Introduction

Appearance and essence

Egyptian society is at war. Appearances of this ongoing war have been misrepresented as revolutions. Starting on 25 January 2011 eighteen days of protest convulsed the country. Street battles raged in Cairo, Alexandria and Suez. The headquarters of the ruling political party was burned. Internet service was severed. Public spaces were occupied and made the objects of sieges. A vice-president was appointed. Nine hundred protestors were killed. The long-serving president resigned. On 11 February the military, in the form of the Supreme Council of the Armed Forces (SCAF), took power. Later, a constitutional referendum was voted on and adopted. A parliament was elected, dismissed and reinstated. Two rounds of hotly contested elections produced a new president. A Constituent Assembly charged with drafting a new constitution was constituted, disbanded and reconstituted. The two most senior members of SCAF were forcibly retired by the newly elected president. The executive seized all judicial and legislative powers. A new constitution was popularly approved. Protests against the president again swelled in the summer of 2013. The minister of defense deposed the president who had recently appointed him. More protestors were massacred. The minister of defense was promoted within the military and resigned his position to contest and win the presidential election in 2014. Another constitution was adopted. And parliamentary elections were held.

Appearances are often deceiving. Egyptian society has yet to produce a revolution. January 2011 was a particular eruption of the universal crisis of capitalist relations and processes. The reproduction of working-class life was endangered by surplus capital appearing in food price inflation and, in dialectical fashion, this posed an existential crisis for capital in the Egyptian social formation. Political expressions and moments since 2011 have been of intra-capitalist class and inter-class struggles between the factions of productive, commercial and finance capital, and between capital and the working class. In 2011, the military as productive capital disposed of its junior partner, predatory capital, vulgarly labeled the Mubarak regime, and aligned with the Muslim Brotherhood as commercial capital to defer the crisis and extend the relations of the commodity form in Egyptian society. After having consumed commercial capital's use-value, in 2013 productive capital disposed of its junior partner and replaced it with finance capital, represented by the state forms of the Gulf Cooperation Council (GCC). During these moments, capital has unrelentingly attacked, and further weakened, the power of the working class and the value of its labor-power commodity under the cover of reform; constitutional and legal reform, technological reform, currency reform. The contradictions that produced the appearances of crisis in 2011 and 2013 have sharpened during these moments, and Egyptian society is building to a higher-stage crisis. The coming eruption of crisis will be more socially extensive and intensive, more violent, and will take the lives of many more workers.

Recent Egyptian politics are not as they have been represented. The 25 January 'revolution' was a particular expression of the general crisis of neoliberal capitalism that has been differently deluging societies since its eruption in 2007. Egyptian society's particular crisis was a crisis of reproduction of daily life. Mass protests by a working class weakened in relation to capital and in possession of a labor-power commodity devalued by food price inflation crystallized out of an environmental crisis, Benthamite mental conceptions, neoliberal processes of accumulation, including privatization, legal arrangements such as the Commodities Futures Modernization Act (CFMA) of 2000 and the Troubled Assets Relief Program (TARP) of 2008, and the technology of derivatives. Egyptian society did not change because of 25January. Egypt's recent political history represents the forms of expression of ongoing changes.

Egyptian society is comprised of the working class and three factions of capital: productive capital, commercial capital and finance capital. When the working class faced an acute crisis of social reproduction in 2011, its weakness in relation to capital meant it was incapable of realizing revolutionary change. In the crisis moment, productive capital rescued the commodity form in Egyptian society by replacing one faction of unproductive capital with another in the bloc governing the Egyptian social formation. In 2013, productive capital again disposed of its junior partner in the governing alignment; this time replacing commercial capital with finance capital, represented by the GCC state forms. Politics in Egypt since 2011 have been defined by intra-capitalist class struggle. The reforms capital has realized through these moments have been possible because of the weakness of the working class in Egypt, and have further weakened the political power of workers and devalued their labor-power commodity.

The contradictions of capitalist relations and processes continue to sharpen. The eruption of crisis to which Egyptian society, like the global capitalist totality of which it is a part, is building will present the working class with another revolutionary opportunity. Unless the working class is able to alter the balance of forces in its favor by, inter alia, thinking in class terms, rather than the fetishisms of nation and religion, the coming crisis will produce even more reactionary relations and political forms of expression that seek disastrously to paralyze the movement of society.

