A Review of Antitézis. Válogatott tanulmányok 2001–2020 [Antithesis: Selected Writings]
Mark Losoncz
Institute for Philosophy and Social Theory, University of Belgrade, Serbia
losonczmark@gmail.com
Abstract
G.M. Tamás’s Antitézis [Antithesis], published originally in Hungarian, mostly comprises translations of articles published previously in English. This review first contextualises Tamás’s Marxism within today’s Hungarian left, before moving to the title of the book, that is, the philosophical meaning of ‘antithesis’. Special attention is paid to the question of whether Tamás’s historical materialism should be characterised as aligned with Western Marxism, given that his theoretical preferences are eclectic and too complex for simple categorisation. The book’s contradictory statements with regard to essential questions such as class relations or revolutionary change can be explained by Tamás’s theoretical development over the last two decades. The article provides detailed analysis of the distinction between Rousseauian and Marxian socialism. Tamás’s other valuable contribution to contemporary Marxism is his analysis of Eastern European ‘real socialism’; however, his analysis of Soviet-type systems as state capitalisms should be criticised carefully. Finally, the review focuses on the implications of Tamás’s historical materialism with regard to contemporary anti-capitalist movements, and concludes that Tamás’s near-apocalyptic statements are counterbalanced by a militant, engaged attitude, producing a Janus-faced Marxism.
Keywords
antithesis – class – Rousseau – Marx – state capitalism – anti-capitalist movement
Gáspár Miklós Tamás, (2021) Antitézis. Válogatott tanulmányok 2001–2020 [Antithesis: Selected Writings], translated and edited by Balázs Sipos, Budapest: Pesti Kalligram.
Antitézis [Antithesis] is a selection of G.M. Tamás’s writings published this century.
The book is a historical-materialist product through and through. Coincidentally, Antitézis was published on the fiftieth anniversary of the death of the most important Hungarian Marxist, Georg Lukács. Indeed, Lukács is one of Tamás’s most important discussion partners throughout the course of the book. It is worth mentioning that today there are no (former) members of the Lukács or Budapest School faithful to historical materialism. Nevertheless, Tamás does not stand entirely alone as a Marxist in Hungary. There are journals that are explicitly Marxist or open to publishing articles of historical-materialist inspiration (Eszmélet,Fordulat), and there are also websites whose profile is close to Tamás’s heretical Marxism (such as rednews.hu, reszeghajo.eoldal.hu or tett.merce.hu). What is more, a few exceptionally important Marxist books have been published in Hungary in the last two decades, including Tamás Krausz’s Deutscher Prize winnerReconstructing Lenin: An Intellectual Biography and István Mészáros’sBeyond Capital: Toward a Theory of Transition. Nevertheless, Marxism is a quite marginal intellectual current in Hungary. Tamás himself has published prolifically in Hungarian (he announced his withdrawal from political journalism at the end of 2020), that is, in the public sphere he is known as an opposition intellectual who relentlessly criticises the various authoritarian regimes. Paradoxically, Tamás’s ‘exoteric’ political criticism has triggered more resistance than his ‘esoteric’ Marxism, which seeks to understand (what he calls) the ‘occult character’ of the capitalist system. His more radical ideas have been mostly neglected – until now. Still, it is indisputable that even Tamás’s historical-materialist writings have proved heavily influential upon his – generally – young readers, thus making him the most important Marxist in Hungary.
The book’s title already demands an effort of interpretation. The term ‘antithesis’ refers to the negation of positivity, conceived in a Hegelian manner. Put simply, positivity can be equated with the constraints of objectivity (Sachzwang) that deprive subjectivity of its autonomy. While Hegel described the despotism and repressive character of Christian religion in this way, Tamás characterises capitalism as positivity – as a system that is naturalised and fetishist, seemingly unchangeable, etc. More precisely, Tamás suggests that despite its tendency to be ‘creatively destructive’ (Joseph Schumpeter, Werner Sombart – and their source, Mikhail Bakunin), capitalism has proved to be a system that separates the subject from its practice, thus, ultimately, it also has become a positivity. The same is true for ‘real socialism’ (which, for Tamás, is state-capitalist), namely, it was also a positivity since it remained faithful to institutional authority, tradition, abstract moralism, unquestioned revolutionary mythology, bureaucratic ideology, etc. According toAntitézis, the task of the left is to historicise what is naturalised, to make subjective what is alienated, in the spirit of ‘active negativity’, under the banner of Faust. At some point, Tamás accuses contemporary movements of being ‘projectless, anti-utopian revolt, pure negation’ (p. 225). This kind of criticism somewhat contradicts Tamás’s ‘pure negativism’. According to him, ‘utopia ... does not play any role in Marxism’ (p. 330), and he refuses to draft formulations even about the general framework of a postcapitalist future. However, while it is true that Marx refused to provide recipes, it is possible to reconstruct his suggestions with regard to postcapitalism in some detail,
The originally English-language articles were translated by Balázs Sipos, who is an established Hungarian translator (among other things, he was the co-translator of David Foster Wallace’s Infinite Jest). His subtle editorial footnotes and his insightful introduction are invaluable. There seems to be only one point where Sipos’s suggestion is highly disputable. In the introduction, he claims that ‘the book is – according to our conviction – the most important Hungarian contribution to the tradition of “Western Marxism” since the belated domestic publication ofHistory and Class Consciousness’ (p. 10). In addition, Sipos claims that ‘Western Marxism appeared during the decade of world revolution (1917–1927)’, and that ‘it is written ... outside of institutional frames, independently from academic discourse’ (ibid.). This is somewhat surprising given that, according to Perry Anderson, the classic monographer of Western Marxism, ‘in the rest of Europe [excepting the USSR], ... the great revolutionary wave ... [that] lasted until 1920, was defeated’.
In fact, if we read the book with sufficient care, we can identify the intellectual streams to which Tamás feels himself the closest. He mentions a ‘more secret’, ‘heretic’ and ‘underground’ tradition to which he belongs. This is the tradition of anarchism and council communism, but also the early Frankfurt School and of heterodox streams of the criticism of value-form (pp. 70, 266, 307). In an interview with Imre Széman, Tamás summarised his preferences in the following way:
I am an avid reader of operaismo and of pre-Empire Negri, and also on the opposite end, theWertkritik school, in my view the best heirs to Critical Theory (Hans-Georg Backhaus, Helmut Reichelt, Michael Heinrich, but also the unruly genius, Robert Kurz, and the ‘cult’ periodicals of this tendency,Krisis, Streifzüge, Exit!) as well as authors like Robert Brenner, Ellen Meiksins Wood, David Harvey, Michael Lebowitz, and various Marxists working in England too numerous to mention. The greatest impact came, however, from Moishe Postone’s magnum opus. These choices may seem eclectic, but I don’t belong to any of these currents. I am working on my own stuff and I am learning from all of them.
Széman 2010.
Is a Strong State All that it Takes? The State, Coercion and Social Transformation
One of the arguments that have appeared during the pandemic, especially during its early phase, was that the measures taken by governments, especially the forced suspension of economic activity, even at the danger of severe economic depression, offered proof of not only the crisis of neoliberalism2 but also of the possibility to use state power as a means to promote social change in a socialist direction.
In such a perspective, a strong state intervention, even in the sense of a government ‘by decree’ that could halt aspects of capitalist production, commandeer parts of the production apparatus and impose strict forms of regulation of everyday life, offers an example that it is possible to impose important changes, through a ‘strong state’. Even the more disciplinary aspects of ‘lockdown strategies’ have been, to a certain extent, embraced as aspects of this positive potential offered by a strong state intervention, as an example on how it is possible to actually halt capitalist production and disrupt the dynamics of capitalist accumulation.
This is also enhanced of the ‘return of the state’ debate, even among ‘organic intellectuals’ of capital, and all the references to entering a period where capitalist states intervene more in the economy, or undertake larger segments of social reproduction. This is also reinforced by the fact that this ‘return of the state’ seems like a negation of an earlier neoliberal ‘anti-statism’, which had indeed led social movements to wage important struggles in defence of state functions and against attempts to privatise them. And, of course, there have been voices in the global right and far right that have accused both the urgent measures to deal with the pandemic and climate change as ‘socialism’3 and, indeed, a certain far-right populism has attempted to appear as a defender of ‘liberties’ against pandemic restrictions. The fascination also exercised by the Chinese state’s intervention and handling of the pandemic4 also suggests a certain conception of the need for a stronger state intervention.
One way perhaps to deal with this problem is to remind ourselves that, in fact, there never was an actual ‘neoliberal anti-statism’, and that neoliberal states were indeed disciplinary and in a rather authoritarian way. Consequently, the actual history of neoliberalism is full of many forms of state intervention, even in the sense of states creating markets or quasi-markets, along with all the forms of increased authoritarian measures and expansion of the coercive apparatuses that has been a defining aspect of neoliberalism.
However, the crucial question is whether, indeed, we can think of social transformation as an expansion of state power and intervention, especially since the classical definition of the transition to communism includes a ‘withering away’ of the state.
It is true that the notion of the dictatorship of the proletariat includes a rather strong sense of coercion, especially in regards to the ‘violent’ re-appropriation of the means of production and the transformation of property relations along with other aspects of social reproduction, exemplified the Communist Manifesto’s call for ‘despotic inroads on the rights of property, and on the conditions of bourgeois production’.5 And, even though one might get the idea that part of the beginning of the process of transformation includes a rather strong state apparatus gaining control over social life, in the sense of a ‘centralisation of credit in the hands of the State, by means of a national bank with State capital and an exclusive monopoly’, the ‘centralisation of the means of communication and transport in the hands of the State’ and the ‘extension of factories and instruments of production owned by the State’,6 at the same time there is a very specific reference that the state referred to is not just the existing state but rather it is something deeply transformed. This is very evident in the tension running through the tentative phrasing of the Manifesto and the reference to ‘the state, i.e., the proletariat organised as the ruling class’.
The proletariat will use its political supremacy to wrest, by degrees, all capital from the bourgeoisie, to centralise all instruments of production in the hands of the State, i.e., of the proletariat organised as the ruling class; and to increase the total of productive forces as rapidly as possible.7
And, even in a text by Engels that was to become a reference point for the Second International, there is a clear warning against any thinking of just using a strong existing state:
The modern state, no matter what its form, is essentially a capitalist machine, the state of the capitalists, the ideal personification of the total national capital. The more it proceeds to the taking over of productive forces, the more does it actually become the national capitalist, the more citizens does it exploit. The workers remain wage-workers—proletarians. The capitalist relation is not done away with. It is rather brought to a head. But, brought to a head, it topples over. State ownership of the productive forces is not the solution of the conflict, but concealed within it are the technical conditions that form the elements of that solution.8
At the same time, one can point to the Civil War in France and how Marx there insists that we are talking about a different and transformed state apparatus and not just taking over and using the existing state apparatuses.
That passage would, in many respects, be very differently worded today. In view of the gigantic strides of Modern Industry in the last twenty-five years, and of the accompanying improved and extended party organization of the working class, in view of the practical experience gained, first in the February Revolution, and then, still more, in the Paris Commune, where the proletariat for the first time held political power for two whole months, this programme has in some details become antiquated. One thing especially was proved by the Commune, viz., that "the working class cannot simply lay hold of the ready-made State machinery, and wield it for its own purposes". (SeeThe Civil War in France. Address of the General Council of the International Working Men's Association, German edition, p. 19, where this point is further developed.)9
Moreover, as Rossana Rossanda stressed, this implies a radical socialisation of politics that moves beyond the notion of ‘withering away’ of the state: ‘
In the model of the Commune therefore, the revolution and the revolutionary society anticipated not only the withering away of the state, but, even more radically, the progressive disappearance of the political dimension as a dimension separate from (and opposed to) social being, reconstituted in its unity.10
And, of course, there is the strong critique of any simple use of existing state by Marx in the Critique of the Gotha Programme exemplified by his distrust towards‘education of the people by the state’.11 Moreover, Marx calls for a profound transformation, in the sense that the state ‘needs a very stern education by the people’12 which is presented by Marx as a process of historical experimentation:
The question then arises: what transformation will the state undergo in communist society? In other words, what social functions will remain in existence there that are analogous to present state functions? This question can only be answered scientifically, and one does not get a flea-hop nearer to the problem by a thousandfold combination of the word people with the word state.13
On the other hand, in the tradition of the working-class movement there was also a strong ‘statist’ line, associated with figures such as Lassalle and his conception of a socialism based on the expansion of the role of the state14 and, even more, a certain idealisation of the state as an agent of social rationalisation, that owes a lot to a certain conception of the state more associated with Fichte or Hegel, namely the state as culmination and condensation of humanity’s rational capacity, exemplified in Lassalle’s conception of the state as an‘ethical whole’.15And, to a large extent, theCritique of the Gotha Programme refers exactly to ‘the Lassallean sect's servile belief in the state’.16
However, such an emphasis on social transformation that is enhanced by a strong intervention from the part of the existing state apparatus was also present in various forms of the Marxism of historical social democracy, and, of course, it was stronger after the split with the Third international.
In contrast, in the original formulation by Lenin in State and Revolution and the accompanying material, one could see a more complex articulation of the what is defined as strong state and also about how this is combined with the emphasis on the soviets - a form of organisation but also of exercise of power that is presented indeed as an aspect of the withering away of the state.
The proletariat needs the state—this is repeated by all the opportunists, social-chauvinists and Kautskyites, who assure us that this is what Marx taught. But they “forget” to add that, in the first place, according to Marx, the proletariat needs only a state which is withering away, i.e., a state so constituted that it begins to wither away immediately, and cannot but wither away. And, secondly, the working people need a “state, i.e., the proletariat organised as the ruling class”.17
And it was Lenin indeed who offered a very important reading of ‘lessons of the Commune’ that at least provide the outlines of a definition of forms of power from below or counter-power that go beyond the simple ‘use of the existing state apparatus’.
The fundamental characteristics of this type are: (1) the source of power is not a law previously discussed and enacted by parliament, but the direct initiative of the people from below, in their local areas—direct “seizure”, to use a current expression; (2) the replacement of the police and the army, which are institutions divorced from the people and set against the people, by the direct arming of the whole people; order in the state under such a power is maintained by the armed workers and peasants themselves, by the armed people themselves; (3) officialdom, the bureaucracy, are either similarly replaced by the direct rule of the people themselves or at least placed under special control; they not only become elected officials, but are also subject to recall at the people’s first demand; they are reduced to the position of simple agents; from a privileged group holding “jobs” remunerated on a high, bourgeois scale, they become workers of a special “arm of the service”, whose remuneration does not exceed the ordinary pay of a competent worker.18
Leaving aside the fact that these might sound as schematic or even simplistic, they still point to the crucial question, namely that of the need for non-state autonomous organisations as part of the very exercise of power. Forms of political organisation that attempt to subsume the state, or exercise forms of transformative control upon it and at the same time enable a politicisation of the economic sphere without precedent, again as part of a transformative political dynamic.19 I think that it is here that we can find the revolutionary importance of the very notion of ‘dual power’, which, in my reading, points not to a ‘moment’ but more to an ‘organic’ aspect of any attempt towards revolutionary transformation.
What is the class composition of this other government? It consists of the proletariat and the peasants (in soldiers’ uniforms). What is the political nature of this government? It is a revolutionary dictatorship, i.e., a power directly based on revolutionary seizure, on the direct initiative of the people from below, and not on a law enacted by a centralised state power. It is an entirely different kind of power from the one that generally exists in the parliamentary bourgeois-democratic republics of the usual type still prevailing in the advanced countries of Europe and America. This circumstance is often overlooked, often not given enough thought, yet it is the crux of the matter. This power is of the same type as the Paris Commune of 1871.20
In the complex situation created by the realities and difficulties of the Russian Revolution and the Civil War, priorities seem to change, yet the question whether we are just dealing with an expansion of centrali,ed power and what the role of non-state entities would be re-emerges, albeit in an over-determined manner, in the debates and around trade unions21 and the critiques from various oppositionist currents.22 By itself, the debate on the role of trade unions is indicative of the centrality of this question and, despite the ‘canonisation’ of Lenin’s response, we should bear in mind that it was, after all, a very time-specific intervention, in a very peculiar conjuncture and not a strategic positioning. And, of course, one could point to the persistence of the councilist tradition outside the Soviet Union,23 within the various forms of left oppositions to the Communist parties.
The evolution of the Soviet state would again pose the problem, since it was obviously moving into the direction of a consolidation and increased strengthening of state power. One could point to the way that Gramsci treated the question of what he defined as ‘statolatry’. Gramsci, although he seemed to accept at least as a provisional or transitory condition a certain form of Soviet ‘Bonapartism’, at the same time offered clear warnings against such positions.
Some social groups rose to autonomous state life without first having had an extended period of independent cultural and moral development of their own (which in medieval society and under absolute regimes was rendered possible by the legal existence of privileged estates or orders; for such social groups, a period of statolatry is necessary and indeed appropriate. Such “statolatry” is nothing other than the normal form of "state life" or, at least, of initiation into autonomous state life and into the creation of a "civil society," which historically could not be created before the ascent to independent state life. Nevertheless, this kind of "statolatry" must not be abandoned to itself, above all, it must not become theoretical fanaticism or come to be seen as "perpetual." It must be criticized, precisely in order for it to develop and to produce new forms of state life in which individual and group initiative has a "state" character even if it is not indebted to the "official government " (makes state life "spontaneous'').24
I believe that this stressing by Gramsci of the need for ‘statolatry’ to be criticised and the need to avoid it becoming ‘perpetual’ and also to avoid it becoming ‘theoretical fanaticism’ in order to move forward with the emergence of forms of political and state organisation that are based on subaltern initiatives, namely transformative political practice with a communist horizon, is very important, in the sense that it offers a dialectical way of moving beyond the identification of socialism with a strong state.25
The way the Soviet model was exported and put in practice did create a very strong sense of the ‘Socialist State’ as the agent of social transformation. State ownership and planning seemed to be the basic aspects of socialist transition and this would also be considered as an example for a ‘developmental’ state enhancing process of democratic modernisation in the context of anticolonial practices and decolonial practices.26
Questions of mass participation and mobilisation would, of course, re-occur and the same can be said about particular experiences such as the particular Yugoslav experiment with self-management (which was not combined with a similar emphasis on non-state political and organisational forms).
The Chinese experience was, at the same time, very important, especially since the first phase of the Cultural Revolution and the Shanghai Commune suggested the return to the logic of non-state independent political forms of organisation, even though this aspect was soon abandoned to a certain degree, and a series of compromises were introduced.27
In contrast, the ‘Western’ Communist movement, along with social democracy ,started to treat the state as inherently progressive, in the sense that a democratised state, implementing progressive reforms and engaging in forms of planning of the economy, along with an expansion of public ownership, was presented as a crucial aspect of the politics of a ‘democratic progressive government’. Moreover, the expansion of the role of the state along with the forms of ‘socialisation of production’ associated with ‘state-monopoly capitalism’ were presented as the ‘objective tendencies towards socialism’ in contrast to the way the ‘monopolies’ were trying to annul them. This ended up in certain idealisation of the state as an antechamber of socialism.28
Against such positions, one could point to the critique of the ‘welfare state’ offered by various forms of radicalism inspired by the Marxist tradition, from the critique of a technocratic society proponents of critical theory to the various radical critiques of the role of the state in social production and reproduction and a conception of the welfare state as an attempt to strengthen the rule of capital. And one could also point to how radical movements, within the context of the ‘Global 1968’, went beyond demanding just an expansion of state education and health systems, offering at the same time a criticism of how they also represented aspects of capitalist social reproduction.
Moreover, against the idea that social transformation will begin by electoral means, a democratic progressive government and the use of the state as a vector for socialist politics, many currents returned to a conception of ‘smashing of the state’ within a revolutionary process, however schematic such position might be at certain points and despite the lack of an elaborated strategy in that direction.
Moreover, movements and forms of organisation that were autonomous from the state were presented as a crucial aspect of social transformation. This was evident in the many varieties of experiments in self-management but also in more articulated conceptions of a dual power of long duration, as suggested for example by Christine Buci-Glucksmann.
In contrast to the contemporary soviet ‘model’ with its constant attack to freedoms, its psychiatric hospitals, its blocking of any real dialectic of the masses, we know that working class hegemony means the recognition of its parties, the autonomy of trade unions, the biggest possible degree of democratic expansion of the base, the highest degree of freedom. However, this hegemony […] also means the exit from a capitalist logic and to go beyond the strict framework of classical “bourgeois democracy”. In this sense we cannot pose within the democratic transition on the one hand the elected assemblies and the class struggle on the other. We must articulate, to think a constant rupture, a dual power of long duration.29
At the same time, such positions were also conditioned by different theoretical approaches to the state. Parts of the German critique of the welfare state30 were based on the particular conception of derivation of the state from social relations of the economy and the value-form.
‘Social policy’ (i.e. state activity intervening ex post facto in society and seeking to resolve its ‘social problems’) thus has the characteristics, down to its smallest details, of a process of paternalistic supervision, control or ‘welfare’ of the producer. (This is felt by every worker who has to wait in the work, who repairs his labour-power as quickly as possible). Hence, however much state social policy offers individual producers a certain security in the event of their partial or total inability to, work, social policy can never provide a conscious and planned care for the maintenance, renewal and improvement of the social working capacity of the collective worker, the associated producers themselves. In a communist society suchplanned care would necessarily be part of the collective social production process; it would be apublic responsibility of society and of its members, as would the rest of social subsistence, and not the object of the abstract bureaucratic activity of a particularpolitical organization31
Also in the 1970s, Louis Althusser’s calls for the need to have autonomous organisations and for the party not to be identified with the state, were based on his rather idiosyncratic conception of the state as a machine that transforms social force into political power and law. It is on the basis of such a conception that Althusser warned against every tendency to imagine a simple ‘democratisation’ of the existing state apparatuses.
Truly, and I ask that these words be carefully weighed, to ‘destroy’ the bourgeois state, in order to replace it with the state of the working class and its allies, is not to add the adjective ‘democratic’ to each existing state apparatus. It is something quite other than a formal and potentially reformist operation, it is to revolutionize in their structures, practices and ideologies the existing state apparatuses; to suppress some of them, to create others; it isto transform the forms of the division of labour between the repressive, political and ideological apparatuses; it isto revolutionize their methods of work andthe bourgeois ideology that dominates their practices; it is to assure themnew relations with the masses in response to mass initiatives, on the basis of a new,proletarian ideology, in order to prepare for the ‘withering away of the state’, i.e. its replacement by mass organizations.32
And even Poulantzas’s relational conception of the state as the condensation of a social relation of forces, sometimes misread as a call for struggles within the state, was also combined with an insistence on autonomous forms of organisations of the masses as part of his strategy for ‘democratic socialism.’ Poulantzas’s fear was that any call simply for awithering away’ of the state, interpreted as doing away with representative democracy in favour of rank-and-file direct participation would eventually lead again to technocracy and statism. However, Poulantzas himself admitted that ‘left to itself, the transformation of the state apparatus and the development of representative democracy would be incapable of avoiding statism’,33hence the need to combine ‘the transformation of representative democracy with the development of forms of rank-and-file democracy or the movement for self-management’.34
I would suggest that, in a certain way, the question of dual power constantly re-emerges whenever the dynamics of social movements and political contestation go beyond a certain threshold and challenge the existing configuration of power. And, in each case, the open question is what to do with those autonomous organisations that are not just ‘instruments of struggle’ but more like forms of counter-power or power from below. And this can explain why this question does not only arise as an ‘article of faith’ with regard to an insurrectionary conception of revolutionary process, but also as way to answer with political challenges in hand, in a spectrum from the Bolivia of René Zavaleta Mercado35 to the debates around ‘Left Eurocommunism’.
Althusser posed this as an open question in his intervention on the ‘Crisis of Marxism’, especially since, for Althusser, the crisis of Marxism had to do with the question of the state. For Althusser, the crisis of Marxism was the result of an inability to come in terms with the theoretical and strategic question facing us, especially in light of the open crisis of the Soviet social formations. And this meant how to think the question of the party and mass organisations and their relation to the state not just as theoretical questions but as a revolutionary practice and politics that started immediately. For Althusser, the process that can lead us to an actual withering away of the state starts from now, must be a defining aspect of our political practice long before the revolutionary process. The question is: ‘How can we grasp now, in order to spur on the process, the need for the “destruction” of the bourgeois State, and prepare the ‘withering away’ of the revolutionary State?’ 36 Therefore, the open questions coming from the crisis of “actually existing socialism” along with the new dynamics of the movements become, at the same time, the potential explanation for the crisis of Western Communism and Marxism and the testing ground for any proposition to exit this crisis. A new practice of mass politics is necessary both for the recomposition of the revolutionary movement but also for the transition process. That is why, noting the emergence of new mass popular movements that emerge outside the limits of the traditional party-form but also of the trade unions, Althusser insists that ‘the most important of questions for past and future—how can relations be established with the mass movement which, transcending the traditional distinction between trade union and party, will permit the development of initiatives among the people, which usually fail to fit into the division between the economic and political spheres.’ 37
The crisis of the Communist movement from the 1980s onwards and the fact that revolutionary politics seemed to be no longer part of the order of the day, led to certain disregard of such questions. However, such questions resurfaced in the context of movements in Latin America. From the way the Zapatistas chose to organize in opposition to the state to contradictions in the relations between the state and autonomous movements within the revolutionary process in Venezuela or Bolivia.
