Library:Class Struggle: A Political and Philosophical History: Difference between revisions
mNo edit summary Tag: Visual edit |
Tag: Visual edit |
||
| Line 1: | Line 1: | ||
{{Library work|title=Class Struggle: A Political and Philosophical History|author=Domenico Losurdo|written in=2013|original language=Italian|type=Book|source=[https:// | {{Library work|title=Class Struggle: A Political and Philosophical History|author=Domenico Losurdo|written in=2013|original language=Italian|type=Book|source=[https://annas-archive.org/slow_download/d3716d0369db24b22bbce60ad704fbed/0/2 Anna's Archive]}} | ||
== Introduction: The Return of Class Struggle? == | == Introduction: The Return of Class Struggle? == | ||
| Line 128: | Line 128: | ||
== Overcoming Binary Logic: A Difficult, Unfinished Process == | == Overcoming Binary Logic: A Difficult, Unfinished Process == | ||
=== Mutilation of the Class Struggle === | |||
In its most mature formulation, the theory of ‘class struggles’ takes the form of a general theory of social conflict and theoretically reflects, whilst at the same time encouraging a multiplicity of struggles for recognition. But it is not easy to attain this vantage-point and retain it. Not infrequently, figures and movements engaged on one front do not attend to other fronts or even regard them with disdain. While he had a powerful sense of the social question, Proudhon branded the incipient feminist movement as sheerly synonymous with ‘pornocracy’, 1 and showed no sympathy for oppressed nations aspiring to shake off the yoke of tsarist autocracy! He was unable to understand the tangled skein of class contradictions: the proletarian exploited by the bourgeoisie might be a participant in the ‘first class oppression’ affecting woman; the Polish noble who oppressed his own serfs might be involved in the struggle against national oppression. | |||
Proudhon took a very narrow view of the class struggle ranging the subaltern classes against privilege and the ruling power in France. In his eyes, the protagonist of the coup d’état of December 1851 was not the inheritor, however contradictory, of the June 1848 massacre of Parisian workers, was not the one who, on the basis of the bourgeoisie’s desire to unsheathe the sword against the insurgent proletariat, ended up unsheathing it against French society as a whole, including the bourgeoisie (see Chap. 9, Sect. 2). Far from sharing Marx’s interpretation, Proudhon at times seemed fascinated by Louis Bonaparte, to the extent that immediately after the coup he wrote to a friend and noted in his diary: ‘I have reason to believe that I am regarded very favourably at the élysée … On this date, I reckon to raise the banner of the social Republic once again, in from two to three months, neither more nor less. This is a magnificent opportunity and success is almost certain’; ‘it is said that the élysée has more than once expressed a desire to address me, and that great pains have been taken to dissuade it’. 2 Marx’s verdict was bitter. He denounced Proudhon’s two ‘basenesses’—that is, ‘[h]is work on the coup d’état, in which he flirts with Louis Bonaparte and, in fact, strives to make him palatable to the French workers, and his last work, written against Poland, in which for the greater glory of the tsar he expresses moronic cynicism’. 3 In any event, the French author, who had the merit of challenging bourgeois private property, performed an anti-educative role, preaching or recommending to the working class ‘abstention from the political movement’, from the struggle against Bonapartism at home and national oppression abroad, as well as from the struggle for women’s emancipation. 4 The binary interpretation of social confl ict, which perceives only one contradiction (opposing rich and poor), does not make it possible to understand emancipatory movements, whose social basis is not formed exclusively of poor people. Concentration on the social question in France turns into a prison stamped by insular corporatism. | |||
While Proudhon harboured illusions about Louis Bonaparte, Lassalle cultivated them in Bismarck, whom he hoped to win to his cause. In arguing against the view of the state as a ‘night watchman’ of property and public order indifferent to the desperate condition of the working class, Lassalle primarily or exclusively targeted the liberal bourgeoisie. 5 Marx was not wrong to reprove him for pursuing an ‘alliance with absolutist and feudal opponents against the bourgeoisie’, 6 fl irting with someone who later promulgated ruthless anti-socialist (and anti-working class) laws. | |||
We may repeat what has already been said in connection with Proudhon. In the case of this great intellectual and charismatic agitator, commitment to the social question—more precisely, the attempt to extract gracious concessions from the existing government in the direction of a welfare state—went hand in hand with neglect of other fronts in the class struggle and a narrowly economistic view of working-class struggle itself. As we shall soon see, Lassalle did not understand the historical importance of the struggle for the abolition of black slavery in the USA. As regards France, he gave vent to odd declarations on Louis Bonaparte’s coup d’état. Having attained power, the latter had proceeded to abolish censitary discrimination, already liquidated by the February 1848 revolution, but reintroduced by the liberal bourgeoisie with the law of 30 May 1850. In the circumstances of Bonapartist dictatorship, the return to universal (male) suffrage simply meant that the poorest popular masses could participate in plebiscitary acclamation of the leader. Lassalle did not argue thus. For him, Louis Bonaparte had overthrown not the ‘republic’, but only ‘the bourgeois republic, which sought to impress the seal of the bourgeoisie, of the rule of capital, on the republican state’. 7 | |||
Similar trends to those observed in France and Germany also emerged in other countries. Engels criticized those Russian intellectuals and circles who liked to positively contrast their country (where communal property forms persisted) with France and Britain (where bourgeois private property and capitalist social polarization were now ubiquitous). There was a current of thought that argued as follows: ‘the introduction of a better order of things is greatly hindered in Western Europe by the boundless extension of the rights of the individual … in the West the individual is used to unlimited private rights. …In the West, a better system of economic relations is bound up with sacrifi ces, and that is why it is diffi cult to establish.’ 8 The view was not foreign to Alexander Herzen. For him ‘there may be a political question for Russia; but the “social question” is already solved as far as Russia is concerned’. 9 We are confronted with a populist current which (Engels observed) liked ‘to describe the Russian peasants as the true vehicles of socialism, as born communists, in contrast to the workers of the aging, decayed European West, who would fi rst have to go through the ordeal of acquiring socialism artifi cially’. Subsequently, ‘[f]rom Herzen [the] knowledge came to Bakunin, and from Bakunin to Mr. Tkachov’ that the Russian people were ‘instinctively, traditionally communist’. 10 The underestimation of the task of abolishing an ancien régime notable for its oppression of nations and women, as well as the working class, was patent. Once again, the class struggle is heavily mutilated and, even when it comes to engagement on behalf of the subaltern classes, what remains is trifl ing. | |||
=== 'Imperial Socialism' === | |||
Mutilation of class struggle can take another form: closing one’s eyes to the fate visited by capitalism on colonial peoples or peoples of colonial origin. From the outset, calling attention to the ‘millions of workers’ forced to die in India, to allow capitalists to make modest concessions to British workers, Marx underlined the connection between the colonial question and the social question in the capitalist metropolis (see Chap. 2, Sect. 3 ). This was a demanding intellectual perspective. In sharp contrast to Proudhon, Fourier was a champion of the cause of women’s emancipation. But it happened that, in the very years when Marx and Engels were expressing their hopes in the proletariat as the agency of universal emancipation with youthful hyperbole, followers of Fourier (and SaintSimon) planned to construct communities of a more or less socialist kind in Algeria, on land taken from the Arabs in a brutal, sometimes genocidal war. 11 | |||
Later, utopian socialism mostly viewed the abolitionist movement with condescension or suspicion. After the February 1848 revolution, Victor Schoelcher and the new government proceeded to the defi nitive abolition of black slavery in French colonies, almost half a century after it had been reintroduced by Napoleon, who had thereby cancelled the results of the black revolution on Santo Domingo led by Toussaint L’Ouverture and the laws emancipating blacks enacted by the Jacobin Convention. However, Etienne Cabet, an eminent representative of French utopian socialism, criticized Schoelcher for focusing on a narrow objective—the emancipation of black slaves—rather than committing himself to the universal emancipation of labour. 12 On the outbreak of the Civil War in the USA, Lassalle argued similarly, judging at least from a letter to Engels of 30 July 1862 in which Marx criticized the ‘antiquated, mouldering speculative rubbish’ of Lassalle, for whom the gigantic clash underway in the USA was ‘of no interest whatever’. Rather than developing positive ‘ideas’ for transforming society, ‘the Yankees’ confi ned themselves to mobilizing a ‘negative idea’ like ‘the freedom of the individual’. 13 For the two representatives of socialism cited here, commitment to the abolition of slavery in the colonies or the North American republic distracted attention from the social question, which remained a burning issue in the capitalist metropolis. | |||
To the American Civil War—in Marx’s view, an epic event—Lassalle made only distracted, reductive references. Because of the blockade imposed by the Union on the secessionist South, and the consequent shortage of cotton for the textile industry of Britain, and Lancashire in particular, British workers were forced into unemployment and risked having to ‘emigrate to the colonies’. It was ‘one of the most bloody and horrible wars that history has ever seen’. What was at stake in it was not touched upon. In fact, rather than the institution of slavery, Lassalle indicted ‘federalism’ and the self-government accorded states as allegedly responsible for the ‘absorption in particular interests’ and ‘mutual hatred’ of the contending parties, which were thus put on par. 14 | |||
The economistic or corporatist limitations of representatives of the labour and socialist movement were not unconnected with the initiative of the dominant classes, whose effectiveness was in fact underestimated by Marx and Engels. Having included ‘Young England’ in the ‘spectacle’ of ‘feudal socialism’ staged by ‘aristocrats’, the Communist Manifesto concluded: ‘the people, so often as it joined them, saw on their hindquarters the old feudal coats of arms, and deserted with loud and irreverent laughter’. 15 In fact, things turned out rather differently. The historically most important member of Young England was Disraeli. In him (as in the organization he joined) are to be found elements of the transfi guration of the ancien régime, but he may be regarded as the inventor of a ‘socialism’ more appropriately defi ned as ‘imperial’ than ‘feudal’. Far from meeting with derision from the popular classes, this was socialism that often enchanted and ensnared them. | |||
In the same years as The Holy Family and The German Ideology proclaimed the irreducible antagonism between proletariat and bourgeoisie, Disraeli published a novel that in its own way dealt with the same themes. We fi nd a Chartist agitator bitterly challenging the existing order and denouncing the reality of the ‘two nations’ (‘rich and poor’) into which England is divided. In the Communist Manifesto, the Chartists are included among the ‘existing working-class parties’; 16 and the agitator seems to exhibit the revolutionary consciousness attributed to the proletariat by Marx and Engels. It is interesting to observe Disraeli’s response: it made no sense to speak of ‘two nations’; a bond of ‘fraternity’ now united ‘the privileged and prosperous English people’. 17 The key word is the one emphasized by me: the English aristocracy had shelved the caste, even racial arrogance it traditionally displayed towards the popular classes; and now it was the ‘fraternal’ national English community as a whole that adopted a pose of supreme aristocratic disdain for other nations, especially colonial populations. | |||
In other words, rather than disappearing, the racialization traditionally suffered by the British popular classes was displaced. It is no accident if Disraeli, who subsequently became the author of the Second Reform Act (which extended political rights beyond the circle of the aristocracy and the bourgeoisie), and of a series of social reforms, was simultaneously the champion of imperialism and the right of the ‘superior’ races to subjugate ‘inferior’ ones. In this way, the British statesman proposed to defuse the social question and class struggle in his own country: ‘I say with confi dence that the great body of the working-class of England […] are English to the core. They are for maintaining the greatness of the Kingdom and the Empire, and they are proud of being subjects of our Sovereign and members of such an Empire.’ 18 These were the years when in France Proudhon adopted the position (according to Marx) of a ‘socialist of the Imperial period’—to be precise, the Second Empire. 19 | |||
Thus, we see a new political movement emerge. In the late nineteenth century, alluding to Napoleon III and Bismarck as well as Disraeli, a German observer spoke of an ‘imperialist social policy’ or ‘imperial socialism’ ( Imperialsozialismus ). 20 Already brought out by Marx, the connection between the colonial question and the social question in the capitalist metropolis was recognized and put at the centre of a new political project, which proposed a kind of quid pro quo: the popular masses and proletariat were invited to respond to the dominant classes’ limited social reforms with patriotism and support for colonial expansionism. | |||
=== 'Class against Class' on a Global Scale? === | |||
The quid pro quo was scornfully rejected by the artisans of the theory of class struggle. But a problem persists. A situation of relatively peaceful development and, a fortiori, a major historical crisis is characterized by a tangle of multiple contradictions and various forms of class struggle: there is no pre-established harmony between them. An adequate understanding of a concrete historical situation requires overcoming the habitual binary logic that claims to explain everything on the basis of a single contradiction. In Marx and Engels themselves, this was a difficult, unfinished process. | |||
The Condition of the Working Class in England, published in 1845, ends by evoking the imminent—in fact, already initiated—revolution of the ‘workers’ against the ‘bourgeoisie’, or ‘open, declared war of the poor against the rich’, of the ‘cottage’ against the ‘mansion’. 21 The Irish national question, to which Engels forcefully drew attention, does not seem to play any role in the impending clash. Approximately two years later, in The Poverty of Philosophy, Marx issued a kind of watchword: ‘the struggle of class against class’. 22 The Communist Manifesto clarifies its basis: ‘[o]ur epoch, the epoch of the bourgeoisie, possesses ... this distinctive feature: it has simplifi ed the class antagonisms. Society as a whole is more and more splitting up into two great hostile camps, into two great classes directly facing each other: Bourgeoisie and Proletariat’. 23 It is true that other social subjects must be taken into account, but the capitalist bourgeoisie—a handful of exploiters—becomes ever more isolated. The prospects for revolution were decidedly encouraging: the proletarians (we read in The German Ideology) constitute ‘a class which forms the majority of all members of society’. 24 Besides, adds the Manifesto, ‘entire sections of the ruling classes are, by the advance of industry, precipitated into the proletariat’. 25 | |||
In the (early) writings cited hitherto, the new revolution (set to emancipate, over and above the proletariat, humanity as a whole) ultimately breaks out from a single contradiction, opposing bourgeoisie and working class; and this new revolution is ineluctable because of the progressive, unstoppable expansion of the working-class and pro-working-class front. | |||
There were no pertinent differences between one country and another. In fact, national borders were tending to decline in importance. This is a view that found its most eloquent expression in a speech made by Engels on 9 December 1847, during a demonstration in London in favour of Polish independence. In Britain, ‘as a result of modern industry, of the introduction of machinery, all oppressed classes are being merged together into a single great class with common interests, the class of the proletariat’, more united than ever thanks to ‘this levelling of the living standards of all workers’. ‘[O]n the opposite side all classes of oppressors have likewise been united into a single class, the bourgeoisie. The struggle has thus been simplified and so it will be possible to decide it by one single heavy blow’. As to the international stage, machinery ‘has evened out the position of all workers and daily continues to do so’ everywhere, so that ‘the workers now have the same interest, which is the overthrow of the class that oppresses them—the bourgeoisie’. In sum, ‘[b]ecause the condition of the workers of all countries is the same, because their interests are the same, their enemies the same, they must also fight together, they must oppose the brotherhood of the bourgeoisie of all nations with a brotherhood of the workers of all nations’. 26 Not only does everything revolve around a single contradiction, but politics, national peculiarities, and ideological factors seem to play no role. | |||
