Ripples, waves, and tsunamis of working class refusal: A review of Cleaver's 33 Lessons on Capital. Harry CleaverHarry Cleaver, 33 Lessons on Capital: Reading Marx Politically, UK: Pluto Press. 519 pp. ISBN: 9780745339979

In the midst of the global COVID-19 pandemic, it might be easy to feel hopeless about reversing the immense global damage caused by capitalism. Not so for Harry Cleaver who intends to empower and inspire with his long awaited reading of Karl Marx's (1976) entire Volume I of Capital. 33 Lessons on Capital is a rigorous, and even entertaining, detailed chapter-by-chapter analysis not only why Marx's Capital was a critical class analysis of capitalism in the mid to late 19th century, but also why it continues to be invaluable to class struggles by both waged and unwaged workers today. 33 Lessons on Capital may be the latest addition to guides on how to read Marx alongside Louis Althusser (2006), David Harvey (2018), and Slavoj Zizek (2018), but it is the only one you will need.

Cleaver's reading of Marx has guided and shaped my ability to understand capitalism since I was a skeptical 19 year old who stumbled into his “Introduction to Marxist Economics” class on the advice of a housemate who learned student aid could finance his resistance to school work. Needless to say, I was the kid in the back of the room who sought to challenge Cleaver's every assumption.

Until I wasn't. By the time I looked up, I had spent a decade studying with him and earned three degrees. Although I was never an economics major, I took and recorded on cassette tape every class he ever taught up to that point, including his graduate courses while I was an undergraduate, and one we asked he design. One of the main reasons I remained institutionalized at UT-Austin for 11 years was to study with Cleaver. He had become a friend, mentor, and teacher. It is painfully obvious that I failed his lesson that all students should symbolically “kill” their teacher.

In this review, I wish to return the gift Cleaver bestowed onto me as he did to thousands of other students in his decades of teaching Marx. His gift is repeated here in 33 Lessons on Capital almost as I received it so many years ago. Studying Marx with Cleaver was not about learning an ideology but rather how to master an analytical tool to read, reread, invert, and go to battle with capitalism both in and outside the reproductive sphere of higher education. This tool has a shelf life which I could only hope is short lived. Cleaver's autonomist Marxism, constructed as it were after Marx's analysis of capitalism, is designed to become obsolete once we get past capitalism. If Marxism is an analytical tool for analyzing and fighting capitalism, Cleaver's 33 Lessons on Capital is an essential handbook.

At 519 pages, 33 Lessons on Capital at first appears daunting. But once you settle in and get through the most difficult section on Part One of Capital, which is actually the second part of the 33 Lessons on Capital for reasons I will explain later, you will be generously rewarded. Cleaver was brought to UT-Austin in response to demands by students that the Economics Department hire someone to teach Marx. He answered the students' demands with dedication, teaching Marx for decades to conservatives, liberals, capitalist, socialists, cynics, and identity politics radicals alike. Cleaver placed himself at the disposal of countless student movements and our own graduate student unionization effort, deftly refining his pedagogy in both the classroom and theory on the campus mall. 33 Lessons on Capital is the product of his lifelong passion and commitment, organized precisely to not merely make Marx's Capital eminently understandable but accessible and—most importantly—useable in the class struggle.

1 NO CAPITALISM, NO MARX

As the title of the book makes clear, Volume I of Capital has 33 chapters and eight parts. Cleaver takes each part and chapter in turn with a critical twist—he begins most importantly with the end, Part Eight, “So-called Primitive Accumulation.” This unorthodox logical organization of 33 Lessons on Capital works. Each part begins with a brief overview of each chapter and their key concepts. Each chapter begins with an “Outline of Marx's Analysis” that might be what a meticulous student taking notes in the pre-powerpoint era would have written. The outline is then followed by Cleaver's “Commentary” on Marx's key concepts drawing from a broad swath of Marx's gigantic universe of writings. The Commentaries are invaluable summary explanations of Marx's key concepts and themes in the chapter.

The richest rewards of the book can be found in these commentaries. Weaving Marx's panoply of work together with literature, pop music, TV, poetry, and film references, as he did skillfully in class lectures, Cleaver critically reflects not only on what Marx meant but why it was relevant then and today for workers' struggle against capitalism. In other words, Cleaver is not a Marxologist prowling the halls of a conference pontificating on universals of Marxist philosophy. He is not satisfied with us merely understanding Marx as a theory. He wants us to apply and use it to overthrow capitalism so that someday we will no longer have to study Marx. Struggle is hard work, the kind that Cleaver expects to be abolished once it becomes no longer relevant. No capitalism, no Marx.

