Harry Cleaver | The University of Texas at Austin (original) (raw)
Books by Harry Cleaver
Research in Political Economy, 1982
The debate concerning the origins of capitalist crisis has involved intense disagreements concern... more The debate concerning the origins of capitalist crisis has involved intense disagreements concerning the meaning of Marx's crisis theory and of the central categories of his analysis. This essay was written in 1982 as contribution to that debate. It was originally intended to be the opening chapter of a book on then current debates, but was pared down and published by itself.
In a world dominated by capitalist work (labour), working for a wage is the central unavoidable r... more In a world dominated by capitalist work (labour), working for a wage is the central unavoidable reality of modern social life. And yet, the category of labour remains underdeveloped in social sciences. While waged labour in all its forms, including unemployment and mass poverty, has now invaded all aspects of social life, labour appears to have disappeared as a practice that constitutes modern society. This book revitalises labour as the fundamental constitutive principle of the social world, through a radical reinterpretation of Marx’s social theory. Each chapter develops a central Marxist theme: the continuing centrality of work; class and classification; commodity fetishism and primitive accumulation; labour movements and the way in which labour moves; unemployment, subjectivity and class consciousness, and the new forms of resistance developed in Europe, Latin America and East Asia. In conclusion, the editors give an account of what they consider to be the main critical and practical problems and possibilities confronting the concept and reality of labour in the 21st century.
The Fragile Juggernaut: Marx & Engels on Capitalism, Class Struggle & Crisis, 2024
Whether loving or hating it, many visualize capitalism as an unstoppable juggernaut. For those of... more Whether loving or hating it, many visualize capitalism as an unstoppable juggernaut. For those of us who would defeat it, we must identify its weaknesses. Fortunately, Marx and Engels’ writings on “crisis” reveal them. They show how its endless imposition of exploitative and alienating work creates such antagonistic conflicts everywhere as to make it, ultimately, a far more fragile monster than it first appears. Each of its efforts to shape social relationships, subordinating them to the work of commodity production and its control over society, has been and can be thrown into crisis by those of us resisting its way of life and seeking to create more appealing alternatives.
The Fragile Juggernaut: Marx & Engels on Capitalism, Class Struggle and Crisis , 2024
For those who have read and downloaded my 1982 essay on "Marx's Theory of Crisis as a Theory of C... more For those who have read and downloaded my 1982 essay on "Marx's Theory of Crisis as a Theory of Class Struggle", this document includes the Outline, one Preface and the Introduction to the book-length amplification of that essay that I am currently preparing for publication. Most of the hyperlinks have been disabled - being only of use inside the complete manuscript. At any rate, for those interested, these will give you an idea of what is forthcoming but now in only near-completed manuscript form. Enjoy?
Thirty-Three Lessons on Capital: Reading Marx Politically, 2019
This manuscript was the basis of the Pluto Press book by the same title. Other than pagination, t... more This manuscript was the basis of the Pluto Press book by the same title. Other than pagination, the main differences between this manuscript and the published book are 1) one is digital, one is hard copy, 2) the digital version can be searched, 3) the hard copy version has a detailed index. Both manuscript and published book were revised versions of my online, illustrated "study guide" to Volume I of CAPITAL, accessible at http://la.utexas.edu/users/hcleaver/357k/357ksg.html
33 Lessons on Capital: Reading Marx Politically, 2019
This introduction to my forthcoming book, 33 Lessons on Capital, explains its origins – in my onl... more This introduction to my forthcoming book, 33 Lessons on Capital, explains its origins – in my online "study guide" to Volume I – and its substance – 33 summaries and commentaries on the 33 chapters of Volume I. Each of those commentaries provides explanations of key points, of their continuing relevance 150 years after they were published, critiques of his analysis and extensions of the analysis to sectors of the working class rarely touched by Marx, e.g., peasants, housewives, the indigenous and students. Originally composed for students in the US they also contain a variety of illustrative material drawn from American history to complement that usually chosen by Marx from British or European experiences.
The Labour Debate. An investigation into the theory and reality of capitalist work, 2002
In a world dominated by capitalist work (labour), working for a wage is the central unavoidable r... more In a world dominated by capitalist work (labour), working for a wage is the central unavoidable reality of modern social life. And yet, the category of labour remains underdeveloped in social sciences. While waged labour in all its forms, including unemployment and mass poverty, has now invaded all aspects of social life, labour appears to have disappeared as a practice that constitutes modern society. This book revitalises labour as the fundamental constitutive principle of the social world, through a radical reinterpretation of Marx’s social theory. Each chapter develops a central Marxist theme: the continuing centrality of work; class and classification; commodity fetishism and primitive accumulation; labour movements and the way in which labour moves; unemployment, subjectivity and class consciousness, and the new forms of resistance developed in Europe, Latin America and East Asia. In conclusion, the editors give an account of what they consider to be the main critical and practical problems and possibilities confronting the concept and reality of labour in the 21st century.