The binary interpretation of social conflict does not fi gure only in Engels and is not even limited to the early period. It is enough to think of a very famous passage in Volume One of Capital: ‘[c]entralisation of the means of production and socialisation of labour at last reach a point where they become incompatible with their capitalist integument. This integument is burst asunder. The knell of capitalist private property sounds. The expropriators are expropriated’. 27 Four years later, in the conclusion to The Civil War in France, Marx drew up this balance-sheet: the ‘cosmopolitan blackleggism’ of the Second Empire was countered by authentic internationalism. The Paris Commune, ‘as a working men’s Government, as the bold champion of the emancipation of labour’ (to be achieved in an international framework), was ‘emphatically international’. It was no accident if ‘the Commune admitted all foreigners to the honour of dying for an immortal cause’. 28 | |||
The picture became even clearer after the repression conducted by the French bourgeoisie (with the complicity of the Prussian army) and the witch hunt (against members of the International) unleashed by the dominant classes throughout Europe: ‘[w]hile the European Governments thus testify, before Paris, to the international character of class rule, they cry down the International Working Men’s Association—the international counter-organization of labour against the cosmopolitan conspiracy of capital—as the head fountain of all these disasters’. 29 The thesis of the 'cosmopolitan conspiracy of capital’ errs in forgetting the competition and conflict between the different bourgeoisies to which the Manifesto drew attention, and in absolutizing a temporary, short-lived situation. Volume One of Capital recalls that ‘the June insurrection in Paris’ united the different bourgeois countries and ‘all fractions of the ruling classes’. 30 The observation dates from 1867. Three years later, the Franco-Prussian War broke out and in its wake emerged the Paris Commune, crushed courtesy of an understanding between the former enemies. But it was an understanding that soon gave way to chauvinistic hatred, destined to result in an ‘industrial war of extermination between nations’, the First World War. During the struggle against that carnage, the fi rst revolution to identify with Marx and Engels broke out and in its wake there developed an anti- colonial movement on a global scale, which targeted the ‘exploitation of one nation by another’ referred to by the Manifesto and contemporaneous texts, but which was totally ignored in 1871 in the wake of the contempt elicited by Franco-German collaboration in repressing the Paris Commune and the well-nigh general applause of the international bourgeoisie for the attendant massacre. | |||
In other circumstances too, a tendency emerges to interpret the revolutionary process with the binary logic of ‘class against class’. In the late 1850s, as the peasant agitation that shortly led Tsar Alexander II to abolish serfdom in Russia intensifi ed, premonitory signs of the impending civil war become ever clearer in the USA. On the night of 16–17 October 1859, John Brown, a fervent abolitionist from the North, invaded Virginia in a desperate, failed attempt to incite the slaves of the South to rise up. On 11 January of the following year, Marx wrote to Engels:<blockquote>In my view, the most momentous thing happening in the world today is the slave movement—on the one hand, in America, started by the death of Brown, and in Russia, on the other. …I have just seen in the Tribune that there’s been another slave revolt in Missouri, which was put down, needless to say. But the signal has now been given. Should the affair grow more serious by and by, what will become of Manchester? 31</blockquote>What is intimated here is a scenario of well-nigh global revolution, whose protagonist would be black slaves in the USA, serfs in Russia, and wage slaves or workers in Britain. In all three cases, it would involve revolutions from below and class struggles directly confronting their exploiters and oppressors. | |||
It scarcely needs to be said that the gap between such expectations and the actual unfolding of the historical process was considerable. In Britain, despite the fact that the Union’s naval blockade of the slaveholding states occasioned a particularly serious crisis in the textile industry, the workers condemned to unemployment did not allow themselves to be used by those sections of the ruling class which would have liked to urge them onto the streets to demonstrate against Lincoln (and in favour of war against the Union). Marx acknowledged this, although, at the same time the absence of revolution was met with disappointment and even scorn. In a letter to Engels of 17 November 1862, he scoffed at ‘the bourgeois and aristocrats [for their] enthusiasm … for slavery in its most direct form’ and at ‘the working men [for] their servile Christian nature’. 32 | |||
There was no revolution by wage slaves in the wake of a black slave revolution across the Atlantic; in fact, the latter did not materialize either. The courage and dignity with which Brown faced his trial and execution stirred great emotion in the white community and strengthened the abolitionist party. But the slaves of Virginia and the South did not propel themselves into insurrection, as Brown had hoped and, along with him, Marx and Engels, who followed events from Europe with trepidation. Not only did the desired revolution from below by black slaves not occur, but for a long time, there was no place for them in the confl ict waged from above. The call for ‘the arming of all slaves as a military measure’, made by the most radical (white) offi cers in the Northern army, and favourably highlighted by Marx, fell on deaf ears. 33 To the serious disappointment of Marx and Engels, the American Civil War mostly took the form of a typical inter-state war, waged by both sides with traditional armies. Only towards the end did the Union proceed to enrol free blacks and black slaves who, escaping their masters in the South, encountered the advancing Northern army. Overall, it may be said the Civil War resulted in a kind of abolitionist revolution, but one conducted chiefl y from above and whose protagonists were whites—primarily the statesmen and generals of the industrialized North. Marx and Engels were right to deprecate this outcome. The revolution from above proved wholly incomplete. It abolished slavery, but did not involve genuine emancipation of the blacks, who after a brief interval of inter-racial democracy were subjected to a terroristic regime of white supremacy. The point is that the expectation of a general revolt from below by black slaves, serfs and wage slaves clouded the capacity for historical prediction. | |||
The capacity was restored when Marx and Engels distanced themselves from the binary interpretation of social confl ict. Some months before Brown’s desperate endeavour, in early 1859, Marx published an article on developments in the situation in Russia, which had just suffered a serious defeat in the Crimean War (against France and Britain) and which, with Alexander II, was to abolish serfdom two years later. There was no reduction in social tension as a result. On the contrary, ‘insurrections of serfs’ had become ‘epidemic’ so that, according to the offi cial statistics from the Interior Ministry, around 60 nobles were killed every year. So determined were the serfs that they entertained the idea of exploiting the advance of French troops to unleash a large-scale revolt. 34 Here, as opposed to a general insurrection of the poor against the rich, revolution is anticipated from a conjunction of international war and internal social confl ict. We are reminded of October 1917. | |||
=== Binary Logic and the 'Self-Evidence' of Exploitation === | |||
Complementing the binary interpretation of the revolutionary process and social confl ict is a theory that seems to derive revolutionary class consciousness from direct sensory self-evidence. Capitalist society, observed The German Ideology in 1845–6, presents us with<blockquote>a class … which has to bear all the burdens of society … and forced into the sharpest contradiction to all other classes; a class which forms the majority of all members of society, and from which emanates the consciousness of the necessity of a fundamental revolution, the communist consciousness, which may, of course, arise among the other classes too through the contemplation [ Anschauung ] of the situation of this class. 35</blockquote>So intolerable are the material living conditions forced on the proletariat that they cannot but rebel and, ‘contemplating’ these, members of other social classes may be induced to challenge the existing order. In other words, sensory self-evidence imposes itself with such force that revolutionary consciousness can, in a way, be taken for granted. In the words of The Holy Family <blockquote>Since in the fully-formed proletariat the abstraction of all humanity, even of the semblance of humanity, is practically complete … since man has lost himself in the proletariat, yet at the same time has not only gained theoretical consciousness of that loss, but through urgent, no longer removable, no longer disguisable, absolutely imperative need—the practical expression of necessity—is driven directly to revolt against this inhumanity. …It cannot abolish the conditions of its own life without abolishing all the inhuman conditions of the life of society today which are summed up in its situation. It is not a question of what this or that proletarian, or even the whole proletariat, at the moment regards as its aim. It is a question of what the proletariat is, and what, in accordance with this being, it will historically be compelled to do. 36</blockquote>The strength of sensory perception entails that proletarians are largely immune from the ideological infl uences of the dominant class. In dedicating The Condition of the Working Class in England ‘to the working-classes of Great Britain’, Engels wrote: ‘[w]ith the greatest pleasure I observed you to be free from that blasting curse, national prejudice and national pride’. In fact, ‘English nationality is annihilated in the working-man’. 37 | |||
In reality, in contradictory fashion, the same text draws attention to the fact that the competition of Irish workers has ‘forced down … the wages’ of English workers. The train of recriminations and resentments can be imagined. In any event, Carlyle (a writer hitherto sympathetic to the Chartist movement) took his cue from this to paint a negative picture of the Irish. 38 Three years later, with his focus now on Central and Eastern Europe, Engels summarized the principles adhered to by the dominant classes: they ‘employ their skill and efforts to set one nation against another and use one nation to subjugate another, and in this manner to perpetuate absolute rule’. 39 Clearly, the proletariat was not immune from the chauvinist wave. The ‘obviousness’ of exploitation and, with it, the unity of the exploited class disappears so that a binary interpretation of social confl ict becomes unsustainable. | |||
All the more so because the class that is the proletariat’s antagonist is far from unifi ed. Having drawn attention to the multiple confl icts in which the bourgeoisie of each country is engaged at home and abroad, the Manifesto adds that such confl icts ‘further, in many ways, the course of development of the proletariat’. In other words, underlying the emergence and development of revolutionary consciousness is a multiplicity of confl icts; and it cannot be deduced exclusively from the antagonism between working class and bourgeoisie. 40 | |||
Hence, far from deriving from some putative sensory self-evidence, revolutionary consciousness presupposes an understanding of political and social relations extending far beyond the confl ict between bourgeoisie and proletariat. Revolutionary consciousness is confi gured as the product of the direct or indirect action of a multiplicity of social subjects and confl icts: the various factions of the bourgeoisie struggling for power within a single country; the bourgeoisie in power in different countries contesting hegemony internationally; the proletariat, which acquires ideology and political autonomy in resisting the infl uence and blandishments not only of the new ruling class, but also of the old landed aristocracy, which (as we know) seeks to seduce it with the siren songs of ‘feudal socialism’. | |||
The process of acquiring class consciousness is all the more tortuous because, in the absence of robust, stable ‘combinations’ (far from easy to form and maintain), workers, even those in large-scale industry, constitute ‘a crowd of people unknown to one another’ and ‘an incoherent mass … broken up by their mutual competition’. 41 This is not simply a matter of competition and confl ict between individuals. Later, Engels noted that in Britain unskilled workers were regarded and ‘treated with contempt’ by skilled workers. 42 Competition can even assume very bitter forms, like the ‘literal battles’ engaged in ‘every morning’ by London dockworkers hoping to be hired on a casual basis. 43 | |||
It might be said that the protagonist of such battles is the lumpenproletariat, rather than the proletariat proper. In reality, Engels speaks of ‘poor devils’ who are ‘in the borderland’ between these two classes;’ 44 and it is a very fl uid border. In fact, on closer inspection, the category of lumpen-proletariat refers to a mutable political function rather than a clearly defi ned social condition. Depending on the case, it can place itself at the service of the dominant bloc or, more rarely, let itself be drawn into the revolutionary movement. The whites in the USA, who allied with the slave-holding oligarchy, were stigmatized as a ‘mob’ and ‘white trash’— ultimately, as a lumpen-proletariat 45—on account not of their social condition (which was modest but certainly on the borderline of subsistence), but their political attitude. | |||
Later, in 1870, Engels identifi ed the ‘lumpen-proletariat of the cities’ (along with the ‘petty bourgeois’, ‘small peasants’ and ‘farm labourers’) as a possible ally of the proletariat, which continued to form a minority of the total population, and hence, could aspire to win power only if, by means of appropriate political action, it succeeded in isolating the ruling class. 46 Here, manifestly, ideological and political maturity and the politics of alliances have taken the place of the decisive role of direct sensory self- evidence and the binary reading of social confl ict and the revolutionary process. | |||
=== 'Class Struggles' or the Struggle between 'Oppressor and Oppressed'? === | |||
The shape of social confl ict is extraordinarily variegated, and its protagonists can be very diverse. However, having drawn attention to ‘class struggles’ (in their various shapes and forms) as the key to interpreting the historical process, the Communist Manifesto proceeds:<blockquote>Freeman and slave, patrician and plebeian, lord and serf, guild-master and journeyman, in a word, oppressor and oppressed, stood in constant opposition to one another, carried on an uninterrupted, now hidden, now open fi ght, a fi ght that each time ended, either in a revolutionary re-constitution of society at large, or in the common ruin of the contending classes. 47</blockquote>I have italicized the phrase which, ‘in a word’, equates ‘class struggles’ (in the plural) with the struggle (in the singular) between ‘oppressor and oppressed’. Is this summary correct? To be clearer: does this formula really encapsulate Marx and Engels’ vision of history, politics and ‘class struggles’? | |||
We should fi rst of all observe that in Marx and Engels confl icts between exploiting classes are the rule, not the exception. They explain the French Revolution primarily on the basis of the contradiction between feudal aristocracy and industrial bourgeoisie. The latter, although not forming part of the ruling bloc in the strict sense before 1789, can scarcely be included in the ranks of the ‘oppressed’. Not only did it enjoy increasing wealth and incipient social prestige. But in the factories it already exercised power over an exploited and oppressed class; in the colonies, it had no hesitation in resorting to genocidal practices. Crossing the Atlantic, if we concern ourselves with the ‘bourgeois revolution’ in America, we see that a decisive role was played in it by slave-owners and, above all, those, at odds with the London government, who were determined to expand beyond the Alleghenies and accelerate the process of expropriation and deportation (and decimation) of the Native Americans. Far from being ‘oppressed’, the protagonists of this revolt were sometimes more ferocious ‘oppressors’ than the ruling class overthrown by them. The class struggle which, on Marx and Engels’ interpretation, at any rate, determined both the revolutions we are referring to in no way coincides with the struggle between ‘oppressor’ and ‘oppressed’. Similar considerations apply to the fall or end of the ancien régime in nineteenth-century Italy and Germany. | |||
