hydrarchist writes: "
Through the aut-op-sy list, we have just been informed that the full text of Harry Cleaver's 'Reading Capital Politically' (2nd ed. AK Press, 1999)has now been made available online as a PDF at the following address:
http://lists.village.virginia.edu/~spoons/aut_html /cleaver_rcp.pdf

The file is very large (1.5mb) and thus we here provide you with a HTML version of the Preface which will give readers some feel for the style, content and subject matter of the text. Enjoy.

Preface

New prefaces to old works are problematical. What to say about something you wrote
a quarter of a century ago? Instead of writing a preface, it’s tempting to simply rewrite
the book in ways that would bring it up to date with your current ideas and formulations.
However, books, as some have pointed out, take on a life of their own after they’ve been
published and the generous leave them unmolested, not tinkered with, but allowed
to follow their own course. About all you can do is introduce them, tell a bit of their
story and then leave them to the mercy of their readers. This makes sense to me. So
here I tell something of the genesis of this book, about how it came to be, and then
something of the subsequent implications of its ideas for my own work since.(1)

Some books are intentionally crafted. Conceived and written as part of a political
project with a particular purpose, an objective, they are designed from the start as a
contribution. The first volume of Karl Marx’s Capital is such a book. He conceived and
wrote Capital as one step in a larger project of laying out his analysis of the nature of
capitalism. That laying out was, in turn, part of an even larger project of contributing to
the overthrow and transcendence of capitalism. His writing was part of his contribution
to the ongoing struggles of workers against their exploitation and alienation and for
the crafting of better, alternative forms of social life.

Other books are accidental by-products. Marx’s Grundrisse is such a book.
Originally it was merely a series of notebooks written during the onset of the crisis of
1857 in a urgent attempt to gather his thoughts, to pull together his theoretical work
and his studies of the evolution of the class struggle. The notebooks were never meant
for publication; they were merely the formulations generated as he worked out his ideas.

They were a moment of synthesis in years of work that would produce other
manuscripts and eventually Capital in the 1860s. The notebooks only became a ‘book’
years after Marx’s death when scholars recognized their coherency and decided to
publish them.

The core of this book, Reading Capital Politically, had a genesis that makes it
much more like the Grundrisse than Capital, much more an accidental by-product
than an intentional product crafted as a conceptualized intervention in political life.
Like the Grundrisse it originated as a set of notes written as part of a particular moment
of intellectual work. In this case the project was an exploration of Marx’s writings on
the labour theory of value to discover an interpretation which made sense to me —
because all of those which had been handed down by earlier Marxist scholars had
left me dissatisfied.

The genesis of the book

The motivation for this exploration lay partly in the changing terrain of class struggle
in the early and mid 1970s and partly in a growing dissatisfaction with my understanding
of Marxism in those years. I had begun studying Marx, and the Marxist tradition, in
reaction to the inability of mainstream economics to usefully interpret either the war
against Vietnam or the social engineering that made up a considerable component of
the ‘nation building’ that the United States was undertaking in Southeast Asia to
expand its influence in the 1950s and 1960s.

As part of the anti-war movement, in the years that I was a graduate student at
Stanford (1967–1971), I investigated the role of the university within the complexity
of the whole US counterinsurgency effort. That investigation led me, along with a
number of others to form a study group to focus on the introduction of new high-yielding
rice to the area. That introduction was being done with the purpose of
increasing food production in order to undercut peasant discontent and support for
revolution against the neocolonialism of the time. In order to grasp theoretically this
political use of technology to transform rural Asian society I was led to Marx and to
Marxist analyses of the transformation of precapitalist modes of production by
capitalism through processes of more or less primitive accumulation.(2)

Unfortunately,
the more I studied the history, the more one-sided and narrow this analysis seemed
to me. While it highlighted and made some sense of what US policy makers were
doing, it virtually ignored the self-activity of the peasants in Southeast Asia against
whose struggles the new technologies and ‘nation/elite building’ were aimed.

During this same period of the early 1970s the cutting edge of capitalist strategy
on a world level was also shifting. Policy makers were replacing Keynesian growth
management with a more repressive use of money: cut backs in social spending,
flexible exchange rates, financial deregulation and eventually severely tight monetary

policies and an international debt crisis. Studying this shift, I saw that just as the
introduction of new agricultural technology in the Third World had been a reaction
against peasant struggle, so too was the shift from Keynesianism to monetarism a
reaction against popular struggle, in this case the international cycle of struggle that
swept the world in the late 1960s and early 1970s, a cycle of which Vietnam was only
one moment. (3)

What these two sets of observations forced me to recognize was that the kinds of
interpretations of Marx that I had been using involved an overly one-sided focus on the
dynamics of capitalist exploitation. Precisely because of this focus, the interpretations
failed to grasp the initiative of those resisting and attacking capital and, by so failing,
they could not even accurately understand the actions of capital itself — which always
developed in an interplay with that resistance and those attacks. Taking this perception
seriously meant for me nothing less than the need for a complete rethinking of Marxian
theory to see if it could be understood in a way that was not one-sided and which
grasped both sides of the social conflicts I had been studying and involved in.