Contents
Acknowledgements ix
From Here to Utopia: Finding Inspiration for the Labour Debate
Ana C. Dinerstein and Michael Neary 1
1 What Labour Debate?
1.1 Class and Classification: Against, In and Beyond Labour
John Holloway p.27
1.2 Class Struggle and the Working Class: The Problem of Commodity Fetishism
Simon Clarke p.41
1.3 The Narrowing of Marxism: A Comment on Simon Clarke’s Comments
John Holloway p.61
2 Capital, Labour and Primitive Accumulation: On Class and Constitution
Werner Bonefeld p.65
3 Labour and Subjectivity: Rethinking the Limits of Working Class Consciousness
Graham Taylor p. 89
4 Hayek, Bentham and the Global Work Machine: The Emergence of the Fractal-Panopticon Massimo De Angelis p. 108
5 Work is Still the Central Issue! New Words for New Worlds
Harry Cleaver p. 135
6 Labour Moves: A Critique of the Concept of Social Movement Unionism
Michael Neary p . 149
7 Fuel for the Living Fire: Labour-Power!
Glenn Rikowski p. 179
8 Regaining Materiality: Unemployment and the Invisible Subjectivity of Labour
Ana C. Dinerstein p. 203
9 Anti-Value-in-Motion: Labour, Real Subsumption and the Struggles against Capitalism
Ana C. Dinerstein and Michael Neary
v
Una Lectura Política de EL CAPITAL, 1985
This is the complete Spanish language version of READING CAPITAL POLITICALLY (1979).
Una Lectura Política de EL CAPITAL, 1985
This text includes the Spanish language versions of Chapter VI: Conclusion, Bibliography and Tabl... more This text includes the Spanish language versions of Chapter VI: Conclusion, Bibliography and Table of Contents of READING CAPITAL POLITICALLY (1979).
Una Lectura Política de EL CAPITAL, 1985
This text is the Spanish language version of Chapter V: The Form of value of READING CAPITAL POLI... more This text is the Spanish language version of Chapter V: The Form of value of READING CAPITAL POLITICALLY (1979).
Una Lectura Politica de EL CAPITAL, 1985
This text is the Spanish language version of Chapter IV: The Twofold character of labour of READI... more This text is the Spanish language version of Chapter IV: The Twofold character of labour of READING CAPITAL POLITICALLY (1979).
Una Lectura Política de EL CAPITAL, 1985
This text is the Spanish language version of Chapter III of READING CAPITAL POLITICALLY (1979).
Una Lectura Política de EL CAPITAL, 1985
This text is the Spanish language version of Chapter II: The Commodity-Form of READING CAPITAL PO... more This text is the Spanish language version of Chapter II: The Commodity-Form of READING CAPITAL POLITICALLY (1979).
Una Lectura Política de EL CAPITAL, 1985
This text is the Spanish language version of the author's introduction to the READING CAPITAL POL... more This text is the Spanish language version of the author's introduction to the READING CAPITAL POLITICALLY (1979).
Una Lectura Política de “El Capital”, 1985
This text includes the Spanish language versions of 1) the author's preface to the Mexican editio... more This text includes the Spanish language versions of 1) the author's preface to the Mexican edition (1985) of READING CAPITAL POLITCIALLY (1979) and 2) an introduction by Gustavo Esteva (1981).
This is the Polish translation of "A Note to Polish Readers", the preface to the Polish translati... more This is the Polish translation of "A Note to Polish Readers", the preface to the Polish translation of "Marxist Crisis Theory as a Theory of Class Struggle". TEORIA KRYZYSU: JAKO TEORIA WALKI KLASS, Poznan, 2017.
This is the expanded, book-length version of a paper given at a Conference on Hegel, Marx and Glo... more This is the expanded, book-length version of a paper given at a Conference on Hegel, Marx and Global Crisis at the University of Warsaw, Poland, October 22-23, 2012. It is currently available from the AK Press, online catalog: https://www.akpress.org/rupturing-the-dialectic.html Consider this pdf version a "look inside the book" feature, better than that provided by Amazon.com.
Recent contributions by Harry Cleaver
The Origins of the Green Revolution, 1974
This is my 1974 dissertation on the origins of the Green Revolution, a byproduct of a study group... more This is my 1974 dissertation on the origins of the Green Revolution, a byproduct of a study group investigating non-military aspects of the US intervention against Vietnamese independence. It traces the origins of the use of a technological "fix", i.e., the introduction of new high-yielding grains to increase food production as one strategy to reduce peasant support for revolution. Those origins turn out to be in earlier experiences in the American South after Reconstruction and in China before the Revolution in that country that brought the Communist Party to power.
This is the Preface to a new Korean translation of Reading CAPITAL Politically that will publishe... more This is the Preface to a new Korean translation of Reading CAPITAL Politically that will published in South Korean this Fall.
