marx will develop further as capitalism's logic, production for production's sake, form the notion of a capitalism. We will not review these two crucial concepts here. However, what is necessary to grasp is that Marx never presented either the essence or the notion of capitalism as undifferentiated, as not containing the highest opposition within. Thus for Marx, the logic of capitalism's development, including the domination of dead labor over living labor, was inseparable from the crucial contradiction that only living labor was the creator of value, and from the laborer's resistance, his/her seeking a different way of laboring and a fuller,

human life. In opposition to capital's universal of production for the sake of production, to its spirit of the fetishism of commodities, came the worker's quest for universality, the fact that only freely associated labor, as in the Paris Commune, could strip away commodity fetishism. It is this opposing dimension of Notion that also resides in Capital. However, Postone fails to recognize Marx's concept of the Notion when it comes to this human dimension, the self-activity of the proletariat who both resists capitalisms logic, and points to the pathway for negating capitalthe co-operative plan of freely-associated labor. Instead, over and over again, what distinguishes Postone's reading of Capital is his view that the subject of Capital is capital itself: Marx . . . explicitly characterizes capital as the self-moving substance which is Subject. In so doing, Marx suggests that a historical Subject in the Hegelian sense does indeed exist in capitalism, yet he does not identify it with any social grouping, such as the proletariat or humanity. Rather, Marx analyzes it in terms of the structure of social relations constituted by forms of objectifying practice and grasped by the category of capital (and, hence, value). (Postone, 1993: 75) [T]he historical Subject analyzed by Marx consists of objectified relations, the subject-objective categorical forms characteristic of capitalism, whose 'substance' is abstract labor, that is, the specific character of labor as a socially mediating activity in capitalism. (76) Marx analyzes those very relations [capitalist relations] as constituting the Subject. (78) Marxs assertion that capital, and not the proletariat or the species, is the total Subject clearly implies that the historical negation of capitalism would not involve the realization, but the abolition, of the totality. (79). What we end up with in Postone's treatise is a dehumanization of Marx's Capital. Postone, in his acceptance, or better advocacy, of capital as subject of Capital, places his focus on the wealth-creating potential of science and technology, which in his view makes the human being's role in the production of wealth superfluous. It is true that there is a wealth potential of science and technology, but there is no such thing as machines as such only their use under a given social system. So it is only potentiality that is present in science or technology. Its realization or use takes form in a given

social-economic order, in this case capitalism, where science and technology have taken on the form of industrial production, the factory. Under capitalism, science and technology takes a certain form in relation to human beings as subjects, in this case not primarily aiding them, but dominating them. However, for Postone, those subjects in capitalist society will be abolished, that is, the proletariat as a class will be eliminated. This abolition, he argues, it the logic of capitalism. Marx too, was for the abolition of the proletariat as a class. But there is all the difference in his view of what that meant, how it would be not the elimination of the proletariat by capital, but the negation of capital by the proletariat. It would be a negation of the negation that would at one and the same time abolish capital, and eliminate the proletariat as a class as humanity recreated itself as fuller, richer beings. That is, it would be human agency, humanity's quest for universality, that would at one and the same time abolish capitalism and abolish the proletariat as a class. That would be the logic of capitalism's destruction. That logic of Marx in Capital is a far cry of Postone's view that the logic of capitalism's own development, without the intervention of the proletariat and the other human forces of resistance, is the destroyer of capitalism. The appropriation of science and technology for a different society begins with a negation of the capitalist social system, a negation of labor under capitalism. Human beings consciously are needed for this negation to take place and for the second negation of appropriating science and technology in the creation of a socialist social system. Postone distinguishes between two contradictory forms of wealth in capitalism, as discussed by Marx in the Grundrisse: value as a historically specific form of wealth measured by the expenditure of human labor time, and material wealth, measured in terms of the quantity and quality of products created. (192-200) Postone's argument is that historically science and technology has vastly increased material wealth. This has made wealth

as measured by value an anachronism in the present stage of capitalism's development. Whether or not one wants to accept his argument capital(ism) certainly seems intent on forever searching for new ways to extract that human labor under the clockPostone has failed to grapple with Marx's concept of what is real human wealth: When the narrow bourgeois form has been peeled away, what is wealth, if not the universality of needs, capacities, enjoyments, productive powers, etc., of individuals, produced in universal exchange. What, if not the full development of human control over the forces of naturethose of his own nature as well as those of so-called 'nature'? What, if not the absolute elaboration of his creative dispositions, without any preconditions other than antecedent historical evolution which make the totality of this evolutioni.e. the evolution of all human powers as such, unmeasured by any previously established yardstickan end in itself? What is this, if not a situation where man does not reproduce himself in any determined form, but produces his totality? Where he does not seek to remain something formed by the past, but is in the absolute movement of becoming. (Marx, 1973)

Of course it is necessary to draw a distinction between value and material wealth as Postone has done. However, it seems no accident that there is the absence of this profoundly human concept of wealth as Marx elaborated it. That human dimension is not alone in the Grundrisse, but in Capital as well. It is the missing dimension in Postone's reading of Capital. To explore that human dimension further we turn to one of Dunayevskaya's central studies of Capital.

