The Notion Of Class Politics In Marx Balibar.pdf

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The Notion of Class Politics in Marx Dominique Parent-Ruccio , Frank R. Annunziato & Etienne Balibar Published online: 05 Jan 2009.

To cite this article: Dominique Parent-Ruccio , Frank R. Annunziato & Etienne Balibar (1988) The Notion of Class Politics in Marx, Rethinking Marxism: A Journal of Economics, Culture & Society, 1:2, 18-51, DOI: 10.1080/08935698808657798 To link to this article: http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/08935698808657798

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Rethinking MARXISM Volume 1, Number 2 (Summer 1988)

The Notion of Class Politics in M a n Translated by Dominique Parent-Ruccio and Frank R. Annunziato Etienne Balibar The PresencelAbsence of the Proletariat in Capital Marx’s fundamental concepts do not constitute a deductive order, but rather an interdependent system. Each concept corresponds to a problem, and reflects¶through its transformations, sometimes a total reversal, the constraints of contemporary history. It seems appropriate for this study to begin with the concepts of “proletariat” and “politics” to understand their astonishingly unstable relationship. However, a striking paradox immediately awaits us. Starting with the “encounter” which took place in 1843-44 in Paris (a theoretical as well as a personal and “lived” encounter), the concept of the proletariat summarizes all the implications of “a class point of view” in Marx. It is the main object of his investigation into the capitalist mode of production, into the specific form of exploitation born with the transformation of labor-power into a commodity, and with the industrial revolution. It is the last term in the historical evolution of the forms of the “social division of labor.” Finally, the concept of the proletariat is the tendentious subject of the revolutionary practice which must “deliver” bourgeois-capitalist society from its own internal contradictions. The argumentation that leads to this conclusion evolved considerably from the 1840s to the 1870s-1880s. The very word “proletariat” almost never appears in Capital (vol. 1) which, whether or not one would like it to be so, constitutes the basic text which

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validates Marxism. Other authors have already noted such an absence but, in my opinion, this “terminological” fact must be granted an essential symptomatic value. Moreover, this is true not only of the universal term “proletariat” as a singular substantive which implies the representation of a personality responsible for a historical mission, but also true of the more “empirical” plural term “proletarians.” In addition, the latter is almost absent from Marx’s eight hundred pages, the result of twenty years of work and line-by-line corrections, and the text in which Marx wanted to concentrate his theory most systematically. In general, Capital does not deal with the “proletariat,” but with the “working class” (Arbeiterklasse). I need to be more specific in stating that the terms “proletariat” and “proletarians” are “almost” absent in Capital. In particular, I must carefully distinguish the two successive editions of Capital edited by Marx (1st edition, 1867; 2d edition, 1872).1 In the first edition, the terms “proletariat” and “proletarians,” with one possible exception (the chapter on the work day, in relationship to the factory inspectors’ reports, Lefebvre 1983, 349-353)2 only appear in the dedication to Wilhelm Wolff and in the twofinal sections on the “general law of capitalist accumulation” (concerning the “law of population” peculiar to the capitalist mode of production) and, especially, the process of the “so-called primitive accumulation” (about twenty citations). Only on one occasion do “the proletarian” and “the capitalist” confront each other (even though the latter is omnipresent in Capital>. The location is very consistent. These passages have in common their insistence upon the insecurity characteristic of the proletarian condition. This insecurity is first seen as a result of the expropriation of “independent” workers from the land and then as a permanent consequence of large capitalist industry. The order in which the arguments on the “expropriation of the expropriators” are presented, which at first blush seemed aberrant, can now be partially understood. These arguments point to the revolutionary reversal of the tendency begun violently at the beginnings of capitalism. However, it is much easier to notice the absence 1 . In the original French text, quotations from Capital were taken from the latest Editions Sociales version, translated by J.P.Lefebvre (1983). When Balibar refers to specific terms used by Lefebvre, or when he only mentions pages, we decided to give the reader the same references in Lefebvre. Our English translations are either from B. Fowkes’s translation of Capital, vol. 1 (New York: Vintage Books, 1977), D. Fernbach’s of Capital, vol. 3 (New York: Vintage Books, 1981), or our own. In all cases, specific references will be indicated.-Trans. 2. It should be mentioned here that the term “proletariat”does not appear in the English translations which were consulted Fowkes, and Moore and Ave1ing.-Trans.

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of any reference to the proletariat in the body of Marx’s analysis dedicated to the labor process, to wages, and to the means of exploitation, in short, to the process which Marx calls the production and accumulation of capital. All this happens as if the “proletariat” had nothing to do per se with the positive function which exploited labor-power accomplishes at the point of production, as the “productive power.” All this happens as if the “proletariat” had nothing to do with the formation of value, with the transformation of surplus labor into surplus value, or with the metamorphosis of “living” labor into “capital.” All this happens as if the term “proletariat” only connoted the “transitional”nature of the working class, in a three-fold way: 1. The condition of the working class is unstable. It is even a condition of “marginality” in comparison with “normal” social existence. A state of general insecurity typifies those societies which have become more and more “proletarianized.” 2. The condition of the working class reproduces or perpetuates in new ways the violence which at first openly and “politically” characterized the transition from feudalism to capitalism. Capitalism legally normalized this violence by substituting a seemingly purely “economic” mechanism for it. 3. The condition of the working class is historically untenable. Another transition is implied which will annul the preceding and for which capitalist accumulation has already prepared the material conditions. We should note, however, that these references to the proletariat in Capital (rare and apart from the central theme, or placed on the margins) belong to a very specific type of writing in the text. This type of writing allows the analysis of the mode of production to be embedded in the historical perspective originally elaborated by Marx in the revolutionary conjuncture of 1848. The dedication to W. Wolff is the symbolically affirmed continuity with the Communist League. Most importantly, the term “proletariat” is the “bridge” which makes it possible to quote significant passages of the Manifesto and the Poverty of Philosophy. Thus, such references constitute the beginnings of what will become from 1870 on, particularly thanks to Engels’s intervention, and indeed under his influence, “historical materialism.” However, on account of this very fact, the references to the “proletariat” accentuate the difficulty in holding together, without aporia or contradiction, historical materialism with the theory of Capital, although these “two discoveries,” as Engels called them, constantly interfered with each other. This problem takes on another dimension with the additions of the second edition (1872). There are two very significant references to the proletariat,

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still located at the same margins of the text, and which therefore reinforce the embedded effect of this historical perspective. One is in the Postface (Lefebvre, 13), to show how the “maturity” of class struggles after 1848 caused the breakdown of classical economics’ “scientific” problematics, by confronting it with the political unconscious sublimation of its own concepts. Thus, the antithetical transformation of these “scientific” problematics takes place, on the one hand, into “vulgar” economics (J.S. Mill) and, on the other hand, into socialism as the “science of the proletariat” (Man himself). The question concerning a new relationship between science and politics (another name for “dialectics”) is raised. The second and most symptomatic reference appears in an added paragraph on the abolition of the “anti-worker coalition” laws in England, the abolition of anti-trade union laws, brought about by class struggles. It is the link between the preceding theme (the emergence of a theory of the proletariat, also designated as “political economy of the working class”) and the theme of the working class’s autonomous political action and organization. It is the introduction of a problem into the text of Capital which so far has been absolutely absent from it: What should be the form of the working class’s political existence within the limits of the capitalist “system,” and potentially, what are the effects of such political organization upon the very “functioning” of the system? At the same time, it suggests not merely a historical way (some kind of a “tendentious law”), but also a strategic way to pose the problem of the conditions under which the political action of the working class can transgress these limits of the capitalist system, to go beyond the capitalist mode of production, or to begin the transition towards communism. To make this point still more explicit, one must refer to several relevant contextual statements. At the same time, however, its ambivalence will become clearer. First, the detailed analyses which Capital dedicates to the question of the length of the work day and to the “factory laws” (limitations on women and children’s work, etc.) formed undoubtedly a major element in the definition of class struggles. However, as I mentioned earlier, they did not refer at all to the “proletariat.” Moreover, since they were focused upon the correlation between the law and power relations at the point of production and in the labor market, they introduced the bourgeois State in two ways: (1) as a relatively autonomous agency with regard to the immediate interests of the capitalists, and (2) as a regulating agency for social antagonisms (Marx spoke of “society’s first conscious and methodical reaction to the natural