For example, in Bolivia, Álvaro Garcia Linera has referred to the creative tensions within the Bolivian revolutionary process, in the period that followed the failed coup of 2008, exemplified in the contradictory relations between the state and social movements, including the efforts of the state to take over some of the functions of social movements and community institutions. Linera has used Gramsci’s notion of theintegral state to describe this process. However, it is interesting – and very indicative of the actual contradictions of this approach – that this is described both as a ‘dilution’ of the state within society and as certain expansion of a democratised state.38
Or, equally, one could look at the problems and dynamics in the process of transferring power to the communes in Venezuela.39 Even the dynamics of social struggles in Greece in the first half of the 2010s and the emergence of an impressive variety of forms of self-organisation also posed, even in the form of an open question that was never answered what could be described as potential forms of dual power.40
So, it is obvious that we are dealing with an important question and, to a certain extent, an open debate running through the history of both Marxism and the working-class movement.
I think it is imperative to pick up this debate again. This, of course, requires a re-opening of the debate on the state. The denial of any instrumentalist theory of the state as a tool of the bourgeoisie, or of any crude class reductionism that disregards the relative autonomy of the superstructures, or indeed the relations and contradictory character of the very materiality of the state cannot lead us to idealisation of the state. In contrast, we need to rethink the state as the material condensation of a relation of forces, with the emphasis on ‘material condensation’ which suggest both a relational character, and the constant effectivity of class struggles and social antagonism, but also the fact that it is the materialisation of a relation of forces that enables bourgeois domination (and, to different extents, hegemony), hence, indeed, acting within the conjuncture as a ‘machine transforming social force into political power and law’. This means that the class character of the state is deeply inscribed in its institutional architecture, in the ways knowledge and information is circulates, in the different ways that crucial aspects are insulated against any form of democratic control, a process enhanced by the constant transfer of authority to various levels of experts, the militarisation of the security and police apparatus and the widespread and pervasive logic of ‘independent agencies’ exemplified in the very notion of ‘Independent Central Banks’ but also in the increased autonomisation of the repressive apparatuses. In this sense, a certain suspicion, at the very least, of the state is always in the order of the day and we cannot suggest that just making this kind of state apparatus stronger can be the starting point of a process of social transformation. Consequently, the necessary clash with the ersatz ‘anti-statism’ of neoliberalism should not lead to a simple support or defence of the existing state forms without questioning the many ways that they are the actual materialisation of class strategies.
What about what we usually consider as ‘public services’, such as education, health systems and social services? It is obvious that we would prefer public services to private, but this does not mean that we are dealing with socially neutral institutions. Public education can also act a process for the reproduction of class hierarchies, the social division of labour and aspects of the dominant ideology, in short to act like an Ideological State Apparatus or a hegemonic apparatus. And there have been important critiques of the way the dominant conception of health and medicine can also be reproduced through a public health system, along with important contributions to how an alternative conception of a public health oriented towards social needs and not just the ‘repair of the labour power’ might be.
Moreover, sometimes we tend to forget that the crucial aspect that makes such state services ‘public’, in the sense of being oriented towards the needs of the subaltern classes, has also to do with the fact that there are important movements in them, movements that oppose aspects of their role in the reproduction of capitalist social relations of domination and exploitation, and, in a certain way, represent the interests, needs and aspirations of the subaltern classes. Étienne Balibar recently highlighted this point and the necessary contradictory (one might say dialectical) contradiction running through the very notion of the state as provider of ‘public services’
As a consequence, the “state” at the same time appears as a recourse, an agent of protection, and an object of critique and replacement, which is challenged by “counter-conducts” and “counterpowers”, in a fragile and problematic equilibrium. But perhaps we are not, in fact, talking of the same “state”? Or perhaps the state itself, in the process of the crisis, becomes divided between antithetic logics? It seems to me that a theoretical solution for this riddle, provisionally at least, could reside in deciding that it is rather the “public service” that harbors a unity of opposites, a dialectics of conflict and cooperation between the two logics which are also two “concepts of the political”, the logic of statist authority (rather than “sovereignty”), and the logic of horizontal commonality. The comprehensive notion of the “public” ranging from public governance and property to the responsibility of institutions before the public as enlightened multitude appears at the same time as a site of encounter between these two logics, and a stake at play in their competition. This is of course not an entirely new pattern of social and political agency, especially in periods of historic crises. But in the current situation it remains to be seen which intensity it will acquire and where it will lead our societies. This will largely depend on how the crisis affects the evolution of the current form of capitalism.41
One might say that the reason we indeed support and defend public services is exactly that, within the terrain of the state, it is possibly to have the intervention of movements that actually represent subaltern needs and aspirations. In this sense, the very notion of what belongs to the state is a terrain of struggle with regard to its very definition and the crucial aspect exactly has to do with a collective practice that redefines the very notion of a ‘public service’.
It is on the basis of the above that I would like to suggest that we can find in the Marxist tradition another theoretical and practical current that attempts to rethink social transformation as a process of experimentation and change that is based not just on the expansion of state power (especially if we think it as the expansion of the power of the existing state apparatus) but also on the emergence of different forms of popular power and counter-power from below, along with profound transformations of the state, a contemporary version of dual power. In such a perspective, autonomous movements and initiatives, from trade unions to forms of self-management and even forms of collective self-defence are crucial aspects even if the political representatives of the subaltern classes have indeed reached political power. At the same time, this requires a complete rethinking of the very notion of the state apparatus that goes beyond simply making it stronger or expanding its powers. In a certain sense, this requires thinking the state exactly as the condensation of a relation of forces but with a strong transformative dynamic. This will require both the existence of strong movements outside the state but also the strong presence and intervention of movements within the state by means of the expansion of forms of democratic control and accountability, but also in the sense of self-management and expansive forms of democratic autonomy.
In such a perspective, not all forms of a ‘stronger’ state can be treated as equally important and not all of them are positive or contribute to social change. It is one thing to use political power to promote important changes, even ‘institutionally violent’ in matters that refer to the expansion of public ownership or interventions that reduce the pervasive effectivity of market mechanisms (from price controls to raising the minimum wage) and another for example to treat as a form of a positively strong state aspects of what we have witnessed during the pandemic. Aspects that include the expansion of police power, the restriction of political freedom (such as the right to assembly), the new forms of supervision and surveillance and the increased authoritarian aspects of what can be described as the lockdown strategy (including the very problematic suspension of access to basic services included in some forms of ‘heath passes’42).
This is definitely not a ‘blueprint for the “despotic” aspects of the dictatorship of the proletariat’, rather this is authoritarian neoliberalism on steroids. One might even say that the very fact that we are in a conjuncture where neoliberalism has been dealt heavy blows, while, at the same time, no plausible alternatives have emerged, can explain why, in a certain way, this is compensated by the turn toward an increasingly authoritarian handling of social problems. Moreover, one might point to the fact that, at least in some countries, the pandemic and the exceptional measures associated with it have been used as a way to enforce large-scale forms of capitalist restructuring.
It is true that aspects of the ‘return of the state’ debate, such as the realisation of the limits of the markets, or of the inability of the markets to act as rational optimisers, are important and represent opportunities for the left to change the relation of forces in the public sphere and articulate aspects an alternative strategy. The same goes for the importance of the provision of public services and also the importance of having state agencies that indeed act to delimitate the private from the public, the market from the terrain of social needs and aspirations. These are surely crucial aspects.
But, at the same time, if we are still thinking in terms of social transformation, it is important to also think about ways to create and bring forward the initiative and ingenuity of the subaltern as a way to suggest that social organisation based on solidarity, collective discussion and decision and constant effort at transformation is possible. In a certain way, this can be the only attempt towards moving beyond the fetishism of the market and the fetishism of the state, which represent the double process of mystification of social relations of domination and exploitation. This is the only way to enable and enhance the emergence of antagonistic social practice, relations and forms.
This also entails another conception of the state itself. Even if we do want stronger state interventions, at the same time we struggle for a profound transformation of the state, in the sense of creating ways that social antagonism becomes more apparent and active within the state, forcing forms of openness and democratic accountability, putting crucial aspects under social control, reducing the size, power and opacity of the oppressive apparatuses of the state, introducing new forms of democratic participation at all levels, and, at the same time, expanding basic political freedoms against all forms of oppression, including the pervasive development of a surveillance state.
If we try and think about the main challenges facing us to today, from the pandemic to climate change, and the need to make again pertinent the need for a non-capitalist organisation of the economy, the necessity for a perspective that moves beyond the call for a ‘strong state’ becomes evident. In the case of the pandemic and the failure of the ‘lockdown strategy’ to deliver, it became obvious that the challenge has been not of suspending social life, but of collectively inventing ways and practices that make it safer, by redesigning production and reproduction on the basis of solidarity and collective mobilisation and not coercion enhanced surveillance. In the case of climate change, the extent of the need for changes in productive and consumer paradigms and the increased need for decentralisation and collective use of limited resources also entails a very wide spectrum of collective redesigning of production that goes beyond the scope of state coercion and have more to do with collective initiative and self-management.
In a similar manner, if we go back to the question of whether some form of ‘left governance’ is possible, in the way it came to the fore during the 2010s, we can see that it was never simply about a left government passing progressive legislation through parliament. If this were to be a socialist strategy, that is a strategy of ruptures with existing social configurations, it would also include a widespread unleashing of collective initiatives at all levels, both as pressure for change, but also as learning sites for new ways to organise schools or hospitals or to manage publicly owned enterprises. It is in this sense that we need to rethink the very notion of dual power as an integral and permanent aspect of any process of transformation.
Consequently, such a conception of transformative politics which is not limited to making good use of the coercive potential of the states should not be conceived as a simple implementation of a set of measures, or just as an institutional reform, even though profound institutional reforms are necessary. It should be thought of as process of transformation, for which, in a certain sense, only principles can be offered, especially if we going to think this as a process of socialisation of politics in the form of a re-absorption of political society into civil society to use Gramsci’s definition of the transformation of state and political forms in the transition to communism.
It is not possible to create a constitutional law of the traditional type on the basis of this reality, which is in continuous movement; it is only possible to create a system of principles asserting that the State's goal is its own end, its own disappearance, in other words the re-absorption of political society into civil society.43
I think that this note from 1930 offers a necessary starting point for a relational and, to a certain extent, open and transformational political practice, treating the state as the terrain and object of this transformation, refusing any conception of the state as the locus of social rationality (although, at the same time, stressing its material efficacy) and indeed treating it as a relation of forces to be changed by means of a new and expansive subaltern politicity. The opposition between ‘constitutional law’ and ‘system of principles’ does not point towards some form of unrestrained revolutionary practice, or towards the simple substitution of the state by ‘soviet-type’ institutions, but rather towards the need to think of both the state and the movements inside and outside of it as parts of the same process of transformation and experimentation. At the same time, this passage suggests a new practice of politics that supersedes the division of the economic and the political within bourgeois society and attempts to create conditions for a subaltern universality, opposed to both the abstract universality of the state and the particularity of ‘corporate interests’ and thus opening the way for social transformation.44
To conclude: it is true that the idea that the state can be the main agency of social rationality and ‘represent’ the collective effort towards an emancipated and just society has a long history. In a certain way, this was the main question that the political philosophy of modernity faced. And some of the answers offered to that direction were indeed very elaborate, suggesting the complex interrelations and mediations between the state, civil society and the possibility of moving from particular interests towards a more universal conception of freedom and justice. If we go back to Hegel’s Philosophy of Right, to give an example, we can find a very complex conception of an ‘integral state’, that leaving aside the shortcomings of some of Hegel’s ‘solutions’, such as the role of the sovereign or the reference to the estates system, is well beyond any liberal conception of the state, includes a conception of sovereignty that is really dialectical, and is based on a very complex articulation of civil society and the state.45 However, one of Marx’s actual epistemological breaks was exactly the idea that social emancipation was not only a process that would lead to the ‘withering away’ of the state, but also a process that will not be state-driven or limited to the state, it will not a self-transformation of the state. Not in the sense of a technocratic replacement of the ‘government of persons’ by the ‘administration of things’,46 but in the constant expansion of new forms of an agonistic democratic political participation at all levels, including that of the economy, of new forms of collective management, of new forms of political civility, and consequently of the emergence of new and original forms of institutionalization, in a process that is going to be both contradictory and experimental.
"A Boy Confronts Egyptian Military Police South of Tahrir Square - A Potentially Tragic Disparity of Power and Equipment." byalisdare1 is licensed underCC BY-SA 2.0
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Allen, Barbara C. 2021, The Workers’ Opposition in the Russian Communist Party. Documents 1919-1930, Leiden: Brill/ Historical Materialism Books.
Althusser, Louis 1977, ‘On the Twenty-Second Congress of the French Communist Party’, translated by Ben Brewster, New Left Review 104: 3-22.
Althusser, Louis 1978, ‘The Crisis of Marxism,’ Marxism Today, July 1978.
Antonini, Francesca 2020, Caesarism and Bonapartism in Gramsci, Leiden Brill.
Balibar, Étienne 1974, Cinque études de matérialisme historique, Paris : Maspero
Balibar, Étienne, ‘Living, Learning, Imagining in the Middle of the Crisis’, Crisis and Critique 7:3:10-24.
Baran, Paul A. 1973, The Political Economy of Growth, London: Penguin.
Chatterjee, Partha 2010, Empire and Nation. Selected Essays, New York: Columbia University Press.
Deutscher, Isaac 1950, Soviet Trade Unions: Their Place in Soviet Labour History,https://www.marxists.org/archive/deutscher/1950/soviet-trade-unions/index.htm
Draper, Hal 2011, Karl Marx’s Theory of Revolution. Critique of Other Socialisms, Delhi: Aakar Books.
Duncan, John 2021, ‘The death of neoliberalism? UK responses to the pandemic’, The International Journal of Human Rights, DOI: 10.1080/13642987.2021.1945583
Gramsci, Antonio 1971, Selections from Prison Writings, edited and translated by Quintin Hoare and Geoffrey Nowell Smith, London: Lawrence and Wishart.
Gramsci, Antonio 2007, Prison Writings. Volume 3, edited and translated by Joseph A. Buttigieg, New York: Columbia University Press.
Holloway, John and Sol Piccioto (eds.) 1978, State and Capital. A Marxist Debate, London: Edward Arnold.
Hongsheng, Jiang 2014, La Commune de Shanghai: Et la Commune de Paris, Paris : La fabrique.
Laumonier, Jean Claude 2021, ‘Macron, la vaccination et le pass sanitaire: pour une alternative au libéralisme autoritaire’, https://www.contretemps.eu/macron-covid-pass-sanitaire-vaccination-capitalisme-autoritarisme/
Lenin, Vladimir Illich 1965, Collected Works, Moscow: Progress Publishers.
Linera, Álvaro García 2011, Las tensiones creativas de la revolución, La Paz : Vicepresidencia del Estado Plurinacional.
Martinez, Carlos 2020, ‘Karl Marx in Wuhan: How Chinese Socialism is Defeating Covid-19’, International Critical Though, 10:2.
Marx, Karl and Friedrich Engels 1975-2004, Collected Works, London: Lawrence and Wishart (MECW).
Müller, Wolfgang and Christel Neusüss 1971, ‘Die Sozialstaatsillusion und der Widerspruch von Lohnarbeit und Kapital’, PROKLA 1(SH1): 7-70.
Ostrowski, Marius S. 2021, Eduard Bernstein on Socialism Past and Present. Essays and Lectures on Ideology, London: Palgrave.
Pannekoek, Anton 2003, Worker’s Councils, Oakland: AK OPres
Pateman, Joe 2021, ‘Friedrich Engels on state socialism’, Human Geography 14:2:198-211
Poulantzas, Nicos 2000 (1980), State, Power, Socialism, London: Verso.
Russian Communist Party. Documents, 1919–30. Leiden: Brill.
Rossana, Rossanda 1970, ‘Class and Party’, Socialist Register.
Russo, Alessandro 2020, Cultural Revolution and Revolutionary Culture, Durham: Duke University Press.
Théret, Bruno et Michel Wieviorka 1978, Critique de la théorie du « capitalisme monopoliste d’État », Paris : Maspero.
Thomas, Peter D. 2009, The Gramscian Moment. Philosophy, Hegemony and Marxism, Leiden: Brill.
Weber, Henri 1977, ‘Le PCF et l’État’, Critique Communiste 16 : 1-13.
Woo-Cummings, Meredith (ed.) 1999, The Developmental State, Ithaca: Cornell University Press.
Zavaleta Mercado, René 1974, El poder dual en América Latina, Mexico : Editores Siglo XXI
- 1. Paper presented at the 2021 Historical Materialism Conference.
- 2. This usually takes the form of the ‘neoliberalism is dead’ approach. For a discussion of this position, see Duncan 2021. For a critique of this thesis in the context of the pandemic see Šumonja 2021.
- 3. Cheryl K. Chumley, an American right-wing pundit has announced a book entitled aptly: ‘Lockdwon. The Socialist Plan to Take Away Your Sleep’.
- 4. See for example Martinez 2020.
- 5. MECW, 6, p. 504.
- 6. MECW, 6, p. 505.
- 7. MECW, 6, p. 504.
- 8. MECW, 25, p. 266. For a reminder of Engels’ opposition to ‘state socialism’ see Pateman 2021.
- 9. MECW, 23, p. 175. On the importance of this ‘rectification’ of the Communist Manifesto see Balibar 1974.
- 10. Rossanda 1970, pp. 220-221.
- 11. MECW, 24, p. 97.
- 12. MECW, 24, p. 97.
- 13. MECW, 24, p. 95.
- 14. On Marx’s critique of the various forms of ‘State socialism’ see Draper 2011.
- 15. Lassalle quoted by Edward Bernstein in Ostrowski 2021, p. 166.
- 16. MECW, 24, p. 97.
- 17. LECW, 24, p. 407.
- 18. LCW, 24, pp. 38-39.
- 19. Balibar has encapsulated this in the following manner: ‘1. The first condition is the existence, besides the state apparatus of political organizations of a new type, mass political organisations, political organisations of workers, which control and subsume the state apparatus, even in its new form […] 2. However, the second condition is even more important, because it is the condition of the preceding one: it is the penetration of political practice to the sphere of “labour”, of production. In other words, it is the end of the absolute separation, developed by capitalism itself, between ‘politics’ and economics’. Not in the sense of an ‘economic policy’ that has nothing new, not even by the transfer of political power to workers, but in order to exercise it as workers, and without stopping workers, the transfer, in the sphere of production of an entire part of political practice. Therefore we can think that work, and before it social conditions, become not only a ‘socially useful’ and ‘socially organised’ practice, but a political practice.’ (Balibar 1974, p. 96-97).
- 20. LCW, 24, p. 38.
- 21. See Lenin’s interventions in the relevant debates in LECW 32. See also Deutscher 1950.
- 22. Allen (ed.) 2021.
- 23. See for example Pannekoek 2003.
- 24. Gramsci PN3, pp. 310-311, Q8, §130).
- 25. As Francesca Antonini notes, Gramsci’s words ‘sound like an invitation to overcome the mere external or formal ‘adjustment’ of the masses to the new political, social and productive system (this adjustment is unavoidable, given the ‘premises’ of the Russian revolution) and to develop, as quickly as possible, a form of hegemony that will lead to the establishment of fully realised socialism. Therefore, Gramsci is warning against the dangers of ‘static’ situations and of the ‘lack’ of revolutionary pressure.’ (Antonini 2020, p. 182).
- 26. Paul Baran (1973) offered the crucial arguments in favour of a strong planning socialist state offering the solution to the challenges of postcolonial growth and development. On the various forms and trajectories of the developmental state see inter alia Woo-Cumings (ed.) 1999 and Chatterjee 2010.
- 27. On the complex dynamics the Cultural Revolution see Hongsheng 2014 and Russo 2020.
- 28. For a critique of such positions, especially in relation the French Communist Party see Weber 1977. See also Théret at Wievorka 1978.
- 29. Buci Glucksmann 1977, p. 153.
- 30. Müller and Neusüss 1971
- 31. Müller and Neüssus in Holloway and Piccioto (eds.) 1974, pp. 38-39.
- 32. Althusser 1977, p. 17.
- 33. Poulantzas 2000, p. 260.
- 34. Poulantzas 2000, p. 262.
- 35. Zavaleta 1974.
- 36. Althusser 1978, p. 220.
- 37. Althusser 1978, p. 220.
- 38. Garcia Linera 2011.
- 39. Cicciariello-Maher 2016
- 40. Sotiris 2018
- 41. Balibar 2020, pp. 19-20.
- 42. Laumonier 2021.
- 43. Gramsci 1971, p. 253 (Q5, § 127).
- 44. In this context, the re-absorption of political society in civil society would constitute the foundation for the emergence of a “self-regulated society”, indicating not merely the relocation of the mechanisms of decision-making and governance from one (minoritarian) sphere to another (majoritarian), but the self-regulation of a society in which economics and politics, the kingdom of necessity and the kingdom of freedom, of external determination and selfdetermination, are no longer separated. More precisely, it would indicate a civil society that, in the midst of its divisive particularity and subaltern interpellation by the existing political society, assumes consciousness of its own contradictions; but not in order to cancel them in a universality that hovers above it in a political society, the “constitutional Right, of a traditional type”.’ (Thomas 2009, p. 190).
- 45. On readings of Hegel that stress the complexity of his thinking of the state see inter alia Lefebvre and Macherey 1984 and Losurdo 2004.
- 46. MECW, 25, p. 268.
Glavsolnca, or the Chief Administration of the Sun
Daniela Russ
A century ago, in April 1921, Lenin received a letter from Petr Alekseevich Kozmin, an old Social Democrat and agricultural engineer specialising on the grain economy. At the latest party congress, which had just ended a few weeks before, there had been a conversation about the possibility of using the wind power of existing windmills for the electrification of the countryside. Gleb Krzhizhanovskii, head of Russia’s electrification commission, had proposed that Kozmin should investigate the matter, as he had access to the necessary information on mills in his capacity as head of the chief grain administration (glavmuka). Kozmin’s follow-up letter––printed with Lenin’s remarks in ‘Leninskii Sbornik’ in 1932, a source recently rediscovered in the context of the October Ecologies project1––reveals a stunning planetary perspective of Russian engineers and a largely forgotten history of renewable energies in the Soviet Union.
In his letter, Kozmin made a proposal that went far beyond the original idea of rural electrification: he argued that an autonomous commission on wind power should be formed where theoretical physicists, experts on aero-dynamics, and engineers would work together on the issue. Such a commission, he claimed, could in only ten years produce more wind than fossil-fueled power and “command five times as much energy than GOELRO.” In what seems like a sudden leap, Kozmin then closes his letter with the assertion that such a commission would constitute “a first step to the organisation of a glavsolnca––a chief administration of the sun.”2
Glavki were the chief committees of the war economy. In a sense, it was no big deal to propose a new one––whatever material needed to be produced, supplied, and distributed could justify central administration. By 1920, when the war economy was coming to an end, there were around 50 glavki, each responsible for a certain economic sector within the Supreme Economic Council:3there was Kozmin’s glavmuka,glavelektro for the electricity sector,glavneft for procuring oil, and so on. But Kozmin’s proposal broke with the established forms of economic organisation and gave theglavy a new meaning.Glavy managed scarce resources in a war-torn economy, but there was no shortage of the sun––even less so one aglavsolnca could possibly manage. Unlike grain and oil, the sun was more a natural condition of the war economy than a thing-like resource in it. Lenin was struck by the term as well, circling it with thick lines and adding a sceptical-interested ‘hm!??’ at the margin. Komzin’s idea of aglavsolnca pointed far beyond the management of scarce resources towards the making of a future base of abundance for the Soviet state: solar radiation.
Little is known about Petr Kozmin’s work and life, so there is room for speculation what exactly he had in mind when he proposed a main administration of the sun. As an expert in flour milling, he worked with grain, a product of photosynthesis, but there is no evidence that Kozmin associated agriculture with the solar economy. Not his grain commission, but the commission on wind power pioneered a glavsolnca by tapping into the air’s motion triggered by solar radiation. Rather than a broad biospheric perspective, he seems to have shared the view of geophysicists, who focused on the sun as a source of energy and work. It was not uncommon among Soviet physicists of that time to conceive of the energy economy as harnessing solar radiation in its different forms and transformations. It is therefore possible that Kozmin had in mind a central administration of what we would today call renewable energy, the use of the infrared and visible wavelengths of solar radiation.
Energy historians commonly associate the first half of the twentieth century with an intensification of fossil fuel use through a transition to the more versatile forms of energy, oil and electricity.4 In the early Soviet Union, however, the two did not merge easily into the same kind of modernity. While electricity was widely understood as progressive, oil was not generally seen as an energy of the future. The electrification plan treated oil as a transitory fuel and argued against combustion engines for their ‘centrifugal’ and ‘decentralising’ tendencies.5Well-known physicists, such as Nikolai Semenov, Abram Ioffe, and Boris Veinberg, thought it reasonable to prepare for a post-fossil future and develop technologies for a more direct use of the sun’s energy.6 Research on renewable energies was necessary, argued Semenov, as “[s]ocialism is not built to last for only a century,” the period over which fossil resources were expected to last.7
Soviet historiography was no less ignorant about this future past than today’s energy historians. While the Marx-Engels-Lenin Institute found Kozmin’s letter worthwhile publishing in 1932, later Soviet historians ridiculed his proposal, denouncing him as an insane ‘superrevolutionary’ who had lost contact with the concrete work of planning.8 Yet this interpretation conceals that Lenin’s reaction was far from dismissive and that research on wind power indeed intensified over the 1930s. Passing the letter on to Gleb Krzhizhanovskii, head of GOELRO and Gosplan, Lenin asked: “A special commission? Do we need that? I remember reading on the impressive progress of wind turbines before the war and that they have achieved impressive success. Shouldn’t one of our experts do a more detailed inquiry: order the (particularly German) literature and study it in Gosplan?”9 Krzhizhanovskii’s reply is unknown, but it is unlikely that he found the idea entirely outlandish. While he saw renewables as an energy for the fringes of the Soviet economy––the backward agriculture of the imperial periphery––he supported research on the matter (his Institute of Energetics later even set up a solar power laboratory).
