In
this important book, Cleaver counsels against treating capital as this
overpowering force, determining our lives. ‘Instead of always portraying capitalism as the
driving force of history – a story in which we appear only as victims or
sometime as merely annoying irritants – let us see capitalism and the efforts
of capitalists as unacceptable constraints on our efforts to live free and
reshape the world to our liking’ (Cleaver 2017: 5). Conceptualising the labour theory of
value as a theory of the value of labour to capital, he emphasises the
significance of resisting the imposition of work in order to create alternative,
non-capitalist spaces (Cleaver 2017: 65-7).
Rupturing the Dialectic, thus, makes a number of key
contributions. First, it provides a focus on workers’ agency driving
developments, rather than on capital or the capitalist system. Financialisation
in this reading is, for example, not a novel strategy of capital to continue
the accumulation of surplus value, but is necessitated by workers’ successful
struggles for wage increases and welfare states after World War II, eating into
capitalist profits. ‘We can analyse capitalism in terms of our struggles – against
what its functionaries try to impose on us and for alternatives – in ways that
re-center our agency and struggles’ (Cleaver 2017: 206).
Importantly,
he avoids a specific focus on trade unions, which often excludes the unemployed,
housewives and students from working-class struggle, simply because they do not
receive a wage (Cleaver 2017: 112). Cleaver’s understanding of working class goes beyond
the narrow focus on wage labour and class struggle goes beyond the sphere of
production including the sphere of social reproduction. ‘Both homework and its
enforcement is work-for-capital’ (Cleaver 2017: 81). It is in moments of class struggle
against the imposition of work that the working class is being constituted by
all those participating in this struggle. ‘When we engage in collective
sabotage or strikes, we redefine ourselves as not just part of the working
class in-itself, but as part of the class-for-itself’ (Cleaver 2017: 117). It is these
moments of class struggle, in which workers can overcome differences in race,
ethnicity, nationality, gender or age, which ‘have all been used by capital to
divide those it has put to work’ (Cleaver 2017: 123).
Second,
he provides a way of allowing us to understand services as productive labour. ‘To
the degree that financial institutions provide services, their workers must be
seen as generating value and, at least potentially surplus value and profit,
just like those in agriculture, mining, manufacturing, and transportation’
(Cleaver 2017: 173). While other Marxists often reject service workers as productive workers
and, therefore, do not consider them as key actors of resistance against
capitalist exploitation, Cleaver helps us to define agency of resistance more
broadly than being simply confined to manufacturing.
Third,
Cleaver outlines the importance of ongoing resistance in everyday life. Any
moment workers do other things than contributing to capitalist accumulation during
the working day, they are considered to engage in acts of resistance. ‘When
office workers use their computers to browse the Internet instead of processing
their spreadsheets, they steal time from their bosses, momentarily rupturing
the process of production’ (Cleaver 2017: 85). Resistance is, thus, not only expressed in
large-scale strikes, mass demonstrations or popular uprisings, but equally in
daily refusals of an increasing imposition of work.
Fourth,
Cleaver usefully distinguishes between reform and revolution, by linking the
former to social democratic inside struggles and the latter to autonomous
outside struggles. It is these autonomous outside struggles, which directly
undermine the capitalist social relations of production and include a
transformational dimension. It is these outside struggles, which are
revolutionary in that ‘they strengthen the commons and expand de-commodified
relationships and spaces’ (Cleaver 2017: 274). The very profit maximisation rational and
set-up of capitalism is questioned in this process.
As I
have written elsewhere, I am sceptical about this almost exclusive focus on the
power of agency of resistance in Marxist autonomists’ work including Cleaver as
well as other approaches (see Bieler 2018).
In order to understand why certain strategies of resistance are successful in
one particular instance, while others have failed at a particular moment in
time, we need to unravel the internal relations between agency and structure
and understand these strategies in relation to the structuring conditions of
the moment (Bieler
and Morton 2018: 27-50). Moreover, I am not convinced that students in
classrooms ignoring their teachers (Cleaver 2017: 85) or cheating in school exams (Cleaver 2017: 103)
are good examples for resistance against capitalism. Nonetheless, this
criticism should not distract from the enormous contribution by Harry Cleaver to
our understanding of the possibilities of resistance against the capitalist
imposition of work. I strongly recommend this book for reading!
Andreas Bieler
Andreas Bieler
Professor of Political Economy
University of Nottingham/UK
Andreas.Bieler@nottingham.ac.uk
Personal website: http://andreasbieler.net
20 September 2018
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