State, Politics, and Social Classes: Theory and History (Marx, Engels, and Marxisms) 3031220455, 9783031220456

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MARX, ENGELS, AND MARXISMS

State, Politics, and Social Classes Theory and History

Armando Boito

Marx, Engels, and Marxisms

Series Editors Marcello Musto, York University, Toronto, ON, Canada Terrell Carver, University of Bristol, Bristol, UK

The Marx renaissance is underway on a global scale. Wherever the critique of capitalism re-emerges, there is an intellectual and political demand for new, critical engagements with Marxism. The peer-reviewed series Marx, Engels and Marxisms (edited by Marcello Musto & Terrell Carver, with Babak Amini, Francesca Antonini, Paula Rauhala & Kohei Saito as Assistant Editors) publishes monographs, edited volumes, critical editions, reprints of old texts, as well as translations of books already published in other languages. Our volumes come from a wide range of political perspectives, subject matters, academic disciplines and geographical areas, producing an eclectic and informative collection that appeals to a diverse and international audience. Our main areas of focus include: the oeuvre of Marx and Engels, Marxist authors and traditions of the 19th and 20th centuries, labour and social movements, Marxist analyses of contemporary issues, and reception of Marxism in the world.

Armando Boito

State, Politics, and Social Classes Theory and History

Armando Boito Political Science State University of Campinas São Paulo, Brazil

ISSN 2524-7123 ISSN 2524-7131 (electronic) Marx, Engels, and Marxisms ISBN 978-3-031-22045-6 ISBN 978-3-031-22046-3 (eBook) https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-22046-3 © The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2023 This work is subject to copyright. All rights are solely and exclusively licensed by the Publisher, whether the whole or part of the material is concerned, specifically the rights of reprinting, reuse of illustrations, recitation, broadcasting, reproduction on microfilms or in any other physical way, and transmission or information storage and retrieval, electronic adaptation, computer software, or by similar or dissimilar methodology now known or hereafter developed. The use of general descriptive names, registered names, trademarks, service marks, etc. in this publication does not imply, even in the absence of a specific statement, that such names are exempt from the relevant protective laws and regulations and therefore free for general use. The publisher, the authors, and the editors are safe to assume that the advice and information in this book are believed to be true and accurate at the date of publication. Neither the publisher nor the authors or the editors give a warranty, expressed or implied, with respect to the material contained herein or for any errors or omissions that may have been made. The publisher remains neutral with regard to jurisdictional claims in published maps and institutional affiliations. Cover illustration: @ oxygen\gettyimages This Palgrave Macmillan imprint is published by the registered company Springer Nature Switzerland AG The registered company address is: Gewerbestrasse 11, 6330 Cham, Switzerland

Titles Published

1. Terrell Carver & Daniel Blank, A Political History of the Editions of Marx and Engels’s “German Ideology” Manuscripts, 2014. 2. Terrell Carver & Daniel Blank, Marx and Engels’s “German Ideology” Manuscripts: Presentation and Analysis of the “Feuerbach chapter,” 2014. 3. Alfonso Maurizio Iacono, The History and Theory of Fetishism, 2015. 4. Paresh Chattopadhyay, Marx’s Associated Mode of Production: A Critique of Marxism, 2016. 5. Domenico Losurdo, Class Struggle: A Political and Philosophical History, 2016. 6. Frederick Harry Pitts, Critiquing Capitalism Today: New Ways to Read Marx, 2017. 7. Ranabir Samaddar, Karl Marx and the Postcolonial Age, 2017. 8. George Comninel, Alienation and Emancipation in the Work of Karl Marx, 2018. 9. Jean-Numa Ducange & Razmig Keucheyan (Eds.), The End of the Democratic State: Nicos Poulantzas, a Marxism for the 21st Century, 2018. 10. Robert X. Ware, Marx on Emancipation and Socialist Goals: Retrieving Marx for the Future, 2018. 11. Xavier LaFrance & Charles Post (Eds.), Case Studies in the Origins of Capitalism, 2018. v

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12. John Gregson, Marxism, Ethics, and Politics: The Work of Alasdair MacIntyre, 2018. 13. Vladimir Puzone & Luis Felipe Miguel (Eds.), The Brazilian Left in the 21st Century: Conflict and Conciliation in Peripheral Capitalism, 2019. 14. James Muldoon & Gaard Kets (Eds.), The German Revolution and Political Theory, 2019. 15. Michael Brie, Rediscovering Lenin: Dialectics of Revolution and Metaphysics of Domination, 2019. 16. August H. Nimtz, Marxism versus Liberalism: Comparative RealTime Political Analysis, 2019. 17. Gustavo Moura de Cavalcanti Mello and Mauricio de Souza Sabadini (Eds.), Financial Speculation and Fictitious Profits: A Marxist Analysis, 2019. 18. Shaibal Gupta, Marcello Musto & Babak Amini (Eds.), Karl Marx’s Life, Ideas, and Influences: A Critical Examination on the Bicentenary, 2019. 19. Igor Shoikhedbrod, Revisiting Marx’s Critique of Liberalism: Rethinking Justice, Legality, and Rights, 2019. 20. Juan Pablo Rodríguez, Resisting Neoliberal Capitalism in Chile: The Possibility of Social Critique, 2019. 21. Kaan Kangal, Friedrich Engels and the Dialectics of Nature, 2020. 22. Victor Wallis, Socialist Practice: Histories and Theories, 2020. 23. Alfonso Maurizio Iacono, The Bourgeois and the Savage: A Marxian Critique of the Image of the Isolated Individual in Defoe, Turgot and Smith, 2020. 24. Terrell Carver, Engels before Marx, 2020. 25. Jean-Numa Ducange, Jules Guesde: The Birth of Socialism and Marxism in France, 2020. 26. Antonio Oliva, Ivan Novara & Angel Oliva (Eds.), Marx and Contemporary Critical Theory: The Philosophy of Real Abstraction, 2020. 27. Francesco Biagi, Henri Lefebvre’s Critical Theory of Space, 2020. 28. Stefano Petrucciani, The Ideas of Karl Marx: A Critical Introduction, 2020. 29. Terrell Carver, The Life and Thought of Friedrich Engels, 30th Anniversary Edition, 2020. 30. Giuseppe Vacca, Alternative Modernities: Antonio Gramsci’s Twentieth Century, 2020.

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31. Kevin B. Anderson, Kieran Durkin & Heather Brown (Eds.), Raya Dunayevskaya’s Intersectional Marxism: Race, Gender, and the Dialectics of Liberation, 2020. 32. Marco Di Maggio, The Rise and Fall of Communist Parties in France and Italy, 2020. 33. Farhang Rajaee, Presence and the Political, 2021. 34. Ryuji Sasaki, A New Introduction to Karl Marx: New Materialism, Critique of Political Economy, and the Concept of Metabolism, 2021. 35. Kohei Saito (Ed.), Reexamining Engels’s Legacy in the 21st Century, 2021. 36. Paresh Chattopadhyay, Socialism in Marx’s Capital: Towards a Dealienated World, 2021. 37. Marcello Musto, Karl Marx’s Writings on Alienation, 2021. 38. Michael Brie & Jörn Schütrumpf, Rosa Luxemburg: A Revolutionary Marxist at the Limits of Marxism, 2021. 39. Stefano Petrucciani, Theodor W. Adorno’s Philosophy, Society, and Aesthetics, 2021. 40. Miguel Vedda, Siegfried Kracauer, or, The Allegories of Improvisation: Critical Studies, 2021. 41. Ronaldo Munck, Rethinking Development: Marxist Perspectives, 2021. 42. Jean-Numa Ducange & Elisa Marcobelli (Eds.), Selected Writings of Jean Jaurès: On Socialism, Pacifism and Marxism, 2021. 43. Elisa Marcobelli, Internationalism Toward Diplomatic Crisis: The Second International and French, German and Italian Socialists, 2021. 44. James Steinhoff, Automation and Autonomy: Labour, Capital and Machines in the Artificial Intelligence Industry, 2021. 45. Juan Dal Maso, Hegemony and Class Struggle: Trotsky, Gramsci and Marxism, 2021. 46. Gianfranco Ragona & Monica Quirico, Frontier Socialism: Selforganisation and Anti-capitalism, 2021. 47. Tsuyoshi Yuki, Socialism, Markets and the Critique of Money: The Theory of “Labour Notes,” 2021. 48. Gustavo Moura de Cavalcanti Mello & Henrique Pereira Braga (Eds.), Wealth and Poverty in Contemporary Brazilian Capitalism, 2021. 49. Paolo Favilli, Historiography and Marxism: Innovations in MidCentury Italy, 2021.

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TITLES PUBLISHED

50. Levy del Aguila Marchena, Communism, Political Power and Personal Freedom in Marx, 2021. 51. V Geetha, Bhimrao Ramji Ambedkar and the Question of Socialism in India, 2021. 52. Satoshi Matsui, Normative Theories of Liberalism and Socialism: Marxist Analysis of Values, 2022. 53. Kei Ehara (Ed.), Japanese Discourse on the Marxian Theory of Finance, 2022. 54. Achim Szepanski, Financial Capital in the 21st Century, 2022. 55. Stephen Maher, Corporate Capitalism and the Integral State: General Electric and a Century of American Power, 2022. 56. Rémy Herrera, Confronting Mainstream Economics to Overcome Capitalism, 2022. 57. Peter McMylor, Graeme Kirkpatrick & Simin Fadaee (Eds.), Marxism, Religion, and Emancipatory Politics, 2022. 58. Genevieve Ritchie, Sara Carpenter & Shahrzad Mojab (Eds.), Marxism and Migration, 2022. 59. Fabio Perocco (Ed.), Racism in and for the Welfare State, 2022. 60. Dong-Min Rieu, A Mathematical Approach to Marxian Value Theory: Time, Money, and Labor Productivity, 2022. 61. Adriana Petra, Intellectuals and Communist Culture: Itineraries, Problems and Debates in Post-war Argentina, 2022. 62. Kolja Lindner, Marx, Marxism and the Question of Eurocentrism, 2022. 63. Marcello Mustè, Marxism and Philosophy of Praxis: An Italian Perspective from Labriola to Gramsci, 2022. 64. Lelio Demichelis, Marx, Alienation and Techno-capitalism, 2022. 65. Terrell Carver, Smail Rapic (Eds.), Friedrich Engels for the 21st Century: Perspectives and Problems, 2022. 66. Alexandros Chrysis, The Marx of Communism: Setting Limits in the Realm of Communism, 2022. 67. Paul Raekstad, Karl Marx’s Realist Critique of Capitalism: Freedom, Alienation, and Socialism, 2022. 68. Marcello Musto, Rethinking Alternatives with Marx, 2022. 69. José Ricardo Villanueva Lira, Marxism and the Origins of International Relations, 2022. 70. Bertel Nygaard, Marxism, Labor Movements, and Historiography, 2022.

TITLES PUBLISHED

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71. Marcos Del Roio, Gramsci and the Emancipation of the Subaltern Classes, 2022. 72. Marcelo Badaró, The Working Class from Marx to Our Times, 2022. 73. Jean Vigreux, Roger Martelli, & Serge Wolikow, One Hundred Years of History of the French Communist Party, 2022. 74. Vincenzo Mele, City and Modernity in George Simmel and Walter Benjamin: Fragments of Metropolis, 2023.

Titles Forthcoming

Vesa Oittinen, Marx’s Russian Moment Spencer A. Leonard, Marx, the India Question, and the Crisis of Cosmopolitanism Joe Collins, Applying Marx’s Capital to the 21st century Jeong Seongjin, Korean Capitalism in the 21st Century: Marxist Analysis and Alternatives Marcello Mustè, Marxism and Philosophy of Praxis: An Italian Perspective from Labriola to Gramsci Shannon Brincat, Dialectical Dialogues in Contemporary World Politics: A Meeting of Traditions in Global Comparative Philosophy Francesca Antonini, Reassessing Marx’s Eighteenth Brumaire: Dictatorship, State, and Revolution Thomas Kemple, Marx’s Wager: Das Kapital and Classical Sociology Xavier Vigna, A Political History of Factories in France: The Workers’ Insubordination of 1968 Attila Melegh, Anti-Migrant Populism in Eastern Europe and Hungary: A Marxist Analysis Marie-Cecile Bouju, A Political History of the Publishing Houses of the French Communist Party Mauro Buccheri, Radical Humanism for the Left: The Quest for Meaning in Late Capitalism Tamás Krausz, Eszter Bartha (Eds.), Socialist Experiences in Eastern Europe: A Hungarian Perspective

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TITLES FORTHCOMING

Martin Cortés, Marxism, Time and Politics: On the Autonomy of the Political João Antonio de Paula, Huga da Gama Cerqueira, Eduardo da Motta e Albuquer & Leonardo de Deus, Marxian Economics for the 21st Century: Revaluating Marx’s Critique of Political Economy Zhi Li, The Concept of the Individual in the Thought of Karl Marx Lelio Demichelis, Marx, Alienation and Techno-capitalism Salvatore Prinzi, Representation, Expression, and Institution: The Philosophy of Merleau-Ponty and Castoriadis Agon Hamza, Slavoj Žižek and the Reconstruction of Marxism Éric Aunoble, French Views on the Russian Revolution Patrizia Dogliani, A Political History of the International Union of Socialist Youth Alexis Cukier, Democratic Work: Radical Democracy and the Future of Labour Christoph Henning, Theories of Alienation: From Rousseau to the Present Daniel Egan, Capitalism, War, and Revolution: A Marxist Analysis Emanuela Conversano, Capital from Afar: Anthropology and Critique of Political Economy in the Late Marx David Norman Smith, Self-Emancipation: Marx’s Unfinished Theory of the Working Class Tomonaga Tairako, A New Perspective on Marx’s Philosophy and Political Economy Matthias Bohlender, Anna-Sophie Schönfelder, & Matthias Spekker, Truth and Revolution in Marx’s Critique of Society Mauricio Vieira Martins, Marx, Spinoza and Darwin: Materialism, Subjectivity and Critique of Religion Aditya Nigam, Border-Marxisms and Historical Materialism Fred Moseley, Marx’s Theory of Value in Chapter 1 of Capital : A Critique of Heinrich’s Value-Form Interpretation Anjan Chakrabarti & Anup Dhar, World of the Third and Hegemonic Capital: Between Marx and Freud Hira Singh, Annihilation of Caste in India: Ambedkar, Ghandi, and Marx Salvatore Engel-Di Mauro, An Introduction to Ecosocialism Mike Berry, A Theory of Housing Provision under Capitalism Maria Chehonadskih, Alexander Bogdanov and Soviet Epistemologies: The Transformation of Knowledge After the October Revolution Peter Lamb, Harold Laski, the Reluctant Marxist: Socialist Democracy for a World in Turmoil

TITLES FORTHCOMING

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Raju Das, Marxism and Revisionism Today: Contours of Marxist Theory for the 21st Century Gary Teeple, The Democracy That Never Was: A Critique of Liberal Democracy Alfonso García Vela & Alberto Bonnet, The Political Thought of John Holloway: Struggle, Critique, Emancipation Erick Omena, Urban Planning as Class Domination: The Games of Land Dispossession

Foreword

It is known that Marx never wrote his planned “book on the state,” which would have been one of six books to make up Das Kapital (including capital, landed property, wage labor, the state, international trade and the world market, and a critique of the history of political economy, socialism, and the historical development of economic categories). In the event, Marx’s works focus primarily on the “economic” structures, dynamics, and contradictions of capitalist accumulation, rather than the “political” institutions underpinning it; given the absence of the proposed book on labor, Marx’s work also stresses the viewpoint of capital more than that of the working class. Marx’s surviving words on the state are often condensed in abstract and general statements; for example: The [...] economic form in which unpaid surplus-labour is pumped out of direct producers determines the relationship of rulers and ruled [...]. Upon this [...] is founded [...] its specific political form. It is always the direct relationship of the owners of the conditions of production to the direct producers [...] which reveals [...] the hidden basis of the [...] social structure and with it the political form of the relation of sovereignty and dependence, in short, the [...] form of the state. (Marx, Capital 3, Chapter 47)

Alternatively: the state is “the active, conscious and official expression of the present structure of society” (Collected Works, Vol. 3), “the form of xv

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organization which the bourgeoisie adopts […] for the mutual guarantee of their property and interests” (German Ideology, Chapter 1), as well as the well-known claim that “[t]he executive of the modern state is but a committee for managing the common affairs of the whole bourgeoisie” (The Manifesto of the Communist Party). In addition to these abstract snippets, we also find in Marx much longer and highly textured political commentary, for example, in The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte, The Class Struggles in France, and The Civil War in France. In the same tradition, Friedrich Engels wrote The Origin of the Family, Private Property and the State, while Lenin left a wealth of material ranging from the relatively abstract The State and Revolution to the practical What is to Be Done?, and a vast range of more or less theoretical interventions as he confronted the practical problems of leading a revolution and, later, building a revolutionary state. The significance of the topic, Marx’s seemingly diverging approaches at different times, the tension between his presumed “economic determinism” and the necessary “autonomy of the political” which would be required for a theory of the political domain, and the gaps between Marx’s brief generalizations about the state and his detailed accounts of current events, have provided fertile ground for generations of works examining the nature and role of the state in capitalist societies and even disputing the scope for, and appropriateness of, a Marxist theory of the state. Scholars and activists generally agree that for Marx the state is a set of political institutions that embody, express, mediate and secure the relations of exploitation in a specific territory within an unavoidably fragmented global economy. In each territory, the state provides the illusion of a community of interests while, at the same time setting up and regulating capitalist production and the functioning of markets (not least the all-important labor market) through consultation, legislation, taxation, spending, sectoral policies, protection, repression, and so on. In doing so, states support some capitals (domestic or international) in their relations of competition against other capitals; states also promote the interests of some social groups, often specific capitalists, as opposed to others and, in turn, receive their political support. Debates about different aspects of Marx’s approach to the state flourished in the late nineteenth century and again, in the wake of the creation of the Soviet Union as a multinational state. After the lull imposed by Stalinism, World War II, the Cold War, and political repression in the West, Marxist interest in the state revived in the late 1960s. It focused primarily

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on efforts to derive logically, from abstract (economic or other) categories the form, functions, and limitations of the capitalist state, in the context of Marx’s newly published manuscripts, the (re)discovery of the works of Gramsci and other “classics,” as well as the publication of new works by Louis Althusser, Ralph Miliband, Nicos Poulantzas, and many others. Western debates about the nature and functions of the state (and, correspondingly, the most appropriate modalities of revolutionary struggle) often assumed an artificial separation between the economic “infrastructure” and the legal and political “superstructure,” presumably because they are grounded on distinct logics, with the economy being somehow determinant: while the economic sphere follows a logic of profit-oriented, market-mediated exchange, the political sphere is oriented toward the construction of a bogus “national interest” and the regulation of the mode of production. Armando Boito’s book examines the relationships between these domains, in the context of the relative stability of capitalism in the post-war period, even if punctuated by crises, restructuring, rebellions, and, on increasingly rare occasions, revolutions. His innovative approach to the Marxist theory of the state in general, and the work of Poulantzas in particular, offers a refreshing interpretation of thorny but critically important topics that have eluded Marxist scholarship for decades, including an alternative to the crude opposition between the economic infrastructure and the political superstructure. In doing this, Boito’s work straddles disciplines and narrowly defined fields: it ranges across the structure and role of the state and the nature of political power, including an important critique of Foucault’s work; the place of the state in the transition periods from feudalism to capitalism and from capitalism to socialism; the historical originality of the political scene linked to the capitalist type of state; the significance of class analysis in Marx, focusing on the challenges around converting classes and class fractions, that exist objectively in the economic field, into political agents; the rise and decline of revolutionary activity across the twentieth century and the role of workers’ struggles in transitions to capitalism and to socialism; the nature and limitations of past revolutions and the spaces for socialist revolutions today, focusing on the relevance of Lenin’s concept of revolutionary crisis for the analysis of the popular revolutions in the twentieth century, and much more. The purpose of this illuminating work is not merely academic but, principally political: in dissecting the relevance of the structure of the state in general, and public policy in particular, in economic and social life, Boito offers an innovative approach to the

