Rancière & La parole ouvrière

In 1976 Jacques Rancière published (together with Alain Faure) a collection of texts by workers from between 1830 and 1851 under the title La Parole ouvrière. His short introduction to this collection, appearing as it does well before La nuit des prolétaires, his own thèse on the same material, is a good (and concise!) starting place for understanding what Rancière is up to in this early post-Althusserian phase of his thinking. I would describe this introduction as working on two levels at once: the first and most fully-stated is a methodological and historiographical argument with a certain kind of social history; the second is an intervention into what we can, problematically, call ‘post-Marxist’ theory. Neither intervention is without ambiguity.

           

In returning to the archive of “la parole ouvrière” between the revolution of 1830 and the coup of 1851, Rancière is, he says, above all not looking for an origin story. He wants to avoid the teleological story of a working class that is at the beginnings of what we all know will eventually be its self-consciousness as “proletarian.” But of course we are in the presence of growing class-consciousness. The specificity of this experience of class-consciousness in this moment for Rancière is that “La prise de parole qu’ils [les ouvrières] effectuent constitue elle-même un élément décisif de cette expérience” (10). This new accession into la parole was a claim to full humanity on the part of the workers. To be more than arms or rifles, but not because they are strong, because they are just as able to speak truth and justice as anyone. This was never separate from other forms of struggle (18-19). But there was nonetheless something particular about the claim to speech: “Vivre en travaillant ou mourir en combattant. La parole fonde un droit que la violence ne saurait se donner à elle-même.” For this, education, and self-education, was required because it was clear that violence would be met with greater counter-violence and experience taught the likelyhood of political betrayal. “Entre la violence suspendue et la servilité refusée, ce dialogue nouveau avec la bourgeoisie exprime un idéal qui est moins de prendre la place des maîtres que de les réduire à leur rôle de marchands ou de prêteurs, d’avoir avec eux ce que Grignon appelle des ‘rapports d’indépendance et d’égalité’” (13). Or, differently put, “Le désir d’être reconnus communique avec le refus d’être méprisés. La volonté de convaincre de son droit engage la résolution de le défendre par les armes” (14). This was a dialogue with the bourgeoisie, and that is what gave it a class character.

This class character has, Rancière says, been challenged or missed by scholars who can see nothing but ideological domination in the adoption by the proletarians of the language of the bourgeoisie. What else but ideological domination could be indicated by claims to the same humanity as the bourgeoise? Claims to respectability and the like? This is to read badly, according to Rancière. The proletarian takes the language of the bourgeoisie literally, turns it against itself, denies to the bourgeois the exclusive right to determine the meaning of this language. “C’est aux ouvriers seuls qu’il revient de nommer leur situation et leur révolte” (16). Rancière pushes especially heavily on the use and reuse of the term “esclave.” The workers are not slaves. They refuse to be slaves. They are quick to feel that they have been called slaves. They refuse to be treated as slaves—and so we have a journal called “Spartacus” Because the workers are “Les Spartacus qui ne veulent pas qu’on les traite d’esclaves prennent les armes” (16). It is difficult, given the state of scholarship today, to read these lines without wanting some reference to the fact that contemporaneous with these exchanges during the Second Republic there is debate on and then the abolition of slavery in the Antilles. But Rancière doesn’t mention this. He is interested, rather in the “sourd travail de réappropriation des institutions, des pratiques et des mots” (18) undertaken by the proletarians. He is interested, that is, in the question “Que se passe-t-il quand la classe qui est dépossédée également des moyens de la production intellectuelle s’efforce de prendre la parole pour s’identifier?” (19).

In historiographic terms, Rancière is calling for a history of “la pensée ouvrière qui occupe cette place demeurée pratiquement vide entre les histoires des doctrines sociales qui nous résument Marx, Fourier ou Proudhon, et les chroniques de la vie ouvrière qui nous deecrivent l’horreur des caves de Lille...” (21). This, let us remember, was written in 1976. We are here after EP Thompson, but in the midst of the ascendency of social history. We are ready for the turn to cultural history that, in this labor-history context, we can associate with Joan Scott, Bill Reddy, Bill Sewell, and others. (Indeed, although I’m not going to try to reconstruct it here, Rancière took part in face-to-face debates with anglophone historians, I’m thinking, if I remember correctly, of a 1983 conference reproduced as Work in France eds Kaplan and Koepp, 1986). It would be interesting to explore the difference between the account of political practice through experience that Rancière suggests here, or even more so his later interventions into arguments about political subjectivity and Joan Scott’s famous anti-“evidence of experience” argument. The two after all both come from French working-class history. Here Rancière is of course aiming at something much more historically specific: “il faudrait étudier comment l’expérience quotidienne de l’exploitation et de l’oppression trouve à se systématiser en empruntant des mots ou des raisonnements au discours d’un haut, comment des idées deviennent des forces matérielles, comment des plans de réorganisation sociale sont mis en oeuvre à l’échelle d’un atelier, d’une corporation, d’un quartier...” (21).

Here, though, we turn to the second, and less fully-articulated point that Rancière wants to make in this particular text. Taking a step back from the argument he has been making, he ventriloquizes a counter-argument: you will say that all of this history is really the past, “songeries d’artisans englouties en pratique par la grande industrie et anéanties en théories par le marxisme” (21-22). Now, there is a kind of social or cultural history that would pause here and say—but all utopias, all ruptures, all possibilities unrealized, are worth recovering. This is one of the great tasks of the historian: to rescue, to paraphrase Thompson, voices from the enormous condescension of posterity. But that is not what Rancière goes on to say. He turns, rather, to Marx. And he introduces two rather surprising (1976!) mechanisms into his narrative to do so: contemporaneity and choice. He writes, “L’idée de la révolution prolétarienne est inexorablement contemporaine des discours de cette avant-garde ouvrière qui pense et agit non pour préparer un futur où les prolétaires recueilleraient l’héritage d’une grande industrie capitaliste formée par la dépossession de leur travail et de leur intelligence, mais pour arrêter le mécanisme de cette dépossession” (22). These soon-to-be obsolete artisans saw themselves to be presented with a choice between two possible futures, “celui de l’organisation capitaliste qui, dans chaque métier, annonce, à travers la réorganisation du procès de travail, l’exacerbation de la concurrance entre les bras ouvriers ou le renforcement de la discipline de l’atelier, l’instauration d’un esclavage nouveau; ou celui de l’association ‘libre et volontaires’ des travailleurs. C’est dans le sentiment de ce choix que se forme l’idée de l’émancipation ouvrière sur laquelle viendra se greffer la théorie de la révolution prolétarienne : non à partir de la conscience des prolétaires formés à ‘l’école de la fabrique’ mais à partir du point de vue de ceux qui entendent refuser cette école” (23).

