In the latter we find readings which help to clarify and develop working-class struggle.

To read Marx philosophically is at best to read his works as critical interpretations, as one form of ideology. This includes readings of Capital as a work of economic theory within a framework of historical materialism. Those political economy readings which develop interpretations of Marx's thought in ways that bring out potentially useful strategic implications for capital in this period are not simply innocuous but must be viewed as potentially dangerous to the working class.

There remains to define what I mean by a political reading of Marx. All readings are political in that their execution involves real political choices and implications with respect to the class relations. Yet I would monopolize the term "political" here to designate that strategic reading of Marx which is done from the point of view of the working class.

Ideological Strategic Readings Readings

Political Economy From capital's From capital's Readings perspective perspective

Philosophical From capital's Empty set Readings perspective

Political Empty set From a working- Readings class perspective

One of the strongest facets of the current Marxist revival is the return to the reading of Capital as a work in political economy.

If it were pointed out that Marx had titled the Contribution, and subtitled Capital, a critique of political economy, the response was that the critique was of classical political economy and what Marx had done was to correct its errors and constitute a more scientific work. This dichotomy was the intellectual and political expression of the structure of German social democracy and the dual character of working-class struggle in that period: militance of the workers at the factory level and the rise of the political party as an answer to the organizational problem of class unity. In his Evolutionary Socialism, Bernstein argued that according to his reading of Capital Marx's theory of economic crisis was predicated on a high level of anarchic competition between capitalists. It was also an economic theory which buttressed Bernstein's political position that emphasized "economic" struggle and social democratic reformism. In all cases, by reading Capital as political economy they limited themselves to a critique of capitalist anarchical instability or exploitative nature.

Marx's works, especially Capital, were after all an analysis of capitalism and had not capitalism been overthrown in the Soviet Union and later in China? Sweezy's work on Marxian political economy is not only some of the best done by economists influenced by Marx but it also typifies the problems raised by a nonorthodox political economy reading of Capital. Sweezy's first major contribution to the literature of Marxian political economy, The Theory of Capitalist Development, appeared in 1942. In both Baran's Political Economy of Growth, published in 1956, and their joint work, Monopoly Capital, which appeared in 1964, the basic analytical weapons brought to bear in analyzing capitalist development in underdeveloped and developed countries were variants of orthodox neoclassical and Keynesian political economy. What place could there be for Marx in a vision in which the working class had sold out and allied with the capitalist class and the only true revolutionaries were nonworking-class students, women, Third World minorities, and peasants? The other side of the attack on neo-Marxist political economy by a renovated orthodoxy has been in the economic theory of capitalism, especially in the political economy of crisis.

At the turn of the century, when working-class struggle was located primarily (but not uniquely by any means) in the factory, there was perhaps some excuse for reading Capital as a theoretical model of the capitalist factory. In either case the working class is only a spectator to the global waltz of capital's autonomous self-activating development.

Not only did he repeatedly insist that capital was a social relation of classes, but he also explicitly stated that at the level of the class the so-called economic relations were in fact political relations:

Every movement in which the working class comes out as a class against the ruling classes and attempts to force them by pressure from without is a political movement. Marx sought out and analyzed several of these struggles -- over the length of the working day, the intensity of work, productivity, mechanization, the social wage, and so on. In Capital he lays out both the specific history of their development in England and their general place within capital, that is, within the overall class struggle. Marx saw how the successful struggle for a shorter working day caused a crisis for capital. Marx saw how that struggle forced the development of productivity-raising innovations which raised the organic composition of capital. Marx saw how workers' wage struggles could help precipitate capitalist crises.