Even if we confi ne ourselves to class struggles of an emancipatory kind, the picture does not change. While it exploited and oppressed workers, when it led the revolution against the ancien régime, the bourgeoisie played an essential role in the struggle against the ‘oppressor’ to be overthrown at that time. The liberation struggles of an oppressed nation or women also witness the participation of social strata that cannot be unequivocally included in the category of ‘oppressed’. As regards the proletarian class struggle, it can sometimes count on the support—but more often must reckon with the hostility—of the sub-proletariat, which may be allied with the oppressed or, more often, the oppressor. | |||
The ambiguity is not dispelled if we confi ne ourselves to the proletariat in the strict sense. Exploited in the factory, the worker (e.g., the English worker) can be indifferent or even sympathetic to the subjugation of Ireland or India, and thus become an accomplice of the oppressor in this respect. Let us then take the Irish or Indian worker, doubly oppressed as a member of an exploited class and, at the same time, an oppressed nation. Yet he is the ‘bourgeois’ within the family, while it is the woman who represents the proletarian and is subjected to ‘domestic slavery’. Let us then take a woman who is working-class and Irish. She is trebly oppressed—in the family, in the factory, and as a member of an oppressed nation. But, within the patriarchal family, she too participates in ‘the exploitation of children by their parents’ referred to by the Manifesto , 48 to which communists are determined to put an end. | |||
In other words, each individual (and even group) is located in a contradictory set of social relations, each of which allocates him or her to a different role in each instance. Far from being based on a single ‘relation of coercion’, the world capitalist system is a tangle of multiple and contradictory ‘relations of coercion’. What determines the ultimate location of an individual (and group) in the camp of the ‘oppressor’ or of the ‘oppressed’ is the hierarchical ordering of these social relations in accordance with their political and social relevance in a determinate concrete situation, on the one hand, and the political choice of the single individual (or group), on the other. | |||
=== Exporting Revolution? === | |||
The diffi cult, unfi nished process of overcoming the binary interpretation of social confl ict also makes itself felt negatively in another respect. What are the tasks of the proletariat, once power has been won? It is enjoined by the Communist Manifesto to promote the development of the productive forces and the socialist transformation of the country governed by it. Nearly a quarter of a century later, Marx credited the Commune with being engaged in France in ‘uprooting the economical foundations upon which rests the existence of classes, and therefore of class rule’. 49 Are we dealing with a class struggle from above, whose protagonist is the proletariat in power? | |||
This is a picture that contrasts with the passage in the Manifesto which, ‘in a word’, equates class struggle with the clash between ‘oppressor and oppressed’ and, more exactly, with the insurrection of the latter against the former. On these premises class struggle becomes inconceivable after the conquest of power. The eternal antagonist of the ‘oppressor’, the victorious proletariat holding political power cannot any longer be included among the ‘oppressed’. On the other hand, if we regard proletarians in power as protagonists of a new phase of the class struggle, we shall not only have a class struggle conducted from above but one whose protagonists are not, precisely speaking, the oppressed. Such was the road taken by Lenin, and which Marx himself seems to embark on when he theorizes the ‘revolutionary dictatorship of the proletariat’. 50 But there was considerable hesitation. Perhaps because the prospect of the conquest of power was remote, and regularly frustrated by developments, the one-sided view of class struggle as an uprising by the oppressed situated below against the oppressors located above never completely disappeared. | |||
Given this presupposition, if a class struggle can be conducted by the victorious proletariat in a single country, it is the one that sees it rebel against the domination which the capitalist bourgeoisie continues to exercise in every other country and, ultimately, globally. Accordingly, it is no cause for surprise that the lesson drawn by Class Struggles in France from the repression of the workers’ revolt of June 1848 by the French bourgeoisie, and of national uprisings in Hungary, Poland, and Italy by the Austrian and Russian empires, was that the proletarian revolution would be ‘forced to leave its national soil forthwith and conquer the European terrain’ (see Chap. 2 , Sect. 6 ). Here the class struggle of the victorious proletariat seems to consist in exporting the revolution. In its way, this resolves the theoretical diffi culty mentioned above. When the whole international picture is taken into account, if they have won power in a single (isolated and surrounded) country, proletarians continue to be the ‘oppressed’ who are called upon to confront the much stronger alliance of ‘oppressors’. Still in 1850, deceiving themselves about the approach of a new revolutionary wave, Marx and Engels explained the objectives of the Communist League as follows:<blockquote>It is our interest and our task to make the revolution permanent, until all more or less possessing classes have been forced out of their position of dominance, the proletariat has conquered state power, and the association of proletarians, not only in one country but all the dominant countries of the world, has advanced so far that competition among the proletarians in these countries has ceased and that at least the decisive productive forces are concentrated in the hands of the proletarians. 51</blockquote>Having prevailed in one country, the struggle of the revolutionary class crosses state and national borders. It might be said that the ‘anachronistic and unnatural “Napoleonism”’ for which Gramsci reproached Trotsky, 52 can already be glimpsed in Marx. Especially given that, at least in his early writings, he tended to conceive socialist revolution by analogy with the bourgeois revolution. The German Ideology credits the Napoleonic occupation of Germany with having delivered powerful blows to the feudal edifi ce, ‘by cleaning out Germany’s Augean stables’. 53The Holy Family is even more emphatic, identifying Napoleon as the ultimate expression of ‘revolutionary terror’; he ‘perfected the [Jacobin] Terror by substituting permanent war for permanent revolution’. 54 Although assuming a new form, the anti-feudal class struggle and liquidation of the ancien régime continued and, in fact, assumed a European dimension. Here too the bourgeois revolution is interpreted in a binary logic, as if the only operative contradiction is that between bourgeoisie and feudal aristocracy, and as if Napoleonic expansionism did not generate profound national contradictions. In the early writings, at any rate, Marx tended to conceive the socialist revolution on the model of revolution interpreted thus. In late 1847, he addressed the British Chartists as follows:<blockquote>Of all countries, England is the one where the contradiction between the proletariat and the bourgeoisie is most highly developed. The victory of the English proletarians over the English bourgeoisie is, therefore, decisive for the victory of all the oppressed over their oppressors. Hence Poland must be liberated not in Poland but in England. 55</blockquote>National emancipation of the less developed countries of Eastern Europe is represented as a product of the initiative of the proletariat that has arrived in power in the most advanced country. | |||
Export of the revolution does not represent a problem, because the export of counter-revolution was underway or on the agenda. This applies to 1848, as to 1871, when the victorious Prussian army backed up the French bourgeoisie in suppressing the Paris Commune. As we know, on the latter occasion Marx saw the world divided in two between a globally unifi ed bourgeoisie and a proletariat urged to create an ‘international counter-organization of labour’: the different forms of class struggle were, in effect, reduced to a single form. | |||
== The Multiplicity of Struggles for Recognition and the Conflict of Liberties == | == The Multiplicity of Struggles for Recognition and the Conflict of Liberties == | ||
Latest revision as of 16:53, 16 June 2024
Class Struggle: A Political and Philosophical History | |
|---|---|
| Author | Domenico Losurdo |
| Written in | 2013 |
| Original language | Italian |
| Type | Book |
| Source | Anna's Archive |
Introduction: The Return of Class Struggle?
The Different Forms of Class Struggle
A Protracted, Positive-Sum Struggle
Class Struggles and Struggles for Recognition
Redistribution or Recognition?
Emancipatory class struggle tends to transcend the interests of the exploited and oppressed who engage in it. In view of this, the thesis that income redistribution represented the dominant paradigm for '150 years', until the 'demise of communism',1 proves extremely reductive. Has the movement that set out from the Communist Manifesto exclusively, or primarily, raised the banner of redistribution?
In fact, from its inception it engaged on all three fronts of emancipatory class struggle, on a platform that certainly includes economic demands, but which goes far beyond them. When founded, the International Working Men's Association declared itself in favour of the liberation of 'oppressed nations'. As to the political and social emancipation of women, with the defeat of their exclusion from political rights and the liberal professions, and with the end of domestic slavery, I shall confine myself to referring to something that speaks volumes. In a preface to Woman and Socialism, August Bebel, interlocutor of Engels and leader of German social-democracy, noted that his book, which had been published 30 years earlier, gone through 50 editions and been translated into 15 languages, had begun its triumphant progress thanks to the clandestine distribution undertaken by members of the socialist party outlawed by Bismarck.2 The feminist movement was bound by multiple ties to the labour movement.
If we focus on the latter, it is hard to understand its tenacious struggle to abolish censitary discrimination exclusively by reference to the paradigm of redistribution. The latter is likewise of little help when it comes to analysing the commitment of the International Working Men's Association to the emancipation of African-American slaves and Lincoln's war on the slave-holding South. The North's naval blockade of the secessionist South made it impossible to export cotton to Britain, resulting in a serious crisis in the British textile industry, mass redundancies, and reductions in working hours and already meagre wages. Even so, Marx pointed to the workers' determination to counter the measures taken by the industrialists, but especially their support for the Union's struggle to put down the slave-owners' rebellion, and their mass mobilization to prevent the British government supporting the Confederacy militarily or even diplomatically, as an expression of a mature class consciousness and celebrated it.
On closer inspection, the paradigm of redistribution is unable to even adequately explain working-class struggles at the point of production. Along with low wages or hunger, the Communist Manifesto denounces the 'despotism' practiced by the boss.3 And the chains which the workers are summoned to break at the end of that text, are, in the first instance, those of the 'slavery' imposed by bourgeois society.4 We are dealing with a struggle demanding liberty inside the factory and outside it. One thinks of the agitation, conducted clandestinely, to abolish the anti-socialist legislation enacted by Bismarck, who was targeted even though he was the initiator of the welfare state.
Dissatisfied by the paradigm of redistribution, I happen upon a text by the young Engels, used by Marx as a draft for the Communist Manifesto. Indeed, Principles of Communism, to which I am referring, suggests an alternative paradigm:
The slave is sold once and for all, the proletarian has to sell himself by the day and by the hour. Being the property of one master, the individual slave has, since it is in the interest of this master, a guaranteed subsistence, however wretched it may be; the individual proletarian, the property, so to speak, of the whole bourgeois class, whose labour is only bought from him when someone needs it, has no guaranteed existence. …The slave is accounted a thing, not a member of civil society; the proletarian is recognised [anerkannt] as a person, as a member of civil society. Thus, the slave may have a better subsistence than the proletarian, but the proletarian belongs to a higher stage of development of society and himself stands at a higher stage than the slave.5
Applied to the proletarian, the key phrase is 'recognised as a person'. Although prey to an insecurity not experienced by the slave, making survival difficult, the proletarian does not have to endure the total reification of someone regarded and treated as a commodity like all the rest. The relative economic advantages the slave might enjoy count for little or nothing compared with the first (modest) result achieved by the proletarian in his or her struggle for recognition.
The liberal tradition interprets class struggle in reductionist and vulgarly economistic terms. Relying on the conceptual couple liberty/equality, it has assigned itself jealous, disinterested love of liberty and branded its opponents as vulgar, envious souls, motivated solely by material interest and the pursuit of economic equality. This is an intellectual tradition that issues in Hannah Arendt, according to whom Marx was the theorist of 'the abdication of freedom before the dictate of necessity' and champion of the view that 'the aim of revolution' was material 'abundance', not 'freedom'.6 Concrete commitment to the emancipation of women and oppressed nations; readiness (during the American Civil War) to support the heaviest material sacrifices to help break the chains imposed on African-Americans; determination to abolish 'modern wage slavery' along with slavery proper; the daily struggle against the bosses' 'despotism' in the factory and Bismarck's legislation suppressing freedoms—all this is forgotten in an interpretation notable more for political and ideological passion (these were the years of the Cold War) than philological and philosophical rigour.
A Widespread Demand for Recognition
The summons to comprehensive class struggle issued by Marx and Engels came at a historical moment when the request—the demand—for recognition advanced by those who, in one way or another, felt themselves subject to exclusion clauses injurious to their human dignity became ever more widespread. A famous cartoon from the abolitionist campaign portrayed a black slave in chains exclaiming: 'Am I not a Man and a Brother?' It was published by the English journal Punch in 1844, the same year that Marx wrote the Economic and Philosophical Manuscripts, which are profoundly marked by an ethos of humanity and the dignity of man. Lying behind all this was the experience of the Black slave revolution on Santo Domingo in the late eighteenth century, which, in the words of its leader (Toussaint L'Ouverture) invoked 'the absolute acceptance of the principle that no man, born red [i.e. mulatto], black, or white, can be the property of another'. However modest their condition, human beings could not be 'confused with animals', as happened in the slave system.7
Even before then, Condorcet had reprehended the fact that the 'American colonist forgets that the Blacks are men; he has no moral relationship with them; for him they are simply objects of profit'.8 And, directly addressing the slaves, the French philosopher wrote as follows:
Dear friends, although I am not the same colour as you, I have always regarded you as my brothers. Nature has fashioned you to have the same spirit, the same reason and the same virtues as White men. I am only speaking here of White men in Europe, for when it comes to those in the colonies, I shall not insult you by comparing them with you … Were one to set off in search of a man on the islands of America, he would certainly not be found among those with white flesh.9
The French philosopher responded to the dehumanization of the Black slave by the White owner by excluding the culprit from the human race in principle. As we can see, the controversy revolves around inclusion, or non-inclusion, in the category of 'man': we are dealing with a struggle for recognition. Engels adopted a not dissimilar attitude when, in 1845, he analysed and denounced The Condition of the Working Class in England. Addressing English workers, whom he was 'glad and proud' to have frequented, who were 'degrade[d] … to machines' and 'worse slaves than the Negroes in America' by existing social relations, Engels exclaimed: 'I found you to be Men, members of the great and universal family of mankind', who represented 'the cause of Humanity' trampled underfoot by capitalists engaged in an 'indirect trade in human flesh', in a barely disguised slave trade.
