Marx’s Inconvenient Truth for Marxism and the Left

In 2003, Michael Lebowitz asked an interesting question: What Keeps Capitalism Going? What explains the persistence of an exploitative relationship in which the working class must sell their labor power to the capitalists who own the means of production. This latter group — the capitalists — have no concern for the workers, Lebowitz explains; they have only two interests in the outcome of this exchange: profits and more profits. The purchase of the worker’s labor power allows the capitalist to direct the workers in the act of production for the purpose of producing more capital; and this new capital goes back into the process of producing even more capital. According to Lebowitz this was what Marx was trying to tell us in books like Capital:

This was the central message that Marx was attempting to communicate to workers. What is capital? It  is the workers’ own product which has been turned against them, a product in the form of tools, machinery—indeed, all the products of human activity (mental and manual).

When I read this passage, I wondered why Lebowitz considers the capitalist exploitation of the worker to be the central message Marx wanted to communicate to the working class? In the 19th Century almost everyone knew labor was the source of the wealth capital produced — even bourgeois economists admitted it. The capitalist and worker engaged in constant conflict over both the division of the working day and, more importantly, over its length. Is Lebowitz suggesting working people are now too dense to understand how their companies make money? But I thought, okay, so let’s see where he is taking us with this revelation.