Struggles circulate; if they circulate far enough, with enough intensity and effectiveness, they ... more Struggles circulate; if they circulate far enough, with enough intensity and effectiveness, they explode into revolutions. In some cases, they merely ripple along what Karl Marx formulated as the circuits of capital – representations of sequential moments that capitalists must realize to reproduce their way of organizing social life around endless work on an ever-expanding scale. Because they are imposed, and involve exploitation and alienation, the moments of the circuits always spawn antagonism, involving various degrees of resistance. The intensity and consequences of struggles vary with the degree of exploitation and alienation involved and the types of action undertaken. Effective instrumentalization that confines opposition within closed circuits can harness it to drive capitalist development. In other cases, ripples become waves as the manner of their circulation defies harnessing and their intensity ruptures moment after moment, disrupting circuits and bringing on crisis. Marx analyzed the circuits of capital in terms of the flows and metamorphoses of value. Workers' actions, when they rupture the circuits, disrupt the flows of value, or, put differently, they disrupt capitalists' ability to impose that which is of value to them, i.e., work-as-social-control. Understanding the circuits required for the reproduction of capitalism reveals both containable patterns of struggle and criteria for recognizing when they have escaped containment to constitute new patterns of behavior that provide alternatives to capitalist modes of social organization. A variety of metaphors facilitate the recognition of both the circulation of struggles and how they may escape the circuits of capital via the creation of new modes of existence. This article is a revised version of a talk delivered to the Union for Democratic Communications' Conference on Circuits of Struggle, held at the University of Toronto on May 2, 2015. My response to the question: "what potential do you see for resistance, subversion, re-appropriation, and repurposing of communication technology as part of a network of global class struggle?" was based mainly upon an intense twelve years using e-mail (electronic mailing lists, especially Chiapas95) and web pages to circulate information about the Zapatista struggle for indigenous autonomy in Chiapas, Mexico. This also involved many discussions among those engaged in solidarity work supporting them. My response was also based, but to a lesser degree, upon more recent observation of the use of social media in other types of conflict [1]. What I offered were a few words – mostly of a
Research in Political Economy, 1982
The debate concerning the origins of capitalist crisis has involved intense disagreements concern... more The debate concerning the origins of capitalist crisis has involved intense disagreements concerning the meaning of Marx's crisis theory and of the central categories of his analysis. This essay was written in 1982 as contribution to that debate. It was originally intended to be the opening chapter of a book on then current debates, but was pared down and published by itself.
In a world dominated by capitalist work (labour), working for a wage is the central unavoidable r... more In a world dominated by capitalist work (labour), working for a wage is the central unavoidable reality of modern social life. And yet, the category of labour remains underdeveloped in social sciences. While waged labour in all its forms, including unemployment and mass poverty, has now invaded all aspects of social life, labour appears to have disappeared as a practice that constitutes modern society. This book revitalises labour as the fundamental constitutive principle of the social world, through a radical reinterpretation of Marx’s social theory. Each chapter develops a central Marxist theme: the continuing centrality of work; class and classification; commodity fetishism and primitive accumulation; labour movements and the way in which labour moves; unemployment, subjectivity and class consciousness, and the new forms of resistance developed in Europe, Latin America and East Asia. In conclusion, the editors give an account of what they consider to be the main critical and practical problems and possibilities confronting the concept and reality of labour in the 21st century.
The Fragile Juggernaut: Marx & Engels on Capitalism, Class Struggle & Crisis, 2024
Whether loving or hating it, many visualize capitalism as an unstoppable juggernaut. For those of... more Whether loving or hating it, many visualize capitalism as an unstoppable juggernaut. For those of us who would defeat it, we must identify its weaknesses. Fortunately, Marx and Engels’ writings on “crisis” reveal them. They show how its endless imposition of exploitative and alienating work creates such antagonistic conflicts everywhere as to make it, ultimately, a far more fragile monster than it first appears. Each of its efforts to shape social relationships, subordinating them to the work of commodity production and its control over society, has been and can be thrown into crisis by those of us resisting its way of life and seeking to create more appealing alternatives.
The Fragile Juggernaut: Marx & Engels on Capitalism, Class Struggle and Crisis , 2024
For those who have read and downloaded my 1982 essay on "Marx's Theory of Crisis as a Theory of C... more For those who have read and downloaded my 1982 essay on "Marx's Theory of Crisis as a Theory of Class Struggle", this document includes the Outline, one Preface and the Introduction to the book-length amplification of that essay that I am currently preparing for publication. Most of the hyperlinks have been disabled - being only of use inside the complete manuscript. At any rate, for those interested, these will give you an idea of what is forthcoming but now in only near-completed manuscript form. Enjoy?
Thirty-Three Lessons on Capital: Reading Marx Politically, 2019
This manuscript was the basis of the Pluto Press book by the same title. Other than pagination, t... more This manuscript was the basis of the Pluto Press book by the same title. Other than pagination, the main differences between this manuscript and the published book are 1) one is digital, one is hard copy, 2) the digital version can be searched, 3) the hard copy version has a detailed index. Both manuscript and published book were revised versions of my online, illustrated "study guide" to Volume I of CAPITAL, accessible at http://la.utexas.edu/users/hcleaver/357k/357ksg.html
33 Lessons on Capital: Reading Marx Politically, 2019
This introduction to my forthcoming book, 33 Lessons on Capital, explains its origins – in my onl... more This introduction to my forthcoming book, 33 Lessons on Capital, explains its origins – in my online "study guide" to Volume I – and its substance – 33 summaries and commentaries on the 33 chapters of Volume I. Each of those commentaries provides explanations of key points, of their continuing relevance 150 years after they were published, critiques of his analysis and extensions of the analysis to sectors of the working class rarely touched by Marx, e.g., peasants, housewives, the indigenous and students. Originally composed for students in the US they also contain a variety of illustrative material drawn from American history to complement that usually chosen by Marx from British or European experiences.
The Labour Debate. An investigation into the theory and reality of capitalist work, 2002
In a world dominated by capitalist work (labour), working for a wage is the central unavoidable r... more In a world dominated by capitalist work (labour), working for a wage is the central unavoidable reality of modern social life. And yet, the category of labour remains underdeveloped in social sciences. While waged labour in all its forms, including unemployment and mass poverty, has now invaded all aspects of social life, labour appears to have disappeared as a practice that constitutes modern society. This book revitalises labour as the fundamental constitutive principle of the social world, through a radical reinterpretation of Marx’s social theory. Each chapter develops a central Marxist theme: the continuing centrality of work; class and classification; commodity fetishism and primitive accumulation; labour movements and the way in which labour moves; unemployment, subjectivity and class consciousness, and the new forms of resistance developed in Europe, Latin America and East Asia. In conclusion, the editors give an account of what they consider to be the main critical and practical problems and possibilities confronting the concept and reality of labour in the 21st century.