Marx could abuse Proudhon for his theoretical incompetence. He could struggle to assert that utopian socialism was past, that his own socialism was scientific. But between this science and the political dream of emancipation there was a gap and “ce décalage se trouve d’entrée de jeu au coeur de la problématique marxienne.” (Is this still an Althusserian reading of Marx? But historicized differently?) Marx “n’a pas pu penser le but à atteindre dans d’autres termes que ceux de ces ‘artisans’: communisme, émancipation des travailleurs, abolition du salariat, libre association des travailleurs. It s’est efforcé de penser avec plus de riguer la nécessité du renversement du pouvoir et les conditions de ce renversement,” along with his political economy, but “il ne pouvait se représenter l’avenir communiste autrement que ne le fait en 1850 le mécanicien Drevet: monde d’ateliers sociaux et de magasins coopératifs où, dans l’égalité de tous devant le travail et le loisir, des travailleurs librement associés régaleraient leur production sur les besoins désormais connus et reconnus de leur frères.” 23-24.

But this does not mean—as for instance is suggested by the recent Sperber biography, as well as the grand narrative of bourgeois life outlined by Jerrold Seigel—that Marx is himself somehow surpassed by subsequent social-economic history. Rather, “la mise en place de ce réseau de mots et d’images où la pensée de Marx prend ses repères peut aussi être le point de départ d’une réflexion matérailiste sur l’histoire des transformations du marxisme” (24).  Rancière, much like Antonio Labriola in the 1890s, asks that we return to the moment at which Marx’s thought was constituted in order to understand it and further the project of emancipation. Although perhaps I am reading Rancière as more sympathetic to Marx than he really is?

To close this rapid overview of a single, now-ancient, text I want to present a methodological-political anxiety. I worry that the intellectual historical call to be open to the demands of the texts we encounter—dialogic, but also for instance the way Gordon frames it—makes it difficult for intellectual historians to make the kind of move that Rancière does. How can we not, if we begin by trying to allow Marx to speak directly to us, fail to read him against these worker-philosophers in just the way he wants us to? Rancière wants, we might say, to use the context of Marx to make Marx’s thinking alive in the present. But this is not the message I get from Gordon. Rancière uses the notion of historical choice—two choices, a moment of clear decision creating a rupture in imaginative futures—to insist that the workers of the 1840s, rather than the theorists, remain contemporary to the idea of revolution. This, it seems to me, requires a set of absolutely contemporary commitments (for Rancière we can say, to equality) that are simply not available to the historian. Or, if they are so available, it is at just the cost that Lilti, contra Gordon, says—we won’t be doing history any longer, but rather politics, because it seems to me that there is nothing else that a claim about contemporaneity can ultimately mean. There’s nothing wrong with that, of course, and this is to some degree what Gordon (et al, he’s getting unfairly abused here, see also Jay and LaCapra) wants. But with that come responsibilities and obligations that have nothing to do with professional historical training or practice. That would be militant history. That would be history that begins with a choice in the present imagined in the same way that Rancière claims works in the 1840s began with a choice. Evidently this is a problem of long standing. My worry, I suppose, is really the idea that intellectual historians (rather than, say, historians of social movements who are in many ways better equipped for this) should be particularly obliged to confront this problem of contemporaneity. Surely it is for us to ask, rather, why there could be a choice of that kind at all, in the particular moment that it seemed to present itself? There’s a problem of recursion here, of course, and the inevitability of making a choice at the beginning of subject-matter. But, then, if you begin by saying that you are an intellectual historian, probably you have already made a choice against, at the least, the equality with which Rancière begins—a choice for Marx and not the proletarians? 

Karl Marx, Antisemite

Around the turn of 1843 and 1844, Marx wrote two essays, which it seems to me articulate in contrasting ways themes, or attack problems, to which he would return throughout his life. I have in mind “On the Jewish Question” and “A Contribution to the Critique of Hegel’s Philosophy of Right, Introduction.” In both ‘critique’ is mobilized in the service of ‘emancipation,’ although especially the latter is very much up for definition. Obviously, generations of very smart and well read people have looked at these texts and thought about what they mean for Marxism in general. After I’ve had my look, I’m going to be very interested in what other people have to say. But for the moment, here is my own naïve reading.

“On the Jewish Question” is a disagreement with Bruno Bauer. Bauer, says Marx, argues that Jewish emancipation will come only when the Jews have ceased to be Jewish, so that they can participate in the universal project of political emancipation. Marx begins by criticizing Bauer’s notion of political emancipation. He does some very interesting things here, ultimately arguing that what is really at stake is human emancipation, which is quite a different project. In the colorful second part of the essay, we get his full answer: since the essence of Jewishness is the essence of modern egotistical material relations, that is the economy, and the economy is that against which human emancipation must struggle, what must really happen is that society must be liberated from the Jews (or at least Jewishness).

“A Contribution to the Critique of Hegel’s Philosophy of Right,” on the other hand, is about Germany. It contains the famous assertions of Germany’s backwardness, of how the German contribution to politics is in its philosophy. At issue here is German emancipation. Whereas in France, every group feels that it is universal, in Germany, no class is able to do so properly. What is needed, then, is a class the suffering of which is universal, so that when it comes to power, even if it acts only for itself, it acts for all. This is the proletariat.

Much about these essays is surprising. What surprises me most is the specificities that they suggest lie at the origin of Marx’s categories. Could it really be that it was only after encountering the French utopians themselves later in the 1840s that Marx came to think of a genuinely total system? The distance between the German need for the proletariat in 1844 and its world historical role in the Manifesto of 1847—this is striking. Perhaps although Marx is dealing with Germany, really he means the whole world, although it seems as though France is for him a very different situation—or perhaps the point is just that France will approach the proletarian revolution in decorous and beautifully balanced stages, while Germany must have only it or nothing at all? And then, of course, there is the Jew. Now, on one level, I recognize that Marx is standing here with a long tradition in European historiography and social thought that saw (and for some, still sees) ‘the Jews’ as a modernizing force. Jewish ideals, or Jewish economic practices, Jewish social reality—somehow, Jews were a force for political and economic development, the development of individual freedoms and rights. Especially toward the end of the 19^th century, this was a major philosemitic argument. Yet, it is not hard to see how ‘force for political liberalism and modernization’ could be goose-stepped into ‘rootless cosmopolitan agitator.’ So there is Marx (and there is also Nietzsche, you might say). Marx does not yet use the word ‘capital,’ he does not yet seem to have the concept. How seriously are we to take his identification of the acquisitive haggling egoism of the marketplace—and therefore economic modernity—with, as he says, the everyday reality of Jewish life?

In another context, it would be worth walking with some care through Marx’s arguments in “On the Jewish Question,” but for the moment, I only want to cite the last sentences of the first part, what comes just after Marx cites Rousseau on how the founding of a new ‘people’s institution’ is really to change human nature,

All emancipation is reduction of the human world and of relationships to man himself.

Political emancipation is the reduction of man on the one hand to the member of civil society, the egoistic, independent individual, and on the other to the citizen, the moral person.