By that time my work on Marx had led me to be certain about at least one thing:
that the labour theory of value was the indispensable core of his theory. The fact that
some had set aside that theory and still called their analysis ‘Marxist’ made no sense
to me. Because his concepts of value were the fundamental conceptual tools and
building blocks from the 1940s onward, any rethinking had to begin with those
concepts. The usefulness of his theory as a coherent whole, it seemed to me, depended
on whether I could find an interpretation of his value theory that helped me to
understand and to find ways of intervening in the dynamics of struggle.

Therefore in the summer of 1975 I gathered together every scrap of Marx’s writing
on value theory that I could find (in what were then my two working languages: English
and French) and began to pore over them. I analysed and dissected it. I compared earlier
and later formulations. I compared drafts and final documents. I compared and
contrasted the 1844 Manuscripts, the Grundrisse, Capital, and many other fragments
and notes, to see if I could come up with an interpretation in which the concepts and
constructs of the theory expressed and provided the means to understand the two-sided
dynamic of struggle in Vietnam that I had studied, of the civil rights and anti-War
movements in which I had participated and, more generally, the conflicts of that
period of history. If I could construct such an interpretation, I would use it. If I could
not, I would relegate Marx’s work to that shelf of great books from which we all draw,
from time to time, a useful bit of insight and clarification.

The result of that work was a set of notes that I gradually reworked into a fairly
comprehensive and, it seemed to me, meaningful interpretation of Marx’s value theory.
The knitting together of that interpretation took the form of a manuscript organized around

the first three sections of chapter one of volume one of Capital — in many
ways Marx’s most pedantic yet also most systematic exposition of the theory.(4) At
least tentatively satisfied, I began to use the ideas that I had worked out within various
areas of my research and political involvement.(5)

The manuscript itself was useful in my teaching, first at the New School for Social
Research in New York and later, beginning in the fall of 1976, at the University of
Texas. It provided my students with a textual exposition of the ideas that I was
discussing in class. And there, on my desk and on those of my students, it might have
remained indefinitely. (I have, unfortunately, the very bad habit of working out ideas,
writing them up to my own satisfaction, and then not bothering to get them published.)
However, it did not work out that way.

One of my graduate students had a friend working as an editor of the University
of Texas Press and it occurred to her that the manuscript might be publishable. So,
she showed it to her friend who subsequently asked me if the Press could, indeed,
publish it. The editor’s only requests were for me to clean up the text and draft an
introduction which would situate the theory within the history of Marxism. The result
was the long introduction that prefaces the manuscript itself.

In order to complete that introduction, however, I felt the need to deepen some
research I had been doing since 1975 on the genesis of certain strains of Marxist theory

that
I felt were akin, in one way or another, to my own reinterpretation of value theory. While
I was teaching at the New School I had collaborated in the production of the journal
Zerowork as well as some pamphlets designed as political interventions into struggles
around the New York City fiscal crisis in the years 1975–76. (Those were the years when
the banks refused to roll over New York City debt and set off what was, in retrospect, a
microcosm of the great international debt crisis of the 1980s. The imposition of austerity
on the workers of New York through wage cutbacks of city workers, fare increases on the
transit system, etc., presaged the more generalized imposition of austerity by the
International Monetary Fund and the international banking system in the next

decade.(6) )

Others brought to the Zerowork project distillations of distinct but connected threads
of ideas with which I had been previously unfamiliar. One was American, an evolution
of ideas that had originated in the work of C.L.R. James and Raya Dunayevskaya, who
had broken from Trotskyism in the late 1940s and gone on to establish their own
spheres of influence in the 1950s and 1960s. Another, influenced as it turned out by
the Americans, was Italian, a thread that had originated in the activities of ‘workerist’

militants such as Danilo Montaldi, Raniero Panzieri and Romano Alquati, who had
come from the Italian Socialist and Communist Parties to develop ideas central to
the Italian New (or ‘Extraparliamentary’) Left. Their efforts, in turn, influenced those
active in the ‘political space of autonomia’ such as Mario Tronti, Antonio Negri, Sergio
Bologna, Bruno Cartosio, Ferruccio Gambino, Mariarosa Della Costa and others. Yet
another, although also influenced by the Americans, was British, a thread that ran
from the first generation of ‘bottom-up’ British Marxist historians such as E.P.
Thompson and Christopher Hill through a second generation that includes Peter
Linebaugh and the other authors of Albion’s Fatal Tree. All of these threads interwove
in different ways in the work of the various editors of Zerowork.