Analytical framework: materialist dialectics

Materialist dialectics is a philosophy, theory and method. The philosophy is critical – dialectics, the theory is of labor value, and the method is of seven inner-related elements.

Marx's ontology is a totality of relations and processes, not things. It is a social rather than an individual ontology. Dialectically, it is an ontology of 'inner relations' and 'mutually dependent processes.' Relations constitute the reified things nondialectical thinking sees – capital, for example, is not a thing but a social relation between labor and capital. And 'processes actually interpenetrate' such that a change in one process, say organization, means a change in other processes, circulation, exploitation, reproduction, accumulation.

Change is constantly occurring in this matrix of internal relations and co-dependent processes. A causal philosophy of change presumes an external relation. A condition of stasis is changed by the intervention of an exogenous stimulant. This is precisely why nondialectical thinkers are so often surprised by manifestations of change and compelled to explain them. Dialectics, on the other hand, understands the contradictions internal to the totality, the totality of capitalism in Marx's case, as the propellant of this constant change. Contradictions are 'the incompatible development of different [and dependent] elements within the same relation.' The commodity, for instances, reifies and internalizes capitalist contradictions. By way of simple example, the commodity has a use-value and an exchange-value, but only one of these incompatible values can be realized at any one moment. The commodity can be sold for its exchange-value, but then it cannot be consumed for its use-value. Or it can be consumed for its use-value, but then it cannot be transformed into its exchange-value. Contradictions, such as capital's interest in paying labor as small a wage as possible in the factory but needing moneyed consumers in the market or developing and implementing technology that produces surplus-value in the short term only to displace the producers of value in the long term, are never resolved. The standard representation of the dialectic as the thesis-antithesis-synthesis misses the mark in this regard. More accurate is the conceptualization Marx suggests at the end of Capital, volume I: dialectical thinking sees an affirmation, its negation, and 'the negation of the negation.' Contradictions are always further internalized, turned in on themselves again and again in a system of perpetual movement or on a grander scale.

The social relation between labor, the class whose only commodity is labor-power, and capital, the class that owns the means of production, is the first contradiction of capitalism. This relation is contradictory because while it is capital that constitutes labor in capitalism and labor that makes possible the capitalist class the relation is antagonistic – capital's goal of accumulating surplus-value can only be realized at the expense of labor. The relation is such that each class needs the other to be and cannot continue to relate to the other if it is to realize itself. The social war fought over capital's attempts to impose the commodity form and appropriate unpaid labor-time from the working class and human beings resisting their own proletarianization and battling to free time from capitalist production produces technology, such as the spinning jenny, and ideas, such as the strike and the union. Societies change because classes fight. Class struggle is the engine of social motion.

The capitalist mode of production is a totality of internal relations and co-dependent processes that are always in contradictory tension. Negations and antagonisms produce constant change and movement. In contrast with commonsensical thinking that is surprised by the dynamism of capitalist societies, materialist dialectics knows '[c]apital is not a thing, but rather a process that exists only in motion.' Capital is value in motion. It is constantly being advanced. It is forever producing commodities. It is being realized every time the commodity transforms into money. It continuously circulates back to be advanced again. A crisis occurs when the flow of value is constricted too much or stops completely.

Marx highlights the capacity of the dialectic to perceive and study motion in the postface to the second edition of Capital, volume I. It is also here that he explains the materialism of his dialectics in contrast with the idealism of Hegel. Says Marx: '[m]y dialectical method, is, in its foundation, not only different from the Hegelian, but exactly opposite to it. For Hegel ... the real world is only the external appearance of the idea. With me the reverse is true: the ideal is nothing but the material world reflected in the mind of man, and translated into forms of thought.' Marx continues: '[t]he mystification which the dialectic suffers in Hegel's hands by no means prevents him from being the first to present its general forms of motion in a comprehensive and conscious manner. With him it is standing on its head. It must be inverted.' Marx inverts the Hegelian dialectic, he stands it on its material feet, by recognizing that '[t]he mode of production of material life conditions the general process of social, political and intellectual life. It is not the consciousness of men that determines their existence, but their social existence that determines their consciousness.' The dialectic needed to be demystified, needed to be righted because 'it regards every historically developed form as being in a fluid state, in motion, and therefore grasps its transient aspects as well.' Hegel's dialectics got the idealism wrong, but its value remained the philosophy's power to understand a society constantly in flux.

