Rupturing the Dialectic: The Struggle against Work, Money, and Financialization

337 Pages·2017·1.548 MB·English

by  Harry Cleaver

RUPTURING
THE DIALECTIC
The Struggle against Work,
Money, and Financialization

Harry Cleaver
RUPTURING
THE DIALECTIC
The Struggle against Work,
Money, and Financialization
Rupturing the Dialectic:
The Struggle against Work, Money, and Financialization
© 2017 Harry Cleaver
This edition © 2017 AK Press (Chico, Oakland, Edinburgh, Baltimore)
ISBN: 978-1-84935-270-3
E-ISBN: 978-1-84935-271-0
Library of Congress Control Number: 2016954842
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TABLE OF CONTENTS
Preface 1
Introduction 15
PART I:
On the Usefulness of Marx’s
Labor Theory of Value
29
Why and How Economists Got Rid of the Labor Theory of Value 31
Why and How Some Marxists Abandoned the Labor Theory of Value 39
The Substance of Value: Abstract Labor or Work as Social Control 71
Can Value be Measured? 87
Exchange and Money as the Form of Value 107
PART II:
Decoding Finance, Financial Crisis,
and Financialization
143
Decoding Finance and Financial Crisis 145
Decoding Financialization 181
PART III:
Potential Strategies and Tactics for Rupturing
the Dialectics of Money
227
Reforms and Revolution 235
Our Use of Money 243
Restricting the Need for Money 255
Conclusion 265
Bibliography 291
Index 309

PREFACE
My objective with this book is to share some thoughts. I wrote it,
not to convince and convert those whose ideas differ, but to contri-
bute to an ongoing conversation about the world we live in, what
we don’t like about it and how we would like to change it. That said,
the thoughts I share here are by no means comprehensive; they do
not deal with everything we don’t like or with all possible means of
change. Nor do they specify many details about the nature of the
new worlds we are striving to create as we experiment with ways to
transcend the present situation. Their focus, rather, is fairly narrow.
They are preoccupied with what I consider fundamental elements of
the existing system that confines and limits us, elements that must
be eliminated if we are to achieve more comprehensive change that
will craft worlds closer to our hearts’ desires.
Frequently in this book I use the first-person plural pronouns
“we” and “our”—despite recognizing them as problematic. Some-
times they refer to all living beings, as in “our very existence is
threatened by the way capitalist industry poisons land, air, and wa-
ter”; sometimes they refer to all of us who struggle against the way
capitali sm organizes society, as in “we struggle against the subordi-
nation of our lives to capitalist imposed work.” My use of these
terms, however, should not be read as a reductionism that ignores
the complex heterogeneity of either living beings or of those of us
who struggle. As I hope will be clear in what follows, I am acutely
aware of those complexities and make no pretense of speaking for
specific groups of which I am clearly not a member. Yet I use these
terms because I want to avoid the academic practice of analyzing
conflict from outside and above, as if an objective observer, by being
clear that what I have to say here is one expression of my political
stance among those opposed to capitalism and striving to create al-
ternatives. I also use these pronouns, where it seems reasonable to
do so, to emphasize how capitalist ways of organizing the world im-
pose common problems on us and how we have often found in the
past, and can hopefully find in the future, complementary ways to
struggle. I juxtapose complementarity in struggle to more tradition-
al evocations of unity. For me, complementarity implies the critical
embrace of differences (not just acceptance or tolerance), both in