Contents
Acknowledgements ix
From Here to Utopia: Finding Inspiration for the Labour Debate
Ana C. Dinerstein and Michael Neary 1
1 What Labour Debate?
1.1 Class and Classification: Against, In and Beyond Labour
John Holloway p.27
1.2 Class Struggle and the Working Class: The Problem of Commodity Fetishism
Simon Clarke p.41
1.3 The Narrowing of Marxism: A Comment on Simon Clarke’s Comments
John Holloway p.61
2 Capital, Labour and Primitive Accumulation: On Class and Constitution
Werner Bonefeld p.65
3 Labour and Subjectivity: Rethinking the Limits of Working Class Consciousness
Graham Taylor p. 89
4 Hayek, Bentham and the Global Work Machine: The Emergence of the Fractal-Panopticon Massimo De Angelis p. 108
5 Work is Still the Central Issue! New Words for New Worlds
Harry Cleaver p. 135
6 Labour Moves: A Critique of the Concept of Social Movement Unionism
Michael Neary p . 149
7 Fuel for the Living Fire: Labour-Power!
Glenn Rikowski p. 179
8 Regaining Materiality: Unemployment and the Invisible Subjectivity of Labour
Ana C. Dinerstein p. 203
9 Anti-Value-in-Motion: Labour, Real Subsumption and the Struggles against Capitalism
Ana C. Dinerstein and Michael Neary
v
Una Lectura Política de EL CAPITAL, 1985
This is the complete Spanish language version of READING CAPITAL POLITICALLY (1979).
Una Lectura Política de EL CAPITAL, 1985
This text includes the Spanish language versions of Chapter VI: Conclusion, Bibliography and Tabl... more This text includes the Spanish language versions of Chapter VI: Conclusion, Bibliography and Table of Contents of READING CAPITAL POLITICALLY (1979).
Una Lectura Política de EL CAPITAL, 1985
This text is the Spanish language version of Chapter V: The Form of value of READING CAPITAL POLI... more This text is the Spanish language version of Chapter V: The Form of value of READING CAPITAL POLITICALLY (1979).
Una Lectura Politica de EL CAPITAL, 1985
This text is the Spanish language version of Chapter IV: The Twofold character of labour of READI... more This text is the Spanish language version of Chapter IV: The Twofold character of labour of READING CAPITAL POLITICALLY (1979).
Una Lectura Política de EL CAPITAL, 1985
This text is the Spanish language version of Chapter III of READING CAPITAL POLITICALLY (1979).
Una Lectura Política de EL CAPITAL, 1985
This text is the Spanish language version of Chapter II: The Commodity-Form of READING CAPITAL PO... more This text is the Spanish language version of Chapter II: The Commodity-Form of READING CAPITAL POLITICALLY (1979).
Una Lectura Política de EL CAPITAL, 1985
This text is the Spanish language version of the author's introduction to the READING CAPITAL POL... more This text is the Spanish language version of the author's introduction to the READING CAPITAL POLITICALLY (1979).
Una Lectura Política de “El Capital”, 1985
This text includes the Spanish language versions of 1) the author's preface to the Mexican editio... more This text includes the Spanish language versions of 1) the author's preface to the Mexican edition (1985) of READING CAPITAL POLITCIALLY (1979) and 2) an introduction by Gustavo Esteva (1981).
This is the Polish translation of "A Note to Polish Readers", the preface to the Polish translati... more This is the Polish translation of "A Note to Polish Readers", the preface to the Polish translation of "Marxist Crisis Theory as a Theory of Class Struggle". TEORIA KRYZYSU: JAKO TEORIA WALKI KLASS, Poznan, 2017.
This is the expanded, book-length version of a paper given at a Conference on Hegel, Marx and Glo... more This is the expanded, book-length version of a paper given at a Conference on Hegel, Marx and Global Crisis at the University of Warsaw, Poland, October 22-23, 2012. It is currently available from the AK Press, online catalog: https://www.akpress.org/rupturing-the-dialectic.html Consider this pdf version a "look inside the book" feature, better than that provided by Amazon.com.
The Origins of the Green Revolution, 1974
This is my 1974 dissertation on the origins of the Green Revolution, a byproduct of a study group... more This is my 1974 dissertation on the origins of the Green Revolution, a byproduct of a study group investigating non-military aspects of the US intervention against Vietnamese independence. It traces the origins of the use of a technological "fix", i.e., the introduction of new high-yielding grains to increase food production as one strategy to reduce peasant support for revolution. Those origins turn out to be in earlier experiences in the American South after Reconstruction and in China before the Revolution in that country that brought the Communist Party to power.
This is the Preface to a new Korean translation of Reading CAPITAL Politically that will publishe... more This is the Preface to a new Korean translation of Reading CAPITAL Politically that will published in South Korean this Fall.
