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Michael A. Lebowitz (Nov 27, 1937 – April 19, 2023) was a Marxist economist and Professor Emeritus of Economics at Simon Fraser University in Canada. He founded the Centro Internacional Miranda in Caracas, Venezuela, where he directed a program on Transformative Practice and Human Development. Throughout his career, Lebowitz focused on socialist transition and the possibilities of building an alternative economic system that prioritizes human development over profit accumulation. His publications include Build it Now (Monthly Review Press, 2006), Following Marx (Haymarket Books, 2009), The Socialist Alternative (Monthly Review Press, 2010), The contradictions of "real socialism" (Monthly Review Press, 2012), The Socialist imperative: from Gotha to now (2015) and Between capitalism and community (2020).

The following conversation with Srećko Horvat, philosopher and Cabinet Member of the Progressive International, was conducted in 2010. In this shorter and edited version for The Internationalist, Lebowitz and Horvat discuss the former’s enduring work on political economy, the crises of capitalism and the hope for a renewed international solidarity movement.

Srećko: One of your most famous books is certainly Beyond Capital: Marx's Political Economy of the Working Class. For those who haven't read it yet, could you explain what is left out of Capital. Is there any relationship between what was missing in the 20th century and missing parts of Marxist theory?

Michael: Well, there's a lot missing in Marx's Capital. That book had an essential purpose but it was limited. The point was to explain the nature of capital and its tendencies. Marx's goal there was to explain to workers what this beast is – how what we see around us is not accidental, how it can't be changed simply through reforms, and that you need to end the rule of capital. There is an enormous mystification of capital, and we need to go beneath the surface to understand capital. Marx did that brilliantly. However, Capital was not an attempt to describe the whole of capitalism. Remember that Marx intended initially to write six books about capitalism, and he only finished the first of these – the book on capital (and, of course, he only finished the first volume of that book himself). We ourselves have to go beyond Capital.

I think the short answer as to what is missing in Marx's Capital is the human being as a being of praxis. We don't see human beings with their own goals, struggling to achieve those goals and transforming themselves in the process. We can see that in Marx's other writings but not as a theme of Capital. Marx necessarily would have had to deal with this if he ever had proceeded to the volume of wage labour. So that's what I was trying to do in my book: explore the implications of Marx not writing the book he planned on wage labour.

I think that once you begin to look at the side of the worker, you are led inevitably to stress the human being as a subject and you see the importance of the "key link" of human development and practice. But if workers don't appear in Capital as subjects for themselves, then we don't focus on capital's constant need to divide and separate workers in order to weaken them. The two-sided class struggle goes into the background, and all capital has to do is increase productivity in order to produce these objects (workers) more cheaply. What you end up with is technological determinism because what capital must do to capture the fruits of productivity gain is not explored. So, we don't even get a full picture of the side of capital without introducing the worker as a subject.

The relation of all this to the question of socialism for the 21st century is that it is essential to recognise that Marx wrote Capital from the perspective of a society in which people are subjects who are able to develop their full potential – where they are able to become, in his words, "rich human beings". His premise was a society based not on the growth of capital but what he referred to in Capital as "the inverse situation in which objective wealth is there to satisfy the worker's own need for development".

Look at how many times Marx talks there about capitalism as an "inversion". Well, an inversion of what? The answer is the inversion of a different, more human society – socialism. A society which does not destroy human beings in the process of production, a society which introduces new productive forces that do not cripple human beings but which allow them to grow, and a society which treats nature as something to be respected and sustained.

Yes, I definitely do think there is a link between what was missing in Marx's Capital and what was missing in 20th-century attempts to build socialism. In my new book, The Socialist Alternative: Real Human Development, I have tried to develop the logic of a socialist alternative based on the concept of human development.

Srećko: A central theme of that book and your recent work is the concept of the "elementary triangle of socialism". Could you explain it?

Michael: If you don't know where you want to go, no road will take you there. For some time, I have been stressing the absolute necessity to have a clear idea of where we want to go, a vision of socialism. That's especially important after the experiences of the 20th century. The socialist alternative (which is not only an alternative to capitalism) must put human development at its core. So, I explore in the book the conditions for this, drawing upon Marx but also upon what we need to learn from the 20th-century experience.

I try to look at socialism as an organic system, a system of production, distribution and consumption in which the elements all coexist and support each other. I consider here these elements as (A) social ownership of the means of production, (B) social production organised by workers for (C) social needs and purposes.

Social ownership is essential because it is the only way to ensure that our communal, social productivity is directed to the free development of all rather than used to satisfy the private goals of capitalists, groups of individuals, or state bureaucrats.

Social production is organised by workers because it's only the way to end what Marx called the crippling of body and mind that comes from the separation of head and hand. As long as workers are prevented from developing their capacities by combining thinking and doing in the workplace, they remain alienated, fragmented human beings whose enjoyment consists in possessing and consuming things. And if workers don't make decisions in the workplace and develop their capacities, we can be certain that someone else will.