Trying to understand these threads and the lines of their influence on my
collaborators in that journal led me to Europe in the summer of 1978. In a whole series
of encounters that proved enormously informative, I began to piece together the
political and intellectual history of the various ideas and politics.
In England I met with John Merrington and Ed Emery, two key figures in the
circulation of Italian New Left ideas into England, and hence to the U.S. In John’s
Offord Road apartment I spent many hours in conversation about intellectual and
political developments in Italy and their influence in England. I also spent several
days reading through his handwritten translations of Italian texts, many of which had
not been published at that time. With Ed Emery I discovered Red Notes, a series of
publications that included translations from the Italian produced by John and him to
influence the pattern of workers’ struggles in England.

In France I met Yann Moulier, translator of Mario Tronti and later Toni Negri and
activist in the development of ‘autonomist’ politics in Paris, especially, though not
uniquely, around the struggles of immigrant workers. Yann at that time was collaborating
in the production of a militant journal Camarades, would later publish Babylone, help
edit Futur Antérieur and today is involved in the quarterly journal Multitudes.

In Italy I met historians Bruno Cartosio and Sergio Bologna in Milan who worked
on the journal Primo Maggio. In conversations with them I added to my understanding
of the struggles in Italy and, once again, spent hour after hour in Bruno’s office reading
— this time a variety of texts of C.L.R. James, Raya Dunayevskaya and their collaborators
like George Rawick and Martin Glaberman that Bruno had gathered in his own studies
of that American tradition. In Milan I also met with Toni Negri, a central figure in the
development of the political space of ‘autonomia’ and gave him a copy of the manuscript
whose introduction I was in the process of crafting. It was then that I learned of his
own reinterpretation of Marx’s theory in the Grundrisse, a reinterpretation which had
just been presented to Louis Althusser’s Spring 1978 seminar in Paris and would
eventually be published as Marx Beyond Marx. When I eventually obtained his book,
I discovered that there were certain parallels in our interpretations, along with many
differences. In Padua I met with Ferruccio Gambino, another editor of Primo Maggio,
and at that time another key figure in the international circulation of what I would
later come to call ‘autonomist’ ideas and politics.

Along with all these discussions, and my efforts to reconstruct the threads of ideas I had

come to study, I also began to gather historical materials, key texts in
which these ideas had been laid out and developed. It was clear that I would have to
learn Italian, at least a reading comprehension, to come to grips with the very large
numbers of books, journal articles and pamphlets generated in the tumultuous and
creative world of the Italian New Left — most of which were untranslated and unknown
in the English speaking world despite the valiant efforts of John Merrington and Ed
Emery. A first synthetic reconstruction of the history of these ideas, based on these
discussions and on the materials gathered, makes up a substantial portion of the
latter half of the introduction to this book. The materials themselves make up the
sizeable collection contained in The Texas Archives of Autonomist Marxism.(7)

The introduction, as you will see, was constructed in three parts. The first was a
brief analysis of the surprising blossoming of interest in Marxism that occurred in
the US in the late 1960s and early 1970s during the cycle of struggle which had thrown
the post-war Keynesian era into crisis. That blossoming was responsible not only for
the willingness of the University of Texas Press to publish such a manuscript as I had
constructed, but also for my own job — which had been created in response to student
demands to study Marx. The second was a gloss on the main lines of the Marxist
tradition that included critiques of several then prominent strains that I found (and still
consider) lacking, especially orthodox Marxist-Leninism (including the work of
Althusser) and critical theory from the Frankfurt School to its more contemporary
manifestations. The most basic critique, which had prompted my own reexploration
of Marx’s value theory, was the one-sidedness of most of these Marxist traditions
with their focus on the mechanisms of capitalist exploitation and their inability to
theorize working class self-activity. The third part consisted of a narrative of those
threads of the Marxist tradition that I perceived to have overcome such one-sidedness,
in one way or another, and which I perceived to have parallels with or direct influence
on my own work. The core of that narrative drew on the work of reconstruction I had
done of the American and Italian threads discussed above.

