Marx's Critique of Economics. On Lebowitz

In this essay in the symposium on The Dark Side of Marx's Capital: On Michael Lebowitz's Beyond Capital, the author summarizes the argument of the book to critique the discovery of wage labour struggles to show the social constitution of capital, & argues that Lebowitz presupposes a theory of social constitution. The assertion that capitalism inverts everything is analyzed in terms of the inversion of subject into object by identifying capital as a perverted form of human cooperation in that the peculiar character of the social labour that produces commodities is absent yet constitutive, & value relations that take the place of the absent self-conscious subjects. The result of the juxtaposition of the critical insight of the theory of social constitution -- that humans produce a reality that increasingly enslaves them with wage-labour struggles -- is critiqued as a collision of his two lines of argumentation. Marx's negation of the negation is distinguished from Lebowitz's positive view of capitalism to wage-labor & the self. Lebowitz's deciphering of the social content of economic forms in that human cooperation is the fundamental form of the capitalist mode of productions locates his summary of class struggle from the side of wage-labour, & demonstrates the practical truth of the political economy of labor of the struggle for human autonomy over its own social practice. References. J. Harwell