First, he ruled out of consideration Marx's early works like the Manuscripts of 1844 by asserting an epistemological break between a young misguided Hegelian Marx and a mature "scientific" Marx -- the Marx of Capital.(65)Second, and more importantly, he argued that Marx's mature scientific work -- Capital -- was a purely theoretical work whose object, the concept of the capitalist mode of production, is analyzed in an abstract manner. Capital is thus deemed to analyze the concept of capital independently of class struggle that may (or may not) be brought in later as a further, derived development. This interpretation is obviously a convenient one for a French Communist party dedicated to playing down working-class struggle and keeping it in check. Despite the fact that Althusser in his Elements d'autocritique and Nicos Poulantzas -- one of the most prolific Althusserians -- in New Left Review have admitted that their previous works (Reading Capital, For Marx, Political Power and Social Classes) by and large ignored the class struggle, they have clung to their basic theoretical structure with all its political ramifications. Whether in the case of the revived Marxist tradition of crisis theory or in the case of neo-Marxist Keynesianism, the analysis focuses predominantly on the development of capital itself -- defined autonomously from the class struggle.

By meeting the working class's quantitative demands at the same time that it manipulates and shapes those demands qualitatively, advanced capitalism is able to integrate workers' economistic struggles within capital and thus blunt the formation of working-class consciousness and revolt. (80) In Monopoly Capital, Baran and Sweezy's critique of the "irrationality" of advanced capital, and their continued dismissal of the revolutionary potential of the U.S. working class, paralleled Marcuse's work, as did their search for revolutionary agents "outside" capital among nonworking-class groups of Third World peasants, disaffected students, and the black unemployed. In the class war, as in conventional military encounters, one must begin with the closest study of one's own forces, that is, the structure of working-class power. It serves little purpose to study the structures of capitalist domination unless they are recognized as strategies that capital must struggle to impose. Revolutionary strategy cannot be created from an ideological critique; it develops within the actual ongoing growth of working-class struggle. Blindness to this inevitably forces one back into the realm of "consciousness raising" as the only way to bridge the perceived gap between working-class powerlessness (capitalist hegemony) and working-class victory (revolutionary defeat of capital).

We find many striking examples of this understanding in Capital, for example, his analysis of worker struggles to shorten the working day (see below, Chapter II).

(89) This background helps explain the inability of the Western Marxists to conceptualize any autonomous role of working-class struggle within capital.

In the United States, James' work on the struggles of blacks anticipated the later rise of the civil rights and black power movements. This confrontation arose as the rapid circulation of new forms of working-class struggles in both factory and community began to escape the Party's control. Through his studies he was able to formulate the technological evolution of capital in terms of capitalist response to working-class struggle through rising levels of planning. In his article "Surplus Value and Planning: Notes on the Reading of Capital," Panzieri set out an analysis of how autonomous working-class struggle overcomes capital's divisions and forces it to reorganize production in the factory and broaden its planning to higher levels. This constituted both a theoretical and a political advance beyond the Frankfurt School, which had seen only capitalist planning, and a theoretical advance beyond those who had emphasized autonomous working-class struggle against such planning but had not worked out such a general theory. The incorporation of working-class autonomy into the theory of capitalist development implied a new way of grasping the analysis of the class struggle in the evolving structure of the capitalist division of labor. This, in turn, implied a new way of understanding both the nature of capital and the problem of working-class organization.