After the book

After the book was published in 1979, I continued my research on these intellectual
and political traditions, gradually broadening my reading to include other threads
that seemed more or less closely related. At first my preoccupation continued with
ferreting out those writings that reflected a recognition and appreciation of the ability
of workers to take the initiative in the class struggle. More recently I’ve come to focus
on the positive content of such initiative and the ways people’s imagination and
creativity carry them beyond both capital and their status as workers.

Along the way I discovered and learned from the political writings of Rosa
Luxemburg, of the Council Communists such as Anton Pannekoek and Paul Mattick
and later of the Anarcho-communists like Emma Goldman and Peter Kropotkin.(8) That

the former were ideologically ‘Marxist’ and the latter were not, interested me less
than their common perception and sympathy for the power of workers to act
autonomously. Similarly, as I explored the early tradition of British ‘bottom-up’ Marxist
history, I was less interested by their formal political connections (often with the very
orthodox British Communist Party) and more with their success in rewriting history in
ways which brought out the hitherto neglected autonomous activity of workers and
peasants in the making and evolution of capitalist society. It was precisely this
recurring theme in the work of diverse Marxist writers and militants that led me to
coin the term ‘autonomist’ Marxism that I now use to refer to such awareness and
emphasis.(9)

But even as this commonality became clear, I was also forced to recognize the
amazing diversity of those I was regrouping under this label. Not only would some,
e.g. Goldman and Kropotkin, certainly refuse the label ‘Marxist’, but there were also
substantial differences among them about many key issues including crisis theory,
the definition of the working class, attitudes toward work and the notion of the future
in the present.

For example, among many writing in the first half of the 20th century, often a great
deal of their ‘economic’ theory was inconsistent with their political appreciation of
workers’ autonomy. For example, although Rosa Luxemburg leavened her attachment
to the Party with close attention to the direction of struggle set by the workers
themselves, when she elaborated her theories of capitalist crisis and imperialism
that self-activity faded completely from view. In the place of a theory embodying the
dynamics of class struggle she substituted an interpretation of Marx’s schemes of
expanded reproduction which turned them into a two-sector growth model that would
collapse on its own quite independently of the struggles of workers.(10)

A similar inconsistency marked the work of Paul Mattick, probably the best known
Council Communist of the post-World War II period. On the one hand, he, and others
in the tradition, considered the workers’ self-directed creation of workers councils in
Western Europe (or soviets in Russia) prime examples of the ability of workers to
organize themselves autonomously of any Party, social democratic or Leninist. On
the other hand, like Luxemburg, in his theories of the crises of capitalism that
autonomy disappeared. In its place was a reworking of Grossman’s very mechanical
theory of crisis and a critique of post-WWII Keynesian capitalism that argued its
inevitable doom in a logic quite independent of any dialectic of struggle. Recognition
of such contradictions led some of us, over time, to reinterpret Marx’s theory of crisis
in class terms using the interpretation of value theory contained in this book.(11)

But,
at the same time, such a reinterpretation implied the need to shift the critique of

mainstream economics and policy making from a criticism of its ideological content
to a focus on its strategic role in the class struggle.(12)

Another major difference that I discovered in my archeological studies of these
traditions, was between those who had a very limited understanding of what
constituted ‘the working class’, that is to say of who was included and who should be
understood as being outside of that class, and those who came later and considerably
expanded the applicability of the category. Just as Luxemburg’s and Mattick’s ‘crisis
theories’ were orthodox in being one-sided expositions of capital’s ‘laws of motion’,
so too was their, and many others’, notion of the working class which they limited to
the waged industrial proletariat. Even by the mid-1970s, I could no longer accept such
a limited perspective.

Over time, the evolution of the struggles of unwaged people led many to a
redefinition in terms. The self-mobilization of a variety of groups, such as women,
students and peasants in 1960s and 1970s implied a real scope of ‘workers’ autonomy’
far greater than previously recognized. Moreover, not only were a wider variety of
people acting autonomously of capital, but they often acted independently vis-à-vis
other groups, e.g. blacks autonomously from whites, women autonomously of men.
An awareness of this reality influenced both those who were studying the working
class in the present and those who studied it in the past.(13)

In the tradition of ‘bottom-up’ history, a new generation of historians such as
Peter Linebaugh and his collaborators studying crime and social struggle and the
formation of the British proletariat — recognized and began to make clear how the
wage was but one form through which capital has forced people to work and exploited
them.(14) George Rawick’s studies of North American slave self-activity, From Sundown
to Sunup, shifted attention away from the previously all-engrossing preoccupation
of earlier Marxist historians of slavery with the master’s exploitation during the long
days of plantation toil.(15)

The emergence of autonomous struggles of unwaged housewives led other Marxists, such as