On when real, individual man resumes the abstract citizen into himself and as an individual man has become a species-being in his empirical life, his individual work and his individual relationships, only when man has recognized and organized his forces propres as social forces so that social force is no longer separated from him in the form of political force, only then will human emancipation be completed.

These passages are from the Penguin Early Writings (p 234). I’m not sure that the translation is perfect (compare). For instance, the word ‘reduction’ is used to render both, in the first sentence, the German ‘Zurückführung’ and in the second sentence the German ‘Reduktion.’ One might also question rendering ‘Kraft’ as ‘force.’ Then, although I don’t want to make too much of this, in the third sentence the English ‘recognized’—a word sure to make one’s ears prick up in these contexts—is used for ‘erkannt.’ The Hegelian word, I think, is ‘anerkennen.’ Enough with the pedantic stuff. The main point is that for Marx, at this moment, emancipation is the end of the political. Or, what is not perhaps the same thing, emancipation is complete when man no longer apprehends social forces in ‘der Gestalt der politischen Kraft.’ Politics is a form of alienation just like religion, and emancipation is its destruction.

Back to the Jews. Marx finally poses the question thus: “what specific social element must be overcome in order to abolish Judaism? For the capacity of the present-day Jew for emancipation is the relation of Judaism to the emancipation of the present-day world. This relation flows inevitably from the special position of Judaism in the enslaved world of today.” The question should not be taken theologically, but practically, “the secular basis of Judaism” is “Practical need, self-interest.” Thus the “secular cult of the Jew” becomes “Haggling. What is his secular God? Money” (236). Giving the best possible reading to this, and perhaps being overgenerous, one might read this as saying that ‘the Jew’ is a collective identity forced on a group of people who have been historically made dependent upon exclusively economic capacities—that is, in the feudal world, they were excluded from the politico-social relations that gave structure to society, relations which, incidentally, Marx analyzes in criticist terms in “Contribution…” The point here is that Marx

Recognize[ses] in Judaism the presence of a universal and contemporary anti-social element whose historical evolution – eagerly nurtured by the Jews in its harmful aspects – has arrived at its present peak, a peak at which it will inevitably disintegrate.

The emancipation of the Jews is, in the last analysis, the emancipation of mankind from Judaism. (237)

…

The contradiction between the practical political power of the Jew and his political rights is the contradiction between politics and financial power in general. Ideally speaking the former is superior to the latter, but in actual fact it is in thrall to it. (238)

Which is to say that although the Jews are nominally at a disadvantage, discriminated against by political power in various ways, in possession of fewer rights—in fact, their power through money is enormous. Reading all of this just after Nietzsche is enlightening. I do not believe that, for instance, historically, the idea of France or ‘frenchness’ has anything like this kind of relation to the idea of ‘the Jew.’ I will look later at Sartre’s essay. One can almost give a good reading (although, to bring in an important rhetorical device of Marx’s, the stench is too great to be mistaken) to the following, “Civil society ceaselessly begets the Jew from its own entrails” (238). And then,

Money is the jealous god of Israel before whom no other god may stand. Money debases all the gods of mankind and turns them into commodities. Money is the universal and self-constituted value of all things. It has therefore deprived the entire world – both the world of man and of nature – of its specific value. Money is the estranged essence of man’s work and existence; this alien essence dominates him and he worships it.

The god of the Jews has been secularized and become the god of the world. Exchange is the true god of the Jew. His god is nothing more than illusory exchange (239).

Marx reads the history of theological Judaism as the Jesuitical (!) justification of self-interest. So we get what, in another context, might be an interesting idea, “the religion of practical need could not by its very nature find its completion in theory but only in practice, precisely because its truth is practice” (240). And so it follows that the Judaism would never really fall out of practice, “since the real essence of the Jew is universally realized and secularized in civil society, civil society could not convince the Jew of the unreality of his religious essence, which is nothing more than the ideal expression of practical need” (241). All of which is why, in the end, in what I take to be a radicalization of Bauer’s thesis, the social (as opposed to political) emancipation of the Jews is equal to “the emancipation of society from Judaism” (241).

Germany, in its actually existing state, is beneath criticism. Marx’s language is very powerful here. In trying to think about what ‘critique’ might mean in general, and specifically now, it seems to me reasonable to compare the situation today to the relation in which Marx claimed that it stood to the actual political reality of Germany in 1844, “But war on conditions in Germany! By all means! They are below the level of history, they are beneath all criticism, but they remain an object of criticism, in the same way as the criminal who is beneath the level of humanity remains an object for the executioner…Criticism is no longer an end in itself, but simply a means. The essential force that moves it is indignation and its essential task is denunciation” (246). Critique, it seems to me, finding that denunciation and indignation got boring, has moved back to suggesting that it can generate change by being its own end. That is, critique wants to make revolution and posits itself as the empty destroying revolutionary force—that which, when it takes power, is fully universal because purely negative. If there are those who feel that this is basically a capitulation to capital…The reversal, or stopping-up, of the practice of enlightenment is also of interest: “the important thing is not to permit the German a single moment of self-deception or resignation. The actual burden must be made even more burdensome by creating an awareness of it. The humiliation must be increased by making it public” (247).

At this point, Marx’s discussion of revolution is remarkably voluntaristic. He says, “if one class is to be the class of liberation per excellence, then another class must be the class of overt oppression” (254). In France, it was and to some extent remains the nobility and the clergy who stood as oppressors. No class in Germany has the moral energy to fill this role; also lacking is a class with the “breadth of spirit… [the] genius which can raise material force to the level of political power, that revolutionary boldness,” that would allow it to claim the universal for itself. Rather, in a striking phrase that must excite literary critics to no end, and perhaps made Lukacs feel that his preparations had all been worth it, “the relationship of the different spheres of German society is therefore epic rather than dramatic” (255).

The comparison is to France. There, “it is enough to be something for one to want to be everything.” Here, Marx sees France going through, modeling, a series of political revolutions and partial emancipations, whereas, for Germany, there can be only one. He says,

In France partial emancipation is the basis of universal emancipation. In Germany universal emancipation is the conditio sine qua non of any partial emancipation [what about the Jews?]. In France it is the reality, in Germany the impossibility, of emancipation in stages that must give birth to complete freedom. In France each class of the people is a political idealist and experiences itself first and foremost not as a particular class but as the representative of social needs in general. The role of emancipator therefore passes in a dramatic movement from one class of the French people to the next, until it finally reaches that class which no longer realizes social freedom by assuming certain conditions external to man and yet created by human society, but rather by organizing all the [pgbrk] conditions of human existence on the basis of social freedom. In Germany, however, where practical life is as devoid of intellect as intellectual life is of practical activity, no class of civil society has the need and the capacity for universal emancipation unless under the compulsion of its immediate situation, of material necessity and of its chains themselves.

So where is the positive possibility of German emancipation?