The attitude adopted by someone about to become Marx's close and inseparable collaborator affords a kind of historical and theoretical balance-sheet of the struggle underway, whose protagonists were the subaltern classes. They had long been regarded by the dominant ideology with a contempt that was in a sense racial. An illustrious historian has observed that between 1660 and 1760 there developed in England 'an attitude towards the new industrial proletariat noticeably harsher than that general in the first half of the seventeenth century, and which has no modern parallel except in the behaviour of the less reputable of White colonists towards colored labor'.11
In reality, this was a phenomenon extending far beyond the spatial and temporal confines just indicated. It is enough to think of Edmund Burke and Emmanuel-Joseph Sieyès, who defined the wage worker as an 'instrumentum vocale' or 'bipedal machine'.12 Such oppressive and explicit dehumanization certainly fell into crisis with the French Revolution and the entry of the putative instruments of labour onto the historical stage. But it did not disappear, so that at each step of the class struggle we find the demand for recognition emerging. In June 1790, Marat had a representative of the 'unfortunates' to whom political citizenship was denied argue thus against the 'aristocracy of the rich': '[i]n your eyes, we are still scum'.13 Excluding the propertyless from political rights, declared Robespierre in April of the same year, meant seeking to expel them into a 'class of "helots"'. No less than the 'feudal aristocracy', the 'aristocracy of the rich' projected 'a certain idea of inferiority and contempt' onto members of the lower classes.14 In Paris immediately after the July Revolution, the popular newspapers, indignant at the survival of censitary discrimination and the proscription of trade-union coalitions and organization, accused the 'bourgeois nobles' of insisting on regarding workers not as 'men' but as 'machines', nothing but 'machines' required to produce solely for the 'needs' of their bosses. After the February 1848 revolution, the attainment of political rights by proletarians proved, in their view, that thanks to their struggle they were finally beginning to be elevated to the 'rank of men'.15
Finally, similar themes and accents echo in the agitation and struggle of women. In one of the very first feminist texts, Wollstonecraft accused the society of her time of regarding and treating women like 'slaves', who were 'not allowed to breathe the sharp invigorating air of freedom', or, worse, like 'gentle, domestic brutes'. In fact, the dominant culture went so far as to allude to the 'female soul' like 'that of animals'.16 However, it was 'time to restore to [women] their lost dignity': they must finally be recognized 'as rational creatures', 'as a part of the human species'.17 In the same year (1792), a French feminist, Pierre Manuel, argued in similar fashion: 'there was a time when human, male society asked itself whether women had a mind'.18 Once again, the demand for recognition emerges from such indignation. Almost a century later, it was the turn of Marx's daughter Eleanor, in her capacity as a militant in both the labour and feminist movements, to denounce the fact that in bourgeois society women, like workers, were denied 'their rights as human beings'.19 The struggle for recognition was far from over.
Hence, the summons issued by Marx and Engels had an enormous echo for a very simple reason: they proved capable of registering and elaborating, theoretically and politically, a very widespread request for recognition. The starting point may be identified in Hegel's Phenomenology of Spirit and the dialectic of lord and bondsman expounded in it. Over and above explicit references to this text, which must have been profoundly influential in Marx's intellectual formation in particular, its influence makes itself clearly felt terminologically. The Economic and Philosophical Manuscripts stress that, '[u]nder the semblance of recognising man' (Anerkennung des Menschen), political economy, bourgeois society, 'carries to its logical conclusion the denial of man'.20 The Anerkennung, or recognition, sought by the kind of modern slave represented by the wage worker did not follow the fall of the ancien régime. The same applies to the other protagonists of class struggles and struggles for recognition. We can now understand the terms in which the Manifesto addresses the bourgeoisie, who pose as champions of the 'person' and her or his dignity: 'by "individual" you mean no person other than the bourgeois, than the middle-class owner of property'.21
'Positive Humanism' and the Critique of Processes of Reification
The various social and national subjects whom we have seen demanding recognition bemoan the fact that they are not fully subsumed under the category of 'person' and 'human being'. This is the context in which to situate the young Marx's indictment of capitalist society. It inflicted severe mutilation on the proletarian, confining and isolating him in 'the abstract existence of man as a mere workman who may therefore daily fall from his filled void into the absolute void—into his social, and therefore actual, non-existence'.22 The wage worker was forced to 'sell himself and his humanity' (seine Menschheit), 'reduce[d] … to a machine', and treated like a 'horse'.23 The truth was that 'political economy knows the worker only as a working animal—as a beast reduced to the strictest bodily needs'. Notwithstanding magniloquent talk about liberty having finally been attained with the fall of the ancien régime, the social order was characterized by the oppression of a 'slave class' (Sklavenklasse).24 The following year, in 1845, Engels expressed himself in similar terms. He too was of the opinion that, along with Blacks in the American Deep South, the very workers who were free in theory were subject to de facto slavery. This signified something very precise: bourgeois society 'publicly proclaimed that proletarians are not human beings, and do not deserve to be treated as such'.25 In any event, the condition they were condemned to was not one 'in which a man or a whole class of men can think, feel, and live as human beings'. Hence, 'the workers must strive to escape from this brutalising condition'. This was only possible in and through class struggle: the worker 'can only save his [humanity] in hatred and rebellion against the bourgeoisie'.26 For the proletarian, 'fight[ing] against the bourgeoisie' ultimately meant 'fight[ing] for his [humanity]'.27 Marx and Engels did not as yet know one another, but were already speaking the same language—a language that blends an ethos of humanity with a powerful demand for recognition.
We can now understand why the young Marx indicted existing society as a negation of 'positive humanism' (positiver Humanismus) and 'fully developed humanism' (vollendeter Humanismus), of 'real humanism' (realer Humanismus).28 He formulated his revolutionary programme articulating 'the categorical imperative to overthrow all relations in which man is a debased, enslaved, forsaken, despicable being'.29 An end had to be put to a social order where man is under 'the rule of inhuman conditions and elements' and 'not yet a real species-being'.30 In Louis Althusser's view, these formulations are ideologically naive and fortunately were surpassed by the mature Marx, from roughly1845 onwards, when an 'epistemological break' supposedly occurred and humanist rhetoric, neglectful of the class struggle, was supplanted by historical materialism or, rather, the science of history.
This is a reading which, philosophically, commits the error of confusing the struggle for recognition, and for the real subsumption of the slave or semi-slave under the category of man, with an edifying humanism that ignores or represses social conflict. In reality, we have seen the young Engels enjoining the worker to 'save his humanity' in and through 'rebellion against the bourgeoisie'—that is, not with generic, vague moral appeals, but with concrete political action, with a challenge to a specific social system. And The German Ideology mocks Max Stirner for his view that 'the insurgent Negroes of Haiti and the fugitive Negroes of all the colonies wanted to free not themselves but "man"'.31 'Humanism' is 'real' insofar as it can identify and realize universality in specific struggles. To Ruge, who celebrated the 1848 revolution as 'most humane [in] its principles', Engels objected that it was such because 'these principles have arisen as a result of the glossing over of the most contradictory interests' and the conflict between proletariat and bourgeoisie. On the other hand, he repeated (in September of the same year), 'philanthropical fantasies and sentimental phrases about fraternity' served only to wipe the slate clean of 'the ferocious cruelties committed in Paris by the victors of June' and the antagonisms that were continuing to explode.32 In Marx and Engels, reference to the universal concept of man and the struggle for recognition went hand in glove with a critique of edifying humanism.
Althusser's thesis is also unconvincing in more narrowly philological terms. 'Humanist' rhetoric continues to echo strongly in the speech on free trade made by Marx in Brussels in early 1848, which condemned capitalism because it sought to reduce to a minimum the cost of 'the maintenance of this machine, called workman'.33 In its turn, the Communist Manifesto called for the overthrow of a system that slighted the human dignity of the overwhelming majority of the population. Under attack were socio-economic relations that involved the 'training to act as a machine' of proletarians, who were degraded from childhood into 'simple articles of commerce and instruments of labour', 'an appendage of the machine', of 'capital [which] is independent and has individuality, while the living person is dependent and has no personality'.34
It is true that, according to Marx's French interpreter, the Manifesto pertains to the 'transitional works', not the fully 'mature works'.35 Let us now glance at the terms in which, in 1865, Value, Price and Profit criticized the capitalist system:
Time is the room of human development. A man who has no free time to dispose of, whose whole lifetime, apart from the mere physical interruptions by sleep, meals, and so forth, is absorbed by his labour for the capitalist, is less than a beast of burden. He is a mere machine for producing Foreign Wealth, broken in body and brutalised in mind.36
We are dealing with a system, Capital maintained, which does not hesitate to sacrifice young lives that are incapable of self-defence: witness 'the extensive kidnapping of children, practised by capitalists in the infancy of the factory system, in workhouses and orphanages, by means of which robbery, unresisting material for exploitation was procured'.37 The human costs of capitalism are terrible. One thinks of the creation of the textile industry in England: the requisite raw material was procured by enclosing, and allocating to pasture, the common land that previously ensured the subsistence of large masses who, now expropriated, were condemned to hunger and desperation, so that (in Thomas More's phrase taken up by Marx) the 'sheep … eat up … the very men'.38
This was not a closed chapter of history, involving only the process of formation of capitalism. Even in its mature form, the system was marked by a hunt for profit that involved a 'Timur-Tamerlanish prodigality of human life'.39 Indeed, 'despite all its niggardliness', capitalist production is 'altogether too prodigal with its human material', 'squanders human lives' and destroys 'the life and limbs of labourers'.40 To summarize, capitalism sanctioned 'the rule of the object over the human',41 involved the transformation of workers into 'labour-power machines'(Arbeitskraftmaschinen), the conversion even of children, of 'immature human beings into mere machines for the fabrication of surplus value', without the least concern about the consequent 'moral degradation' and 'intellectual desolation'.42 Bourgeois society loved to celebrate itself as 'a very Eden of the innate rights of man', but in it 'human labour', in fact, 'mere man … [plays] a very shabby part'.43 No sooner have we turned from the sphere of circulation to the sphere of production than we observe that, far from being recognized in his dignity as a human being, the wage worker 'bring[s] his own hide to market and has nothing to expect but—a hiding'.44 If, in writing The Condition of the Working Class in England, Engels (as we have seen) denounced the 'indirect trade in human flesh' of which capitalists were guilty, Capital draws attention to the 'traffic in human flesh', similar to that in Black slaves, which continued to operate in Britain, the then model country of capitalist development and the liberal tradition.45
The critique of the dehumanizing processes inherent in capitalism reverberates even more powerfully when Marx refers to the fate of colonial peoples: with 'the rosy dawn of the era of capitalist production', Africa was turned into 'a warren for the commercial hunting of black-skins'.46 Let us now turn to Asia and the Dutch colonial empire: '[n]othing is more characteristic than their system of stealing men, to get slaves for Java', with 'men stealers [Menschenstehler] trained for this purpose'.47 Still in the midnineteenth century, we find the Black slave in the USA so dehumanized by his master as to take the form of mere 'property' like any other, the form of 'human chattel' or 'black chattel'.48 So consummate was this reduction to the status of commodity that some states specialized in 'the breeding of blacks' (Negerzucht), or—a concept that Marx repeats in English—in 'breeding of slaves'.49 Renouncing traditional 'export articles', these states 'raise[d] slaves' as 'export' commodities.50 Furthermore, the law on the return of fugitive slaves sanctioned the transformation of northern citizens into 'slave-catchers'.51 Domestic 'human livestock' was thus transformed into game, in a further escalation of the process of dehumanization.
As we can see, even in the mature writings there is a recurrence of the critical theme that reproves bourgeois society for reducing the overwhelming majority of humanity to 'machines', 'instruments of labour', 'commodities' which can be calmly squandered, to 'articles of commerce' and 'export articles', to 'chattels', to livestock to be raised, or game to be hunted, or hides to be tanned.
Denunciation of the anti-humanism of the capitalist system did not, and could not, disappear because it was at the very heart of Marx's thought. His repeated comparison between modern slavery and ancient slavery, wage slavery and colonial slavery, signifies the permanence in capitalism of the reifying process that manifests itself in all its crudity in connection with the slave proper. Scientific analysis and moral condemnation are intimately linked and this alone can explain the appeal to revolution. However faithful and pitiless, the description of existing society cannot in and of itself stimulate action to overthrow it, except via the mediation of moral condemnation; and such condemnation resounds all the more powerfully because the socio-political order analysed and indicted turns out to be responsible not merely, or not so much, for individual injustices, but for non-recognition of the human dignity of a whole social class and colonial peoples in their entirety—in other words, ultimately, the great majority of humanity.
On this basis, the creation of a new order is experienced as a 'categorical imperative', in the early and mature works alike. If the Theses on Feuerbach conclude by criticizing philosophers who are incapable of 'changing' a world where human beings are crushed and humiliated, Capital is a 'critique of political economy'—as indicated by the sub-title—in moral terms as well. The 'political economist' is criticized not only for his theoretical errors but also for his 'stoical peace of mind'—his incapacity for moral indignation at the tragedies inflicted by bourgeois society.52 This is the context in which to situate the denunciation of 'the Pharisees of "political economy"'.53 In short, it is difficult to imagine a text more charged with moral indignation than Volume One of Capital! The continuity in Marx's development is clear, and what Althusser described as an epistemological break is simply the transition to a discourse in which moral condemnation of the reifying processes inherent in bourgeois society, and of its antihumanism, is expressed more concisely and elliptically.
It is true that the French philosopher concedes the possibility of a 'revolutionary humanism'.54 But he is very hesitant on this point and thereby precludes understanding class struggles as struggles for recognition. The class struggle waged by slaves (and by colonial peoples or peoples of colonial origins), who represent the social subject prey to the most explicit, radical dehumanization, is a struggle for recognition. The class struggle waged by the proletarians of the capitalist metropolis, themselves long equated by the dominant ideology with instruments of labour or 'bipedal machines', is a struggle for recognition. The class struggle that sees women engaged in challenging, undermining or abolishing the domestic slavery to which the patriarchal family subjects them, is a struggle for recognition.
The inadequate, misleading character of the purely economistic reading of Marx's theory of conflict is now clear. What is at stake in class struggle? Subjugated peoples, the proletariat and subaltern classes, women enduring domestic slavery—these very different subjects can advance the most varied demands: national liberation; abolition of slavery proper and the conquest of the most basic forms of freedom; better living and working conditions; the transformation of property and production relations; an end to domestic segregation. Just as its subjects vary, so does the content of class struggle. However, we can identify a lowest common denominator. On the economico-political level, it comprises the objective of altering the division of labour (internationally, inside the factory or family); on the politico-moral level, that of overcoming the dehumanizing and reifying processes which characterize capitalist society—the objective of achieving recognition.
The Contractual Paradigm and Justification of the Existing Order
The presence of the paradigm of the struggle for recognition, Hegelian in origin, is tangible. The other philosophical paradigms in circulation proved to be exhausted and inadequate given the contours of socio-political conflict in those years. To popular demands for the right to life and dignified human existence, the ruling classes replied as follows: however low the level of wages, they are the fruit of a freely negotiated contract; as for the unemployed and invalids, no contract requires them to be afforded aid and to claim or invoke it exhibits the mentality of a slave (who expects subsistence from his master), not a free man, who knows how to take Class Struggles and Struggles for Recognition responsibility for his free choices and their consequences.55 In 1845, having underscored that in the factory the capitalist posed as 'absolute lawgiver', and an arbitrary one, Engels referred to the argument with which 'the Justice of the Peace, who is a bourgeois himself', recommended resignation and obedience to the worker: '[y]ou were your own master, no one forced you to agree to such a contract if you did not wish to; but now, when you have freely entered into it, you must be bound by it'.56 At the heart of Capital is precisely the critique of the contractual paradigm: 'the isolated labourer, the labourer as "free" vendor of his labour power, when capitalist production has once attained a certain stage, succumbs without any power of resistance'.57 That is why Marx regarded legal regulation of working hours as a measure to prevent workers from selling themselves as slaves in a 'voluntary contract with capital' (see Chap. 2, Sect. 7). The tendentially slave-like logic of the contract could be checked only by class struggle, trade-union action, and working-class politics, and state intervention demanded by the working class.