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configuration taken by its production process” [Lefebvre, 540, Balibar’s emphasis, our translation]). In short, the working class was presented as struggling “economically,” whereas “politics” was the concern of the bourgeoisie, inasmuch as the latter, through the State, was distinguished from mere capitalists, the owners of the means of production. Second, in 1865, Wages, Prices and Profit defined capitalism as a “system” (to my knowledge, it is indeed the only text where this notion explicitly plays such an important role) endowed with an inside and an outside, or which functions according to regulatory limits. Within these limits, the system is stable; beyond them it must become another system functioning according to other laws. It was a way for Marx to articulate economic and political struggle: the former remains “internal” to the system, and the latter, by definition, automatically contradicts it and goes beyond it. However, this definition ran the risk of becoming nothing but a tautology. It could be read as a statement that the working class only questions the system from the moment when it itself goes beyond the trade union form (defined as the collective defense of the wage level, or Lebensstandard) to assume a political form and political objectives (reversal of bourgeois domination). It could also be read as an act of theoretical decision: by definition, class struggle is political insofar as it goes from the demands for “normal wages,” for “the normal work day,” et cetera, to the demands for the “abolition of the wage-earning system.” Wages, Prices and Profit justified this decision by describing the “double outcome” of the workers’ economic struggle. On the one hand, at best it opposes the tendency of capital to decrease wages below the value of labor-power, a result which is simply defensive and historically conservative (like Sisyphus’s rock which always needs to be pushed up again: one wastes away). In this sense, such a result serves the interest of the capitalist class more than it serves the interests of the proletarians. At this point, however, the working-class struggle produces a second, potentially more revolutionary result, far more decisive than the former. The workers’ organization is reinforced, the workers’ forces permanently come together; they are made conscious of revolutionary ideology, to the point where a break occurs with the system. Superb dialectics-although narrowly dependent on presuppositions which the history of capitalism, even while Marx and Engels were still alive, was quickly going to nullify: (1) the profits of capitalist production imply the maintenance of average wages at the absolute minimum; (2) the permanent organization of the proletariat is

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ultimately incompatible with the “system”; and (3) the class struggle, bourgeois as well as proletarian, unifies irreversibly the working class.3 Third, the additions made in 1872 to Capital fit into a very specific political context whose marks are evident: the days following the Paris Commune, the conflict within the International with the English trade-unionists and the anarchists, the resurgence of the concept of the “dictatorship of the proletariat” with a new significance, and the attempt to elaborate the theory and organizational principles of the revolutionary party.“ Let us reread this addition while keeping the context in mind: The barbarous laws against combinations of workers collapsed in 1825 in the face of the threatening attitude of the proletariat. Despite this, they disappeared only in part...until at length the “great Liberal party,” by an alliance with the Tones, found the courage to turn decisively against the very proletariat that had carried it into power.. .It is evident that only against its will, and under the pressure of the masses, did the English Parliament give up the laws against strikes and trade unions, after it had itseu, with shameless egoism, held the position of a permanent trade union of the capitalists against the workers. (Lefebvre, 832-833, Balibar’s emphasis, Fowkes, 903).

We recognize here the terminology of the criticism against anarchism which bears more often than not an ironic tone: The working class must not participate in politics. Its task is limited to organizing trade unions. One day, with the help of the International, they will replace all existing states. See the caricature he [Bakunin] did of my doctrine! Since the transformation of existing states into an association is our final aim, we should let governments, these big trade unions of ruling classes, do whatever they wish, because by the mere fact of paying attention to them, we acknowledge them (Letter of Marx to Lafargue, April 19,1870, our translation, Balibar’s emphasis).

In relation to the analysis of the factory laws which I mentioned above, it is obvious that the reversal is total in its conceptual form if not in its content. Everything takes place as if the two antagonistic classes of society had traded places as far as the “political” and the “economic” are concerned. Now, the bourgeois class only pursues an economic struggle, or rather its political 3. These themes are developed at length by Engels in his articles on trade-unionism in the 1880s, which form the basis of the orthodoxy of “Marxist” parties, in a very ambiguous relation with Lassalle’s iron law of wages. 4. See my article “Dictature du ProlCtariat,” in G. Labica and G. Bensussan, eds., Dictionnaire critique du marxisme (Pans: Presses Universitaires de France, 1983) and my essay “Etat, parti, idkologie: esquisse d’un probleme,” in E. Balibar, C. Luponni, and A. Tosel, Marx et sa critique de lapolitique (Paris: Maspero, 1979).

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organization merely represents a corporatist, “syndicalist” practice, in the broad sense of the term. On the other hand, the mass action of the proletariat allows its own “political” forms and stakes to emerge. If one prefers, it is the proletarian initiative which, even when it only perceives of itself as being simply trade unionist, forces the bourgeoisie to “do politics,” to endow its State with a political capacity to use, control, and repress the proletariat. This thesis is coherent with the exigency of the working-class mass party, with the idea of a “proletarian vision of the world,” with the analysis of the Commune as the first “working-class government,” with Engels’s statement that “workers are political by nature,” and with the definition of communism as a resolution to the old historical contradiction between work and politics (a contradiction which was started at the dawn of history by the democratic, yet pro-slavery Greek city). All these theses appear at the same moment in Marx’s and Engels’s “political” and “historical” texts.

The Paradoxes of “Proletarian Politics” In short, this discursive configuration which I have just indicated can only seem highly paradoxical. All of Marx’s writings suggest that the term “proletariat” refers precisely to the political sense of his analyses, to the necessary tendency linking together the two theories of exploitation and revolution, and not just to the political conclusions of his economic or historical analysis. On the other hand, we accept in Capital the most precise, but not necessarily exhaustive, elaboration of this tendency. However, such a configuration indeed means that the determinant concept of the analysis can only appear under its name in a position of relative exteriority, and even then it must be added afterwards. One can guess that this situation, if it removes doubt and if it reduces the ambiguity engendered by the analysis of the capitalist mode of production (that is, by the development of the wurklcapital antithesis), can only, in tun, lead to more ambiguities. We must now show how this difficulty does nothing but reflect an omnipresent ideological uncertainty in Marx. This is not so much a mark of weakness with regard to the ruling ideology, as much as it is first and foremost the mark of the break which Marx undertakes with that ideology, and the repercussions of this break which he must sustain. Marx’s omnipresent uncertainty can be located at the theoretical (or philosophical) level, but it is to be found principally at the level of the political action which he tried to conduct. I have already insisted on the first point in other essays to which I refer the reader. Marx

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could never stabilize his theoretical discourse with respect to the concept of “politics.”5 By emphasizing the extreme positions, it is clearly possible to retrace something like an evolution on this point. Thus, we can say that the works of the “young Marx,” including The German Ideology and The Poverty of Philosophy, are dominated by a negative thesis which is obviously not appropriate to M a n (even though he gives it a personal dialectical formulation), but which puts him within the mainstream of the working-class and/or utopian thought of the early nineteenth century. This thought proposed the “social revolution’’ of the producers in opposition to the “political” bourgeois revolution, and free association to the political State, and so on.6 This negative thesis shows politics and the State as alienated from the real conflicts and interests that constitute society. This implies, not without a contradiction which will become more and more untenable in practice, that the “political State” be thought of, at the same time: ( a ) as an illusion (and even as an “idealist illusion”) or as the ‘‘locus’’ where all revolutionary practice becomes an illusion, and (b) as the material instrument of an oppressive domination (in conjunction with all kinds of oppressive modalities: more or less archaic military-bureaucratic domination; “the committee which manages the common interests of the whole bourgeois class” [the Manifesto];the final product of the “division of manual and intellectual work” [The German Ideology], etc.). On the other hand, one can say that the works of the “old M a d after 1870, in what I once called the “period of rectification,”7 are dominated by the opposite thesis, that is apositive concept of politics. First in the sense that, as mentioned earlier, the necessity of the proletariat’s political organization and political action is always stated in those works. The transition to communism, even the construction of communism, is no longer the negation of politics, even less its “abolition,” but rather its expansion, its transformation by the workers’ mass practice who take it over (it is the sole object of the “second” dictatorship of the proletariat to which, from this point of view, Lenin and Gramsci will always remain faithful). Then, and the link between 5 . See note 4, as well as “Marx le Joker,” in Rejouer le politique, collective work edited by J.L. Nancy and Ph. Lacoue-Labarthe (Paris: GalilCe, 1981) and “The Vacillation of Ideology,” in Marxism and the Interpretation of Culture, ed. and with an introduction by C. Nelson and L. Grossberg (Urbana and Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 1988). 6. See the works of E. Halevy, Ch. Andler, and more recently of B. Andreas, H. Desroche, J. Grandjonc, J. Ranciere, M. Lowy. The essential text is L’Exposition de la doctrine saint-simonienne of 1829. 7. Cinq ktudes du matkrialisme historique (Paris: Maspero, 1974).