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relationship between global structures (across the economy, politics, and ideology) and the forms of resistance by the exploited classes in each mode of production. This investigation offers essential support for the political practice of the working class, whose interests and struggles must drive the political transformation of the mode of production—otherwise, socialism will remain an empty aspiration. Boito shows that the proposition that the working class is the revolutionary class under capitalism is not some metaphysical notion conjured by Marx, but a corollary of his analysis. By the same token, nothing in the Marxist analysis implies that socialism is inevitable; but everything implies that socialism will come about through the self-emancipation of the working class, their seizure of the state power, and the introduction of a new form of political democracy—history shows that socialism must come this way, or it will not come about at all. Boito’s important work signposts the way ahead and shows that it is possible to imagine better worlds, and to anticipate how to build them. August 2022

Alfredo Saad Filho King’s College London London, UK

Preface

My goal in this book is to present some fundamental concepts and theses of Marxist political theory with the aim of discussing and developing them. Together with an Introduction especially written for the English edition, the book presents a set of thirteen essays, produced at different times of my career as a university professor and researcher. Most of these essays are theoretical, i.e., they take theory itself as their object of analysis. Those that deal not directly with theory but with current capitalist society or its history also have, nonetheless, a theoretical objective: to present and test theses, controversies, and problems of Marxist political theory in the light of a historiographical debate. My greatest ambition with this work is to contribute, albeit modestly, to the renewal of Marxist theory, a task that requires a detached attitude toward the legacy of Marxism and also toward the new research produced by the human sciences. The construction of a renewed Marxism demands a critical assessment of the dominant Marxist currents in the twentieth century and a careful dialogue with innovative authors and works—of varied theoretical orientations—that have enriched the human sciences in recent decades. I have tried to develop my ideas in a contentious manner, setting them openly in opposition to divergent or opposing ideas and opinions, to show the reader the presuppositions and consequences of the analyses I conduct. From the outset, I put forth a basic controversy. Many

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authors deny the very hypothesis of this work: they maintain that there is no Marxist political theory. There are at least two versions of this thesis. First, we have the non-Marxist authors like Norberto Bobbio who, relying on the fact that Marx and Engels did not produce a systematic theoretical work on politics and the state, suggest that this is either forbidden ground for Marxists or territory that they could only enter by riding on the back of other social theories—or in other words, on condition that they abandon Marxism. Those who think this way undervalue the importance of Marx and Engels’ historical texts, which, although not theoretical texts, introduce and develop original and founding concepts and theses. Historical works have two levels to be discerned by the reader. For starters, they contain particular theses and concepts restricted to the circumstances and historical phenomena they analyze, but they also offer some approaches of a more general and abstract character that open a new field where politics can be considered in a way it had never been before. Furthermore, non-Marxist authors who deny the existence of a Marxist political theory ignore its later developments that were carried out both by socialist leaders who emerged after Marx and Engels and by Marxist university researchers from the second half of the twentieth century onward, when Marxism began to conquer the small space it still holds in academia. Second, the proposal of a Marxist political theory is not consensual even among authors located in the field of Marxism. Some schools of the Marxist tradition understand that it would not be possible to distinguish, in the general body of this theory, the analysis of political power from the analysis of the culture or the analysis of the economy. The Marxists of the Lukácsian school think this way. They believe that to speak of Marxist sociology, Marxist political science, or Marxist economics would mean mutilating Marxism and knowledge. These areas would constitute one same object, merged into a single conceptual body that would not even contain methodological distinctions. Furthermore, among Marxists, including Lukácsians, there is a strong presence of economism, which also conspires against the idea of a Marxist political theory. Economism, dominant in twentieth-century Marxism, has not yet been sufficiently criticized. This conception, which consists of reducing all the phenomena of society, politics, and culture to alleged economic causes, blocks theoretical reflection on politics. According to economism, politics can only be thought of as an appendix, as an epiphenomenon, in short, as something secondary or unimportant, and no one is encouraged to reflect on

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unimportant subjects. For my part, although I recognize the unity of the Marxist theory of society and history—which can be called the theory of historical materialism—I also understand that methodological distinctions are possible and necessary to contemplate the specificity of the study of culture, politics, economics, etc. Marxist political theory, although a regional knowledge dependent on the general theory of historical materialism and therefore on the set of its regional theories (economy, society, culture), nevertheless has a specific conceptual framework that allows it to approach its object, which is also specific: political power and the struggle to maintain or conquer it. In the near future, I intend to devote my efforts to this controversy. For now, I only alert the reader to the fact that it runs through every page of this book. ∗ ∗ ∗ In the first part of the book, I examine various aspects of the relationship between political power organized in the state, historical change, and social classes. The second chapter brings a discussion on Michel Foucault’s work, criticizing his conception of power as an institutionally diffuse and socially dispersed phenomenon. This essay sheds light on why, throughout this book, the state is conceived of as the main center of political power, and political action as an ultimately state-oriented activity. In the third chapter, I offer a theoretical discussion about the place of the state in the Marxist theory of history. The question is: what is the place that the state occupies (or should occupy) in the theory of the transition from one type of society to another? I seek, then, to clarify, in theoretical terms, the importance of the political revolution in the transition processes. The two following chapters in this collection carry out, in the light of this theoretical discussion, the historical analysis of two distinct processes. In one of them, I examine the role of the absolutist state in the reproduction of feudalism and the importance of the bourgeois political revolution in the transition to capitalism. I discuss the analyses that describe the absolutist state as a capitalist, transitional, or “modernizing” state and that, for this very reason, neglect, explicitly or implicitly, the relevance of the bourgeois political revolution. In the following chapter,

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I examine the question of the specific form of organization of workers’ power in the Paris Commune of 1871. I seek to show that only an understanding of the transition process that overcomes economism allows us to see why Marx considered the Paris Commune as the first experience of workers’ power. It was precisely because they did not abandon economism that some critics have been able to maintain, against Marx’s analysis, the thesis according to which the Commune represented merely another popular uprising like so many others in France in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. My ideas are presented concomitantly with a critical evaluation of part of the bibliography on the bourgeois political revolution and the Paris Commune of 1871. These processes have been widely discussed in specialized historiography, but I believe to have managed to shed some new light on them since my analyses are informed by a problem that had been dismissed or rejected by historiographical research. The historical process and specifically the transition processes also depend on the circumstances of a conjuncture of crisis. The sixth chapter develops the concepts of political process and revolutionary crisis, showing the specificity of the Leninist tradition in this matter, and comparing it with the thought of other Marxists such as Trotsky and Rosa Luxemburg. My objective is also to show the scope of the Leninist concept of revolutionary crisis, highlighting the fecundity of this concept for the analysis of the bourgeois revolutions of the absolutist period, and not only for the analysis of the workers’ and popular revolutions of the twentieth century. The seventh and last chapter of the first part examines the concept of the political scene, which designates the space in which the presence of class interests and conflicts is disguised amid the discourse and programs of bourgeois and petty-bourgeois political parties. Such a conception, typical of Marxist political theory, contrasts with homologous notions of other currents of contemporary political thought, such as liberalism and the theory of elites. ∗ ∗ ∗ In the second part of the book, I deal specifically with social classes and class conflict; in other words, I examine what is theoretically presupposed in the chapters of the first part, in the discussions about political

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power, historical change, the state, the revolutionary crisis, and the political scene. I seek, then, to show the multidimensional importance of politics in the formation of social classes and the development of the class struggle. These chapters shall clarify, among other questions, why the long revolutionary cycle of the twentieth century was followed by an also prolonged period of decline in the polarization of class conflict. Moreover, they will show the different forms that class conflict can take even in the absence of this polarization. The eighth chapter deals with the relationship between the global structure (economy, politics, ideology) of the modes of production in which there is class exploitation and the possible modalities of resistance by direct producers in these modes of production. The text seeks to show how the structure of the capitalist mode of production, which comprises its economic infrastructure and its juridical-political superstructure— unlike the structure of slave and feudal modes of production—allows the permanent organization of direct producers, making it feasible for them, after educating themselves and accumulating forces in the struggle for demands and social reforms, to become the driving class of a revolutionary process, contrarily to what happened with the slave masses and the serf peasantry. I believe this text provides some background elements to think about a theory of union action. The following three chapters in the second part of the book present the idea that the organization of workers into a class is the result of multiple contradictions and conflicts in specific conjunctures that have the power to consolidate the class that exists only potentially in the field of the economy. In addition to a general discussion on this topic, I return, in the tenth chapter, to the Manifesto of the Communist Party and offer a reading that differs from the current ones, resuming some controversies that this text aroused among important leaders and theorists of the nineteenth and twentieth-century labor movement. The eleventh chapter deals with the decline and exhaustion of what I call the long revolutionary cycle of the twentieth century, applying, to understand the end of that period, the theoretical ideas developed in the two previous chapters I have just mentioned. In the mid-1990s, the discussion on the social and economic changes of capitalism and on the social and ideological impacts of these changes on the working classes tended to neglect the political element. This approach persists today. It is evident not only in authors such as Claus Offe and André Gorz, but also in many of their Brazilian critics, who failed to break with the economism of the authors

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they intended to criticize. I intervened in the debate to highlight the need to understand that the reflux and crisis of the socialist labor movement were an expression of the exhaustion of that revolutionary cycle, whose determinations went far beyond the relations between workers and capitalists in the production process and labor market. The twelfth chapter, which discusses the notion of middle class and middle-class unionism, seeks to highlight the importance of ideology and class struggle in establishing social classes. In the thirteenth and final chapter, I examine the relationship between the development of citizenship and the class struggle, offering a critical analysis of the bourgeois notion of citizenship and, at the same time, describing the complex and contradictory relations between citizenship and the interests of the working classes. ∗ ∗ ∗ Each chapter that makes up this collection, although part of an integrated set, is an autonomous text and can be read separately. As a result, whoever examines the book as a whole will come across some repetitions here and there. I apologize to the reader, but these small repetitions seem to be inevitable in a collection like this. To carry out my research work, I have counted on the excellent working conditions provided by the University of Campinas (Unicamp), where I teach Political Science. I also owe a lot to my colleagues and students who participate in the study and research groups at the Center for Marxist Studies (Cemarx) and in the collective production of the Crítica Marxista journal. These activities contributed to the clarification of the problems that I analyze, in addition to stimulating the production of several of the texts published in this collection. They all have my gratitude. São Paulo, Brazil

Armando Boito

Contents

Part I Political Power, Social Classes, and Historical Change 3

1

Introduction to the English Edition

2

The Capitalist State at the Center: A Critique of Michel Foucault’s Concept of Power

15

3

The Place of the State in the Marxist Theory of History

37

4

State and Transition to Capitalism: Feudalism, Absolutism, and Bourgeois Political Revolution

61

State and Transition to Socialism: Was the Paris Commune a Workers’ Power?

87

5 6

The Concept of Revolutionary Crisis: France in 1789

107

7

The Political Scene and Class Interests in Capitalist Society: Marx’s Analysis

135

Part II Politics and Economy in the Formation of Working Classes 8 9

Pre-capitalism, Capitalism, and Workers’ Resistance—Elements for a Theory of Union Action

151

The (Difficult) Formation of the Working Class

183 xxv

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CONTENTS

The Constitution of the Proletariat into a Class in the Manifesto of the Communist Party: Polemicizing with Some Classic Interpretations

195

The Exhaustion of the Twentieth-Century Revolutionary Cycle

207

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Middle Class and Unionism

217

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Citizenship and Social Classes

239

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Index

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About the Author

Armando Boito is Professor of Political Science at the State University of Campinas, Brazil. He is the editor of the Brazilian journal Crítica Marxista. Among other books, he has published Reform and Political Crisis in Brazil: Class Conflicts in Workers’ Party Governments and the Rise of Bolsonaro Neo-Fascism (2021).

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List of Tables

Table 3.1 Table 7.1

The idea of the historical process: homology between the Marx of 1859 and Hegel Class struggle and the political scene, France (1848–1851)

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PART I

Political Power, Social Classes, and Historical Change

CHAPTER 1

Introduction to the English Edition

This chapter introduces the book to the English-speaking reader, highlighting its affiliation to the Marxist tradition, as well as its contribution to Marxist political theory. It explains that the book criticizes other theoretical traditions of political theory and makes extensive reference to the works of Louis Althusser and Nicos Poulantzas. The most general issue treated in the book is the political level in the capitalist mode of production. The theory of the state and the historical types of state, as well as the theory of class and class struggle are also approached, with references to current studies on such topics.

I As exposed in the Preface, this book aims to contribute to the development of Marxist political theory and, particularly, the theory of the political level in the capitalist mode of production, analyzing its structure, the institutions that integrate it, and the social functions that this level plays in the reproduction of capitalism. I also examine the social relations and contradictions that may lead to the formation of an anti-capitalist class collective. In this Introduction for the English-speaking reader, I will indicate in more detail the theoretical orientation of this book, as well as briefly articulate it with part of the pertinent bibliography. I hope this is not too © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2023 A. Boito, State, Politics, and Social Classes, Marx, Engels, and Marxisms, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-22046-3_1

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tiring and I think that, as with any Introduction, its content will only become completely clear after the book itself is read. Classical Marxist authors provide fundamental elements for this intellectual project. However, their works have shortcomings. As is well known, Marx and Engels did not write a treatise on politics similar to what Marx wrote on capitalist economy. Lenin’s and Gramsci’s texts are very important contributions, but Lenin’s work on politics is fundamentally focused on the demands of practice, and Gramsci’s centers around political action, hardly touching upon political structures and institutions. The work of Nicos Poulantzas Political Power and Social Classes is an attempt to theoretically think politics in the capitalist mode of production, i.e., the political structure of that mode of production. As this book intends to show, the theoretical reflection on the political structure is fundamental for understanding important characteristics of politics in capitalism, among which: why, contrary to what Michel Foucault thought, power is socially and also institutionally concentrated in the state’s institutions; why, contrary to what some currents of twentieth-century Marxism declare, the transition from one mode of production to another begins with a change in the political structure, not only with a change of state policy; why the types of resistance on the part of workers vary from one mode of production to another—only under capitalism do workers have unions. A distinctive feature of this book is that it draws heavily on Nicos Poulantzas’s general theoretical proposals, developed when he wrote under the influence of the structural reading of Marxism elaborated by Louis Althusser and his group in the 1960s in the works Pour Marx and Lire le Capital. I therefore highly value Poulantzas’s book Political Power and Social Classes, published in English in 1975. Poulantzas, supported by Althusser’s notion of an expanded concept of mode of production, set out to elaborate the “regional theory” of the political level in the capitalist mode of production. Poulantzas considered, following the Althusserian school, that each level of the mode of production—the economic, the political, and the ideological—required a specific regional theory that would be an integral part of the general theory of historical materialism. Elaborating on the regional theory of the political level would be something like doing for the political level what Marx has done for the economic level in his greatest work, Capital. The book’s proposal is to develop Poulantzas’s work in a critical and creative approach and in different directions. This ambitious project, for which Poulantzas has laid

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the main foundations, deserves to be taken up and further developed by twenty-first century Marxists. It is a project that breaks with economism, an abiding trait of the twentieth century. In Political Power and Social Classes, Poulantzas values not only political action but also political structures and institutions, unlike other Marxist traditions that, despite having also broken with economism, did this by valuing only political action and ideology. My work applies Poulantzas’s theses to themes that he did not explore and, it should be added, not strictly following everything he wrote. I would like to make two more observations. First, when I say that I return to the Althusserian tradition, I am referring to a particular phase of Althusser’s works from the mid-1960s—Pour Marx and Lire le Capital. The book leaves aside the self-criticism works published by the author in the late 1960s and early 1970s. It also leaves out the “last Althusser,” the Althusser of the so-called “aleatory materialism” which, as the expression itself already suggests, is a conception that breaks with historical materialism. Historical materialism appears in Althusser’s early texts as a science of history and, therefore, as a set of theses and concepts that aim to detect and explain the regularities observed in social life. The last Althusser’s aleatory materialism deals with the casual encounter of facts and conceives of society and history as the realm of contingency. The last Althusser is frequently analyzed and much appreciated in international publications such as Décalages, Rethinking Marxism, Quaderni Materialisti, and others. The second observation is the following: it is necessary to apply the Althusserian reading method, the so-called symptomatic reading, in the analyses of Althusser’s own texts to come to the conclusion I reach in this book—that both the political level and the economic level are equally determinant. It is true that in the works Pour Marx and Lire le Capital, Althusser and his associates affirm that the economy is the last stance of determination. In other words, politics would not have the same weight as the economy in determining social facts. However, in spite of this general claim, the fact is that Althusser and his disciples, while delving into their theoretical ideas, treat economy and politics as equally determinant and as two dimensions of the social whole within which they maintain a reciprocal conditioning relationship. In other words, there is a mismatch between the general statement—that economy is the last stance of determination—and the particular analyses—that work with the idea of the reciprocal conditioning of economic and political structures. It is

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this latter conception that seems most promising to us since it made it possible to develop the theses and analyses proposed in this book. In fact, and following the current debates among Latin American Marxists (Saes, 1994), it is possible to conceive of two types of determination: in a period of stable reproduction of a certain mode of production, we would have a relationship of reciprocal conditioning between the economic structure and the political structure, while in a period of crisis of the mode of production, we would have the economic structure as the last stance of determination. It is only when a certain level of development of the productive forces is reached that an era of social revolution starts. In this approach, I resume and develop the theses and concepts of the so-called structuralist phase of Nicos Poulantzas, and not the concepts of the last Poulantzas, known as the relational phase of his work. Therefore, I do not use the book State, Power, Socialism, which is the last book by Nicos Poulantzas, published for the first time in French in 1978. In this last work, Poulantzas abandons the analysis of the state that he had made ten years earlier in Political Power and Social Classes. The state that had been conceived by the author as a structure, organized around formally egalitarian law and bureaucratism, is considered in the book State, Power, Socialism as the condensation of the relationship of forces among classes. Therefore, if in the former work the state was endowed with an invariant structure, in the latter its nature changes as the relationship of forces changes. Marx and Lenin’s thesis on the need to destroy the old state apparatus in order to transition to socialism or, generally speaking, the thesis on the need to destroy the old state apparatus in order to transition to a new mode of production, this thesis loses its raison d’être. The new concept of state and the new political position of Poulantzas about the transition to socialism, both present in the book State, Power, Socialism, were, on the one hand, well received by the Eurocommunist movement, which, in the late 1970s, was thriving in Europe. It was well received especially in France by some intellectuals of the French Communist Party and the Socialist Party that were working out, under the leadership, respectively, of Georges Marchais and François Mitterrand, a strategy of parliamentary transition to socialism based on the so-called “Common Program.” On the other hand, his new theoretical and political position faced enormous resistance among his auxiliaries in the university and among the parties to the left of the French Communist Party and the Socialist Party. At the time, I was a doctoral student in