This is our answer. In the formation of a class with radical chains, a class of civil society which is not a class of civil society, a class which is the dissolution of all classes, a sphere which has a universal character because of its universal suffering and which lays claim to no particular right because the wrong it suffers is not a particular wrong but wrong in general; a sphere of society which can no longer lay claim to a historical title, but merely to a human one, which does not stand in one-sided opposition to the consequences but in all-sided opposition to the premises of the German political system; and finally a sphere which cannot emancipate itself without emancipating itself from – and therefore emancipating – all the other spheres of society, which is, in a word, the total loss of humanity and which can therefore redeem itself only through the total redemption of humanity. This dissolution of society as a particular class is the proletariat. (255-6)

To sum up what it seems to me has so far happened. The vision of Marxist revolution as we have come to recognize it—inevitable, catastrophic, redemptive, carried by a universal class forced into action by their own radical dispossession—as it would be articulated in the Manifesto and elsewhere, originally applied to Germany in contrast to France. The revolution was to take place in Germany. The universal condition that, ultimately, strips the proletariat of its humanity and therefore renders it capable of redeeming humanity in general through revolution—is the spirit of Jewishness. Is it not the case, then, that the entire movement of Marx’s thought begins with the drama of German and Jew? And further, that for him the drama concludes when the German eliminates the Jew?

Freudo-Marxism mark 3 (or higher)

Le capitalisme, au XXè siècle, a fait de la libido sa principale énergie : l'énergie qui, canalisée sur les objets de la consommation, permet d'absorber les excédents de la production industrielle, en suscitant, par des moyens de captation de la libido, des désirs entièrement façonnés selon les besoins de la rentabilité des investissements. Or, aujourd'hui, cette captation de la libido a fini par la détruire, et ce fait majeur constitue une immense menace pour la civilisation industrielle : elle conduit inévitablement, à terme, à une crise économique mondiale sans précédent.

The work of Bernard Stiegler was recommended to me the other day. I was told that I could start with the writing available on the website of the Ars Industrialis, the organization he co-founded in 2003. Their manifesto is remarkable. The above is a chunk from its 3rd proposition that gives an idea of how they are updating Marx.

The French Commonwealth

The excellent website La Vie des Idées has just posted a review of Hardt and Negri’s Commonwealth written by Stéphane Haber. The review is positive, but brief and aware of the difficulty of reviewing such a book briefly. It makes none the less some interesting points that I want to summarize here yet more briefly.

First, Haber notes the strong engagement with, or return to, what might be called the technical vocabulary of Marxism. Hardt and Negri find themselves in a moment somewhat different from that of Empire or Multitude, in which, “apparemment, il ne faut plus craindre le reproche traditionnel d’économicisme.” Their critique of capitalism is a communist critique. Haber’s summation of Hardt and Negri’s basic economic diagnosis of the contemporary world gets, I think, only half the picture. It is rightly pointed out that, somewhat problematically, Hardt and Negri put ‘immaterial production’ at the center of the contemporary economy. It seems to me that their analysis of the turn to rent, as opposed to surplus value, as a source of capitalist profit, is also of enormous importance. For them, the contemporary world is typified by capital’s tendency to capture the product of the common—the new enclosure. This is important not least because it suggests that we are, perhaps, on the way to (rather than in the midst of) a revolution in the mode of production.

Haber’s comments are organized into three fundamental thematics: production, the critique of capitalism, and the philosophy of poverty.

The essential objection in the realm of production is that, it seems, it tends to include potentially everything. What Haber calls Spinozist, and what I myself would call a Bergsonian, monism includes everything. This seems to bother Haber—I can’t say that it bothers me:

Le schème du travail, relayant le monisme spinoziste, permet ainsi de couper court aux tergiversations : le monde (y compris dans celles de ses composantes que nous sommes tentés de qualifier de « naturelles »), tout comme nous-mêmes, sommes toujours déjà pris dans le cercle de la production inventive et collective dont « nature » et « société » ne forment que des moments isolés par abstraction. Tout cela ne manque pas d’allure, philosophiquement parlant. Mais la question reste posée de savoir si un écologisme quelque peu articulé (ne serait-ce que sous la forme d’une préoccupation minimale pour le « développement durable »), en tant qu’inévitablement orienté en direction de la préservation d’un environnement existant, peut trouver son compte dans une telle élaboration. Il lui faudra bien, ouvertement ou en catimini, une ontologie qui ménage une place à ce qui vient avant le travail humain. Voilà qui symbolise sans doute la difficulté du parti-pris néoproductiviste, si immatérialisé soit-il.

If I understand Haber correctly—and things are compressed here, I am writing on the fly, so perhaps I do not—then it seems to me that he misses the whole force of refusing to partition ‘the natural’ from ‘the human.’ Radical ecology is not the recognition that we must protect mother nature, but rather the recognition that there is no mother nature, that we must regulate ourselves for ourselves—in fact, radical ecology is clearly a critique of capital or, better put, a critique of capital is radical ecology. The point is that nothing comes before human labor—this is precisely why it is so important to understand the limits internal to this labor and its social formations. David Harvey makes a similar point about the inclusion of ecology within the critique of capital in the new preface to his big book. This brings us to Haber’s next point.

Hardt and Negri conduct a rigorously immanent critique of capitalism. Haber finds it unusual: “Ce qu’il y a sans doute de plus étonnant dans leur livre, c’est le sérieux avec lequel Hardt et Negri prennent au pied de la lettre le mot d’ordre de la « critique immanente ».” So immanent is the critique, in fact, that it turns out not to be sufficiently critical for Haber of life as it is lived ‘under capitalism.’ What is wanted and not supplied is a treatment of alienation (as we would find in the Frankfurt school, or on the contemporary French left in so many places—the comité invisible, say).

Ainsi, le passage au communisme suppose non pas la réinvention de régulations (dans le style d’ATTAC) ou la promotion d’institutions économiques nouvelles (une position actuellement défendue par la social-démocratie associationniste), mais la libération des forces productives existantes qui, d’elles-mêmes, s’assumant elles-mêmes, se soustrayant au pseudo-soutien que leur offre le capital tel qu’il existe aujourd’hui (en fait une force de contrainte et de parasitage) sont censées pouvoir favoriser l’avènement de la société désirable.

...

Hardt et Negri critiquent non pas l’autonomie aliénante du capitalisme comme « système » (inhumain, anonyme, poussé à l’autoreproduction élargie constante, délié de la volonté et de l’intelligence etc.), mais cet aspect bien particulier du capitalisme qu’est la privatisation, c’est-à-dire en fait la sous-utilisation, des richesses produites en commun, un « vol » qui est d’ailleurs aussi censé expliquer la misère des exclus.