C. Dunayevskaya: The Humanism and Dialectic of Capital, Volume I, 18671883

In her Marxism and Freedom, Dunayevskaya wrote four chapters on Capital. The first dealt with the historical circumstances surrounding the writing of

Capital, The Impact of the Civil War in the United States on the Structure of Capital, while the second encompassed Marx's editing of the French edition of Capital, 1872-75, The Paris Commune Illuminates and Deepens the Content of Capital. The fact that she has these two chapters centered on the activities of Black slaves in resistance and revolt as well as the Abolitionists in the U.S., and on the Communards in Paris, speaks to her view that the movement from below, from practice, has been central to the creation of revolutionary theory, especially in Marx. At the same time, the heart of her analysis of Capital is her analysis of the first volume: The Humanism and Dialectic of Capital, Volume I, 1867 to 1883. Here we want to focus on Dunayevskaya's view of what was central to and revolutionary in how Marx created Capital, citing excerpts from her commentaries in Marxism and Freedom: No one is more blind to the greatness of Marxs contributions than those who praise him to the skies for his genius as if that genius matured outside of the actual struggles of the historic period in which he lived.

In her chapter on the Civil War's impact on Capital Dunayevskaya summarized Marx's activities with regard to publishing the speeches of the Abolitionists in Europe, and how the struggle for the abolition of slavery that was at the heart of the Civil War entered in Capital, as it had a decisive effect on the development of a national labor movement in the United States, which following abolition could launch a movement for the 8-hour day. These developments can be found in the chapter on The Working Day, which she quoted: In the United States of North America, every independent movement of the workers was paralyzed so long as slavery disfigured a part of the Republic. Labor cannot emancipate itself in the white skin where in the black it is branded. But out of the death of slavery a new life at once arose. The first fruit of the Civil War was the eight hours agitation, that ran with the seven-leagued boots of the locomotive from the Atlantic to the Pacific, from New England to California.

Dunayevskaya contrasted Marx's Critique of Political Economy (1859) with Capital (1867), designating the former as The Limits of an Intellectual Work and the latter as containing The Working Day and the Break with the Concept of Theory. She noted the difference between an application of dialectics to political economy, verses the creation of the dialectic that would arise out of the workers struggles themselves. The establishment of a normal working day, he wrote, is the result of centuries of struggle between capitalist and laborer. Marxs method of analysis was revolutionized thereby. Where, in his Critique, history and theory are separated with a historical explanation attached to each theoretical chapter; in Capital history and theory are inseparable. Where, in Critique, history is the history of theory; in Capital, history is the history of the class struggle. . . . Marxs shift from the history of theory to the history of production relations gives flesh and blood to the generalization that Marxism is the theoretical expression of the instinctive striving of the proletariat for liberation. More than that, he says that ultimately the fundamental abolition of inequality lies in the shortening of the working day. In 1866, he made this the historical framework of capitalism itself. The struggles of the workers over the working day develop capitalist production. The ultimate creation of freedom rests upon the shortening of the working day. The philosophy of the shortening of the working day, which arose out of the actual struggles, embraces all concepts inside and outside of it. Thus, the thinking of the theoretician is constantly filled with more and more content, filled by workers struggles and workers thoughts. . . . The real movement of the proletariat, at this specific stage of capitalist development, revealed not only the negative aspects in the fight for the working daythe struggle against unlimited capitalist exploitation but the positive aspectsa road to freedom. This then, was a new philosophy, the philosophy of labor, arrived at naturally out of its own concrete struggles. We see why Marx had to to turn everything around. He is breaking with the whole concept of theory as something intellectual, a dispute between theoreticians. . . . For Marx, the theoretical axis of Capitalthe central core around which all else developsis the question of plan: the despotic plan of capital against the cooperative plan of freely associated labor. . . . Planned despotism arises out of the antagonistic relationship between the workers, on the one hand, and the capitalist and his bureaucracy on the other had. . . . Cooperation under the mastership of the capitalist is indirect opposition to the cooperating laborers. . . .