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these two aspects is immediate, the concept of the bourgeois State maintains its sense of domination, but loses the idea of illusion, insofar as the power of the ruling class is now characterized by the existence and the structure (one is tempted to say the “techno-structure”) of a State apparatus. This evolution is very real, but it is only tendentious, and it makes much clearer the existence of a permanent contradiction. Indeed, the initial period is not only one in which the proletariat appears entrusted with a historical and revolutionary mission, since it has already been liberated from all political illusions (Zllusions1osigkeit)r should we understand that it has been summoned to liberate itself as quickly as possible? It is also the period in which Marx defines for the first time the revolution as proletarian politics which is, as we know, the key to the Communist Manifesto, for Marx the direct link to the experience which seems to him the furthest from the “utopianism” of those advocating the “end of the political”: neo-Babouvism and Blanquism. l‘he very concept of “communism”then appears as the contradictory addition of certain anti-capitalist tendencies which claim to be “political” and others which claim to be “apolitical” or “anti-political.” The same applies to the conception of the political party which runs throughout the Manifesto, and which contradictorily finds some of its origins in English Chartism, and others in French Blanquism. Similarly, at the other extreme, one need only compare Marx’s Critique of the Gotha Program and Engels’s Anti-Diihring (with Marx’s chapter), despite their significant differences (the former obviously taking a stronger stand against State control than the latter), to establish that the period of affirmation of the necessity and the validity of the political is also, and contradictorily, the same period during which the denial of the political finds its most striking formulations, destined to have the greatest influence. Thus, Marx’s declaration of the idea of “anarchism in the real sense of the term” against Bakunin,s and the borrowing of the Saint-Simonian shibboleth, “substitution of the administration of things for the government of men,” introduced in a dialectical schema for the disappearance of the State. It is thus clear, as I said above, that Marx’s discourse is, in this regard, literally contradictory. The objection will probably be made that the contradiction can be resolved with a necessary distinction between the political and the statist 8 . See Die angeblichen Spaltungen in der Internationale in Marx-Engels Werke, vol. 18,50. This more than ambiguous phrase largely determines Lenin’s argument in The State and Revolution. See my article “Bakouninisme,” in Dictionnaire critique du marxisme.

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abusively confused in the preceding summary.9 The argument will also be made that Marx’s texts (and those of the best Marxists) taken as a whole, even provide a criterion for this distinction which has the great advantage of not only dealing with the future,or the ideal (the idea of a stateless society which would not necessarily be without politics), but the immediate actuality, the very conditions of class struggle. The statist would be politics done without the masses, and against them, by an oppressive or manipulative minority. The political, in the strong sense of the term,would be the politics of the masses, not solely done for them but also by them, and in this sense anti-statist, by definition. In admitting that this criterion is properly Marxist (which is doubtful, since it can be found in a large portion of classical political philosophy where it appears as a shadow cast by the formation of the bourgeois State apparatus), it is far from solving the contradiction, but rather only reinforces it. As a matter of fact, it is sufficient to reread the texts mentioned above to establish the impossibility in which M a n always found himself to define once and for all, from the proletariat’s point of view, the boundary line between “political” and “statist” in this sense or, in other words, the boundary line between the “compromise” with the existing statist forms and their revolutionary “use” against the ruling class. Previously, the analysis of Capital with respect to the relation between the State and the working-class struggles would show the same impossibility, and I will add that this isfortunate because Marx’s positions (Lenin’s perhaps even more so) thus show that the distinction between the “political” and the “statist” can certainly establish a regulatory function upon revolutionary practice, but cannot, without giving way to metaphysics, serve to categorize, once and for all, the strategies, the forms of organization, or the theories of the social movement. It only has utility if it is submitted to the appreciation of the conjunctures and to the “practical criterion” of concrete actions. In this way, we begin to see that the contradictions, the vacillation of fundamental concepts in Marx, rather than simply masking a theoretical incapacity, conceal a gap between the historical reality which it brings to light and the necessarily “impure” discourse through which (even today) such a clarification can be formulated. Why this gap is unavoidable remains to be understood. 9. Throughout the text, Balibar employs the noun “Ctatisme” and more frequently its adjective, “Ctatique.”Both words are extremely difficult to translate into English. Robert (1977) defines “Ctatisme” as “the political doctrine advocating the extension of the role and the amibution of the state to the whole of economic and social life” (701). and “Ctatique” as “concerning the state.” We have translated“Ctatisme” as statism and “Ctatique” as statist.Trans.

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The same conclusion would be reached from a study of the contradictions of Marx’s political action (to my knowledge, such a study has never been done entirely). Contrary to the wish set forth in the Manifesto (“the communists do not form a distinct party opposed to the other working-class parties” and “in the various phases that the struggle between proletarians and the bourgeois goes through, they [the communists] always represent the interests of the movement in its totality,” [our translation]), the actual struggle could only develop against a series of rival political and ideological positions. Some of these positions were, at certain times, more massively and more truly introduced into the working-class movement than were Marx’s positions, and therefore into the practices and the institutions which gave shape to the ideological autonomy of the working class. I am even tempted to say that, taken together, these rival positions (for example, Proudhon, Lassalle, Bakunin, the collectivists) have always been more massively accepted than his, even after the recognition here and there of a Marxist “orthodoxy.” Practically, Marx had to take this situation into account, although he completely disregarded its reasons.10 In the end, however, the position which he represented intervened and polarized the movement of “proletarian” ideologies. Let us mention only one example: the political and ideological triangle formed by Marx, Lassalle, and Bakunin. In my opinion, one does not wonder enough about the fact that such indefatigable polemicists as Marx and his faithful assistant Engels turned out to be incapable of writing an anti-Lassalle or an anti-Bakunin, which would have been practically much more important than an “anti-Diihring,” or even much more important than the reissue of an “anti-Proudhon.” No personal and no tactical reason in the world will ever be able to explain such a lapse, a lapse which was, as we indeed know, heavy with political consequences. They did not write it because they could not. A reading of those texts (Critical Notes on the Gotha Programme, Marginal Notes on Bakunin’s Statism and Anarchy) which in a certain sense constitute “rough drafts” of these aborted criticisms shows fairly well why such an impossibilityexisted. What is Marx’s response when Bakunin attacks, with truly diabolical skill, the “dictatorship of the proletariat” and the Marxist conception of the “revolutionary party,” when Bakunin systematically associates the totality of Marx’s “scientific socialism,” even his “German scientific socialism” with Lassalle’s “state socialism”? He has no other recourse than to reaffirm the meaning of the Manifesto’s transitional democratic program which, as a matter of fact, had allowed Lassalle to proclaim himself in 10. On this point, see 0. Negt’s excellent indications in “I1 marxismo e la teoria della rivoluzione nell’ ultimo Engels,” in Scoria del Marxism, vol. 2 (Einaudi), 107-179.

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its favor. Conversely, Marx also proclaimed himself, as against Bakunin, in favor of “real anarchism” which he supposedly discovered and defended “long before him”! The high point of this “response” consists in the affirmation that Marxism and Bakunin’s anarchism are the opposite of each other, which ends up admitting, as an enormous concession, that they are constituted from the very same terms. The former (Marxism) would make the State the product of capital, and the latter (Bakunin’s anarchism) would make capital the product of the State, therefore, making the abolition of capital the result of the abolition of the State. Reciprocally, when Marx is confronted with what H. Lefebvre rightly refers to as the pre-Stalinist Lassallean theses ratified by the Gotha program-nationalism, statism, and workerism-he can certainly reaffirm the essential themes of mass politics and class position.11 Such themes are internationalism, the autonomy of the working-class movement from the State, and the critical function of theory with respect to the institution of the party (which presupposes, at least in principle, the keeping of a distance between their respective “centers”). But in the end, to “define” the moments of a communist transition, Marx has no other solution than to resurrect the utopian ideological shibboleths (“from each according to hisher own abilities,” etc.). Indeed, they constitute the common ground for anti-statism (including anarchism), and he tries to give them a sufficient twist, through reference to the historical limitations of the bourgeois law of exchange, to reconcile them to his affirmation of the dictatorship of the proletariat. In doing so, Marx finds himself “trapped” in the statism/anarchism mirror relation from which it would be essential to escape.12 In fact, what these altogether allusive analyses demonstrate is that Marx’s ‘‘political’’theory and action have no proper space in the ideological configuration of his time. All things considered, this configuration is itself a “full” space, devoid of any gap into which the specifically Marxist discourse could have established itself either alongside, or opposite, other discourses. This is why, at least at a certain moment in time, he plays off these discourses, or fragments of discourses, against each other. In the same vein, practically all of Marx’s political “art” consisted in building more and more massive organizations of the working-class movement, while playing off different tendencies and sectarianisms against each other, to neutralize them enough so 11. See H. Lefebvre, De I’Etat, 2, Thtorie marxiste de I’Etat de Hegei d Mao, collection 10/18 (Paris: Union Gtntrale d’Editions, 1976), 272ff. 12. The root of the difficulty is undoubtedly that M a x , unlike Lassalle, does not have a historical theory of law, but only sociological theses on the law. For all that, he cannot, like Bakunin, ignore the problem. On this very little studied question, the reader may want to refer to J. Michel, M a n et la sociktk juridique (Paris: Publisud, 1983).