Struggles circulate; if they circulate far enough, with enough intensity and effectiveness, they ... more Struggles circulate; if they circulate far enough, with enough intensity and effectiveness, they explode into revolutions. In some cases, they merely ripple along what Karl Marx formulated as the circuits of capital – representations of sequential moments that capitalists must realize to reproduce their way of organizing social life around endless work on an ever-expanding scale. Because they are imposed, and involve exploitation and alienation, the moments of the circuits always spawn antagonism, involving various degrees of resistance. The intensity and consequences of struggles vary with the degree of exploitation and alienation involved and the types of action undertaken. Effective instrumentalization that confines opposition within closed circuits can harness it to drive capitalist development. In other cases, ripples become waves as the manner of their circulation defies harnessing and their intensity ruptures moment after moment, disrupting circuits and bringing on crisis. Marx analyzed the circuits of capital in terms of the flows and metamorphoses of value. Workers' actions, when they rupture the circuits, disrupt the flows of value, or, put differently, they disrupt capitalists' ability to impose that which is of value to them, i.e., work-as-social-control. Understanding the circuits required for the reproduction of capitalism reveals both containable patterns of struggle and criteria for recognizing when they have escaped containment to constitute new patterns of behavior that provide alternatives to capitalist modes of social organization. A variety of metaphors facilitate the recognition of both the circulation of struggles and how they may escape the circuits of capital via the creation of new modes of existence. This article is a revised version of a talk delivered to the Union for Democratic Communications' Conference on Circuits of Struggle, held at the University of Toronto on May 2, 2015. My response to the question: "what potential do you see for resistance, subversion, re-appropriation, and repurposing of communication technology as part of a network of global class struggle?" was based mainly upon an intense twelve years using e-mail (electronic mailing lists, especially Chiapas95) and web pages to circulate information about the Zapatista struggle for indigenous autonomy in Chiapas, Mexico. This also involved many discussions among those engaged in solidarity work supporting them. My response was also based, but to a lesser degree, upon more recent observation of the use of social media in other types of conflict [1]. What I offered were a few words – mostly of a
The aim of this paper is to present some thoughts on the political meaning of technology and tech... more The aim of this paper is to present some thoughts on the political meaning of technology and technological change within contemporary societal development. "Political meaning" here refers to the implications of technology for the full set of power relations between social classes within our present capitalist society. This paper will first present a series of general arguments about this question and then illustrate them by examining the case of those agricultural technologies generally grouped under the rubric of the Green Revolution.
Review of Radical Political Economics, Apr 1, 1977
The Zapatista Effect: The Internet and the Rise of an Alternative Political Fabric
Journal of International Affairs, Mar 22, 1998
... 35-50. For an analysis of the latter see Harry Cleaver, "Reforming the CIA in the Im... more ... 35-50. For an analysis of the latter see Harry Cleaver, "Reforming the CIA in the Image of the Zapatistas?," at http://www.eco.utexas.edu/faculty/Cleaver/hmconberk.html. (37) Jessica T. Mathews, "Power Shift," Foreign Affairs, 76, no. 1 (January/February 1997). ...
La insurrección de Chiapas y las perpectivas de la lucha de clases en el Nuevo Orden Internacional
Africa América Latina, cuadernos: Revista de análisis sur-norte para una cooperación solidaria, 1995
Work Refusal and Self-Organisation
Pluto Press eBooks, Sep 7, 2017
The Commoner, 2002
This is a revised version of the original article, which was published in 1982 in Volume 5 of Res... more This is a revised version of the original article, which was published in 1982 in Volume 5 of Research in Political Economy, a series edited by Paul Zarembka. This version was published in The Commoner, an online journal edited by Massimo de Angelis. This 2002 version was later revised and amplified into book length and published in 2025 as The Fragile Juggernaut: Marx & Engels on Capitalism, Crisis and Class Struggle.
The American Economic Review, 1972
Will the Green Revolution turn red? That is the big question about the recent and highly publiciz... more Will the Green Revolution turn red? That is the big question about the recent and highly publicized upsurge in Third-World food production. Food output is rising, but so is the number of unemployed in countryside and city. Is this growing class of dispossessed going to rise up in socialist revolution? Such is the specter invoked in an increasing number of mass-media news stories. Scholarly studies echo the same fear, and concern is growing among officials at the Ford and Rockefeller Foundations, the World Bank, and the U.S. Agency for International Development (AID). All of these organizations are anxiously trying to buy the answers to these questions. As more and more research money flows out, reams of reports from eager university and field-staff researchers are piling up. Yet for all the vast literature, radical researchers and strategists have paid little heed to the Green Revolution or to its revolutionary potential.1 This is a strange oversight in a generation of radicals more impressed by peasant revolution than by Marx's vision of revolution by an industrial proletariat. How important is this new development to U.S. foreign policy, that such mighty institutions should be stirred into action? What is the real impact of the Green Revolution on the internal contradictions of modern capitalism? Will social tensions be abated or exacerbated? It is my hope that this essay, which discusses these and related questions, will open a discussion among radicals and move others to probe more deeply into the whole phenomenon.
Pluto Press, Jun 20, 2019
This is a contribution to Camille Barbagallo, Nicholas Beuret & David Harvie (eds) Commoning with... more This is a contribution to Camille Barbagallo, Nicholas Beuret & David Harvie (eds) Commoning with George Caffentzis and Silvia Federici, Pluto Press, 2019.