Cooperation is in itself a productive power, the power of social labor. Under capitalistic control, this cooperative labor is not allowed to develop freely. Its function is confined to the production of value. It cannot release its new, social, human energies so long as the old mode of production continues. Thus the nature of cooperative form of labor power is in opposition to the capitalist integument, the value-form. Marxs concept of the degraded worker seeking universality, seeking to be a whole man, transformed the science of political economy into the science of human liberation. . . . By introducing the laborer into political economy, Marx transformed it from a science dealing with things, such as commodities, money, wages, profits, into one which analyzes relations of men at the point of production. . . . The very term, labor power, opened all sorts of new doors of comprehension. It enabled him (Marx) to make a leap in thought to correspond with the new activity of workers. . . . Cooperation chapter Its twenty-five pages seem merely to describe how men work together to produce things, but in reality, by analyzing how men work together, Marx described how a new social power is created. He could discover this new social power in production because, first of all, he distinguished between the productivity of machines and the productivity of men. What characterizes Capital from beginning to end is the concern with living human beings. . . . In Capital, he shows how the stripping off the fetters of individuality and the development of capacities of the human species, discloses what is second nature to workers as the result of years in large-scale productionthe vast store of creative energy latent in them. . . . Capitalism knows this new social power as a rival and as opponent. The capitalist Plan exists to stifle and suppress it. . . . Proletarian knowledge, on the other hand, grasps the truth of the present. Because it is not a passive, but an active force, it at the same time restores the unity of theory and practice. These very acts by the workers against the machines Marx called revolts against this particular form of the means of production as being the material basis of the capitalist mode of production. These professional Marxists thus miss the central point of Marxist theory that revolt marks every stage of capitalist progress. As Marx put it It would be possible to write quite a history of the inventions made since 1830, for the sole person of supplying capital with weapons against the revolts of the working class. The revolt caused the change to advanced methods; the revolt saved the life of the country. In turn, each revolt caused a greater centralization, exploitation, socialization and great organization, both objectively and subjectively of the proletariat. . . . [In Machinery and Modern Industry Marx] reaches the absolute contradiction between the technical necessities of Modern Industry and the social character inherent in its capitalistic form, and sees how

this antagonism vents its rage in the reaction of that monstrosity, an industrial reserve army, and the devastation caused by a social anarchy which turns every economical progress into a social calamity. Marx stress that this is the negative side. He shows how the resistance of the workers is the positive aspect which compels Modern Industry under the penalty of death to replace the mere fragment of a man by the fully developed individual, fit for a variety of labors, ready to face any change in production, and to whom the different social functions he performs, are but so many modes of giving free scope to his own natural and acquired powers. . . . Marx concludes that there is no other than the historical solution to the revolutionary ferments, the final result of which is the abolition of the old division of labor, diametrically opposed the capitalistic form of production and to the economic status of the laborer corresponding to that form. . . . Marx wished, above all, to analyze the law of development of capitalism. For, no matter what its beginnings were, the contradictions arise not from its origin but from its inherent nature, which begets with the inexorability of a law of Nature, its own negation. [Quoting Marx] Centralization of the means of production and socialization of labor at last reach a point where they become incompatible with their capitalist integument. The integument is burst asunder. The knell of capitalist private property sounds. The expropriators are expropriated. The positive side of all this is that it brings forth the material agencies for its own dissolution. From that moment new forces and new passions spring up in the bosom of society; but the old social organization fetters them and keeps them down. It must be annihilated. It is annihilated. Thus the development of capitalism itself creates the basis of a new Humanismthe new forces and new passions which will reconstruct society on new, truly human beginnings, a society in which the free and full development of every individual is the ruling principle. It is because Marx based himself on this Humanism, more popularly called the inevitability of socialism, that he could discern the law of motion of capitalist society, the inevitability of its collapse. The Humanism of Capital runs like a red thread throughout the work. This gives it both its profundity and its force and direction. (Dunayevskaya, 2002: Chapters 5, 6, 7) The contrast of Dunayevskaya's view of the dialectic in Marx's Capital to that of both Lebowitz and Postone could not be greater.

Footnote [4] A recent erudite study of Marx's Capital (Jameson, 2011) makes an argument that it is not so much a study of capital or of labor. Rather, it is a book about unemployment. In his complex chapter on Capital and the Dialectic, Jameson characterizes Marx's dialectic in this book, for it must be repeatedly be stressed that Capital is not dialectical philosophy, but rather, if the term conveys the difference, dialectical theory. . . . Marx's text, to use another current word, may be seen as a practice of dialectical immanence. . . . Each dialectical moment is unique and ungeneralizable. . . . Capital is itself a unique historical event, and this constitutes its dialectic. (136, 137) Jameson's shying away from Marx's labors in Capital as being dialectical philosophy (as in the Economic-Philosophic Manuscripts), but rather a concretization as dialectical theory seems true, but at the same time not the whole truth. By making, in my view, a too sharp separate between philosophy and theory in Capital, Jameson skips over the two-way road between the two. Theory is the needed concretization of philosophy, while at the same time dialectical philosophy needs to be returned to again and again. It is not exhausted by a concretization, or a series of concretizations. Rather, dialectical philosophy is itself enriched by these concretizations. Thus, there is the need to return to the fullness of the philosophic expression with the experience of the concretizations. Marx's dialectic in Capital can perhaps better be seen as the continual interplay between philosophy and theory, together with his eyes, ears and mind focused on the activity of working masses, included the army of unemployed as an army of revolt.