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that they could dilute each other’s strengths, at least for a while: to “manipulate” them, if necessary, which still seems scandalous to wellmeaning people. Now, this is a fundamentally binary ideological space, entirely structured by a series of dialectical couplets which are linked to each other and which can be translated from each other: first of all, Statelsociety, but also capitalllabor, and Statelcapital, constraintlfreedom, hierarchylequality ,public (collective)interestlprivate interest, plan (or organization)/mmket (or competition), and so on. The only possible “game” in such a space is to substitute one antithesis for another, or to identify with one of the terms of the antithesis against the other. Such is the game unconsciously played by all interested sides in the political or ideological struggles for which the constitution of the labor movement is at stake (and from this game, surprising variations and collusions are commonly observed today).13 And such is also Marx’s game, sometimes from a defensive posture, as we have just seen, and sometimes, when he thinks he is choosing his own ground, from an offensive posture, starting from a historical and philosophical theory which he thinks allows him to dominate the fundamental facts of the game, as well as its conditions (the origin of “ideas” that compose it, and the material basis of their constitution). Let us just suggest here that when Marx, and Marxists, think that they have mastered the ideological game which they inevitably must play, this game in fact escapes their control and comes back to haunt them. However, this does not mean that one should give up, or merely record and illustrate Marxism’s mark in the space of the ruling ideology and, in turn, the effects of this ruling ideology upon Marxist discourse which I have discussed earlier: vacillations, contradictions, uncertainty. This would be a little too easy! And under these conditions, it would be hard to understand why Marxism, or something obviously central to it, did not end up being digested, and blended into the totality of ruling ideology. On the contrary, Marxism has constituted for a century, not the only one, but one of the very

13. I particularly have in mind the works of J.-P. Faye (Langages totalitaires) and of Z . Stemhell (Ladroite rholutionnaire: ni droite ni gauche). However, I would blame the latter on two points: (1) for privileging in his study the “exmmes” to the prejudice of the “center” (reformistniberal), the center from which he himself speaks and (2) for separating completely the history of ideas from social history. Would this be a return to thefreischwebe& Intelligenz?

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few permanent entry points for any critique of ruling ideology (if necessary, through the prior means of a “Marxist critique,” in its official fom).l4 It seems to me that there are theoretical as well as factual reasons for this continuous critical function, although suspended within its own criticism. The ideological “game” is not the physical law of statics, the equilibrium of permutations. It is a process of reproduction whose historical significance can be measured by the resistance which it is capable, or incapable, of mustering in opposing the unexpected manifestation of an excessive reality which contradicts its own representations. The effects of the displacement of concepts or the twist in the discourse of ruling ideology is then what is historically significant, and in turn these effects make the coherent vacillate in a given conjuncture. It is indeed the fact that, if no discourse can be held outside of the ruling ideological space (this space does not have an “outside”), any discourse in a conjuncture or in a given relationship of forces is not, for all that, reducible to that space, and does not function as a moment in its reproduction. The fact is that in the conjuncture in which we still find ourselves today, Marxism, or something of Marx’s discourse, functions as an obstacle and produces this twisting effect. It is also a fact that the decisive concepts, mostly those in Capital which explain the logic of exploitation, keep playing as foreign bodies within the space of ruling ideology. Marxism’s decisive concepts which are not reducible to the ruling ideology’s “consensus” effects thus impose a perpetual work of refutation, interpretation, and reformulation. This is why we now must examine what it is in Marx’s reference to the “proletariat” that disrupts the aforementioned binary representations of the ruling ideology, and thus liberates another field of practico-theoretical investigation.

Marx’s Theoretical Short Circuit I will call a short circuit this irreducible element which was established by Marx’s analyses between those two “realities” which the whole movement of bourgeois ideology sought, conversely, to separate from one another since 14. This is so unless one wants to use once again the phantasmagorical scenario of the Great Historical Incantation to explain this persistence and insistence. Such a scenario in the end would have had two consequences: (1) Marxism would have become in turn a “ruling ideology,” in giving a better instrument to the dominations of the modem world than those it traditionally had (liberalism, nationalism, theocratism, etc.) and (2) the working-class movement would have become in turn the biggest force for collective and individual oppression.

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the beginnings of the “transitional phase” in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. Bourgeois ideology sought this separation, not only through theoretical discourses, but especially through a multiplication of material institutions: not only “economy” and “politics,” but much more concretely the labor process and the State. Bourgeois ideology elaborates a whole system of mediations between these two realities, which are more or less easy to observe and localize: each with its own history, its own “personnel,” its own social finality. The law’s resources play a critical role within these mediations, particularly the distinction between “public” and “private.” The labor process is a private activity; its social utility is only a result of this private activity, whether it is imagined as springing spontaneously from the division of labor and from competition, or whether one establishes the necessity for regulating interventions to limit the perverse effects of private initiative and to direct its ends. On the contrary, the function and the existence of the State, whatever importance one is willing to give them, embody a very different principle which expresses the necessity of a “totality,” a central power, and a common law, and which is organized according to various “political” modalities. The distance between these two extremes can only be overcome through a series of mediations because of the existence of an unavoidable institution called property. Indeed, property is part of both realities according to two very different modalities, the one irreducible to the other. On the one hand, property “controls” labor, but allows it to organize to provide for human needs. On the other hand, at the same time that property receives judicial sanction, it finds itself limited in its desires. Put another way, its meaning is reversed: instead of “controlling” the existence of individuals, it appears as a faculty or a capacity which belongs to them, as subjects of the State, citizens, or public individuals. The importance of political economy as a tendentiously dominant form of ruling ideology, comes both from the fact that, through successive historical adaptations, it has made possible the practical organization of the disjunction of the site of labor from the site of the State, and also from the fact that political economy gives this disjunction a “scientific” foundation. Political economy either encloses the equation of property and labor within the area of production (thus making “productive work” the origin of property in general, which in turn allows for the justification of the organization of labor according to the owners’ interests and logic), or it introduces more mediations to reach this justification: utility, the relationship of equilibrium between production and consumption, thus widening its conception of the market. Under these conditions, it is easy to understand why liberalism’s assumptions (including its conception of the individual), which find their

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permanent verification in economic reasoning, have never presented any difficulty-in fact, quite the contrary-to the continuous extension of the State apparatus. And most importantly in our present analysis, it is easy to understand why Marx’s endeavor, which started as an attempt at a “critique of politics,” was to become very quickly a “critique of political economy,” the effect of which is not to confirm but to contest and invalidate this separation which political economy establishes, even though a whole part of the Marxist tradition has always misunderstood this. It is in fact an essential part of the preceding ideological construction not to ignore such notions as “classes” and “class struggles,” but to keep them only on one side of the separation, or at most to distribute them between the two sides: labor and economy unite, politics divides, or the reverse, depending on whether one believes in the omnipotence of “necessity,” or the omnipotence of the “group.” It is therefore important to insist on Marx’s constant and easily verifiable affirmation that he did not introduce the concepts of classes and class struggles. What characterizes Marx’s endeavor is that he reunited the two aspects against the evidence of bourgeois social institutions, while drawing the utmost consequences from the first social struggles caused by the industrial revolution, and while anticipating to an amazing degree the future history of capitalism. Marx’s endeavor is also characterized by his introduction of notions such as antagonism and the irreducibility of social antagonism within the very analysis of the labor process itself (instead of keeping them on its edges, on the margin of its more or less deferred consequences), and to make such notions the principle explanation for its historical tendencies. Therefore, Marx thought paradoxically that the existence and the very identity of classes is the tendentious effect of their struggle, thus opening up the historical question of their overdetermined transformation. Then, at the cost of subverting the meaning of such notions as “labor,” “politics,” or “State,” the work relation, with its own complexity, becomes the fundamental social relation, outside of which all political relations would remain unintelligible, whether conceived as contractual or as “pure” power relations. I deliberately talked about a short circuit because Marx’s critical endeavor, if it obviously opens up a whole field of analyses which was mystified until then, also forces one, including Marx, to think against the facts of the social representation, to deny in a way the institutional and ideological distance which separates the “base” of the social organism (or mechanism) from its “summit.” However, I did not completely come up with such a formulation; it seemed to me to be the most rigorous way to read the

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provocative statement in which Marx explained how he conceived the object of “historical materialism”: The specific economic form in which unpaid surplus labour is pumped out (ausgepumpt) from the immediate producers determines the relations of domination and servitude, as this grows directly out of production itself and reacts back on it in turn as a determinant. On this is based the entire configuration of the economic community arising from the actual relations of production, and hence (damit zugleich) also its specific political form. It is in each case the direct relationship of the owners of the conditions of production to the immediate producers.. .in which we find the innermost secret, the hidden basis of the entire social edifice, and hence also the political form of the relationship of sovereignty and dependence, in short, the specific form of State in each case (our translation adapted from Fernbach, Capital, vol. 3,927; Editions Sociales, vol. 8, 162).15

“Immediate” and “direct” are the important words: the work relation (as a relation of exploitation) is immediately and directly economic and political; and the form of the “economic community” and the State “spring” simultaneously (or concurrently) from this “base.” There is therefore no ambiguity, regardless of the historical problems which are raised by the looseness of certain architectural metaphors. If there are “mediations,” they take place neither between pre-existing spheres, the economic and the political, nor does one originate from a pre-existing other. Rather, the formation and the evolution of each one of them occurs from their permanent common base, which precisely explains the “correlation” that remains between the two. In other words, the relations of the exploitation of labor are both the seed of the market (“economic community”) and the seed of the State (sovereignty/ servitude). Such a thesis may and must seem blunt and debatable when looked at from a static perspective, if one reasons only in terms of given structures and “correspondences” between these structures. However, the thesis can become singularly more explanatory if the notion of “determination” is given a strong sense, that is, if it is considered as the conducting wire to analyze the transformational tendencies of the market and the bourgeois State in the past two centuries or, even better, following the best “concrete analyses” of Marxism, to analyze the critical conjunctures which punctuate this tendentious transformation and which precipitate its modifications.16 15. Balibar revised the original Lefebvre translation.-Trans. 16. That is to say, “revolutions,” whether they originate “from the bottom” or “from the top.” One may say that this is true only for capitalism, but what Marx reflects upon, in the strong sense of the t e m v e n when he seems to state transhistorical determinations-is capitalism as an actual tendency, nothing more.