Mariarosa Dalla Costa, Selma James and Silvia Federici to analyse
the work against which women fought and to recognize how that work was, at least
in part, work for capital and from which the latter profited through a reduction in the
value of labour power.(16) They also pointed out that because men often mediated the
imposition of that work and benefited from it, women’s rebellion had to be autonomous
from that of men. Men’s mediation could be confronted or bypassed for a direct attack
on capital, but men could not be counted on to take up women’s interests as their
own. Similarly, work on peasants in Mexico, Nigeria and elsewhere demonstrated
how their unwaged work contributed to the expanded reproduction of capital and
how their struggles, often autonomous of those of waged workers, had the power to
rupture such accumulation.(17) The broadened notion of ‘working class’ that such
understanding implied, along with the appreciation of divisions and autonomy within
the class, differentiated contemporary ‘autonomist’ Marxists from many of their
forerunners.

Another historical shift in the understanding of many of those who recognized the
autonomy of workers struggles resulted from a change in workers’ attitudes toward
work. Many in earlier generations of those Marxists who had appreciated workers’
ability to take the initiative in the class struggle clung to the very orthodox belief that
the object of revolution was the liberation of work from the domination of capital, and
hence from alienation and exploitation. For many anarchists, the Council Communists
and even the ex-Trotskyists regrouped around C. L. R. James and Raya Dunayevskaya,
the formation of workers’ councils (say by Hungarian workers during the revolution
of 1956) to take over and manage production seemed the epitome of ‘revolution’ and
the freeing of labour. But two tendencies forced a more contemporary generation
beyond such formulations. First, the continuing spread of Taylorist and Fordist
deskilling produced such an alienation of young workers from work that, by the 1960s,
the desire to take over work and make it less alienating was being more and more
replaced by its simple refusal. They didn’t want control; they wanted out. Second,
the refusal of work on the job was increasingly accompanied by a refusal of the
unwaged work of reproducing labour power in life outside the formal job. Moreover,
the refusal of both kinds of work was accompanied by new kinds of non-work activity.
Against the ‘cultural’ mechanisms of domination, highlighted and analyzed by the
critical theorists, was being pitted a ‘cultural revolution’ in the 1960s that continued
on into the 1970s and since. Indeed, the self-activity of the women’s movement, the
student movement, the environmental movement and of many peasant struggles
quite self-consciously set out to elaborate new ways of being, new relationships
among people and between humans and nature. As opposed to the traditional Leninist
view that building a new society could only occur after revolution-as-overthrow-of-capital,
these new movements that were rapidly undermining the Keynesian capitalist world order

demanded, and indeed were undertaking, the building of ‘the future’ in
the present.

With the persistence into the 1980s and 1990s of such positive forms of struggle,
of such efforts not just to resist capital but to create alternatives to it, my own agenda
of research underwent something of a shift in emphasis. The shift in my work described
above, from a focus on capitalist domination to working class self-activity, was followed
by a shift from the study of working class resistance to the study of what Toni Negri
has called working class self-valorization, i.e. the autonomous elaboration of new
ways of being, of new social relationships alternative to those of capitalism. While
this term ‘self-valorization’ has its problems (Marx originally used the term to refer to
capitalist valorization), it provides a useful concept to draw our attention to struggles
that go beyond resistance to various kinds of positive, socially constitutive

self-activity.(18)
The concept can designate not only work that escapes capitalist control, but all forms
of working class self-activity that imagines and creates new ways of being.(19)

The very existence of such positive, autonomous activity that elaborates alternative
social relationships, however, implies that those who are doing the elaboration are
actually moving beyond their class status. In other words, to the degree that workers
‘autonomously valorize’ their lives, they move beyond being ‘workers’ and constitute
themselves as some other kind of social category. At this point we discover a new
kind of limitation to the concept of ‘working class’. Not only has it, in the past, been
far too restrictive in terms of designating who gets exploited by capital and who
resists, but the presence of self-valorization shows how it has failed to grasp the
newness, the otherness, being created in the process. Where we have self-valorization
we not only have class struggle but also the emergence, however fleeting or durable,
of new worlds and new kinds of people.(20)

In short, in the history of the traditions that I call ‘autonomist Marxist’ we find
an evolution toward an extension of the political appreciation of the ability of workers
to act autonomously, toward a reconceptualization of crisis theory that grasps it as
a crisis of class power, toward a redefinition of ‘working class’ that both broadens it
to include the unwaged, deepens the understanding of autonomy to intraclass relations
and also recognizes the efforts of ‘workers’ to escape their class status and to become
something more.