Haber is put off by this lack. It seems to me to be one of the signal virtues of the book. Capitalism is productive, and not only of misery (which Hardt and Negri hardly ignore), but also of possibility and innovation (although that word has been co-opted by CAppleitism). Haber recognizes that this perspective connects Hardt and Negri to the Proudhonian tradition—this is a tradition that seems to me, in parts, salvageable.

Lastly, Haber recognizes that Commonwealth takes the human suffering inflicted by capital as its starting point. How is this done, how might it be done? After discussing several possibilities, Haber describes the one in which Hardt and Negri can be located:

Un intersubjectivisme participationniste. Ici, les conditions de vie décentes, non-misérables, sont considérées comme faisant partie des supports empiriques d’une délibération digne de ce nom. Présupposé dans ces approches, l’argument trivial selon lequel on n’est pas prêt à bien délibérer lorsque l’on est dans le besoin suffit à la fois à emporter la conviction et à orienter la discussion. L’idéal d’une participation démocratique inclusive et authentique y forme donc le point de vue à partir duquel les situations socioéconomiques concrètes se trouvent évaluées. Dans le champ contemporain, Habermas a fourni une légitimation influente de ce genre d’approches d’aspect plus républicaniste.

Republican is right. One might also describe this, nodding to Petit: ‘freedom as (collective?) non-domination.’ But, for Haber, problems arise because the authors of Commonwealth link this collective participation not necessarily to fundamental bare-life issues such as drinking water or rule of law, but rather to participation in bio-political production. This is indeed difficult. It seems to me here that, on the one hand, Hardt and Negri are being faithful to a certain relativism in Marx, one that might be shorthanded as ‘time socially necessary.’ On the other hand, it is unjust to first admit that the authors begin with the problem of human misery, and then object when they subtract misery as such from the solution to the problem. This may be related to Haber’s relative discounting of the shift from a regime in which profit is based on the extraction of surplus value to one in which it rests on rent. It is not, it seems to me, empirically unrealistic to say—with many ‘official economists’—that poverty is the result of not-enough globalization. This ‘not-enough’ is required by capital. Remove it, and you allow the fruits of production to be distributed in a more egalitarian way.

Haber’s review, I think, hits many of the right points. Its incompleteness should be ascribed to its length rather than anything else. The final word of the review is positive and, it seems to me, rightly points out that the most appealing aspect of Hardt and Negri’s work is the attempt to grapple with the empirical reality of new economic formations in a critical and even revolutionary philosophical mode. The clear (although unnamed) foil here is Badiou. I’ll reproduce the last lines:

Les difficultés de la position défendue par Hardt et Negri forment la contrepartie de leur façon nette et décidée de répondre à cette exigence, et c’est pour cela que, sûrement, elle jouera à juste titre un rôle important dans la discussion contemporaine. Ne serait-ce que parce que, en ce qu’elle a de plus intéressante pour nous, l’impulsion marxienne a plus de chance de survivre dans une tentative sincère pour concevoir les transformations du travail et de l’exploitation que dans une quelconque spéculation déliée sur l’essence du Communisme comme Exigence pure.

on the use and usury of time

E. P. Thompson, 'Time, Work-Discipline, and Industrial Capitalism', Past & Present, 38 (1967), pp 56-97.

E. P. Thompson is always worth reading. I’ve just read through the above article, and have three observations. First, in some ways we historians have progressed very little since the open Marxism of the 1960s. Cited in Thompson’s essay are, among others, Henri Lefebvre and Lucien Febvre, but also Pierre Bourdieu and Andre Gunder Frank. These authors are all still important methodological references.

Second, might we take this essay as a starting point for an anthropology, or anthropologizing, of Marx’s labor time theory of value? Is this how Thompson intended it? Were there discussions of this sort of thing any longer in the 1960s? My ignorance here is staggering. It seems to me that it would be possible to argue that although Marx’s theory of value is clearly an abstraction, it does, must, have some basis in actual practice. In tracing the history of time as a measure of work, Thompson traced the foundation of the genuinely capitalist world, since this time discipline was generated both by mechanical necessity (literally, by work with machines), but also for the effective market unification toward which capital tends. Certainly, Thompson in this article shows a complex interplay of economic and cultural forces that in part generated the economic world from which Marx’s deduced theory of value. The trick would be getting closer to an understanding of the field of historical applicability for Marx’s edifice.

Which comes to the third point. Thompson himself, in the ‘political’ epilog to the article, sounds quite dated, and reveals, perhaps, a Marxist worldview to betray his empirical sensitivity. Describing his own world, that is the 1960s, he says, “if the purposive notation of time-use becomes less compulsive, then men might have to re-learn some of the arts of living lost in the industrial revolution: how to fill the interstices of their days with enriched, more leisurely, personal and social relations; how to break down once more the barriers between work and life” (pg 95). When people talk about ‘post-industrial society,’ in particularly regarding the internet, I imagine what they want to indicate is exactly why this sentiment no longer makes any sense at all.

A universal yet disinterested sympathy

In the preface to Commonwealth, Hardt and Negri define for us several of their key concepts. First of all, the common. It is most obviously ‘natural’ resources (such as air), but is “also and more significantly those results of social production that are necessary for social interaction and further production, such as knowledges, languages, codes, information, affects, and so forth” (viii). It will be argued that contemporary forms of capitalism are caught in a trap: they rely on the common, but are able to generate profit only by capturing—privatizing—the common and thereby destroying its productive capacities. Ultimately, it will be argued, this most recent cycle of capitalist accumulation has little to do with the production of wealth, and more with the seizing of previously common wealth, something like a new enclosure. What do we call this new regime of production over which capital is struggling so paradoxically to retain control? It is the biopolitical. The authors say that, “the ultimate core of biopolitical production…is not the production of objects for subjects as commodity production is often understood, but the production of subjectivity itself” (x). Biopower is what the authors call the control that capital attempts to exert over this new form of production. New or renewed concepts will be required, the authors say, to understand the new situation. They identify at the outset the two central such concepts: poverty and love. Many more concepts will be added to these by the end of the book, in particular Spinoza’s conception of joy, but corruption is mobilized as an idea with philosophical content, and in the very last pages of the book we find a particularly grisly figuring of revolutionary laughter.

The authors have, in the past, been accused of idealistic (in a non-technical sense) messianism. They take a more ‘realist’ tone here, saying, “we…believe that…intellectual force is required to overcome dogmatism and nihilism, but we insist on the need to complement it with physical force and political action. Love needs force to conquer the ruling powers and dismantle their corrupt institutions before it can create a new world of common wealth” (xii). The issue of force and violence is treated relatively openly by Hardt and Negri. In essence, their position is that the multitude must withdraw from capital, and that this act of force will doubtless require the support of violence, just as—and they return to this example more than once—the Jews could not leave Egypt without some violence, the Pharaoh would not let them go. How, then, do they define this multitude that must perform an exodus from capital? They say, “the multitude is a set of singularities that poverty and love compose in the reproduction of the common” (xii-xiii). The multitude has as yet only a shadowy existence. It is, on the one hand, the economic foundation of the current structure of capital—but on the other hand, it does not yet exist as a political form. The project of this book, then, after Empire and Multitude, is to articulate the “political construction of the multitude with Empire” as an “ethical project” (xii). The authors are fully engaged in the Leninist critique of revolutionary thought that fails to think the transition between present possibilities and the future. They say, “the becoming-Prince of the multitude is a project that relies entirely on the immanence of decision making within the multitude. We will have to discover the passage from revolt to revolutionary institution that the multitude can set in motion” (xiii).

