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Title: Reading Capital Politically by Harry Cleaver ISBN: 1-902593-29-4 Publisher: AK PRESS Pub. Date: 01 August, 2000 Format: Paperback Volumes: 1 List Price(USD): $15.00 |
Average Customer Rating: 4 (4 reviews)
Rating: 5
Summary: excellent book
Comment: Cleaver restores the communist tradition looking back to Capital to understand class struggle, and NOT the vanguard party, as the motivator of communism. Cleaver re-examines Capital with an understanding that is popularly overlooked by the Soviet fetishists: the composition of labor and capital. Cleaver sews in his understand of the often willfully ignored communist left from Rosa Luxemburg, to CLR James, to even the Italian Autonomia Operaia.
His understand of Capital is only the beginning though. To really get a grip on where he's coming from I suggest also checking out Werner Bonefeld's Revolutionary Writing, a compilation which Cleaver is also in. Cleaver's interpretation of Capital is most that of the composition of the working class and does not fully extend (at least not directly) to that of the social factory, social labor, contemporary alienation, the refusal of work, and many of the other theories of autonomist Marxists.
The communist left have an elaborate history that most in the mainstream, both capitalist and vanguard communist, would like to ignore for the benefit of a dualistic thinking. This is possibly the best summation of Autonomist communism available.
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Rating: 2
Summary: An economist's reading
Comment: Oh brother. Here's some unimaginative work. There's nothing here a person with a Beatles CD, a book of Dylan Thomas' poetry, and an intro to macroeconomics textbook couldn't figure out on their own. If you want to know how to read Das Capital politically, then read Das Capital and think about the original text. You do not need someone else to interpret it for you. If the author would like to construct a modern interpretation of the capitalist system, then perhaps he should construct his own ideas, rather than reappropriating Marx's genius. A politcal reading of Capital would make an interesting book someday. This one isn't it, and I don't think the author understands Capital outside of an economic perspective.
Rating: 4
Summary: The Struggle Continues
Comment: Now that the Soviet Union is gone, should Marx exit too? Before you dig that grave, check out working conditions world wide, from underage Asian sweatshops to desperate whitecollar temps to idled American steel workers. The Soviet Union may be gone, but by all evidence the class struggle of epic lore continues.
Obituaries to the contrary, Cleaver maintains Marxism is still very much alive, and most importantly, able to furnish strategies for defeating the reign of wage slavery. But first we have to stop reading Capital as though it's just economics. That has only brought us tyrannical communist parties, feckless parliamentary reformers, and ivory tower Kultur critics. The book's first half traces this misdirected path over the past century. The second half walks us through Capital's Chapter One with different spectacles on-- a political reading. This fresh reading, Cleaver believes, reveals a political dimension long hidden by the old economist prism, capable of turning Capital's overlooked human potential into effective worker strategizing against wage slavery.
How much of this is on target. Well, I wish Cleaver had updated this second edition from the 1970's to the 90's, because the 70's were a very different landscape from now. Capital has since morphed and gone on a rampage, replacing its crisis of the 70's with a worker's crisis of the new millenium. Too bad Cleaver's no help to analyzing recent developments despite many nuggets along the way. Nonetheless, there remains the intellectual side. Cleaver certainly wants to bring back the human element, which is well and good given the doubts cast upon structuralism and its exclusion of the subjective. But are working people the only uncontrollable card in the capitalist deck, as Cleaver asserts. What with lotteries, tv, and wall to wall news management, I begin to wonder. Still there's the book's main point. What about a political reading, new spectacles, and Capital-led strategizing. Aside from a few angles on use-value and exchange-value, and a really sparkling section on money and value, I'm not sure how much actual help a political reading is. But then I've always been a little myopic, so maybe he's owed the benefit. Three things I do know. As long as there is capital, there will be hungry workers, class struggle, and Karl Marx; and also that-- despite the superficial dismissal by reviewer Allen-- Cleaver's work remains an important contribution to the CLR James school of activism, and should be judged on its own merits.
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Title: Marx Beyond Marx by Negri ISBN: 093675625X Publisher: Autonomedia Pub. Date: 01 June, 1989 List Price(USD): $12.00 |
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Title: Grundrisse: Foundations of the Critique of Political Economy by Karl Marx, Martin Nicolaus ISBN: 0140445757 Publisher: Penguin Books Pub. Date: 01 November, 1993 List Price(USD): $20.00 |
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Title: Capital: A Critique of Political Economy by Karl Marx, Ben Fowkes ISBN: 0140445684 Publisher: Penguin Books Pub. Date: 01 May, 1992 List Price(USD): $16.95 |
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Title: Cyber-Marx: Cycles and Circuits of Struggle in High-Technology Capitalism by Nick Dyer-Witheford ISBN: 0252067959 Publisher: University of Illinois Press Pub. Date: 01 January, 2000 List Price(USD): $21.95 |
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Title: Insurgencies: Constituent Power and the Modern State by Antonio Negri, Maurizia Boscagli, Negri Antonio ISBN: 0816622752 Publisher: University of Minnesota Press Pub. Date: 15 September, 1999 List Price(USD): $25.95 |
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