It was from this theoretical and political perspective that I greeted with some
curiosity the Zapatista rebellion that exploded in the southern Mexican state of Chiapas
on January 1, 1994. Was this another Central American Marxist-Leninist uprising, led by some

Old Left party still intact despite the collapse of the Soviet regime in 1989?(21)
Or was it something new? Asked by the editors of the Italian journal Riff-Raff (Padua)
to write something about what was happening, my first reaction was to protest that
I was not an expert on Chiapas. As they insisted, however, I poured over the various
press stories and flood of Internet reports and analyses to see if I had anything to
say which had not already been said.

Two things struck me forcefully. First, there was indeed something new.
Immediately evident was a surprisingly articulate and refreshingly new self-presentation
of what seemed to be a genuine indigenous rebellion. In the place of the usual
hackneyed Marxist-Leninist jargon was a straightforward language clearly expressive
of the diverse local indigenous cultures in Chiapas. Moreover, the Zapatista
communiqués expressed not only a fierce resistance to 500 years of forced work and
exploitation but also a clear vision of alternative forms of self-organization. In the
words from the South I read a concern with self-valorisation that I had previously
found in the barrios of Mexico City some years before.(22) I also could see that the
rebellion sought the political space and power to build diverse and autonomous new
worlds. Not only was the traditional unitary project of ‘socialism’ absent, but the
notion of autonomy was not that of secession for the formation of new nation states.
Unlike nationalist demands for autonomy in the Balkans, the indigenous of Chiapas
were seeking a cultural and political autonomy against the centralized power of
Mexican and international capital. Finally, the Zapatista analysis of the international
context of the rebellion replaced the usual excoriation of ‘imperialism’ by a cogent
analysis of an increasingly global capitalist strategy: the free movement of industrial,
financial and commodity capital coupled with the imposition of constraints on the
working class via austerity, structural adjustment and repression that in Latin America
goes by the name of ‘neoliberalism’.

Second, I was struck by the role played by the Internet in the wide array of
grassroots mobilizations, in both Mexico and elsewhere in the world, that forced the
Mexican government to halt its attempts to repress the rebellion militarily and to enter
into negotiations. In 1990–91 I had noticed the roles of cyberspacial communications
in the failed tri-national efforts to block the North American Free Trade Agreement
(NAFTA) and in the widespread opposition to the Gulf War. But the role of the Internet
in the mobilizations of early 1994 in support of the Zapatistas seemed not only more
central but also more widespread, more intense and more successful. Massive
circulation of information bypassed the efforts of the Mexican government to block
knowledge of the rebellion and made up for limited mainstream press coverage.
Moreover, the Internet lists and conferences where that information circulated also
provided public space for the organization of political actions and for the sharing and
analysis of those actions in ways that dramatically accelerated the process of mobilization.

Finally, the international circulation of the Zapatista analysis of
neoliberalism and their vision of diverse alternatives to it, seemed to resonate in
many contemporary struggles around the world. As subsequent events would
demonstrate, that resonance would give them a power of convocation and example
unequaled by any other group in the present period.

As a result of these observations, I not only wrote an article for Riff-Raff on the
rebellion but focused in part on the role of the Internet in the rapid circulation of the
struggle.(23) The positive reception and widespread translation and reproduction of
that article encouraged me to continue work in these two areas: the Zapatista rebellion
itself and the role of the Internet in the acceleration of opposition to global
neoliberalism. Not only has the rebellion continued to have a character worthy of
respect and support, but its ability to go beyond solidarity to construct networks of
interconnected struggle has clearly continued to provide inspiration and example to
many others fighting against neoliberalism and for their own self-determination
around the world. Similarly, as subsequent interntional actions against neoliberalism
have demonstrated, the Internet is playing an ever more important role in the weaving
of an international fabric of resistance and alternatives.(24) The recent

mobilizations
against the World Trade Organization that brought thousands into the streets, first in
Geneva and then in Seattle, are excellent examples. The Internet played a key role
first in organizing and then, especially in the case of the Independent Media Center
set up in Seattle, in circulating the experience around the world as the events
themselves unfolded. Learning from all such experiences seems to be accelerating and
contributing to the construction of a new spectre to haunt the nightmares of capitalist
policy makers: a vast world network of self-active, autonomous struggles with the
growing capacity to act in complementary ways against capitalist globalization in all
its forms.(25)