Such an ambitious project might be vulnerable in many ways. I expect to be thinking about it for some time to come. For now, on the heels of my reading, I have a few questions, or challenges.

It is crucial for Hardt and Negri’s argument that the biopolitical economy does not suffer from scarcity. Industrial production, on the other hand, was ruled by scarcity. What does scarcity mean? Here it refers not so much to the problem of ‘not enough,’ but rather to the fact that something owned by one person cannot be owned by another. This is to say that while scarcity certainly can mean the absolute dearth of, for instance, food, it also refers to a whole system of ownership. The industrial economy is ruled by prices, which are determined, at least in theory, by supply and demand—scarcity. The biopolitical economy, for Hardt and Negri, is in a sense defined by the tendency towards immaterial production. Immaterial products, unlike cars, can be in principle enjoyed by an unlimited number of people. A television show, once produced, is infinitely repeatable and distributable. This means, for Hardt and Negri, that the biopolitical economy is essentially an economy of the common—a concept that replaces the bourgeois/capitalist notion of a division between public and private. Various pieces of empirical evidence are brought in at this point, for instance the increasing reliance of economic value on ‘externalities,’ paradigmatically in real-estate.

Biopolitical production, enabled, we might say, by the trend in the direction of the immaterial, is centrally defined by the production of subjectivities. I would like to understand better the relation between these immaterial products and subjectivities. Subjectivity is, in a certain sense, an immaterial product. But there are other immaterial products that may be, in the hands of a bricoleur, turned into subjectivities. Biopolitical production draws on and expands the common. Yet, I wonder if we might not find a logic of scarcity at work in the production of subjectivities through the common as well. Contrary to the Jeffersonian image (the flame of my candle is not diminished when you use it to light your candle), it seems to me that subjectivities, in as much as they are conceived as identities, are necessarily exclusionary. In the game of identity, this is to say, my candle (or really, our candles) signifies less if you have one as well.

This objection may be a failure of revolutionary imagination on my part. Certainly, Hardt and Negri discuss the various traps into which identity politics falls. Chapter 6.1, “Revolutionary Parallelism” is a wonderfully lucid exposition of how to differentiate the essentially parallel revolutionary identity politics from the many competing non-revolutionary identity politics. The goal is to get beyond the “frequent embarrassment that accompanies reproducing the catalogue race, class, gender, sexuality, and so forth. (The ‘and so forth’ is especially embarrassing)” (343). In essence, the distinction is that identity politics is bad when it in the end only re-enforces the identity around which it organizes. It is good (revolutionary) when its practice and goal are the dissolution of that identity. The paradigm here is obviously the proletariat, supposedly the only class that makes revolution in order to eliminate itself. For Hardt and Negri (specifically against Zizek), it is patently obvious that certain kinds of feminism, for instance, also seek to dissolve the category of woman, and are therefore revolutionary. The distinction here would be between the essentializing practice of certain feminisms, (although Hardt and Negri don’t mention it, we could say Cixous’ écriture feminine) and the destabilization practiced by queer theory (they do give us the positive example: Butler). Hardt and Negri find a similar division between essentializing black nationalisms and those forms of black radicalism that ultimately transcend these racial categories. Fanon, for instance, rather than simply affirming the blackness that has been denigrated, sees that in the end it will be necessary to destroy both whiteness and blackness. This whole chapter, in my view, is both brilliant and entirely correct.

So what am I doing talking about exclusionary identities? In the context of queer theory, we get the quote from the Anti-Oedipus: not 2 sexes, not 0 sexes, but n sexes. All that I am saying is that even in a world with n sexes, there is no reason to think that it will not be possible to make a commodity out of each singularity in the multitude, thereby reintroducing the logic of scarcity into what had been the paradise of the common. No doubt this objection springs from a smearing-together of important distinctions, or a misunderstanding of the goal. Perhaps the authors would simply shrug—the point isn’t that everything will be perfect, but rather that the problems will be new. Does it even make sense to speak of the commodity in the era of biopolitical production? I see no reason why we can’t, although the concept would need some elaboration in order to be applied to subjectivities—no doubt this work has already, somewhere, been done.

Commonwealth is an enormous and lucid synthesis not only of post-Revolutionary social thought, but also of the last two generations of academic critical theory. Together with Empire and Multitude, we have on our hands a thoroughgoing attempt to renew the empirical, philosophical, and political gambit of Marxism. This trilogy is not a philosophical treatise, nor a political program, nor a study of economic morphology. It is certainly also not a ‘theoretical intervention.’ Indeed, what I admire most about this body of work is precisely the fact that it dares to be empirico-political rather than simply theoretical and philosophical—this is what connects it to Marx and the best tradition of theoretical political writing. I mean by this that the authors begin with a given conceptual framework, and critique and expand these concepts, replacing them as necessary, with resources drawn not only from the observed world, but from what they judge to be the edge of the world in its becoming. This is a fancy way of saying that the authors have examined the evidence and made a bet about the direction in which it is pointing, and staked themselves philosophically and politically on this judgment. It seems to me that the language of wager is appropriate here in a way that it generally is not in situations that are primarily philosophical, empirical, or political.

It would be very interesting to look at Empire, Multitude, and Commonwealth as a trajectory. For one thing, Commonwealth opens with a round denunciation of the contemporary obsession with sovereignty, an obsession that, it seems to me, has a great deal to do with the analysis of sovereignty undertaken in Empire. If this first book was, perhaps justly, criticized for being messianic about revolution, the same cannot, or ought not, be said of Commonwealth. We have there a remarkably clear and honest gaze into the abyss of revolutionary violence. I am even surprised that the authors were as willing to condone violence as they seem to be. The last sentence of the book is “they will be buried by laughter.” This, together with the image of the apocalyptic Exodus, is strong stuff. Similarly, the reintroduction of corruption as a meaningful category is slightly alarming. It is none the less necessary, because it allows the authors to provide guidelines for distinguishing between good and bad forms of the common—the movement of their thought here is in many ways parallel to Alain Badiou’s ‘negative’ account of evil. This parallelism, together with a renewed attention to the evental nature of revolutionary action is something that I believe was missing from Empire. Verifying this, and examining the ways in which the geopolitical changes since the era of Empire (although Commonwealth argues that no major structural changes have in fact taken place in that time) have changed the authors’ conception of the world, would I think be instructive. These, though, are projects I can’t undertake at the moment.