For a short time, the Soviet Union was leading wind power technology in the 1930s.10 While the concrete chain of events and the role of Kozmin’s letter have yet to be established, a wind power commission was indeed formed. The Central Aero-Hydrodynamic Institute (ZAGI), which had studied wind turbines since 1918, set up a wind power laboratory in the mid-1920s. Supported by the head of the Supreme Economic Council, the Georgian Bolshevik Sergo Ordzhonikidze, the laboratory designed and constructed various wind power plants with a capacity of up to 100 kW over the 1930s.11 True to the Soviet commitment to electrification, the ZAGI engineers developed the first utility-scale wind generator and the earliest system integrating wind and thermal power. Contrary to Kozmin’s hopes, however, neither the commission, nor the successes in wind power technology, gave way to a glavsolnca and a deeper institutionalization of renewable energy. By World War II, the Soviet Union had embarked on an oil-based energy path.12The urgency to secure current energy supply may have eclipsed a planetary perspective, which drew a future into the present that was looming a century ahead.
Image: Stalingrad Hydroelectric Power Station. Public domain.
- 1. The October Ecologies Project (Giulia Rispoli, Daniela Russ, and Andreas Malm) is striving to make early Soviet ecological thought more accessible to an international audience. In a cooperation between the Historical Materialism Book Series and the V-A-C Foundation based in Moscow, the project is collecting, translating, and publishing primary sources on Soviet ecological thought broadly conceived, covering texts on the biosphere, energetics, cosmism, and conservation.
- 2. Vladimir Ilich Lenin and Petr A. Kozmin, “Zametki o Vetrosilovykh Ustanovkakh [Correspondence between Lenin and Kozmin on Wind Power Stations],” in Leninskii Sbornik, Tom XX (Moscow: Institut Marksa-Engelsa-Lenina, 1932), 217.
- 3. Silvana Malle, The Economic Organization of War Communism, 1918-1921, Soviet and East European Studies (Cambridge [Cambridgeshire]; New York: Cambridge University Press, 1985), 218–26, 232.
- 4. Astrid Kander, Paolo Malanima, and Paul Warde, Power to the People: Energy in Europe over the Last Five Centuries (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2014).
- 5. Gosudarstvennoi Komissii po elektrifikacii Rossii, “Plan Elektrifikacii RSFSR, Vvedenie k Dokladu 8-Mu s’ezdu Sovetov” (Moscow: Nauchno-Tekhnicheskii Otdel Vysshego Sovet Narodnogo Khozyaystvo, 1920), 50.
- 6. Boris P. Veinberg, Boris P., “Predposylki k Izpolzovaniiu Solnechnoi Energii v SSSR,” Planovoe Khoziaistvo, no. 6 (1927): 201–5; Nikolai N. Semenov, “Problema Energii,” Nauchnoe Slovo, no. 2–3 (1931): 3–12. Before turning to nuclear energy, Abram Ioffe worked on semiconductors and the photoelectric effect, the conversion of solar radiation into electricity.
- 7. Semenov, “Problema Energii,” 12.
- 8. Vladimir Krasilshchikov, Chelovek Budushchego. Povest’ o Glebe Krzhizhanovskom (Moscow: Politizdat, 1977), 365–66. The book idealises Krzhizhanovskii and justifies the energetic path taken.
- 9. enin and Kozmin, “Zametki o Vetrosilovykh Ustanovkakh [Correspondence between Lenin and Kozmin on Wind Power Stations],” 217 – Lenin’s emphasis.
- 10. Brandon Owens, The Wind Power Story: A Century of Innovation That Reshaped the Global Energy Landscape (Hoboken, NJ: Wiley IEEE Press, 2019), 42–45, https://ieeexplore.ieee.org/xpl/bkabstractplus.jsp?bkn=8826414.
- 11. A.C. Ginevskii, “N. E. Zhukovskii i Promyshlennaia Aerodinamika,” Uchenie Zapiski ZAGI XXVIII, no. 1 (1997): 73–84.
- 12. Felix Rehschuh, Aufstieg zur Energiemacht. Der sowjetische Weg ins Erdölzeitalter, 1930er bis 1950er Jahre, 2019. Jeronim Perović, “The Soviet Union’s Rise as an International Energy Power: A Short History,” in Cold War Energy: A Transnational History of Soviet Oil and Gas, ed. Jeronim Perović (Cham: Palgrave MacMillan, 2017), 1–43.
Trotsky and Thermidor
David S. Law
University of Keele
During the Great French Revolution many were guillotined. We too had many people brought before the firing squad. But in the Great French Revolution there were two great chapters, of which one went like this (points upwards) and the other like that (points downwards). We must understand this. When the chapter headed like this – upwards – the French Jacobins, the Bolsheviks of that time, guillotined the Royalists and Girondists … And then there began another chapter in France, when the French Ustrialovs and semi-Ustrialovs – the Thermidorians and the Bonapartists from among the Right-wing Jacobins – began exiling and shooting the Left Jacobins – the Bolsheviks of that time. I should like comrade Sol’c to think this analogy through to the end and, first of all, to give himself an answer to the following question: in accordance with which chapter is Sol’c preparing to have us shot? … When we did the shooting, we were firm in our knowledge as to the chapter. But comrade Sol’c, do you clearly understand in accordance with which chapter you are now preparing to shoot? I fear, comrade Sol’c, that you are about to shoot us in accordance with the Ustrjalov, i.e., Thermidorian chapter.2
This was Trotsky speaking in his defence at the Central Control Commission in 1927. He was making a forthright public declaration that the concept of a Thermidor could be usefully applied to the understanding of post-revolutionary events in Russia. From this time, Trotsky would be fascinated by the uses to which the notion of Thermidor could be put.
Trotsky used Thermidor both as analogy and as metaphor: he gave it both a precise and a broad scope. What begins as analogy to indicate parallel processes between events in France and Russia becomes overextended and transformed into a metaphor for the Soviet counter-revolution. It becomes a backcloth against which all the scenery of the decline and fall of October can be arranged. Yet the kernel of the analogy endures: the idea that a counter-revolution may be achieved through the degeneration of the revolutionary party, assisted by the evaporation of revolutionary class consciousness once the first objectives have been achieved.
This paper discusses the more precise aspects of Trotsky’s use of Thermidor. It begins by outlining the intellectual context in which the analogy was developed, then it describes the form Trotsky’s ideas took at different stages. It concludes by pointing to the strengths and weaknesses of Trotsky on Thermidor.
Context
Just as the Russian Revolution fascinates twentieth-century socialists, so the French Revolution stimulated Russian revolutionaries. Already before 1917, most of the classic accounts from Thiers to Carlyle to Aulard and Sorel had been translated; so too had Taine, Louis Blanc and Jean Jaurès.3A bibliography published in 1924 in Russia entitledWhat to Read on the Social Sciences, contained a section on the Great French Revolution which listed 45 items ranging from modest pamphlets to a republication of Kropotkin’sGreat French Revolution (600 pages) and several weighty volumes by Jaurès.4 All publications listed appeared between 1917 and 1923 at a time when there was an acute shortage of paper. No more than this is needed to testify to the fascination the French Revolution engendered.
The fascination, however, was by no means abstract. Prior to 1917, the French Revolution figured in the deliberations of revolutionaries as a possible model for Russia. In a country still feudal in many respects, the great bourgeois revolution of history could not be ignored. Trotsky in his first major theoretical work, Results and Prospects, takes up the example of 1789 as one form of bourgeois revolution, counterposes it to 1848 and asks himself which model the Russian bourgeoisie will follow. Nearly twenty years later, in a work devoted to urging a critical study of Bolshevik theory and practice in 1917,Lessons of October, he states with some polemical exaggeration:
Had we failed to study the Great French Revolution, the revolution of 1848, and the Paris Commune, we should never have been able to achieve the October Revolution, even though we passed through the experience of the year 1905.5
Inevitably, after the establishment of the Soviet regime, the question would be asked – does the French Revolution in its post-1789 phases offer any hints as to the future of the October Revolution?
As early as 1921, the Russian Communist Party explicitly accepted the view that the drawing of revolutionary parallels need not be restricted to the “first chapter” of revolutionary ascendancy. The resolution of the Tenth Party Congress, On Party Unity, passed partly in response to the Kronstadt rebellion, included the following paragraph:
Propaganda should also explain the experience of previous revolutions, in which the counter-revolution supported the petty-bourgeois groups that were closest to the extreme revolutionary party, in order to shake and then overthrow the revolutionary dictatorship, thus opening the way for the subsequent complete victory of counter-revolution, the capitalists and the landowners.6
When Lenin was not using the polemical characterisation of the Kronstadt revolt as a White Guard plot, this was precisely his view.
During the 1920s, parallels were frequently drawn in literature. In 1920, Albert Mathiez, the distinguished historian of the French Revolution, devoted a ten page article to discussing what he regarded as close parallels between Jacobinism in power, between June 1793 and July 1794, and Bolshevism.7 Two years later, Martov followed the same paths, elaborating on “the striking similarity and a number of perfect analogies, between the institutions used by the Jacobins and those serving the contemporary dictatorship”.8 By the end of the decade, Victor Serge was writing in his Year One of the Russian Revolution (the title in itself is significant), of the “striking parallels (which) can be traced between the French Revolution and the Russian Revolution, even in the details of events and actions” and outlining some of them in a section on comparisons between 1793 and 1918.9 Lenin himself often took reference points from French revolutionary history when discussing the course of the Russian revolution.10
Bolshevism did not shrink from being compared with revolutionary Jacobinism, just as Lenin had proudly accepted the taunt of Jacobin from Trotsky and others, after his plans for a vanguard party had caused the split in Russian Social Democracy at the Second Congress in 1903.11 But what credibility should be given to those who sought parallels and prediction not from the Jacobin dictatorship of 1793 but from the Thermidorian period after July 1794? The period when Robespierre went to the guillotine, the revolutionary Jacobins gave way to moderates and the Revolution took a sharp swing to the Right with the disarming and disenfranchising of the sans-culottes and the attempt to revert to “the principles of 1789”. What of those who saw in Bonapartism and restoration, the future of the Russian Revolution?
Exposition
In his study of the Georgian Menshevik Republic published in 1922 under the title Between Imperialism and Revolution, Trotsky briefly referred to the Menshevik hope of a Russian Thermidor. His answer to the Mensheviks was that the Soviet regime had demonstrated its vitality by recognising and responding to the moods of the petty bourgeois masses of Russia and instituting the NEP. The Communist Party had dealt correctly with “the Thermidor moods and tendencies of the petty bourgeois”.12
During the following year, 1923, Trotsky, in conjunction with a left opposition, began to publicly criticise the bureaucratism of the party. In his famous letter to the Party of 8 December 1923, later republished as an appendix in The New Course, he warned: “History offers us more than one case of degeneration of the old guard”. But, at this time, the parallel in his mind was the degeneration of German Social Democracy and he warned, at about the same time, in a set of theses first published inThe New Course, that:
Historical analogies with the Great French Revolution (the fall of the Jacobins) made by liberalism and Menshevism for their own nourishment and consolation, are superficial and inconsistent.13
Trotsky here viewed the fall of the Jacobins as “predetermined by the lack of maturity of the social relationship”, moreover, “Europe, economically and politically more backward, prevented the revolution from spreading beyond the limits of France”. Whereas in Russia:
The proletariat is politically so strong that while permitting, within certain limits, the formation by its side of a new bourgeoisie, it has the peasantry participate in the state power not through the intermediary of the bourgeoisie and the petty-bourgeois parties, but directly, thus barring to the bourgeoisie any access to political life.
In Trotsky’s view, the economic and political situation of Europe made an extension of the revolution inevitable and this made revolutionary prospects in Russia “infinitely more favourable” than they had been in France. Nevertheless, “for a considerable period of time”, the current political line would be “a decisive factor in safeguarding the revolution”. Socialism had to be built; political revolution, nationalisation of the means of production and the prospect of imminent revolutionary support from the West was not enough.
When Trotsky, in 1926 and 1927, turned to systematic consideration of Thermidor he did so with a revised attitude. No longer were the analogies with the French Revolution “superficial and inconsistent” but now he declared “it is absolutely indispensable” that “we must at all costs refresh our knowledge of the Great French Revolution”, “especially of its late period”.14
Despite the great reversals in policy represented by the repudiation of NEP, Trotsky retained a consistent appraisal of Thermidor from 1927 until 1933. In essence, his position was that Thermidor could be said to exist only in the case of a restoration of capitalism in the Soviet Union; prior to this all that could be observed was the political preparation for Thermidor. Thus, in the present situation, it was permissible to speak of Thermidorean tendencies but not of Thermidor. The tendencies towards Thermidor could be seen in the existence of capitalist elements, primarily the kulaks, the upper section of the middle peasants who are trying to become kulaks, and private merchant capital, and in the right wing of the Party which was influenced by these forces, adapted to them and paved the way for their growth. This right faction of the party, which became the Right Opposition in 1928, was identified by Trotsky as early as the summer of 1926 even to the extent of correctly naming names.15 It believed itself to be revolutionary but, for all that, its policies prepared the way for counter-revolution. Although Trotsky referred to Thermidor, more than once, as capitalism on the instalment plan he also consistently declares that without civil war, by which he means sharp and probably violent class conflict, the reestablishment of capitalism could not take place. The instalments are only at the level of a political preparation represented by the adoption of policies which foster capitalist tendencies. When these regenerated forces of capitalism are strong enough to attempt capitalist restoration, they will be resisted by the socialist forces. To believe otherwise is, according to Trotsky, to run the film of reformism backwards.16
Trotsky’s view of politics in the 1920s was that the Soviet state and the Communist Party had been considerably influenced by the necessity of the class compromise represented by the NEP. With a heterogenous society but a dictatorship of a single party, the diverse interests of antagonistic social classes found reflection among the ranks of the Communists. Trotsky sees class struggle between proletariat, and capitalist elements, especially the kulak and merchant capital, as taking an inner party form of Left Opposition and Right Opposition against the Party centrist apparatus which attempts to mediate between classes but of necessity is pulled first this way, then that.
For Trotsky, the social basis of Thermidor was the peasantry. An article of 1933 declares unequivocally: “In the Soviet Union only the peasantry can become a force for Thermidor”. Those who spoke most forcefully for a policy of adaptation to the peasantry were to be accused of preparing Thermidor: “… a consistent right-wing policy, whatever the intentions of Bukharin, Rykov and Tomsky, is the policy of Thermidor”.17 However, Trotsky was clearly aware that the charge of “agent of capitalist restoration” did not sit easily on the shoulders of an old Bolshevik like Bukharin, and he conscientiously drew a distinction between the intention and effects of the policy of the Right. “Even that right group which represents an open tendency to abandon the proletarian revolution does not consciously desire a Thermidor”.18 In various writings, Trotsky declares that the “real Thermidoreans of the Party” are to be found not in the first rank of the right wingers but in the “second, third and fifth ranks”.19
After 1933, Thermidor, as a term, underwent a period of relative neglect by Trotsky. Although the reasoning was never made explicit, it is not difficult to understand why Trotsky, for a period, hesitated to use the analogy. Prior to 1933, the centrality of Thermidor in Trotsky’s theoretical armoury had represented the belief that the most acute danger to the revolution was the restoration of capitalism, taking place in an insidious manner with the cooperation, albeit unconscious, of the right wing of the Party. The description of the Stalinist faction as “centrist” carried the corollary of the incapacity of this group to operate on its own behalf. The centrists lacked a definitive social base in class relations and would, by turns, be drawn towards the left and proletarian policies and then towards the right reflecting the pressure of bourgeois interests. Once Trotsky had adopted the orientation of political revolution, it followed that the characterisation of the Stalinist faction as centrist would be dropped. It also implied that, even if the restoration of capitalism was a possible ultimate destination of the society, the view that the greatest immediate danger was “creeping capitalist restoration” had been rejected, to be replaced by a concentration upon, and a greater respect for, the current political regime. It is, therefore, not surprising that the pamphlet in which Trotsky redefined his position in 1933, the Class Nature of the Soviet State, contains absolutely no reference to Thermidor. The central strategic concept that Trotsky had used from 1925 to 1933 was temporarily to virtually disappear from view.20
Trotsky returns to the problem of Thermidor in 1935. He now openly admits that “the analogy of Thermidor served to becloud rather than to clarify the question”. Thermidor in the French Revolution is now defined as a counter-revolutionary overturn in a narrowly restricted political sense. The political/social distinction made for Soviet development by Trotsky is introduced to his appreciation of the French Thermidor. The political change represented by Thermidor in France was undeniable, but Thermidor represents no change in the social basis of the revolution. The French revolution was bourgeois in character.
In essence it reduced itself to the replacement of fixed feudal property by “free” bourgeois property. The counter-revolution corresponding to this revolution would have had to attain the re-establishment of feudal property. But Thermidor did not even make an attempt in this direction.
However, political Thermidor did represent a change; power was transferred “into the hands of the more moderate and conservative Jacobins, the better-to-do elements of bourgeois society”.21
By his reconsideration of Thermidor, Trotsky had paved the way for the reintroduction of the analogy to his analysis of Soviet history. Now Trotsky had established a direct parallel between the French and Russian revolutions in the course of their “second chapters”. In both cases, the revolutionary state was seen as subject to a process of degeneration such that the political conquests of the revolution were considerably compromised. But, in both cases, the social conquests, the transition from on mode of production to another, had been preserved, even if in a surprising manner. Once more, the French Revolution would present an irresistible temptation as a storehouse to be raided for theoretical concepts. The same pamphlet which admitted the unhelpful part played by Thermidor in previous Russian discussions also declared:
Today it is impossible to overlook that in the Soviet revolution also a shift to the right took place a long time ago, a shift entirely analogous to Thermidor, although much slower in tempo, and more masked in form … The year 1924 – that was the beginning of the Soviet Thermidor.22
The article announcing Trotsky’s reacceptance of the term Thermidor also marks definitive acceptance by Trotsky of the term Bonapartism as directly applicable to the current Soviet regime. “The present political regime in the USSR is the regime of Soviet (or anti-Soviet) Bonapartism, closer in type to the Empire than the Consulate”.23 Hitherto, Trotsky had warned of the threat of Bonapartism or had described certain features of the regime as Bonapartist (the single leader, a dictatorial style, forms of plebiscitary affirmation of the leadership) but he had hesitated to invoke the term Bonapartism as a comprehensive assessment of the current regime. Now, however, he unequivocally condemned the regime as Bonapartist. Analogy proved irresistibly tempting, surely the more so because his analysis paralleled so closely Marx’s writings on Bonapartism.24
Commentary
What were the strengths of Trotsky’s use of Thermidor? Primarily that he understood that it was possible to find parallels between the political processes of different revolutions. In consistency with a view which he had developed for ten years, Trotsky in Revolution Betrayed stated: “The axiomlike assertions of Soviet literature, to the effect that the laws of bourgeois revolution are inapplicable to a proletarian revolution have no scientific content whatever”.25
First of all, Trotsky, over and over again, indicates that the Thermidor represents reaction clothed in the banners of revolution.
When the Opposition spoke of the danger of Thermidor, it had in mind primarily a very significant and widespread process within the party: the growth of a stratum of Bolsheviks who had separated themselves from the masses, felt secure, connected themselves with non-proletarian circles, and were satisfied with their social status, analogous to the strata of bloated Jacobins who became, in part, the support and the prime executive apparatus of the Thermidorean overturn in 1794, thus paving the road for Bonapartism.26
Secondly, Trotsky saw a certain law-like tendency for revolution to be followed by counter-revolution on the basis of features of class consciousness. The first systematic discussion of the ideas which became characteristic of Trotsky’s Thermidor analogy is in a series of notes, apparently written by Trotsky for his diary in November 1926 and marked “for reflection”.27 The notes conclude that “to speak of Thermidor as an accomplished fact would be a crude distortion of reality”, but they indicate the possibility of a Thermidor. A crucial element in this is played by the class consciousness of the revolutionary class after the fall of the old regime.
The succession of revolutions and counterrevolutions is the product of certain fundamental features in the mechanics of class society. Revolution is impossible without the participation of the masses. This participation is in its turn possible only when the oppressed masses connect their hopes for a better future with the idea of revolution. In a sense the hopes engendered by the revolution are always exaggerated … But from these same conditions comes one of the most important – and moreover, one of the most common – elements of the counterrevolution. The conquests gained in the struggle do not correspond, and in the nature of things, cannot directly correspond, with the expectation of the broad backward masses awakened for the first time in the course of the revolution. The disillusionment of these masses, their return to routine and futility, is as much an integral part of the post-revolutionary period as is the passage into the camp of “law and order” of those “satisfied” classes or layers of classes that had participated in the revolution…
Moods of caution, scepticism, lack of responsiveness to revolutionary appeals “constitute the basic background of party life”; they are the moods which bureaucratism “banks on”. Such moods together with “the fatigue of the older generation” present one of the bases on which a restoration of capitalism is possible.
Trotsky, in various places, indicates that, although counter-revolutions may follow revolutions, they do not completely reverse the work of the revolution. For instance, the diary notes of November 1926 begin by noting that “Revolutions have always in history been followed by counterrevolutions. Counterrevolutions have always thrown society back but never as far back as the starting point of the revolution”. This was so in France: the restoration of the monarchy did not bring about a destruction of the Code Napoléon nor a restoration of feudalism. It was to prove to be so in Russia: the Stalinist counter-revolution did not, yet at least, secure the restoration of capitalism.
Trotsky articulated the Thermidor analogy during a period of relative uncertainty regarding the course of Soviet development. There was a sureness of touch in his political analyses of 1923, and a confidence in his own theories after 1933, almost until his death. But the period 1925 to 1933 presented some difficulties: the split in the triumvirate and the formation of the Leningrad Opposition; the separation of the Right and Centre with the victory of the Centre; the rapid dismantling of NEP; the turn to industrialisation and collectivisation; and the consolidation of Stalin’s power. Trotsky found concepts to deal with all this, and even anticipated a split between Right and Centre. However, what seemed difficult for him to accept was the ability of the Stalinist Centre to so completely vanquish the forces of capitalism and to base itself on nationalised property and sustain a policy of industrial development. So, alongside some acute insights into political processes, one discovers a perspective which proved ill-founded.
However wrong, Trotsky’s perspective of this period was, it is not difficult to see how and why it was adopted. The NEP was a concession to the self-interest of the peasantry, a recognition that capitalism in the countryside could not be so easily transcended as some Bolsheviks had imagined during the period of War Communism. NEP essentially did present some danger of the restoration of capitalism, but, in the end, a rather remote danger. The NEP also, surely, did have an influence on the Party. It did cause social differentiation. It did bring some sections of the Party and state bureaucracy into contact with “private” interests in such a way as to exert a corrupting influence. Moreover, the exclusive alternative - capitalism or socialism - was a position commonly accepted. Few people, if any, anticipated the political dispossession of the working class, forcible surplus extraction from them and a regime which developed industry on the basis of nationalisation and not private ownership. From all this, it was not difficult to conclude that the main danger to the revolution was the restoration of capitalism.
Trotsky based his political perspectives of 1925 to 1933 on a view which ultimately history demonstrated to him to be ill conceived. Nevertheless, while the restoration of capitalism was described as the Thermidor of the Russian Revolution, the conclusion could only be that it was necessary to base political tactics on this danger. This meant fighting for correct policies within the limits of Party discipline and not weakening the unity of the Party, in the face of the danger of capitalist restoration. It meant a resolute hostility towards Bukharin and those of rightist dispositions; and it meant critical support for actions of the Stalinists against the policies of the Right (even if this could not in practice be distinguished from the consolidation of bureaucratic methods in political struggle).28 It might not unreasonably be concluded that the tactics that derived from the strategic conception of a struggle against Thermidor (as capitalist restoration) tended to reduce the effectiveness of the Left’s Opposition struggle against the bureaucracy (or as Trotsky after 1935 would regard it “Thermidor as bureaucratic degeneration”).
It is true that, for Trotsky, these were two aspects of the same struggle: the attempt to win the Party to the policies of the Bolshevik-Leninists, that is the Left Opposition, and thereby advance proletarian interests. But it is equally true that, in certain instances, emphasis on one or other of the two sides of the struggle could produce different tactical positions, as for example in the evaluation of the policy changes of 1928. The apostasy of a majority of leaders of the Left Opposition has its basis less in repression and more in the implications of the strategic conception advocated especially by Trotsky and generalised in the concepts of the Thermidor.
Trotsky’s usage of Thermidor in his later works prompts two further criticisms. The first is that, to an ever-increasing extent, the specificity of the analogy is lost. The second, and more substantial, criticism raises the possible limits of any Marxist comparison of bourgeois and proletarian revolutions. The criticism is suggested by Trotsky himself, although not applied to his own theories. In setting it out, we must first return to Trotsky’s revision of his strategic position regarding the Stalinist regime.