If autonomous workers' power forces reorganization and changes in capital that develop it, then capital cannot be understood as an outside force independent of the working class. It must be understood as the class relation itself. The first was the concrete study of contemporary class struggles. (114) The second kind of study involved a reassessment of earlier struggles in the history of the working class internationally. Retracing and going behind the rise of Fordism, they examined the relation between class composition and working-class organization. In "Workers and Capital," Tronti similarly retraced the experience of both the period of German social democracy and American industrial unionism in terms of the underlying class composition and the interaction between workers' struggles and capitalist planning. Working-class struggles only achieve the recomposition of a certain division of labor (e.g., skilled labor or mass worker) through appropriate organizational forms (e.g., workers' councils or industrial unions). By shifting the focus of study from the self-development of capital to that of the working class, these authors revealed the idealism of those Marxists who treat both the form of capital and the form of working-class organization as eternally given (see Chapter 5 below). This understanding led directly to the realization that the basic characteristic of working-class struggle in this period is not only an escape from capital but also an escape from existence as working class. (124) In all these studies the object has been to study the interplay of working-class and capitalist power as the basis of building the former. Starting from the recognition that capital includes the working class within itself (until its struggles to break out succeed), Mario Tronti returned to Marx to analyze the total process of accumulation. It was not hard for him to locate the fundamental point in Capital in which Marx insists that the process of accumulation is, at its core, the process of the "accumulation of the classes, of the capitalist class and of the working class." This insight meant that the equation of capital with the "factory," characteristic of Marxist political economy, was clearly inadequate. The reproduction of the working class involves not only work in the factory but also work in the home and in the community of homes. The "factory" where the working class worked was the society as a whole, a social factory. The working class had to be redefined to include nonfactory workers. The various struggles that were emerging in the community outside the industrial factory could be understood and supported as integral components of working-class struggle against capitalist labor in all its forms. On the theoretical level they vastly expanded Tronti's work on the nonfactory part of the working class. This work formed a decisive advance over the earlier work by Tronti and others. It not only allowed a more adequate grasp of the political recomposition of the Italian working class, but also opened the path to the generalization of earlier work on the capitalist crisis to the global level. Beginning with Antonio Negri's work on Marx's crisis theory, crisis has been reinterpreted in terms of the power relations between the classes and competition has been located as only one organization of this relation. (135) Marx's understanding of crisis as a means to restore the conditions of growth is seen in terms of restoring adequate control over the working class. Thus "the" modern crisis emerges as a phenomenon of two moments: a first, in which working-class struggle imposes crisis on capital, and a second, in which capital tries to turn the crisis against the working class to restore command. Thus in the present cycle of international crisis, the 1960s figure as the period in which capital lost control of the social factory as a whole due to an international cycle of working-class offensive. At the same time capital's organization of this second phase of the international crisis has included the attempt to decompose working-class unity by restructuring the class technologically and geographically. Panzieri discovers working-class autonomy in forcing the transformation of capitalist technology and planning. Zerowork locates contemporary struggles against work as creating a historical crisis of capital.

The answer is that it provides a fundamental insight into the nature of categories and relations in capitalist society: there are always two perspectives, capital's versus the working class's! Second, capital uses the wage-form to hide its exploitation and the separation of variable capital and surplus value. But then the working class uses wage demands to attack this exploitation. We need not be content with such approaches because through the optic of current struggles we can now see how Marx's work reveals the workers' standpoint as both antithetical to capital and as having the power to destroy capital's determination. It implies a way of reading Capital politically that involves two steps: to show how each category and relationship relates to and clarifies the nature of the class struggle and to show what that means for the political strategy of the working class. For example, by showing us how money is an integral part of capital -- a mediation imposed by capital as part of the commodity-form -- Marx is implicitly saying that any working-class strategy to destroy capital must ultimately involve the destruction of money.

This demand that each category be explicitly related to the class struggle is not to reduce everything to the class struggle, because class struggle is not an independent, outside cause of the categories and relations. Capital, as we have begun to see, is the class relation, and that relation is one of struggle. Class struggle is the confrontation of the capitalist class's attempt to impose its social order -- with all its categories and determinations -- and the working class's attempts to assert its autonomous interests. Working-class struggle is that revolutionary activity which puts the "rules of the game" of capitalist society into question. The political reading of Capital, and of capital, is a strategic activity of the working class. What Marx shows us in Capital are the "rules of the game" laid down by capital. These rules reflect its own internal structure -- the contradictory struggle of two classes.

This seems to me to be avoidable through a political reading of Marx's analysis of value in Chapter One of Volume I of Capital. In each case I have attempted to bring out the two class perspectives and briefly discuss the implications for working-class struggle.