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Paris; I attended Poulantzas’s courses and could witness the contradictory repercussions of his latest book. In Brazil, there is a great tradition of Poulantzian analysis of past and present Brazilian political history. Many books and articles were produced on topics such as the bourgeois political revolution in Brazil; the bloc in power in different periods in the history of Republican Brazil; the political crises and ruptures that mark this history; Brazilian foreign policy and, mainly, the recent period in the history of Brazil, a period marked by neoliberal capitalism, by the governments of the Workers’ Party (PT) and by the political rise of neofascism under Jair Bolsonaro. I, as one of the intellectuals that integrate this tradition, have published two books on contemporary Brazilian politics. The English version of one of these books was published by Brill—Reform and Political Crisis in Brazil—Class Conflicts in Workers’ Party Governments and the Rise of Bolsonaro Neo-Fascism. This Brazilian Poulantzian tradition privileges exactly the phase of Nicos Poulantzas’s work in which he develops the Althusserian—structural—reading of Marxism. This book has other particularities that I would like to highlight. In the first part, I focus on the regional theory at the political level. First, I examine the characteristics and functions of the political in class societies in general. To do this, I conduct analyses of the political level in pre-capitalist modes of production, in which class exploitation and domination exist, and also in the capitalist mode of production. In both cases, I use the Althusserian distinction between the mode of production, which designates the abstract concept of capitalism, and social formation, which designates the realization of capitalism in particular historical places and epochs. Second, I examine in this same part of the book the situation at the political level in the transition from one mode of production to another. This is the theme of the theory of history, the theme par excellence of historical materialism. For both cases, in addition to the theoretical texts to which I have been referring, I use other theoretical sources that seem to be of great importance, as well as a part of the Marxist historiography on some countries in Europe and South America. As far as history is concerned, I have relied a lot on the rich English, French, Soviet, and Brazilian Marxist historiographies to make an effort of theoretical reflection on ancient slavery, feudalism, modern slavery, and capitalism itself. I have also used the work of non-Marxist historians from some of these countries. It is clear that in the face of such broad historical themes, the limits of the author of this book, who does not consider

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himself a scholar, may, as I point out throughout the work, compromise some of the results of the analysis. However, since this is, as I imagine it is, an original theoretical approach, I concluded that it was worthwhile to carry out, in essayistic terms, the theoretical reflections I have made using this rich historiographical material. As far as theoretical texts are concerned, I use authors such as Ralph Miliband who, though a Marxist, has produced as is known, a lot of criticism of the Poulantzian analysis of the capitalist state. As some scholars have claimed, there are points of convergence between the state concepts of these two authors. I also make use of non-Marxist authors and even critics of Marxism. I establish with them, in the first place, a critical debate, in order to highlight the differences in presuppositions and their consequences, as well as to try to demonstrate the scientific superiority of Marxism over such works. However, this effort of debate and criticism does not exclude the possibility of eventual incorporation, after theoretical rectification, of concepts that such authors have produced. This is a delicate theoretical operation in which it becomes possible to transport, with the proper theoretical rectification, concepts from one problem, for example, the institutionalist theory problem, to the Marxist problem. This is a procedure duly discussed in the epistemology presented and developed by Althusser and his collaborators in the aforementioned work, Lire le Capital. But I also follow here, and contrary to what might appear at first sight, a tradition that has accompanied Marxism since its origin. Marx did so with the authors of classical political economy; Engels did the same with the production of anthropology to write about the origin of the family; Lenin rectified and incorporated the historiography on imperialism, and Gramsci did the same thing with the Italian political theory of his time. Poulantzas, in Political Power and Social Classes, used, for example, classic works of institutionalism to characterize political regimes; he reworked Max Weber’s theses to characterize bureaucracy in the capitalist state, and critically assimilated problems posed by the theory of elites to distinguish the ruling class from the classes he calls the detaining and reigning classes, contemplating both the question “for whom do decisionmakers rule?”, which is the classic and fundamental question of Marxist political theory, and the question “who are the decision-makers?” or “who governs?”, which is the question posed by the theory of elites, with which it rightly seeks to combat Marxism and for which the elitists have an answer that originates the whole formalism of their political theory.

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II This book has characteristics that differentiate it from most existing studies on the work of Poulantzas and Althusser we find in the recent books and academic events. I cite as references two books that are very representative of Poulantzian studies because they bring together different authors. The first is the book edited by Alexander Gallas, Lars Bretthauer, John Kannanculam, and Ingo Stützle entitled Reading Poulantzas (2011); the second is the book, which also brings together several authors, and was organized by Stanley Aronowitz and Peter Bratsis, entitled Paradigm Lost —State Theory Reconsidered (2002). Among significant academic events, I highlight a seminar that took place in 2021 in France and three others that took place in recent years in South America. The Université Paris Nanterre’s Laboratoire Sophiapol held on April 30 of this year a Poulantzas Journey (https://sophiapol.parisnanterre.fr). I would like to mention some of the participants of this Journey: Alexios Michaloudas, Bob Jessop, Costas Douzinas, Christine Glucksman, Etienne Balibar, Yohann Douet. The three other seminars were held in Buenos Aires (Argentina), Santiago (Chile), and Campinas (Brazil)—respectively in 2014 (http://iealc.sociales.uba.ar/sin-categoria/ii-jornadas-internaciona les-nicos-poulantzas), 2016 and 2018 (https://www.ifch.unicamp.br/ cemarx/site/eventos-cemarx). About thirty Latin American intellectuals who studied the work of Nicos Poulantzas participated in these events. With the exception of the works of Brazilian scholars, the studies contained in these books and in these academic activities present, not in their entirety, but in their great majority, two striking characteristics that distinguish them from this book. First, they focus on the phase identified as that of the “last Poulantzas,” whose main work is the book State, Power, Socialism (SPS), and leave aside the book Political Power and Social Classes (PPSC). As already said, the essays in my book do exactly the opposite, that is, they value the Poulantzas of PPSC to the detriment of the “last Poulantzas.” At the risk of insisting too much, I want to emphasize that the PPSC develops a theory of the structure of the capitalist state that underlies the Leninist thesis of the necessary destruction of the bourgeois state and the also necessary construction of a new type of state apparatus in order to initiate the transition to socialism, while the book SPS abandons the idea that the capitalist state is a structure and elaborates the concept of the state as a condensation of power relations—the

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state as a “strategic field”—which underlies the thesis that a transition to socialism is possible without the prior destruction of the bourgeois state. The project of elaborating a theory of the political structure of the capitalist mode of production, which is the theoretical project of PPSC, comes to be regarded, pejoratively, as structuralist and deterministic. My understanding is different. The debate is therefore theoretical, but it also has political consequences. And I hope that the chapters of my book will provide some elements to justify my theoretical position in this debate. These studies which I refer to have, for the most part, a second characteristic that also differentiates them from the work I present in this book. It consists of the fact that they comment on Poulantzas’s work without the commitment to theoretically develop the theses and concepts elaborated by this author and, more broadly, to develop Marxist political theory itself. They are very useful and clarifying comments on the influences of this or that author on Poulantzas’s work, comments on the evolution of his work and its different phases, comments that seek to systematize the author’s concepts, detect problems in his texts, etc. The concern of my work is another. In it, I try to resume, rectify, renew, develop, and apply Poulantzas’s concepts and theses in different dimensions, themes, and problems. It is a commitment that assumes, in the first place, that Marxist political theory is a scientific theory that requires development, renovation, and that must be applied and tested in social and historical reality. I believe that by reading the summaries of the essays contained in this book the reader will have a better understanding of this characteristic of my work. Not all studies found in the books and annals of academic events that I have mentioned prioritize the “last Poulantzas.” As I already said, a reasonably large group of Brazilian researchers make extensive use of the political theory presented in PPSC by Nicos Poulantzas to produce many articles and several books on political history topics. Also, as a result of these researches, I and other colleagues in this group have produced articles and books on political theory, using the contributions of PPCS and other books by Nicos Poulantzas—Fascism and Dictatorship, Classes in Contemporary Capitalism, The Crisis of the Dictatorships: Portugal, Greece, Spain, and others. This production analyzes issues such as the particularity of the political level in the capitalist mode of production, the norms and values that govern the functioning of this institution that is the capitalist state, the particularity of the political scene in capitalist societies, the concept of bourgeois fraction and the concept of bloc in power, the

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concept of hegemony within the bloc in power, the theorization of the bloc in power’s relations with different political regimes and forms of state, the concept of the internal bourgeoisie, the concept of political crisis, the place of the state in the theory of transition and others.1

III There is one issue missing from this book that I want to draw the reader’s attention to. I am referring to the question of the relationship between classes and class struggle on the one hand, and the struggle against gender oppression, racial oppression, and sexual oppression on the other. Feminist and anti-racist researchers have developed concepts and theses on this subject and have tried, in dialogue with the Marxist tradition, to remove some theoretical and epistemological obstacles that prevented reflection on such issues. Their research can contribute greatly to the development of Marxist theory and, particularly, to the development of Marxist political theory. Especially worthy of note is the recent book, entitled Capitalism—a Conversation in Critical Theory, in which Fraser and Jaeggi take stock of much of this production and seek to go further (Fraser & Jaeggi, 2018). Perhaps the most general and important thesis of this book is that gender oppression and race oppression should be conceived of as integral parts of the very concept of capitalism. Such oppressions would therefore be part of what is invariable about capitalism, regardless of the time and place in which this mode of production has existed or exists. We have here a double correction about, or double rupture with the Marxist tradition. In the first place, because the concept of capitalism would not refer only to the economy, a rectification that, in fact, has already been made by Althusser in the 1960s with his expanded concept of mode of production, which is, as I have already announced, the concept that I use in this book. Second, it is a rectification, or rupture, because

1 We highlight three recent theoretical publications. (1) Tatiana Berringer and Angela Lazagna (Orgs.), A atualidade da teoria política de Nicos Poulantzas [The Topicality of Nicos Poulantzas’s Political Theory]. São Bernardo do Campo: Editora da Universidade Federal do ABC, 2021; (2) Décio Azevedo Saes and Francisco Farias, Reflexões sobre a teoria política do jovem Poulantzas (1968–1974) [Reflexions on the Young Nicos Poulantzas’s Political Theory]. São Paulo: Lutas Anticapital. 2021. (3) Ramiro Parodi (Org.) La actualidad de Nicos Poulantzas: el Estado y las luchas populares contemporâneas. El ejercicio del pensar, n. 14/15. Buenos Aires: CLACSO. 2022.

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history would no longer be, contrary to what the Communist Manifesto announced, the history of class struggle, but rather the history of class, gender, and race struggles, amalgamated into a single struggle— the distinction between one another of these struggles would only be methodological and not ontological, says Fraser. The authors, like other Marxist social scientists who reflect on this subject, try to point out what would be the reasons to link these oppressions to the very concept of capitalism. As for gender oppression, the argument consists of the fact that the production and reproduction of the commodity labor force does not occur, contrary to what Marx seems to assume in Capital, entirely within capitalist production itself, that is, the production of commodities based on wage labor. It also depends, and in varying proportions from one phase of capitalism to another, on unpaid domestic work that overloads women. As for racial oppression, the authors argue that the capitalist mode of production is inseparable from imperialism and, therefore, from national and racial oppression. This is just to stick to the most general issues and without considering other functionalities of these oppressions—lower wages, political division of workers, etc. Machismo and racism would thus be part of the very concept of capitalism. My book does not face these questions, and obviously, I will not be able to do so in a short introduction like this. I will just say, in an initial assessment, that Fraser and Jaeggi do not develop this new and possibly refreshing proposition well. They use it, and in a convincing way, to deal with the transition from one phase to another in the history of capitalism, leaving aside the question of how the fusion of the three struggles mentioned above would present itself in the transition to socialism— and yet there are many indications in the classical texts and in the revolutionary experiences of the twentieth century to begin to think theoretically about this problem. For my part, I think that the relationship among these struggles requires one specific kind of theoretical treatment when set in a period of reproduction of capitalism, and another specific kind of theoretical treatment when it comes to analyzing such struggles in the period of transition from capitalism to socialism. That’s because the first case is characterized by a reproduction that entails changes of phases in the history of capitalism itself and that is driven also by reformative struggles by oppressed workers, women, and races, which is not so in the latter case. Marxist-inspired feminist and anti-racist literature has taught that these struggles are intertwined. I should add to the struggles commented on

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by Fraser and Jaeggi the struggle against imperialism and national oppression. Having done this, I can put on record two hypotheses. In the reproduction of the mode of production, the class, feminist, anti-racist, and anti-imperialist struggles, understood not as separate struggles, but as dimensions of the same movement, these struggles can alternate in the position of main struggle from one country to another and from one conjuncture to another. In the transition from capitalism to socialism, the workers’ struggle, which in this case has as its central objectives the socialization of the means of production and also and necessarily the socialization of political power itself, this struggle, which is a class struggle, is always the dominant aspect of the socialist movement. Armando Boito Berkeley, California, August 2022

References Aronowitz, S., & Bratsis, P. (2002). Paradigm lost: State theory reconsidered. University of Minnesota Press. Berringer, T., & Lazagna, A. (Orgs.). (2021). A atualidade da teoria política de Nicos Poulantzas. Editora da Universidade Federal do ABC. Fraser, N., & Jaeggi, R. (2018). Capitalism—A conversation in critical theory. Polity Press. Gallas, A., Bretthauer, L., Kannankulam, J., & Stutzle, I. (Eds.). (2011). Reading Poulantzas. Merlin Press. Parodi, R. (Org.). (2022). La actualidad de Nicos Poulantzas: el Estado y las luchas populares contemporâneas. El ejercicio del pensar, n.15/16. CLACSO. Saes, D. (1994). Marxismo e história. Crítica Marxista, n.1. Brasiliense. Saes, D., & Farias, F. (2021). Reflexões sobre a teoria política do jovem Poulantzas (1968–1974). Lutas Anticapital.

CHAPTER 2

The Capitalist State at the Center: A Critique of Michel Foucault’s Concept of Power

This chapter engages in a debate with Michel Foucault, criticizing his conception of “diffuse power.” This critique serves to explain why, in the other chapters in this first part of the book, I deal with political power and political struggle as state-centered phenomena. I then explain why the different centers of power in capitalist society depend on the state. In several texts, interviews, and lectures, Michel Foucault criticizes the supposedly “traditional” concept of power. He specifically criticizes Marxism for, according to him, accepting this traditional concept. He disapproves of how this concept aspires to generalize and systematize, offers undue importance to repressive action, and describes power as something institutionally concentrated in the state and enforced by one part of society over another. Foucault maintains that he does not have an alternative general concept of power and has no intention to develop one, aiming solely at analyzing power where it is manifested. It is clear, however, that he cannot identify power “where it is manifested” without

This text develops ideas presented in a lecture given at the Annual Meeting of the National Association of Graduate Studies and Research in Social Sciences (Anpocs) in October 2006. The presentation took place at the roundtable entitled “Marxism and Contemporary Social Theories.” © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2023 A. Boito, State, Politics, and Social Classes, Marx, Engels, and Marxisms, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-22046-3_2

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starting from a general concept of power that has been minimally developed—and we will see that Foucault’s thought embraces the concept of power, though he avoids describing it. The aim of this chapter is to reflect on Michel Foucault’s criticisms of Marxism and the traditional concept of power. Foucault’s work, in addition to its intrinsic importance, is still studied and debated with great interest in universities today. Foucault is alive and well in Brazil. In 2004, on the occasion of the twentieth anniversary of the author’s death, we had in Brazil a wide mobilization of professors, students, researchers, and intellectuals, in universities and cultural centers alike, for the study of Foucault’s work. As an example, we could mention seminars organized in several Brazilian universities (Unesp [São Paulo State University], Unicamp [University of Campinas], Uerj [Rio de Janeiro State University], UFRGS [Federal University of Rio Grande do Sul], UFMS [Federal University of Mato Grosso do Sul], UFSC [Federal University of Santa Catarina], and others) and in several cultural centers (CCBB [Bank of Brazil Cultural Central] in Rio de Janeiro, MIS [São Paulo Museum of Image and Sound], and others) on the work of Foucault. These seminars attracted many researchers and a large audience throughout the country. Some of them also attracted foreign researchers, earning some international repercussions. In this text, I will not consider the concept of power and its transformations throughout Foucault’s work. Foucault himself estimated that only in the early 1970s did he become aware that the axis of his research was the matter of power and not the matter of knowledge. In a well-known interview with S. Hasumi, in 1977, Foucault stated: For a long time, I believed I was after some sort of analysis of knowledge, such as it can exist in a society like ours: what is known about madness, what is known about illnesses, what is known of the world, of life? Now, I don’t think that was my issue. My real issue is, by the way, everyone’s issue today: power. (Foucault, 1977, In: Mota, 2006, pp. 224–225)

I will then consider a specific phase of Foucault’s work, produced in the mid-1970s, which comprises most of the texts published in Portuguese with the title Microfísica do Poder [Microphysics of Power], the first volume of The History of Sexuality, and other texts that I will cite in our intervention.

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Michel Foucault’s Four Theses In 1976, when La volonté de savoir was published, Michel Foucault visited Brazil. He gave a lecture in Salvador, Bahia, at UFBA [Federal University of Bahia], in which he summarized his critique of what he considered to be the traditional and bourgeois notion of power. Shortly before, he had passed through the city of Campinas, in the countryside of the State of São Paulo, where, at the headquarters of Unicamp’s Academic Center for the Humanities (CACH), he offered a similar lecture. What he said to Unicamp students was not recorded, but the text of the Salvador lecture was published by Magazine Litteraire in its September 1994 issue, later appearing in one of the volumes of Dits et écrits (Foucault, 1994).1 Foucault maintains in that text that the traditional, bourgeois view of power would be the same as that found in Marxist authors. He suggests that Marxists do not follow Marx’s work in this issue. In Foucault’s opinion, Marx’s conceptualization of power would be closer to his own. The ideas that Foucault delineates in that text are theses that are well known to readers of his work, but what is most interesting is the systematic aspect of his exposition. He enumerates, one by one, four theses, presenting them in a polemic manner. First thesis: there is not one power or the power, but several powers. Each of these powers would have its historical and geographical specificity. Marx himself thought that way, according to Foucault, when he analyzed in Capital the capitalist’s power in the workplace. This power would be specific in comparison to the legal power that exists in the rest of society. Foucault affirms that Marx showed that the employer’s power in the workplace is impermeable to the power of the state. And he concludes his first thesis by stating: “Society is an archipelago of different powers” (Foucault, 2012). In this case, we conclude it would be misleading to speak of the power of one part of society over another, as in the theory of elites, which describes the power of the elite over the mass, or—regarding our interest in the matter—as in Marxist theory, which describes the power of the ruling class over the dominated class. Power would be socially diffuse. 1 This text was published in English with the title “The Mesh of Power” in Viewpoint Magazine (Foucault, 2012).

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Second thesis: these various powers should not be understood as a sort of derivation of a presumed central power. On the contrary, says Foucault, it was from these small regions of power—property, slavery, the modern factory, the army—that the great state apparatuses could be formed, little by little. “State unity is basically secondary in relation to these regional and specific powers; these latter come first” (Foucault, 2012). According to Foucault, although Marxists insist on the centrality of the state, in Capital Marx would be closer to the approach that describes power as a network of specific powers. In this case, it would be incorrect to speak of a concentration of power in the institution of the state. Socially diffuse power would also be institutionally diffuse. Third thesis: these specific powers—local and regional—have the primary function of producing skill, efficiency. Hence, the main function of such powers is not to prohibit, impede, or say “you must not.” Speaking of the productive function of the new military organization, developed in Western Europe between the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, Foucault highlights two points. Firstly, the organizational change of the armed forces was brought about by technology—“essentially because a technical discovery had been made: the gun with comparatively rapid and calibrated fire”—and secondly, that the goal of this change was the efficiency of “the army as production of dead bodies” and “absolutely not prohibition” (Foucault, 2012). It can be implied that according to Foucault, the traditional view both of the bourgeoisie and Marxist authors erroneously considers power as a fundamentally repressive institution. Fourth thesis: these mechanisms of power, these procedures, must be considered as techniques, i.e., as procedures that have been invented, perfected, and never ceased to develop. The conclusion is that the analysis of power should focus on the methods employed for the exercise of power and not on the content of the measures taken, on the objectives pursued by power, or on the question of who is benefited and who is harmed by such measures. The means of exercising power, not its content and goals, would be the most important element in the study of power. In La volonté de savoir, a book published in the same year as his lecture in the Brazilian city of Salvador, Foucault introduces a definition of power that is clearly consistent with the four theses listed above.