The originality of Trotsky’s position of 1933 lies in its repudiation of the necessity of political criteria for the recognition of a workers’ state. Trotsky introduces a new concept to the lexicon of Marxist politics in 1933: the degenerated workers’ state. The term is highly significant. It is qualitatively different from the concept of a workers’ state with bureaucratic deformations, the view which Lenin takes of the young Soviet state. According to Trotsky’s new view, it is possible for a workers’ state to continue to exist even after the process of degeneration has been completed to the point where a new political revolution is urged by a new revolutionary party. This apparently bizarre position represented, in fact, a retreat from the problems of analysing the Soviet regime. Working with the traditional Marxist concepts, Trotsky, after arguing that there was neither capitalism nor socialism in the Soviet Union, was left with the transition between them, the workers’ state. However, it had become clear that the bureaucracy was an entrenched group, unwilling to be moved by demands for reform. Therefore, a new political revolution was required, but it was evident that this revolution would not change the forms of property, since nationalised property already predominated, therefore it could not be regarded as a social revolution. The conclusion was that the regime had to be regarded as a degenerated workers’ state, since the bureaucracy, by preserving nationalised property, was still expressing the workers’ interests.
The objections to this theory are many and varied. Some have argued that the real relations of production differed little from capitalism as a far as the position of the workers was concerned and that the position of the bureaucracy was effectively that of a new ruling class. Others have suggested that the criterion of nationalisations is formal, and that the touchstone of the definition of a workers’ state should be the collective control of the means of production by the associated producers and the consequent existence of planning. The social and political contradictions of the current regime give rise not to planning but to a more or less coercive attempt to administer. This is clearly not the place to discuss the various criticisms of Trotsky’s view that have been made or that might be made. What we are interested in here is the relevance of the Thermidor analogy to the “mature” characterisation of Soviet society that Trotsky advanced.
Once Trotsky had re-evaluated his earlier view of Thermidor as social counter-revolution, it is clear that the revised political definition of Thermidor could serve a purpose. It could serve as an analogy between the social and political relationships of a bourgeois revolution and the social and political relationships of Soviet development. Thermidor as a model was irresistible as a defence of the view that the Soviet state was a degenerated workers’ state. Political counterrevolution alongside the preservation of the social revolution. This, in Trotsky’s analysis, was the course of Soviet development. Was it not also the meaning of Thermidor?
The overturn of the Ninth Thermidor did not liquidate the basic conquests of the bourgeois revolution, but it did transfer power into the hands of the more moderate and conservative Jacobins, the better-to-do elements of bourgeois society. Today it is impossible to overlook that in the Soviet revolution also a shift to the right took place a long time ago, a shift entirely analogous to Thermidor, although much slower in tempo, and more marked in form.29
If bourgeois society could survive with a variety of different forms, why could not a workers’ state continue to exist in the Soviet Union taking different forms?
In fact, Trotsky answers this question in the pamphlet which readopted the Thermidor analogy. The question with which implicitly he is concerned is why a degenerated workers’ state cannot create a socialist society but, in fact, it seems that Trotsky here points to a crucial objection to his own theories, although without recognising it as such.
The proletarian revolution not only frees the productive forces from the fetters of private ownership, but it transfers them to the direct disposal of the state that it itself creates. While the bourgeois state, after the revolution confines itself to a police role, leaving the market to its own laws, the workers’ state assumes the direct role of economist and organizer. The replacement of one political regime by another exerts only an indirect and superficial influence upon market economy.30
Trotsky continues by asserting that the replacement of a workers’ government by a bourgeois or petty-bourgeois government “would inevitably lead to the liquidation of the planned beginnings and, subsequently to the restoration of private property”. But, surely, the argument also applies with full force to a regime which has degenerated from revolutionary ideals to such a point where the call for a new revolution is felt to be necessary; to a regime which does not depend on democracy; to a regime which creates and defends social inequality and material privilege; and so on? Trotsky’s Thermidor analogy, if it means anything, means that an impeccable class background and a revolutionary history offer no guarantees for future action. Why then restrict the alternative to a workers’ government or a bourgeois or petty-bourgeois government? Why not add to these a government which has its past in the workers’ revolutionary movement but its present in the offices of state and party administration, the safe end of a machine gun, the guard house of a prison camp, the soft chair of a roomy flat, the material comfort of privileged access, special shops, thenomenklatura system and so on?
Trotsky continues:
In contradistinction to capitalism socialism is built not automatically but consciously … Socialism can acquire an immutable character only at a very high stage of development … At the given stage of development, the socialist construction stands and falls with the workers’ state … Only after thoroughly pondering the difference between the laws of the formation of bourgeois (‘anarchistic’) and socialist (‘planned’) economy, it is possible to understand those limits beyond which the analogy with the Great French Revolution cannot pass (emphasis in the original).
Trotsky puts clearly the objection to the analogy in its revised form. The concept has been re-introduced in an attempt to support his distinction between political counterrevolution and social counterrevolution. Given the Marxist approach, this is satisfactory for a bourgeois revolution. As Trotsky indicates, there is a relative autonomy of the state and the political sphere in capitalist society. Classes are established outside the arena of politics. But, surely, for a post-capitalist society the situation is quite different, and therefore the analogy dubious. Trotsky, in the passages quoted above argued cogently for the view that the working class can only articulate itself as the ruling class by political means. The position of the state is central once private ownership of the means of production is abolished. How, then, can a political counterrevolution be anything other than a social counterrevolution at the same time? Is it not control of the means of production, rather than ownership by itself, that is decisive? How can the working class control the means of production except through the state? These powerful objections to Trotsky’s theory are not removed by resort to the analogy of Thermidor. In the end, the term mainly served as a historical invocation to justify a theory which proved increasingly absurd by the standards both of common sense and theoretical analysis.
Conclusion
Trotsky’s first major theoretical enquiries attempted to employ the standards of the French Revolution in its ascendancy as a yardstick against which to assess the prospects of revolution in Russia. At the end of his life, Trotsky was still pondering the mysteries of revolution in the light of comparisons between France and Russia, by now absorbed in the problems of revolutionary decline. Frequently, political analogy mystifies as much as it reveals. Was it so with Trotsky? His uses of Thermidor surely assisted understanding of some of the processes of degeneration, but, in the end, more was asked of the analogy than it could bear. In his mature usage, Trotsky conflated two separable problems within the notion of Thermidor. The first was the political process of bureaucratisation; the second, the nature of the society which was being formed through the experience of Stalinism. Without doubt, Trotsky’s handling of the first problem was far surer than his approach to the second.
How was it possible to make sense of a society where the working class had lost power, but capitalism and the power of the bourgeoisie had not been restored? Trotsky’s commitment to struggle against Stalinism was unquestionable, heroic, and inspiring. Yet his legacy as a theoretician is ambiguous. There was a failure to recognise that the society being established in the process of counter-revolution required its own forms of analysis; this was demonstrated by the continued prominence in Trotsky’s work of the Thermidor analogy. For all the insight he provides into the decay of a revolution, he fails to transcend a conventional view of the transition to socialism. When that process is brought to a halt, he has little to say beyond general political slogans. He concludes that the Soviet Union in its Stalinist form has no right to survive for more than a moment; there is no room for it in his theory of history. But, unfortunately, and not only for Trotsky, it has survived, and requires an investigation which sees Trotsky not as a map but simply as a signpost.
* References to the series of volumes published by Pathfinder Press, New York, which collect Trotsky’s shorter published writings of the exile years are indicated thus: WLT, with the relevant dating. For the years 1929 to 1933 citations are from the first editions, published 1972 to 1975, and for the years 1933 to 1940 they are from the second editions, published 1973 to 1978.
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- 1. This paper was originally published in a volume bringing together papers presented at a conference in Italy : Pensiero e azione politica di Lev Trockij: atti del convegno internazionale per il quarantesimo anniversario della morte, ed. Francesca Gori (Firenze: Leo S. Olschki. 1982), 2: 433-449.
- 2. TROTSKY, ‘Two Speeches at the Central Control Commission, 1927’, in Ip., The Stalin School of Falsification, New York 1972, p. 143.
- 3. J. KEEP, 1917: ‘The Tyranny of Paris over Petrograd’, Soviet Studies, vol. XX, 1968-69, n. 1, pp. 22-35.
- 4. I. KNIZNIK, Cto Citat po Obscestvennym Naukam: Sistemasticeskij Ukazatel’ Kommunisticeskoj i Marksisticeskoj Literatury 1917-1923, Leningrad 1924.
- 5. TROTSKY, The Lessons of October reprinted in Ip., The Challenge of the Left Opposition (1923-25), New York 1975. The passage quoted appears on p. 202.
- 6. KPSS vs Rezoljucijach i Resenijach, Tom Vtoroj 1917-1924, Moskva 1970, p. 220.
- 7. A. MATHIEZ, ‘Bolshevism and Jacobinism’, Dissent, Winter 1955.
- 8. J. MARTOV, The State and the Socialist Revolution, partially published in translation in I. HOWE, Essential Works of Socialism, New York 1971. The passage quoted appears on p. 264.
- 9. V. SERGE, Year One of the Russian Revolution, London 1972, pp. 307-309.
- 10. Lenin, like Trotsky, considered approaching Russian Revolution in terms of a comparison with the French revolutions of 1789 and 1848. See: A Revolution of the 1789 or the 1848 Type?, March-April 1905, LENIN, Collected Works, vol. 8, Moscow 1962, pp. 257-259. He also, like Trotsky, made reference to the NEP as a possible Thermidor in a brief comment as part of his preparatory notes for a report to the Tenth Party Conference of May 1921 on the tax in kind. He wrote: “Thermidor? Soberly, it may be, yes? Will be? We shall see”, P.S.S., XLIII, p. 403. This idea did not find a place in the speech Lenin actually delivered. Lenin’s notes for the speech, first published in 1932, were not published in the relevant volume of the English edition of the Collected Works, published in 1969.
- 11. In his pamphlet One Step Forward, Two Steps Back, Lenin declared: “The division into majority and minority is a direct and inevitable continuation of that division of the Social Democrats into a revolutionary and an opportunist wing, into a Mountain and a Gironde, which did not appear only yesterday, nor in the Russian workers’ party alone, and which no doubt will not disappear tomorrow”. Later in the pamphlet, Lenin responds to criticism from Axelrod of “Jacobin” conceptions of revolution. He asserts that Axelrod is at one with “the Girondists of present day Social Democracy everywhere” who “always resort to the terms ‘Jacobinism’, ‘Blanquism’, and so on to describe their opponents … These ‘dreadful words’ – Jacobinism and the rest – are expressive of opportunism and nothing else. A Jacobin who wholly identifies himself with the organisation of the proletariat a proletariat conscious of its class interests – is a revolutionary Social-Democrat”. LENIN, Collected Works cit., vol. 7, pp. 344, 381, 383. See also Lenin’s response to Rosa Luxemburg’s review of One Step Forward, Two Steps Back, where he denies that he introduced the analogy with Jacobinism to the current debate but accepts the parallel between the “revolutionary” wing of Russian social-democracy and the Jacobins. Collected Works, vol. 7, pp. 474-485.
- 12. Originally published under the title Mezhdu Imperializmom i Revoliuciei. Published in translation as TROTSKY, Social Democracy and the Wars of Intervention in Russia 1918-1921 (Between Red and White), London 1975, The passage quoted appears on p. 83.
- 13. TROTSKY, The New Course, Ann Arbor 1965, pp. 92, 40.
- 14. TROTSKY, ‘Two Speeches at the Central Control Commission’, 1927, in Ip., The Stalin School of Falsification cit., p. 142.
- 15. As early as September 1926, Trotsky had predicted: “It is quite clear that neither Tomsky nor Bukharin nor Rykov, because of their past, their moral authority, and so forth are not and cannot be capable of playing the role under Stalin that is played by Uglanov, Kagonovic, Petrovskij and company. To amputate the present Opposition would in fact inevitably mean the transformation into an opposition of the rest of the former group in the Central Committee. A new discussion would then be in order, in the course of which Kaganovic would unmask Rykov, Uglanov would do the same for Tomsky, while the Slepkovs, Stalins and company expose Bukharin”, T.A., T-891.
- 16. For a reference to Thermidor as “capitalism on the installment plan” see: TROTSKY, ‘The War Danger – The Defense Policy and the Opposition, Speech at the Joint Plenary Session of the Central Committee and the Central Control Commission (1 August 1927)’, in Stalin School of Falsification cit., p. 172. The reference to “film of reformism” is from The Class Nature of the Soviet State, 1 October 1933, W.L.T., 1933-1934, p. 103: “He who asserts that the Soviet government has gradually changed from proletarian to bourgeois is only so to speak, running backwards the film of reformism”. Similar statements are made elsewhere; for example: “how … can anyone assume or believe that power can pass from the hands of the Russian proletariat into the hands of the bourgeoisie in a peaceful, tranquil, imperceptible, bureaucratic manner? Such a conception of Thermidor is nothing else but inverted reformism”. ‘Defense of the Soviet Republic and the Opposition’, 7 September 1929, W.L.T. 1929, p. 284.
- 17. TROTSKY, ‘The Bloc of the Right and the Left’, 21 November 1930, W.L.T. 1930-1931, p. 58.
- 18. TROTKSY, The Platform of the Joint Opposition (1927), p. 108.
- 19. TROTSKY, ‘The Three Factions in the Comintern’, 1930, W.L.T. 1930, p. 15.
- 20. TROTSKY, The Class Nature of the Soviet State, 1 October 1933, W.L.T. 1933-1934, pp. 168, 174.
- 21. TROTSKY, ‘The Workers’ State, Thermidor and Bonapartism’, 1 February 1935, W.L.T. 1934-1935, pp. 168, 174.
- 22. Ibidem, p. 174.
- 23. Ibidem, p. 182.
- 24. Marx in an assessment of the Second Empire in France had written: “In reality it was the only form of government possible at a time when the bourgeoisie had already lost, and the working class had not yet acquired, the faculty of ruling the nation”. K. MARX, The Civil War in France, London 1921, p. 30. Trotsky’s assessment of the Stalinist regime in Russia was a mirror image of this assessment.
- 25. TROTSKY, The Revolution Betrayed, New York 1970, p. 89.
- 26. TROTSKY, ‘Thermidor and Bonapartism’, 26 November 1930, W.L.T. 1930-1931, p. 75.
- 27. TROTSKY, Iz Dnevnika (Dlja Pamjati), 26 November 1926, T.A., T-3015.
- 28. For example: “(The Bolshevik-Leninists) … will support every real, even if timid and insufficient step toward the Left taken by the Centrist leaders”. Krizis prevo-centrist-kogo bloka i perspektivy, October or November 1928, T.A., T-3143.
- 29. TROTSKY, ‘The Workers’ State, Thermidor and Bonapartism’, 1 February 1935, W.L.T. 1934-1935, pp. 173, 174.
- 30. Ibidem, p. 179.
The Workers’ Movement and the National Question in Ukraine 1897-1918 – Introduction
Marko Bojcun
Editor’s note: We are publishing below the Introduction to the new book in the Historical Materialism series - The Workers’ Movement and the National Question in Ukraine 1897-1918 by Marko Bojcun:https://brill.com/view/title/21251
Bojcun explores the social-democratic workers’ movement in the Ukrainian provinces of the Russian Empire, focused on the Ukrainian, Jewish and Russian parties. Providing a wealth of information for the first time in English, he traces the development of the labour movement from its beginnings through the tumultuous first year of the revolution, examining the relationship of the social and national aspects of the revolution. This new book is essential reading for an understanding of the Ukrainian Revolution of 1917-1921, which was to be pivotal to the fate of the Russian Revolution and the wider revolutionary wave in Europe at the time.
Christopher Ford
To read the Table of Contents or purchase the hardcover library edition, click here:The Workers’ Movement and the National Question in Ukraine – 1897-1918 | Brill
INTRODUCTION
The Great Revolution is a historical fact of exceptional importance for the Ukrainian people. Above all, the people discovered their identity in it ... every peasant and worker knows now that he or she is a Ukrainian... The national identity of the urban workers has grown enormously. In 1917 they came forward as Russians and today more than half identify themselves as Ukrainians. This is an important conquest of the revolution and of our difficult struggle.1
The exiled Socialist Revolutionary leader Mykyta Shapoval2 drew this conclusion during one of his speeches to Ukrainian workers living in Canada in 1927. Although Ukrainians had failed to secure their independence in the recent upheaval, Shapoval remained optimistic about the future. Tsarism had been swept away. Among workers as well as peasants there was a new sense of national awareness which the Soviet government could not ignore. Like many other socialists and communists living in Ukraine and abroad, Shapoval believed in 1927 that the Revolution had not yet run its full course.
Such optimism was dispelled soon afterwards by Stalin’s collectivisation of agriculture, the 1932-33 Famine and the purges. Yet Shapoval’s claim about the adoption of a Ukrainian national identity by the lower classes became all the more credible in the following decades. Before the Revolution, the price that peasants paid for their social mobilisation, their transition from agricultural to industrial occupations, was assimilation into the Russian and Polish culture of the towns and cities. Not all were assimilated nor did they submit to it without resistance. But, before 1917, they were fighting a losing battle. After the Revolution, however, the peasantry came into the cities and the working class more and more on their own terms. In 1897, 44 percent of the working class identified themselves as Ukrainians, by 1926, 55 percent, 1939 66 percent and 1959 69 percent. By 1970, three-quarters of the working class in the Ukrainian Soviet Socialist Republic identified themselves as Ukrainians.3
Rapid industrialisation in the twentieth century drew the rural population to urban centres at an unprecedented rate and profoundly changed the ethno-linguistic composition of urban society. Yet the adoption of a national identity by members of the working class was a result not only of the peasant sources of the class, but also of conscious political choice. The assertion of Ukrainian national identity arose from the historic clash between classes of a stateless people mobilised by industrialisation and classes with the levers of industrialisation and state power already in their hands. A decisive turning point in this process was when the choice of national identity began to be made by the majority of peasants and workers in Ukraine was 1917.
The scope of the work
This is a study of the formation of the working class in Ukraine and its relationship to the national question. It examines the working class as a force in the labour process and in politics from 1897 to 1918. It endeavours to explain how the formation of the working class was shaped by the national question, what interests workers had in its resolution and the kinds of solutions they pursued through their mass organisations and political parties.
The study focuses on eight provinces (gubernia) of the Russian Empire in which Ukrainians were a majority at the turn of the century.4 It excludes from consideration the territories of Western Ukraine under Austro-Hungarian rule until the end of 1918 and after that under Poland until 1939. It maps out a broad view of the historical process: the succession of state powers on Ukrainian territories, the emergence of the capitalist mode of production and the formation of the working class as a labour force and as a political force. It examines the debates about the national question among internationally prominent Marxists of the era and analyses the positions taken by the Ukrainian, Russian and Jewish social democratic parties active in the Ukrainian provinces. These themes provide a context for examining in detail the first “long year” of the Revolution from February 1917 to April 1918.
A theory of the national question
Throughout the study, I use the terms “national question”, “national movement”, “nation” and “nation state”. They refer respectively to the genesis, politicisation, mobilisation and unification of nations. Used in such a way, they are merely signposts, heuristic indicators of historical stages of national development. A viable theory of national development, however, should explain how and why the national question arises in the first place.
I have adopted and extended Karl Marx’s use of the concept of the division of labour in order to explain the origins of the national question. Marx observed in the development of capitalism an increasing separation and specialisation of human labour: agricultural and industrial, menial and intellectual, and male and female labour. These separations in social labour were not peculiar to capitalism, but were the product of a much longer evolution of human society. However, as the capitalist mode of production emerged, it incorporated the city-country, menial-intellectual and gender divisions of earlier modes of production and accentuated them in an even sharper way.
For Marx, the division of labour was the infrastructure of class society, while private property was but a juridical expression and defence of the division of labour peculiar to capitalism.5 The European social-democratic movement which inherited his ideas had a tendency to reduce Marx’s concept of class society to its juridical expression, as the relationship between the owners of labour and the owners of the means of production. This notion of ownership served as a general indicator or the “last word” on class under capitalism, but it was not of much use for understanding class struggles other than economic ones. Nor could it provide insight into the contradictions within the working class itself, divided as it was by occupational privileges based on location, education and gender.
How does all this apply to the national question? The division of labour did not stop evolving with the advent of capitalism. Since the end of the nineteenth century, capitalism as a global economic system has built an international division of labour. It is now characterised by the imposition of specific economic tasks by the economically powerful metropoles upon the ever more distant peripheral societies it draws onto the world market.6 Regions of the world and their inhabitants have taken different paths of social and economic evolution depending on the time they were linked to the world market, the resources most readily exploitable in them and the relative strength of the state power already in control of their territories.
For different historical reasons, the boundaries of states in peripheral societies seldom conform to the boundaries of compact ethno-linguistic groups. As a rule, they encompass several of them. Such groups within single states are drawn into the process of industrialisation and urbanisation at varying rates. These rates depend on the readily exploitable natural resources and human labour in their vicinity, the influence of these groups’ leaders in the central state institutions, the groups’ knowledge of the language of modern industry and government, their possession of industrial skills and work habits and their willingness to assimilate into a new urban-industrial culture. Because the resources available for industrialisation are limited, they are applied only in selected parts of the country. Invariably industrialisation will benefit the ethno-linguistic group or groups that control the state power. Even if new industries are not located on their own group’s traditional territory, they are in control of the state mechanisms for centralising and redistributing a major portion of the surplus product produced over the whole territory of the state.
Thus, the division of labour that has emerged on a global scale between the industrialised and industrialising regions is reproduced once again within the confines of the latter, the industrialising region. Here, the division of labour incorporates the potential attributes of a national identity (language, culture, attachment to territory, etc) that affect an ethno-linguistic group’s capacity for social mobility through the class structure of the industrialising region – that is, the capacity to secure urban, intellectual and “male” designated occupations in the modernising economy. Thus, it is the crystallisation of a division of labour between established and incipient nations within an existing state, a process that holds back the social mobility of the incipient nation and redistributes the surplus product of the whole society inequitably in favour of the established nation, which politicises these well-known attributes of national identity (language, culture, attachment to territory) and provokes national movements among the incipient nations.7
One can, therefore, argue that labour in contemporary world society is divided not only along gender, menial-intellectual and city-country lines, but also along national lines. If one accepts such a view of the division of labour, it follows that national movements, that is movements which contest this division, are one of the expressions of class struggle. For class struggle is, in the first instance, nothing more than a struggle over the division of labour and the distribution of wealth stemming from that labour.
I have proposed above in a most general way a concept of the historical development of a division of labour between state-established and incipient nations at three distinct levels: in the globalising capitalist economy, in the industrialising region of the peripheral state and within the working class itself. In the chapters below, I have applied this concept to the case of Ukraine and examined how the workers movement and its social-democratic parties dealt with the national question from their inception in the late nineteenth century up to and including the first year of the Revolution.
The historical debate
The historical literature on the Revolution and Civil War presents three distinct assessments of the efforts of the mass organisations and political parties of the working class in relation to the national question and the movement for independence. The first of these originated in the Ukrainian Social-Democratic Workers’ Party (USDWP), one of the parties vanquished in the Revolution. Volodymyr Vynnychenko, a prominent USDWP leader has argued that
in its great majority, our proletariat was denationalised and Russified by force of historical circumstances. Because of this we did not have a broad proletarian base... to support us... to demand resoluteness from us... We rested on the peasantry, not on the poor strata but for the most part on the well-to-do peasants who were more politically mature and conscious.
Instead of going to our proletariat even though it had not awakened nationally, instead of awakening it and drawing social resoluteness and confidence from it... approaching it with a social programme and giving it national leadership, we turned away from it. We became scared of it and even of the peasants who went after the proletariat. That was our main mistake and shortcoming.8
Vynnychenko attributed the failure of the national independence movement to attract working-class support mainly to the USDWP’s own limitations. On the other hand, Isaak Mazepa, another USDWP leader, stressed more the subjective and organisational immaturity of the Ukrainian speaking proletariat:
... the Ukrainian nation began to awaken and muster its forces only a few decades before the outbreak of the revolution. It is not surprising that the trade union and political organisation of the Ukrainian proletariat began considerably later than among the Russians and that the Ukrainian intelligentsia approached its proletarian masses very late in the day.... The Ukrainian proletariat proved young and disorganised. The revolution came too soon for it.9
The leaders of the vanquished Social Democrats and others, such as the Ukrainian Party of Socialist Revolutionaries (UPSR), continued in exile to debate their defeat in the Civil War at the hands of the Bolsheviks. Their thinking about 1917 evolved from regarding it as a social revolution, as they had called it in 1917, to remembering it also, and even more so, as a national liberation struggle. They attributed the defeat of their state building efforts to an immature Ukrainian proletariat, which denied them an adequate social base in the cities, and to a Russian proletariat hostile towards any kind of Ukrainian state.
