“Changing circumstances, changing ourselves”: the Marxism of Michael Lebowitz

Abstract

Michael Lebowitz (November 27, 1937–April 19, 2023) was an eminent representative of the New Left. He sought to reclaim Marx from the mechanistic readings—of both the Left and Right—that formed during the Cold War. Following Marx, he wrote on the creative potentials in every worker and the possibilities that might emerge for socialism once the fetters of capitalism were broken. This essay traces Lebowitz’s theoretical journey across his many books.

Keywords:

• Democracy
• economics
• Marx
• political economy
• socialism

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes

1 A variation on Marx’s third thesis on Feuerbach, which Lebowitz referenced in numerous iterations: “The coincidence of the changing of circumstances and of human activity or self-changing can be conceived and rationally understood only as revolutionary practice.” Marx, Theses on Feuerbach.

2 Biographical information can be found in the following sources: Lebowitz’s personal website at https://michaelalebowitz.com; “Michael A. Lebowitz,” https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Michael_A._Lebowitz; Fischer, “Completing Marx’s Project”; and Fuentes, “Michael Lebowitz, presente!” Many of his writings can be found at his website, and the websites for The Socialist Project, Monthly Review, and Links: International Journal of Socialist Renewal.

3 Lebowitz, Socialist Alternative, 9. Lebowitz was influenced at the time by the Institute for Workers Control in Britain. The newly elected British Columbia New Democratic Party government of Dave Barrett had strong support from unions and workers, and was seen as more open to the Left after years of rule by the political Right. Lebowitz would later draw much harsher conclusions on the “failures of social democratic governments,” although he never retreated from the electoral terrain as a necessary space for socialist politics. See Lebowitz, Beyond Capital, 198.

4 Lebowitz, Socialist Alternative, 163.

5 For example, Harnecker, World to Build. She died in 2019 in Vancouver.

6 Harnecker and Lebowitz moved back to Vancouver for health reasons, and did not turn away from the Bolivarian process in Venezuela, even after the death of Chavez. Lebowitz (and Harnecker) always stressed the contradictions in the process from the outset, both internal and external, but pointed positively to the impact of the communal councils and communes and the need to continue to struggle through these processes. See Lebowitz, “Popular Protaganism.”

7 Lebowitz, “The Jacksonians.”

8 Lebowitz, “Another Crisis of Economic Theory: The Neo-Ricardian Critique,” in Following Marx. Originally published in Science & Society, Winter 1973–74.

9 Lebowitz, “Another Crisis of Economic Theory” in Following Marx, 18–19.

10 Lebowitz, “Another Crisis of Economic Theory” in Following Marx, 21.

11 Lebowitz, “Another Crisis of Economic Theory” in Following Marx, 27, 28. Lebowitz followed Sweezy in approaching the Neo-Ricardians as friends, not enemies, to be debated with. The critique of marginal productivity they developed was a case in point. Following Marx, 188–90.

12 Lebowitz, “Is ‘Analytical Marxism’ Marxism?” and “Analytical Marxism and the Marxian Theory of Crisis,” in Following Marx. The first originally appeared in Science & Society, Summer 1988, and the second in the Cambridge Journal of Economics, April 1994.

13 Lebowitz, “Is ‘Analytical Marxism’ Marxism?” 43.

14 Lebowitz, “Understanding Sweezy,” in Following Marx, 164. An earlier version of this essay appeared in Studies in Political Economy 74 (2004).

15 Lebowitz, “The Theoretical Status of Monopoly Capital,” in Following Marx, 232.

16 Lebowitz, “The Theoretical Status of Monopoly Capital,” in Following Marx, 245.

17 Lebowitz, “Analytical Marxism and the Marxian Theory of Crisis,” in Following Marx, 248, quoting Marx from the Grundrisse.

18 Lebowitz, “Following Hegel: The Science of Marx,” in Following Marx, 85.

19 A few of the key authors of the “new readings” of Marx merit mention: David Harvey, Moishe Postone, Michael Heinrich, and, from an ecological perspective, John Bellamy Foster and Kohei Saito.

20 Lebowitz, Beyond Capital, xi.

21 Lebowitz, Beyond Capital, 23.

22 Lebowitz, Beyond Capital, 80.

23 Lebowitz, Beyond Capital, 30.

24 Lebowitz, Beyond Capital, 99.

25 Lebowitz, Beyond Capital, 99. For further discussions see “Symposium on Beyond Capital,” Historical Materialism; and Part 5 of Following Marx.

26 Lebowitz, “Hats and Men.”

27 Lebowitz, Between Capitalism and Community, 121.

28 Lebowitz, Contradictions of “Real Socialism,” 81.

29 See Lebowitz, “Kornai and the Vanguard Mode of Production”; and Lebowitz, “Kornai and Socialist Laws of Motion.”

30 Lebowitz, Contradictions of “Real Socialism,” 81–87.

31 Lebowitz, Build It Now, 41.

32 Lebowitz, Build It Now, 65.

33 Lebowitz, Build It Now, 103.

34 Lebowitz, Socialist Alternative, 1.

35 Ideas developed initially in Lebowitz, “Socialist Fetter.”

36 Lebowitz, Socialist Alternative, 85, quoting Marx from the Grundrisse,

37 Lebowitz, Socialist Alternative, 88.

38 Lebowitz, Socialist Alternative, 164.

39 Lebowitz, Socialist Alternative, 161–62, 168.

40 Lebowitz, Socialist Imperative, 69.

41 Lebowitz, Socialist Imperative, 199, 217. Lebowitz also sees this as a process of confronting the capitalist vandalism of the earth. In its effort to push past every barrier, the “limited earth is not a concern because for capital there is always another source of growth to be found.” Instead, for any rational relationship to nature, it needs to be understood that there are no “owners of the earth” and needs to be visioned as a “commons” for all. The Socialist Imperative, 25, 221. Although Lebowitz was involved in various ecosocialist projects, it is implicit as opposed to centred, and relatively sparse across his alternative books.

42 Lebowitz, Between Capitalism and Community, 8.

43 Lebowitz, Between Capitalism and Community, 120–21, quoting Marx in the Grundrisse.

44 Fischer, “Completing Marx’s Project,” 7.

45 Fischer, “Completing Marx’s Project,” 8.

46 Fischer, “Completing Marx’s Project,” 9.

47 Lebowitz, Contradictions of “Real Socialism,” 188.

48 In his final essay, which he was completing in the last week of his life, Lebowitz was tying together his own position on Marx’s value theory, market competition, and the allocation of total social labour through money and prices in capitalism. As with Beyond Capital, this allowed an emphasis on the oppositional antagonism to the law of value in the struggle for allocation to meet societal and individual social needs. “Conscious planning, the visible hand, a communal hand, is the condition for building a socialist society. This process does more, however, than produce the ‘correct plan.’ Importantly, it also produces and reproduces the producers themselves and the relations among them. What Marx called ‘revolutionary practice.’” Lebowitz, “What Every Child Should Know,” n.p.

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Greg Albo

Greg Albo teaches in the Department of Political Science at York University in Toronto, Ontario, Canada.