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By power [...] I do not have in mind a general system of domination exerted by one group over another, a system whose effects, through successive derivations, pervade the entire social body. The analysis, made in terms of power, must not assume that the sovereignty of the state, the form of the law, or the over-all unity of a domination are given at the outset; rather, these are only the terminal forms power takes. It seems to me that power must be understood in the first instance as the multiplicity of force relations immanent in the sphere in which they operate and which constitute their own organization; as the process which, through ceaseless struggles and confrontations, transforms, strengthens, or reverses them. (Foucault, 1978a, p. 92)

Institutional Concentration of Power in the State: Repression To offer a critical comparison between the Marxist concept of political power and Michel Foucault’s theses on the concept of power, we can proceed in two different ways. The first would be to ask ourselves about the problematic2 underlying Foucault’s considerations. It would be necessary to contrast them with the Marxist problematic and reflect on the efficiency of each of them as an appropriate space for the production of relevant concepts for the study of power. In other words: Foucault places power in the field of interindividual relations, while Marx and the Marxist tradition place it in the field of class relations; in Marxism, power is connected to the replication of certain production relations and the transformation of power is the instrument of historical change, while Foucault is neither concerned with the social function of power nor does he work with a theory of

2 In some parts of this book we have adopted the term “problematic” as a noun, meaning “a set of interrelated issues,” or, as the Oxford English Dictionary has it, “A thing that constitutes a problem or an area of difficulty, esp. in a particular field of study.”

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history.3 There is, therefore, a heterogeneity of problematics that recommends special care when drawing direct comparisons between the two concepts of power. However, such a comparison is possible. The concepts, even belonging to different problematics, can be settled on a common ground. To understand this, we can imagine the drawing of a tree from whose trunk divergent branches spread out in a large convex crown. Starting at the top of the crown and following down the path from the thinnest to the thickest branches and, finally, reaching the trunk toward which they converge, we may discover in the latter an attribute that is common to the compared concepts. In this trunk, which represents a more general, abstract plan, we will be able to find a space in which the concepts of power that are present in Foucault and Marx speak the same language. It is this common trunk that allows us to directly compare—to a certain extent, and as long as we take certain precautions—Marx’s and Foucault’s concepts of power, which is the path we chose. Here is their common ground: both concepts name, albeit within different problematics, the mechanisms that induce certain behaviors of social agents. Having clarified the procedure that will be adopted here, let us examine Michel Foucault’s theses. We begin with critiques of the second and third theses listed by the author in his lecture. Is power institutionally diffuse or dispersed, as Foucault’s thesis number two describes? That is not our understanding. In our view, Marx and the Marxist tradition are correct in thinking of political power as institutionally concentrated in the state. In the development of this idea, two elements must be considered: the

3 Foucault inherits his concept of history from Nietzsche. According to Scarlett Marton, Nietzsche—inspired by French moralists such as Montaigne, La Rochefoucauld, Vauvenargues, and Chamfort—thought of history as a “[…] disorderly mixture of actions, events, moral situations, customs, social arrangements, character traits, [which] they certainly do not consider as science. It matters little to them whether history is intelligible or not, what counts is its use to understand the human being […] priceless treasure of examples, history is life’s teacher. If French moralists resort to it, it is not to predict the future, but to probe the human being” (Marton, 1993, p. 61). In his text “Nietzsche, la généalogie, l’histoire,” first published as a homage to Jean Hyppolite, Michel Foucault (1971) reaffirms this contingent, unexpected character of historical events and of history itself: history as an accumulation of various facts, and society as a network of acts. This is evidently very different from the Hegelian tradition, to which Marx is affiliated, a tradition that seeks to detect the logic of the articulation and reproduction of “civilizations” and the dynamics of the process of historical change.

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existence of the state’s repressive apparatus and its use to maintain order— a factor that is minimized or even denied by Michel Foucault in his third thesis—and the ideology produced and disseminated by this same state apparatus—a factor that Foucault dismissed completely because he was probably unaware of much of the Marxist production regarding the theory of the state and political power, even though such production was already within his reach in France when he conceived the theses we have enumerated. First, a word about the importance of repression in the exercise of power, since Michel Foucault failed to address it. He does not take into consideration that the mere threat of repression, or the certainty that repression will ensue if this or that action is taken, deters actions contrary to the order. Gerard Lebrun, disputing Foucault’s rose-colored view of power, wisely recalls the case of the New York blackout of 1977. The poor neighborhoods’ population, aware that the electricity outage would keep the police operating at less than minimum efficiency, massively looted stores that sold durable goods such as television sets, sound systems, kitchen appliances, and others (Lebrun, 1981). Private property is respected also out of fear of repression. Now, as Max Weber pointed out for other theoretical purposes, the state has a monopoly on the legitimate use of force in situations of political stability. In addition to the deterrent effect provided by the ostentation of its repressive apparatus, the state makes use of repressive force in two ways: in an open, massive way—in critical moments of confrontation with social and political movements—but also in a molecular, barely visible way in the daily containment of acts of disobedience that may occur in various centers of power. This issue is addressed in the Marxist bibliography, although much work remains to be done on this subject. For us, what is most important is to remember that the power exercised in the family, in schools, in companies, in hospitals, or in prisons is conferred or regulated by legal norms established and supervised by the state apparatus. Let us leave aside the analysis of the social function and importance of each of these several centers of power (which indeed vary greatly). By framing the question in the same terms as Foucault himself puts it, let us consider, through some examples, how these centers may depend on the institution of the state. Let us discuss the controversy considering only society and the capitalist state. Kinship relations have existed long before either state or capitalism and are effectively inter-individual power relations. But kinship relations in

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capitalism are of a particular historical type and regulated by the capitalist state. It is the courts that, ultimately, decide on the validity of kinship relations, the passing of inheritance, on the custody of children, and other matters at the core of the bourgeois family organization, and it is up to the party harmed by such decisions to choose between acquiescence or penal sanctions. The authority of a teacher or a doctor is also real, but it is based on a school system established and regulated by the state—basically, on the legal requirement of a diploma for the exercise of certain professions—and a transgression implies legal sanction in this case as well. Within the capitalist enterprise, there is employer power, which can be observed, as workers well know, in the employer’s right to establish the company’s internal regulations, that is, the conditions for maximum use of the workforce. But this employer power, which is actual power, is regulated by the state and stems in its entirety from the statute of private property—a statute created by the capitalist state, which is responsible for preserving it. Foucault erroneously asserts that the state cannot reach employer power in the company. He could certainly argue that the employer can defy governmental decisions.4 Marx showed, in the first volume of Capital, in the long chapter on the struggle for the regulation of the working day, that capitalists had ample room for maneuver inside the factories to circumvent the legislation limiting the working day. In Brazil, we had a specific and enlightening example of other facets of employer power, which is real power, in the capitalist economy. We refer to the Cruzado Plan, the anti-inflationary economic plan implemented by the Sarney government in 1986. This plan froze the prices of all goods. In a short time, capitalists reacted in a variety of ways: flouting the law and openly marking up prices, selling goods in the black market, or simply withholding production. The government proved to be incapable of maintaining price-fixing in a capitalist economy, precisely due to the capitalists’ molecular control over the economic fabric. However, even the capitalists’ capability to resist the decisions of a determined government depends on the statute of private property established and guaranteed by the state. It is also worth remembering that employer power is tested by workers in situations of crisis. In the event of a workers’ revolt that challenges the right of property, it is the employer’s resourcing to justice and 4 Marxist author Ralph Miliband thoroughly analyzes how the employers’ authority within the company represents an asset for the capitalist class in the dispute for state power in The State in Capitalist Society (1961, Chapter 6, “Imperfect competition”).

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repression—i.e., to the state—that will restore the power relations within the capitalist order. Therefore, as a general conclusion, although the exercise of power does not take place only in the state, the various centers of power effectively depend on the legislative and repressive action of the state to function as such. Prohibiting, interdicting, and repressing are also part of the exercise of power. The simple ostentation of the repressive apparatus of the state is by itself an element of containment of contesting actions or simple disobedience to the order. The efficient use of this apparatus occurs basically in two ways: in an open, massive manner against social struggles that transgress the limits of private property and of the bourgeois order; and in a hidden, molecular manner, by organizing and disciplining the daily functioning of the various power centers of capitalist society.

Institutional Concentration of Power in the State: Ideology What is most important is that Michel Foucault does not realize that the capitalist state apparatus—its legal norms and institutions—produces and disseminates ideology and that this ideology is a necessary condition for the functioning of the various centers of power studied by Foucault. Such centers depend not only on the state’s repressive action but also on the ideological production of the state apparatus. Foucault attributes to Marxists the concept of power as mere prohibition and repression, and yet he also sees the state in this light: as a merely repressive apparatus. That is why he locates the “productive” or “creative” function of power elsewhere. Michel Foucault, as we have already indicated in one of the quotes transcribed above, does not give due consideration to the juridicalpolitical structure of the state and believes an examination of this structure to be of minor importance. As we have already highlighted, in our discussion we are only taking into account the capitalist state’s power. Well, this type of state brings together a new kind of law and bureaucratic organization, which is a consequence of the bourgeois political revolution and produces ideological effects that are precise and paramount to the reproduction of the capitalist social and economic order. Both Marx and Lenin drew attention to the importance of this phenomenon. By contrast, Foucault did not realize its complexity and, as we have already indicated, attributed the modernization of the state bureaucracy, i.e., the

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replacement of a repressive force organized through lord–vassal ties with a professional repressive force—a process that began in a narrow way under the absolutist state—to a merely technical requirement of the new weapons of war. After Marx and Lenin, one of the first Marxist authors to take this problem (the state’s new capitalist organization) as a central object of study was the Soviet jurist Pashukanis, in the 1920s. In the 1960s, in Political Power and Social Classes, Nicos Poulantzas resumed Pashukanis’s analysis and reached an innovative characterization of the structure of the capitalist state.5 In Poulantzas’s analysis, the capitalist law equalizes agents who occupy unequal socioeconomic positions, thus taking on a formally egalitarian character, while the bureaucracy, consistently with the formal equality of the capitalist law, recruits its agents from all social classes, taking on an apparent universalist character. None of this occurred in pre-capitalist states. In slavery and feudalism, the law treated unequally those who were unequal, giving rise to orders and estates, and state institutions had their class character inscribed in their norms, composition, and functioning—suffice it to remember the organization, during Absolutism, of the French Estates General, which excluded serfs and separated representatives of the clergy, nobility, and commoners from one another. On the other hand, the apparent universalism of the capitalist bureaucracy is unfolded in the other institutions of this state, which includes its representative institutions. As Lenin recalled in his 1919 lecture on the state—presented to students at the University of Sverdlov—the bourgeois democracy, unlike the pre-bourgeois democracies, can be forced, by the very structure of the bourgeois state and depending on the popular and workers’ struggles, to welcome workers as subjects of political rights. And Lenin indicated one of the possible consequences of this fact: the workers’ illusion regarding the transformative potential of the institutions of the bourgeois democracy (see Lenin, 1972 [1919]).

5 Pashukanis’s major work was published in the USSR in 1924. In English it was

published with the title Law and Marxism: a General Theory (London: Pluto Press, 1987). Poulantzas’s book was released in 1968 by the former Éditions Maspero, and published in English with the title Political Power and Social Classes (London: Verso, 1978). Ten years later, he published L’État, le pouvoir et le socialism (1978). In this second book, he polemicizes with Michel Foucault. However, having abandoned the theses from Political Power and Social Classes, the considerations he draws about Foucault are different from those we will present here.

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It was this type of analysis that Poulantzas undertook, noting that the formally egalitarian law and the supposedly universalist state institutions produce very important ideological effects. Formal equality produces an effect of isolation, which hides from social agents their belonging to a class and induces them to think of themselves as singular, atomized individuals. The apparent universalism of the state produces, in turn, an ideological effect that Poulantzas calls the effect of representation of a unity, shaped in the ideological figure of the people-nation. Therefore, contrary to what Foucault imagines, there is a long Marxist tradition that does consider the “productive” aspect of power, and not just its negative or repressive aspects. According to Pashukanis and Poulantzas—not to mention Antonio Gramsci, who also highlighted, in different terms, the ideological function of the state—the bourgeois power produces the modern “individual-citizen” and the “state of all the people,” which are the cells, both real and illusory, of all bourgeois politics. Well, we hypothesize that the existing centers of power in capitalist society depend on these two basic ideological effects produced by the capitalist state. Let us illustrate this hypothesis. The capitalist enterprise, which Foucault describes as a power impervious to the intervention of the “legal power,” depends, directly and doubly, on the ideological effects produced by the bourgeois state. On the one hand, as already stated, the law institutes and guarantees private property; in case strikers occupy a factory or rural workers occupy an agricultural property, the capitalist can, by filing a repossession suit, count on the “public” police force to expel those who have invaded the property. On the other hand—and here we enter the ideological dimension of the problem—it is the capitalist law that, through the creation of formal equality, creates in the worker the illusion that the relationship of exploitation of his work is a contractual relationship between free and equal parties. Under the influence of this ideological illusion, the worker may understand their presence in the enterprise and the work they perform there as a result of their choice, allowing the exploitation of the workforce to be sustained in a more or less peaceful way. The worker may be compelled by material necessity to lease their labor power to the capitalist, but it is the bourgeois legal ideology that convinces them that this is a legitimate or natural practice. Employer authority is thus legitimized by this specific ideological effect. It seems rather commonplace: the same

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citizen who, according to the bourgeois ideological discourse, holds political sovereignty is prevented from managing the workplace where they are employed or even from participating in the choice of management of the enterprise or its governing body. They can have the most, but not the least, because the state is “public,” but the company is private and its owner must reign over it. At the beginning of the first volume of Capital (Marx, 2015 [1887]), more precisely in the passage from the second section (The Transformation of Money into Capital ) to the third section (The Production of Absolute Surplus-Value), in analyzing the relations between the worker and the capitalist as relations between seller and buyer of commodities, Marx comments on this contractual illusion produced by the bourgeois law. The owners of commodities, including the workers who sell their labor power, all appear as free and equal people who exchange equivalent things. The salaried worker is, in fact, legally free, unlike the slave and the serf. The proclamation of freedom is, as Louis Althusser observed in his comments on ideology, an allusion to reality. However, this very proclamation is also mainly an illusion, insofar as it hides the relationship between exploitation and class domination— the workers can at most choose for which capitalist they will work, but they cannot choose whether or not to work for the capitalist class. The juridical-political structure of the state, unaddressed by Michel Foucault, acts through ideology in the back of the social agents—the capitalist and the worker—ensuring that the power of the former over the latter can be exercised regularly and more or less peacefully. The ideological effects of the capitalist state are also active both in the functioning of the school system and in the exercise of power within the school. To address this matter, we should carry out an appropriationrectification, by Marxism, of sociology concepts developed by Pierre Bourdieu regarding the school system. Two concealments allow the race for diplomas to be perceived as a fair and balanced dispute, thus legitimizing the social and economic inequalities established by the school: (1) The concealment of socioeconomic inequality by formal legal equality and; (2) the concealment of class functioning in the capitalist state by its supposedly universalist institutions. The result is that in the race for diplomas, the children of the bourgeoisie and the upper-middle class come out ahead and can rely on the rules of the game being set in their

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favor (cf. Baudelot & Establet, 1980).6 The diploma is a source of power within the school system and outside of it: in large public and private companies, in the branches of the state apparatus, in hospitals, in prisons, and many other institutions of the capitalist society. The legal-political ideology produced and disseminated by the institutions of the capitalist state acts effectively, even though covertly, to ensure the legitimacy of the school system and the diplomas. Considerations similar to those we have drawn for the enterprise and the capitalist school could be made in the case of unions oriented by a capitalist of bourgeois and petty-bourgeois political parties, and other institutions of society and the political process in capitalism. The typical ideological figures of bourgeois political ideology, produced by the structure of the capitalist state, are presupposed and, at the same time, realized and disseminated in these associations. Bourgeois and petty-bourgeois political parties can represent themselves as associations of indistinct citizens who share certain ideas and values, and not as class organizations, thanks to the legal-political structure that is typical of capitalism (see Chapter 7 of this book); unions oriented by a capitalist ideology can function as mere negotiators of the labor power commodity thanks to the legal figure of the employment contract created and maintained by the capitalist state (see Chapter 7 of this book). Let us conclude this section: if we think, as suggested above, of the double dimension of the capitalist state (at the same time repressive and ideological), we will be able to understand that the centers of power in the capitalist society, even though having their own efficiency and importance, gravitate around an institutional center that is the capitalist state. It should be noted that this thesis leads to an important theoretical-political consequence. The concept of political action depends on the concept of power. If power is concentrated in the state, the political struggle must also have the state power as its main objective. Unlike what Foucault used to say and some intellectuals of the alter-globalist movement claim today, the matter of conquering state power remains a central strategic task of the movements fighting for the revolutionary transformation of capitalist society. If the thesis alleging that power is diffuse is false, the 6 A rigorous, comprehensive exposition of Pierre Bourdieu’s work on education is provided by Nogueira and Nogueira (2004). On the marginalization and stigmas that the school system reserves for members of the working class, see the now classic monograph written by Bourdieu’s disciples (Beaud & Pialoux, 1999).

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thesis proposing that “everything is politics” is also false. To propose, as Foucault does, the dispersion of the political struggle—indistinctly, across all real or supposed centers of power and ignoring the strategic centrality of the conquest of state power—is to divert the popular classes from the struggle to transform capitalist society.7

Social Concentration of Power by the Ruling Class Let us move on to the critique of the first and fourth theses listed by Foucault. The author’s first thesis maintains that power is socially diffuse. Now, in our understanding, and following the Marxist tradition that presumes the existence of a dominant class, we feel able to argue that the state and the peripheral power centers cooperate with the reproduction of capitalism and, therefore, the domination of a part of the society over another; in our case here, the domination of the bourgeoisie over the workers. Following this line of thought, power must be considered to be concentrated not only institutionally, but also socially. This is already indicated by the previously discussed examples regarding the enterprise and the school. Capitalist private property is implemented and guaranteed by the state, while the capitalist division of labor is legitimized by the school system, which is itself organized by the state. The enterprise and the school build and reproduce, each in their particular ways, peripheral centers of the bourgeoisie’s class power. In this sense, power would be, to make use of a clever summary made up by Foucault to illustrate the conception he criticizes: “a general system of domination exerted by one group over another, a system whose effects, through successive derivations, pervade the entire social body” (Foucault, 1978a, p. 92). However, the broader difference between the Foucauldian and the Marxist problematics interferes directly and unavoidably in the discussion of the social concentration of power. As we have already indicated, a fundamental assumption of the Foucauldian concept of power is the idea that the power relationship is inter-individual. Although this presupposition was not formulated in any of the theses listed by the author when he began to reflect on his

7 On the “new Foucauldians” of the alter-globalizatist movement, see Boron (2003).

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own concept of power, it is one of the pillars on which all his arguments stand. Such presupposition separates Foucault from Marx and the Marxist tradition, which conceives of power as a class relationship. Would this difference make the two problematics incommunicable—or incommensurable, as Thomas Kuhn would put it—and would it make it impossible to judge the superiority of either concept of power? We believe not. In order to oppose the idea that power expresses the domination of one part of society over another, one might follow the Foucauldian line of thought to argue that the capitalist, despite being master in his enterprise, must submit, outside of it, to the policeman or the traffic officer, who are salaried workers just like those under his command within the small private kingdom that is the modern enterprise. We would have then a flow of power relations with successive inversions of positions and confrontations, without ever fixating on a group of individuals in the dominant rank and another in the dominant position. To understand this, let us recall another element of Foucault’s analysis. In addition to individualizing the power relationship, Foucault has pointed out in the fourth thesis listed at the beginning of this chapter that he is interested in the way power is exercised—in its means and methods—while dismissing or ignoring, we should add, the analysis of the content of measures and the relationship of this content with particular interests and values of specific social sectors. Finally, to conclude our comparison, on Foucault’s side, power is a relationship between individuals whose main attribute is the method or means that establishes and maintains this relationship; on the other camp, in the field of Marxism, power is a relationship between (class) collectives whose main attribute is the content of the measures implemented by power. Incommensurability of issues? Not at all, if we take into consideration that the analysis of society and the problematics that support them, just like any scientific analysis, cannot evade empirical verification—the factual evidence. The decisions made by the state power favor certain individuals to the detriment of others depending on the positions they occupy in the economy and society. There is a possible statistic of the cumulative reproductive effect of class inequality. State policy and class position will condition personal prospects concerning the goods that are most necessary for life, well-being, social and political status, and access to leisure and culture. Keeping the peace or declaring war, preserving private property or socializing the means of production, increasing or decreasing employment rates, distributing or concentrating income, democratizing

