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? 

Césaire marxisant

In the summer of 1935, the 22 year old Aimé Césaire published a short essay called “Conscience raciale et révolution sociale” in what was only the second and would be the last issue of L’Etudiant noir. By chance, I recently came across this essay—republished in 2013 by Les temps modernes—looking for a short piece of prose from Césaire suitable for anglophone undergraduates. “Conscience raciale” is probably not that piece, although it is very interesting. So interesting that I made a rough-and-ready translation of it and gave it to the students anyway, without great effect. Only later did I see that no less a scholar than Christopher Miller wrote about the essay in the PMLA a few years ago. The hook for Miller’s essay is that, thanks to the new availability of this short essay, we now know that Césaire used the word “négritude” for the first time not in the Cahiers in 1939, but in 1935, in quite a different context.

I don’t have very much to say about this here, but wanted to register a certain shock. The central point of Miller’s piece is that in “Conscience raciale,” Césaire is already engaged with a Marxist way of approaching the world, that his thought is already marxisante. Miller has other worthwhile observations, particularly linking this early text forward to the Cahiers and the Lettre à Maurice Thorez. And of course Miller is writing to tell people about this new Césaire text (and, as he does so, provide generous, translated, quotes). It seems that the relevant issue of the journal had been practically lost, and was brought to light only recently, reproduced in part in a 2008 book by Christian Filostrat. Hence the shock. Césaire is not a minor figure. How can this sort of material be, until recently, lost? How can there be the debate that, at least according to Miller, exists over Césaire’s relative awareness of Marxism in the 1930s?

Notes on Korsch on Non-Dogmatic Marxism.

Karl Korsch is an appealing figure for any number of reasons. For me, not least important is that he was perhaps the German Marxist with the most consistently positive view of Georges Sorel. A reference to Korsch’s “A Non-Dogmatic Approach to Marxism,” in which Korsch reproduces a chunk of Sorel’s writing from 1902, caught my eye earlier today. I wanted to set down a few points about it.

This is a peculiar text. It appeared in Macdonald’s Politics in 1946 (which means that the original is available here). It consists of an introduction, and four older documents. The first and fourth are by Korsch himself, dated 1931. That was the date of a previous attempt on the part of Korsch and others, he tells us, to de-dogmatize Marxism. The central move seems to me to link Marxism explicitly with activist struggle—to insist, indeed, that Marxist thought can take place only within and through struggle. Marxism, Korsch suggests, has therefore never actually been discussed in America. In any case, he states his own goal thus:

“it is here proposed to revindicate the critical, pragmatic, and activistic element...has never been entirely eliminated from the social theory of Marx and which during the few short phases of its predominance has made that theory a most efficient weapon of the proletarian class struggle” (151)

I won’t here offer comment on Korsch’s own thinking (documents one and four), or on the fragment from a young Lenin (document three). Document two, on the other hand, is labeled as a list of six theses on the Materialistic Conception of History, “Submitted to the 1902 Convention of the Societé Francaise de Philosophie.” This text, Korsch writes, was read and under consideration in 1931. For Korsch, what is valuable is Sorel’s attempt to extract principles for the scientific practice of history from historical materialism. Korsch calls Sorel “one of the most scientific and most pragmatically minded interpreters of Marxism in modern times,” which is not a description with which many people would agree. In any case, for Korsch, Sorel was attempting to make historical materialism generative.  

Why did Korsch pick this particular text? Probably those better versed in Korsch will be the ones to answer. But: this is one of relatively few bulleted lists in Sorel’s writing, and so is apparently clear. Also—and I suspect this has something to do with it—the original publication in the Bulletin de la société française de la philosophie would likely have been available in German universities. Because this is not exactly a communication to a convention, but rather an intervention—although apparently one read out loud—in something like a regular seminar. Sorel was presenting to the Société, whose meetings were not open to the public and mostly, although not exclusively, involved professional philosophers. According to the record (which is hardly a transcription, never mind of course a recording), Sorel had made a short introductory presentation, been challenged on several points by Élie Halévy, and then read several pages of a mémoire to the group, after which the discussion continued.

This particular list, in fact, is the concluding section of Sorel’s remarks in which he presents a set of guidelines that one might extract from the living philosophy of historical materialism for the use of philosophers. Indeed the opposition between philosophers and historians is a significant one for Sorel who was, together with many of his most important interlocutors, able to be now one and now the other. In any case, Sorel says that these points are not so original when cut off from the center of historical materialism as a philosophy, which is to be found in bringing together theory and practice.

Given Korsch’s tendencies, I wonder what he made not only of Halévy’s constant pressure during the discussion on Sorel to clarify the meaning of these terms—theory and practice. I wonder, further, what he made of the disagreement, first between Sorel and Halévy, and then between Halévy and Frederic Rauh, over the status of Capital is Marx’s work. Was Marx basically a man of action, who was always writing from a particular angle, always against someone, always polemicing—or, as Halévy wrote, does Marx, “by his methods of documentation, of work, of exposition...demand to be treated as a systematic philosopher much more than as a man of action” (116 Bul 1902)? More, what about Rauh’s rather wonderful capacity to find in Marxism a theory of moral action (not, perhaps, so different from his own), according to which “like science, morality is relative to a certain time, expresses a certain historical moment, the state of mind of a class” (120 Bul 1902)? These are fireworks!

In any case, it seems to me that Korsch managed to pull out among the driest and least convincingly didactic blocks of texts from what was, in fact, a quite vigorously argued dialogue. Perhaps this was a provocation?