Cleaver focuses on three critical themes running through all of the commentaries. The first theme is why capitalism is a system of control based on the endless imposition of work. Secondly, the book examines why Marx is still relevant to the exploitation of both waged and unwaged workers, such as “housewives” and students, today. Lastly, Cleaver demonstrates why the class struggle is fundamentally a struggle against work in which workers use both unions and self-organization to struggle in such a way that it has forced concessions from capitalism, triggered crises, and potentially ruptured its domination of all life with work. These struggles, Cleaver reminds us, can be understood as the dynamic interplay between capital's plan, or the technical composition of capital, and working class struggle, or working class recomposition. To the degree that capital prevails, a new relation of production, class composition, is imposed restoring production and control. Ultimately, it is possible that workers prevail not in merely recomposing their own power but entirely rupturing and transcending capitalism in order to realize the infinite possibilities of existence (p. 125).

Along the way, Cleaver is not shy about highlighting flaws, absences, and limitations of Marx's analysis, particularly Marx's incapacity to fully appreciate the role of unwaged reproductive labor being done primarily by women. He intends to do so not in order to dispose of Marx but to build on and extend it to understanding the composition of class power today.

2 READING MARX FROM BACK TO FRONT

Reminiscent of same way he taught Marx to us decades ago, Cleaver starts with Part Eight, “So-Called Primitive Accumulation,” the place where Marx ends Volume I. The reason is solid: Capitalism begins with the endless accumulation of a class of workers through the process of the enclosures at home and abroad in the form of internal and external colonialism. This dispossession from the means of subsistence serves as the driving force for the formation of a class of workers with nothing to sell but their own labor power. Cleaver upends Marx's logical progression through Capital to make a point: capitalism is not merely a system of exploitation but a system that survives and grows through the endless imposition of work. To understand Marx's insight it is critical to beginning at the violent beginning of capitalism: colonialism, the enclosure, and the creation of a working class. In order to break up feudal domination of labor tied to the landlord, enclosures in England ripped the peasants from the land, their means of subsistence, and created a class of workers with nothing to sell but their labor.

The enclosure is the “original sin” of capitalism, creating by deadly force not merely a class of waged but also unwaged workers. As Cleaver argues, “Although primitive accumulation has often been defined as the creation of a waged proletariat, we have seen how that very process also involved the creation of the unwaged, from vagabonds through slaves to housewives and children” (p. 55). Herein lies the crux of Cleaver's reading of Marx. The circuits of production, wages, and money hide the golden elixir of capital: unwaged labor. To illustrate how Marx laid the theoretical foundation for understanding the continuing relevance of unwaged labor as the source of all surplus value and profit, Cleaver finds it imperative to begin with primitive accumulation, the process which highlighted, according to Marx, how “force is the midwife of every old society which is pregnant with a new one” (Marx, p. 916).

3 THE ENDLESS IMPOSITION OF WORK

Continuing his life's work to demystify Marx's “labor theory of value” (see also Cleaver 2017), Cleaver argues that “value” is not a thing but a relationship. “Value is work-for-capital as social control” (p. 174). The imposition of endless work is the fundamental relationship of capitalism. The more work that can be imposed, the more value that is created. In other words, the value of work to capital is that it maintains control by forcing us to work. Refuse work and no value is created and the system of control breaks down. “Where the imposition of work is the substance of the social order, the backbone of civilization, then the eternal maintenance of that order requires that such imposition be endless” (p. 270). Elsewhere, Cleaver observes the possibility of rupturing the role of work as value, as control. “Work is value only when it produces surplus-value, when it contributes to the expansion of value. Work which does not, may serve the function of social control when it occurs, but if it does not result in sufficient surplus-value, then the imposition of that kind of work will cease” (p. 814).

4 THE EXPLOITATION OF UNWAGED LABOR

As Cleaver reads Marx, the consumption of the workers' labor power in the production of commodities is only made possible by the hidden unwaged labor that “occurs inside or outside the workshop, inside or outside the labour process” (pp. 717–718). His focus here is on countering the legacy of Marxist theory that demonstrates the continuing influence of Vladimir Lenin, Leon Trotsky, Louis Althusser, and Rosa Luxemburg by focusing exclusively on waged work. To show how the wage hides unwaged reproductive labor, Cleaver draws on the work of Wages for Housework, which has now been absorbed by the better known social reproduction theory, which recovered the central role of reproduction in Marx's analysis.

The relentless focus on incorporating the missing element of reproductive labor in Marx's analysis turns out to be both a strength and a weakness in Cleaver's book. Returning to housework and schoolwork as sites of struggle and exploitation in every chapter makes his lengthy book, although generously enriched by numerous cultural references, sometimes repetitive and even tedious. Cleaver would have better served by analyzing the changing composition of unwaged reproductive labor elsewhere in the world. He could have alternatively delved more deeply into passing references to the impact of rising wages for women workers who refuse the unwaged second (cleaning) and third (effective) shift by doing less unwaged housework. Cleaver could have deepened his nuanced analysis of high waged women outsourcing some or all of their labor by exploitating primarily immigrant women workers. This would allow for an analysis of the attack on immigrants as a simultaneous attack on women's refusal of unwaged reproductive labor.

