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book-review2020
CNC0010.1177/0309816820923787Capital & ClassBook Reviews

Book Reviews

Capital & Class

Book Reviews 2020, Vol. 44(2) 293­–299

© The Author(s) 2020
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DOI: 10.1177/0309816820923787
https://doi.org/10.1177/0309816820923787
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Harry Cleaver
33 Lessons on Capital: Reading Marx Politically, London: Pluto Press, 2019; 519 pp.:
ISBN 9780745339979, £24.99 (pb.)

Reviewed by: Daniel Hinze, Independent Scholar

With this book, Harry Cleaver wants to re-sharpen the ‘weapon’ that Marx created with
Capital for its continued use in the struggle against capitalism. In each ‘lesson’, he sets
out a short outline of each of the 33 chapters of Capital, Vol. I and provides an explana-
tory commentary that is designed to demonstrate the contemporary relevance of Marx.
To draw the reader into the material, the book starts with the final, eighth part of
Capital in which Marx sets out the violent genesis of capitalism using various strategies
of expropriation that he dubbed ‘primitive’ accumulation through to the development of
industrial capitalism. According to Cleaver,

these final chapters make clear why Marx formulated a labor theory of value as his primary
theoretical tool. He shows us how capitalism came into the world as a new form of social
domination whose most fundamental method of controlling society was the endless imposition
of work. (p. 16)

Having thus whetted the reader’s appetite for what Capital has to offer, the book returns
to Part 1 and the theory of the commodity, value, and money. Cleaver acknowledges the
subjectivity of his reading of Marx and his idiosyncratic interpretation of the labor the-
ory of value. He is at pains to bring to the fore a dynamic of class struggle and his defini-
tion of value is a case in point:

the substance of value is [. . .] the social control over people’s lives provided by any form of
labor, independently of its content or form. [. . . ‘V]alue’ expresses the particular social use-
value of labor to capital as its primary means of social control. Marx’s labor theory of value is a
theory of the value of labor to capital. (p. 110)

Similarly, ‘money is a mediator – interposed between capital and the working class’
(p. 134).
Cleaver proceeds to work through the rest of Capital, giving short expositions of each
chapter and supplementing the material with more recent examples of the workers’
struggle and with passages from literature and music to underscore the nature of the
historic development of capitalism and the resistance to it.
294 Capital & Class 44(2)

As with his definition of value, Cleaver de-emphasizes the underlying system dynam-
ics of capital accumulation and competition and accentuates the critique of capitalism as
class antagonism instead of the ‘critique of political economy’ that Marx put in prospect
in the subtitle of his work. It is not the systemic drivers but capitalists’ individual motiva-
tions that thereby come into focus:

in their fetishistic pursuit of monetary profit, some capitalists lose sight of their social role of
putting people to work and in their fanaticism result in putting people to death, undermining
the very society they are trying to control and structure. (p. 237)

This statement is rather problematic and quite opposed to the thrust of Marx’s analy-
sis. Capitalists’ pursuit of profit is neither fetishistic nor fanatical but borne out of neces-
sity – putting people to work is a means to fulfilling their role as capitalists, which is to
generate profit in a permanent struggle against their capitalist competitors. The creation
of surplus value (through the application of labor) is a necessary means to that end.
Individual capitalists’ actions may indeed undermine the regeneration of society but the
state has tended to look after the collective interest of capitalists and intervened to pre-
vent system collapse.
Cleaver is keen to underscore workers’ (housewives’, students’) agency and their suc-
cesses in resisting capitalism. The book discusses ‘alienation’ at length (pp. 203ff ) – a
concept which is not used in Capital – in order to underscore how capitalism destroys
the meaning of work for the individual worker. In numerous places, Cleaver also reminds
us of the role of extra-economic, ‘reproductive’ labor in ensuring the continuation of the
system. While not novel, these are all fair points but the problem is that they are shoe-
horned into the material of Capital where they often sit incongruously. This will make it
difficult for a novice to use the book as an entry point into Marx’s thought – quite apart
from the thrust of the interpretation which gives a misleading impression of what Marx
was trying to achieve.
I am sure that Marx himself would agree with Cleaver that Capital needs to be read
politically. In the first instance, however, Capital is a scientific endeavor in which Marx
puts the analysis of capitalism as a system on a coherent base. As such, it provides the
starting point for radical political criticism and the search for alternatives. It is the opin-
ion of this reviewer that little is to be gained from re-focussing the analysis within Capital
in order to make it more relevant to political activism when this only obscures the under-
standing of Marx’s theory of how the system works.
For readers who agree with this assessment, there are many alternatives to 33 Lessons
on Capital. For a short and accessible introduction to Capital, see Joseph Choonara’s
(2017[1999]) Unravelling Capitalism. It is complemented well by Ellen Meiksins Wood’s
(2017[1999]) Origin of Capitalism for a historical perspective on the development of
capitalism. In Markt und Gewalt, Heide Gerstenberger (2017) traces comprehensively
the function of violence and worker repression in the history (and present) of capitalism,
and addresses many of Cleaver’s concerns but in a more systematic way.