* * * * * * *
If I were to rewrite this book today, I might change various formulations, but I would
leave the basic insights intact. Subsequent research and the production of teaching
materials involving the extension of this kind of reinterpretation from Chapter One
to virtually the whole of Volume I of Capital and to other texts have provided the
opportunity to test the ability of the ideas to produce a consistent and meaningful
reinterpretation of a substantial portion of Marx’s theoretical writings. The results,
to my mind, verify the original set of ideas. Moreover, since this book was written in
the mid-1970s I have found that its fundamental insights have provided a useful
framework for understanding the dynamics of capitalist development in terms of class

struggle. And, precisely because this interpretation of value theory provides a clear
understanding of the class relationships that capital has sought to impose and
maintain, it also has made it possible to recognize the ways in which struggles have
not only threatened or undermined those relationships but have also gone beyond
them toward the crafting of new, alternative ways of being. These are my conclusions,
readers can draw their own.

Austin, Texas

January 2000

1. In as much as this preface tells the story of this book by resituating it within a

political and intellectual
trajectory, the footnotes provide references to various relevant publications along the way.

2. A first synthesis of that research on the introduction of high-yielding grain varieties

was published as Harry
Cleaver, ‘The Contradictions of the Green Revolution’, American Economic Review, May 1972

and Monthly
Review, June 1972. In that article the reader will find little hint of the theoretical

perspective of this book, other
than a preoccupation with class struggle. The same was true of my dissertation on the

subject, The Origins of
the Green Revolution, that was even more explicitly framed within the context of ‘mode of

production’ analysis.

3. This analysis was originally set out in the two published issues of Zerowork in 1975 and

1977. For more recent
expositions see: Harry Cleaver, ‘The Subversion of Money-as-Command in the Current Crisis’

and the other
articles in the collection: Werner Bonefeld and John Holloway, eds. Global Capital, National

State and the
Politics of Money; this collection also includes an article first published (in English) in

Zerowork 2, Christian
Marazzi’s ‘Money in the World Crisis: The New Basis of Capitalist Power’. The journal

Midnight Notes has
continued and added to this line of analysis.

4. The fourth section of Chapter One, on fetishism, receives no separate treatment in the

book because the
methodology at work throughout undertakes, in part, the defetishization of Marx’s own

concepts through the
process of discovering the moments of class struggle that they grasp.

5. One application was to the politics of public health technologies: see Harry Cleaver,

‘Malaria, the Politics
of Public Health and the International Crisis’, Review of Radical Political Economy, Spring

1977. Another was to
the rethinking of the issue of the introduction of high-yielding grain varieties within the

class struggle. See:
Harry Cleaver, ‘Food, Famine and the International Crisis’, Zerowork 2, 1977. Such case

studies led to a more
general formulation: Harry Cleaver, ‘Technology as Political Weaponry’, in Robert S.

Anderson, Paul R. Brass,
Edwin Levy and Barrie M. Morrison, eds. Science, Politics and the Agricultural Revolution in

Asia.

6. See Donna Demac and Philip Mattera, ‘Developing and Underdeveloping New York: The ‘Fiscal

Crisis’ and the
Imposition of Austerity’, Zerowork 2, 1977 and Harry Cleaver, ‘Close the IMF, Abolish Debt

and End
Development: A Class Analysis of the International Debt Crisis’, Capital & Class (UK) 39,

Winter 1989.

7. An index to this collection is available on-line at url:

http://www.eco.utexas.edu/faculty/Cleaver/txarchin tro.html

8. On the similarities between the work of Kropotkin and that of ‘autonomist Marxists’, see

Harry Cleaver,
‘Kropotkin, Self-valorization and the Crisis of Marxism’, Anarchist Studies (Lancaster, UK)

2, 1994.

9. See Massimo de Angelis, ‘Intervista a Harry Cleaver’, Vis à Vis: Quaderni per l’autonomia

di classe (Italy) 1,
autumno 1993 (available in English on-line at url:

http://www.geocities.com/CapitolHill/3843/cleaver. htlm).

10. For further discussion of this see: Harry Cleaver, ‘Karl Marx: Economist or

Revolutionary?’ in Suzanne W.
Helburn and David F. Bramhall, eds. Marx, Schumpeter and Keynes.

11. One such reinterpretation was Harry Cleaver and Peter Bell, ‘Marx’s Theory of Crisis as

a Theory of Class
Struggle’, Research in Political Economy, Vol. 5, 1982. Another formulation is offered

succinctly in Harry
Cleaver, ‘Theses on Secular Crises in Capitalism: The Insurpassability of Class

Antagonisms’, in C. Polychroniou
and H. R. Targ, eds. Marxism Today: Essays on Capitalism, Socialism and Strategies for

Social Change.