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In such conditions, what does “antagonism” mean? Without attempting to summarize the theory of exploitation, which would be not only an enormous task but also a useless one for anyone who has read closely the analyses of Capital, a few notable characteristics can be pointed out to the reader. What Marx calls the “mechanism” of exploitation is a process with two sides, neither of which has a privileged position over the other; they are designated by the two correlative terms, surplus labor and surplus value (MehrarbeitlMehrwert). Surplus labor is the “concrete” organization of the expenditure of social labor-power, or the differential between necessary labor and unpaid labor, between labor productivity and labor intensity, which increases through the various stages of the industrial revolution. Surplus value is the “abstract” movement in establishing value, or the differential in the increase of capital. It is the discovery of the Grundrisse shaped (still provisionally?) in Capital. Marx calls this movement a “self-movement” of capital, but one should not be deceived by this word, or rather one should confront it with a proper historical perspective: the “self-movement” is not a “supernatural power” of capital (Marx), but a result. It is on the side of the effects of a social relation in which labor-power is mated as a “commodity,” and only insofar as this can exist (because it resists). In other words, selfmovement presupposes a series of unstable conditions, some created in the sphere of production (labor discipline and habits, a hierarchy in skills and in salaries, etc.), and others created “outside” of this sphere, in the social space supervised by the State. In the last analysis, all of these conditions exist only through class struggles, and are all highly “political.” It is then easy to see why, as capitalism developed, as these conditions led to sharper conflicts, they were progressively recognized as “political.” I have elsewhere called attention, following others, to the complete identity of the terminology used by Marx to describe, on the one hand, the effects of the State “machinery” and, on the other hand, the effects of the “machinery” established by the industrial revolution, rather than by the succession of industrial revolutions, to “suck out” labor-power. “The central machine is not only an automaton, but also an autocrat,” writes Marx as he interprets Ure, “the Pindar of the automatic factory” (Capital, vol. 1; Fowkes, 544;Lefebvre, 470-471).*7 This identity in terminology makes it 17. Credit must be given to Tronti (Ouvriers et capital, 1966; 1977 for the French translation) and to Italian “workerism” for having stated in a very decisive way the political and technological unity of factory despotism. The Chinese cultural revolution, in its ascending phase, and the working-class struggles of the 1960s and 1970s, were to confirm the soundness of this point of view, but also to invalidate the “voluntarist catastrophism” which tended on such basis to reduce society to the factory, and class politics to “working-

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possible, strictly speaking, to describe the constraint upon labor as “capital despotism,” but it undoubtedly poses a problem.18 At the same time, however, this identity in terminology advances a double characteristic of capitalist relations of production which confirms their indiscriminately “economic” and “political” nature, or rather, as we can now write it, neither economic nor political in the sense given to these categories by bourgeois ideology. The first characteristic is that there is no “pure” process of exploitation: there is always some domination involved with it. In fact, the idea of “pure exploitation,” the pure accountable difference between the value of laborpower and the capitalizing surplus value, is nothing but a juridical illusion which comes as a result of the contractual form in which “seller” and “buyer” of labor-power “exchange” their respective “properties.” This point is very clearly explained in Marx’s analysis of wages. But if this illusion expresses the effectivio of juridical forms, which precisely prevents any consideration of the law itself as an illusion, it cannot, however, continue very long in the face of a reality which cannot be separated from juridical norms and from power relations, and in which law and violence always exchange roles. At least in principle, they exchange roles and one passes into the other at the level of what is commonly referred to as “the State” and the “political life.”l9 The other characteristic is essential to understand how radically new was Marx’s concept of “social relation.” It is essential to make sure this concept does not fall into the classical antitheses, nature and history, nature and institution, or “mechanism” and social “organism”--or as is fashionable to say nowadays, “individualism” and “holism.” All these classical antitheses, in fact, presuppose that the social relation is conceived as a communal link through which the proper human nature (“socialization”) expresses itself, or on the contrary, constitutes itself. And this is so even if this link is likely to exist in two contradictory forms, one of which would be “correct,” “true,” or “essential,” whereas the other would be “false,” “perverted,” or “alienated.”

class self-organization.” See also the collection of texts edited by A. Gorz in Critique de la division du travail (Paris: Seuil, 1973) and R. Linhart’s two books: L’ttabli (Paris: Minuit, 1978) and Lhine, lespaysans, Taylor (Paris: Seuil, 1976). 18. For example, it raises the question of knowing whether in the history of the “division of manual and intellectual labor,” which develops long before capitalism, we really deal with only one social process, or with a convergence of relatively autonomous processes to which education today would give a common ground. In this respect, see my essay “Sur le concept marxiste de la division du travail manuel et du travail intellectuel et la lutte des classes,” in J. Belkhii, ed. L‘intellectuel: l’intelligentsiaet les manuels (Paris: Anthropos, 1983). 19. See my articles “Pouvoirz‘and ‘‘Appmil” in Dicrionnaire critique du marxisme.

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In other words, these antitheses presuppose that the social relation is a link between men which unites or opposes them depending on the relationship they have to a common idea (essence, origin, destination, species, descent, etc.>.20 In opposition to this conception, and as Althusser has stressed,21 the analysis of exploitation implies that any social relation, including statist relations, must be the organization of a material constraint upon social groups defined as a function of the nature of the constraint. Just as there is no “pure exploitation,” there is no “pure antagonism” without materiality (that is, without power techniques and unevenly distributed means). From there, one can indeed debate the necessary role which Marx assigns to “violence” in his explanation of history and in his definition of revolutionary practice: this violence should no longer take on a metaphysical significance. I will only indicate here two crucial problems which may be raised. The first one concerns Marx’s concept of the “tendentious law” of the capitalist mode of production, the nature of its “contradictions,” and the place that should be given to the “development of the productive forces” in their explanation. If one accepts the definition of the materiality of the social relation given above, this place can only be essential. But it cannot lead to any “naturalist” autonomous development of the productive forces, and even less to the idea of a ‘‘historical determinism” conceived of as a law of technological progress. Rather, the concept of productive forces always already includes within it the quality of labor-power used in the labor process. In other words, the historical alternative proposed by Marx is between a “development of the productive forces,” in which labor-power must follow and has to adapt to the transformation of the means of production (the “techniques”), and a “development of the productive forces,” in which it is the techniques (the systems, madmachine) which are adapted as much as possible to the transformations of labor-power. In both cases, the evaluation of the relation of forces renders the orientation which has imposed itself de facto. The very fact that the notion of “proletariat” in its modem sense originally emerged not only from impoverishment and social insecurity, but also 20. In our modern times, perhaps such a conception should be considered as the paradoxical expression of bourgeois social relations in the very language of “feudal” ideology-see for example Rousseau’s astonishing expression: “man of man”-and several traces of this can indeed be found in Marx, particularly in the opposition he establishes between “relations between people” and “relations between things” in the “fetishism of the commodity.” 21. See L. Althusser’s “La critique de Marx,” in L. Althusser, et al., Lire le Capital, vol. 2 , 2 d ed. (Paris: Petite Collection Maspero, 1968), 32ff.

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from an enormous historical process of deskilling (in which, paradoxically, the very notion of skills was constituted), the fact that the word proletariat remains linked to the working-class struggle for (re)skilling, or rather for the collective mastery of skills, again clearly expresses the political dimension. This is why, from the point of view of the concrete analyses of Capital, the correct formula which expresses at best its very logic is that which defines the tendentious law of capitalism as a development of the contradictions in the organization of the productive forces, under the effect of class antagonisms, as institutionalized by capitalist property and management. As we know, however, an opposite formula has prevailed in most of the Marxist literature, under the influence of Engels’s formulations: the development of class contradictions under the effect of the “fundamental” contradiction between the “socialization of the productive forces” and the “relations of production” (reduced to the form of property). But this reversal of meaning in his analysis, or rather its disguising of the new sense of the analysis through a former “materialistic” formulation, which is nothing but evolutionist, is due, in the end, to ambiguities from which M a n could never completely free himself. One of these ambiguities lies in the idea of communism when it is identified with the liberation of labor, not with regard to the domination of capital, but with regard to the material conditions themselves; when communism is identified with the advent of the reign of a social transparency based upon the “voluntary” association of workers, which in turn leads, in the purest tradition of German idealism, to a naturalization of class societies. Another ambiguity, as we shall see in a moment, lies in the intrinsic difficulty experienced by Marx in thinking of the “relations of production” as anything other than afixed structure, that is, in thinking of a real history of capitalism. The second, and as crucial a problem, is the notion of the reproduction of the mode of production. It is not by accident that this notion is at the heart of controversies concerned today both with the limits of the validity of Marx’s concepts and with their adaptation to the analysis of contemporary capitalism. By definition, the notion of reproduction has an economistic origin. As we know, Marx used it in the wake of Adam Smith and Quesnay’s Tableau Economique, to formalize the constraints imposed by the law of value on the circulation of social capital. Set in the perspective of the analysis of exploitation, it obviously takes on another significance. This new significance is what we have seen earlier with regard to the social conditions which must be combined, always “reproduced” (that is, in fact, recreated and transformed)

