Cleaver's "Reading Capital Politically"

Good passage

It is important to stress that "workers control" or "self-management" without the liquidation of market relations amounts to nothing less than "workers self-exploitation"

I like the last half of this article: http://www.worldsocialism.org/spgb/may08/page11.html

Have you read this review of Cleavers book? http://libcom.org/library/operaismo-autonomist-marxism-aufheben-11

Cleaver's book is an abomination, among the worst introductions to Capital that are out there, but unfortunately, it is also sometimes the first work that anarchists encounter when they are moving towards communism.

Far better as an introduction to Capital is Freddy Perlman's _The Reproduction of Everyday Life_, available on this very website: http://libcom.org/library/reproduction-everyday-life-fredy-perlman

After that, you can't beat actually reading _Capital_ on your own or with others, maybe with I.I. Rubin's _Essays on Marx's Theory of Value_ as secondary literature.

To understand what distinguishes Marx's monetary value theory from the "labor theory of value" of classical political economists, Michael Heinrich's short article "A Thing With Transcendental Qualities" is also helpful: http://mrzine.monthlyreview.org/heinrich031106.html

Well it's nice to know there's someone out there that truly gets it isn't there?

Reading Capital Politically was one of the first books I read which covered the various 'libertarian' splits away from Leninism in any depth. I think that's probably true for a reasonable number of people on libcom as well. The introduction gives you an overview of stuff that if you only read 'anarchist' literature (or for that matter Trotskyist literature) you'll hardly ever hear about - CLR James, Operaismo, etc. etc. so in that sense it's a useful entry point into a lot of that stuff (although now there's the libcom library of course . It's also a lot of people's entry point into reading Marx (or anything other than the communist manifesto anyway)

In that sense, if you take 'communism' as the middle ground between anarchist communism and the ultra-left, and excluding non-communist anarchists and non-libertarian Marxists, then there's a grain of truth to Angelus Novus' statement - although it's not put well.

I'd read Capital Vol 1. before I read Reading Capital Politically, and haven't gone back and read them side by side (nor the Rubin yet) - but in general I find myself agreeing with a lot of Aufheben's criticisms of autonomist marxism in general so would probably be more critical if I did re-read it, same as I'd probably be more critical of the introduction as well.

The quotes you posted about the 'imposition of work' are interesting, but I'm not sure it stands up to much scrutiny as a general theory (which certainly some people seem to use it as). Cleaver also puts forward the line that all ruling class manoeuvres are in response to working class struggle - which may have seemed plausible in the late '60s early '70s but doesn't really account for the decades of defeat since then.

Darren Poynton's comment about the penguin edition of Capital is true, it is written in more modern English but the copies that I have read contain mistakes in printing the basic arithmetic of some of Marx's examples so beware! Use a calculator when working through them to verify their accuracy. I love Harry Cleavers little book, and find autonomist Marxism intellectually stimulating and exiting. If ncwob has Harry Cleaver's email perhaps he /she could give it to me in a private message. Angelus Novus why is the book an ABOMINATION? This seems like a rather strong word for something you may only disagree with. Has it got two heads or tentacles something? Possibly he has exaggerated the sphere of circulation above that of production, but I wouldn't call it an abomination.
Ncwob I have a lot to say about Gramsci and his idea of ideological hegemony, vis -a- vis the working class' ability to create its own inherently resistant culture .Firstly, Gramsci's formulation seems to imply that hegemony comes from the outside, that consent (which is what hegemony implies,) rather than force is what enables the working class to accept our own oppression and exploitation It amounts to an external force keeping the working class in check, an ideological apparatus with its media, religious ideas transmitted from the past and a whole load of attitudes which justify and naturalise capitalism as being natural, eternal and the only possible way to do things. Then, apparently by contrast there is the working class' own inherently resistant culture. But reading Harry Cleaver's book and also Mike Rooke's paper “Marxism is Dead, Long Live Marxism”(available elsewhere on the libcom website) and also,but not least, by our own daily lives it is apparent that capital is an internal and not merely an external relation.-it is not just a question of fighting the boss but of fighting our own production and reproduction of capital. This is why it is quite possible to have self-managed capitalism without capitalists. The Israeli kibbutz and cooperative farms in Denmark spring to mind as examples. In that case hegemony is produced from within the working class, it is consent to something we do to ourselves rather than what somebody else does to us. Possibly it does not make sense to talk about “hegemony” at all when we consider it in these terms, and an autonomous, inherently resistant working class culture begins to look a bit dubious as well. It seems we could be talking about a culture which is both resistant and self-hegemonic, and not about a separate, dominant hegemonic culture and an autonomous, resistant one.
It seems to me that the Gramscian and the autonomist are at variance with one another, and need to be reconciled. Do not forget that Gramsci wrote his notebooks in prison and was therefore theorising the failure of a revolution, and not its successful accomplishment. Hegemony was thus considered to be one-way. His theoretical outlook was ripe for considering that counter- hegemony could only come from the outside in the form of the party. This reminds me of Lenin in What Is To Be Done? Do not forget also that Gramsci was the leader of the -Leninist- Italian Communist Party, the PCI. He did not seem to see that counter -hegemony can occur without the help of a Leninist party. It seems to be a question of ideas for Gramsci rather than action..Gramsci has been used by various reformist politicians such as the Eurocommunists and seems to be as far as the SWP has got in updating their theory.
All this is a bit sketchy. Further comments are welcome.