Dialogue and universalism, 2018
In a period in which capital has been on the offensive for many years, using debt and financial c... more In a period in which capital has been on the offensive for many years, using debt and financial crises as rationales for wielding austerity to hammer down wages and social services and terrorism as an excuse for attacking civil liberties, it is important to realize that the origins of this long period of crisis lay in the struggles of people to free their lives from the endless subordination to work within a society organized as a gigantic social factory. In both the self-proclaimed capitalist West and socialist East the managers of that subordination, whether in private enterprise or the state, repeatedly found their plans undermined by people who refused to play by their rules and who elaborated activities and social relationships that escaped their control. The refusal of their rules meant crisis for the managers; the elaboration of other ways of beingwhether characterized as the crafting of civil society or as autonomous self-valorizationmeant crisis for and freedom from society-as-work-machine. As always, the capitalist response has involved instrumentalization and repression; basically its managers have sought to harness what they could and eliminate what they couldn't. For a long time instrumentalization was most obvious in the West and repression was most obvious in the East, yet both were always at play everywhere, and everywhere those responses were resisted and often escaped. It was that resistance and those escapes that led to the unleashing of the monetary weapons of financialization and their current employment to convert crisis-for-capital into crisisfor-us. It is in past and present resistance and escapes that we must discover both our weaknesses and our strengths in order to overcome capital's current offensive and to elaborate new worlds. It is the overall thesis of this paper that Marx's labor theory of value still provides vital aid in helping us understand these historical developments. behooves me to note at the outset of these remarks that I have come to the analysis and politics that I will set out here through a personal trajectory that has passed through science and economics on the one hand and a variety of engagements in social struggles on the other. Although I entered college bent on refining my scientific skills, I left it with a Ph.D in economics. The transition from the one to the other came about in response to participation in the American Civil Rights and Anti-war movements which led me out of the laboratory, into the streets and into a search for some intellectual framework for grasping the tumultuous events in which I had been involved. I was drawn to economics because it seemed to deal most directly with the structures against which the civil rights and anti-war movements were struggling: those of an economic inequality organized, in part, through racial hierarchies and those of an American imperialism that sought to extend that inequality globally in a post-colonial world where pacified pools of labor could be pitted against existing militant ones. Unfortunately, economics turned out to provide, indeed to have always provided, since its beginnings in the self-serving writings of the mercantilists, not only a justification for such a world but strategies and tactics for creating and managing that world. What it lacked in the 1960s when I was studying the subject in school, were any direct ways of grasping the struggles against that worldthe struggles in which I and millions of others were engaged. Eventually some economists would try to adapt game theory, operations research, thermodynamics and chaos theory to handle the contestation that repeatedly frustrated the strategies implied by their elegant theoretical modelsbut never with much success. Even before I completed my Ph.D I decided that economics was very much part of the problem and not part of the solution. Casting about for alternative approaches I wound up studying Marx and, to a lesser degree, Hegelboth of whom were familiar with what economists call the classical political economy of the 18 th and 19 th Centuries. My interest in Marx was obviousbecause his entire life and work were dedicated to overthrowing the capitalist grip on the world, he inevitably dealt with the struggles that subverted and threatened to transcend that world. My interest in Hegel was less obvious. On the one hand, a course on the Hegel's Phénoménologie de L'Esprit at the Université de Montpellier had drawn my attention to his analysis of the master-slave relationship, but it was primarily to his Science of Logic and Philosophy of Right that I turned in trying to make sense of Marx's exposition of his labor theory of value in the early chapters of Volume I of Capital. In both cases I discovered how these two authors grasped not only the dialectics of class struggle, but also, in their different ways, the tendencies of capital to infinite expansion and totalization. But whereas I found Hegel's analysis, however critical, to be ultimately accepting of capitalism, I found in Marx not only an analysis of capital's efforts to endlessly reimposed its dialectic but, more importantly, an analysis of the struggles that repeatedly ruptured, subverted and, sometimes strove to create post-capitalist futures in the present. 38 The rationale for such expenditures was provided by studies that demonstrated how much of the early post-WWII growth in the US economy was due to improvements in the quality of both capital and labor. 39 Although, as I have mentioned, capital was able to shape public education throughout the 20 th Century, the student movement of the 1960s seriously reduced the legitimacy of business influence in schoolsa situation corporations have been trying hard to reverse ever since. 40 While the economists discussed, of course, other parts of the government were sending in police and military troops to quell the uprisings. 41 The expenditure of money on hiring workers, of course, is only part of the expenditure by business of money as capital. Other monies are spent on the means of productionfactories, tools, machines, raw materials. In Part I of Volume III of Capital the circuit of capital M-C-M' is expanded in a way that makes this explicit: M-C(LP,MP). .. P. . .C'-M'.
Ciberlegenda, Jan 29, 2001
In recent years the future of foreign policy in the post-Cold War era has been widely and hotly d... more In recent years the future of foreign policy in the post-Cold War era has been widely and hotly debated. The debates have included discussion of the future of the nation-state, of the appropriate principles to guide foreign policy and of the implications for international relations of the rapid expansion of international informational infrastructures. For the most part these discussions have come to focus on how to renovate the foreign policy apparatus to make it more effective in the emerging new era. The focus derives from a defacto consensus that assumes that while there is an ongoing, gradual expansion in the responsibilities and powers of supranational institutions, such as the International Monetary Fund (IMF) or the European Union (EU), and while subnational actors such as state and even municipal governments or non-governmental organizations (NGOs) are playing a larger role on the international scene, the nationstate will continue to be the primary international actor and thus in need of "foreign" policy. Given the history of modern capitalist society, such expectations seem reasonable; they may, however, be increasingly disappointed. Ever since the rise of capitalism as a social system, the nation-state has been the primary vehicle for the imposition and maintenance of political order. Even private property and the market, generally assumed to be the key institutions of capitalism, owe their modern existence and survival to the nation-state. Human society has been organized locally through individual nation-states and globally through the collaborations and conflicts among them. The necessary corollary of this situation has 1been the omnipresence coexistence of "domestic policy" and "foreign policy". In the 1 This paper was prepared for an issue of the Journal of International Affairs on technology and foreign affairs.