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to perpetuate the capitalist form of the labor process, and for the possibility of using labor-power as a “commodity.” Reproduction is then the locus of an amazing dialectic outside of which the definition of capitalist relations of production as a “wage relation” may fool us completely at any time. In reality, labor-power is and is not a “commodity”; it can only be treated as such insofar as it is “reproduced” in a social process which has nothing to do with the production of commodities. Marx tries to express this by regularly reminding us that labor-power “is not like any other commodity.” Rather, we are on a narrow ridge from which we can always fall either on the “economistic” side (reproduction as regulation, as a rule of accumulation, broadening the idea of economic balance by integrating the “wage norm” into it), or on the “sociological” side (or “micropolitical”: reproduction as a set of disciplinary homologous structures, among them, “power relations” and cultural norms).22 Let us conclude on the point already proposed that Marx’s short circuit is the discovery of an immediate relationship, a correlation without mediation (but which develops historically through economic and political mediations) between the form of the labor process and the State. Then the implications of the concepts of proletariat, of “proletarian politics,” and of “proletarian revolution” appear more clearly. The proletarian condition and proletarian demands are directly perceived, in the space of the ruling ideology, as “nonpolitical,” even if in order to obtain such a result a whole body of political, and in any case statist, means and efforts must be displayed. The details of this are now, one hundred years after Marx, much better known thanks to a series of works by Marxist and non-Marxist historians. The class struggle and, consequently, the working-class movement have considerably displaced this boundary, a boundary which is imaginary in its justifications but very real in its effects (including its effects upon the working-class movement which tends to reproduce it in the “division of labor” between its trade unionist and political organizations, or in its secular incapacity to adjust its political perceptions to the contradictions within the family). However, despite the displacement of the boundary, there is still a sphere which defines 22. See J. Mathiot, “Discours normatif et concept de kgulation: Essai de critique Cpistemologique de I’tconomie politique,” in ACCES, Revue critique des sciences tconomiques et sociales 1 (March 1978);“Le concept de travail simultant, Esquisse d’une probltmatique de la reproduction,” in Rtexamens de la theorie du salariat, de la force de travail individuelle a la reproduction sociale, collective work (Lyon: Presses Universitaires de Lyon, 1981); S. de Brunhoff, Etat et capital (Paris: Maspero, Presses Universitaires de Grenoble, 1976); and “Teoria dello Stato et teoria del potere in Marx,” in Discurere lo Stato, various authors (Bari: De Donato, 1978).

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itself as “nonpolitical” in the area of labor, in production and in the reproduction of labor-power, which the State needs to keep “outside of’ politics in order to function as the State of a ruling class. One can even wonder whether the counterpart of the working-class movement on this point has not been a permanent reconstitution of the “nonpolitical” sphere under new forms (precisely, statist or technocratic forms). It is also possible to wonder whether this factual division does not represent the bourgeois form of a much older division which would justify Marx for having sought to include the capitalist mode of production within the schema of the hypothetical evolution of “class societies.” Let us note that this division is kept alive by a series of “cultural,” economic, and institutional gulfs, a series which is inscribed in the organization of space, and in the schedule of individuals. In any case, and under these conditions, the horizon of working-class struggles can be formulated only as labor politics in a triple sense: (1) workers’ political power (or better, citizens as workers); (2) the transformation of the forms of labor through political struggle; and (3) the transformation of the forms of “government” by the political recognition of labor-power’s capacities to expand, unlike productivism which represses such capacities. Thus, labor politics becomes the clearest meaning of communism, the key notion for the communist tendency in history. In creating this short circuit, Marxism thus produces not so much a “reversal” in accordance with the classical metaphor, but rather a displacement and a rotation of the axis of the representations of the “social.” It deprives the notion of property of its central function (which it keeps, in a negative sense, in most of the socialist ideologies of the nineteenth century) and it replaces the “vertical” axis of the society/State relationship with the transversal network of implications, effects, and conditions of the relations of production. At the same time, Marxism creates an unbearable voltage zone in the space of ideological confrontations. As I said above, Marxism is unavoidably always subjected to this tension, since it is part of that space. What this means is that it is always subjected to a force of reinstatement and permanent reregistering of the representations which it contradicts. The history of Marxism and its “crises” is obviously comprised of a continuous dialectic in the deepening of the break and the formulation of the theoretical means needed to conduct the reregistering. The history of Marxism starts with Marx himself, and it would be easy to show here how the famous “topic” of 1859, or schema of the correspondence between the base and the superstructure, responds to this necessity. What this identifies, on one side, in terms of conflict and antagonism, is indeed moved away from and strained, on the other side, introducing again the idea of a series of “mediations”

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between the “economic” and the “political” whose architecture needs to be “constructed.” It is also obvious that this construction responds to Marx’s “need” to deduce a representation of the “social whole” from the concept of class struggles, or society as a “whole,” as an organism unified by one principle which would be, at the same time, the principle of its history. Quite independent of the ideological influences which can enlighten this “need” of the Marxist theory, Hegelian philosophy on one side and sociological evolutionism on the other, one can say that it points out a true theoretical difficulty. Indeed, how can a social relation whose effects extend to any social practice be defined without identifying the social practice as such with the development of this relation? Or in other words, how can it be defined without excluding a priori other different relations (other antagonisms?), each with its own “topic” of general extension? On this point, we may not be any further along than Marx was. However, we may be more able to pose the problem, thanks to the development of the contradictions of Marxism.

Classes and Masses: Of Historicity Without History? Granted what was just said, I would like to go back to what I had presented earlier as a paradox in the terminology of Capital, the eclipse of the word “proletariat” in the body of its analyses, and offer a new interpretation. Capital is an analytical work which is presented in the form of a narrative. A formal subject is necessary, even if the narrative is not linear and has stylistic and logical breaks (these breaks are needed to redefine several times and expand upon the axiomatic and the empirical field of the analysis).23 The subject is “capital,” or more precisely what I referred to earlier as the “selfmovement of capital,” capable of becoming, for the purpose of exposition, an individual and collective character: “the capitalist” and, on rare occasions, “the capitalist class.” It is striking that the reference to the capitalist class appears especially when Marx wants to show how the antagonism between capital and wage labor carries over to, and benefits from, the competition between “individual” capitals (as in the analysis of the mechanism of relative surplus value). As for the concept of the bourgeoisie, it appears mostly to give the capitalist class a historical individuality from the perspective of universal history. The role of the bourgeoisie, and the historic limits of its role, is seen in the disintegration of the “feudal” mode of production, in the generalization of commodity relations, and in the socialization of the 23. See G . Dumhil, Le concept de loi tconomique dans Le Capital (Paris: Maspero, 1978).

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productive forces. However, this presentation always presents the bourgeoisie as an effect of the movement of capital, a “support” (Triiger) of the relations of production, even when, as I said above, the bourgeoisie intervenes as an organized political force, that is, as a State. The bourgeoisie’s historical individuality is thus presented only in accordance with the determinations conferred upon it by the movement of “capital.” Such is the very specific point of view which is designated by the abstractkoncrete reference to the “capitalist.” Under such conditions, the explicit absence of the proletariat assumes a triple significance. First, the working class cannot be presented as facing capital symmetrically, as would be the case if the two terms were exterior to each other. Labor, and the totality of working-class practices linked to the expenditure and reconstitution of labor-power, are part of the movement of “capital.” In fact, they constitute its concrete reality. This theoretical asymmetry (the abstractness of capital and the concreteness of labor) is precisely the form of the “class theoretical point of view.” The abstractions “capital” and the “capitalist” appear as the theoretical condition which unveils the concrete reality of wage labor as the very object of investigation. This is why labor can stop functioning here, in contrast to political economy, as a central but undifferentiated concept and become a process. Secondly, the object of Capital’s duality in its “economic-political” aspects (neither purely economic nor purely political, these terms being inadequate) would lead Marx to an insoluble dilemma if he were forced to personalize the proletariat at the same time as he developed its concrete analysis. Such a historical “character” would have had to define itself once again as either an “economic” or as a “political” entity. Or, in the representation of the class struggle, the proletariat would have had to define itself either as the other (or the adversary) of capital, or as the other (or the adversary) of the bourgeois State, whose empirical manifestations and developed forms are different, even though their evolution is correlated. We know that historically Marx takes the term “proletariat” from an ideological tradition which sees class antagonism as a political struggle. On the contrary, the term does not have a significant existence among economists.24 24. A close confrontation would be very instructive in this respect between the text of Capital and that of Sismondi’s Nouveaux principes d‘kconomie politique (1819 and 1827). Marx transposes a whole series of formulations from Sismondi’s text, sometimes saying it, but mostly without saying it. Now what characterizes Sismondi’s text is his reformulation of the discourse of political economy in terms of a cupita~iproierar~at antithesis. But this “proletariat” has a purely economistic significance (see for example, his definition of impoverishment as a “disproportion of the relations” which is the result of “false economic