Gender, the Parasitical State, and Revolution

The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte is, it is often asserted, a classic. It is as rewarding a document for a meta-reading, or a history of reception, as any—see Donald Reid’s 2007 essay in Modern Intellectual History for just such a project. But before a scholarly survey of this kind can be properly appreciated, the text itself should be read because the reception history of a work is more interesting when one understands how complex the thing is all on its own.

The Brumaire recounts in some detail the period from February of 1848 to the days just following Louis Bonaparte’s coup of December 2nd, 1851. The tone is one of bitter invective and scorn; the mode is very often satire. The question, of course, was how what began as a proletarian revolution could end in a cheap, tawdry, strong (but really weak)-man dictatorship. Today the spectacle of a revolution descending into tawdry authoritarianism is so banal as to be declared often enough a law of history. At the time, in France, certainly dictatorship was associated with revolution, but it should be born in mind that if 1789 eventually lead to military dictatorship—Napoleon’s empire—it did so first by passing through a Jacobin period that had the highest possible ambitions, and that Napoleon himself was easy to see as a world-historical genius. Marx’s task, then, writing in the 1850s, was to understand and explain the path revolution had taken, and indicate what might be the consequences, theoretical and practical, of this revolution.

By way of introducing what Marx says about the interrelated issues of the state and the class base of Louis Napoleon’s power, and considering the relation of this to Marx’s other work, I would like to make a rhetorical, or metaphorological, point that I feel smells strongly of a certain outmoded style of criticism, and that perhaps has already been made.

The famous opening passages of the text catalogue symbolic borrowings of various revolutions from history—these borrowings go from narratives to costumes. Marx puts language in a central position here. Indeed, he makes the learning of a language the metaphorical bridge from the faintly ridiculous actual history of these borrowings to an imagined revolution: “Likewise a beginner studying a new language always translates it back into his mother tongue; but only when he can use it without referring back, and thus forsake his native language for the new, only then has he entered into the spirit of the new language, and gained the ability to speak it fluently”(32).[1] In the case of the 1848 revolution, however, farce is in the air. Marx’s satire holds what is, what is said, and what ought to be, up for inspection. Louis Bonaparte is a con man running a nation as an emperor in order to pay his own debts. Everything is tawdry and small in comparison to past revolutions. If the Brumaire has become a central text for interpretation of Marx’s understanding of ideology, it is because he pays so much attention here to language and its power, perception and reality—to the essential emptiness, or lack, that drives the logic of public political discourse.

I would like to suggest that we link this obsession with farce, the tawdry, the small, and the emptiness and corruption of discourse, with Marx’s occasional, throw-away comparisons of politics and sex. There are a few remarks in the text, not central to the argument, but which in good post-structuralist fashion, I would like to suggest might provide a key to its rhetoric. It need hardly be said that Marx’s sexual politics are not those of the politically correct 21st century. First, famously, we have, “it is not enough to say, as the French do, that their nation has been taken [by Louis Bonaparte] unawares. A nation like a woman is not forgiven the unguarded hour in which the first rake that tries can take her by force”(36). In reference to the eventual arrival of Odilon Barrot at the head of a ministry, a position he had sought for many years, Marx says, “he brought the bride home at last, but only after she had been prostituted” (49). Later on, more obliquely, discussing the accumulation of small bribes by which Bonaparte purchased the loyalty of the army, we find a similar trope, “hence the shamefaced despair, the feeling of terrible humiliation, degradation, which weighs down upon France and suffocates her. France feels dishonored. Just as under Napoleon there was scarcely any pretext for freedom, so under the second Bonaparte there was no longer any pretext for servitude” (116). Finally, and again veiled, there is the gender imaginary implied in the joke Marx makes discussing the duping of the peasants about the merits of the newer Napoleon, who perhaps does not really have a right to the glorious name he bears. Louis Bonaparte arrives protected by the Napoleonic (law) Code, under which “all inquiry into paternity is forbidden” (118).

The point here isn’t the boring simple-feminist one that Marx had reprehensible, perhaps Victorian, views about virtue and chastity, corruption and promiscuity. The point is rather the (I hope more sophisticated) sort of one made by gender analysis. The same set of idealist beliefs Marx had about the virtue of women slide over into politics, and seem also to govern the relationships he perceives between political action and social foundation. Louis Bonaparte is a weak and self-interested individual who finds the social foundation of his power in the conservative elements of the least-organized class, the small-holding peasantry. If he himself is a member of the lumpenproletariat (the members of which, it should be pointed out, typically have low moral standards), and if he draws his personal army from their ranks, his support in the larger society comes from what is essentially his seduction of a simple—but morally reprehensible—class. The smallholding farmers are only half a class, although they share the physical make-up of a class, in other words are united by a similar relation to and means of production, they lack the intellectual or superstructural unity, the community, that forms a class. Marx ends his breathtaking single-paragraph analysis of this sector of society thus:

They cannot represent themselves, they must be represented. Their representative must also appear as their master, as an authority over them, as an unrestricted governmental power which protects them from other classes and watches over them from on high. The political influence of peasant proprietors is ultimately expressed in the subordination of parliament to the executive, society to the state.(p. 117)

It must be admitted that this description is not unlike a certain 19th century idea of woman—who would, if admitted into the homosocial community of politics, only drag unfreedom into it by acting simply as the proxy of her husband or her priest.

Louis Bonaparte is not the only object of Marx’s scorn in the Brumaire. The fragmented and indecisive bourgeoisie also comes in for much abuse. (It should be indicated here that a good point of comparison with Marx’s analysis of the political dynamics of these years is Maurice Agulhon’s book on the Second Republic. Agulhon, like Marx, sees the Republic as caught, paralyzed, between the twin dangers of popular uprising and monarchism; unlike Marx, he has, or is able to express, more respect for the political perspicacity of Louis Bonaparte in allowing each faction to believe what they liked about him, playing them off against one another). The source of Marx’s scorn, though not of his hostility, is the failure of the bourgeoisie to insist on the alignment of its economic and its political power. Marx heaps invective on the bourgeoisie because, fragmented as it is, it effectively renounces political life—which for Marx is the power to act (108)—in the hope of thus securing its economic creature comforts. That is, the bourgeoisie falls away from its ideals and prostitutes itself out. Sexual and political virtue are confounded.