International Journal of Health Services, Oct 1, 1977
After more than a decade when the disease was under increasing control, malaria has been making a... more After more than a decade when the disease was under increasing control, malaria has been making a dramatic resurgence in the 1970s. Even more troubling has been the inadequacy of government response despite appeals by public health officials and despite the availability of adequate resources. This article seeks an understanding of this decontrol in the history of the political economy of public health and in an analysis of the current international economic crisis. An examination of several episodes in the history of malaria control and related public health programs shows how they have played a role in and been defined by a series of social and political conflicts. These conflicts have included agrarian unrest in the American South, colonial expansion in the Third World, peasant revolution in China, the Cold War, and a whole series of urban and rural upheavals for and against development in the post-World War I1 period. An examination of the current world crisis suggests that it is another such period of social conflict-one in which various sectors of business and various governments are trying to restore the conditions of growth and accumulation which were ruptured in the late 1960s by an international cycle of social instability. Allowing malaria to spread, like allowing drought and flood to turn into famine, thus appears as a de facto repressive use of "nature" to reestablish social control. Such circumstances raise hard questions both for the public at large and for public health workers as to the most effective means of reversing these trends.
Intimate Enemies: Landowners, Power and Violence in Chiapas - by Bobrow-Strain, Aaron
Bulletin of Latin American Research, Apr 1, 2009
Palgrave Macmillan UK eBooks, 1996
Over a period of two decades money has emerged as a central axis of class conflict in much of the... more Over a period of two decades money has emerged as a central axis of class conflict in much of the world. Beginning in the early 1970s with the shift from fixed to flexible exchange rates, developing through the rise of monetarism and "tight money" policies to the "debt crisis" of the 1980s, money has been used by capital against the insurgent power of the working classes. During this period, it has become impossible to continue to treat money technically as "standard of price, "means of circulation", "means of payment" or "store of value". It has become a weapon of command in new and unusually brutal ways. Yet, at the same time, as we will see, in comparison to the earlier Keynesian use of money, monetarist money has proven to be, at best, a blunt and crude instrument. It has been useful for hammering down real wages and standards of living, for creating massive unemployment and widespread suffering. But its ability to transform itself into truly productive capital has been limited. It has been, so far, unable to organize a new cycle of accumulation. This inability, we will see, has been due to two processes of subversion: one from within capital, where money has been used for the redistribution rather than generation of surplus value and one from the working class, where money has been subverted into non-capitalist uses in ways which undermine the foundations of accumulation. In what follows, I shall sketch four arguments: first, that in Marxist theory money under capitalism is the embodiment of class power, second, that in the era of the Keynesian state money played a fundamental role in the capitalist management of class relations at both the national and international levels, third that the cycle of working class struggle that brought that era to an end involved, in part, an undermining of the Keynesian uses of money, and fourth, that in the recent period of capitalist counterattack the new ways of using money as a weapon have failed to achieve their most important ends. The Marxist Theory of Money-as-Command Marx's point of departure in his analysis of money was the roles it plays in capitalist society; his point of arrival was an understanding of the various roles of money in the dynamics of class struggle. The subordination of money-asmediator of exchange (C-M-C) to money-as-end (M-C-M') is a crucial differentia of the capitalist economy and society. But what does money-as-end mean? To stop with the mere quantitative augmentation of money (profit) is to fall prey to fetishism. Marx shows us rather that the essential social role played by money in capitalism is the command of people's lives as labor. The "capitalists" are not just the rich who consume luxuriously-the precapitalist landed gentry did that. They are not just merchants who buy and sell for profit-those have been around since the Sumerians. They are a new breed who use their money to put people to work where the production of use values is merely the necessary means to the end of organizing society around endless work. Yes, that work produces more value and surplus value (profit in money terms) but that surplus money (qua capital) is merely the means to put people, often more people, to work once again. Capital, Marx often insisted, is a social relation-an antagonistic relation of the imposition of work and the resistance to it. Thus historically the capitalists rose against the leisure and consumption of both the landed aristocracy and the working classes raising instead the banner of frugality, investment and work. * This paper was written for and prsented to the Conference on Money and the State at FLACSO, Mexico City, Mexico, July 14-17, 1992. The Conference was organized by John Holloway and brought together a number of people from Mexico, the United States and Europe to discuss theoretico-political issues of money in the crisis. Several of the papers presented to that conference (including this one) were subsequently published as Werner Bonefeld and John Holloway (eds) Global Capital, National State and the Politics of Money, London: St. Martin's Press, 1995. This contribution, with the same title, appears on pp. 141-177 of that book. 9 "There's nothing more frequent," Defoe worried, "than for an Englishman to work until he has got his pocket full of money, and then go and be idle." Cited by Linebaugh, op.cit., p. 54. 10 Marx's account appears in his work Class Struggles in France and it has been analyzed at length in Joseph Ricciardi, Essays on the Role of Money and Finance in Economic Development, Ph.D.Dissertation, University of Texas, 1985, Chapter 4. 11 Marx's comments on the role of banks in primitive accumulation appear in Capital, Volume I, Chapter 31 on "The Genesis of the Industrial Capitalist". His writings on the Crédit Moblier consist primarily of a series of newspaper articles written in late 1857, most of which appear in Volume 15 of Karl Marx and Frederick Engels, Collected Works. Their importance to Marx's analysis of capitalist finance has been highlighted in Ricciardi, Ibid., chapter 5.