On the other side, capitalists condemned attempts to regulate working hours and practices as a violation of freedom of contract, whether hailing from above (via industrial relations legislation) or below (via trade-union action). Indeed, reference to contract and the free, unimpeded operation of the labour market also served to justify the proscription of coalitions and trade-union organization—'enlarged monopolies', in Adam Smith's definition,58 which illegitimately prevented free, individual contracting of the terms of labour. From Burke's viewpoint, the only contract that could be regarded as genuinely free and valid was one made in the absence of any 'combination or 'collusion' (the allusion to, and support for, the Combination Acts, which outlawed and penalized working-class coalitions, is manifest).59
This was a highly dynamic ideologeme. Passed in the USA in 1890, the Sherman Anti-Trust Act was especially, and very effectively, deployed against workers guilty of combining in union 'monopolies' disrespectful of individual initiative and liberty. By contrast, contracts whereby, on being hired, workers and employees pledged (were compelled to pledge) not to join any trade-union organization, were long regarded as perfectly legal. From the standpoint of legislators and the dominant ideology, the clauses of the contract respected the rules of the market and individual liberty.60
To confirm its unsuitability for the emancipatory struggle of the working class, let us glance at the history of the contractualist paradigm. Hugo Grotius employed it to explain and justify the institution of slavery. A prisoner of war at the victor's mercy, or a poor wretch on the point of dying of starvation, was committed to serving his master unremittingly; by virtue of an implicit or explicit contract, both were guaranteed subsistence in exchange. Reference to the contract served to legitimate slavery. In a theorist of contractualism like John Locke, we read that the plantation owners in the West Indies own 'slaves or horses' on the basis of legal 'purchase'—that is, 'by bargain or money'.61 In the mid-nineteenth century, the slave-owners in the American South argued in the same way—something to which Marx indignantly drew attention in Capital: 'the slave-owner buys his labourer as he buys his horse',62 in accordance with a legal contract.
In addition to legitimizing slavery in the strict sense, the contractualist paradigm was invoked to counter the struggle against more or less servile labour relations. In France, Sieyès proposed to transform the 'slavery of need', afflicting the poor and miserable, into a 'servile engagement' (engageance serve), into a 'legally sanctioned slavery', in accordance with the model adopted in America for White indentured servants, who were in fact semi-slaves, often subject to purchase and sale (like black slaves). It might be objected that the servant 'loses part of his liberty'. But Sieyès had a ready reply: '[i]t is more accurate to say that, when the contract is drawn up, far from being impeded in his liberty, he exercises it in the way that best suits him; any agreement is an exchange whereby each likes what he receives more than what he surrenders'. It was true that, for the duration of the contract, the servant could not exercise the liberty ceded by him. But it was a general rule that the liberty of an individual 'never extends to the point of harming others'.63 Historically, the French author ended up being right in a way. Following the abolition of slavery in the colonies, Britain was concerned to replace the Blacks, ensuring a flow of indentured servants from Africa and Asia: hence, the Indian and Chinese 'coolies', subject to a slavery or semi-slavery that was legitimated and edulcorated by a 'contract'.
As we can see, the idea of the contract can be invoked, and historically has been, to legitimize very different social relations, including those destructive of liberty. Attempts have been made to remedy such formalism by underlining that not everything can be subject to contract or sale and purchase. In Kant's words, 'any pact of servile submission is in and of itself null and void; a man can only lease out his own labour', and only do so in adhering to the 'imprescriptible duty' to safeguard 'his own human determination with respect to the [human] race'. Hence, more or less masked slavery or semi-slavery was precluded, like any social relation that 'degrades humanity'. 'The personality is not alienable' and hence, a social relation in which the servant 'is a thing, not a person' (est res, non persona)', was inadmissible.64 Accordingly, states Hegel's Philosophy of Right in its turn, '[t]hose goods, or rather substantial determinations, which constitute my own distinct personality and the universal essence of my self-consciousness are … inalienable'.65
In his argument against the economic liberals of the time, T.H. Green, a left-Hegelian, drew on this tradition and lesson in Britain in the second half of the nineteenth century.66 They condemned state regulation of working hours in factories, and of female and juvenile labour, in the name of 'freedom of contract'—freedom construed exclusively as noninterference in the private sphere by political power. Green was fully aware of this ideological campaign, which witnessed successive interventions by Herbert Spencer, Lord Acton, and others: 'the most pressing political questions of our time are questions of which the settlement, I do not say necessarily involves an interference with freedom of contract, but is sure to be resisted in the sacred name of individual liberty'. Green objected to the liberal ideologues of his time as follows:
We condemn slavery no less when it arises out of a voluntary agreement on the part of the enslaved person. A contract by which anyone agreed for a certain consideration to become the slave of another we should reckon a void contract. Here, then, is a limitation upon freedom of contract which we all recognise as rightful. No contract is valid in which human persons, willingly or unwillingly, are dealt with as commodities….67
The argument previously used to refute contractualist justifications of slavery (and more or less servile labour relations) was now employed to challenge the most odious aspects of what, in Marx and Engels' view, amounted to 'present enslavement'.
However, what might be characterized as the dual formalism of the contractualist paradigm was not thereby overcome. In fact, it was further confirmed. The contract invoked can comprise and legitimize the most diverse and conflicting contents (bearing the stamp of freedom or of serfdom). Above all, it is not clear who the contracting parties are. For centuries the market in the liberal West involved the presence of chattel slavery: in the past, the ancestors of today's Black citizens were commodities to be bought and sold, not autonomous consumers; they were the objects, not the subjects, of purchase contracts.
On the other hand, insistence on the existence of inalienable goods (or determinations), which the individual cannot renounce even should she wish to; insistence on the existence of goods (or determinations) that cannot in any circumstances be subject to purchase and contract, because they are inseparable from the nature or dignity of human beings—all this signals the transition from the contractualist paradigm to the natural law paradigm.
The Shortcomings of the Natural Law Paradigm
Nor was the natural law paradigm equipped to further the emancipatory 'class struggles' theorized by Marx and Engels. It betrayed its problematic and inadequate character as early as its triumph, when it inspired the Declaration of the Independence of the United States of America in 1776 and, thirteen years later, the Declaration of the Rights of Man and the Citizen in France. The first of these solemn documents proclaimed that 'all men are created equal' and were the bearers of 'unalienable rights'. With even greater eloquence, the second paid tribute to the 'natural, inalienable and sacred rights of man' and affirmed that 'neglect and scorn for the rights of man are the sole cause of public calamities and the corruption of rulers'. But this did not prevent slavery from flourishing in the USA (where the post of President was held by slave-owners for 32 of the country's first 36 years of existence) and in France's colonies.
A violent crisis erupted over slavery in the French colony of Santo Domingo as early as 1791 and the years of Marx and Engels' intellectual formation saw the civil war that eventually erupted in the USA brewing. In both cases, the problem was the same: were Blacks to be counted among the bearers of natural, inalienable rights? The answer was far from self-evident. Grotius, who employed the contractualist paradigm, but who in general is rightly regarded as the father of natural law theory, had no difficulty in justifying the institution of slavery. Although resorting to the natural law paradigm, the principal authors of the Declaration of Independence and the 1787 US Constitution were Thomas Jefferson and James Madison, respectively, both of them slave-owners. The verdict of Engels' Anti-Dühring is readily intelligible: 'the American constitution, the first to recognise the rights of man, in the same breath confirms the slavery of the coloured races existing in America'.68
What happened in France is especially significant. A particular opponent of the Declaration of the Rights of Man was Pierre-Victor Malouet, a plantation- and slave-owner subsequently in the forefront (with the Massiac club) of the struggle against abolitionist plans. When he spoke in the National Assembly on 2 August 1789, he cautioned against the incendiary impact that the discourse of the rights of man might have on the 'immense multitude of propertyless men', engaged as they were in an arduous struggle for 'subsistence' and inclined to be angered by the 'spectacle of luxury and opulence'.69 No reference was made to slaves. In other words, for Malouet Black slaves could unquestionably not be included among the bearers of the rights of man; there was a danger that such rights would be invoked by the menu people of Paris, not the human livestock of Santo Domingo.
What sparked the second serious critical moment for the natural law paradigm was the feminist movement, which began to take shape in France in wake of the overthrow of the ancien régime. Declining in the feminine the rights of man and the citizen proclaimed by the French Revolution, Olympe de Gouges elaborated her Declaration of the Rights of Woman and the Female Citizen in 1791, the same year as the Black slave revolt on Santo Domingo. Once again, we are referred to a problem with which we are familiar: is woman to be included among the bearers of natural, inalienable rights? Here too the answer was far from self-evident, as demonstrated by the tragic fate of Gouges, who was guillotined in 1793, at a time when a convinced supporter of the natural law paradigm—Robespierre—was in power. By contrast, the Jacobin leader had no difficulty in appealing to this paradigm when, even before sanctioning the abolition of Black slavery, he proclaimed 'the political rights of men of colour' and demanded respect for the 'rights of humanity' in their case too.70
Over and above this exemplary sequence of events, in the liberal tradition the exclusion of women, along with children and minors, from political rights was long regarded as obvious. Both cases involved calmly registering a lack of the maturity required to participate in political life. In Marx and Engels' view, this confirmed that the appeal to natural, inalienable rights in the natural law tradition was not a suitable instrument for genuinely challenging Black slavery, wage slavery, or female domestic slavery, and supersession of the view of its victims as 'mere instruments of production'.
Finally, the third moment in the crisis of the natural law model comprises the labour movement's entry onto the stage of history. Marx dwelt at some length on the French law of June 1791 that outlawed workers' coalitions as an 'attack on liberty and the Declaration of the Rights of Man'. The proposer, Isaac R.G. Le Chapelier, acknowledged that workers in effect found themselves in a 'state of absolute dependence due to the want of the necessities of life, which amounts to slavery'. Yet, he considered the protection of a right of man, which the nascent trade unions sought to obstruct, to be the priority.71 What emerges ever more clearly is what the natural law banner was raised for by the opposing parties and classes. The popular masses demanded the right to existence, defined by Robespierre as the first of the 'imprescriptible rights of man'.72 It should be guaranteed by the intervention of political power in existing property relations. However, such intervention was immediately branded as an intolerable violation of the natural right to peaceful enjoyment of property by the affluent classes. On the basis of this final position, we can understand the balance-sheet drawn up by The Holy Family: 'the recognition of the rights of man by the modern state has no other meaning than the recognition of slavery by the state of antiquity had'.73 Or, to cite On the Jewish Question, 'the practical application of man's right to liberty is man's right to private property'; and this in turn was the 'right of man' to 'enjoy [his] property and to dispose of it at [his] discretion … without regard to other men' (e.g., the slaves or semi-slaves whose existence Le Chapelier himself was compelled to note).74
Like the contractualist paradigm, the natural law paradigm suffers from a dual formalism. The category of rights of man can subsume different conflicting contents: the right of the property-owner to enjoy and dispose of his property at will; or, on the contrary, the right to a dignified life or existence, to be realized through the intervention of political power in existing property relations—that is, by means of intervention which is a patent violation of the rights of man in the property-owner's eyes. But the more serious formalism is the second one, which concerns the figure of the bearer of the rights of man: which social subjects are really encompassed by this figure? Locke, a foremost representative of contractualism, raised no objection to the figure of the Black slave, who thus is the object, not the subject, of the contract. Grotius, father of natural law theory, likewise did not challenge the figure of the Black slave, who thus is not included among the bearers of inalienable rights—in fact, can be the object of the inalienable right to property and the untrammelled enjoyment of property by free citizens. An example from history serves to illustrate the problem. In the USA, recently, created in the wake of rebellion fuelled by ideological motifs derived from contractualism and natural law theory, Virginia and other states rewarded veterans of the War of Independence with land and Black slaves.75
Not being a signatory to the contract or the bearer of inalienable rights, the slave aspiring to freedom could not appeal either to contractualism or natural law. In other words, both paradigms wrongly take the main thing for granted, take as read what is in fact the result of a protracted struggle sometimes so bitter as to take the form of armed struggle. This 'presupposition' is the recognition that occurs between the signatories of the contract or the bearers of inalienable rights—more precisely, between those who mutually recognize one another as signatories of the contract or bearers of inalienable rights.
Hegel, Marx and the Paradigm of the Struggle for Recognition
Hence, we must base ourselves on the struggle for recognition. If we confine ourselves to the capitalist metropolis, the proletarian struggle promoted by Marx and Engels goes far beyond the existing distribution of income, targeting the dehumanizing processes constitutive of capitalist society. Moreover, it is not possible to make a clear distinction between the struggle for redistribution and the struggle for recognition. A man who risks dying of starvation, observes Hegel in Elements of the Philosophy of Right, is reduced to a condition of 'forfeit[ing] all his rights',76 a condition, in other words, which is akin to the slave's; and what defines the figure of the slave is non-subsumption under the universal concept of man, non-recognition as a man.
But is Hegel's influence on Marx and Engels clearly documented? Paradoxically, the presence of the Hegelian paradigm of the struggle for recognition manifests itself with particular clarity in connection with the relationship not between empirical individuals, but between peoples—in connection, that is, with a context which Hegel did not explicitly consider when he developed his analysis of the struggle for recognition. We shall see that on several occasions Marx and Engels asserted that 'a nation cannot be free and at the same time oppress other nations'. We are immediately reminded of the Phenomenology of Spirit, which summarizes the result of the dialectic of lord and bondsman thus: 'they recognize themselves as mutually recognizing one another'. Or, in the words of the Encyclopaedia (§431Z), 'I am truly free only when the other is free as well and is recognized as free by me'.77
To appreciate the salience in Marx of the theme of the struggle for recognition, we must bear in mind that it is elaborated in Hegel in two different terminologies. We have already encountered the first. We must now examine the second, which is more elliptical and starts out from an important distinction formulated in the Science of Logic. It is necessary to distinguish between 'simple negative judgement', which negates a specific, limited predicate of a subject (this rose is not red), and 'negative infinite judgement', which, instead of an individual predicate or predicates, negates the subject as such (this is not a rose). In other words, while the negative infinite judgement negates the genus (the rose as such), the simple negative judgement only negates the species, the specific determination (the red colour of the rose). The logical distinction can also be of help when it comes to analysing social relations. 'Civil litigation', which occurs, for example, during a dispute between the inheritors of a particular property, is one thing, stresses Hegel. The person who goes to law because she has suffered a wrong is the victim of a simple negative judgement: what has been violated is 'only this particular right', not 'right as such', not the 'judicial capacity of a determinate person'. Criminal law, which is the sphere of the application of negative infinite judgement, is very different. Crime in the strict sense also negates the universal, the 'judicial capacity' of the victim, who is not recognized as a rights-bearing subject and, ultimately, is not included in the category of man. The genus negated in the negative infinite judgement represented by crime is the genus 'man', while in the simple negative judgement of civil litigation what is called into question is the species, the specific determination on the basis of which a person is recognized as the owner of a determinate property. Not including the victim in the genus 'man', crime cancels recognition of the other.