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the access to leisure and culture or maintaining them as a privilege— these are fundamental issues for human life that cannot be placed on the same level as those regarding traffic control or the authority of adults over children. Foucault levels everything arbitrarily: power relations necessarily bring out […] open the possibility of resistance[…] So it is more the multiform, perpetual struggle that I try to elicit than the stable, lukewarm domination of a uniformizing apparatus. Everywhere there is a struggle − at every moment there is the revolt of the child who puts a finger up their nose at the table to annoy their parents, and that is, if you like, a rebellion − and at every moment one goes from rebellion to domination, from domination to rebellion; and it is all this perpetual stirring that I would like to elicit. (Foucault, 1977, In: Mota, 2006, p. 232)

We argue that the control of traffic and hygiene at the table, enforced by traffic officers and adults, cannot be leveled with the control of the economy, international politics, and access to leisure and culture. If we level everything, it is clear that individual trajectories will zigzag, over the course of a single day, from being the one enforcing power to being the one who resists it. The individual—a female worker, for example—can start the day exerting her “power” over her children, spend the workday suffering the action of her employer’s “power,” and stop at a bar at the end of the workday where she gives orders to the waiter, and then return home, where she takes orders from the spouse. It so happens that the nature and social importance of these four relationships are different, and it is this difference that Foucault’s generic concept of “power” conceals and ignores. There are different kinds of “power,” but Michel Foucault’s formalism, which only considers the methods of exercising power in the analysis of this phenomenon, hides all these distinctions. It is the power to influence the course of the economy, to choose between war and peace, and make decisions related to culture that most affects an individual’s position in society and living. This is an empirically observable fact. In these major issues, which are in charge of state policy and some peripheral centers of power as well, we notice two important phenomena. Firstly, whoever holds a position of power in one sphere (for example, the economy) has an important advantage to compete for power in another (for example, government). However, Foucault refuses to reflect on the relationship between politics and economics, presenting this refusal as

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an important difference between his conception of power and that of historical materialism (see Foucault, 1978b). The phenomenon of convergence between powers occurs because inter-individual relationships are, in fact, socially determined: the wealthy can use their wealth to bribe a traffic officer who threatens to arrest or fine them, thus inhibiting the enforcement of the officer’s power; if the head of a company section is a male, he can rely on the authority conferred by sexism added to the authority of his position to intimidate a female employee, who will be thus doubly disadvantaged, both as a subordinate and a woman. It is the refusal to reflect on the nature of the different power relations and on the relations of such “powers” among themselves that allows Foucault to think of power as something so fluid and indistinct. Secondly, state measures are cumulative, both positively and negatively, for groups in social and economic positions defined as class positions. This is why power is not a softly flowing network, but something that establishes rigid divisions that regularly separate individuals belonging to favored groups from those belonging to disadvantaged groups. This is also a fact statistically demonstrated by sociological research.8

Final Considerations Marxism is a rather broad, heterogeneous intellectual field that we believe to be unified only by the thesis that history is a process that creates, in the capitalist society, the conditions for the transition to socialism. Save for that, the traditions of thought within the Marxist heritage vary greatly. The Marxism that Foucault knew and with which he debated was just the Soviet Marxism of the Stalin period, the Marxism he studied during his time in the French Communist Party. That is not enough to polemicize, as Foucault intended, with the Marxist conception of power, since such an undertaking would require the consideration of a broader intellectual universe. Two of the criticisms that Foucault erroneously directed toward Marxism, in general had, in our opinion, a certain rationale, as long as they were directed solely at the Soviet Marxism of the Stalin period. It is true that this form of Marxism considered repression almost exclusively as a source of power and power based only and entirely on the state. But we have seen that not all Marxists regarded power this way.

8 A pioneering book on this subject is Bertaux (1977).

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As for the issue of repression, the Marxist authors we have analyzed, who considered ideology as a fundamental factor of power, were already well known in France in the 1970s. It is rather surprising that Foucault did not even consider Gramsci’s work—also published and much studied and discussed in France at the time—given that the central focus of Gramsci’s political thought was the study of the cultural dimension of power and not just its repressive aspect. In fact, it is worth pointing to the unexpected similarity one might spot between Gramsci and these theses by Foucault—and, for the same reasons, between the concept of Ideological State Apparatuses (ISA), coined by Althusser, and these same theses by Foucault. In his own way, Gramsci (like the Althusser of the ISA) also unduly reduces the importance of the state apparatus (“in a strict sense”) and, at this institutional level, moves closer to Foucault’s line of thought—although he moves away when it comes to the social (class) function of power. We should clarify that the hypothesis we stick to, concerning the precedence of the bourgeois legal-political ideology (produced and disseminated by the bureaucratic apparatus of the capitalist state), over non-state political associations (such as schools, parties, and unions), collides with the Gramscian distinction between political society and civil society, which we know is based on the idea of the prevalence of force in the former (political society or state in the strict sense) and the prevalence of ideology in the latter (civil society or private apparatuses of hegemony). We maintain that the basic ideological assumptions of the bourgeois hegemony come not from the sphere of “civil society,” but precisely from what Gramsci calls “political society” or “state in a strict sense.” The idea that there are peripheral centers of power organized outside the state was a topic of intense discussion among French Marxists of that period, mainly among Maoists, who were influenced by the Cultural Revolution, and, to a lesser extent, among the Trotskyists of the Revolutionary Communist League in France (Ligue communiste révolutionnaire, LCR). At that time, it was discussed the importance of initiating, after the conquest of state power, a process of transforming the power in the factory, (replacing the management by specialists with the management by the workers), in the school, as well as in the whole set of the social fabric. The need to destatizate political power in the construction of socialism—the transfer of state purviews to popular organizations—was also discussed. Such discussion took place within the Marxist domain, contemplating the transference of power from the bourgeoisie to the workers, and not from

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Foucault’s generic, individualistic, anti-authoritarian perspective. Foucault knew some of the Marxist intellectuals involved in this debate, particularly the Maoists to whom he granted controversial interviews, such as the one published in Portuguese with the title Microfísica do Poder [Microphysics of Power] (Foucault, 1979). However, when debating with Marxism, Foucault always returned to—or took refuge in, we are tempted to say— the simple, simplified figure of Soviet Marxism generated during the Stalin period. It was this simplified Marxism that he criticized. Foucault’s theses on power resume, as some authors have already indicated, the concept of power elaborated before him by Talcott Parsons in the 1950s. Unlike Foucault, Parsons aspired to build a general, systematic theory of society and inserted his concept of power within this theory. In his normative functionalism, values hold the “cybernetic command” (Parsons) of the social system, i.e., they are the system’s integrating center (Quintaneiro & Oliveira, 2000). Power and politics would then be the means for the collective pursuit of goals that are common to the whole society and provided by common integrative values. That is a much different field from that in which Foucault works, a network of powers marked by struggle, confrontation, and fluidity. However, the similarities between Parsons and Foucault are many, making it odd that Foucault and today’s Foucauldian scholars do not refer, unless we are mistaken, to his American predecessor. Parsons also described power as being diffuse both at the institutional and social levels, also dismissed the importance of force in the exercise of power—presenting, in the opinion of his critics, a rose-colored view of this phenomenon—and finally, like Foucault, concealed the relations between political power and economic power (Parsons, 1969).9 For Parsons—more precisely, in the last phase of his theoretical production—power and politics were indistinctly present in the enterprise, school, hospital, or government, without hierarchy and not centered in the state or a dominant group (Parsons, 1970). Parsons did admit that power can be unequally distributed, but rejected the idea of a dominant social group and defended a pluralist concept of power. Nonetheless, we maintain that the diffusion, distribution, and omission of the importance of the use of force are possible because the Parsonian system had a central integrating element—the values that would be shared by the whole society. In Foucault’s case, the matter of how 9 For an enlightening critique of Parsons’s concepts of power and politics, see Giddens (1998).

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the shifting flow of power relations and confrontations coexists with the relative stability of the social organization was a question the French philosopher refused to face.

References Baudelot, C., & Etablet, R. (1980). L´école capitaliste en France. Maspéro. Beaud, S., & Pialoux, M. (1999). Retour sur la condition ouvrière: enquête aux usines Peugeot de Sochaux-Montbéliard. Fayard. Bertaux, D. (1977). Structures de classes et inégalités sociales. PUF. Boron, A. (2003). A selva e a polis. Interrogações em torno da teoria política do zapatismo. In Filosofia política marxista. Cortez. Foucault, M. (1971). Nietzsche, la généalogie, l’histoire. In Dits et Écrits. P.U.F. Available (checked 20 April 2022) at: http://1libertaire.free.fr/MFoucault 217.html Foucault, M. (2006 [1977]). Poder e saber, entrevista com S. Hasumi, gravada em Paris em 13 de outubro. In M. B. Mota (Org.), Michel Foucault: Ditos e escritos IV. Estratégias, poder-saber (2ª. ed.). Forense Universitária. Foucault, M. (1978a). The history of sexuality (Vol. 1). Pantheon Books. Foucault, M. (2006 [1978b]). Diálogo sobre o poder. In M. B. Mota (Org.), Michel Foucault: Ditos e escritos IV. Estratégias, poder-saber (2ª. ed.). Forense Universitária. Foucault, M. (1979). Microfísica do poder. Graal. Foucault, M. (1994, September). Les mailles du pouvoir. Magazine Litteraire, no. 324. Foucault, M. (2012, September 12). The Mesh of Power. Viewpoint Magazine. Available (checked 2 August 2022) at: https://viewpointmag.com/2012/ 09/12/the-mesh-of-power/ Giddens, A. (1998). Poder nos escritos de Talcott Parsons. In Política, sociologia e teoria social. Editora Unesp. Lebrun, G. (1981). O poder. Brasiliense (Coleção Primeiros Passos). Lenin, V. I. (1972 [1919]). The state. In Lenin’s collected works (4th ed., Vol. 29). Progress Publishers. Available (checked 14 May 2022) at: https://www. marxists.org/archive/lenin/works/1919/jul/11.htm Marton, S. (1993). Nietzsche. Moderna. Marx, K. (2015 [1887]). Capital—A critique of political economy (Vol. 1). Progress Publishers. Available (checked 11 August 2022) at: https://www. marxists.org/archive/marx/works/download/pdf/Capital-Volume-I.pdf Miliband, R. (1961). The state in capitalist society. Basic Books. Nogueira, M. A., & Nogueira, C. M. (2004). Bourdieu & a educação. Autêntica. Pakushanis, E. (1987). Law and Marxism: A general theory. Pluto Press.

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Parsons, T. (1969). On the concept of political power. In Politics and social structure. The Free Press and Collier-Macmillan Limited. Parsons, T. (1970). O aspecto político da estrutura e do processo social. In D. Easton (Org.), Modalidades de análise política. Zahar. Poulantzas, N. (1978). State, power, social classes. Verso. Quintaneiro, T., & de Oliveira, M. G. M. (2000). Labirintos simétricos: uma introdução à teoria sociológica de Talcott Parsons. Editora UFMG.

CHAPTER 3

The Place of the State in the Marxist Theory of History

This chapter makes a theoretical discussion about the role of politics in historical change. What is the place that politics occupies (or should occupy) in the theory of the transition from one type of society to another? With the help of theory, we try to clarify the importance of the political revolution in the transition process. The central thesis is this: the development of new relations of production requires a new type of state, with a new type of structure. It is not possible to develop capitalist production relations under a feudal state, just as it is not possible to develop socialist production relations under an organized state based on bureaucracy and bourgeois law.

Text prepared for a presentation at the Marxism Working Group during the XI Meeting of the National Association of Graduate Studies in Philosophy, held in October 2004 in the city of Salvador, state of Bahia, Brazil. The composition of this text was inspired by the discussions of the Group of Althusserian Studies of the Center for Marxist Studies (Cemarx) at Unicamp, which counted on the participation of our colleagues Andriei Gutierrez, Ângela Lazagna, Anita Handfas, Eleonora Frenkel, Flávio de Castro, Jair Pinheiro, Luciano de Assis, Luziano Mendez, Paula Marcelino, and Santiane Arias. Published in Crítica Marxista, n. 19, Rio de Janeiro: Revan, second semester of 2004. © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2023 A. Boito, State, Politics, and Social Classes, Marx, Engels, and Marxisms, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-22046-3_3

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The general goal of this chapter is to resume the discussion about the Marxist theory of history and the transition to socialism, a discussion that, unfortunately, has been practically abandoned by most Marxist intellectuals. Our specific goal will be to offer a reflection on the place of politics in the theory of history, recovering part of the debate conducted in the 1960s and 1970s around the subject. The definition of the place of politics in the Marxist theory of history— understood here as the definition of the place of political practice and the juridical-political structure in the transition processes from one mode of production to another—needs to overcome numerous theoretical and ideological obstacles in order to advance. For many decades, this definition has faced the theoretical-ideological obstacle represented by economism, which was a hegemonic trend in twentieth-century Marxist social democracy and communism and is still very powerful today. Economistic Marxism perceives historical change as a simple reflection of a previous economic change and, in terms of political strategy, such Marxism can, in some of its versions, reject the idea that the revolutionary struggle for power is a prerequisite for the transition to socialism; economistic Marxism tends towards reformism. Although this conception of Marxism is broadly, rigorously, and multifariously discredited by the body of Marx’s work, we shall see that it finds shelter in an important text by the founder of historical materialism, at least as far as the theory of history is concerned. More recently, since the end of the twentieth and the beginning of the twenty-first centuries, the definition of the place of politics in historical change has faced new obstacles and interdictions. These new obstacles have different origins and natures. Some of them were brought into the theoretical-ideological debate by the political and organizational proposals of neo-utopian tendencies, present in the so-called anti-globalization movement; others, by the theoretical and philosophical theses of the so-called aleatory materialism, developed by the “last Althusser.” The new utopianism has spread a thesis claiming that it would be possible to “change the world without taking power”—as the title of a book, we will quote later states with rare stylistic clarity. To accomplish such a feat, it would suffice for workers to exercise socialism at the heart of capitalist society itself. Between the old economism and the new utopianism, despite their specificities, there is an approximation through negative attributes, since both can dispense with political revolution, but there are also some positive similarities. We can find an example of that

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in the ideas of Brazilian economist Paul Singer, national secretary for the Solidarity Economy during the Lula government. Singer theorizes about the possibility of gradually building socialism at the core of the capitalist economy, developing production and consumption cooperatives. Workers should abandon the preparation of the political revolution, a task that would only divert socialists from the implantation, here and now, of cells of socialism, i.e., from the effective realization of what Singer calls the social revolution. Another neo-utopian theorist is John Holloway, who theorizes the experience of Zapatism in Chiapas. Holloway rejects the struggle for state power as a transition to socialism; like Singer, he also defends the possibility of starting to build socialism here and now (Holloway, 2005; Singer, 1999).1 As for the “last Althusser”, his aleatory materialism replaces the problematic of historical materialism—which conceives of history as a process whose laws are cognizable—with another problematic, in which history is perceived as the realm of contingency (see Althusser, 2006). While the defenders of neo-utopianism and economism deny or dismiss the role of the political struggle for power in the transition to socialism, aleatory materialism disqualifies any claim to determine the place of politics in the theory of history, since it would be pointless to set the task of determining places in a theory that is non-existent and unthinkable. It is worth noting that this contingent materialism also leaves the door open for reformism, as it cannot deny, in good logic, the possibility of dispensing with the political revolution to achieve the transition to socialism, provided that it can only think of history as a surprise.

The Hegelian Problematic and Economism in the 1859 Preface The hypotheses for a theory of history that Marx presents in the famous Preface to his book A Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy are based on a problematic very close to that of the philosophy of history developed by Hegel in Lectures on the Philosophy of World History and Elements of the Philosophy of Right. The theoretical and political consequence of Marx’s particular use of the Hegelian problematic in this text

1 For a critique of these and other authors of the current we are calling neo-utopian, see Boron (2003) and Zarpelon (2003).

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is an economistic view of history that conceals the role of politics in transition processes. In a synthetic formula, Louis Althusser states that the problematic is the “deep unit” of a theoretical or ideological thought (see Althusser, 1965).2 The problematic is the set of questions, ideas, and assumptions that delimit the field in which a certain theory is produced, a field not always visible on the surface of theoretical discourse, but that determines the conditions and possibilities for the formulations of such discourse. We should add two observations. The first is that different theories can be built based on the same and unique problematic, as we claim to have happened with Hegel’s philosophy of history and the theory of history outlined in Marx’s 1859 Preface—as we shall see, despite their differences, these theories are based on the same problematic. The second observation is that a problematic must be subdivided into levels of abstraction forming a pyramid in which each new step is, starting from the vertex that constitutes the elementary, most abstract point of the problematic, a derived position with a greater concreteness. Thus, the Hegelian problematic in Lectures on the Philosophy of World History introduces as its most general, elementary questions, firstly, the question related to the universal Spirit, which is conceived as the only free, active element, and then, those questions concerning the historical process, conceived as an ordered whole, and also those questions related to the movement, conceived as the result of a single contradiction. Marx never took up this problematic in its entirety, but he never completely broke with it either, although, as we shall see, he moved further away from it in his texts of the 1870s. Hegel, both in Elements of the Philosophy of Right, published in 1821 and in the course he taught in 1831 and which led to Lectures on the Philosophy of World History, described history as the contradictory process of self-development of the Spirit of the world, while Marx, writing about 25 years later, described it as the contradictory process of selfdevelopment of the productive forces. Let us examine this. On the one hand, we are talking about self-development because, for both authors, the 2 Since we have rejected the “last Althusser” and are now using concepts this same author developed in Pour Marx and Lire le Capital, both from the 1960s, it is appropriate to include a clarification. Our procedure might appear contradictory, but it is coherent because, in our view, there is an epistemological rupture separating the Althusser of the 1960s from the “last Althusser” (of the 1980s). This rupture was provoked precisely by the introduction in his work of the problematic of aleatory materialism in place of that of historical materialism, as we have already indicated.

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force that moves history is autonomous and unique3 ; on the other hand, this self-development is contradictory because both forces, the Spirit of the world and the productive forces, exist and expand within a form that, at a given moment in the process, is transformed from a stimulus into an obstacle to its development—in Hegel, this form is the Spirit of a people, which can develop, up to a certain stage, the virtualities of the Spirit of the world4 ; in Marx, this form is the production relations, which can develop, up to a certain stage, the productive forces. In the same way that the Spirit of the Greek people, at a certain stage in the development of the Spirit of the world, ceased to be a stimulus to become an obstacle to that development, leading the Greek people to lose, as a result of this mismatch, their status as “dominant people in the history of the world,” so the feudal mode of production, at a certain stage in the development of the productive forces, turned from a stimulus into an obstacle to such development and was therefore replaced with a superior mode of production. The Marx of the 1859 Preface literally inverted Hegel, as Marx himself would later state in the preface to the second German edition of Capital: he put economy (productive forces and production relations) in place of Spirit (universal Spirit and the Spirit of a people), i.e., he replaced an idealist dialectic, which would present the world upside down, by a materialist dialectic, which would show it with its feet on the ground. However, we could add that the inversion does not imply a relocation. The 1859 text remained a prisoner of the same dialectic according to which “all is one,” i.e., for which all history is nothing more than the development of the Spirit (Lectures ) or of the productive forces (1859

3 “[The Spirit] is its own product, it is its beginning and its end […]. To produce itself, to make of itself an object of itself, to know itself: this is the activity of the Spirit.” “The substance of history is the Spirit and the course of its evolution.” “History is the exhibition and realization of the universal Spirit” (Hegel, 1965, quotes extracted, respectively, from pp. 70, 76, and 298). 4 “The people that receives such an element [i.e., the particular Spirit that expresses

the universal Spirit in its self-evolution] as a natural principle has the mission of realizing it in the evolutionary process of the self-consciousness of the Spirit of the world. [This people is] the representative of a certain stage of the Spirit of the world […]” (Hegel, 1965, p. 300). “[With] the birth of a higher principle […] [i. e., with] the passing of the Spirit to a new principle […] history is handed over to another people” (p. 300).