Close the IMF, abolish debt and end development: a class analysis of the international debt crisis
Capital & Class, Nov 1, 1989
The political targets of this article are reformist understandings of international debt and deve... more The political targets of this article are reformist understandings of international debt and development. Opposing theories which ‘blame the victim’, Cleaver construes international debt as ‘a weapon against the working class’, and the debt crisis as ‘a product of working class power’. Repudiation of debt is accordingly the necessary Marxist political response.
Studies in Political Economy, 1994
If you have come here to help me, You are wasting your time ... But if you have come because Your... more If you have come here to help me, You are wasting your time ... But if you have come because Your liberation is bound up with mine, Then let us work together.
Socialism
Zed Books Ltd, 2019
The Political Economy of Communication, Jun 20, 2016
Struggles circulate; if they circulate far enough, with enough intensity and effectiveness, they ... more Struggles circulate; if they circulate far enough, with enough intensity and effectiveness, they explode into revolutions. In some cases, they merely ripple along what Karl Marx formulated as the circuits of capital-representations of sequential moments that capitalists must realize to reproduce their way of organizing social life around endless work on an ever-expanding scale. Because they are imposed, and involve exploitation and alienation, the moments of the circuits always spawn antagonism, involving various degrees of resistance. The intensity and consequences of struggles vary with the degree of exploitation and alienation involved and the types of action undertaken. Effective instrumentalization that confines opposition within closed circuits can harness it to drive capitalist development. In other cases, ripples become waves as the manner of their circulation defies harnessing and their intensity ruptures moment after moment, disrupting circuits and bringing on crisis. Marx analyzed the circuits of capital in terms of the flows and metamorphoses of value. Workers' actions, when they rupture the circuits, disrupt the flows of value, or, put differently, they disrupt capitalists' ability to impose that which is of value to them, i.e., work-as-social-control. Understanding the circuits required for the reproduction of capitalism reveals both containable patterns of struggle and criteria for recognizing when they have escaped containment to constitute new patterns of behavior that provide alternatives to capitalist modes of social organization. A variety of metaphors facilitate the recognition of both the circulation of struggles and how they may escape the circuits of capital via the creation of new modes of existence. This article is a revised version of a talk delivered to the Union for Democratic Communications' Conference on Circuits of Struggle, held at the University of Toronto on May 2, 2015. My response to the question: "what potential do you see for resistance, subversion, re-appropriation, and repurposing of communication technology as part of a network of global class struggle?" was based mainly upon an intense twelve years using e-mail (electronic mailing lists, especially Chiapas95) and web pages to circulate information about the Zapatista struggle for indigenous autonomy in Chiapas, Mexico. This also involved many discussions among those engaged in solidarity work supporting them. My response was also based, but to a lesser degree, upon more recent observation of the use of social media in other types of conflict [1]. What I offered were a few words-mostly of a
Una Lectura Política de EL CAPITAL
This is the complete Spanish language version of READING CAPITAL POLITICALLY (1979).
33 Lessons on Capital: Reading Marx Politically
This manuscript was the basis of the Pluto Press book by the same title. Other than pagination, t... more This manuscript was the basis of the Pluto Press book by the same title. Other than pagination, the main differences between this manuscript and the published book are 1) one is digital, one is hard copy, 2) the digital version can be searched, 3) the hard copy version has a detailed index. Both manuscript and published book were revised versions of my online, illustrated "study guide" to Volume I of CAPITAL, accessible at http://la.utexas.edu/users/hcleaver/357k/357ksg.html
This is a draft of the Introduction to a new book that combines the revised content of 1) Reading... more This is a draft of the Introduction to a new book that combines the revised content of 1) Reading Capital Politically and 2) my online "study guide" notes on all the chapters of Volume I of Marx's Capital. The online versions of the notes do not yet include the revisions that have been, and are being made, to convert their 250,000+ words into a book-length manuscript. I have begun, however, to change the music hyperlinks to facilitate accessing the songs on YouTube. (Previously only available through a university library copyright-protecting firewall that required a password.)
Draft: Comments welcome, but please do not quote. The final version will be posted to my website ... more Draft: Comments welcome, but please do not quote. The final version will be posted to my website at http:// la.utexas.edu/users/hcleaver/hmchtmlpapers.html and uploaded to Academia.edu and researchgate.net. This "Note" constitutes a preface to a Polish translation of a revised 1982 essay "Marx's Theory of Crisis as a Theory of Class Struggle" that lays out a systematic reinterpretation of Karl Marx and Frederick Engels' writings on various kinds of crises that were common in the capitalism of the 19 th Century. This "Note" provides a sketch of Marx and Engels' views and responses to struggles in Poland in their time and then some suggestions as to the relevance of their analysis of crisis to contemporary conflicts in Poland.
Letter written in response to a request for comments on Varoufakis' essay on his "erratic Marxism".