In Hegel's view, an 'infinite negative judgement' is pronounced on the slave—an 'infinite negative judgement' in its all its plenitude, in an 'infinity' that is wholly adequate to the 'concept': the negation of recognition has reached its apex. That is why slavery may be regarded as the 'absolute crime', a crime which is in a sense even worse than murder. In the latter instance, the negation of recognition and of the universal concept of man, although it has a fatal result, is nevertheless consummated in an instant. By contrast, slavery represents a negation of recognition and a reification that become an uninterrupted daily practice. In his turn, the hungry man who risks starving to death, and who is reduced to a condition of 'total lack of rights' can be compared to the slave. He too suffers an infinite negative judgement, which cancels his recognition or renders it impossible. This is not a question of isolated or individual cases. Against the mass of those who live in conditions of extreme destitution is 'pronounced the [negative] infinite judgement of crime'. Ultimately, they are no longer recognized as rights-bearing subjects, are no longer recognized as human beings.78
Hegel himself juxtaposes the two terminologies. Having observed that an awareness that 'slavery is absolutely contrary to right' is the mandatory starting-point for a correct orientation in the debate on slavery, Elements of the Philosophy of Right refers to the pages on the struggle for recognition in the Phenomenology and the Encyclopaedia on the one hand, while on the other it stresses that the institution of slavery is in contradiction with 'the concept of the human being as spirit'and 'the ineligibility of the human being in and for himself for slavery'.79 The ethos of the universal concept of man and the struggle for recognition blend into one.
Both these terminologies occur in the young Marx. Let us first look at On the Jewish Question, which criticizes bourgeois-civil society in these terms: in it the individual 'regards other men as a means', but in so doing 'degrades himself into a means'.80 We already know how Hegel's Encyclopaedia describes the struggle for recognition: 'I am truly free only when the other is free as well and is recognized as free by me'. In the words of the young Marx, I cease to be a 'means', and am recognized as a man and a free man, only when I refuse to degrade other men to a simple 'means'. The thesis, stated many times by Marx and Engels, that the alienation and reification imposed on the proletariat by the bourgeoisie end up investing the dominant class itself, can be situated in the same context (see Chap. 3, Sect. 4). It is the viewpoint of The Holy Family, which also employs the second type of terminology, when it identifies the watchword of égalité as 'the French expression for the unity of human essence [menschliche Wesenseinheit], for man's consciousness of his species and his attitude towards his species [Gattungsbewusstsein und Gattungsverhalten], for the practical identity of man with man, i.e., for the social or human relation of man to man'.81 Celebration of the human race and its unity is tantamount to condemnation of the non-recognition suffered by a huge mass of human beings in bourgeois society.
The basic thing about the paradigm of recognition, then, is this: it does not take for granted the subject from which the paradigms of the contract and rights of man start out uncritically, as if it were an immediate, incontrovertible datum. And the same might be said of the paradigms of 'praxis' and 'communicative action' favoured by Arendt and Habermas, respectively. There too the main thing is ignored: determination of the subject regarded as signatory to the contract or bearer of human rights, or participant in praxis or communicative action, has been at the centre of centuries-long struggles against exclusion clauses aimed at colonial peoples, subaltern classes, and women. The cancellation of the exclusion clauses is the result of a painful historical process and a protracted struggle for recognition. Social conflict is at the same time a struggle for recognition; the general theory of social conflict is at the same time a general theory of the struggle for recognition.
The Struggle for Recognition and the Conquest of Self-Esteem
Nevertheless, the Hegelian model undergoes some alteration. In Marx and Engels' view, wage slaves take the first step in the struggle for recognition by forging relations with one another. Nietzsche and Bentham respectively refer to the proletariat and subaltern classes as a 'barbaric caste of slaves' and a tribe of 'savages'. The victims of the capitalist system begin to shake off the sense of culpability, and consequent lack of self-esteem, with which the dominant ideology saddles them, when, overcoming isolation, they engage in a joint struggle and in building organizations to foster it. Regardless of subsequent developments, this merger is a result of decisive importance. Coming into contact with one another, the members of a class that is not only 'oppressed', but also (stresses Engels) 'calumniated', begin to get to know themselves and to shake off the denigration and self-denigration impressed on them by the dominant class.82 At this point, repeats the young Marx of the Economic and Philosophical Manuscripts, there emerges 'a new need—the need for society', so that '[a]ssociation, society and conversation' become an 'end' in themselves.83 In the words of The Poverty of Philosophy, 'the maintenance of association becomes even more necessary to [the workers] than that of wages. It is so true that English economists are amazed to see the workers sacrifice a good part of their wages in favour of associations, which, in the eyes of these economists, are established solely in favour of wages'.84 Wage demands have become less important than trade-union combination or the workers' political party, and not only because the latter confer regularity and strategic depth on the struggle for wages. Combination as such is an initial major victory won by the workers.
Organization of the struggle and the struggle itself then intervene to consolidate it. Many years later, in two letters to Eduard Bernstein and Laura Lafargue, dated 22 and 29 August 1889 respectively, Engels referred to a strike organized by casual workers on the London docks and explained the reasons for his enthusiasm:
Hitherto the East End had been in a state of poverty-stricken stagnation, its hallmark being the apathy of men whose spirit had been broken by hunger, and who had abandoned all hope. Anyone who found himself there was lost, physically and morally. …Because of the lack of organisation and the passively vegetable existence of the real East End workers, the lumpen proletariat has hitherto had last say there, purporting, and indeed being held, to be the prototype and representative of the million starvelings in the East End.
Now, following 'this gigantic strike of the most demoralised elements of the lot', everything had changed:
They are as you know the most miserable of all the misérables of the East End, the broken down ones of all trades, the lowest stratum above the Lumpenproletariat. That these poor famished broken-down creatures who bodily fight amongst each other every morning for admission to work, should organise for resistance, turn out 49-50,000 strong, draw after them into the strike all and every trade of the East End in any way connected with shipping, hold out above a week, and terrify the wealthy and powerful Dock Companies—that is a revival I am proud [to have lived to see].85
First the coming together of the members of the 'oppressed and calumniated' class, and then their organization for class struggle and the actual class struggle—these preliminary moves altered the picture radically. Poverty was far from having disappeared and material living conditions had not yet improved. But the 'barbarians' and 'savages' had ceased to be such, because they had mutually recognized one another as members of an exploited and oppressed class, called upon to achieve its emancipation through struggle.
The Struggle for Recognition: From Individuals to Peoples
A second alteration occurs in the paradigm of the struggle for recognition: its presence in Marx and Engels emerges with particular clarity in connection with the relations between peoples. We thus witness an extension of the paradigm and its application in a context not explicitly considered by Hegel. In terms of the paradigm of the struggle for recognition, the individual is genuinely free only when he or she recognizes and respects the other as a free individual. The same consideration is reiterated by Engels as regards the relations between peoples. In later 1847, during a London demonstration of solidarity with Poland, he proclaimed: 'a nation cannot become free and at the same time continue to oppress other nations. The liberation of Germany cannot therefore take place without the liberation of Poland from German oppression'.86 A few months after the outbreak of the revolution, Engels called upon Germany to put an end both to the oppression it suffered at the hands of absolutist monarchy and the ancien régime and to the oppression that it inflicted on Poland in particular: 'Germany will liberate herself to the extent to which she sets free neighbouring nations'.87
This was not simply an appeal to the German people not to let themselves be engulfed by chauvinism, but to identify their own cause with that of the Polish people. It was also intended to have an analytical significance, as emerges from the position adopted by Marx and Engels in 1875 during another solidarity demonstration with Poland: '[n]o one can enslave a people with impunity'. The consequences for Prussia-Germany, one of the three protagonists in the partitioning of the unhappy country, were manifest: 'we have enemies everywhere, we have encumbered ourselves with debts and taxes in order to maintain countless masses of soldiers who must also serve to suppress the German workers'.88
The dialectic also manifested itself in other geographical areas and political contexts. In 1869, Engels observed that 'Irish history shows what a misfortune it is for one nation to subjugate another'.89 Such is also the recurrent guiding thread of Marx's analysis of the Irish question. The British working class's inability to solidarize with an oppressed people reinforced the rule of the aristocracy and bourgeoisie at home as well: '[a]ny people that oppresses another people forges its own chains'. The 'enslavement of Ireland' prevented 'the emancipation of the English working class' and the 'big standing army' on hand to control and silence the rebel island also impacted on the proletariat of the dominant nation and, in fact, on British society as a whole.90
Finally, the dialectic we are referring is graphically illustrated in a famous page of Capital. Originating in the East, opium found its way into London and other industrial cities. It served to deaden the hunger pangs of working-class families, to stifle the cries of famished children, and sometimes even became an instrument of 'ill-disguised infanticide'; infants "shrunk up into little old men" or "wizened like little monkeys"'. Taking these horrific details from official reports, Marx comments: '[w]e here see how India and China avenged themselves on England'.91 By virtue of a kind of lex talionis, non-recognition of the Chinese people ends up having consequences for the country that is the protagonist of colonial oppression and the Opium Wars.
On closer examination, the history of the West as a whole can be interpreted in the light of the principle that a people which oppresses another people is not free. In the twentieth century, the totalitarian domination and genocidal practices running from top to bottom of the colonial tradition erupted in the very continent where this historical sequence started, in the wake of Hitler's attempt to build a continental empire in Eastern Europe, subjugating, decimating and enslaving the 'natives' who inhabited it.
Overcoming Binary Logic: A Difficult, Unfinished Process
Mutilation of the Class Struggle
In its most mature formulation, the theory of ‘class struggles’ takes the form of a general theory of social conflict and theoretically reflects, whilst at the same time encouraging a multiplicity of struggles for recognition. But it is not easy to attain this vantage-point and retain it. Not infrequently, figures and movements engaged on one front do not attend to other fronts or even regard them with disdain. While he had a powerful sense of the social question, Proudhon branded the incipient feminist movement as sheerly synonymous with ‘pornocracy’, 1 and showed no sympathy for oppressed nations aspiring to shake off the yoke of tsarist autocracy! He was unable to understand the tangled skein of class contradictions: the proletarian exploited by the bourgeoisie might be a participant in the ‘first class oppression’ affecting woman; the Polish noble who oppressed his own serfs might be involved in the struggle against national oppression.
Proudhon took a very narrow view of the class struggle ranging the subaltern classes against privilege and the ruling power in France. In his eyes, the protagonist of the coup d’état of December 1851 was not the inheritor, however contradictory, of the June 1848 massacre of Parisian workers, was not the one who, on the basis of the bourgeoisie’s desire to unsheathe the sword against the insurgent proletariat, ended up unsheathing it against French society as a whole, including the bourgeoisie (see Chap. 9, Sect. 2). Far from sharing Marx’s interpretation, Proudhon at times seemed fascinated by Louis Bonaparte, to the extent that immediately after the coup he wrote to a friend and noted in his diary: ‘I have reason to believe that I am regarded very favourably at the élysée … On this date, I reckon to raise the banner of the social Republic once again, in from two to three months, neither more nor less. This is a magnificent opportunity and success is almost certain’; ‘it is said that the élysée has more than once expressed a desire to address me, and that great pains have been taken to dissuade it’. 2 Marx’s verdict was bitter. He denounced Proudhon’s two ‘basenesses’—that is, ‘[h]is work on the coup d’état, in which he flirts with Louis Bonaparte and, in fact, strives to make him palatable to the French workers, and his last work, written against Poland, in which for the greater glory of the tsar he expresses moronic cynicism’. 3 In any event, the French author, who had the merit of challenging bourgeois private property, performed an anti-educative role, preaching or recommending to the working class ‘abstention from the political movement’, from the struggle against Bonapartism at home and national oppression abroad, as well as from the struggle for women’s emancipation. 4 The binary interpretation of social confl ict, which perceives only one contradiction (opposing rich and poor), does not make it possible to understand emancipatory movements, whose social basis is not formed exclusively of poor people. Concentration on the social question in France turns into a prison stamped by insular corporatism.
While Proudhon harboured illusions about Louis Bonaparte, Lassalle cultivated them in Bismarck, whom he hoped to win to his cause. In arguing against the view of the state as a ‘night watchman’ of property and public order indifferent to the desperate condition of the working class, Lassalle primarily or exclusively targeted the liberal bourgeoisie. 5 Marx was not wrong to reprove him for pursuing an ‘alliance with absolutist and feudal opponents against the bourgeoisie’, 6 fl irting with someone who later promulgated ruthless anti-socialist (and anti-working class) laws.
We may repeat what has already been said in connection with Proudhon. In the case of this great intellectual and charismatic agitator, commitment to the social question—more precisely, the attempt to extract gracious concessions from the existing government in the direction of a welfare state—went hand in hand with neglect of other fronts in the class struggle and a narrowly economistic view of working-class struggle itself. As we shall soon see, Lassalle did not understand the historical importance of the struggle for the abolition of black slavery in the USA. As regards France, he gave vent to odd declarations on Louis Bonaparte’s coup d’état. Having attained power, the latter had proceeded to abolish censitary discrimination, already liquidated by the February 1848 revolution, but reintroduced by the liberal bourgeoisie with the law of 30 May 1850. In the circumstances of Bonapartist dictatorship, the return to universal (male) suffrage simply meant that the poorest popular masses could participate in plebiscitary acclamation of the leader. Lassalle did not argue thus. For him, Louis Bonaparte had overthrown not the ‘republic’, but only ‘the bourgeois republic, which sought to impress the seal of the bourgeoisie, of the rule of capital, on the republican state’. 7
Similar trends to those observed in France and Germany also emerged in other countries. Engels criticized those Russian intellectuals and circles who liked to positively contrast their country (where communal property forms persisted) with France and Britain (where bourgeois private property and capitalist social polarization were now ubiquitous). There was a current of thought that argued as follows: ‘the introduction of a better order of things is greatly hindered in Western Europe by the boundless extension of the rights of the individual … in the West the individual is used to unlimited private rights. …In the West, a better system of economic relations is bound up with sacrifi ces, and that is why it is diffi cult to establish.’ 8 The view was not foreign to Alexander Herzen. For him ‘there may be a political question for Russia; but the “social question” is already solved as far as Russia is concerned’. 9 We are confronted with a populist current which (Engels observed) liked ‘to describe the Russian peasants as the true vehicles of socialism, as born communists, in contrast to the workers of the aging, decayed European West, who would fi rst have to go through the ordeal of acquiring socialism artifi cially’. Subsequently, ‘[f]rom Herzen [the] knowledge came to Bakunin, and from Bakunin to Mr. Tkachov’ that the Russian people were ‘instinctively, traditionally communist’. 10 The underestimation of the task of abolishing an ancien régime notable for its oppression of nations and women, as well as the working class, was patent. Once again, the class struggle is heavily mutilated and, even when it comes to engagement on behalf of the subaltern classes, what remains is trifl ing.