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Preface).5 After establishing his fundamental hypothesis about the historical process, Marx concludes the Preface by describing the movement of the economy as a necessary and sufficient cause of historical change. In the sequence, we transcribe a key and well-known passage: At a certain stage of development, the material productive forces of society come into conflict with the existing relations of production or – this merely expresses the same thing in legal terms – with the property relations within the framework of which they have operated hitherto. From forms of development of the productive forces these relations turn into their fetters. Then begins an era of social revolution. The changes in the economic foundation lead sooner or later to the transformation of the whole immense superstructure. (Marx, 1970, p. 21)6

The only caveat contained in this sentence concerns the length of time that might elapse between the cause (economic change) and the consequence (political change). Politics appears only as an epiphenomenon. We shall make two more observations to better illustrate the proximity between the two texts. The first observation brings them even closer together. Both in Hegel and in the Marx of 1859, the historical process, reflecting either the development of the Spirit of the world or the development of the productive forces, makes use in its immanent development of men’s actions—for Hegel, human action, although essential for the realization of the Spirit, is only the unconscious arm of the Spirit, whereas for the Marx of the 1859 Preface, men live the conflict between the productive forces and the production relations in the field of ideology and act, even without realizing it, to resolve it in the field of political action. Hence, in both cases, it is men who make history, but in neither case do they make it as subjects. This finding may seem paradoxical to the rather hasty analyses of the problem.

5 Commenting on a fragment by Thales of Miletus, Hegel (1973) asserts that Thales should be considered the first philosopher because he was the first to establish that “all is one.” 6 G. A. Cohen claims that the 1859 Preface is Marx’s definitive text on the theory of

history (Cohen, 1989). It is worth remembering, though, that a year or two before writing the Preface, Marx offered a very different approach to this same issue. In the well-known text from the Grundrisse, in which he examines the forms prior to capitalist production, Marx describes different paths for historical development and does not conceive such development as being the result of a single cause. See Marx and Hobsbawm (1971).

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In fact, in an article criticizing the work of Louis Althusser, Michael Löwy reminds the reader of two theses that Althusser defended with equal insistence in several texts: the thesis according to which history is a process without subject or end, and the thesis claiming that the masses make history. After aligning these two theses, Löwy ironically asks how an author can maintain, in good logic, that the masses make history and, at the same time, that history is a process without a subject. It seemed so obvious to him that he had discovered a contradiction in the Althusserian work that he refrained from demonstrating it to the reader and ended his article in triumph (Löwy, 1999). Now, what we see in the texts of Hegel and Marx discussed here are different ways of conceiving history as a result of men’s actions without, therefore, men being the subjects of history. To make this idea clearer, it is appropriate to present some considerations. In Hegel’s philosophy of history, there is a tension in the issue concerning the subject of history and more than one possibility of reading it, but none of these readings can support the idea that men would be the subjects of history. If we emphasize the idea that the Spirit of the world—which is realized at the point of arrival of the historical process— is virtually ready at the beginning of this same process, we will have the Spirit as the subject of a history that takes place only to realize it [the Spirit]—such is the reading Jean Hyppolite conveys in his essay on Hegel’s philosophy of history. If we emphasize instead that the Spirit is actually formed during the very process, the process will be the true subject of the Spirit. Now, a process that has itself as the subject is, in fact, a process without a subject—such is the reading Althusser submitted in his lecture on Hegel at the Collège de France, in which he presented the thesis defending that history is a process without subject or end. Hence, in Hegel’s work, one can argue that history has a subject, although that subject is the universal Spirit and never men. As for Marx’s text of 1859, there is under no circumstances a subject of history, since the dynamics of history is given by the blind, spontaneous development of the productive forces. In either case, however, men make history, but never as subjects (see Althusser, 1979; Hyppolite, 1995). The second observation is that the reader might get carried away by a merely apparent approximation. As Marx did not set himself in 1859 the task of explaining the reason for the development of productive forces throughout history, his fundamental hypothesis may appear, in a less attentive reading, to be a metaphysical postulate, on the same level as

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the metaphysical postulate of the existence of the Spirit of the world in Hegel’s philosophy of history. However, this approximation is only formal because the limitation or blind spot of a scientific theory is not the same thing as a metaphysical postulate—the limitation is posited as such, i.e., as an obstacle to be overcome by further development of the research, while the Hegelian metaphysical postulate is “immovable.” At the end of this chapter, we will return to this point. Table 3.1 summarizes what we have said so far.

Table 3.1 The idea of the historical process: homology between the Marx of 1859 and Hegel HEGEL What (Introduction is Spirit? to Lectures on the Philosophy of World History and Elements of the Philosophy of Right

The Spirit is free, active, and transcendental The process of the Spirit’s realization is universal history

MARX What History is a process (Preface to is A Contri- history? determined by bution to the develthe opment of Critique of productive Political forces Economy)

Successive peoples (civilizations) as stages in the development of the Spirit

Successive modes of production as stages in the development of productive forces

At a certain stage of the process, the universal Spirit comes into contradiction with the Spirit of the people in which it realized itself This contradiction produces historical change

At a certain stage of the process, the productive forces come into contradiction with the production relations in which they developed. This contradiction produces a change in the superstructure as a whole

Peoples and individuals act in pursuit of their particular interests, but, without noticing it, they act concurrently as instruments of the universal (the Spirit)

Men become aware of the contradiction between productive forces and production relations in the field of ideology and solve it through class struggle

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Sketch of a New Problematic in Marx’s Late Texts However, as several studies have already shown, Marx did not remain faithful to this problematic throughout his work. In the so-called “late” phase of his production, Marx moved away from this Hegelian view of history—a spontaneous evolution that resulted from the unique, immanent contradiction of the very structure (see Costa Neto, 2003). It is worth quoting a reflection by Marx contained in one of his wellknown letters written in the 1870s on the Russian agrarian commune. In that letter, Marx states that his analysis of the evolution from feudalism to capitalism should be seen as a piece of historical analysis and not as a philosophy of history, and he draws other considerations—whose most important passages are italicized for our discussion. He [My critic] feels himself obliged to metamorphose my historical sketch of the genesis of capitalism in Western Europe into a historical-philosophic theory of the marche generale [general path] imposed by fate upon every people, whatever the historic circumstances in which it finds itself … But I beg his pardon. (He is both honouring and shaming me too much.) Let us take an example. In several parts of Capital I allude to the fate which overtook the plebeians of ancient Rome. They were originally free peasants, each cultivating his own piece of land on his own account. In the course of Roman history they were expropriated. The same movement which divorced them from their means of production and subsistence involved the formation not only of big landed property but also of big money capital. And so one fine morning there were to be found on the one hand free men, stripped of everything except their labour power, and on the other, in order to exploit this labour, those who held all the acquired wealth in possession. What happened? The Roman proletarians became, not wage labourers but a mob of do-nothings more abject than the former “poor whites” in the southern country of the United States, and alongside of them there developed a mode of production which was not capitalist but dependent upon slavery. Thus events strikingly analogous but taking place in different historic surroundings led to totally different results. By studying each of these forms of evolution separately and then comparing them one can easily find the clue to this phenomenon, but one will never arrive there by the universal passport of a general historical-philosophical theory, the

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supreme virtue of which consists in being super-historical.7 (Marx and Engels Correspondence)

Several aspects of this passage deserve reflection so we can understand how far it departs from the problematic on which the 1859 Preface is based. It is no longer possible to think of an immanent and unique contradiction whose spontaneous development would produce the totality of the historical process; proof of this is that Marx does not state that capitalism was not born in Rome because the productive forces were not sufficiently developed; what he claims is that “different historical surroundings” led to different results. Now, the notion of historical surroundings necessarily establishes the idea of a plurality of causes at the origin of a given mode of production. Capitalism was not born in ancient Rome—even though there arose, on the one hand, “big money capital” accumulated in the hands of a few, and, on the other hand, “free men, stripped of everything”—due to the lack of something capable of inducing these two elements to meet and converting them, respectively, into buyers and sellers of labor power, or in other words, into capitalists and laborers— “the Roman proletarians became […]a mob of do-nothings.” We would add, following Marx’s line of reasoning in the text previously quoted, that at the end of the Middle Ages, money capital and the free worker without property reappeared, but this time something made these two elements come together and generate the figures of the capitalist and the modern wage worker. Therefore, several factors are necessary to form the structure of a new mode of production and these factors can present relatively independent histories. “The late Marx” does not completely break with the Hegelian tradition. The quoted text remains faithful to the idea of a historical process, one of the fundamental ideas, as we have seen, of Hegel’s problematic. However, he breaks with the idea of causal unicity also present in that problematic and, consequently, breaks with the concept of a predictable, inevitable, unidirectional development that is its corollary. If there are multiple causes, an opening is introduced in the conception of the historical process. The transition to socialism must now be conceived as a historical possibility and not as an uncontestable necessity. However, Marx 7 Excerpt from Marx’s letter, written in November 1877, addressed to the editor of Otietchestvienniie Zapiski (Marx and Engels Correspondence).

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does not move toward the empiricist stance of abandoning the idea of a theory of history, and imagining the plurality of causes as a universe of infinite circumstances. We have seen that Marx dismisses the idea of a universal passport to the historical process, but not the idea that the historical process has an explanatory key, as the text also makes clear. Therefore, one solution would be to think of this plurality of causes as a complex, articulated chain of causes with unequal efficiencies.8 At this point, we can make use of the Althusserian concept of overdetermination: a concept that may serve to indicate ultimately the place of politics in a process determined, in the last stance, by the economy. “The late Marx” should not be seen as a precursor to Max Weber. By preserving the idea that history is a process governed by cognizable laws, which would be the object of a theory of history, Marx erects a barrier between his reflections and those that would form Weber’s theory, since for the latter it is not possible to produce a theory of history because History should be thought of as the result of an infinity of circumstantial causes. It would be up to researchers—informed by their own values and, in a certain manner, arbitrarily—to select the causes and circumstances with which they will build their explanation. Hence, there is no space in Weberian causal pluralism for the idea of a complex, articulated chain of causes with unequal efficiencies that would allow the formulation of a theory of the historical process.9 In the seminars held in Cemarx’s Althusserian Studies Group, a possible challenge arose to our statement that the texts by “the late Marx” would break with the issue of the 1859 Preface. The direct comparison of this Preface with the Letter to Russian Populists of 1877 would not be valid, since the former text would deal with a supramodal object, i.e., common to all modes of production and transitions, while the Letter to the Populists would address a specific transition in an also specific social formation (Rome). We do not consider this objection to be justified. In the theoretical formulation of the concepts of production mode and transition, we can conceive of three levels of abstraction ordered hierarchically from the most simple and abstract to the most complex and concrete: 8 This is a contribution from a text by Saes (1993). 9 On the Weberian issue about the infinity of causes and the arbitrariness of selection,

see Julien Freund’s excellent book, The Sociology of Max Weber (1968). As we do here, Gabriel Cohn also compares the Althusserian concepts of determination in the last stance and overdetermination with the Weberian-type explanation (Cohn, 1979).

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(a) the level of both the production mode and transition in general; (b) the level, more concrete than the previous one, of a specific production mode and its transition to another, also specific, production mode (for example, the transition from feudalism to capitalism); and (c) the even more concrete level of social formations, i.e., of actual existing societies within which different production modes can be articulated, societies that can present specific characteristics in the same type of transition—it is on this last level that we find, for example, the classic discussions about different paths of transition to capitalism (revolutionary, Prussian, etc.) in the different feudal social formations of modern Europe. The argument that challenged our analysis claimed that the direct comparison between the 1859 Preface and the Letter to the Russian Populists would be incorrect because, in the existing hierarchy between the supramodal level, the modal level, and the level of social formations, the Preface would be situated at the first level, and the Letter, at the third. However, I consider that Marx, in the Letter to the Russian Populists, after making some historical considerations about ancient Rome, compares that social formation with the social formation of modern Europe and draws a theoretical conclusion that refers to the most general level of abstraction, the supramodal level of the enumeration above. The conclusion of the Letter is situated at the same level as the Preface.

The Althusserian Marxists’ Contribution In the 1960s, the collective of authors that was producing, under the direction of Louis Althusser, the work Lire le Capital commissioned Etienne Balibar to examine the theme of transition. As we know, he started with the criticism of the 1859 Preface (Balibar, 2015).10 Balibar maintained that this text contained a mismatch between the Hegelian problematic, on which Marx still relied, and the new concepts and theses that he was just beginning to produce. Balibar relied on other texts by Marx, some of them produced in the 1870s, his so-called “late period.” The most used texts were those in which Marx discusses with the Russian revolutionaries the possibility of the socialist transition in Russia reusing the agrarian commune that remained in that country, especially Marx’s 10 See Althusser et al. (2015, Part 5). See particularly the last item of this text—“Elements for a Theory of Transition.” Secondarily, we also used Althusser (1993), particularly chapter IV, “Temps et progrès: encore une philosophie de l’histoire?”.

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letters to Mikhailovsky and Vera Zasulitch, the chapter “So-Called Primitive Accumulation” in volume I of Capital and the book Pre-Capitalist Economic Formations (Marx, 1965).11 Balibar’s text is developed on two different levels: on the epistemological level, addressing the problematic within which a Marxist theory of transition should be considered—a Marxist theory of history—and on the theoretical level, when the author presents his theses on the transition period. We believe that, by introducing some corrections to Balibar’s text and resuming the Marxist theory of political power and the State, we will be able to move forward with the reflection concerning the place of politics in the Marxist theory of history. The author’s general epistemological proposition is that it is necessary to think about transition outside the Hegelian problematic of the spontaneous evolution of the structure moved by its own internal, original, and unique contradiction. Contrary to what the historicist (evolutionist and teleological) conception assumes, a new structure is not born out of the previous structure. There are internal contradictions that originate in the structure, but these remain within the structural limits of the production mode. Balibar cites examples of the cyclical economic crises of capitalism. They stem from the contradictions of the structure of the capitalist economy, but, by themselves, they merely reproduce capitalism on another scale. It is true that they force us to think about the capitalist mode of production in its dynamics (extended reproduction), and not in a static way, as one does in a synchronic analysis (simple reproduction). Nevertheless, Balibar introduces a distinction between the dynamics of the capitalist mode of production (extended reproduction) and its diachrony (transition). As the transition does not result from the spontaneous evolution of the unique, original, internal contradiction of the structure, the laws of transition from any mode of production to another (laws of diachrony) are necessarily distinct from the laws of reproduction of any mode of production (laws of synchrony, for simple reproduction, and of dynamics, for extended reproduction): reproduction and transition are two objects belonging to two distinct regional theories.

11 The correspondence between Marx, Mikhaylovsky, and Vera Zasulitch was published in the aforementioned Dilemas do socialismo: a controvérsia entre Marx, Engels e os populistas russos (Fernandes, 1982).

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If transition can be the object of a theory of transition, this means that this text by Balibar, in spite of abandoning the Hegelian problematic, cannot be identified with the aleatory materialism of the “last Althusser.” In a reflection from the perspective of this materialism of contingency, Althusser maintains that the encounter of the two elements that are necessary for the development of the capitalist economy—the concentration of big money capital in the hands of a few and the existence of a mass of free, dispossessed workers, as mentioned in the Letter to the Russian Populists of 1877—is an aleatory encounter. These two elements did not come across each other in ancient Rome, but they could have done so, thus making capitalist relations of production appear before the rise of feudalism. Some ten centuries later, these same two elements crossed paths during the decline of feudalism, giving rise to the capitalist economic structure; but, as Althusser reminds us, they might not have crossed paths. Moreover, Althusser applies his aleatory materialism to both the transition and the reproduction of the production mode. The repetition in time of the encounter of these two elements, a repetition that characterizes the reproduction of the fully developed capitalist mode of production, is necessary only in appearance; in reality, at any moment, the encounter may or may not take place, and we will not be able to predict it. Aleatory materialism is, to its fullest extent, the realm of contingency, not that of necessary laws (Morfino, 2002). Let us return to Balibar’s text, as he works under the influence of the Althusserian problematic of the 1960s. If the structure does not evolve spontaneously thanks to a unique, internal contradiction, how can the transition take place? Would it be through a contradiction from the outside? That is not Balibar’s answer. What happens is that the expanded reproduction, i.e., the dynamics of the production mode, generates contradictory effects that may indeed give rise to the elements of the future production mode. “Contradiction is […] not original, but derivative”, asserts Balibar, or, in other words, contradiction is not in the structure, but in the effects of the structure. Based on the part entitled “Primitive Accumulation,” Balibar states that money capital concentrated in the hands of a few and the expropriated free worker emerged in the period when the feudal mode of production prevailed as an effect derived from the dynamics of this production mode; the concentration and centralization of capital and the socialization of labor are effects of the dynamics of the capitalist mode of production. However, concentration and socialization in capitalism are both of capitalist type; they are not

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seeds of socialism growing within capitalist society. The genealogy of these elements is not yet the history of capitalism, but its prehistory—Balibar makes abundant use of the part entitled “Primitive Accumulation.” This prehistory, which corresponds to the origins of the new mode of production—to the formation of each of its components—is separated from another phenomenon that is the beginning of its structure, of its history: the emergence of the new structural totality. The formation of this structure is, in fact, the beginning of a new mode of production and, therefore, of the object of transition theory. Having established these general epistemological propositions, Balibar presents his theoretical theses on transition. The transition phases, according to Balibar, would be characterized by two mismatches. In terms of the economic structure, the non-correspondence would be between property relations and material appropriation relations. An example would be the manufacturing period, in which we would have a non-correspondence between, on the one hand, the (already) capitalist property and, on the other hand, the technical control of production (still) in the hands of the workers. Capitalist private property (ownership relation) undermines the producer’s technical control over the production process (material appropriation relation), inducing the replacement of manufacturing by large-scale industry. The latter, by establishing the real subjection of labor to capital, restores the correspondence between property and material appropriation. In terms of the whole social structure, the non-correspondence between the different structural levels would be found thanks to a mismatch by anticipation of the political (“law, politics, and the state”) relative to the economic. Balibar does not abandon the thesis according to which the development of productive forces is at the basis of historical change.12 What can be inferred from his text is that development happens without an alteration of the nature of the prevailing economic structure. The political is anticipated because the state, thanks to the possibilities created by the development of the productive forces, is able to change the nature of its politics when the economy remains socially linked to the previous production relations. While speaking of the transition to capitalism, Balibar makes generic references to state violence and the manipulation of the law to advance the process of primitive accumulation. He suggests that the politics of the absolutist state would

12 It was Ângela Lazagna who, in the Cemarx debates, drew my attention to this point.

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induce the development of the then still-fledgling capitalist economy. Well, due to the non-correspondence or mismatch between, on the one hand, the property relation and the material appropriation relation, and, on the other hand, between politics and economy, the different structures and the different relations, instead of reproducing the conditions of reproduction of the others, interfere in their functioning by altering them. This would be the dynamics of the transition process. Firstly, Balibar does not specify what the relationship is between the two types of non-correspondence or mismatch that he presents—the mismatches in the economy and the whole social structure. Secondly, Balibar describes the political intervention of the state in primitive accumulation as a mismatch by anticipation of the political relative to the economic. Now, within the Balibarian problematic, that accumulation should be considered the history of the constitutive elements of the capitalist mode of production, or in other words, the prehistory of this mode of production, not the transition process, which is what is at stake here. Following Balibar’s general thesis about the mismatch by anticipation of the political, but characterizing such mismatch in another way, we will propose that the transition starts with the mismatch between the state and the economy, i.e., it begins with the mismatch between, on the one hand, the juridical-political structure of the state that “moved forward” as a result of a revolution and, on the other hand, the structure of the economy that was “left behind,” stuck to the previous production mode. We shall illustrate this thesis by referring to the transition from feudalism to capitalism and the transition from capitalism to socialism. The state is the main factor of cohesion of the social formations divided into classes, thanks to its repressive function and to another aspect that is almost always ignored: its ideological function. On the one hand, this organism holds the monopoly of organized force, displaying and mobilizing it regularly for the maintenance of production relations. In moments of crisis, this force is used widely and as a last resort to prevent social change. On the other hand, the state permanently secretes the fundamental ideological figures for the more or less peaceful reproduction of production relations. The legal existence of orders and estates was the source of the aristocratic ideology that legitimized the compulsory labor of peasant serfs in feudalism, in the same way as the formally egalitarian law in capitalism is the source of the contractual ideology that covers the exploitation relationship between the capitalist and the worker.