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Thirdly, however, I would like to suggest here that if the proletariat is concretely present in Capital, although without a unique meaning, it is mainly because the proletariat appears in the analysis according to at least two modalities which cannot simply be identified per se. To be clear, let us say that it appears both as a class and as a mass. We now touch upon a fundamental difficulty of historical materialism (a difficulty which has reappeared frequently in the history of Marxism). To remain within the purview of Marx and Engels, it would be easy to show that the distinction between the proletariat as a class and the proletariat as a mass never ceased to preoccupy them, although it never resulted in a clear exposition.25 This distinction is always linked to the proximity of the problem of revolution, or the revolutionary movement. We can almost say that only the bourgeoisie is a “class” in the German Ideology. The proletariat, on the contrary, is defined as a “mass,” as the last product of the decomposition of society. This definition precisely makes it the agent for communist revolution in which no “private” interest (no class interest) need be advanced. The Manifesto will take up this theme, if not this politically risky terminology. At the other end of the development, Engels’s texts which attempt to elaborate a definition of the “proletarian conception of the world” and answer the question of the “driving forces” of historical transformation (particularly his Ludwig Feuerbach of 1888) are based entirely on this couplet formed by classes and masses. The proletariat becomes an effective revolutionary class when it organizes as a movement of the masses: this raises the problem of its “ideology.” Between these two extremes, some of Marx’s concrete analyses linked to the strategic evaluation of the historical conjuncture are organized directly around this problem. Such is the case of the Eighteenth Brumaire in which there is, and this has been noted for a long time, a true breakdown of the concept of “class” at the very moment when the problem of “class consciousness” or the passage from “class in itself’ to “class for itself’ is posed.26 Not only do the “two-class’’ or “three-class” schemas explode in a series of subdivisions, but the amazing idea appears that crisis and revolutionary conjunctures direction”).In the Anti-Duhring,Engels systematicallytakes over the analyses of Capital in terms of the polarity bourgeoisie/proletariat,but he does so at the cost of a massive screening (the whole analysis of the labor process). See J. Grandjonc, CommunismelKommunismuslCommunism.Origine et dheloppement international de la terminologie communautairepr&namiste a’es utopistes aux do-babouvistes (Trier: Karl-Marx-Haus, 1985). 25. See my study, “The Vacillation of Ideology.” 26. Chr. Buci-Glucksmann brought back to light the importance of this point at the colloquium “Marx et la repdsentation de l’histoire,” Quefaire aujourd‘hui (January 1984).

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are those in which classes decompose as social groups defined by simple and distinct “interests” with a direct expression, or a direct political representation, especially in the form of well-defined parties. Marx declares at the same time that these conjunctures are also those during which the course of history “accelerates.” These are periods during which the polarization of society into opposing camps in the class struggle really manifests itself. Then the conclusion must be drawn that this revolutionary polarization does not directly develop from the existence of classes, but rather from a more complex process (Althusser would say an “overdetermined” process) whose raw material is composed of mass movements, practices, and ideologies. Marx does not say that “classes make history,” but that “masses, or people en masse, make history.” It is not as easy to develop an apparently simple and specifically “Marxist” definition of “masses” (or classes as they concretely exist as masses) by reference to the definition of the mode of production as it is to develop a “Marxist” definition of the fundamental classes. To stay only with the work of Marx and Engels (since it is a known fact that the problem has never ceased to haunt Marxism, from Lenin or Luxemburg to Mao), it is obvious that their usage of this term is not so different, most of the time, from the usage of their contemporaries, whether historians or political ideologues. This term keeps wavering between two very dissimilar centers. On the one hand, there is the description of a social condition in which the “communal links” of traditional societies are breaking down (communes, families, corporations, parishes, etc.), from which emerges a uniformity and radical isolation of individuals. On the other hand, there is the description of a movement, a collective thrust in which the diversity of conditions is covered over by a “consciousness” or a common ideology, which aims at the real or imaginary transformation of the existing order. In other words, on the one hand, there is extreme disorganization; on the other, the utmost historical organization: the atomization of individuals versus the thrust of collective power. I shall put forward the thesis that Marx attempted in Capital, whether consciously or not, to overcome this dilemma, which obviously remains very abstract. The description of the working class, in which he tried to integrate all possible information, aims both at characterizing a class structure “typical” of capitalism, and at explaining in reference to the immediate actuality the process which rends to transform a more or less standardized “proletarian condition” into a mass movement. The first aspect (the characterization of a class structure “typical” of capitalism) is organized around the notion of wage system, or the capitalist

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relation defined as the selling/buying of labor-power. It is undoubtedly that relation which prevails in the general exposition of the mechanism for establishing value and makes it possible to affirm that “only variable capital is productive of surplus value.” It is thus narrowly linked to the representation of labor-power as a “commodity.” But as it goes along, it takes on a series of assumptions or simplifications, whether or not they are stated as such: as an example of this, the justification of the theoretical reduction of “complex labor” to “simple labor” from the allegedly empirical tendency towards uniformity and the interchangeability of workers; or especially, despite the allusion to a “historical and moral element” in the determination of the value of labor-power (Capital, vol. 1, Lefebvre, 193), a return to the economists’ conception directly equating the value of this labor-power and the value of the “necessary” means of consumption. Thus, a theory of the “real wage” is a function of the process of accumulation. On the contrary, the second aspect (the process of transformation of a more or less standardized proletarian condition into a mass movement) implies the development of a whole series of mediations and historical analyses which takes the concept of labor-power even further from the simple notion of a commodity. I have already alluded to this with respect to reproduction. We now need to look at this as it also concerns the labor process itself and the class struggles which occur there. Here, the wage system is not a simple form anymore: it is diversified and evolutionary. In the capitalist labor process, labor-power is not only a commodity, even as a “use value,” or as a quality. Depending on the period at stake, on the branches of production which are unevenly affected by manufacturing and by mechanization, laborpower also represents the division between manual and intellectual labor, the hierarchical combination of “skilled” and “unskilled” labor, the use of men, women, or children, and the attraction or the repulsion of immigrant manual workers (the Irish). The use of this labor-power is not a mere “consumption.” It is unavoidably the management of these differences, and consequently¶the management of conflicts which these differences bring up among the workers themselves, as much as between the workers and capital, or rather, its representatives. There is, therefore, a complete object identity between the analysis of labor-power which is involved and the historical analysis of working-class struggles: the length of the work day, the disappearance of skilled labor, “technological” unemployment, and the use of machines as a means to intensify labor. Thus, there is an intrinsic relation between these struggles and the “development of the productive forces” which we mentioned above.

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Balibar It may be added that all these analyses are linked to Marx’s use of the concept of population. Marx had read very closely not only Malthus, but also Qutitelet. It is true that if the idea of a “law of population” of the capitalist mode of production were to be understood as a regulating automatism, it would lead again to a negation of the historical conjuncture. The fact that this idea cannot be disassociated from the study of the conditions of existence of the “industrial reserve army of the unemployed” which is not, as we know, limited to cyclical unemployment, is already enough to distinguish them. From this point of view, the concept of population is in Marx the mediation par excellence between the idea of “class” and the idea of “mass.” And I could go so far as to say that the “movements of populations” are the main basis to explain the “movements of the masses.” But then, the rare and eccentric location of the term proletariat in Capital, precisely where this problem of movements of populations is completely explained, becomes amazingly pertinent. Let us try to specify not only the interest, but also the limitation of Marx’s analyses. Their interest lies in the fact that they allow us to dismiss the problematic of the “subject of history,” thus the “revolutionary subject,” without either rejecting (quite the contrary) the idea of practice as the moment for the transformation of social relations, or without adopting the thesis of an indefinite reproduction of the mode of production as a constant system. As a matter of fact, the idea of the proletariat as a subject supposes an identity; such identity can be either spontaneous or acquired as the result of a process of formation and sudden awareness, of unification, or organization. In any case, it is always guaranteed by the condition of class. In passing, we can add that it holds quite a difficulty in store for its defenders (the practical implications of which nobody will miss) when it finds itself engaged in a revolutionary process of the “construction of socialism.’’ Constituted as subject, how will the proletariat be able to disappear as such? Terrible surprise! And we know that all the resources of the dialectic are needed to explain that its accomplishment is, at the same time, its negation. After all, if it has the poor taste to survive, it will only have itself to blame for the difficulties that may result! At a minimum, the double analysis of the proletariat as a class and as a mass is the sign of another dialectic in which it will be argued that the proletariat never becomes identical with itself. For various reasons, I presuppose here that the same thing is true for the “bourgeoisie,” although Marx never analyzed it in the same way. The fact that the proletariat is not a subject and that it never identifies with itself does not mean that the proletariat never presents itself or acts as a subject in history. However, this action is always an effect of determined