'Imperial Socialism'
Mutilation of class struggle can take another form: closing one’s eyes to the fate visited by capitalism on colonial peoples or peoples of colonial origin. From the outset, calling attention to the ‘millions of workers’ forced to die in India, to allow capitalists to make modest concessions to British workers, Marx underlined the connection between the colonial question and the social question in the capitalist metropolis (see Chap. 2, Sect. 3 ). This was a demanding intellectual perspective. In sharp contrast to Proudhon, Fourier was a champion of the cause of women’s emancipation. But it happened that, in the very years when Marx and Engels were expressing their hopes in the proletariat as the agency of universal emancipation with youthful hyperbole, followers of Fourier (and SaintSimon) planned to construct communities of a more or less socialist kind in Algeria, on land taken from the Arabs in a brutal, sometimes genocidal war. 11
Later, utopian socialism mostly viewed the abolitionist movement with condescension or suspicion. After the February 1848 revolution, Victor Schoelcher and the new government proceeded to the defi nitive abolition of black slavery in French colonies, almost half a century after it had been reintroduced by Napoleon, who had thereby cancelled the results of the black revolution on Santo Domingo led by Toussaint L’Ouverture and the laws emancipating blacks enacted by the Jacobin Convention. However, Etienne Cabet, an eminent representative of French utopian socialism, criticized Schoelcher for focusing on a narrow objective—the emancipation of black slaves—rather than committing himself to the universal emancipation of labour. 12 On the outbreak of the Civil War in the USA, Lassalle argued similarly, judging at least from a letter to Engels of 30 July 1862 in which Marx criticized the ‘antiquated, mouldering speculative rubbish’ of Lassalle, for whom the gigantic clash underway in the USA was ‘of no interest whatever’. Rather than developing positive ‘ideas’ for transforming society, ‘the Yankees’ confi ned themselves to mobilizing a ‘negative idea’ like ‘the freedom of the individual’. 13 For the two representatives of socialism cited here, commitment to the abolition of slavery in the colonies or the North American republic distracted attention from the social question, which remained a burning issue in the capitalist metropolis.
To the American Civil War—in Marx’s view, an epic event—Lassalle made only distracted, reductive references. Because of the blockade imposed by the Union on the secessionist South, and the consequent shortage of cotton for the textile industry of Britain, and Lancashire in particular, British workers were forced into unemployment and risked having to ‘emigrate to the colonies’. It was ‘one of the most bloody and horrible wars that history has ever seen’. What was at stake in it was not touched upon. In fact, rather than the institution of slavery, Lassalle indicted ‘federalism’ and the self-government accorded states as allegedly responsible for the ‘absorption in particular interests’ and ‘mutual hatred’ of the contending parties, which were thus put on par. 14
The economistic or corporatist limitations of representatives of the labour and socialist movement were not unconnected with the initiative of the dominant classes, whose effectiveness was in fact underestimated by Marx and Engels. Having included ‘Young England’ in the ‘spectacle’ of ‘feudal socialism’ staged by ‘aristocrats’, the Communist Manifesto concluded: ‘the people, so often as it joined them, saw on their hindquarters the old feudal coats of arms, and deserted with loud and irreverent laughter’. 15 In fact, things turned out rather differently. The historically most important member of Young England was Disraeli. In him (as in the organization he joined) are to be found elements of the transfi guration of the ancien régime, but he may be regarded as the inventor of a ‘socialism’ more appropriately defi ned as ‘imperial’ than ‘feudal’. Far from meeting with derision from the popular classes, this was socialism that often enchanted and ensnared them.
In the same years as The Holy Family and The German Ideology proclaimed the irreducible antagonism between proletariat and bourgeoisie, Disraeli published a novel that in its own way dealt with the same themes. We fi nd a Chartist agitator bitterly challenging the existing order and denouncing the reality of the ‘two nations’ (‘rich and poor’) into which England is divided. In the Communist Manifesto, the Chartists are included among the ‘existing working-class parties’; 16 and the agitator seems to exhibit the revolutionary consciousness attributed to the proletariat by Marx and Engels. It is interesting to observe Disraeli’s response: it made no sense to speak of ‘two nations’; a bond of ‘fraternity’ now united ‘the privileged and prosperous English people’. 17 The key word is the one emphasized by me: the English aristocracy had shelved the caste, even racial arrogance it traditionally displayed towards the popular classes; and now it was the ‘fraternal’ national English community as a whole that adopted a pose of supreme aristocratic disdain for other nations, especially colonial populations.
In other words, rather than disappearing, the racialization traditionally suffered by the British popular classes was displaced. It is no accident if Disraeli, who subsequently became the author of the Second Reform Act (which extended political rights beyond the circle of the aristocracy and the bourgeoisie), and of a series of social reforms, was simultaneously the champion of imperialism and the right of the ‘superior’ races to subjugate ‘inferior’ ones. In this way, the British statesman proposed to defuse the social question and class struggle in his own country: ‘I say with confi dence that the great body of the working-class of England […] are English to the core. They are for maintaining the greatness of the Kingdom and the Empire, and they are proud of being subjects of our Sovereign and members of such an Empire.’ 18 These were the years when in France Proudhon adopted the position (according to Marx) of a ‘socialist of the Imperial period’—to be precise, the Second Empire. 19
Thus, we see a new political movement emerge. In the late nineteenth century, alluding to Napoleon III and Bismarck as well as Disraeli, a German observer spoke of an ‘imperialist social policy’ or ‘imperial socialism’ ( Imperialsozialismus ). 20 Already brought out by Marx, the connection between the colonial question and the social question in the capitalist metropolis was recognized and put at the centre of a new political project, which proposed a kind of quid pro quo: the popular masses and proletariat were invited to respond to the dominant classes’ limited social reforms with patriotism and support for colonial expansionism.
'Class against Class' on a Global Scale?
The quid pro quo was scornfully rejected by the artisans of the theory of class struggle. But a problem persists. A situation of relatively peaceful development and, a fortiori, a major historical crisis is characterized by a tangle of multiple contradictions and various forms of class struggle: there is no pre-established harmony between them. An adequate understanding of a concrete historical situation requires overcoming the habitual binary logic that claims to explain everything on the basis of a single contradiction. In Marx and Engels themselves, this was a difficult, unfinished process.
The Condition of the Working Class in England, published in 1845, ends by evoking the imminent—in fact, already initiated—revolution of the ‘workers’ against the ‘bourgeoisie’, or ‘open, declared war of the poor against the rich’, of the ‘cottage’ against the ‘mansion’. 21 The Irish national question, to which Engels forcefully drew attention, does not seem to play any role in the impending clash. Approximately two years later, in The Poverty of Philosophy, Marx issued a kind of watchword: ‘the struggle of class against class’. 22 The Communist Manifesto clarifies its basis: ‘[o]ur epoch, the epoch of the bourgeoisie, possesses ... this distinctive feature: it has simplifi ed the class antagonisms. Society as a whole is more and more splitting up into two great hostile camps, into two great classes directly facing each other: Bourgeoisie and Proletariat’. 23 It is true that other social subjects must be taken into account, but the capitalist bourgeoisie—a handful of exploiters—becomes ever more isolated. The prospects for revolution were decidedly encouraging: the proletarians (we read in The German Ideology) constitute ‘a class which forms the majority of all members of society’. 24 Besides, adds the Manifesto, ‘entire sections of the ruling classes are, by the advance of industry, precipitated into the proletariat’. 25
In the (early) writings cited hitherto, the new revolution (set to emancipate, over and above the proletariat, humanity as a whole) ultimately breaks out from a single contradiction, opposing bourgeoisie and working class; and this new revolution is ineluctable because of the progressive, unstoppable expansion of the working-class and pro-working-class front.
There were no pertinent differences between one country and another. In fact, national borders were tending to decline in importance. This is a view that found its most eloquent expression in a speech made by Engels on 9 December 1847, during a demonstration in London in favour of Polish independence. In Britain, ‘as a result of modern industry, of the introduction of machinery, all oppressed classes are being merged together into a single great class with common interests, the class of the proletariat’, more united than ever thanks to ‘this levelling of the living standards of all workers’. ‘[O]n the opposite side all classes of oppressors have likewise been united into a single class, the bourgeoisie. The struggle has thus been simplified and so it will be possible to decide it by one single heavy blow’. As to the international stage, machinery ‘has evened out the position of all workers and daily continues to do so’ everywhere, so that ‘the workers now have the same interest, which is the overthrow of the class that oppresses them—the bourgeoisie’. In sum, ‘[b]ecause the condition of the workers of all countries is the same, because their interests are the same, their enemies the same, they must also fight together, they must oppose the brotherhood of the bourgeoisie of all nations with a brotherhood of the workers of all nations’. 26 Not only does everything revolve around a single contradiction, but politics, national peculiarities, and ideological factors seem to play no role.
The binary interpretation of social conflict does not fi gure only in Engels and is not even limited to the early period. It is enough to think of a very famous passage in Volume One of Capital: ‘[c]entralisation of the means of production and socialisation of labour at last reach a point where they become incompatible with their capitalist integument. This integument is burst asunder. The knell of capitalist private property sounds. The expropriators are expropriated’. 27 Four years later, in the conclusion to The Civil War in France, Marx drew up this balance-sheet: the ‘cosmopolitan blackleggism’ of the Second Empire was countered by authentic internationalism. The Paris Commune, ‘as a working men’s Government, as the bold champion of the emancipation of labour’ (to be achieved in an international framework), was ‘emphatically international’. It was no accident if ‘the Commune admitted all foreigners to the honour of dying for an immortal cause’. 28
The picture became even clearer after the repression conducted by the French bourgeoisie (with the complicity of the Prussian army) and the witch hunt (against members of the International) unleashed by the dominant classes throughout Europe: ‘[w]hile the European Governments thus testify, before Paris, to the international character of class rule, they cry down the International Working Men’s Association—the international counter-organization of labour against the cosmopolitan conspiracy of capital—as the head fountain of all these disasters’. 29 The thesis of the 'cosmopolitan conspiracy of capital’ errs in forgetting the competition and conflict between the different bourgeoisies to which the Manifesto drew attention, and in absolutizing a temporary, short-lived situation. Volume One of Capital recalls that ‘the June insurrection in Paris’ united the different bourgeois countries and ‘all fractions of the ruling classes’. 30 The observation dates from 1867. Three years later, the Franco-Prussian War broke out and in its wake emerged the Paris Commune, crushed courtesy of an understanding between the former enemies. But it was an understanding that soon gave way to chauvinistic hatred, destined to result in an ‘industrial war of extermination between nations’, the First World War. During the struggle against that carnage, the fi rst revolution to identify with Marx and Engels broke out and in its wake there developed an anti- colonial movement on a global scale, which targeted the ‘exploitation of one nation by another’ referred to by the Manifesto and contemporaneous texts, but which was totally ignored in 1871 in the wake of the contempt elicited by Franco-German collaboration in repressing the Paris Commune and the well-nigh general applause of the international bourgeoisie for the attendant massacre.
In other circumstances too, a tendency emerges to interpret the revolutionary process with the binary logic of ‘class against class’. In the late 1850s, as the peasant agitation that shortly led Tsar Alexander II to abolish serfdom in Russia intensifi ed, premonitory signs of the impending civil war become ever clearer in the USA. On the night of 16–17 October 1859, John Brown, a fervent abolitionist from the North, invaded Virginia in a desperate, failed attempt to incite the slaves of the South to rise up. On 11 January of the following year, Marx wrote to Engels:
In my view, the most momentous thing happening in the world today is the slave movement—on the one hand, in America, started by the death of Brown, and in Russia, on the other. …I have just seen in the Tribune that there’s been another slave revolt in Missouri, which was put down, needless to say. But the signal has now been given. Should the affair grow more serious by and by, what will become of Manchester? 31
What is intimated here is a scenario of well-nigh global revolution, whose protagonist would be black slaves in the USA, serfs in Russia, and wage slaves or workers in Britain. In all three cases, it would involve revolutions from below and class struggles directly confronting their exploiters and oppressors.
It scarcely needs to be said that the gap between such expectations and the actual unfolding of the historical process was considerable. In Britain, despite the fact that the Union’s naval blockade of the slaveholding states occasioned a particularly serious crisis in the textile industry, the workers condemned to unemployment did not allow themselves to be used by those sections of the ruling class which would have liked to urge them onto the streets to demonstrate against Lincoln (and in favour of war against the Union). Marx acknowledged this, although, at the same time the absence of revolution was met with disappointment and even scorn. In a letter to Engels of 17 November 1862, he scoffed at ‘the bourgeois and aristocrats [for their] enthusiasm … for slavery in its most direct form’ and at ‘the working men [for] their servile Christian nature’. 32
There was no revolution by wage slaves in the wake of a black slave revolution across the Atlantic; in fact, the latter did not materialize either. The courage and dignity with which Brown faced his trial and execution stirred great emotion in the white community and strengthened the abolitionist party. But the slaves of Virginia and the South did not propel themselves into insurrection, as Brown had hoped and, along with him, Marx and Engels, who followed events from Europe with trepidation. Not only did the desired revolution from below by black slaves not occur, but for a long time, there was no place for them in the confl ict waged from above. The call for ‘the arming of all slaves as a military measure’, made by the most radical (white) offi cers in the Northern army, and favourably highlighted by Marx, fell on deaf ears. 33 To the serious disappointment of Marx and Engels, the American Civil War mostly took the form of a typical inter-state war, waged by both sides with traditional armies. Only towards the end did the Union proceed to enrol free blacks and black slaves who, escaping their masters in the South, encountered the advancing Northern army. Overall, it may be said the Civil War resulted in a kind of abolitionist revolution, but one conducted chiefl y from above and whose protagonists were whites—primarily the statesmen and generals of the industrialized North. Marx and Engels were right to deprecate this outcome. The revolution from above proved wholly incomplete. It abolished slavery, but did not involve genuine emancipation of the blacks, who after a brief interval of inter-racial democracy were subjected to a terroristic regime of white supremacy. The point is that the expectation of a general revolt from below by black slaves, serfs and wage slaves clouded the capacity for historical prediction.