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A formally egalitarian law system and the apparently universalist state institutions linked to it are also the sources of the modern ideology of popular representation in the state. If we were to use Gramscian terminology, we would say, at least to indicate how this position diverges from that of the great Italian Marxist, that both domination (repression) and hegemony (moral orientation) have as their main center the state apparatus (in the strict sense) of the dominant class. Since the state is the main factor of cohesion of a social formation divided into classes, the transition requires a prior change in the state. In examining the transition to capitalism, the treatment chosen by Marxist historians and theorists is highly marked by economism. In almost all cases, they conceived of this transition as the result of the spontaneous, cumulative development of the capitalist economy within the feudal mode of production itself—a development that would lead, when reaching a certain level, to a political change that would simply “officialize,” at the level of politics, capitalism, which would already be a “fact” when it comes to the economy. In the terms of the 1859 Preface: “The changes in the economic foundation lead sooner or later to the transformation of the whole immense superstructure.” We have most likely made it already clear that our analysis goes in a different direction. In the process of bourgeois political revolution, which opens the transition period to capitalism, the bourgeois state created by the revolution, thanks to its formally egalitarian law, drives the replacement of compulsory labor, which is linked to the feudal legal hierarchy of orders and estates, by free work. The Declaration of the Rights of Man and of the Citizen is the revolutionary act par excellence that makes the state born of the revolution incompatible with servitude and, at the same time, promotes the formation of the labor (force) market, an essential element for the future development of the capitalist economy. Yes indeed, because, in our analysis, the economy that precedes the bourgeois political revolution is not of a capitalist type, but a feudal economy—feudal agriculture, manufacturing based on compulsory, feudal-type labor, and commerce bound by feudalism. This may seem like a vision that unilaterally values political change, but this impression will disappear, however, if we take into consideration that the social classes interested in and politically able to lead the process of a bourgeois political revolution were formed because of the process of (feudal) development of commerce, cities, and manufacturing that characterized European feudalism in the last centuries of its existence (Saes,

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1985).13 At this point, we return to Balibar: the development of productive forces opens up new possibilities. What we are adding here is that it is the political revolution that, if victorious, would make that possibility effective by creating a new type of state. Let us now consider, in the same light, the process of transition to socialism. In the analysis of this topic, the impact of economism on historiography and on Marxist theory may have been lighter. From the inaugural text written by Karl Marx for the International Workingmen’s Association (IWA) to the texts and programs written by Lenin and the main Marxist leaders of the Communist International, the idea that the working class must first seize political power to then begin the construction of socialism is widely spread in Marxist literature. However, this does not mean that different conceptions have not flourished in the socialist camp. Numerous texts from the Second International suggest that some aspects of monopoly capitalism are already elements of socialism within capitalism and, more recently a current we call the new utopian socialism has developed with the intention to, as we have seen, transition to socialism by dispensing with the power struggle or, in other words, forgoing the political revolution. Now, the political revolution is the inescapable beginning of the process of transition to socialism because only the workers’ state, which must already be a semi-state, can start the process of socialization of the means of production. This new form of organization of political power is characterized by a new type of mass democracy: execution of administrative, judicial, and repressive tasks—previously monopolized by the state bureaucracy—by mass organizations; appointment of the remaining bureaucrats through the popular vote and not by co-optation; the imperative mandate for all administrative, judicial, and political positions; wage equalization for workers and officers, etc. Well, only this semi-state can constitute a barrier to the private control of the means of production and, thanks to what we call the socialization of political power, boost the socialization of the means of production: unified democratic planning at the center and management of the base production in the hands of the workers. It is this process of suppression of private property and the establishment of collective control by the direct producer over the means of production, initiated by the political revolution, that can restore the

13 See the next chapter of this book (State and Transition to Capitalism).

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correspondence between politics and economics—by making the socialization of the economy advance until it corresponds to the socialization of the political power produced by the working class’s political revolution. It is precisely this dynamic that Marx had in mind in his writings on the Paris Commune of 1871. Marx characterized the Commune as the first experiment in workers’ power, based on a new type of “socialized” power, which remained at odds with the still capitalist economy and that could only find stabilization if it were “complemented” by the socialization of the economy (Martorano, 2002; see Chapter 5 of this book).14 Returning to Marx’s letter to the Russian populists, we would say that the element missing in ancient Rome was, among others, the social agent of the bourgeois political revolution—a revolution without which, as we previously indicated, neither the process of construction of capitalism nor that of socialism can begin. Thanks to the development of the productive forces, Modern Europe, unlike Rome, had accumulated a range of popular agents of the bourgeois political revolution (as a rule, the bourgeoisie showed no disposition to unleash and maintain a revolutionary process): urban artisans, small shopkeepers and traders, and the new “middle class” linked to non-manual work in services and in the state. Did ancient Rome ever have anything similar? We do not believe so: Roman and Greek peasants were citizens and could own slaves. This is, nevertheless, a mere indication of a path to reflect on the problem: the path that seriously considers the political revolution as a requirement for the transition from one production mode to another.

Open Questions We have started by examining the convergence of issues between Lectures on the Philosophy of World History by Hegel and the theses for a theory of history from Marx’s 1859 Preface: the historical change conceived as the result of a single cause, an original contradiction inscribed from the beginning within the social totality, and the consequent conception of the

14 We quote here a phrase with which Marx indicates this phenomenon of the mismatch

between the political and the economic as well as the dynamics of the resulting transition: “The political rule of the producer cannot co-exist with the perpetuation of his social slavery. The Commune was therefore to serve as a lever for uprooting the economical foundation upon which rests the existence of classes, and therefore of class rule” (Marx, 2009, p. 41).

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historical process as a predictable, inevitable evolution. In Marx’s texts from the 1870s, we are able to discern an outline of another problematic: the idea of multiple causality, which we believe should be thought of as an articulated whole of unequal causes. Next, we saw that Balibar thought of a place for politics in the transition process: it begins with a mismatch by anticipation of the political relative to the economic. We have qualified the political factor, which in Balibar’s text was indicated in an insufficient and problematic manner, as the change in the structure of the state, which makes the political revolution the starting point of every transition process—at this point, we made a critical reference to the new utopianism that seeks to “change the world without taking power.” The basic movement continues to be the movement of the economy, which provides the basis for the process of change. In this new formulation, the interplay between politics and economy in the transition process alters the conception of the historical process, which will then be thought of as a range of possibilities and no longer as inescapable needs. These few statements that we have made are far from covering all the complex issues involved in the composition of a Marxist theory of history. We have not discussed the role played by the productive forces, class struggle, and ideology. T. B. Bottomore, responding in the 1960s to a critique of Marxism by elitist theorists, observed: Marx did not say that all social and cultural changes could be explained by economic factors. He intended to establish that the main types of society, especially those comprised within the area of European civilization, could be distinguished by their economic systems and that the most important social changes from one type of society to another would find their best expression in changes in economic activities, which bring with them new social groups with new interests. (Bottomore, 1965, p. 24)

This is one of the ways of thinking about the relationship between society’s economic movement and class struggle. In any case, the relationships between the few elements that we have discussed and all those others that we have now enumerated simultaneously depend on the deepening, on the part of Marxist thinkers, of both the theoretical reflection and the historical research. On a historical level, we just have to recall the discussion we indicated about the relations between the absolutist state and feudalism to glimpse the difficulties of the enterprise. What shape would assume the discussion of the transition from ancient slavery to feudalism

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in Western Europe? It is worth remembering that Marxists, informed by the economistic vision present in the 1859 Preface, always rejected the argument according to which serfdom and vassalage were born out of political changes. Now, given what we have said in this text, and following Balibar, this rejection can be re-examined in the same manner as we have indicated a way to re-examine the thesis according to which the bourgeois political revolution in Europe would only substantiate the development of the economy (which would be already capitalist) in the main European countries. In terms of theory, there is a need to, among other things, think theoretically about the type of relationships established between the political, economic, and ideological factors in the transition process (see Martorano, 2004). To conclude this journey, let us go back to the question of the limits of the theory of history. In Bottomore’s quote above, it is possible to note that two fundamental ideas are supposed and, at the same time, insufficiently discussed by Marx: Why does a development of the productive forces occur (or can occur) throughout history? And why do the new social classes that express this development have, according to Marxist thought, a powerful trump card in the historical struggle? These questions are not entirely answered. However, this limitation of the Marxist theory in no way diminishes its scientific quality. Great scientists who have propitiated significant leaps in the history of science, when formulating their theories, were aware of the limitations they contained and of the fact that they could hardly, in their lifetime, overcome them. When comparing the hypotheses for a theory of history present in the 1859 Preface with other domains of scientific knowledge, we could recall that Charles Darwin formulated the theory of the origin of species through natural selection, in which the transmission of characteristics from one generation to the next plays a central role, without knowing the foundations of genetics, and that Sigmund Freud formulated his theory of neuroses as distorted manifestations of repressed drives, mainly sexual, without being able to explain why such drives were so important (Howard, 1982; Laplanche & Pontalis, 1974).

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Perhaps the explanation for the primacy of the development of the productive forces must rely on both the variable character of the historical processes and some permanent attributes of humans as an animal species.15

References Althusser, L. (1965). Sur le jeune Marx. In Pour Marx. François Maspero. Althusser, L. (1979). Sobre a relação de Marx com Hegel. In J. D’Hondt (Org.), Hegel e o pensamento moderno. Rés Editora. Althusser, L. (1993). La philosophie de Marx. La Decouverte. Althusser, L. (2002). A querela do humanismo – II. Crítica Marxista, no. 14. Boitempo. Althusser, L. (2006). The underground current of the materialism of the encounter. In Philosophy of the encounter, later writings, 1978–87 . Verso. Althusser, L., et al. (2015). Reading capital (The complete ed.). Verso. Balibar, E. (2015). On the basic concepts of historical materialism. In L. Althusser, et al. (Eds.), Reading capital (The complete ed.). Verso. Boron, A. (2003). A selva e a polis. Interrogações em torno da teoria política do zapatismo. In Filosofia política marxista. Cortez. Bottomore, T. B. (1965). As elites e a sociedade. Zahar Editores. Bracaleti, S. (2002). Il marxismo analitico e il problema della spiegazione funzionale applicata al materialismo storico. Quaderni materialisti, no. 1. Edizione Ghibli. Cohen, G. A. (1989). Fuerzas productivas y relaciones de producción. In J. E. Roemer (Ed.), El marxismo: una perspectiva analítica. Fondo de Cultura Econômica. Cohn, G. (1979). Crítica e resignação: fundamentos da sociologia de Max Weber. TAQ Editores. da Costa Neto, P. L. (2003). Marx tardio: notas introdutórias. Crítica Marxista, no. 17. Revan. Fernandes, R. C. (Org.). (1982). Dilemas do socialismo: a controvérsia entre Marx, Engels e os populistas russos. Paz e Terra. Freund, J. (1968). The sociology of Max Weber. Random House (Vintage Books). 15 It is Louis Althusser himself, a rigorous critic of speculative theoretical humanism, who warns us of the need for Marxists to develop the scientific study of the human species. Gerald A. Cohen, one of the founders of analytical Marxism, seeks to support the thesis of the 1859 Preface, arguing that the development of productive forces and their primacy over production relations stem from the rationality of the human species. Is it a mere philosophical speculation or a scientifically based thesis? See Althusser (2002) and Bracaleti (2002).

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Hegel, G. W. F. (1965). La raison dans l´histoire: introduction à la philosophie de l´histoire. Union Générale d´Éditions (Coleção 10/18). Hegel, G. W. F. (1973). Os pré-socráticos. Abril Cultural (Os Pensadores). Hegel, G. W. F. (1975). Lectures on the philosophy of world history. Cambridge University Press. Hegel, G. W. F. (1991). Elements of the philosophy of right (A. W. Wood, Ed.). Cambridge University Press. Holloway, J. (2005). Change the world without taking power. Pluto Press. Howard, J. (1982). Darwin. Hill & Wang. Hyppolite, J. (1995). Introdução à filosofia da história de Hegel. Edições 70. Laplanche, J., & Pontalis, J. B. (1974). The language of psychoanalysis. W. W. Norton. Löwy, M. (1999). L´humanisme historiciste de Marx ou relire le Capital. In VV.AA. Contre Althusser – pour Marx. 2. ed. rev. e ampl. Les Editions de la Passion. Martorano, L. C. (2002). Elementos do Estado proletário na Comuna de Paris. In A. Boito Jr. (Org.), A Comuna de Paris na história. Xamã. Martorano, L. C. (2004). Socialismo: Notas sobre revolução, transição e programa. Crítica Marxista, no. 18. Revan. Marx, K. (1965). Pre-capitalist economic formations. International Publishers. Marx, K. (1970). A contribution to the critique of political economy. Progress Publishers. Available (checked 24 May 2022) at: https://archive.org/details/ marxcontributioncritpolecon/page/n3/mode/2up Marx, K. (2009). The civil war in France. Dodo Press. Marx and Engels Correspondence. (1968). International Publishers. Available (checked 18 May 2022) at: https://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/ 1877/11/russia.htm Marx, K., & Hobsbawn, E. (1971). Formaciones económicas precapitalistas. Cuadernos de Pasado y Presente, no. 20. Morfino, V. (2002). Il materialismo della pioggia di Althusser. Um lessico. Quaderni Materialiti, no. 1. Milano. Saes, D. (1985). A formação do Estado burguês no Brasil (1888–1891). Paz e Terra. Saes, D. (1993). Marxismo e história. Crítica Marxista, no. 1. Brasiliense. Singer, P. (1999). A utopia militante. Vozes. Zarpelon, S. (2003). A esquerda não socialista e o novo socialismo utópico [Master’s thesis in Political Science]. Unicamp.

CHAPTER 4

State and Transition to Capitalism: Feudalism, Absolutism, and Bourgeois Political Revolution

This chapter examines the role of the absolutist state in reproducing feudalism and the importance of the bourgeois political revolution for the transition to capitalism. I dispute with the analyses that present the absolutist state as a capitalist, transitional, or “modernizing” state and that, for this very reason, neglect, explicitly, or implicitly, the importance of the bourgeois political revolution. A new organizational structure of the state is needed so that capitalist production relations can develop. This new structure was created by the bourgeois political revolution.

State and Transition to Capitalism: Feudalism, Absolutism, and Bourgeois Political Revolution Political Power and Social Classes, by Nicos Poulantzas, was published in Paris, by François Maspero, in 1968. It is little discussed by Marxists nowadays, which is a shame. In our opinion, Poulantzas’s book is one of the most important works of political theory produced by Marxists in the second half of the twentieth century and one of the most ambitious treatises in all of contemporary political science. It is well known that Poulantzas was a theorist affiliated with the structural reading of Marxism inaugurated by Louis Althusser. Therefore, I imagined that this Giornate di Studio sul Pensiero di Louis Althusser could be a good opportunity to take stock of the originality, theoretical © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2023 A. Boito, State, Politics, and Social Classes, Marx, Engels, and Marxisms, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-22046-3_4

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progress, influence, and also problems of this great treatise on Marxist political theory. Imbued with this spirit, we will address in this essay a historical theme present in this work by Poulantzas: the class nature of the absolutist state. Would the absolutist state be a capitalist state, as Poulantzas claims? To address this historical issue, we will enter the field of theoretical discussion, since the characterization of the absolutist state depends on what concepts of feudal state and capitalist state are employed. Such characterization also has consequences not only for the analysis of the transition from feudalism to capitalism, but also for the theory of transition itself. Hence, to discuss the class nature of the absolutist state, we will broach the subject of state theory and transition theory. To talk about the theory of the state, our fundamental reference is the very work by Poulantzas that we are discussing. The systematization of the concept of the capitalist state constitutes one of the decisive contributions of Political Power and Social Classes to Marxist political theory. In this work, Poulantzas links the class nature of each and every state to its juridical-political structure. The class nature of a type of state (slave, feudal, or capitalist) is inscribed in the very structure of that state, and not just in the policy implemented by it. Moreover, the state policy—the economic, social, and repressive measures implemented by government agents—is itself limited by the structure of the state. One of the problems we see in Poulantzas’s analysis of the absolutist state in Political Power and Social Classes is precisely that it departs from central aspects of the theory of the state that he presented in previous chapters of his book. For our part, we understand that the absolutist state does not “fit” in the Poulantizian concept of a capitalist state. To discuss transition, our main reference is the text by Etienne Balibar found in the collective work by the Althusserian group, Reading Capital. From Balibar’s text, known as “On the Basic Concepts of Historical Materialism,” we are interested in two basic theses on transition (Balibar, 2015, Part 5). First, we are interested in the thesis that supports the need to separate the dynamics of reproduction of a mode of production from the dynamics of transition from one mode of production to another. This procedure breaks with the tradition of Hegel’s philosophy of history, in which the internal contradictions of the universal Spirit, unfolded into the Spirit of the world and the Spirit of a people, create empires and civilizations mechanically and in successive stages. This separation between the dynamics of reproduction and the dynamics of transition also breaks

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with the conception present in Marx’s 1859 Preface, in which the internal contradictions of the economy, unfolded in productive forces and production relations, generate—also mechanically and in successive stages—the modes of production. Secondly, we will retain Balibar’s thesis according to which, in the transition period, there is a mismatch by anticipation of the political relative to the economic. The transition is triggered by a political change that happens before any economic change. However, Balibar’s description of such anticipation is somewhat vague; for our part, we will align it with the concept of political revolution: the change both in the state power (class interest represented in the state) and in the state apparatus (juridicalpolitical structure) that elevates a new social class to the status of the ruling class. This thesis demands from us a revision, as we will indicate in most of the analyses on the transition from feudalism to capitalism. Poulantzas’s Thesis on the Capitalist Character of the Absolutist State and Marxist Historiography Among Marxist authors, there are two types of analysis of the class character of the absolutist state. On one end, occupying an apparent minority position, we have the group of authors such as Poulantzas, who, following Engels’s directions, support the thesis that the absolutist state is a capitalist state (Engels, 1981; Poulantzas, 1975). Some passages in Marx’s works, such as the one devoted to the absolutist state in his The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte, also sanction this thesis at least indirectly.1 The procedures chosen by Marx, Engels, and Poulantzas in these texts have, in general, a point in common. They consider in their analysis both the juridical-political structure of the absolutist state—the law and the form of organizing the body of the state’s civil and military employees—as well as the policy of that state, to then conclude in favor of accommodating these two aspects—structure and politics—to the interests of the fledgling capitalism. Engels refers to the rebirth of Roman law from the thirteenth century onwards—a law enshrining private property in opposition to a feudal-type 1 “This executive power,” says Marx, “with its enormous bureaucratic and military organization […] sprang up in the days of the absolute monarchy, with the decay of the feudal system, which it helped to hasten” (Marx, 1972, p. 104).