Dialectics is 'in its essence critical and revolutionary.' Cleaver makes the point that part of this criticality lies in the revelation that the 'analysis of every category and phenomenon must be two-sided' because 'there are always two perspectives, capital's versus the working class's.' Moreover, each class perspective on a phenomenon is two-sided. This means that a commodity has a use-value and an exchange-value for the working class and a use-value and an exchange-value for capital. These values are contradictory. From the working-class perspective, food has the use-value of providing workers with nutrition. The exchange-value of the food commodity determines workers' access to it; with wages unchanged, the higher the exchange-value, the more limited the workers' access. From the perspective of capital, the food commodity is useful because it forces workers to labor for capital to obtain the wage needed to be able to consume it. The exchange-value of food for capital is a source of profit. The contradictions are rife. The working class needs food to live and capital 'depends on making hunger permanent among the working class' – no one would work for others if we could adequately feed ourselves. The tendency is that the working class wants a food commodity with a lower exchange-value so it can have qualitatively better nutrition. Concomitantly, capital wants a food commodity with a higher exchange-value so it can accumulate quantitatively more money. To understand how these antagonistic class values are wielded and realized, in whose interest and at whose expense, is to conduct political analysis.

Marx's labor theory of value is dialectical. It is critical. It is material. It captures fluidity. And it is relational.

A commodity is any article that 'satisfies human needs of whatever kind.' As already suggested, such useful articles have a dual character. A commodity has a use-value. Use-values are material – utility is a physical property – and qualitative. A commodity is also a bearer of exchange-value. Exchange-value is the social 'mode of expression' of an equation between two commodities and a quantitative relation; some quantity of this commodity is exchangeable for this quantity of another commodity. Exchange-values can be realized because all commodities embody a common element: value. Value is the '[s]ocially necessary labour-time ... required to produce any use-value under the conditions of production normal for a given society and with the average degree of skill and intensity of labour prevalent in that society.' When supply and demand are in equilibrium and commodities are represented as having the same exchange-value what is really being expressed is that the commodities took the same amount of socially necessary labor-time to produce.

Value is a fluid concept because the amount of labor-time socially necessary to produce a commodity changes. A change to the conditions of production – for example, the reorganization of labor-power to make it more efficient or the introduction of new technology – will reduce the labor-time socially necessary to produce a commodity, and thereby reduce the commodity's value. Any innovations that increase the productivity of labor, that speed production, reduce the value of the commodity produced by reducing the amount of labor-time objectified in it. Because labor-power is a commodity like any other in the capitalist totality, its value, too, is dependent on the socially necessary labor-time required to produce it (this is why Dunayevskaya speaks of the value theory of labor). The 'labour-time necessary for the production of labour-power is the same as that necessary for the production of means of subsistence; in other words the value of labour-power is the value of the means of subsistence necessary for the maintenance of its owner.' Extending the conceptual dynamism further, the means of subsistence determining the value of the labor-power commodity are 'themselves products of history, and depend therefore to a great extent on the level of civilization attained by a country.' Stated otherwise, 'the determination of the value of labour-power contains a historical and moral element.' As Harvey explains, 'the value of labor-power is highly variable, depending not only on physical needs but also on conditions of class struggle, the degree of civilization in the country and the history of social movements.' Ultimately, none of the factors in the labor theory of value are fixed. They are products of history, and they change.

The total value of a commodity (C) is comprised of three elements: constant capital (c), variable capital (v), and surplus-value (s). Stated algebraically, C = c + v + s. Constant capital is the value of the means of production consumed in production. A drill bit or an overhead crane is constant capital. It is what Marx calls dead labor. Variable capital, on the other hand, is the value of the labor-power commodity consumed in production. The workers on the factory floor are variable capital and their value is determined by the socially necessary labor-time required to produce their means of subsistence. This is Marx's living labor. Constant capital transfers value to the new product in the production process. It loses some value that is objectified in the new commodity. Living labor transfers and adds value to the commodity in the production process. It does not receive an equivalent for the total value it objectifies in the commodity. The increment is appropriated by the capitalist. '[S]urplus-value [s] is the difference between the value of the product [C] and the value of the elements consumed in the formation of the product, in other words the means of production [c] and the labour-power [v].' Again algebraically, s = C – (c + v). Surplus-value is what bourgeois economists fetishize as profit.