12. See for example, Harry Cleaver, ‘Supply-side Economics: The New Phase of Capitalist

Strategy in the Crisis’,
in the French journal Babylone (Fall 1981) and the Italian journal Metropoli (Rome, 1981)

and Harry Cleaver,
‘Nature, Neoliberalism and Sustainable Development: Between Charybdis & Scylla’, in

Allessandro
Marucci, ed. Camminare Domandando: La rivoluzione zapatista (also on the web in English at
http://www.eco.utexas.edu/faculty/Cleaver/hmchtmlp apers.html. Also see George Caffentzis,

Clipped Coins,
Abused Words and Civil Government: John Locke’s Philosophy of Money, Massimo de Angelis,

Keynesianism,
Social Conflict and Political Economy, and a dissertation by Carl Wennerlind on the concept

of scarcity.

13. Some, of course, refused to recognize the working-class character of these struggles,

either regarding them as
secondary phenomena (the approach of many orthodox Marxists) or celebrating them as

constituting ‘new
social movements’ which were seen eclipsing the old ‘labour movement’ (the approach of

anti-Marxists happy
to accept uncritically the vulnerable old orthodox definition of working class as a

convenient target for critique).

14. See, for example, Peter Linebaugh, The London Hanged, that demonstrates, through a

detailed analysis of a
large number of 18th century examples, how the working class predates the hegemony of the

wage and thus
the inadequacy of orthodox conceptions. Linebaugh and Marcus Rediger (author of Between the

Devil and the
Deep Blue Sea — a study of seamen’s struggles in the 17th century) are currently working

jointly on a new
book, The Many-headed Hydra, about the formation of the Atlantic proletariat. The general

thrust of that
analysis can be obtained through their article of that name in Ron Sakolsky and James

Koehnline, eds. Gone to
Croatan: Origins of North American Dropout Culture. See also Yann Moulier-Boutang, De

l’esclavage au
salariat: Economie historique du salariat bride, a sweeping survey and analysis of the

history of primitive
accumulation and the making of the working class in all its forms, waged and unwaged.

15. George P. Rawick, From Sundown to Sunup: The Making of the Black Community.

16. All of these women were central figures in the Wages for Housework Movement. Their

reinterpretation of the
role of housework in the reproduction of labour power and the genesis of capitalist profit

triggered an
extensive debate among Marxists on the subject.

17. Ann Lucas de Rouffignac, The Contemporary Peasantry in Mexico; Ezielen Agbon, Class and

Economic
Development in Nigeria 1900–1980, Ph. D dissertation, University of Texas at Austin, 1985.

18. See Harry Cleaver, ‘The Inversion of Class Perspective in Marxian Theory: from

Valorization to Self-valorization’,
in Werner Bonefeld, R. Gunn and K. Psychopedis, eds. Open Marxism, Vol. II.

19. This said, it should also be obvious that just as working class ‘autonomy’ is inevitably

limited by the mere
fact that it develops within the context of capitalist society (and thus must, to some

degree, be defined by it
and not totally ‘autonomous’), so too the activities of self- or autonomous-valorization,

being a subset of such
struggles, are inevitably marked and scarred by the society within which they emerge.

20. I have argued this point in Harry Cleaver, ‘Marxist Categories, the Crisis of Capital

and the Constitution of
Social Subjectivity Today’, Common Sense (Scotland), 14, October 1993. One example of such

positive self-determination
in Mexico City can be found in Harry Cleaver, ‘The Uses of an Earthquake’, Midnight Notes,
No. 9, May 1988.

21. For those unfamiliar with the history of struggle in the region, after 1989 there was a

widespread collapse of
Left parties, many of whose disillusioned members abandoned any kind of revolutionary

activity and some of
whom went so far as to join the state to seek marginal reforms.

22.See ‘The Uses of an Earthquake’, op. cit.

23 Harry Cleaver, ‘The Chiapas Uprising: The Future of Class Struggle in the New World

Order’, Riff-Raff, marzo
1994 (in Italian) and Common Sense, No. 15, April 1994 (in English). A subsequent and more

in-depth treatment
can be found in Harry Cleaver, ‘The Zapatistas and the Electronic Fabric of Struggle’, in

John Holloway and
Eloina Pelaez, eds. Zapatista!

24. See Harry Cleaver, ‘The Zapatista Effect: The Internet and the Rise of an Alternative

Political Fabric’, Journal
of International Affairs, Vol. 51, No. 2, Spring 1998.

25. See Harry Cleaver, ‘Computer-linked Social Movements and the Global Threat to

Capitalism’, draft at url:
http://www.eco.utexas.edu/faculty/Cleaver/hmchtmlp apers.html."