Now, I will want to wait and see how Marx’s analysis of this period appears in his later, post 1870 writings on France, but it seems possible to assert that this confusion of virtues makes it difficult for Marx to see the potential of what Louis Napoleon had done. When Marx looked at the new regime, he seems largely to have seen only the socially marginal, the classless, and therefore corruption that is coded sexually—for instance in his reproduction at the end of the piece of the quip about the specific difference of the new regime: “France has often had a government of mistresses, but never before a government of kept men” (126). I understand that the Brumaire was referred to in the 1930s as a tool for understanding the rise of Fascism, seen then as a classless gang of petty criminals grabbing power from the weak and divided bourgeoisie. Is it permissible to suggest that this kind of analysis makes sense only when one cannot fully appreciate the power of political rhetoric because one is trapped in a sexist grounding of moral virtue on physical innocence? The purity of the physical must be certain, or there can be no moral (which is to say, spiritual) force? Could this be a sort of cruel irony whereby the sexist assumptions of progressive rationalism prevented it from seeing the enormous power and danger of fascist demagoguery? Or perhaps this is going much too far. It would none the less perhaps be interesting to see if previous feminist readings of the Brumaire (which must exist, but which I know nothing about) move in this direction.

The above is a little unfair to Marx in that he does not base his entire analysis of Louis Napoleon’s power base on the staging of an act of sexual violence. Marx’s treatment of the nature and tendencies of the French state is also crucial here. What I find most productive here in terms of a Marxist vision of French history is how close Marx comes to describing the state as itself a sort of class. The material reality of this seems to have made a great impression on Marx. The president, as head of state, has the power to fire and appoint 500,000 bureaucrats, which is to say that 1.5 million individuals (the families of the appointees), owe their daily bread to him personally (44, 67-8, 115, 122). According to Marx, during the Second Republic, the president makes a strong contrast with the national assembly, “While each individual delegate of the people merely represents this or that party, this or that city...He is the elect of the nation...The elected national assembly stands in a metaphysical relation to the nation, but the elected president stands in a personal one” (45). [2]

Marx’s analysis of the French state and the role it plays in Louis Bonaparte’s ascension must have an important role his broader interpretation of 19th century French history. (Clearly expressing Marx’s position here also provides a crucial substratum for reading Lenin—indeed, it seems to me now that I must go back and re-read State and Revolution to see precisely what it was that Lenin adds to Marx, and what he merely renames). The great centralizing bureaucratic apparatus of the French state—and Tocqueville would agree with Marx here—developed first under the absolute monarchy, and in the sequence of revolutions in the earlier part of the century, always served as the tool of the rising bourgeoisie (115-116). This has been the history of the state, “this executive with its enormous bureaucratic machinery of state...this fearsome parasitic body, which traps French society like a net and chokes it at every pore...All upheavals perfected this machinery instead of destroying it...Only under the second Bonaparte does the state seem to have achieved independence with respect to society and to have brought it into submission” (115-116). The state, if it is conceived as a monstrous parasite, must of course have a host. It must also have support, “state power is not suspended in mid-air” (116), the cohort of bureaucrats themselves are not enough support. Here we return to the above-mentioned small-holding peasants, the formless class seduced, with the aid of the Napoleonic legend, into supporting Louis Bonaparte.

The discussion above of the curiously directionless nature of the small peasants is important here. If these peasants exist in no sense as community or organization, and are a group only by virtue of the similarity of their employment (that is, their position relative to the means of production), then the state as it is described by Marx is precisely the opposite of this. It is entirely organization, and has no material substrate whatsoever. It is an unproductive parasite. The opposition isn’t highlighted by Marx, and has, we might say, a poetic content rather than anything else. It is one more sign that the end is near.

Terrell Carver, in his brief accompanying note calls the Brumaire a “consolation.” In what sense? In the sense that Marx attempts to show some progressive result to the catastrophe of having such a nonentity as Louis Napoleon rise to power. Marx says,

It’s plain as day: ‘all Napoleonic ideals’ are ideals of the undeveloped smallholding in its heyday, but for the smallholding that has outlived this, they are an absurdity. They are merely hallucinations of its death struggle, words transformed into phrases, ideas into spectres, befitting dress into preposterous costumes. But the parody f the empire was necessary to liberate the bulk of the French nation from the weight of tradition and to work out in pure form the opposition between state and society. The demolition of the state machine will not endanger centralisation. Bureaucracy is only the low and brutal form of a centralization which is still afflicted with its opposite, feudalism. When, disappointed with the Napoleonic restoration, the French peasant will cease to believe in the smallholding, the whole edifice of state erected on this smallholding will collapse, and the proletarian revolution will obtain the chorus without which its solo becomes a swan song in all peasant countries. (p. 123)

The whole course of revolution, Marx suggests, can be read as a ‘heightening of the contradictions’ in a political sense. In the whole period up until the coup in 1851, revolution had “developed parliamentary power so that it could be overthrown. Now that this has been attained, it is developing the executive power, reducing it to its purest expression, isolating it, confronting it as sole challenger in order to concentrate all its powers of destruction against it” (115). That is, the purification of executive power represented by Louis Bonaparte is a necessary stage in the development of the consciousness of the rural population before an urban proletarian revolution can be successful.

Here is the basic inspiration for Leninism, although my sense is that Lenin made explicit the important additional step that it would be necessary for the proletariat to seize and use the full force of the bureaucratic machinery of state built by the bourgeoisie in order to eliminate the bourgeoisie. Here, also, is a theory on the level of the political that is structured much in the same way as an ‘economist’ Marxian theory of revolution. Based on Capital alone, one might well think that Marx’s theory of revolution was largely limited to the developing contradictions between the means of production and the relations of production (property). Perhaps the overlap I see here is the famous ‘dialectic’ applied to both realms. Or perhaps my reading of Marx is clouded by my reading of Lenin. Yet it seems that Marx is here posing his characteristic theory of social change as contradiction driven evolution-then-revolution in a manner that leaves economic change almost entirely out of the picture. No doubt much effort has been made by other more accomplished exegetes of Marx than this one, to make the two versions line up.

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[1] I am reading from the Later Political Writings, edited by Terrell Carver, published through the Cambridge Texts in the History of Political Thought series. It seems to me that this earlier passage mentioning the learning of a language must certainly be read as the first part of another, more famous passage a few pages on: “The social revolution of the nineteenth century cannot create its poetry from the past but only from the future...Past revolutions required recollections of world history in order to dull themselves to their own content. The revolution of the nineteenth century must let the dead bury the dead in order to realise its own content. There phrase transcended content, here content transcends phrase” (32). That is, we might say, the revolution is in fact taking place only when the form of what takes place is no longer drawn from the textbook of the past, but arises out of immediate necessity.

[2] These passages suggest two areas of comparison. The first is with the history of suffrage in France, in particular the intellectual-philosophical history approach to it taken by Pierre Rosanvallon. Another is to compare Marx’s analysis of the concept and physical reality of sovereignty in this and perhaps other texts with the current obsession with the idea, drawing primarily on Schmitt and Agamben, in contemporary Theory. Having mentioned Schmitt, I’d like to record my impulse, which will go unfulfilled here, to compare what he says about the parliamentary system in The Crisis of Parliamentary Democracy to the various critical noises Marx makes here. The sentiment Schmitt identifies is supposed to be shared by the right and left—what relation does that fin-de-siècle and interwar manner of thinking actually owe to the Brumaire?