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conditions. This effect is always linked to a conjuncture, lasting or not, and only exists within the limits of this conjuncture. This thesis opens up two practical questions: (1) What are the conditions and forms through which such an effect can occur? and (2) What enters a mass movement, from a determined class condition, that makes it capable of being recognized practically as the expression of this class? Conversely, this thesis dismisses the speculations and the puerile controversies concerning the irreducible difference between the “ideal proletariat” and the “empirical proletariat.” As for the question of the “farewell to the proletariat,” it is obvious that, from this point of view, such a question is absolutely purposeless. Marx has already dismissed the proletariat in this sense for a long time, not to speak of replacing it with an even more mystical entity, a “nonclass” within which post-industrial society would immediately inspire a consciousness for liberation through the reversal of unemployment into “non-work.”27 The admission that the emergence of a revolutionary form of subjectivity (or identity) is always a partial effect, and never a specific property of nature, and therefore with no guarantee, has two consequences. First, one must look for the conditions in a conjuncture which can precipitate class struggles into mass movements. Secondly, one must look for the forms of collective representation (now a discredited concept) which, under particular conditions, can maintain the element of class struggles within mass movements. There is no proof (rather, quite the contrary) that these forms are always and eternally the same. However, it is obvious that neither Marx himself, nor Lenin, Gramsci, or Mao escaped the representation of the proletariat as the subject of history. They are still read as if they were the instigators par excellence of this concept. There are several reasons for this which relate to what has been described earlier as the binary matrix of the bourgeois ideology of history. We should elaborate upon these reasons at greater length. The most immediate reason is that they (Marx, Lenin, Gramsci, Mao, etc.) saw in the party form, under its successive variations, not only a conjunctural form of organization for the class struggle, but the essentialform to guarantee its continuity to overcome the vicissitudes of the history of capitalism and its crises, both for the proletarian revolution, the taking of power, and even beyond this revolution. Under these conditions, it turned out to be extremely difficult, not to say impossible, to maintain what I called earlier, plagiarizing a few phrases from Engels, the critical distance between the two

27. See A, Gorz, Adieux auprolktariat.Au-deld du socialism, new edition (Paris, 1981).

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theoretical and strategic “centers” of the working-class movement.28 According to a process which is now clear enough, this led, on the one hand, to the illusion of mastering the sense of history or of corresponding to it and, on the other hand, to the illusion that the unity of the organization represented, by itseZf, the unity of the working class, In both cases, this illusion was maintained only through a flight of fancy in the realm of the “proletariat’s” imagination as represented by the organization and, therefore, through the exercise of restraint (first on the organization itself) in conjuring up the threatening eruption of the real. This is not the place to wonder about the encircling pressures which, from the Great War to fascism, contributed to the enclosure of this movement within its own spiral. The second reason is the impossibility in which M a n and Engels found themselves in thinking of the dialectic of classes and masses as they had outlined it, in terms of ideology and not in terms of “consciousness” or “selfconsciousness.” They never were able to formulate the concept of proletarian ideology as the ideology of the proletariat or the ideology of the proletarians: neither as a problem of workers’ ideology (national, religious, familial, juridical) when they were confronted with either the question of the English “labor aristocracy’’ or with the question of the German workers’ “state superstition,” nor as a problem of the organizational ideology of the proletarian party. After them, this aporia reversed itself into a scholasticism of proletarian ideology, into a “conception of the world.” In both cases however, it was always a matter of “non-ideology,” that is to say, a way of affirming that the proletariat as such was freed from illusions (Zllusionslos), thus outside of, by nature, the space of ruling ideology.29 But this incapacity itself leads us to another aporia of Marxism which directly concerns the history of capitalism. If it is useless to pose the problem of proletarian ideology in a critical way, this is because, for Marx and Engels, this problem is tendentiously without an object. “Classes” and “masses” are temporarily different, they show a divergence or an empirical complexity which is soon nothing more than a relic. In the end we are told that this divergence only characterizes pre-capitalist societies, or the “transition” to capitalism (see Engels’s analyses of the fall of the Roman empire and of primitive Christianity, or of the Peasant Wars). However, this 28. Engels’s letter to Bebel, dated 18-28 of March 1875, in Critique ofrhe Gotha Program (New York International Publishers, 1973), 27-34. 29. Brecht took the opposite view of this illusory thesis: “One should always consider the working-class movement as an integral part of capitalism” (our translation) in Journai (Arbeitsjournal)bearing the date of 1 January 1940 (Paris: L’Arche). Korsch’s and Lenin’s influence can be recognized here.

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divergence no longer exists when the capitalist mode of production functions on its own foundation and extends to the whole “world market.” One will recognize here the thesis of the “simplification of class antagonisms” by capitalism, a thesis foreign to the profound logic of Capital, but essential to the philosophy of history presented in the Manifesto (and thus also essential to register the discourse of the Manifesto within the discourse of Capital to allow for the constitution of “historical materialism”). And this is in the double sense of a reductionism of all social antagonisms into a single fundamental conflict, and the continuous radicalization of that conflict. Now this thesis is, in turn, only an extreme formulation of what I will call the ahistorical historicism, or the historicity without history in Marx’s thought, but which this time is concerned equally with whole sections of the theory of Capital. I mean by this that the critical recognition in Mam (against political economy) of the historicity of capitalism, the fact that capitalist relations are neither natural nor eternal but rather the product of conditions, with a determined genesis and subjected to internal contradictions, is balanced off, paradoxically, by an incapacity to think about and analyze the very history of capitalism. This (certainly unequally strong) incapacity plunged Mam and Engels into unresolvable contradictions concerning the “revolutions from above” (for example, Bonapartism or Bismarkism, but in the end, as Gramsci saw it very well, the whole bourgeois nineteenth century raises itself up as a revolution from above, or as the “passive revolution”). Marx and Engels saw that these revolutions from above started to give the State a direct role in controlling capital accumulation and, through the embryonic form of “social politics,” in controlling the very conditions of proletarianization. At the same time, Marx and Engels became mired down with the idea that the bourgeoisie (identified as a class of owners of capital or stock-holders, when the whole analysis of Capital showed that its main function is that of management) was becoming a “superfluous class.” They also became mired down with the idea that “the bourgeoisie cannot itself exercise political power,” instead of wondering how the functions and the exercise of political power contribute to the constitution or reconstitution of a bourgeoisie. This incapacity meant that Marx could never really think that in the history of capitalism, the capital-wage labor relation, and thus the class struggle between bourgeoisie and proletariat, and the very composition of these classes, actually takes on new forms. After him, the Marxists could only do so with great difficulty, or without drawing all the possible consequences from it (see Lenin’s Imperialism). These new forms are qualitatively different from those caused by the first industrial revolution. Although they are

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still based on the monetary accumulation of capital, the circulation of commodities, and the purchase of labor-power, the emergence of a generalized wage-system is in no way synonymous with pure and simple proletarianization, and consequently leads to a modified “law of population.” Today, everyone knows that the working-class organizations (trade unionist and even political) not only are not exclusive of the capitalist relations of production, but indeed constitute an organic aspect of their modem form (which has nothing to do with the myth of the “integrated” working class, symmetrical to the myth that the party or the trade union is a revolutionary organization by nature). The notion which expresses this theoretical block par excellence is that of capitalist system. Even if this term does not play any essential role in Capital (Marx talks of the “factory system,” which is different), even if Marx never assigned a calculable term to the contradictions of capitalism, these contradictions are nevertheless thought of as “mortal” in their immediate form, which means that they have no other choice than to leave or destroy the “system.” Thus we are faced with a discourse which paradoxically combines the affirmation of the historicity of capitalism with its denial. Even when the class struggle is presented as the necessary effect of capitalist relations of production, it still does not produce any determined effect upon them, as long as a revolutionary transformation does not intervene. It only acts under the form of “all or nothing,” and it even acts to keep capitalism identical to itself for as long as it does not destroy it. This denial, obviously linked to the critique of reformism, is particularly sensitive to the analysis of trade-unionism which always aims at showing that working-class “economic” struggles have only a regulatory effect on the “norms” of exploitation, and do not modify the relations of production at all. This paradox of a historicity without history only finds an apparent solution by referring to ideal “laws of evolution” which postulate the permanence of the system’s structure, while claiming that they foreshadow its negation. Whether in the Marxist or the non-Marxist camp, one will not be surprised by the fact that historians, as a profession, have generally been more sensitive to this paradox than economists who most of the time try to solve the difficulty by running away from it: by substituting a series of systems to the one system indicated by Marx, and even in looking for metatheoretical resources on the side of a “theory of systems.” However, I do not believe that we can be content with empiricism either. There is in Marx, and this is what is essential, a concept of social relation which fundamentally escapes this aporia. At least, I have tried to show this. The question then is how to develop this concept, not in a historicist way, but in a completely

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historical way. Obviously, such a question is not indifferent to the crisis of the working-class movement.

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This text is a translation of an article which appeared in B . Chavance’s Marx en perspective (Paris: Editions de 1’Ecole des Haures Etudes en Sciences Sociales, 1985), revised by the authorfor Rethinking MARXISM.-Trans.