The capacity was restored when Marx and Engels distanced themselves from the binary interpretation of social confl ict. Some months before Brown’s desperate endeavour, in early 1859, Marx published an article on developments in the situation in Russia, which had just suffered a serious defeat in the Crimean War (against France and Britain) and which, with Alexander II, was to abolish serfdom two years later. There was no reduction in social tension as a result. On the contrary, ‘insurrections of serfs’ had become ‘epidemic’ so that, according to the offi cial statistics from the Interior Ministry, around 60 nobles were killed every year. So determined were the serfs that they entertained the idea of exploiting the advance of French troops to unleash a large-scale revolt. 34 Here, as opposed to a general insurrection of the poor against the rich, revolution is anticipated from a conjunction of international war and internal social confl ict. We are reminded of October 1917.
Binary Logic and the 'Self-Evidence' of Exploitation
Complementing the binary interpretation of the revolutionary process and social confl ict is a theory that seems to derive revolutionary class consciousness from direct sensory self-evidence. Capitalist society, observed The German Ideology in 1845–6, presents us with
a class … which has to bear all the burdens of society … and forced into the sharpest contradiction to all other classes; a class which forms the majority of all members of society, and from which emanates the consciousness of the necessity of a fundamental revolution, the communist consciousness, which may, of course, arise among the other classes too through the contemplation [ Anschauung ] of the situation of this class. 35
So intolerable are the material living conditions forced on the proletariat that they cannot but rebel and, ‘contemplating’ these, members of other social classes may be induced to challenge the existing order. In other words, sensory self-evidence imposes itself with such force that revolutionary consciousness can, in a way, be taken for granted. In the words of The Holy Family
Since in the fully-formed proletariat the abstraction of all humanity, even of the semblance of humanity, is practically complete … since man has lost himself in the proletariat, yet at the same time has not only gained theoretical consciousness of that loss, but through urgent, no longer removable, no longer disguisable, absolutely imperative need—the practical expression of necessity—is driven directly to revolt against this inhumanity. …It cannot abolish the conditions of its own life without abolishing all the inhuman conditions of the life of society today which are summed up in its situation. It is not a question of what this or that proletarian, or even the whole proletariat, at the moment regards as its aim. It is a question of what the proletariat is, and what, in accordance with this being, it will historically be compelled to do. 36
The strength of sensory perception entails that proletarians are largely immune from the ideological infl uences of the dominant class. In dedicating The Condition of the Working Class in England ‘to the working-classes of Great Britain’, Engels wrote: ‘[w]ith the greatest pleasure I observed you to be free from that blasting curse, national prejudice and national pride’. In fact, ‘English nationality is annihilated in the working-man’. 37
In reality, in contradictory fashion, the same text draws attention to the fact that the competition of Irish workers has ‘forced down … the wages’ of English workers. The train of recriminations and resentments can be imagined. In any event, Carlyle (a writer hitherto sympathetic to the Chartist movement) took his cue from this to paint a negative picture of the Irish. 38 Three years later, with his focus now on Central and Eastern Europe, Engels summarized the principles adhered to by the dominant classes: they ‘employ their skill and efforts to set one nation against another and use one nation to subjugate another, and in this manner to perpetuate absolute rule’. 39 Clearly, the proletariat was not immune from the chauvinist wave. The ‘obviousness’ of exploitation and, with it, the unity of the exploited class disappears so that a binary interpretation of social confl ict becomes unsustainable.
All the more so because the class that is the proletariat’s antagonist is far from unifi ed. Having drawn attention to the multiple confl icts in which the bourgeoisie of each country is engaged at home and abroad, the Manifesto adds that such confl icts ‘further, in many ways, the course of development of the proletariat’. In other words, underlying the emergence and development of revolutionary consciousness is a multiplicity of confl icts; and it cannot be deduced exclusively from the antagonism between working class and bourgeoisie. 40
Hence, far from deriving from some putative sensory self-evidence, revolutionary consciousness presupposes an understanding of political and social relations extending far beyond the confl ict between bourgeoisie and proletariat. Revolutionary consciousness is confi gured as the product of the direct or indirect action of a multiplicity of social subjects and confl icts: the various factions of the bourgeoisie struggling for power within a single country; the bourgeoisie in power in different countries contesting hegemony internationally; the proletariat, which acquires ideology and political autonomy in resisting the infl uence and blandishments not only of the new ruling class, but also of the old landed aristocracy, which (as we know) seeks to seduce it with the siren songs of ‘feudal socialism’.
The process of acquiring class consciousness is all the more tortuous because, in the absence of robust, stable ‘combinations’ (far from easy to form and maintain), workers, even those in large-scale industry, constitute ‘a crowd of people unknown to one another’ and ‘an incoherent mass … broken up by their mutual competition’. 41 This is not simply a matter of competition and confl ict between individuals. Later, Engels noted that in Britain unskilled workers were regarded and ‘treated with contempt’ by skilled workers. 42 Competition can even assume very bitter forms, like the ‘literal battles’ engaged in ‘every morning’ by London dockworkers hoping to be hired on a casual basis. 43
It might be said that the protagonist of such battles is the lumpenproletariat, rather than the proletariat proper. In reality, Engels speaks of ‘poor devils’ who are ‘in the borderland’ between these two classes;’ 44 and it is a very fl uid border. In fact, on closer inspection, the category of lumpen-proletariat refers to a mutable political function rather than a clearly defi ned social condition. Depending on the case, it can place itself at the service of the dominant bloc or, more rarely, let itself be drawn into the revolutionary movement. The whites in the USA, who allied with the slave-holding oligarchy, were stigmatized as a ‘mob’ and ‘white trash’— ultimately, as a lumpen-proletariat 45—on account not of their social condition (which was modest but certainly on the borderline of subsistence), but their political attitude.
Later, in 1870, Engels identifi ed the ‘lumpen-proletariat of the cities’ (along with the ‘petty bourgeois’, ‘small peasants’ and ‘farm labourers’) as a possible ally of the proletariat, which continued to form a minority of the total population, and hence, could aspire to win power only if, by means of appropriate political action, it succeeded in isolating the ruling class. 46 Here, manifestly, ideological and political maturity and the politics of alliances have taken the place of the decisive role of direct sensory self- evidence and the binary reading of social confl ict and the revolutionary process.
'Class Struggles' or the Struggle between 'Oppressor and Oppressed'?
The shape of social confl ict is extraordinarily variegated, and its protagonists can be very diverse. However, having drawn attention to ‘class struggles’ (in their various shapes and forms) as the key to interpreting the historical process, the Communist Manifesto proceeds:
Freeman and slave, patrician and plebeian, lord and serf, guild-master and journeyman, in a word, oppressor and oppressed, stood in constant opposition to one another, carried on an uninterrupted, now hidden, now open fi ght, a fi ght that each time ended, either in a revolutionary re-constitution of society at large, or in the common ruin of the contending classes. 47
I have italicized the phrase which, ‘in a word’, equates ‘class struggles’ (in the plural) with the struggle (in the singular) between ‘oppressor and oppressed’. Is this summary correct? To be clearer: does this formula really encapsulate Marx and Engels’ vision of history, politics and ‘class struggles’?
We should fi rst of all observe that in Marx and Engels confl icts between exploiting classes are the rule, not the exception. They explain the French Revolution primarily on the basis of the contradiction between feudal aristocracy and industrial bourgeoisie. The latter, although not forming part of the ruling bloc in the strict sense before 1789, can scarcely be included in the ranks of the ‘oppressed’. Not only did it enjoy increasing wealth and incipient social prestige. But in the factories it already exercised power over an exploited and oppressed class; in the colonies, it had no hesitation in resorting to genocidal practices. Crossing the Atlantic, if we concern ourselves with the ‘bourgeois revolution’ in America, we see that a decisive role was played in it by slave-owners and, above all, those, at odds with the London government, who were determined to expand beyond the Alleghenies and accelerate the process of expropriation and deportation (and decimation) of the Native Americans. Far from being ‘oppressed’, the protagonists of this revolt were sometimes more ferocious ‘oppressors’ than the ruling class overthrown by them. The class struggle which, on Marx and Engels’ interpretation, at any rate, determined both the revolutions we are referring to in no way coincides with the struggle between ‘oppressor’ and ‘oppressed’. Similar considerations apply to the fall or end of the ancien régime in nineteenth-century Italy and Germany.
Even if we confi ne ourselves to class struggles of an emancipatory kind, the picture does not change. While it exploited and oppressed workers, when it led the revolution against the ancien régime, the bourgeoisie played an essential role in the struggle against the ‘oppressor’ to be overthrown at that time. The liberation struggles of an oppressed nation or women also witness the participation of social strata that cannot be unequivocally included in the category of ‘oppressed’. As regards the proletarian class struggle, it can sometimes count on the support—but more often must reckon with the hostility—of the sub-proletariat, which may be allied with the oppressed or, more often, the oppressor.
The ambiguity is not dispelled if we confi ne ourselves to the proletariat in the strict sense. Exploited in the factory, the worker (e.g., the English worker) can be indifferent or even sympathetic to the subjugation of Ireland or India, and thus become an accomplice of the oppressor in this respect. Let us then take the Irish or Indian worker, doubly oppressed as a member of an exploited class and, at the same time, an oppressed nation. Yet he is the ‘bourgeois’ within the family, while it is the woman who represents the proletarian and is subjected to ‘domestic slavery’. Let us then take a woman who is working-class and Irish. She is trebly oppressed—in the family, in the factory, and as a member of an oppressed nation. But, within the patriarchal family, she too participates in ‘the exploitation of children by their parents’ referred to by the Manifesto , 48 to which communists are determined to put an end.
In other words, each individual (and even group) is located in a contradictory set of social relations, each of which allocates him or her to a different role in each instance. Far from being based on a single ‘relation of coercion’, the world capitalist system is a tangle of multiple and contradictory ‘relations of coercion’. What determines the ultimate location of an individual (and group) in the camp of the ‘oppressor’ or of the ‘oppressed’ is the hierarchical ordering of these social relations in accordance with their political and social relevance in a determinate concrete situation, on the one hand, and the political choice of the single individual (or group), on the other.
Exporting Revolution?
The diffi cult, unfi nished process of overcoming the binary interpretation of social confl ict also makes itself felt negatively in another respect. What are the tasks of the proletariat, once power has been won? It is enjoined by the Communist Manifesto to promote the development of the productive forces and the socialist transformation of the country governed by it. Nearly a quarter of a century later, Marx credited the Commune with being engaged in France in ‘uprooting the economical foundations upon which rests the existence of classes, and therefore of class rule’. 49 Are we dealing with a class struggle from above, whose protagonist is the proletariat in power?
This is a picture that contrasts with the passage in the Manifesto which, ‘in a word’, equates class struggle with the clash between ‘oppressor and oppressed’ and, more exactly, with the insurrection of the latter against the former. On these premises class struggle becomes inconceivable after the conquest of power. The eternal antagonist of the ‘oppressor’, the victorious proletariat holding political power cannot any longer be included among the ‘oppressed’. On the other hand, if we regard proletarians in power as protagonists of a new phase of the class struggle, we shall not only have a class struggle conducted from above but one whose protagonists are not, precisely speaking, the oppressed. Such was the road taken by Lenin, and which Marx himself seems to embark on when he theorizes the ‘revolutionary dictatorship of the proletariat’. 50 But there was considerable hesitation. Perhaps because the prospect of the conquest of power was remote, and regularly frustrated by developments, the one-sided view of class struggle as an uprising by the oppressed situated below against the oppressors located above never completely disappeared.
Given this presupposition, if a class struggle can be conducted by the victorious proletariat in a single country, it is the one that sees it rebel against the domination which the capitalist bourgeoisie continues to exercise in every other country and, ultimately, globally. Accordingly, it is no cause for surprise that the lesson drawn by Class Struggles in France from the repression of the workers’ revolt of June 1848 by the French bourgeoisie, and of national uprisings in Hungary, Poland, and Italy by the Austrian and Russian empires, was that the proletarian revolution would be ‘forced to leave its national soil forthwith and conquer the European terrain’ (see Chap. 2 , Sect. 6 ). Here the class struggle of the victorious proletariat seems to consist in exporting the revolution. In its way, this resolves the theoretical diffi culty mentioned above. When the whole international picture is taken into account, if they have won power in a single (isolated and surrounded) country, proletarians continue to be the ‘oppressed’ who are called upon to confront the much stronger alliance of ‘oppressors’. Still in 1850, deceiving themselves about the approach of a new revolutionary wave, Marx and Engels explained the objectives of the Communist League as follows:
It is our interest and our task to make the revolution permanent, until all more or less possessing classes have been forced out of their position of dominance, the proletariat has conquered state power, and the association of proletarians, not only in one country but all the dominant countries of the world, has advanced so far that competition among the proletarians in these countries has ceased and that at least the decisive productive forces are concentrated in the hands of the proletarians. 51
Having prevailed in one country, the struggle of the revolutionary class crosses state and national borders. It might be said that the ‘anachronistic and unnatural “Napoleonism”’ for which Gramsci reproached Trotsky, 52 can already be glimpsed in Marx. Especially given that, at least in his early writings, he tended to conceive socialist revolution by analogy with the bourgeois revolution. The German Ideology credits the Napoleonic occupation of Germany with having delivered powerful blows to the feudal edifi ce, ‘by cleaning out Germany’s Augean stables’. 53The Holy Family is even more emphatic, identifying Napoleon as the ultimate expression of ‘revolutionary terror’; he ‘perfected the [Jacobin] Terror by substituting permanent war for permanent revolution’. 54 Although assuming a new form, the anti-feudal class struggle and liquidation of the ancien régime continued and, in fact, assumed a European dimension. Here too the bourgeois revolution is interpreted in a binary logic, as if the only operative contradiction is that between bourgeoisie and feudal aristocracy, and as if Napoleonic expansionism did not generate profound national contradictions. In the early writings, at any rate, Marx tended to conceive the socialist revolution on the model of revolution interpreted thus. In late 1847, he addressed the British Chartists as follows:
Of all countries, England is the one where the contradiction between the proletariat and the bourgeoisie is most highly developed. The victory of the English proletarians over the English bourgeoisie is, therefore, decisive for the victory of all the oppressed over their oppressors. Hence Poland must be liberated not in Poland but in England. 55
National emancipation of the less developed countries of Eastern Europe is represented as a product of the initiative of the proletariat that has arrived in power in the most advanced country.
Export of the revolution does not represent a problem, because the export of counter-revolution was underway or on the agenda. This applies to 1848, as to 1871, when the victorious Prussian army backed up the French bourgeoisie in suppressing the Paris Commune. As we know, on the latter occasion Marx saw the world divided in two between a globally unifi ed bourgeoisie and a proletariat urged to create an ‘international counter-organization of labour’: the different forms of class struggle were, in effect, reduced to a single form.