Despite its redundancy, Cleaver's objective in expanding Marx's analysis of capitalism to the unwaged is not merely an academic exercise, but rather to provide a fuller understanding of what he called the class composition, or the current relations of production, the organization of work, and the makeup of the working class, both waged and unwaged. Class composition is the outcome of capital's response to previous class struggle by reorganizing production, increasing the organic composition of capital by introducing new technology, reducing necessary labor either by increasing absolute (lengthening work time) or relative (increasing productivity by raising the intensity of work) surplus value, rationalizing work, and deskilling labor. All of this is intended to reduce its reliance on labor or shifting its exploitation somewhere else in the global supply chain where workers are more pliable, unorganized, and weak. “Such reorganization of work has not only increased productivity but has also constituted an ever more prevalent strategy for dealing with workers” (italics in original, p. 276). It can be understood as capital's strategy for purging itself of a reliance on unruly workers.

5 THE STRUGGLE AGAINST WORK

Capital's strategy to restore and maintain control is also reflected in the division of labor. Marx observed that “Manufacture therefore develops a hierarchy of labor-powers, to which there corresponds a scale of wages” (Marx, p. 469). This underscores capital's current division of labor which “involves not merely differences in tasks, it also involves differentials in power” among workers by skill, race, legal status, gender, etc., which track the hierarchy of the wage (p. 299). Cleaver places the sphere of reproduction, housework, and schoolwork, at the center of his study of the global division of labor in order to understand the current class composition (p. 304, 396).

Capital imposes what Marx called its “despotic plan” to reorganize work and alter the division of labor in order to find a new technical composition and reimpose control. One of its two tactics is to reorganize work by rearranging its “sequential tasks” illustrated by Frederick Taylor's time-motion studies and Henry Ford's assembly line that deskilled and fragmented industrial labor. A second tactic is to change the “spatial distribution of work,” better known today as outsourcing or dispersing production along a global supply chain (p. 301).

While the tactics are ever changing, capital's strategy remains the same. Today, we see the central role of AI to incessantly gather data that informs new tactics for maintaining control over labor. Among these are app or platform-based labor management strategies that rely on the ubiquitous collection of algorithmic data by tracking worker productivity in real time. The equivalent in education is web-based learning management systems and remote conferencing apps in on-line education that have exploded in use during the COVID-19 pandemic. Providing management with the capacity for ubiquitous data collection and tracking, this threatens to become a genie that will be very difficult to put back in the bottle once the crisis passes.

Rising productivity, Cleaver reminds us, was capital's response to successful wage and hour struggles by better organized workers. Post-depression wage-productivity deals exchanged higher wages and shorter work days/weeks/life for control over the intensity and organization of work. This so-called Fordist deal provided capital breathing room in order to shift from absolute surplus value to relative surplus value production. New tactics and strategies were deployed elsewhere in the global factory to develop a new technical composition, eventually returning to reimpose the new post-Fordist relations of production on these previously successful workers. Cleaver reframes capital's search for a new technical composition as part of the ebb and flow of the global class struggle in which understanding the current class composition and how we arrived at it informs workers' new tactics, strategies, and objectives for recomposing working class power in order to relaunch and circulate the struggle on a new terrain.

6 RIPPLES, WAVES, AND REVOLUTIONARY TSUNAMIS

For Cleaver, the refusal of work is the core strategy for the struggle against capital's attempt to colonize all life, disrupt the accumulation process and rupture capital's dialectical plan. Reading Capital can give us the tools we need for this struggle. “Escaping capitalism must involve the reduction of work to one voluntary activity among others in such a manner as to free everyone to explore alternative means of self-fulfillment, both individually and collectively and the liberation of social relationships from being measured by any singular value” (p. 485).

This is no detour into utopian socialism. Cleaver's materialist reading of capitalism closely studies capitalism and class struggle to identify the countless efforts to give birth what C.L.R. James (1980) called “the future in the present”. Circulating among one another, these futures in the present can disrupt the continuous accumulation of a class of workers whose lives are subordinated to endless work, rupture and transcend those relations, and realize the endless possibilities of existence. On the flip side of the endless expansion of capitalism is the amplified circulation of class struggle. “Growth, or accumulation,” Cleaver observes, “is, above all, the accumulation of the classes and of class struggle” (p. 406, see also pp. 446 and 453). This is why Cleaver's autonomist Marxism has long found an affinity among anarchists, syndicalists, and autonomists. The struggle to free life from work is a struggle first and foremost against capitalism.

It is easy to feel such a society is hopelessly out of reach. But if there is one opportunity in the unprecedented pandemic raging across the planet, it is the global discussion of what exactly is “essential” labor, who does it, and what we should all receive regardless of work and wages. These very questions have been made front and center by the wave of wildcat strikes around the world by workers doing what capital suddenly calls “essential” labor. These struggles have made the topic of what is useful labor that meets the needs of humanity and the planet now open for debate and worker control, something we can continue practicing when the crisis passes and our awareness returns to the planetary suicide pact of climate catastrophe. There is no going back.

Ultimately, Cleaver asks us to read Marx not for hope but to devise a strategy to move quickly beyond capitalism. “In so far as resistance has invested autonomous alternatives, even when those fail or are absorbed, they foreshadow the transcendence of capitalism” (p. 198). The real test is turning such defeats into success.