The second interpretation of working-class practice on the national question, which became dominant among Soviet Ukrainian historians, originated in a debate among the victors of the Civil War at the end of the 1920s. After the Civil War, the Bolsheviks embarked upon a programme of “indigenisation” or “Ukrainisation”, in order to broaden the social base of their regime from its narrow, mainly Russian and Jewish urban base. The ranks of the Communist Party (Bolsheviks) of Ukraine (CP(B)U) were swelled by large numbers of Ukrainians for the first time, among them former members of the USDWP and UPSR, their rivals in the Civil War. This second interpretation was advanced by the Stalinist faction that fought “nationalist deviations” appearing in CP(B)U as a result of the Ukrainian influx. It guided party thinking and historical scholarship thereafter, until the collapse of the Soviet Union. It was made up of several interlocking propositions: that the working class was the leading force in the Revolution; that its Russian section led the other nations in the working class; that the Communist Party led the working class as a whole; and that the national question was of insignificant concern in the order of problems faced by the working class. This set of propositions provided a clear framework in which Soviet scholars from the 1930s onwards explained how the working class came to power in the Revolution and Civil War, established a multinational state of its own and resolved the national question in the process.10
One of its most serious consequences was the committal of all other parties of the working class to historical oblivion. The Mensheviks, USDWP and Bund were seldom mentioned. When they were, it was to the tune of accompanying epithets as to their “opportunist,” “bourgeois nationalist” or “counterrevolutionary” activities. Another consequence was the studious denial of the peasantry, the class that had a greater social weight than the working class and that deeply affected the fortunes of all urban based state building projects.
The so-called state school of the history of the Revolution and Civil War provides a third interpretation of the role of the working class with regard to the national question. Ukrainian historians after 1991 were freed from the restrictions of Stalinist historiography to approach the revolutionary period 1917-21 from a wide variety of perspectives, to focus on the full spectrum of its participants. However, almost without exception, they adopted the term and concept of the “Ukrainian revolution” and the explanatory framework of national liberation struggle or movement. They rejected the concept and the study of the social revolution of this period and considered the parties and movements that addressed it as such as carriers of a foreign ideology. So, too, they downplayed, if not denied, the links of the Ukrainian revolution to the Russian, and of the turbulent growth of the national movement to the democratic gains made by the February 1917 overthrow of Tsarism.11
This school, which has dominated the field of enquiry into this period since 1991, identifies with the conclusions reached by moderate and conservative participants in the Revolution and Civil War, with individuals like Dmytro Doroshenko12 and organisations like the Ukrainian Party of Socialist Federalists (UPSF). In addition to its basic proposition that a national liberal struggle, rather than a social revolution, lay at the heart of the upheavals of 1917-21, this school also contends that the behaviour and choices of elite forces, rather than of the masses of workers and peasants, determined the outcome of this struggle. It concludes that Ukrainian elites of the time made the wrong choices by favouring radical social policies and downplaying the task of independent nation state building; and, ultimately, that the Ukrainian masses succumbed to the demagogy of foreign, Bolshevik forces and so abandoned their leaders and the struggle for their own nation state.
The state school’s propositions provoke several important questions that this study seeks to answer. Were indeed the social revolution and the national liberation struggle counterposed as mutually exclusive alternatives in the reasoning and the actions of participants in the Revolution and Civil War? If not, then just how did they understand the relationship between them in a broader, unifying historical process? Finally, can we speak of a social class as a subject, a maker of history? In other words, did the working class demonstrate any capacity for independent reasoning and action, or should we accept the proposition of the primacy of elites in the revolutionary process of those times? In the following chapters, I consider these three interpretations of a turbulent period of Ukraine’s history as I attempt to disclose the relationship of the working class to the national question of that time on the basis of my own study of the original source.
- 1. Mykyta Shapoval, Velyka Revoliutsiia i Ukrains’ka Vyzvolna Prohrama (Prague: Vilna Spilka i Ukrainskyi Robitnychyi Instytut, 1927), 251.
- 2. Mykyta Shapoval (1882-1931) - poet, literary critic, agronomist and political activist; founding member of the Ukrainian Party of Socialist Revolutionaries (UPSR) and an organiser of the November 1918 uprising against Hetman Pavlo Skoropadsky’s regime. Exiled in Czechoslovakia after the Civil War, he helped establish several organisations, including the Ukrainian Workers’ Institute in Prague. Shapoval also co-edited the journal Nova Ukraina with the Ukrainian Social-Democratic leader Volodymyr Vynnychenko.
- 3. Bohdan Krawchenko, Social Change and National Consciousness in Twentieth Century Ukraine. (Basingstoke, Macmillan, 1985), 206.
- 4. They are the Right Bank provinces (of the Dnipro River) of Kyiv, Podillia and Volyn’; the Left Bank provinces of Chernihiv, Poltava and Kharkiv; and the southern provinces of Katerynoslav, Kherson and Tavria. In this study the Right and Left Bank provinces are also referred to as the northern tier provinces. At the eastern edge of the tier, Kharkiv shared characteristics of economic development both with the other five, largely agrarian, northern provinces and the industrialising south. Strictly speaking, the industrialising provinces were in the southeastern part of Ukraine but are referred to simply as the southern provinces or “the south.”
- 5. Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, The German Ideology, Parts I and III, edited and with an introduction by R. Pascal (New York: International Publishers, 1947), 8-16, 21-27, 43-44.
- 6. Marx studied the beginning of this process. In Capital, vol. 1 (Moscow: Progress Publishers, 1977), 425 he writes: “A new and international division of labour, a division suited to the requirements of the chief centres of modern industry springs up, and converts one part of the globe into a chiefly agricultural field of production for supplying the other part which remains a chiefly industrial field.”
- 7. Michael Hechter, Internal Colonialism. The Celtic Fringe in British National Development (Berkeley, Calif.: University of California Press, 1975) 33-39.
- 8. Volodymyr Vynnychenko, Vidrodzhennia Natsii, 3 vols. (Kyiv-Vienna: Dzvin, 1920), 2:97.
- 9. Isaak Mazepa, Bol’shevyzm i Okupatsiia Ukrainy. Sotsiial’no-ekonomichni prychyny nedozrilosty syl ukrains’koi revoliutsii (Lviv-Kyiv: Znattia to Syla, 1922), 17-18.
- 10. P. Hrytsenko, Robitnychi Fortetsi Sotsialistychnoi Revoliutsii (Kyiv: Naukova Dumka, 1965); P. P. Hudzenko, Sotsialistychna Natsionalizatsiia Promyslovosti v Ukrains’kii RSR (Kyiv: Naukova Dumka, 1965); I. O. Hurzhii, Zarodzhennia Robitnychoho Klasu Ukrainy (kinets XVIII - persha polovyna XIX st.) (Kyiv: Derzhavne Vydavnytstvo Politychnoi Literatury URSR, 1958); Yu. Y. Kirianov, Rabochie Iuga Rossii 1914 - fevral 1917 g. (Moscow : Izdatelstvo Nauka, 1971); F. Ie. Los, gen. ed, I. O. Hurzhii, I. T. Shcherbyna, O. I. Luhova, eds. Istoriia Robitnychoho Klasu URSR , 2 vols. (Kyiv : Naukova Dumka, 1967); O. O. Nesterenko, Rozvytok Promyslovosti na Ukraini. Chastyna II (Kyiv: Vydavnytstvo Akademii Nauk URSR, 1962); Ye. M. Skliarenko, Robitnychyi Klas Ukrainy v Roky Hromadians’koi Viiny (Kyiv: Naukova Dumka, 1966); and Narys Istorii Profspilkovoho Rukhu na Ukraini 1917-20 (Kyiv: Naukova Dumka, 1974).
- 11. A comprehensive review of Ukrainian historical writing about this period is provided by Valeriii Soldatenko, “Novi pidkhody v osmyslenniu istorychnoho dosvidu i urokiv revoliutsiinoi doby 1917-20 rr. v Ukraini”, Naukovi pratsi istorychnoho fakul’tetu Zaporiz’koho Derzhavnoho Universytetu,No. 24, 2008; 93-203.
- 12. Doroshenko, Dmytro. Moi Spomyny pro Nedavnie Mynule, 1914-20. (Munich: Ukrainske Vydavnytstvo, 1969); Istoriia Ukrainy. 2nd ed. (Augsburg: P. Pohasyi, 1947).
Time, Labour, and the Overcoming of Domination: Reflections on Martin Hagglund’s 'This Life: Secular Faith and Spiritual Freedom'
By Peter Hudis
I.
In the face of a global pandemic that underlines the fragility of individual life and the massive protests against police abuse and for Black lives that call for a reorganisation ofsocial life, few books speak more to the present moment than Martin Hägglund’sThis Life, Secular Life and Spiritual Freedom. It is not often that a dense philosophical work that engages thinkers ranging from St. Augustine, Spinoza, and Hegel to Marx, Adorno, and Martin Luther King Jr. achieves widespread popularity outside of academia. That Hägglund’s book has done so is due not only to his facility in conveying complex ideas without succumbing to the sin of popularisation; it is most of all because its central argument—thatfreedom is determined by how we cultivate the finite time at our disposal—speaks directly to the present historical juncture.
Freedom, he correctly emphasises, is not liberation from external constraints. It is being ‘able to ask ourselves what we ought to do with our time’.1 Taking ownership of our time is what he means by spiritualfreedom. It involvessecular as againstreligious faith, since notions of divine transcendence inevitably distract from prioritising the free and collective organisation of the limited time available to us. All living beings devote time to activities not directly related to maintaining their material existence. What characterises humans (for better or worse) is that we canreflect andact upon how to manage thissurplus time. ‘It underlies all normative considerations, since what I do with my time is what I do with my life. Every question of what I ought to do—or ought not to do—is ultimately a question of what I ought to do with my time’.2 However, we can seize the time only if we acknowledge that time is finite; if we believe our lives are potentially infinite, there is no urgency to cultivate lived life as the highest value.
Hägglund’s critique of religion has nothing to do with the crude materialism of ‘new atheists’ or many orthodox Marxists. He is not suggesting that religious people are incapable of spiritual freedom, only that their pursuit of it is at odds with a belief in eternal life. Believers who help the poor out of fear (or love) of God actually treat them as means to an end instead of as ends-in-themselves; their standpoint is instrumental. I can treat someone as an end in itself only if in caring for them I affirm that their lives are not a mere way-station on the road to eternal bliss. Hägglund pulls no punches: ‘Freedom as an end in itself is not promoted by any of the world religions or by any of its founding figures. Neither Jesus nor Buddha nor Muhammad has anything to say about freedom as an end in itself. That is not an accident but consistent with their teachings. What ultimately matters from a religious perspective is not freedom but salvation, what ultimately matters is not to lead a life but to be saved from being alive’.3
While Hägglund’s critique of monotheistic religions (as well as Buddhism, which defines nirvana as liberation from contingency and finitude) is extremely cogent, it is less clear that it applies to animism (common among many indigenous peoples), which denies any categorical distinction between the physical and the spiritual (Hägglund does not address the issue). Nor is it so clear that religion per se necessarily reflects an alienated society (one is reminded of Hegel’s praise of Greek religion for fusing religious imagery with ethical life, despite his criticisms of its accommodation with slavery). In any case, Hägglund does not presume that religion can be annulled by enlightened critique; he follows Marx in holding that, since religious alienation is an expression of alienated social relations, the former will persist as long as the latter remains to be uprooted.
The most important part or the book is the second half, which consists of a creative (if not totally original) reading of Marx’s critique of capital. Though few deny that the theory of value is integral to Marx’s critique of capital, many have attributed to him the view that ‘labour is the source of all value’. But this is clearly incorrect. The value of commodities is not determined by the number of hours employed in making them but by theaverage amount of time in which it isnecessary to do so. If it were otherwise, producers would be made to work slower rather than faster, since the greater the quantity of labour time, the greater would be the value of the product. Hence, concrete labour is not the source of value; its substance isabstract orhomogenous labour—labour forced to conform to a constantly-shifting average irrespective of the needs of the producers. Hägglund brilliantly shows that ‘socially necessary labour time as the measure of value is specific to the commodity form and becomes the essence of value only in the capitalist mode of production. Labour time as the measure of value is not transhistorically necessary but the historically specific essence of capitalism, which is contradictory and can be overcome’.4
Sadly, many Marxists view value production as a transhistorical necessity that cannot be overcome. They are so overburdened by the unequal distribution of value that permeates modern society that they overlook the need to uproot the human relations that makes value production possible in the first place. The emphasis on a ‘fair’ redistribution of value rather than the abolition of social relations which compel wealth to assume a monetary form defines not just the failed efforts to promote a ‘transition to socialism’ in the twentieth century but also much of the rebirth of interest in socialism in much of the world today. The critique of capitalism remains on the superficial, phenomenal level of targeting property forms and exchange relations rather than what is essential—the domination of abstract universal labour time. It is not hard to see that a superficial critique of the logic of capital that leaves aside its critical time determinant leads of necessity to an impoverished notion of socialism that stops short of a new humanism.
Before turning to the broader implications of Hägglund’s reading of Marx, it is worth noting that it speaks directly to subtle but crucial shifts underway in the advent of the Covid-19 pandemic—even though This Life was published prior to it. I am referring to the fact that millions of workers in the US and elsewhere are deciding not to return to work now that social restrictions in many countries are being lifted—even though there is an enormous pent-up demand for their labour power. As one report put it, ‘On a more philosophical level, the constant threat of illnesses, more time with family members, leisure time that gave way to new passions—all may have prompted some workers to reassess how they want to spend their time. Burned out, some people have left their jobs for once-on-a-lifetime experiences, like traveling the world. Others have seen an opportunity to shift careers or branch out on their own’.5 Another report notes, ‘Many are rethinking what work means to them, how they are valued, and how they spend their time. It’s leading to a dramatic increase in resignations—a record four million people quit their jobs [in the US] in April alone, according to the Labor Department’. It cites a worker saying, ‘I think the pandemic has changed my mindset in a way, like I really value my time now… I think the pandemic has just allowed for time. You just have more time to think about what you really want in life’.6
This hardly reflects the experience of all workers; many (especially in the health care profession) found that the pandemic left them with much less time. But we should not overlook the dramatic sea change in attitudes spurred by the pandemic. Faced with constant reminders of how fickle and uncertain is our finite existence in the face of millions of deaths, increasing numbers of people are rethinking their priorities—especially when it comes to deciding how to organise their time. Without realising it, they are grappling with a problem that is central to the Marxian critique of the capitalist mode of production.
II.
It may seem that Hägglund’s critique of the anxiety felt by many religious and philosophical currents when it comes to accepting the finitude of the human condition does not apply to secular leftists, who are devoted to more mundane matters than the pursuit of everlasting life. However, this is not the case. Marx is often credited or condemned for having a ‘perfectionist’ view of human nature, which implies that socialism ends not just class conflict but all basic conflicts. Others hold that socialism transcends natural necessity, often taken to mean that it abolishes labour—even though Marx held, ‘Labour, as the creator of use-values, as useful labour, is a condition of human existence which is independent of all forms of society; it is an eternal natural necessity which mediates the metabolism between man and nature, and therefore human life itself’.7 It can be argued that secular standpoints that envision a new society freed from such considerations express a disquiet with finitude similar to that found in many religious traditions.
Marx, of course, conceived of socialism as the end of class society, the transcendence of alienation, and the abolition of alienated labour. However, that is a far cry from suggesting that he conceived of the realm of freedom as bidding adieu to natural necessity. As he put it in his 1844 critique of Hegel, ‘Humanity is directly anatural being … [and] as a natural, corporeal, sensuous, objective being it is a, conditioned, and limited creature, like animals and plants’. For Marx, the aspiration to overcome our limited, sensuous being is possible only as ‘a product of pure thought (i.e., of mere imagination)—an abstraction’.8 That is why he stressed, ‘to be sensuous is to suffer’.9 A new society does not put an end to suffering, it puts an end to needless suffering, and it enables us to face our suffering by giving meaning to our life’s accomplishment and setbacks through the free organisation of our time.
That many are reluctant to acknowledge this is reflected in the widespread prohibition against discussing a postcapitalist society. There are good reasons for caution in trying to specify the content of a socialist or communist future, as suggested by Marx’s critique of the utopians. But many have taken this further, by applying the religious prohibition against making images of God to efforts to describe a new society freed from alienation. Perhaps the foremost expression is Theodor Adorno’s invocation of Bilderverbot inNegative Dialectics: ‘Such absence concurs with the theological ban on images. Materialism brought that ban into secular form by not permitting Utopia be positively pictured; that is the substance of its negativity. At its most materialistic, materialism comes to agree with theology’.10
There are serious problems with this perspective. It makes sense for a monotheist to prohibit positive descriptions of the ‘absolute,’ since doing so represents the infinite in finite terms. The most that can be done is to say what God is not (via negativa). But communism is not a substitute for God: the latter is unconditioned and freed of finitude whereas the former is historically conditioned and immersed in finitude. It is for good reason that Marx proclaimed, ‘communism is not the end, the goal, of human development’.11 There can be no ‘end,’ since development is impossible without an internal lack or limit. As Hegel never ceases to remind us, negativity isimmanent in Spirit. Marx knew this well, as seen from his discussion of the ‘defects’ that define the lower phase of communism inTheCritique of the Gotha Programme. He does not suggest that abstract labour, value production, or class domination persists in the lower phase; these are all superseded from the inception of socialism. However, the realm of freedom also undergoes self-development. The needed revolutions never end. Which is why theGrundrisse defines a society that frees material wealth from its value integument is one defined by ‘the absolute movement of becoming’.
But the question remains—is it possible to positively envision an alternative to capitalism without falling into the shortcomings associated with utopian speculation?
Perhaps the most original aspect of This Life is its discussion of how Hegel’s thought speaks to this. Many will object that Hegel was an idealist who glorified the Prussian state and had little to offer in the way of a critique of capital. Much of contemporary Hegel scholarship undermines such stereotypes and Hägglund puts it to good use. It is true that ‘the absolute’ in Hegel involves mutual recognition between individuals and the state, but, by ‘the state’, he means social institutions that embody the idea of freedom. An idea of ‘freedom’ that lacks concrete embodiment is formalist and empty. Hegel therefore contends that the quest for other-worldly religious salvation turns us away from the true object of devotion—freedom’s embodiment in forms of collective social praxis in which no one is considered free unless everyone is free. Such institutions arefinite; but, like the Christian God, the idea of freedom must be embodied in a material form that is reconstituted (or born anew) when faced withdeath—that is, the rise of a new era that renders obsolete older forms of social praxis. Hence, Hägglund writes, ‘The aim of Hegel’sPhenomenology can be seen as a secular “reconciliation” with our finitude, in the sense of grasping that our finitude is not a limitation that blocks us from attaining the absolute. Rather … the absolute knowing of absolute spirit is not the act of a divine mind, but our philosophical grasp of the conditions of spiritual life’.12
Hägglund, nevertheless, acknowledges Hegel’s limits, since ‘On Hegel’s account, only the philosopher can attain the “absolute knowing” that we are the source of the authority of our norms and that our freedom—the highest good—is possible only through our mutual recognition of one another as essentially social, historical, material, and finite living beings’.13 Hegel makes this plain enough in The Philosophy of Religion: ‘How the actual present-day world is to find its way out of the state of dualism [between individual self-interest and collective praxis] and what form it is to take, are questions which must be left to itself to settle and to deal with them is not the immediate and practical business of philosophy’.14 Herein lies the fundamental philosophical divide between Marx and Hegel. As Hägglund puts it, ‘For Marx, on the contrary, absolute knowing cannot be limited to a theoretical achievement of the philosopher. Rather, absolute knowing must be a practical achievement that in principle can be taken up and sustained by everyone’.15 This is the meaning of the Eleventh Thesis on Feuerbach—not that we forgo the effort to think the absolute, let alone the need to think philosophically, but that we change the world by creating conditions in which the absolute can be known—and so that we can be known.
As Gillian Rose magnificently put it several decades ago, ‘Hegel’s philosophy has no social import if the absolute cannot be thought’.16 It can likewise be said that Marx’s philosophy has no social import if the new society cannot be thought. This is because the absolute is immanent in our mundane earthly existence. Which means, ‘If the absolute is misrepresented, we are misrepresenting ourselves, and are correspondingly unfree. But the absolute has always been misrepresented by societies and peoples, for these societies have not been free, and they have re-presented their lack of freedom to themselves in the form of religion’.17
Insofar as the ‘absolute,’ when viewed from the vantage point of Marx’s transformation of Hegel’s revolution in philosophy into a philosophy of revolution, is the expression of a new society that transcends alienation, Hägglund’s book provides a powerful counter to the prevailing prejudice that envisioning the alternative to capitalism is pointless or counterproductive.
III.
There is still more to be said, however, as to whether is it possible to envision an alternative to capitalism without falling prey to the shortcomings associated with utopian speculation.
Many no doubt think that any effort to do so runs counter to Marx’s insistence that ‘Communism is for us not a state of affairs which is to be established, an ideal to which reality [will] have to adjust itself. We call communism the real movement which abolishes the present state of things’.18 Yet I would argue that Marx’s opposition to defining the future irrespective of actual movements is precisely what compels us to spell out an alternative to capitalism. Marx made no secret of the fact that he considered the most vital accomplishment of the workers’ movements of his time to be its rejection of the capitalist organisation of time. The chapter on ‘The Working Day’ in Volume One of Capital goes so far as to call the movement for the eight-hour day a greater step in the fight for freedom than the Declaration of the Rights of Man. The question of time was hardly restricted to ‘when does my working day begin and end’; it extended to questioning the timing and rhythm of the work process itself, which Marx takes up in his critique of the despotic plan of capital at the point of production.’
This has taken on greater importance in recent decades in light of struggles against automation and artificial intelligence, objections to digital capital’s extension of the working day, criticisms of the enormous time constraints placed upon women burdened with unpaid domestic labour, and attacks on the prison industrial complex that offers victims of deindustrialisation little more than prison time for committing the pettiest of offenses—especially if they are Black, Latinx, and Native American.
Hägglund’s argument that socialism consists, first and foremost, of replacing socially necessary labour time with free time as the measure of social relations may not constitute an outline of a new society, but it surely provides conceptual ground for developing one. He stresses, ‘Socially available free time is not merely leisure time but time devoted to activities that we count as meaningful in themselves. These activities can range from participation in forms of labour that we recognize as necessary for the common good, all the way to the pursuit of individual projects that challenge the given norms of what may be a meaningful activity’.19 The abolition of socially necessary labour time does not end labour as such, since there will always be a need to reproduce our means of subsistence. It rather means that necessary labour will be reduced to a minimum, while its character and form—like all kinds of activity—will be freely determined: ‘Even our socially necessary labour can be an expression of our freedom if it is shared for the sake of the common good. The aim, then, is to decrease the realm of necessity and increase the realm of freedom by making the relation between the two a democratic question… we need to negotiate… how to cultivate the finite time that is the condition of our freedom’.20
Although Hägglund’s interpretation of Marx’s theory of capital is incisive, it raises a number of critical questions.
First, the term ‘value’ has two distinct meanings—one refers to economic valuation (‘what’s the value of your mortgage?’), the other tomoral valuation (‘I value your love and friendship’). The first treats value as a quantity ofmoney; the second cannot be quantified in terms of money. The two are, at times, conflated by Hagglund, as in, ‘The revaluation of value as the foundation for Marx’s arguments has generally been overlooked and never fully understood, partly because Marx restricts his own use of the term “value” to the capitalist conception of value as the quantity of labour time’.21He is right about this, but Marx has very good reasons for discussing ‘value’ in a purely economic sense. As Hägglund notes elsewhere,Capital is an immanent critique of capitalist society; it employs terms that are adequate to its concept. Valuein an economic sense serves asCapital’s object of critique, since that is the only ‘value’ that is acknowledged by capital. This does not mean that arevaluation of value is not extraordinarily important; the creation of an alternative to capitalism hinges on developing social values that break from the notion that only that which augments profit is valuable. However, not alerting the reader to the divide between these two uses of ‘value’ can lead to lack of clarity.
Take the statement, ‘The measure of value is thus different in the realm of freedom than in the realm of necessity. The value of an object or an activity in the realm of freedom is not directly correlated with the amount of labour time required to produce or maintain it’.22 The ‘measure of value’ is indeed different in these two realms since the annulment of alienated or abstract labour puts an end to value production. It is impossible to ‘measure’ what does not exist. Things continue to be valued in socialism but not in terms of socially necessary labour time.
However, Marx clearly states—in the Grundrisse,Capital, andThe Critique of the Gotha Programme—thatactual labour time (not to be confused withsocially necessary labour time) will serve as a measure of social relations in at least the initial phase of socialism or communism (Marx treats the two as indistinguishable, not as distinct historical stages). When Marx, inCapital, calls upon the reader to ‘imagine, for a change, an association offree people, working with the means of production held in common,’ he describes this postcapitalist, socialist society as follows: ‘The share of each individual producer in the means of subsistence is determined by his labour-time. Labour-time would in that case play a double part’—it would be the basis of ‘a definite social plan [that] maintains the correct proportion between the different functions of labour and the various needs of the associations’ as well as ‘ameasure of the part taken by each individual in the common labour’.23 Actual labour time—the number of concrete hours one works—becomes a measure of social relations. Nowhere does Marx speak of the measure of value in a socialist or communist society, sinceactual labour time in no way implies the existence of socially necessary labour time. Since abstract labour is the substance of value, the abolition of the dual character of labour by the freely associated producers eliminates the very basis of value and surplus valuein the economic sense. What is abolished is not labour, but social relations in which it is treated as a means for augmenting wealth in monetary form. As Marx discusses inThe Critique of the Gotha Programme, once society dispenses with exchange value, commodity exchange and capital and subsequently distributes the social product based on the actual number of hours of labour performed by the individual, we will have reached the initial phase of freedom which prepares us for a higher one in which free time rather than labour time serves as a measure.