The fetishism of bourgeois social relations is central to Marx's critique of political economy. Cleaver devotes a whopping one and a half pages to Marx's discussion of fetishism, in the *introduction* of all places, and gets it embarrassingly wrong.

In my more charitable moments, I'm inclined to interpret these sort of misunderstandings as the result of the difficulties in translating the German verb erscheinen, which can mean both "to appear as" or "to take the form of". Cleaver, ironically in accord with the whole of traditional Marxism that he purports to distinguish himself from, understands things in the former sense, social relations between people merely "appearing" as social relations between things, thus somehow hiding the actual social relationships involved.

This is however, not at all Marx's understanding, and indeed, old Marx is quite clear on this point:

(emphasis mine)

The fetish problematic really is at the center of Marx's critique, and isn't simply some "surface" phenomenon that Marx abandons before turning towards the class struggle. Indeed, in Volume 3 of Capital (and Cleaver also continues another bad traditional Marxist practice of conflating "reading Capital" with reading Volume I), Marx takes up the fetish problematic again with his analysis of the trinity formula.

I generally don't have much respect for Operaismo as a theoretical school anyway, in my estimation it's nothing but glorified workplace sociology, I agree with the critique of "Autonomist Marxism" formulated by Aufheben, though IMHO they still accord way too much respect to what is a fairly uninteresting school of thought. That sort of theoretical flabbiness is ultimately compatible with all sorts of political stupidity, as Negri's admiration for the German Green Party is certainly a testament to.

Again, if Anarchists are going to explore Marx, and they certainly should, the best extant secondary literature in English is still Rubin's book, at least until figures like Backhaus, Reichelt, and Heinrich are translated into English.

(and just to be catty, Operaismo is a *Leninist* tendency, for fuck's sake!)

interestingly, I just found an article in the 2007 volume (issue 4) of Historical Materialism, written by Reichelt

http://www.ingentaconnect.com/content/brill/hm/2007/00000015/00000004/art00001

Cleaver's intro may be a nice text for people who haven't heard of the tendencies involved, but his schematic attempt to divide the good and bad marxisms involves a reductionism in his presentation of the relations of theory, politics and practice which seems quite absurd. (I'm really not sure that Operaismo can be said to be "largely about rejecting the idea of a vanguard party", though there are certainly strong trends within or associated with the Italian workerists and their successors which attempt to do so.)

The 'Open Marxism' crowd are hardly homogenous in theory and politics - I'd put Bonefeld at the more radical end, Simon Clarke at the more 'reasonable' leftist end - but I'd be interested to know what it is about their work which people think isn't worthy of respect. I thought Clarke's Keynesianism, Monetarism and the Crisis of the State book was impressive, and Bonefeld's The Reconstitution of the British State in the 1980s seemed in many ways excellent as an account of the processes of neoliberalisation. There was a lot of good stuff in Common Sense too, which I can't seem to find on-line.

I've liked what I've read by Werner Bonefeld fwiw, not been keen on the (very little) John Holloway I've read though.

lumpnboy - we've got some articles by common sense here:
http://libcom.org/tags/common-sense

You raise an extremely important point here.

Martin Glaberman, who Cleaver rather questionably and dishonestly tries to appropriate for his made-up category of "Autonomist Marxism", was a staunch opponent of these idiotic attempts to press all manner of social struggles and social subjects into the category of "proletarian". What ultimately lies behind such attempts is a dodgy morality: because proletarians are the "good guys" in orthodox Marxist cosmology, every single social struggle that Cleaver approves of is squeezed into that category. Thus the Vietnamese NLF (!!!) is a proletarian force struggling against work.

Cleaver's affirmation of an essentially innocent use-value is also problematic for reasons outlined by Moishe Postone in his famous pamphlet:

I want to see the bright side and say that maybe Cleaver's book might introduce a lot of people to reading Marx's Capital, but the problem is that so many of them will have to work through it with bullshit preconceptions inherited from Cleaver.

Ultimately, the prominence of place of Cleaver's book I think is just a weird coincidence that owes its existence primarily to the contingencies of 1990s Internet culture. The Aut-Op-Sy list was I think the first place a lot of Anarchists first encountered any sort of Marxian theory, and because Cleaver basically falsifies the history of Italian Operaismo by repressing its essentially Leninist roots, the meme somehow spread that Operaismo was a sort of "libertarian" strand of Marxism. Add a few flattering references to Kropotkin, the legitimation of an AK Press imprimatur, and an uncritical cheerleading for the Zapatistas, and voilà, you have a theoretical mish-mash that fills an objective need on the part of people dissatisfied with the theoretically unsophisticated Anarchist milieu, but who are only wiling to engage in a Marxism that satisfies some putative "libertarian" criteria.