Class Struggle: A Political and Philosophical History (Domenico Losurdo)

Class Struggle: A Political and Philosophical History
Author	Domenico Losurdo
Written in	2013
Original language	Italian
Type	Book
Source	PDF

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.