Second, while This Life has much to say about themeasure of value, it has much less on thesubstance of value—abstract labour. The two are closely related: labour becomes a value-creating substance insofar as it is subjected to an abstract time determination that is beyond the producers’ control. But labour time is not necessarily correlated to abstract universal labour time; in fact, for most of human history the latter did not even exist. Nevertheless, Hägglund writes, ‘As long as we measure our social wealth in terms of labour time, technological development is bound to intensify exploitative methods for extracting relative surplus value from workers’.24 This is, again, not consistent with Marx’s discussions of a postcapitalist society.
That Marx—briefly and very much in outline—presented a conception of what life would be like following capitalism does mean it should be followed as a blueprint. We do need to take seriously, however, why Marx distinguishes between actual labour time and socially necessary labour time—especially since the point is lost on the part of almost all of his commentators. Take Hägglund’s statement, ‘As soon as the satisfaction of our needs depends on the contribution of our labour, we are back to the form of coercion that Marx sought to overcome through his critique of wage labour’.25 This not only overlooks the fact that some kind of labour contribution will be needed in any society; it also leaves unclear what is meant by a ‘contribution of labour’. Does it refer to producing goods and services in accordance with an average amount of time that is determined by the market or the state? Or does it refer to the actual number of hours of labour performed by freely associated individuals in communes or cooperatives? The two are not just different, they are diametrically opposed. If ‘contribution of labour’ is understood in the first sense, Hägglund is right; if it is understood in the second sense, he is not.
These problems may stem from the debt that This Life owes to Moishe Postone’sTime, Labour, and Social Domination. As I have discussed elsewhere,26 although the book is an important contribution to Marxist scholarship, it suffers from serious theoretical limitations. These appear in its most important contribution—its correct contention that the split between concrete and abstract labour (and value production generally) is specific to capitalism and is not a transhistorical fact of human existence. That, in itself, is no discovery of Postone’s; it was pointed out decades earlier by such figures as Rosa Luxemburg, Raya Dunayevskaya, and Karel Kosik. What is new in Postone’s ‘reinterpretation’ of Marx is the claim that concrete labour becomes so dominated by abstract labour as to become virtually indistinguishable from it. He well knows that both are generated in the same instant; but he argues that since concrete labour is the mode of expression of abstract labour, the logic of capital effaces any distinction between labourers and the value-form of labour power. The logical conclusion is that any appeal to subjective human forces to uproot capital (whether through class struggle or other kinds of human resistance) is futile; the subject of liberation is not living labour but dead labour, capital.
Postone largely draws his interpretation from the section of Marx’s Grundrisse on the automaton, which envisions a point at which living labour becomes so totally displaced from production that ‘labour time ceases and must cease to be a measure’27 of social wealth. Value production comes to an end through the very principle which governs it—the drive to squeeze out more value in less amounts of time through labour-saving devices.
But there are problems with such appropriations of the Grundrisse. First, Marx takes a different position inCapital, writing ‘Only the abolition of the capitalist form of production would permit the reduction of the working day to the necessary labour time. But even in that case. the latter would expand to take up more of the working day’.28 Second, as Dunayevskaya pointed out as early as 1958, since the Grundrisse was written during the politically quiescent 1850s, it falls short of dialectically connecting the objective laws of capitalism with subjective forms of resistance—unlikeCapital, which was written under the impact of the campaigns for the eight-hour day and the struggles of African Americans against slavery. As she put it, ‘there is too much emphasis in theGrundrisse on machinery as providing the material basis for the dissolution of capital’.29 The effort to expunge class struggle and other forms of resistance from Marx’s value-theoretic categories—as if the former concerns the ‘exoteric’ Marx which can be put aside in favour of the ‘esoteric’ theory of value—rests on very shaky ground.
Hägglund takes aim at the claim that dead labour is the emancipatory alternative, writing, ‘In Postone’s story of the transition from capitalism to socialism, historical agents do not have the power to change anything… he offers no account of what we will be free to do and why our freedom matters’.30 He rightly holds that Postone’s ‘indeterminant conception of freedom is incompatible with democratic socialism’.31However, while these defects may be related to Postone’s failure to argue for a re-evaluation of value, it has much more to do with his peculiar reading of Marx’s theory of value, in which abstract labour effaces concrete labour to the point of foreclosing any human agency—and hence the kind of re-evaluation Hägglund is arguing for.
Hägglund’s project would be strengthened by engaging the Marxist-Humanist tradition, which decades before Postone, the Neue Marx-Lektüre, and value-form theorists, argued for the historical specificity of Marx’s theory of value, opposed the view that the abolition of private property and competitive markets ensures an exit from capitalism, and held that the elimination of socially necessary labour time in favour of freely associated time is the cardinal principle of socialism. As Dunayevskaya wrote inMarxism and Freedom, ‘The capitalist organisation [of society] is where all labour, no matter what its concrete nature, is timed according to what is socially necessary. It becomes one mass of abstract labour precisely because thelabourer himself is paid at value’.32 Notice, here, that the duality of labour under capitalism is posed not only in terms of concrete versus abstract labour, but of the labourer versus the value-form of its labour power. Skipping over such potential internal resistance to the value-form renders value theory, and by extensive Marxism, arid, objectivist and non-humanist.
Marx’s critique of the value-form of mediation, however, is thoroughly humanist—contrary to the claims of Postone and many others. Marx’s value-theoretic categories are thoroughly rooted in class relations, not because he was a class reductionist, but because his fundamental object of critique is the reified form of human praxis that defines modern society—beginning with social relations at the point of production, but hardly ending there. As Dunayevskays argues, ‘Marx’s analysis of labour—and this is what distinguishes him from all other Socialists and Communists of his dayand of ours—goes much further than the economic structure of society. His analysis goes to the actual human relations’.33 Grasping and developing this is the fundamental challenge facing all revolutionary theory today, especially when it comes to extending Marxism beyond issues of class to that of race, gender, and sexuality. ‘Marxism is a theory of liberation or it is nothing’.34 Each generation must find its way to meeting that perspective, most of all our own.
The issues raised by Hägglund’s study are of the foremost importance. For, if the logic of capital effaces subjective human resistance, it can only mean (as Postone and many capital-logic theorists openly affirm) that capital is the ‘absolute’ of modern life. And, if that is the case, it follows that we who resist capital are not part of the absolute. The absolute once again gets viewed as outside or beyond us. That is an egregious misrepresentation of the absolute. The claim that the human can no longer be thought—a central premise of much of contemporary left-wing thought—cannot but misrepresent ourselves as well as freedom itself. But the absolute—whether understood in Hegelian terms as the unity of subject and object or in Marxist-Humanist terms as the new society—can be thought, if only we are daring enough tothink it.
References
Adorno, T. 1973. Negative Dialectics. New York: Seabury Press.
Dunayevskaya, R.1973. Philosophy and Revolution, from Hegel to Sartre and from Marx to Mao. New York: Dell.
Dunayevskaya, R. 2000 [orig. 1958]. Marxism and Freedom, from 1776 Until Today. Amherst NY: Humanities Books.
Ember, EW. 2021. ‘Record Numbers Are Quitting Jobs as Virus Wanes, The New York Times, June 21.
Hägglund, M. 2019. This Life: Secular Faith and Spiritual Freedom. New York: Pantheon.
Hägglund, M. 2021.
Hegel, G.W.F. 2007. Lectures on the Philosophy of Revolution, Vol. III: The Consummate Religion, ed. Peter C. Hodgson. Oxford: Clarenden Press.
Hsu, Andrea 2021. ‘The Great Resignation: Why Millions of Workers are Quitting Their Jobs,’ National Public Radio, June 24.
Hudis, P. 1995. ‘Labour, High Tech Capitalism, and the Crisis of the Subject: A Critique of Recent Developments in Critical Theory,’ Humanity & Society, 19 (4) November, pp. 14-20.
Hudis, P. 2000. ‘The Death of the Death of the Subject,’ Historical Materialism, 12 (3), pp. 147-69.
Hudis, P. 2103. Marx’s Concept of the Alternative to Capitalism. Chicago: Haymarket Books.
Marx, K. Marx, K. 1975 [orig. 1844]. Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts of 1844. InMarx-Engels Collected Works, Vol. 3. New York: International Publishers.
Marx, K. 1977 [orig. 1867]. Capital, Vol. 1. New York: Penguin
Marx, K. 1987 [orig. 1858]. Outlines of the Critique of Political Economy, inMarx-Engels Collected Works, Vol. 29. New York: International Publishers.
Marx, K. and Engels, F. 1976 [orig. 1846]. The German Ideology, in Marx-Engels Collected Works, Vol. 5. New York: International Publishsers.
Rose, G. 2009 [orig. 1981]. Hegel Contra Sociology. New York and London: Verso Books.
- 1. Hägglund 2019, p. 11.
- 2. Ibid., p. 191.
- 3. Ibid., p. 375.
- 4. Hägglund, p. 252.
- 5. Ember 2021.
- 6. Hsu 2021.
- 7. Marx 1977, p. 133.
- 8. Marx 1975, pp. 376, 377.
- 9. Ibid. p. 377.
- 10. Adorno 1973, p. 207.
- 11. Marx 1975, p. 308.
- 12. Hägglund 2019, p. 365.
- 13. Hägglund 2021.
- 14. Hegel 2007, p. 162.
- 15. Hägglund 2021.
- 16. Rose 2009, p. 98.
- 17. Ibid.
- 18. Marx 1976, p. 49.
- 19. Hägglund 2019, p. 344.
- 20. Ibid., p. 25
- 21. Ibid., p. 262.
- 22. Ibid., p. 223.
- 23. Marx 1977, p. 172.
- 24. Hägglund 2019, p. 264.
- 25. Ibid., p. 273.
- 26. See Hudis 1995, Hudis 2000, and Hudis 2012.
- 27. Marx 1987, p. 91.
- 28. Marx 1977, p. 667.
- 29. Dunayevskaya 1973, p. 70.
- 30. Hägglund 2019, p. 277.
- 31. Ibid., p. 278.
- 32. Dunayevskaya 2000, p. 86.
- 33. Ibid., p. 60.
- 34. Ibid., p. 22.
Marxism, Strategy and the Art of War
A Review of Estrategia Socialista y Arte Militar [Socialist Strategy and the Art of War] by Emilio Albamonte and Matías Maiello
Panagiotis Sotiris
Hellenic Open University, Greece
panagiotis.sotiris@gmail.com
Emilio Albamonte and Matías Maiello, (2017) Estrategia Socialista y Arte Militar, Buenos Aires: Ediciones IPS.
Introduction
Within Marxism, there has been a long tradition of discussing strategy in terms that are close to the discussion of the ‘art of war’.
The starting point of the book is that Lenin and other Marxists had read Clausewitz and the classics of military thought, and had a vivid interest in military matters.
Presentation of the Book
The book begins with a very interesting and informative chapter on the German debate and polemic surrounding ‘strategy of attrition’ versus ‘strategy of overthrow’.
Then the authors move on to a reading of Rosa Luxemburg’s interventions in those debates. They use references to Clausewitz to stress the dynamics of the situation and the importance of Rosa Luxemburg’s interventions, although they also stress the limitations of her thinking on insurrection. Their discussion of the debate is careful and well-documented, and the open questions, such as that of strategic reserves and alliances, are stressed.
With regard to Lenin, the authors situate his intervention in the context of the debates both in international Social Democracy and specifically in the debates in Russia. They offer a very interesting reading of Lenin in Clausewitzian terms such as ‘military virtue’. They stress that Lenin had a more complex conception of the relation between ‘peace’ (a non-revolutionary situation) and ‘war’ (a revolutionary situation). Again, we find here a criticism of the reading of Lenin by Lars T. Lih. They also find in Lenin the qualities attributed by Clausewitz to what the latter defined as military genius. Of particular interest is their critique of Lars T. Lih’s polemic against the ‘rearmament thesis’ in regard to Lenin after 1914.
Lenin would use Clausewitz’s formula to define that strategic framework and draw conclusions regarding the attitude of revolutionaries towards war. Two of his definitions would be essential. First of all, if war is the continuation of politics by other means, the position of revolutionaries cannot be determined by which state is fighting on the offensive and which on the defensive. One must determine which policies the different states are continuing by means of the war. Secondly, the continuation of revolutionary politics in the context of war necessarily involves the continuity of class struggle also ‘by other means’, that is, by the development of civil war. (p. 134.)
The Pasts and Futures of Social Reproduction as Dual Terrains Struggle
A Review of Women and Work by Susan Ferguson
Maud Perrier
SPAIS
Gender Research Centre, Faculty of Social Sciences and Law, University of Bristol, UK
Maud.Perrier@bristol.ac.uk
Abstract
This article discusses Susan Ferguson’s Women and Work and how it advances contemporary debates about social reproduction within and beyond Marxist feminism. In particular, I emphasise its call for avoiding hierarchising struggles against oppression and those against exploitation, and for centring a dual-terrains approach. The article calls upon social-reproduction scholars to learn from Ferguson’s careful approach to writing the pasts and presents of social reproduction, and also calls for a further widening of the archives from which the political theory of women’s labour struggles is written.
Keywords
social reproduction – labour – feminism – struggle
Susan Ferguson, (2019) Women and Work: Feminism, Labour and Social Reproduction, London: Pluto Press.
Women and Work: Feminism, Labour and Social Reproduction (Pluto Press, 2019) presents a masterful analysis of three centuries of feminist deliberations on work, carefully tracing how the fault lines of social-reproduction theory emerged. Given the troubling lack of precision in terms of how the concept of social reproduction is deployed in academic debate, inside and beyond orthodox Marxism, Ferguson’s book stands out as offering precisely the analytical rigour needed to take this scholarly resurgence forward. Women and Work shows why an historical and nuanced appreciation of the social-reproduction perspective is crucial to analysing contemporary anti-capitalist feminist struggles. In a time when postwork feminist critiques such as Kathi Weeks’s The Problem with Work
The question of women’s work and its relation to oppression most animated feminist theorising in the 1970s, and this book stands shoulder to shoulder with such Marxist-feminist classics as Lise Vogel’s Marxism and the Oppression of Women
Divided into two parts, the book analyses the history of feminist thought on labour through three different perspectives: equality feminism, social-reproduction feminism and critical-equality feminism. While equality feminism is associated with the rational-humanist tradition of Wollstonecraft, critical-equality feminism is described as sharing ‘social reproduction’s feminist critique of capitalism’s separation of productive and non-productive work, but […] without elaborating a political-economic analysis of unpaid women’s work’ (p. 4). The limitation of critical-equality feminism, according to Ferguson, lies in its tendency to conceive of patriarchy and capitalism as dual, distinct systems of oppression, and she illustrates the ways in which this has narrowed the scope of analysis for authors as wide ranging as Flora Tristan and Clara Zetkin. Chapter 3 discusses the significance of the less well-known socialist thinkers Anna Wheeler and William Thompson, and identifies their book The Appeal (1825) as a radical departure from contemporary works, they being among the first socialists to analyse unproductive housework as integral to the system of reproductive labour. Ferguson highlights how Wheeler and Thompson (and to some extent Inman’s) theorising of unpaid work was consistently erased from socialist thought and party politics, and how this continues in virtue of the way feminist theory is received via canonised ‘founders’ and simplified categories, hence calling out significant erasures in the telling of socialist-feminist histories.
The discussion of what constitutes a social-reproductive strike and her engagement with the ideas of Federici and Weeks are some of the most stimulating parts of the book for those interested in contemporary social-reproduction movements. The care with which Ferguson develops her analysis is exemplary: where, in the course of making her argument, she departs from Fortunati and Federici’s autonomist perspective, she stresses points of similarity in their approaches, namely that working within and outside capitalist relations are not mutually exclusive strategies. Ultimately, she argues that the distinction between productive and unproductive labour under capitalism disappears in their analysis of value production. Her claim that Fortunati’s alternative theory of value transfer is imprecise and too randomly based on Marx’s categories (p. 125) might have been even more convincing had it been developed in more detail. For Ferguson, the Marxian school’s perspective is superior because it highlights how capitalist subsumption is not a totalising process, a dimension she claims autonomists underestimate. Hence her argument for the necessity of centring struggles from within capitalist relations, rather than developing alternative value communities outside capital. Her critique of autonomists is rendered incisive by what she identifies as missing from their accounts. She points out that Federici, Weeks and others are silent about the significance of workplace-based struggles, and neglect to discuss how solidarity between the employed and the unemployed could be built, a point also echoed in Pitts and Dinerstein’s most recent book. In turn, this strengthens her argument that the Marxian perspective is the one best able to guide a mass movement that bridges struggles on productive and reproductive terrains. This argument is made more compelling by the examples she chooses, such as Eric Blanc’s study of the 2018 US teachers’ strikes
The differentiated analysis of capital as producing unequal and divided workforces broadens the relevance of the book out to those scholars analysing the social organisation of labour. The story of how oppressed groups came to identify capital’s interest in ensuring that marginalised groups of women are paid poverty wages to perform social-reproductive work is surely foundational, yet this insight often remains left out of mainstream intersectional analyses. The book also illustrates the ways in which observing and standing with workers catalysed the insights of the theorists she foregrounds. She writes evocatively about Flora Tristan’s observations on French washer women’s ill-health due to exposure to polluted water and dyes, and the nineteenth-century African American abolitionist feminist Maria Stewart’s speech about domestic labour as servitude: ‘How long shall the fair daughters of Africa be compelled to bury their minds and talents beneath a load of iron pots and kettles?’ (p. 73). She thus brings our attention to the significance of the historical and material conditions of knowledge-production for Marxist theory and shows us that, then as today, the act of seeing workers matters for analysing processes of revolutionary consciousness.
Women and Work has few shortcomings as critical theory, because it is both erudite and sharp. Ferguson’s highlighting of the critical-equality perspective as having an important role in the development of Marxist feminism is an important contribution, because too often the categories of liberal feminism and Marxist feminism are mis-characterised as respectively reformist and revolutionary, descriptions which are ‘too blunt to capture the assumptions shared by both traditions’ (p. 60). Yet, I wanted to know how these categories translate into contemporary feminist and left politics today, and what alliances between critical-equality and social-reproduction feminism she thinks are worth pursuing given the shifting political terrain since 2010. Those are clearly questions for other scholars of social movements to reflect on, but Ferguson’s take on them will have convinced the reader further of why these categories continue to matter. The book brings classic feminist-Marxist texts vividly to life, but left me with many questions about the present: how do the increased contradictions between paid and unpaid social reproduction that characterise many women’s lives today reinvigorate these foundational texts? For example, the financialisation of sectors such as care work and education poses particular questions for theorising women’s labour struggles. Ferguson clearly sees both unions and grassroots groups as having a unique role to play in these struggles, but their historically distinct articulations are not always acknowledged. I was also curious about what her argument means for building alliances that centre the distinctive experiences of migrant and informal workers’ organising, given this stratification plays a significant role in international labour struggles that have massively transformed studies and struggles of women’s labour over the last fifty years. Those are ever more pressing questions for theorising women’s labour in a way that centres global inequalities.
Ferguson characterises the best social-reproduction feminism accounts as being neither purely historical nor purely abstract.
The book’s approach to dislodging unpaid housework from the centre of social-reproduction theory and her case for the importance of building bridges with workplace-based struggles mean that this book will remain a landmark of Marxist-feminist thought for years to come. Ferguson develops social-reproduction theory as a multi-faceted critical theory of oppression, and shows the importance of tracing its roots critically and thoroughly. The significance of workplace organising is especially ripe at a time when nursery workers’, fast-food workers’, teachers’ and home-care workers’ unions are seeing a resurgence in their membership’s appetite for strikes. As Ferguson discusses in a recent interview,
References
Arruzza, Cinzia, Tithi Bhattacharya and Nancy Fraser 2019, Feminism for the 99%: A Manifesto, London: Verso.
Bhattacharya, Tithi (ed.) 2017, Social Reproduction Theory: Remapping Class, Recentering Oppression, London: Pluto Press.
Blanc, Eric 2019, Red State Revolt: The Teachers’ Strike Wave and Working-Class Politics, London: Verso.
Boris, Eileen 2019, Making the Woman Worker: Precarious Labor and the Fight for Global Standards, 1919–2019, New York: Oxford University Press.
Cobble, Dorothy Sue 2010, ‘More Intimate Unions’, in Intimate Labors: Cultures, Technologies, and the Politics of Care, edited by Eileen Boris and Rhacel Salazar Parreñas, pp. 280–95, Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press.
Dinerstein, Ana Cecilia and Frederick Harry Pitts 2021, A World Beyond Work?: Labour, Money and the Capitalist State between Crisis and Utopia, Bingley: Emerald Publishing Ltd.
Ferguson, Susan 2016, ‘Social Reproduction: What’s the Big Idea?’, available at: <https://www.plutobooks.com/blog/social-reproduction-theory-ferguson/>.
Giménez, Martha E. 2018, Marx, Women, and Capitalist Social Reproduction: Marxist-Feminist Essays, Historical Materialism Book Series, Leiden: Brill.
Hemmings, Clare 2005, ‘Telling Feminist Stories’, Feminist Theory, 6, 2: 115–39, <doi:10.1177/1464700105053690>.
Perrier, Maud M. (forthcoming), Contemporary Childcare Struggles: Maternal Workers and Social Reproduction, Bristol: Bristol University Press.
Rowbotham, Sheila 2013 [1972], Women, Resistance and Revolution: A History of Women and Revolution in the Modern World, London: Verso.
Vogel, Lise 2013 [1983], Marxism and the Oppression of Women: Toward a Unitary Theory, Revised Edition, Historical Materialism Book Series, Leiden: Brill.
Weeks, Kathi 2011, Feminism, Marxism, Antiwork Politics, and Postwork Imaginaries, Chapel Hill, NC: Duke University Press.
Absolute Sex and the Problems of Political Economy
A Review of Sex and the Failed Absolute by Slavoj Žižek
Matt McManus
Department of Politics, Whitman College, Washington, USA
mattmcmanus300@gmail.com
Abstract
Sex and the Failed Absolute constitutes the most systematic and rigorous account of Zizek’s resuscitation of dialectical materialism thus far. It displays all the erudition and imagination his readers have come to expect. But it remains hamstrung by an unwillingness to take moral philosophy and political economy seriously, leaving it strangely limited relative to the classical Marxist account. Radicals should take his critiques of ideology and philosophical ideas seriously while trying to comprehensively link them to a more sustained programme.
Keywords
Hegel – dialectical materialism – the absolute – totality – Trump – postmodernity
Slavoj Žižek, (2020) Sex and the Failed Absolute, London: Bloomsbury Academic.
A Failed Attempt at Myth-Busting
A Review of The Myth of Mao Zedong and Modern Insurgency by Francis Grice
Alex de Jong
International Institute for Research and Education, Amsterdam, The Netherlands
alexdejong@iire.org
The Working Class and Capital: The Dialectic of Struggle, Accumulation and Breakdown [1980]
The Working Class and Capital: The Dialectic of Struggle, Accumulation and Breakdown [1980]
Rohini Hensman
DIALECTIC AND HISTORY – WORK, ALIENATION, CLASSES AND THE STATE IN SARTRE’S CRITIQUE OF DIALECTICAL REASON [1978]
By Jairus Banaji
In her conversations with Sartre published as La Cérémonie des adieux (1981), Simone de Beauvoir reminds him of the background against which the Critique emerged. Apart from the work he did on the long methodological essay that Gallimard would publish as Questions de méthode, she said, “wasn’t there another motivation? From 1952 on you had taken to reading an enormous amount about Marxism, and philosophy became something … political”. Sartre replied that, for Marx, philosophy was something that should be suppressed. “For my part, I didn’t see things that way. I saw philosophy dwelling in the city of the future. But there’s no doubt that I looked toward Marxist philosophy” (de Beauvoir, Adieux: A Farewell to Sartre, pp.172–3).
The harsh, forbidding style of the Critique has made it probably least read text of “Marxist philosophy” ever published. Yet, it is certainly one of the most important (in my own view, the most important). In the best single introduction to the book, Andre Gorz described the stakes involved here. “The aim of Sartre’s enterprise, by which it stands or falls, is to establish the dialectical intelligibility of historical processes (this is not the same as the study of these processes themselves), and by the same stroke to provide a reciprocity of perspective that permits an understanding of the individual as the alienated agent of history… If the individual is explicable through the society, but the society is not intelligible through individuals – that is, if the ‘forces’ that act in history are impermeable and radically heterogeneous to organic praxis – then socialism as the socialization of man can never coincide with socialism as the humanization of the social. It cannot come from individuals as their reappropriation by collective praxis of the resultant of their individual praxes…The positivist (or transcendental materialist) hypothesis is that the historical process is impermeable to dialectical intelligiblity. If so, then socialism, born of an external logic, will also remain external to individuals and will not be a submission of Society and History to individuals and their demands…” (Gorz, “Sartre and Marx”, NLR, I/37, May-June 1966, pp.38-9).
The essay below is a slightly revised version of one that was written and published in India in 1978 in the Bulletin of the Communist Platform. The preface to my essay on the theses on Feuerbach explains the general background against which both essays were written. The intense theoretical life of the Platform Group involved readings, discussions, debate and numerous translations of Marxist classics that were simply unavailable in English at the time, even when, like Kautsky’s Die Agrarfrage (1899) or Grossman’s book on Marx’s theory of crisis (1929), they had been published decades earlier. The attempt to introduce Sartre into those discussions took the form of this essay, which is best seen as an introduction to the Critique that underscores some of its key themes as I saw them then and translates substantial extracts from the text. In a short preface to the version that was published in the Bulletin, I pointed out, “In this essay I have followed the odious convention of male designations (‘he’,‘his’). Conventions are worked matter in Sartre’s sense, and this is obviously a matter worked only by males. All page references are to the original French edition (Paris, 1960)”. The point about male designations bears repeating, of course. In revising the text I’ve added page references from the Verso translation, which wasn’t available to me in 1978. These references appear in bold. The translations are my own, which doesn’t mean that I haven’t now consulted Sheridan-Smith’s translation as well.