References
Choonara J (2017[1999]) Unravelling Capitalism. 2nd ed. London: Bookmarks Publications.
Book Reviews 295

Gerstenberger H (2017) Markt und Gewalt. Münster: Dampfboot Verlag.

Meiksins Wood E (2017[1999]) The Origin of Capitalism. London: Verso.

Author biography
Daniel Hinze earned a PhD in economics from Johns Hopkins University, Baltimore. He has
worked at the World Bank, the Deutsche Bundesbank, and is now a civil servant in the UK.
Email: Daniel.Hinze@gmail.com

Bengt Erik Eriksson, Mikael Holmqvist and Lena Sohl (eds)

Eliter i Sverige: Tvärvetenskapliga perspektiv på makt, status och klass, Lund:
Studentlitteratur, 2018; 344 pp.: ISBN 9789144116365, 270 kr (paper)

Reviewed by Guy Lancaster, Central Arkansas Library System, Little Rock, AR

The word ‘elite’ is quickly going the way of the word ‘fascist’, often employed by those it
denotes against their opponents. In October 2019, for example, US Senator Josh Hawley
described a Washington Post reporter on Twitter as a ‘smug, rich liberal elitist’ – quite
rich coming from the son of a prominent banker and a graduate of both Stanford and
Yale universities. In similar vein, Brexit cheerleader Nigel Farage received lavish funding
from millionaire Arron Banks to denounce the ‘elite’ bureaucrats of the European Union.
But scholars, too, are implicated in this process by their research priorities. Criminologists
typically study murderers and rapists, not fraudsters and financiers; sociologists continue
to explore the devastating effects of poverty, not the distorting effects of wealth; and
historians, still in reaction to the ideological origins of their discipline, can prefer the
history of subaltern peoples over their elite oppressors.
There is irony in the fact that one of the major recent texts to explore the nature of
the elite hails from Sweden, a country regularly praised for higher levels of income and
gender equality, but perhaps elite power can only be fully appreciated as abnormal from
within a society that still largely adheres to Jantelagen (the ‘law of Jante’), a cultural code
that condemns personal ambition. And so Eliter i Sverige: Tvärvetenskapliga perspektiv på
makt, status och klass (Elites in Sweden: Interdisciplinary Perspectives on Power, Status,
and Class) proves revelatory not simply for its analysis of Swedish society but more for
the framework it establishes for studying inequality in general. As the editors write in
their introduction, ‘To study elites thus entails .  .  . studying power and the unequal divi-
sion of resources’ (p. 12, translations by the reviewer).
The first three chapters revolve around education, with Ida Lidegran finding that,
while in the past elites studied Latin and the humanities, today’s elite youth focus upon
the sciences. However, ‘the choice of high school program does not always relate to an
interest for scientific disciplines’. Instead, it is a combination of instruction focused upon
fact, certified teachers, and classmates who went through the same process of selection
that ‘makes an educational culture that is extremely desirable and manifestly difficult to
substitute’ (p. 52). Next, Petter Sandgren explores how the emergence of boarding schools
facilitated the creation of the modern Swedish upper class by offering a shared social space
in which the children of the old aristocracy and the new economic elites could