Between Capitalism and Community

Connects the Marxist construct of capitalism to systems of community In this book, Michael Lebowitz deepens the arguments he made in his award-winning, Beyond Capital.

Karl Marx, in Capital, focused on capital and the capitalist class that is its embodiment. It is the endless

accumulation of capital, its causes and consequences that are central to Marx's analysis. In taking this

approach, Marx tended to obscure not only the centrality of capital's "immanent drive" and "constant

tendency" to divide the working class but also the political economy of the working class ("social

production controlled by social foresight"). In Between Capitalism and Community, Lebowitz

demonstrates that capitalism contains within itself elements of a different society, one of community.

Whereas Marx's intellectual construct of capitalism treats it as an organic system that reproduces its

premises of capital and wage-labor (including a working class that looks upon the requirements of

capital "as self-evident natural laws"), Lebowitz argues that the struggle of workers in common and

activities based upon solidarity point in the direction of the organic system of community, an alternative

system that produces its own premises, communality, and recognition of the needs of others. If we are

to escape the ultimate barbarism portended by the existing crisis of the earth system, the subordination

of the system of capitalism by that of community is essential. Since the interregnum in which capitalism

and community coexist is marked by the interpenetration and mutual deformation of both sides within

this whole, however, the path to community cannot emerge spontaneously but requires a revolutionary

party that stresses the development of the capacities of people through their protagonism.