Finally, the satisfaction of communal needs and purposes focuses on the importance of going beyond self-interest. It means we look upon others as members of a community, as members of a human family. The essential starting point here is the concept of a community, a concept of solidarity – something we can never build by focusing on selfishness and self-interest.

These three sides of this combination (which Chávez has called the elementary triangle of socialism) clearly reinforce each other. And, if any of these are missing, it poisons the other sides of the triangle – this is an important lesson from the 20th century.

Srećko: Where in the world do you see those new possibilities, new hopes for better societies based on the concept of solidarity?

Michael: There are new possibilities, and we see them especially in Latin America right now because the strong rejection of the effects of neoliberalism there has opened the door to think of an alternative – not a third way, a barbarism with a human face, but a socialist alternative.

I have been working in Venezuela for several years along with my wife Marta Harnecker, and I think there are many very important developments there. In particular, there is a vision of a socialist alternative in Venezuela. You can see that represented in parts of Venezuela's Bolivarian Constitution introduced under Chávez. In its explicit recognition (in Article 299) that the goal of human society must be that of "ensuring overall human development", in the declaration of Article 20 that "everyone has the right to the free development of his or her own personality" and the focus of Article 102 upon "developing the creative potential of every human being and the full exercise of his or her personality in a democratic society" – the theme of human development pervades the Bolivarian Constitution.

That constitution also focuses upon the question of how people develop their capacities and capabilities – that is, how overall human development occurs. Article 62 of the constitution declares that participation by people in "forming, carrying out and controlling the management of public affairs is the necessary way of achieving the involvement to ensure their complete development, both individual and collective". The same emphasis upon a democratic, participatory and protagonistic society is also present in the economic sphere, which is why Article 70 stresses "self-management, co-management, cooperatives in all forms" and why Article 102’s goal of "developing the creative potential of every human being" emphasises "active, conscious and joint participation".

In other words, that "key link" of human development and practice figures prominently in the Bolivarian Constitution. But, it’s not just words. There has been a conscious attempt to develop new institutions which allow people to transform themselves while transforming circumstances. This is most apparent with the development of communal councils – councils based on 200-400 families in urban areas (and smaller in rural areas). These councils, in which the general assemblies are the supreme decision-making body, are engaging in the participatory diagnosis of their needs and participatory budgeting.

Of course, while they are a real place where people can develop through their protagonism, the problems they can deal with are limited by their size. So, the step occurring now is the coming together of councils to form communes so they can take on larger responsibilities. Here there is attention being given to ensure economic viability – units of productive activity oriented to social needs. And the next step will be the coming together of communes to form communal cities.

In fact, a new state is being formed (not easily and not without contradictions and conflicts with the old state); Chávez has said many times that the communal councils are the cells of the new socialist state.

Although it is not as advanced, there also is a process going in the direction of workers' management of state industries. Here there has been great resistance from bureaucrats and managers against workers' management, and some of the initial steps taken toward what was called co-management in Venezuela (a partnership between workers and society) were reversed.

However, in the last year, the combination of workers' militancy and Chávez has put workers' management back on the agenda. For example, workers in the state steel and aluminium industries, with Chávez’s encouragement, have produced a socialist plan for their region and Chávez has insisted that what Venezuela has now is state capitalism and that, without workers' control, you can’t have socialism. The same thing is happening now in the electrical industry. And, that appears to be occurring as the state moves into new sectors of the economy.

The central focus is definitely not self-interest – Chávez in particular is very conscious of the problems associated with that. So, there is a real attempt in Venezuela to work at building the socialist triangle. I don’t want to minimise the problems and obstacles. The goal is clear but it’s a real struggle.

Srećko: Do you think the current crisis of capitalism will lead to a rejection of capitalism in other parts of the world and the search for a socialist alternative?

Michael: A crisis in capitalism is not the same as a crisis of capitalism. In the absence of subjects prepared to struggle to change the system, capitalism has a free hand to try to restructure itself. That is certainly what we see occurring as the G20 is invented to take the place of the G7; it’s a recognition that restructuring international capital involves the incorporation of the new capitalist actors (especially China, India and Brazil).

Whether that attempt to restructure will succeed, on the other hand, remains to be seen. The more important question, though, is whether the attempt to make the working class pay for the deficiencies of capitalism will produce new actors who are increasingly oriented toward putting an end to capitalism. That was the pattern in Latin America, and we can see resistance at this time in Greece and I suspect we’ll see it elsewhere. I think that is important and has much potential. But resistance in itself can just raise the costs of particular measures to capital and may lead no further than to some reforms.

To go further, I think it is necessary both to understand the nature of capital and also to have a vision of a socialist alternative. I think the first of these is beginning – as indicated by the growing interest in Marx in the context of the crisis. We need to work on the second, too, to make it clear that socialism is not about a state-controlled and -dominated society; rather, the socialism we need to struggle for must be about creating the conditions for real human development.

Will the ongoing crisis be a new method for strengthening the old system? Only struggle will decide that.

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