In ‘The Wall’, a story by Andreev, a wall divides heaven and earth from each other, leaving only cruel and unnecessary suffering on the side of humanity. People come together and separate in a mad dance; repulsive as lepers, they poison one another’s existence. Hating this life, they butt their heads against the wall, trying to make a breach in it. They seek desperately for some way to destroy it. But the mind is powerless before the fatal obstacle, and those who do not submit to fate perish at the immovable wall. As a symbol of an obstacle to freedom and joy, the wall differs from the real obstacle only in that it is formed of dead stones. But the obstacle to the progress of mankind consists of the people themselves, suffering, wretched, pitiful, yet immovable in their inertia. It is this wall of the inert human mass that we must destroy.
We socialists must be the men of the future. We must foresee this future, and by it, by our vision, we must guide our lives and actions! According to our teaching, in every modern civilised nation there is a vital revolutionary stratum, which creates the future. This is the lowest stratum, the very foundation of the wall – the proletariat. When it comes into motion, then, as the Communist Manifesto says, with the force of geological upheaval it will destroy everything that rests upon it. It will bring down the entire wall.
Vladimir Akimov
1. Dialectic and history
We have to be able to imagine how a book like this could have been written, and yet we have no means of imagining it, except through our own action which is a way of living the concrete relationship that unites us to its writer. ‘Our understanding of others is never contemplative’ (p. 98).
It is 1925, you are twenty, and in your country, in the universities you go to, there is a deep hatred of dialectical reason. Hegel is unknown to you, and, without a knowledge of Hegel, without Marxist teachers, you know nothing of Marxism itself (p. 22). You read Capital, you understand everything, it is all quite clear, and yet you have understood nothing. Nothing at all. But slowly you begin to change. In the suburbs, on the horizon of your limited world, for you are an intellectual from another class, there is a vast, sombre mass of workers, and they live Marxism, it is their action, and this mass exerts at some distance an irresistible pressure of attraction on you. So, it was not the idea that transformed you, and not the conditions of life and work of the class on your horizon, for you know little about them. It is one linked to the other; it is the class as the incarnation of an idea (p. 23).
Now it is the bloody history of this part of the century that will force you to understand the reality of the class struggle. It is the war that will shatter all the old frameworks of your thought. The war, the occupation, the resistance, the years that follow. In 1937 a Russian begins to lecture on the Phenomenology at the École des Hautes Etudes. You go there, listen to him. Time passes. History has now taken hold of you. For two and half years, the Civil War in Spain dominated your life. Spain was a field of battle. You go to the Bibliothèque Nationale and take a reader’s ticket. You have embarked upon Hegel’s Phenomenology. At present, you scarcely make head or tail of a word of it. But History has burst over you and dissolved you into fragments. In France, the Popular Front struggles for a few months, then collapses. Madrid is still holding out, but is it true that the Stalinists have assassinated the revolution? Time passes. You have decided to work at Hegel every afternoon from two till five. It’s the most soothing occupation you can imagine. But History has taken hold of you.
The man who lectures at the École knows all this. He knows you are History. He knows that Spain was a battlefield, and that is why you are here. So, this is what he says –
Man is self-consciousness. Man becomes conscious of himself when he says “I”. Now a man who contemplates the world can never say “I”. This man who contemplates the world, who is absorbed by what he contemplates, can be brought back to himself only by some force within him that troubles him. A force that agitates you, disquiets you, moves you to action. This force within you that troubles you is called desire. Desire is what transforms the world revealed to itself in man’s contemplation into an object revealed to a subject by a subject different from the object and opposed to it (A. Kojève, Introduction to the Reading of Hegel, p. 5). Or, desire is the primordial structure in the constitution of human subjectivity.
So, a specifically human reality, that is, a reality that hears itself, is never attainable within the limits of passive contemplation. Desire moves you to action. Since desire is realised as action that negates the given, the very being of this I which is infected by desire will be action, and the universal form of this being will not be space but time. So, this man tells you that man, who is self-consciousness, is therefore history, or time. Man’s being is becoming, and this he is only as an action that negates the world in order to go beyond it as this given world, to transcend it. Man is perpetual transcendence of the given world, a ceaseless action riveted to the future, to something that is not.
Now this is not enough, for my comrade Nizan has been killed, and I am here in the Bibliothèque reading more Hegel. Politzer has been tortured and shot. So this man who lectures must tell you a second thing.
For man to be truly human, for him to be essentially and really different from an animal, his human desire must actually win out over his animal desire. Now all desire is desire for a value. The supreme value for an animal is its animal life. Human desire therefore must win out over this desire for self-preservation. Or, man’s humanity only comes to light when he risks his animal life for the sake of his human desire. It is in and through this risk of life that a human reality is born, emerges within the order of nature and becomes revealed as reality.
This is how this lecturer wants to explain, to account for, the history that we know, human history, which is a history of class struggles. For he goes on to say that to substitute oneself as the value desired by another’s desire is to seek recognition, and this search for recognition becomes the fundamental motor of human history. It accounts for the primordial struggles of mankind, for the social relations of domination and slavery, and for the emancipating and humanising role of the slave’s work. The relation of domination is born out of struggle. Here, two consciousnesses each seeking recognition from the other, seek this in the form of their risk of life. If both really risk their lives, all consciousness is abolished and history becomes impossible. In this struggle, the consciousness that truly risks its life, that subordinates its animal (non-human) desire for preservation to its human (non-animal) desire for recognition is the consciousness that wins. It becomes master. Thus, classes are born. But through this very relation, in which the master finds himself in an impasse, for he is doomed to abstract identity with self, and to gaining the recognition of a consciousness to which he ascribes no recognition, through this relation the slave now learns, through work, to repress his desires in the service of an idea, of what does not exist in the biological sense of the word, the idea of the master. Thus, through his work, which also makes the slave the master of nature, the slave finally comes to the same result to which the master came by his risk of life: he no longer depends on the given, natural conditions of existence (Kojève, op.cit. pp. 6ff., 25ff., 48ff.).
Sartre attends these lectures, hears all of this.
He agreed with Kojève that if there is something like a dialectical reason, then its basis is human action, or praxis. The dialectic ‘is the practical rationality of man who makes history’ (p. 129; 33). He agreed also that need (besoin), or desire, is fundamental to a conception of human action and of history (p. 166; 80).
But is it not also true that this man who acts, who makes history, who is time, acts on the basis of ‘conditions’ he has not chosen, that these ‘conditions make man as much as he makes them’. Thus, there is an element in history that remains unintelligible if we follow Kojève throughout. But the dialectic is precisely the intelligibility, the rationality, of history. So, there is something wrong in the dialectic that Kojève (and through Kojève, Hegel?) explain to us.
The first form in which we can state the problem of historical intelligibility, of the intelligibility of history in terms of man’s being as perpetual becoming, as action, might be put like this: ‘How is one to understand this statement that man makes History if in another sense it is History that makes man?’ (p. 60). To resolve the problem of historical intelligibility Sartre rejected completely the second thing that Kojève had said. And, in a sense, the whole of the Critique of Dialectical Reason might be seen as an attempt to resolve the problem of historical intelligibility while accepting the first part of Kojève’s argument but rejecting the second.
For this second part, the further exposition of the lecturer, allowed for no dialectical reversals. Kojève said that relations of domination are born from an unmediated confrontation of two consciousnesses. Domination established, work allows the slave to obtain a status of self-consciousness, because the slave represses his desires in relation to something purely abstract (the master). Thus eventually, in this dialectic, there is only one moment of true counterfinality (or tragedy). This is the impasse in which the master finds himself within the relation of domination. Or, alienation is only the alienation of the ruling classes.
Thus, no proper theory of alienation, of this history which I make depriving the actions through which I make it, depriving my labour, of their meaning, is contained in this pure dialectic of self-consciousness. If Sartre’s first point of departure is entirely in agreement with Kojève – the dialectic is the rationality of human action (p. 134; 39), or Man is Action – his second one goes beyond Kojève. The dialectic, which is the rationality of human action and of history, ‘is in a certain sense experienced by man as alien power’, just as much as ‘in another sense it is man himself who makes the dialectic’ (p. 131; 35-36). Indeed, Marxism must accept both starting-points and make their contradiction the basic principle of historical intelligibility. ‘If we want to preserve the real complexity of Marxist thought, then we have to say that in a world founded on exploitation, man is at once a product of his product and a historical actor who can in any case never pass for a product’ (p. 61). And when we seriously consider whether there is a single Marxist who has ever followed through this contradiction, or dialectical circularity, and transformed it into the very principle of historical intelligibility, when we answer this in the negative, then the Critique, which follows through this contradiction at successive levels of complexity, emerges as probably the most important work of theory produced by any Marxist since Marx’s Capital.
2. The dialectical priority of action (praxis)
Let us formulate the problem of dialectical intelligibility in the following terms: ‘We have to seize action (praxis) and its result from two inseparable points of view. That is, of its objectification (of man acting on matter) and that of its objectivity (of totalised matter acting on man)’ (p. 284; 225). In the pure dialectic of self-consciousness, there is only the objectification of human activity. But a truly dialectical reason is a Reason that is also non-dialectical—or, if there is a dialectic, then, obeying its own law of development, there must be within this dialectic a non-dialectic or anti-dialectic.
Action/praxis can be defined as ‘an organising project which surpasses the given material conditions towards an end (fin) and which through work inscribes itself in inorganic materiality as a reshaping of the practical field and reunification of the means deployed towards the given end’ (p. 687; 734). This can be called the dialectical structure of praxis, of conscious human action, whether individual or common, and its definition necessarily refers us to a moment that is not-action, the moment of Matter, or of materiality. In fact, human action ‘presupposes a material agent (the organic individual) and the material organization of an enterprise on matter through matter’ (p. 158; 92). In reworking the practical field, this organism which in its very being is praxis/action, which is a practical organism, operates a synthesis, it “totalises” the multiplicity of inert matter, or, totalisation is this relation of interiority which mediates between the parts of a whole. Totalisation as the dialectical structure of action makes the notion of time possible, which totality does not.
In the Critique, totalisation forms the specific structure of what we call history. History is totalisation or it is nothing. But Sartre’s project is to investigate not history itself but the ‘static conditions of its possibility’ (p. 155; 68), that is, the logical conditions of possibility of a totalisation of this order. Hence it is also possible to say that the Critique asks itself, ‘How is history possible?’ in the same fundamental sense in which Kant in the Critique of Pure Reason asked ‘How is experience possible?’. In fact, the Critique of Dialectical Reason moves further than Kant’s Critique, because human experience is an experience of history, it is something intrinsically historical, and therefore to ask “how is experience possible?” is to ask what makes history and the experience of history possible.
To repeat; in the Critique, Sartre is not concerned with concrete history, but with its internal ‘logical structures’ or conditions of possibility. These are established or developed at successively more complex levels of intelligibility, all of which, even the most concrete or ‘synthetic’, form only abstract moments of dialectical experience, for all of them form part of the ‘regressive’ phase of the dialectical movement. In Vol.2, which Sartre planned to call the Critique of Dialectical Experience, he will ‘recompose’ the historical process in a reverse moment of progression, once its conditions of possibility have been seized and established abstractly.
Three overall moments of dialectical experience dominate and shape the internal structure of the Critique (Vol. 1): the praxis of the ‘organic’ individual, the negation of this in matter, and the praxis of groups. Each of these are levels of intelligibility of the historical process. The praxis of the organic individual finds its dialectical limit in its own work as the exteriorisation of interiority or in what Sartre calls worked matter (p. 158; 71), and passes over at this limit into a dialectic of passivity, or anti-dialectic. The dialectic of passivity is the specific moment of experience or level of intelligibility corresponding to praxis that turns/returns against itself as something bearing the permanent seal or stamp of inertia. (The theory of alienation, or the dialectical experience of alienation as an a priori possibility of human activity, is contained in this moment.) Here, in exploring the negation of organic action (that is, of individual praxis) in and through worked matter, the series emerges as the fundamental type of social ensemble. Common praxis or the constituted action of groups then forms the final moment of this entire movement. Sartre proposes to argue that social classes ‘do not possess a unique and homogeneous type of being, but exist and form at all levels’ (p. 155; 67). (To illustrate this nature of classes, much later in the book he will argue that at any given moment the working class itself comprises all dialectical statuts; it is ‘at the same time a group whose organizations have become institutions [e.g., mass parties with their ‘cadre’], a fused or a pledged group [workers’ councils; soviets], and inert seriality’ (p. 647; 683); but this anticipates the argument below).
Once we have followed through this movement it should be possible to comprehend the practical statut (let’s define this to mean a specific place in the spiral of the dialectic) of the entire range of ensembles conceivable in any historical society: not only of social classes as the most important of these, but of the state, mass parties, trade unions, and of course the so-called ‘unorganized masses’. But the depth of dialectical intelligibility which allows us to differentiate the practical statut of a lynch mob from that of a strike committee, or of individual capital from social capital, or of groups from classes, and to distinguish rigorously between ‘societies’, ‘systems’, ‘structures’, ‘processes’, or between praxis and process, will only become possible because at each level of intelligibility, in each moment of the dialectical experience, new determinations are established.
Yet this entire movement has a basis or a ground principle. Sartre himself vacillates between two conceptions of this, and appears to shift imperceptibly from one to the other in the course of the Critique. One conception of the ground principle states the dialectical priority of the praxis of the organic individual in the entire movement. This priority is signalised through its description as the ‘constituting dialectic’ of history (p. 154, 178; 66, 96, where the Verso translation always has ‘constituent’). The strongest argument that Sartre adduces for this conception is the notion of the praxis of the organic individual as an ‘untranscendable limit’ of the praxis of groups or common praxis. The former, ‘organic praxis’, the free, conscious activity of individuals, forms the ‘very foundation, always present and always concealed of the latter’ (p. 643; 677-8). The alternative conception asserts not so much the priority of individual action over common action (of a constituting dialectic over a constituted dialectic) as the priority of praxis itself over worked matter. And, since what matters here is praxis, the ground principle can just as well be formulated as the dialectical priority of constituted action over Being or worked matter or the practico-inert. So, Sartre can say, ‘Without constituted praxis, everything disappears, even alienation, since there is nothing left to be alienated, even reification since man becomes an inert thing from birth and one cannot reify a thing’ (p. 731-32; 789).
At any rate, accepting the weaker formulation, the principle that sustains the whole movement of the Critique is that of the dialectical priority of action over being. Without conscious projects, without human aims or objectives or desires, history vanishes. If human relations are simply the passive product of something we call ‘material circumstances’, then such relations are by their very nature reified and it would be impossible to understand what their reification would mean (p. 180; 97). Now action is dialectic. To assert the priority of action over being, or of praxis over the practico-inert, of dialectic over anti-dialectic, is to argue that at any given time relations among humans ‘are the dialectical consequence of their own activity’ (p. 180; 97), no matter how mystified those relations appear in their own eyes.
This world in which I no longer recognise myself is a world I have created. Expressed differently, without work (which is action, indeed its model-type) there would be no ‘mode of production’ (p. 671; 713).
3. Domination by worked matter: scarcity and counterfinality
What movement is it, however, that leads from one to the other, from work as a living praxis to the mode of production as its inorganic synthesis? From freedom to alienation? From the translucidity of my aims to my experience of necessity?
Man ‘is’ only as a ‘becoming’. Man is action, he is a practical organism. But praxis would be impossible to conceive, at least in the historical world we know, without Hegel’s or Kojève’s desire, that is, need. Or, man is a practical organism with material needs. Need is the primordial relation of the dialectic of individual (organic) action/praxis. ‘It is the first totalising relation of this material being, man, with a material ensemble which he is part of. This initial totalisation is transcendent in the sense that the practical organism finds its being outside itself in inanimate being’, or in natural resources (p. 166; 81). To find its being in nature, the practical organism transforms itself into its own tool, acts on the inert objects of its external environment through the intermediary of the inert body which it is (as material organism) and which it makes itself. Here, instrumentality, end and work are given together: the organic totality is projected as totalisation of the movement through which the living body utilises its own inertia to overcome the inertia of things. Now it is scarcity, an absence of what the organism looks for in the environment, which by transforming the organic totality into a pure possibility, entails that the organism is no longer simply the destiny of its function but its aim or its end. ‘In the first instance praxis is nothing but this relation of the organism as external end and future to the present organism as a (organic) totality thrown into danger’ (p. 168; 83). And this ‘action born of need is a totalisation whose movement towards its own end actively transforms the environment into a totality’ (p. 170; 85). The practical organism now traverses the surrounding world as a project, it unifies a field of instrumentality around itself, and in and through the creation of this instrumental field transforms inert multiplicity into totality, so that ‘this inert plurality which has become totality’ is in itself ‘the end fallen into the domain of passivity’ (p. 171; 87). In short, we can say that ‘human labour, that is, the primordial human praxis through which the organism produces and reproduces its own life, is entirely dialectical: its possibility and its permanent necessity rest on the relation of interiority which unifies the organism with its environment and on the profound contradiction between the organic and the inorganic orders, both present in each individual; its initial movement and basic character are defined by a double contradictory transformation: the unity of man’s project gives to the practical field a quasi-synthetic unity, or the crucial moment of work is that in which the organism makes itself inert to transform the inertia that surrounds it’ (p. 174; 90). Here Sartre adds, ‘The oscillation which opposes the human thing to the man-thing will recur at all levels of dialectical experience; however, the meaning of Work is established by an end, and Need, far from being a force that pushes the worker from behind, is, on the contrary, the lived revelation of an end which is to be attained’, in this case the reproduction of the living organism itself (p. 174; 90).
Matter as something purely non-human and inorganic is governed by the laws of exteriority (and thus open to penetration by non-dialectical reason, that is, science). Within dialectical reason and dialectical experience, matter is inseparable from its human functions or meanings and contains these only to the extent that ‘man has already attempted to confer unity on it’, and to the extent that ‘it comes to form the passive support of the stamp of this unity’. Matter in its human function, or as the passive synthesis of human activity, can be called the ‘passive motor of history’ (p. 200; 122).
In history as we know it, our human history, the one-sided (non-reciprocal) relation of surrounding matter to man manifests itself in the specific and entirely contingent factual form of scarcity. Scarcity ‘is a fundamental human relation’ (p. 201; 123), but inconceivable in any dialectic which suppresses matter as a mediation between men (p. 192; 113). ‘What no one has so far tried to do is to explore the kind of passive action which is exerted by matter over men and over their history when their praxis returns to them as something stolen from them, in the form of counterfinality. History is more complicated than certain simplistic forms of Marxism suppose, and man has to struggle not only against Nature, against his own social milieu, against other men, but also against his own action as something become other. This primordial form of alienation finds its expression through all other forms, but it is independent of them and on the contrary their very basis’ (p. 202; 124).
Now, ‘abstractly, scarcity can be seen as relation between the individual and his environment. But in practice, and historically, this environment is an already constituted practical field that refers to each of its collective structures (what these are we shall see later) and the most basic of these is precisely scarcity conceived as negative unity of the human multiplicity (of this concrete multiplicity)’ (p. 204; 127). Thus, if work forms the basic type of totalisation of matter by man, the primordial totalisation of men by materiality manifests itself ‘as the possibility of a common destruction’ of all mankind and as ‘the permanent possibility for each individual of this destruction coming to him from matter through the action of other men’ (p. 204; 127). ‘Scarcity realises the passive totality of the individuals’ of a society ‘as the impossibility of coexisting’ (p. 205; 129). Sartre is of course emphatic that this is not a proposition about concrete history (about this or that historical situation) and that he is still dealing with ‘a very abstract moment’ of dialectical experience. What counts here are the ‘structures of dialectical intelligibility’ (p. 205; 128). Totalised passively into an inert and negative unity by matter, ‘man constitutes himself as Other than man’ (p. 206; 130). ‘The mere existence of each is defined, through scarcity, as the perpetual risk of non-existence for another and for everyone. Or, better still, this constant threat of annihilation that hangs over myself and everyone is not something I discover only in Others, but I am myself this threat as an Other’ (p. 205; 130). Thus, there is in man (in all men) ‘an inert structure of inhumanity’ (p. 207; 130) which is simply man’s interiorisation of his own negation by matter. In fact, ‘the historical process is impossible to understand without this permanent element of negativity, which is at once external and internal to man – the permanent possibility of being, through his very existence, the person who makes others die or whom others make die – in other words, without scarcity’ (p. 221; 148).
Scarcity is the first concrete validation of ‘that basic discovery of dialectical experience, that humans are mediated through things to the precise extent that things are mediated through humans’ (p. 165; 79). The negative element in history is man’s interiorisation of scarcity as a relation to other men, that is, as the negation in man of man by matter. The circularity might be redescribed as follows – ‘there is a dialectical movement and a dialectical relation within praxis’ between action as the negation of matter and matter as the negation of action (p. 230; 159). Sartre clarifies this by saying that ‘This negation of action, which has nothing to do with defeat, cannot be translated in action except in terms of action itself, that is, its positive results, in the form in which these become inscribed in an object only to return against it and in it in the form of objective and negative commands’ (p. 230; 159).
To develop this new moment of dialectical experience – the return of praxis against itself in its objectified form and as a negation of its enterprise – Sartre returns to the conception of praxis itself. ‘Praxis whatever its concrete nature is basically an instrumentalisation of material reality. It envelopes the inanimate thing in a totalising project that imposes on it a pseudo-organic unity. By that I mean that this unity is naturally the unity of a whole, but that it remains social and human, that by itself it does not obtain the structures of exteriority that define the molecular world. If unity persists, it is, on the contrary, through material inertia. Since this unity is only the passive reflection of human action itself, that is, of a given enterprise carried through in given conditions with given instruments and in a historical society at a given stage of its development, the produced object reflects the entire society. Only it reflects it in the dimension of passivity’ (p. 231; 161).
This dimension of passivity, of the absorption of human action by the inertia of materiality, is the sphere of man’s domination by worked matter, or of his domination by himself as matter. ‘In surpassing the given material conditions man objectifies himself in matter through work: that means he loses himself so that the human thing comes into being’ (p. 240). Loses himself – his praxis becomes absorbed in passive and inert syntheses of innumerable other actions, and his finality (his ends) reappears as counterfinality (as a negation of his ends). The Chinese peasant household that cuts wood from the surrounding forests – this is a living organic action motivated by need – creates an absence of forests and eventually, through this absence of forests, massive periodic flooding and famines. ‘Worked matter’, materiality that absorbs and passivises human action, ‘reflects our activity back to us as inertia and our inertia as our activity’ (p. 247; 179). It is this dimension of passivised action, of worked matter as the alienated (counterfinal) objectification of praxis that Sartre calls the practico-inert.
The practico-inert, this ‘site of violence, darkness and magic’ (p. 358; 318), of an inverted praxis (p. 235; 165), is the specifically non-dialectical moment of the Critique. Sartre explores this level of historical intelligibility, praxis as inertia, and the experience of this inertia as a praxis-without-authorship, as necessity, with the example, taken from Braudel’s major study, of the circulation of precious metals in the Mediterranean world of the Renaissance (pp. 235 ff.; 165-78). To start with, there is no being, no materiality or matter devoid of human significance − at least not within the field of human experience. ‘At any given historical time, things are human to the very degree that men are things’ (p.247; 180). Matter as the inert and passive support of human action, as an inertia that retains its meanings, refers us to those very projects, to human action, as dialectically fundamental. In fact, there could be no experience of alienation (of domination by worked matter) if man were not basically action. If he were pure materiality, neither action nor alienation would be conceivable. ‘Slavery is possible only because there is freedom’ (p. 248; 181). Only two choices are possible at this level. Either man is ontologically other than himself and one then elaborates a philosophy founded on a hatred of man. Or man is himself, he is the active source of this destiny which confronts him as his future. And if man were pure being, the only time conceivable would be the time of degradation, a dialectic moving in reverse from the complex to the simple, in short, involution and dissolution would then replace evolution. Thus, at the start of Spain’s ineluctable decadence and crisis, there lies human action. The regime of Philip II accumulates the precious metals. That is, organises their extraction, transport, melting and minting into coins. But there is no human action that does not crystallise its meanings in matter, and no matter that does not condition human action through the passive unity of its prefabricated meanings (p. 238; 169). Thus ‘the Spanish government accumulates gold but there is a flight of gold’ (p. 241; 173). If the accumulation of gold is founded on a type of human mediation defined by a common, deliberate praxis that unifies certain men in a single enterprise aimed at a single objective (p. 239; 170), then this flight of gold implies another form of human mediation which Sartre will call ‘serial’. For on the margin of that common enterprise, of the extraction and accumulation of gold by the regime, there are other men who are others in relation to its common praxis. ‘The synthetic interiority the group’, of the Spanish regime, ‘is traversed by the reciprocal exteriority of individuals formed by their material separation’ (p. 240; 171-2). Gold leaves Spain, flows across her borders, through these others. And their serial action finds its own external link in the inertness of gold and the inert idea inscribed on each piece of gold that the precious metals are wealth. Then thirdly, there is the counterfinality that turns the abundance of gold, of ‘wealth’, into negativity, into mass impoverishment throughout the Mediterranean littoral. The value of each piece of gold diminishes as the total mass expands, the total sum acts negatively on its parts as if it were whole (p. 242; 174). Prices rise, employers cut wages, there is a crisis in the labour market. No defence of wages is possible: atomised and massified, the wage-earners of Spain form a vast inert system conditioned from the outside (p. 243; 175). And here one form of materiality collides with another: depopulation augments the value of each unit of labour-power. Wages begin to climb upwards. In short, ‘worked matter, through the contradictions that it contains within itself, becomes for and through men the fundamental motor of history’ (p. 250; 183). The historical decline of Spain is inconceivable without the role of the precious metals, of human things, of inert materiality on which men have inscribed their meanings and which absorbs their action and re-exteriorises it against itself as their destiny. ‘In worked matter the actions of all men become unified and take on a meaning, that is, they constitute for all of them the unity of a common future’ (p. 250; 183). This future, the decline of Spain, bears the stamp of pure counterfinality. The enrichment of Spain is the source of its decline.
4. The inert exigencies of worked matter: working at machines
The image elaborated through this illustration is now applied directly to the factory. ‘Praxis as unification of inorganic plurality becomes the practical unity of matter. The material forces assembled into the passive synthesis of the tool or the machine produce actions: they unify other inorganic dispersions and thereby impose a certain material unification on a plurality of persons … the praxis inscribed in the instrument through past labour defines behaviour a priori’ (p. 250; 184).
In our experience, the typical symbols of the practico-inert are not simple objects and tools, but whole material ensembles. We refer to ‘the’ factory or ‘the’ company to mean either a combination of instruments surrounded by walls or the personnel within it or both indifferently. ‘If individuals were only a free praxis organising materiality … we could not really talk about this typical unity present in the social field as passive activity, active passivity, praxis and destiny. For this kind of social object to have a being, man and his products must exchange their qualities and their statuts within production itself’ (p. 251-52; 185)
The level of dialectical intelligibility has shifted from the purely abstract moment of the action of organic individuality to the moment of its negation in worked matter. We deal with agents now from the angle of their domination by worked matter – and with human praxis as a temporalisation within the field of worked matter. ‘This man remains a man of needs, of action and of scarcity. But as a man dominated by worked matter, his activity no longer finds its source directly in need, although need remains fundamental to it: it is aroused in him (suscitée en lui) from the outside by Worked Matter as the practical exigency (exigence) of the inanimate object. Or, if you like, the object comes to define (désigne) its man as this person from whom a certain type of conduct is expected’ (p. 252; 185-6). The machine defines this man as a worker, as this or that kind of worker, and the work that this person performs as an ‘activity aroused in him from the outside’ is ‘the work of Others, of all others, of whom he is one’. Through the machine the worker becomes this ‘Other from whom certain motions are expected’ (p. 254; 188).
Sartre contrasts the reciprocity of ends, desires desiring desires, that defines common praxis through structures of reciprocity with the inert finality of machine work. ‘What one person may hope of another, when their relation is a human one, is something defined in reciprocity. This hoping is a human act. The question of passive exigency does not arise here…praxis as such can unify with praxis in a reciprocal action, each can formulate his ends through a recognition of the ends of others, but no praxis in the strict sense can even formulate a command, simply because exigency is not part of the structure of reciprocity’ (p. 253; 187). On the other hand, ‘the demand of a tool that expects to be operated in a definite way, according to a definite rhythm, etc. undergoes basic transformation through its very materiality: it becomes exigency because it acquires the double character of otherness and of passivity. In fact, exigency … constitutes itself in each worker as something other than him (he has no means of modifying it, he can only conform to it, it does not enter the dialectical movement of human performance), and in the same blow it constitutes each worker as other than himself: insofar as the worker is defined by his praxis, this finds its source not in need or in desire, it is not the ongoing realisation of his project but, as something constituted around an alien objective, it is, in the agent himself, the praxis of an other and it is an other that objectifies itself in the result’ (p. 253; 187-88).
The worker who operates a machine engages in action (praxis), but this is his praxis as the praxis of someone other than himself, of an indefinite multiplicity of persons capable of the same ‘definition’ through that instrument. ‘Through materiality it is man as Other than himself who affirms his dominance over man: the machine has to be preserved in its market condition and the practical relation of man to matter becomes man’s response to the exigency of the machine’ (p. 254; 188). Of course, individuals interiorise the inert commands of matter to re-exteriorise these as commands delivered by men: it is through the apparatuses of control and supervision in the factory that the machine enforces a certain type and rhythm of work in the worker (p. 256).
The machine shapes its man to the very degree that man shapes the machine … it constitutes its operator as a machine that must operate machines. All relations within the practical agent are reversed by it; as categorical imperative, the machine makes the worker a pure means, but a conscious means (for he knows its imperative); as a source of wages, it transforms his praxis (or his labour-power) into a commodity, that is, an inert product that preserves its power of unifying a practical field. Finally, the machine becomes a living thing, a pseudo-organism only to the extent that the worker makes himself a force of inert exteriority (expends his own substance). The machine defines and creates the reality of the man who operates it, makes him a practico-inert being who will be a machine to the degree that the machine is human and a man to the degree that the machine remains a tool to be used. At the same time, the machine determines his future as a living organism, just as it defines the future of its owner. The difference here is that it defines the worker’s future negatively as the impossibility of living long. Not only through the counterfinalities that we have described (air pollution, destruction of the environment, job diseases, etc.), but also because it represents for the worker…the permanent threat of low wages, technological unemployment and deskilling. And the rationality of this lies in the real meaning of industry: the machine was created to replace man…in the machine the worker discovers his being as indifferent generality, his praxis as something already materialised in tasks that are predetermined as inert exigencies to be obeyed, his future as powerlessness…’ (p. 269-70; 207-8).
Now, ‘to the extent that the machine imparts to the worker the meaning of a practico-inert being, devoid of any particular interest (and of any possibility of having one), it defines the worker as a general individual…this does not mean that the machine produces abstract beings without individuality: the human agent remains, even within his reification, a constituting and dialectical totality’, a practical organism.
In fact, each (general) individual expresses the particularity of his praxis in the way in which he constitutes himself and allows himself to be constituted as generality, and this generality of each defines the relations of all of them; each discovers in the Other his own generality. Inert generality as the milieu of the working class in the beginnings of industrialisation cannot be seen as a real and totalising unity of workers (in a given factory, town or country) ... it comes to them through worked matter … and is constitutive of every one of them and all of them as the negative unity of a destiny that condemns them. But in this very act, in the negative milieu of the general, each worker perceives this general destiny of the individual worker and of all workers (and not yet of a worker totality…) in the very generality of his own destiny. Or, if you like, he sees his worker’s destiny, that is, the negation of the possibility of his own existence, in the generality of machines as something owned by the generality of Others… In the capitalist period, the contradiction of the machine is that it creates and denies the worker in the same blow: this contradiction, materialised as a general destiny, is a fundamental condition in the growth of class consciousness (prise de conscience), that is, in the negation of the negation. (p. 270-71; 209-10).
5. The notion of ‘interest’
Thus, machine work is praxis, but praxis which forms a response to the exigencies of worked matter, ‘activity as passivity, power as impotence’ (Marx), or passive activity. The transition from the formal to the real subsumption of labour into capital can also be described as a dialectical transcendence of praxis in passive activity. This is a transcendence (dépassement, Aufhebung) and not an abstract substitution, because ‘materiality as the inflexible necessity of the practico-inert transcends the free praxis of individuals only to conserve it within itself as the indispensable means by which its heavy machinery works’ (p. 376; 340). Moreover, the transition from praxis to passive activity is itself the object of a living praxis – the praxis of the capitalist in enforcing the norms of abstract labour, that is, in ‘breaking up the old psycho-physical nexus of qualified professional work’ (Gramsci, “Americanism and Fordism”).
This remains incomplete, however, because this action – of reorganising the methods of production and styles of life of a large sector of the population – is itself definable within the dimension of worked matter. Asked, “why would a capitalist do this?”, we would automatically reply, “because it is in his interest to do so”. Thus, the notion of ‘interest’ emerges as a further specification of the field of the practico-inert.
Interest is definable in Sartre’s dialectic as one’s being-entirely-outside-self-in-a-thing insofar as it conditions praxis by its categorical imperative (p. 261; 197). ‘Taken on his own, in his free and simple action, an individual has needs, desires, he is a project, he realises his ends through work. But in this abstract and fictitious state, the individual cannot be said to have an interest... Interest is a certain relation of men to things within the social field. It is something discovered in the practico-inert moment of experience when man constitutes himself in the external milieu as this practico-inert ensemble of worked matters even as he establishes the practical inertia of the ensemble in his real person’ (p. 261; 197). An individual can be said to possess an interest from the moment when a material ensemble defines him in his personal particularity, and when its preservation and expansion at any cost conditions his activity as categorical imperative (p. 263; 199).
However, Sartre immediately goes on to suggest that the notion of interest as a practico-inert relation is impossible to conceive without reference to the structure of alterity, of otherness, that defines the field of the practico-inert. If interest appears initially only as a ‘relation of men to things’, the mediated nature of this relation is what counts later. ‘As always interest is born out of alterity as the primary human practical relation but deformed by its conducting matter, and only sustains itself in the milieu of alterity’ (p. 272; 210). In a wider definition not restricted to bourgeois property, interest is ‘the negative and practical relation of man to the practical field through the thing which he is outside (à travers la chose qu’il est dehors) or, in another sense, a relation of the thing to other things of the social field through its human object’ (p. 267; 204).
The obvious example of this nexus is the factory and its bourgeois owner. ‘The French industrialist who in 1830, in the heyday of family capitalism, cautiously introduces English machinery “because it is in his interest” in fact has no relation with those machines except through the intermediary of his factory’. His desire to expand is simply the real expansion of his factory as something he controls through his praxis. ‘If he imports machinery from England, it is because the factory’, which he is as a thing outside himself,
requires this (l’exige) in a given competitive field, therefore insofar as it (the factory) is Other and a thing conditioned by Others… The decision is dictated to him as an exigency by the competitive milieu (defeating his competitors by selling at a lower price) but negatively, because competition (and the possibility that other factories will import English machines) makes him vulnerable insofar as he has constituted himself as a factory. But scarcely has the machine been installed, than the interest is displaced. His interest in the machine, that is, his subjection to his being-outside-self, was the factory; but the interest of the factory becomes the machine itself: once it comes into operation, it is the machine that determines production, it is the machine that forces him to break the earlier equilibrium between supply and demand and to search for new markets, that is, to allow demand to be conditioned by supply. The interest of the factory has changed, the caution and stability that characterised that interest are transformed into calculated risk and expansion; the factory-owner has installed an irreversibility within the walls of his enterprise. And this irreversibility (the machine never stops) defines him in his being as well as his praxis, or rather as social object it realises in him the identity of Being (as structure of inertia) and of praxis (as the expansion which is ongoing). But, in the antagonisms of alterity (here the competitive milieu) the interest of each factory owner is the same to the precise degree that it is constituted as Other; or, if you like, the compulsion to effect perpetual cost reductions by installing ever newer, ever more advanced machines comes to each as his interest (the real exigency of the factory) insofar as it is the interest of Others and insofar as for Others he himself constitutes this interest as the interest of the Other. (pp. 263-64; 200-1.)
So, in the name of “interest”, being-outside-self as worked matter unites individuals and groups through the negation of each by all and of all by each, as a negation defined in alterity.
Which amounts to saying that the interest-object acts (through the mediation of the individual) under the negative pressure of similar exigencies developed in other interest-objects. At this level it is impossible to say … whether for the industrialist profits represent an end or a means: in the movement of interest as negative exigency – in other words, in the never-ending transformation of the means of production that becomes necessary – the greater portion is reinvested in the enterprise itself; in one sense, the aim of these transformations is to maintain or increase the rate of profit, but in another sense profit is the sole possible means for the capitalist to realise these transformations … in the unity of the total process, the factory as the possession-power of an individual or of a group of individuals constitutes itself in its preservation and development as its own end... From the impossibility of halting the movement of production without destroying the object to the necessity of finding new markets for an expanded volume of production and of expanding production to retain market share, one comes up against the movement of growth and of motivation of a quasi-organism, that is, of the inverted image of an organism, a totalised false totality where man loses himself so that it exists, a totalising false totality that regroups all the persons of the practical field in the negative unity of Alterity. (p. 265; 202.)
The machine is the capitalist‘s interest in the sense just defined. But, as we saw, it is also a determination of the practical field of the working class. However, to the very extent that the machine is the capitalist’s interest, it is the worker’s destiny or fate. Like the capitalist, the worker has his being in the machine. ‘But the machine is not, cannot be, the interest of the worker. The reason is simple: far from objectifying himself in it, it is the machine that objectifies itself in the worker’ (p. 269; 206). We saw this in the previous section. In the machine the worker finds his being as indifferent generality, or the machine ‘designates’ or defines the worker as a general individual. This inert generality which is the milieu of the working class comes to workers from worked matter, as a false negative unity, ‘the negative unity of a destiny or fate that condemns all of them’ (p. 271; 209). Now, the movement of the working class, the constitution of the class into a ‘class for itself’ and no longer simply ‘as against capital’, is the very process by which this inert generality (which is also the first definition of the class as being) becomes transformed into a unifying totalisation, in the course of which and as which the class actively negates its being-outside-self as destiny, constituting that destiny as its future interest.
This implies that the class negates not the machine as such or the machine in itself – for this would be a negation of the worker who is a product of the machine, or whose being is the machine – but negates the machine ‘insofar as it is destiny’, that is, ‘insofar as in a given social order it dominates or controls the worker without allowing him to control it in return’ (p. 271; 210). The capitalist, in appropriating the machine as his interest, constitutes the destiny of workers as an interest of the Other experienced and lived by them in the form of a counter-interest (destiny), and the class struggle, the totalisation through which an inert generality and identity becomes a class interest, is thus a negation of the negation, a negation of the capitalist’s interest as the worker’s destiny, or a negation of the interest of the Other as negation. ‘The combination of workers, if it takes place, is indissolubly linked to the constitution of a general interest as class interest’ (p. 273; 212).
So ‘interest appears as the inorganic materiality of the individual or of the group in the form of absolute and irreducible being that subordinates praxis to itself as a means of preserving itself in its practico-inert exteriority. Or, if you like, it is the passive and inverted image of freedom, the only form in which freedom can produce itself (and become aware of itself) in the infernal world of practical passivity’ (p. 279; 219).
Interest and destiny are practico-inert relations among humans, and classes obtain their first statut of intelligibility at this level of practico-inert relationships. Class Being is collective being-outside-self-in-worked matter, practico-inert being. ‘As practico-inert being, class being comes to men through men across the passive syntheses of worked matter’ (p. 294; 238), as their ‘being-outside-in-the-thing’, which is ‘their fundamental truth and their reality’ (p. 286; 228). Sartre then proposes to show how the being of classes as inorganic materiality forms the inert status and objective limit of their praxis.
6. Class being as practico-inert limit: French anarcho-syndicalism
The complex based on coal and iron found its typical resonance in the so-called “universal” machine. By that one means a machine, for example, the lathe, whose task is indeterminate … and which can accomplish quite different jobs as long as it is directed, set in motion and controlled by a skilled and expert worker. The universal function of this machine creates the specialised character of its operator … in this product its inventor envisaged a certain kind of worker, to be exact, highly skilled workers (travailleurs qualifiés), capable of carrying through a complete operation from start to finish, that is, a dialectical praxis. This practical aim is built into the machine in form of an exigency: it entails a reduction of physical effort as such but demands skill. It demands the attention and concentration of a man completely freed from all secondary tasks: through this the universal machine determines first of all the form of recruitment; through the employers it creates possibilities of employment and of comparatively higher wages; a structured future now opens for certain sons of workers defined by the dispositions or situation necessary for apprenticeship. But in the same blow it creates an inferior proletariat which is both a direct product of the appearance of this better-paid elite of workers…and a layer required by the machine itself as the ensemble of manual labourers who in each factory gravitate around the skilled workers, obey them, and free them of all inferior tasks that others can perform. Thus the 19th century machine establishes a passive structure within the working-class. (p. 295; 239-40.)
Sartre writes,
I shall call this structure a solar system; the manual labourers, defined quite simply as individuals without specialisation (hence perfectly indeterminate) gravitate in groups of five to ten around a skilled worker defined by his specialisation. The machine organises persons. Only, we should note that this human organisation has nothing to do with a synthetic union, with a community founded on an act of consciousness; the hierarchy becomes established in a mechanical dispersion of massified pluralities and quasi-accidentally. It is precisely the material inertia that permits this strange, rigid hierarchical unity within dispersion, just as it is the congealed action of matter, as the mechanical future of a group, class or society, that a priori establishes this hierarchical order as an ensemble of abstract relations that has to unify some individuals and that will impose itself on these individuals, whoever they are, within the temporal framework of production: already the factory, with all its machines, has decided the ratio of manual workers to skilled workers, has established for each worker the probabilities defining his future within the hierarchy.
In this way the universal machine imposes differentiation on the workers as a law of things; but at the same time and through the very process we described for Spanish gold, it becomes its own idea. The property of a capitalist, it throws its operator into the ranks of the exploited, keeps alive and intensifies the contradiction that opposes the possessing class to the working class; yet through the skill it demands, it engenders in the hands, in the body of the man who operates it, a humanism of labour. The skilled worker does not see himself as a “subhuman conscious of his subhumanity”. Of course, his product is stolen from him but his indignation as an exploited worker finds its deepest source in his pride as a producer. Only the “wretched of the earth” can change life, do change it every day, only they nourish, clothe and house the whole of humanity. And since the machine is selective, since, through the very competence that it demands and creates, it constitutes labour for the skilled worker as the honour of the exploited, in the very same act it produces the manual worker as an inferior being with a lower wage, a lower technical value, and a lower being. To be sure, in relation to the capitalist this worker is someone exploited; but what is he in relation to the elite of workers? Perhaps someone who never had the chance (his father was poor, he started work at twelve), or someone who lacked the courage or the talent. Perhaps all of this. A tension exists. This is not a real antagonism, at least not at first: towards the professional worker the manual worker harbours ambiguous feelings. He admires him, listens to him: in acquiring a political and sometimes a scientific training, the skilled worker only develops the idea which the machine has of itself and of its operator. That is also why he sees himself as the militant wing of the working class. Militant action is something one imposes on the manual worker: he is someone who follows. But sometimes this worker gets the impression that when they participate in his struggles, the worker elite doesn’t always defend his interests.
Everything I have said so far is inscribed in being. The inert idea of work as a point of honour, the technical operations, the differentiation of workers, this hierarchy, the tension that flows from it – all of this is a product of the machine, or, if you like, it is, in a given factory, any factory at all, the practico-inert being of the workers themselves in the sense that their relations with one another are the machine itself through its servants. But what one has to show is that these passive structures will later form a definite inertia within the workers’ action groups – there are a certain number of structures that no praxis will be able to transcend, they are unsurpassable. I have shown elsewhere how anarcho-syndicalist organisation, product of the free efforts of the elite within the class, was destined, even before unification was realised, to reproduce in the form of a “voluntary” association structures that were or had been established in certain enterprises through the mediation of the universal machine. But one would be sadly mistaken to suppose that it was the machine that engendered the Syndicalism of 1900 the way a “cause” produces its “effect”. If this were so, the dialectic and the human race would jointly disappear. Indeed, the humanism of labour is the material being of the skilled worker: he realises it in his work, with his hands and eyes, he receives it in his wages which express both the exploitation of this worker and the hierarchy of all exploited workers; finally, he brings it into being through the very influence that he exerts over the manual labourers and through that obscure conflict, still difficult to grasp, that opposes him to them. But he has to discover what he is. That means that his movement to unite with other skilled workers and to negate exploitation in practice necessarily occurs as the projection of what he is in his praxis itself: with what will he surpass exploitation if not with what exploitation has made of him? The basic movement through which the skilled workers combine and overcome their antagonisms is simultaneously an affirmation of the humanism of labour. The anarcho-syndicalist condemns exploitation in the name of the absolute superiority of skilled, manual labour over all other forms of activity. Practice only goes to confirm this basic principle: in the epoch of the universal machine it matters little whether the manual labourers go on strike or not, the absence of a few professionals, difficult to replace, is enough to disorganise the entire factory. Without knowing this, the elite of specialist workers abolishes the means of protesting against the exploitation of the manual workers: of course, they are indignant about the wretched condition of those workers , but they cannot justify the demands made by these “subhumans” on the basis of the skills attaching to the work they do. In a period when machine work demands a kind of lordship of (skilled) workers over their assistants, the basic principle of worker humanism and the related circumstances of the class struggle lie at the origin of a new discovery that one can call the paternalism of the worker elite: the skilled worker has to educate the labourers, involve them, galvanise them with his own example, etc. Thus the association that they form against capitalist exploitation reinvents rigorously but freely all the conditions which materiality imposes on alienated man. What interests us here is this subtle nothingness within positive being – the impossibility of transcending this humanism. In fact, it was transcended when the deskilling of the skilled workers brought about by the specialised machine reshaped the unity of the working class (in the advanced countries of capitalism) on new foundations of the interchangeability of all specialised workers. Work suddenly took on the same features for all of them: exhausting compulsion, hostile force. Of course, workers still had the pride of being workers but because they were the rockbed of society and not because the particular character of their work set them apart. A humanism of need... slowly began to crystallise. But it is crucially important that anarcho-syndicalism could never accomplish this transcendence on its own. The reason is simple: this practice and this theory represented the very life of the group and this active group (whether it was a union or the personnel of the factory) was nothing but a reunification and reorganisation of the struggle on the existing structural foundations. It was really impossible that the skilled workers, who were better educated, more combative, more effective, who through their mere absence could bring work to a standstill, should really, in practice, enroll into mass organisations that would have given the majority to the less educated, less militant workers. If such mass unions are today possible as well as necessary, it is because the techniques of struggle have changed along with the structure of the class – the interchangeability of semi-skilled workers (ouvriers spécialisés) compels them to adopt a strategy of mass action. This equality between workers came from changes in the means of production and in the practical tasks entailed by those changes: that equality is therefore true, that is to say, it proves its effectiveness every single day. But in 1900 it would have been an idealist position as the smallest strike would have shown. How could one argue that all workers were equal when strikes could succeed without the manual labourers, and when labourers on their own could never win any strikes? And how could you ascribe the same importance to all perspectives when manual workers, less educated, more hesitant, and without the profoundly respectable pride of the skilled workers, really did form a mass too inert to be aroused and galvanised into action?...The skilled worker came to identify the real, complete human being with himself. And this false identification (false not in relation to their employers but in relation to the masses) was an untranscendable limit because this identification was the workers themselves or, if you like, it was the expression, in theory as well as in practice, of their own practico-inert relationships with the other workers… When the problem of the kind of structure the unions should have was posed (should unions be craft or industrial?), the theory and practice (of syndicalism) became false because they posed an inert resistance to any effective reorganisation; their worker humanism became false when it led certain syndicalists to dream of the constitution of a proletarian chivalry; their relation to the masses became false when the docility of the manual workers gave way to growing discontent. And above all, the ideological and practical ensemble that expressed the struggles of a class structured by the universal machine became false when it prevented the trade unions from enrolling and organising the new masses, already brought into being before 1914 by the first specialised machines. But how could that exploited class fight for a proletariat other than itself? And what was this proletariat if not precisely the one structured in its being by the universal machine and passively infected by the material idea of ‘work as honour’ which the elite interiorised in its praxis? In deciding who they were, it was the machine that decided what they could be: it deprived them of the very possibility of imagining any other form of struggle at the same time as it gave to their self-affirmation, that is, to their ethico-practical reinteriorisation of its exigencies, to the active development through time of the structures prefabricated by it, the sole form of struggle that was effective against this class of employers in these circumstances. In short, here being is a prefabricated future as negative determination of what unfolds in time (temporalisation). Or if you like, it appears in action…as its congealed and unseizable contradiction, as the impossibility of going any further, or of wanting more or understanding more, as an iron wall within translucidity… To us who belong to another society (still capitalist, but one whose structures have mobilized new sources of energy, new machines, and mass production) the limits interiorised [in the praxis of that class] appear as the objective meaning of the structural relations that prevailed in the period of Anarcho-syndicalism....
Every practico-inert limit to a human relation can always (this is always abstractly possible) be revealed to the men whom it unites as the objective being of their relationship. But that is the very moment when their experience of this sense as real being shows them that it has always existed, interiorised but petrified, in their living praxis , down to their moments of subjectivity… But here we should insist above all that this prefabricated objectivity does not stop praxis from being a free temporal development (temporalisation) and effective reorganisation of the practical field in the pursuit of ends revealed and posed in the course of this praxis. In fact, anarcho-syndicalism was a living and effective struggle that forged its own weapons step by step and established unity among the trade unions starting from complete dispersion. Today its historical role even appears to have been that of establishing the first organs of unification within the working class. Or, better still, anarcho-syndicalism is nothing but the working class itself at a certain moment in its development, creating its first collective apparatuses in rudimentary form. What we quite simply have to understand is that its particular type of hierarchical unity was already inscribed in the human plurality by the universal machine insofar as it was structured through (the machine’s) exigencies for stratified groups of workers. (pp. 295-301; 239-47.)
Sartre concludes this long analysis by noting that the political ideas and practice of the syndicalists (their theory, their organising drives, their struggles, and so on) ‘only realised humanly, that is, through praxis and dialectically, the sentence passed by the universal machine on that working class. Moreover, this was a sentence that had to be realised: without human praxis the class would have remained the inert collective which we shall discuss in the pages that follow.