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conditional property and providing norms developed within the scope of commercial law—and to the political-administrative centralization implemented by the absolutist state as fundamental elements for the affirmation of the bourgeoisie. He also refers to the emergence of the standing army which, unlike those recruited when required and based on lord–vassal ties, would already represent the constitution of a bourgeois-type army. Poulantzas goes in the same direction. He first highlights the centralized character of the absolutist state, in contrast with the decentralization of the medieval state, to ground its capitalist nature.2 Then, with regard to the legal-political structure of the absolutist state, he stresses the bourgeois character of the law under absolutism—the advanced level of formalization and generalization in this law—and the equally bourgeois character of the bureaucracy of that same state. The state functions would have overcome the class particularism that was typical of the Middle Ages, and hence acquired the character of “public functions.”3 Equipped with a law that would present “the characteristic abstraction, generality, and formality of the modern juridical system,” and a body of workers recruited from all social classes, the absolutist state, unlike precapitalist states, would be able to produce the idea of general interest, of “people-nation,” and to present itself as a representative of this national collective.4 Regarding the absolutist state policy, Poulantzas refers to mercantilism, whose function would be to direct the primitive accumulation of capital—with the generalized expropriation of small landowners and the provision of funds for capitalist industrialization. In short, due to its structure and policy, the social function of the absolutist state would be, according to Poulantzas, to destroy the old feudal production relations and establish capitalist production relations .

2 “In contrast to [the feudal state], the absolutist state appears as a strongly centralized state” (Poulantzas, 1975, p. 162). 3 “Its [bureaucracy’s] role in the state apparatus is, however, determined by the capitalist structures of the absolutist state: this is the birth of bureaucracy in the modern sense of the term. The various public offices are no longer directly tied to the quality of their holders as members of ‘caste’ classes, but gradually assume the character of political functions of the State” (Poulantzas, 1975, pp. 164–165). 4 “We can see the formation of the concepts of ‘people’ and ‘nation’ as constitutive principles of a state that is held to represent the ‘general interest’” (Poulantzas, 1977, p. 163).

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On the other end, occupying an apparent majority position, we have the group of Marxist authors for whom the function of the absolutist state, contrary to what Poulantzas advocates, would actually be to preserve feudal production relations. The absolutist state would thus be a feudal state, whose destruction by bourgeois political revolutions was a prerequisite for the development of the capitalist mode of production in Europe. Among the authors who defend this thesis are several Soviet historians, such as Porchenev; British historians, such as C. Hill; as well as the French philosopher Louis Althusser (Althusser, 1972; Hill, 1972; Porchenev, 1972).5 These authors, like Poulantzas, operate with the Marxist concept of the state (state = apparatus that organizes political class domination), but they do so in a different manner which, to our way of thinking, is incomplete. They consider only the policy of the absolutist state; they leave out the juridical-political structure of that state when trying to demonstrate the functionality of absolutism in relation to the political interests of feudal landowners. We will shortly return to this conceptual critique. For now, let us better clarify these authors’ arguments. Some of them point out that this feudal state takes a different form from that of the feudal state during the Middle Ages. However, they stress that this change of form, summarized in the term absolutism, does not change the class character of the state. On the contrary, the despotic form of the decision-making process and the political-administrative centralization are presented, by several of these authors, as requirements for the maintenance of feudalism in a period when popular revolts escalated both in cities and rural areas, and when there were commercial expansion and competition between European powers. Althusser reminds us that the absolutist state’s function of maintaining feudal production relations would not cease to be a fact just because feudal landowners were dissatisfied with the decline of some of their former fiscal, judicial, and military prerogatives as a result of monarchical centralization. The centralization of the absolutist state is not an indicator, as Poulantzas claims, of the change in the type of state—from feudal to capitalist. The feudal landowners’ dissatisfaction with the monarch would only reflect a superficial conflict: the conflict between the feudal landowners’ particular

5 Another historian who characterizes the absolutist state as feudal is the Frenchman François Hincker. See Hincker (1978).

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interests and the measures necessary to ensure the general interest of this class as a whole—the maintenance of feudal production relations. What is our essay’s position regarding this debate? We will try to defend the thesis that the absolutist state is a feudal state. This is not, in essence, an original thesis. However, if we are not mistaken, it is innovative in one important respect. We will consider not only state policy, which was the strategy chosen by the aforementioned defenders of the thesis that the absolutist state is feudal, but also the juridical-political structure of the absolutist state.6 We will try to show the feudal character of this juridical-political structure which, at first glance, can be confused with bourgeois-style bureaucracy and law. Furthermore, to demonstrate the feudal character of the absolutist state, we will employ a concept of state in which the options of state policy are limited not only by the political correlation of forces between social classes but also by the juridical-political structure of that state. For all these reasons, we can say that we will start from the concept of state described in Poulantzas’s treatise, Political Power and Social Classes, but we will arrive, in the analysis of the absolutist state, at a different result from the one Poulantzas himself reached in this work. Minimal Indications for an Outline of the Concept of the Feudal State Extracted from Poulantzas’s Work Nicos Poulantzas’s aforementioned work led to a leap in Marxist political theory as he systematically developed the concept of the bourgeois state, centered on the analysis of the juridical-political structure of this kind of state. From Poulantzas’s analysis, it is possible to extract, albeit by analogy and in a precarious way, elements for the theoretical characterization of the juridical-political structure of the various types of pre-capitalist state (oriental despotic, slave, and feudal). This is precisely what Décio Saes accomplished in his work on the formation of the bourgeois state in Brazil (Saes, 1985). To outline some of the feudal state’s characteristics and establish the conceptual references from which we will

6 Perry Anderson, if we are not mistaken, is the only Marxist author who, while supporting the thesis of the feudal character of the absolutist state, takes into account its juridical-political structure. To that extent, he is an exception. Nevertheless, Anderson’s concepts and analyses of feudal law and bureaucratism are distinct from those we present in this essay. See Anderson (1974).

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analyze the absolutist state, we will rely essentially on Poulantzas’s work and the development Décio Saes added to it, except for some secondary developments. The concept of state types we use here is linked to a more general issue that encompasses the concept of mode of production as an articulation between economic structure (production relations plus productive forces) and juridical-political structure (the state) and maintains that the content of this articulation is the state’s function of reproducing the production relations. Each state type (oriental despotic, slave, feudal, bourgeois) is thus a particular juridical-political structure whose function is to reproduce, also in a particular way, certain production relations. It is possible to distinguish two sets of state types. One, forming a set of a single element, is the bourgeois state, while the other is a set that brings together all other state types of exploiting classes, the pre-capitalist states. What differentiates the bourgeois state from the pre-capitalist states is the apparent universality of its institutions, which allow the former to present itself as the representative of a supposed general interest of society. In contrast to this type of state, the set of pre-capitalist states openly affirms the particularist character of their institutions, presenting themselves as class states. Each of these two types of juridical-political structure (bourgeois state and pre-capitalist states) corresponds to specific production relations (capitalist and pre-capitalist). The effort to compose the concept of feudal state must therefore consider the situation of this type of state within a larger set: the set of pre-capitalist states. The structure of the state represents an articulation between law and bureaucratism: let us see what this means, albeit very briefly and without extrapolating the limitations imposed by the needs of this chapter. Bourgeois law is characterized by the “equal treatment of unequals”: equal civil rights for social agents who occupy unequal (antagonistic) positions in the production process. The ideological effect engendered by this type of law consists of the fact that, in the capitalist mode of production, the exploitation of the direct producer by the owner of the means of production appears as a contractual relationship in which free and equal parties carry out an exchange—wage for work. It is specifically through the creation of this illusion that the bourgeois law contributes to the reproduction of capitalist production relations. Conversely, and in correspondence with the pre-capitalist relations of production it is supposed to reproduce, pre-bourgeois law is essentially an inequitable law. While bourgeois law converts direct producers into

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subjects with full rights, equating their legal status to that of the owners of the means of production, slave law denies legal entity to the slave, and feudal law, although granting legal personality to the serf, does so in a limited way. Hence, both slave law and feudal law are unequal: the former in absolute terms, and the latter in relative terms (Foignet, 1946; see also Villey, 1949). Feudal law, which is our main interest here, corresponds thus to a system of norms and to more or less specialized sectors of the state apparatus that distribute production agents—owners of the means of production and direct producers—in an unequal system, founded on a chain of obligations and privileges. The orders (free men and serfs) and the estates (nobility, clergy, and commoners, or plebs), and not the figure of the individual/citizen, are the distinctive creation of this type of law. Feudal law coerces the peasant bound to the land to render services and pay tribute to the feudal landowner, and this is the specific way in which this type of law contributes to the reproduction of feudal production relations: feudal legal ideology does not hide exploitation, but instead presents it as necessary. The bureaucratism of the bourgeois state—the way in which state officers are organized—is established by two basic norms: (a) all agents of production have a formally assured access to state tasks; (b) the criterion for ranking state tasks is competence.7 The first of these two is the fundamental rule. It assures all citizens, free and equal individuals created by bourgeois law, the legal capacity for the exercise of state functions, thus producing the universalist appearance that is typical of the institutions of the bourgeois state. This is what Poulantzas calls the effect of representation of unity: the bourgeois state appears not as a class state, but as the representative of the “people-nation.” It is by placing the ideology of national unity before the proletariat’s virtual class unity that bourgeois 7 In Political Power and Social Classes (1975), Nicos Poulantzas lists the norms of bourgeois bureaucratism—cf. Chapter V, “Bureaucracy and Elites.” Décio Saes, in his book A formação do estado Burguês no Brasil [The formation of the bourgeois state in Brazil] (1985), addresses this list, going so far as to rank these norms in an articulated totality. Saes presents six secondary norms derived from the two norms that he considers the basic norms of bourgeois bureaucratism—universal access to state positions, i.e., nonmonopolization on state positions by the ruling class, and ranking of state tasks according to competence. A secondary norm of bourgeois bureaucratism that interests us closely is the separation between the state’s material resources and the assets owned by members of the ruling class, a norm arising from the non-monopolization on state positions by the ruling class. We will see that this separation, typical of a bourgeois state, does not occur in the absolutist state.

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bureaucratism contributes to the reproduction of capitalist production relations. The pre-capitalist form of organization of states is different. The basic rule of its institutions assures the formal and explicit monopoly on state command functions by members of the ruling class. Direct producers, classified in a subaltern category by pre-capitalist law, do not have the legal capacity to exercise state functions. The institutions of a pre-capitalist state openly assert their class character. Like the law, this norm of the precapitalist bureaucratism proclaims the direct producer’s social inferiority, hence contributing to the reproduction of a type of production relation based not on the illusion of exchange, but on the direct producer’s acceptance of exploitation as a (natural, religious or social) necessity. Focusing now on feudal bureaucracy, which is what interests us most here, it is worth noting that the ranking of state tasks in a feudal state is not based on competence. The hierarchy of state officers reproduces, in some way, the hierarchy established by lord–vassal ties. From this point of view, the case of the feudal army is typical. And we will see the crisis that took place within the absolutist army when its ranking system began to combine, as founding criteria, the estates with competence standards introduced by military academies. By briefly listing some basic characteristics of feudal law and bureaucratism in contraposition to bourgeois law and bureaucratism, we were already able to indicate the congruence between law and bureaucratism in the legal-political structure of the state. We have seen that the basic rules of both pre-capitalist bureaucratism and bourgeois bureaucratism (monopoly or non-monopoly on state positions) presuppose a particular type of law (inequitable in the first case, equitable in the second). We should also note that law also presupposes a type of bureaucratism: only an apparently universalist judiciary can embody the norms of an equitable law, in the same way as an inequitable law such as feudal law requires for its application a judiciary monopolized by members of the ruling class. This internal unity of each type of state is a condition for maintaining the unity between the state and the production relations whose reproduction the state permits. Developing Poulantzas’s formulations in the aforementioned work, Décio Saes indicated that the various modes of disruption of the internal unity of the state can generate different types of state crises. And we will see that the absolutist state is a feudal state that, in certain situations, through the fracturing of its internal unity, faces situations of crisis in its functioning.

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The Feudal Character of the Absolutist State: A Challenge to Poulantzas’s Analysis Our attempt to determine the class character of the absolutist state runs up against some limitations. Firstly, the theoretical indications systematized above cannot fully compensate for the lack of a concept of the feudal state, still underdeveloped in the Marxist bibliography. Secondly, besides this theoretical deficiency of the Marxist bibliography, there is a historiographical deficiency of a personal nature. Our predominant reference will be the French absolutism, as that is the case we know best— and in defense of our procedure, we should point out that the French monarchy was an exemplary case of an absolutist state. In any case, such limitations confer to the theses we will present a provisional and tentative character. Law In our view, the essentially feudal character of the legal system of the absolutist s’tate resides in the maintenance, under absolutism, of the orders and estates that existed since the Middle Ages. In fact, both orders and estates represent inequalities established in the legal field and not, as in the case of social classes, in the field of the productive process.8 The division of society into orders is the result of the civil inequality that the legal system imposes on the agents of production. Thus, the feudal landowner, as a member of the order of free men has—to use the formula employed by Foignet—full legal capacity, while the peasant, if he is a serf, has limited legal capacity: the peasant bound to the land does not enjoy the freedom of movement (as he is bound to the land); neither does he have full capacity to form a family (right of formariage), nor the right to property (his personal property may be subject to the mortmain (from the product of his work, the part that falls to him has its use subject to the feudal lord’s determinations—the banalités ). The members of the order of free men, although they have a common civil legal status, are subdivided into estates (nobility, clergy, and commoners), as a result of political, fiscal, and

8 Here we follow G. Lemarchand’s thesis (1978) that suggests that modern Europe is, at the same time, a society of classes and orders. I would add that the (legal) situation of order is not alien to the (economic) situation of class. Nonetheless, we shall not need to develop here the complex relations that are established between order and social class.

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honorary privileges attributed to the higher estates (nobility and clergy). However, the division into estates is a derived, secondary characteristic of feudal law, since it is the division into orders, based on civil inequality, that directly affects the position of the agents in the productive process— it is the civil inferiority that constrains the peasant bound to the land to supply surplus labor to the feudal landowner. The vast majority of historians—perhaps influenced by the feudal jurist Charles Loyseau, who in 1610 published his frequently re-edited Cinq Livres du Droit des Offices, Suivi du Livre des Seigneuries et de Celui des Ordres —consider only the division into estates (nobility, clergy, and commoners), dismissing the fact that this division is established within a larger unit—the order of free men. Not considering the estate as a subunit of the order of free men makes it difficult to explain the position of social forces in the crisis of the absolutist state. The French bourgeoisie, in August 1789, defended simultaneously the suppression of estates— the organization of a national assembly—and the maintenance of the orders—the so-called decree of extinction of feudal rights of August 4, 1789, which, in reality, maintained the peasants’ servile status, insofar as it imposed the payment of compensation for their release. This obstacle to the revolution led to a civil war in the countryside, which was only solved in 1793, in favor of the peasants, by the Jacobin government. Our analysis of the absolutist law clashes with a very current thesis defended by, among others, the historian Marc Bloch. According to his thesis, there would have been, from the thirteenth century onwards, a process of gradual extinction of serfdom in France (Bloch, 1976, esp. Chapters III, IV, and V).9 This thesis is endorsed by several Marxist authors. It is supported by a restricted conception of the servile situation, identified with personal servitude, and particularly with the practice of corvée. Now, from the thirteenth century onwards, according to the most acknowledged studies, the practice of corvée declined sharply—it 9 Other authors try to deny the existence of serfdom in modern France, alluding either to the monetization of taxes paid by peasants to the feudal lord, or to the increasingly mercantile purpose of agricultural production in that period. It would be fruitless to dwell on this point. We just wish to assert the reasons why we do not accept such arguments. Both of them shift the analysis of the relationship between the agents in the production process to aspects that, in the problematic concerning modes of production, may be considered secondary. The means of payment (labor, product, or money) does not determine the social character of land rent, nor does the purpose of production (market) constitute the specific difference of a capitalist-type economy.

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is estimated that from an average of 150 days of unpaid work per year the corvée was reduced in the seventeenth century to an average of only 15 days a year. In addition, at the same time, some rights of the feudal lord over personal property and the serfs’ family fell into disuse—such as the mortmain and the formariage. Such changes have led these authors to speak of the extinction of serfdom. It seems necessary, though, to employ a broader concept of serfdom, understanding the servile situation as the lord’s limited ownership over the direct producer (Parain, 1978), which is the counterpart of the restriction on the serf’s legal entity. This concept of servitude contemplates, by its very content, the possibility of degree variations in the servile situation—Engels, for example, speaks of heavy servitude and attenuated servitude (letter to Marx, dated December 22, 1882). From this perspective, and resuming the controversy with Marc Bloch’s analysis of the French case, the manumission movement, extending from the thirteenth to the mid-sixteenth century, represented for many rural regions the end of personal servitude, but not the end of serfdom tout court.10 The reduction of the corvée and the extinction of rights like the mortmain and the formariage were accompanied by the emergence of the legal figure, arising precisely from Roman law, of the peasant bound to the land— no longer bound directly to the person of the feudal lord. Moreover, it is worth remembering that, in the French case, there was a process— albeit partial—of regression to heavy serfdom during the second half of the eighteenth century. Albert Soboul’s studies showed the existence of a largely successful movement by feudal landowners to recover numerous feudal rights that had fallen into disuse since the thirteenth century. This reactionary movement, traditionally known as the feudal reaction, also affected, as we shall see, the structure of the absolutist state. This maintenance, although attenuated, of the serf’s personal subordination to the feudal landowner, who owns the land to which the serf is tied—i.e., this maintenance of the servile legal norm—scorresponds to the preservation of manorial justice during the absolutist period, i.e., the preservation of manorial jurisdictions in each feud. As Edmond

10 The French case has raised controversy. However, for Central and Eastern Europe, it is difficult to dissociate absolutism from serfdom: in this area of Europe, the formation of the absolutist state was accompanied by the development of the so-called “second serfdom.” See Dobb (2008).

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Seligman demonstrates, although the absolutist state centralized the judiciary, reducing the sphere of competence of manorial jurisdictions, these were never abolished under absolutism. Thus, the structure of the judiciary under absolutism, in accordance with the maintenance of the legal norm of serfdom, also preserved this private justice apparatus of the feudal lord: the manorial courts (Seligman, 1901). The legal system of the absolutist state, insofar as it unequally distributes the agents of production in a hierarchical system of orders and estates and which is embodied in particularist institutions, blocks precisely—and contrary to what Poulantzas claims—the formation of a citizenship ideology and the ideological figure of “people-nation,” which are specific outcomes of a bourgeois state. Under the absolutist state, the ideology of legal egalitarianism and the “people-nation,” or in other words, the ideology of citizenship and national discourse is formed precisely in opposition to that state, and will be a component of its final crisis. The inequitable, particularist legal system of the absolutist state does not ratify Poulantzas’s conclusion that such a system would already be characterized by an advanced level of formalism and generalization. Bureaucratism The bureaucratism of the absolutist state, like its law, is also feudal in character. Two phenomena much studied by historians of the absolutist period illustrate our affirmation in an exemplary way: the organization of the hierarchy in the army according to the estates and the venality of state positions. The armed forces represent a fundamental sector of the bureaucracy of any state apparatus. In all European absolutist states, access to a position of military officer was forbidden to members of the serf order, making it impossible for the fundamental ruled class, the peasants bound to the land, to perform command functions in this branch of the state apparatus.11 This fact would suffice to prove that these states were organized according to the fundamental rule of pre-capitalist (and feudal) bureaucratism: the monopoly on command positions in the state apparatus by members of the ruling class. However, the particularist character of the

11 The same ban applied to civil bureaucracy—administrative and judiciary branches. However, our analysis is restricted to the armed forces of the absolutist state.

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absolutist armies is even more noticeable as, in different times and countries, the selection for officialdom starts taking into consideration not only whether the individual belongs to the appropriate order, but also what is his estate. This is precisely the case in France in the second half of the eighteenth century when the country restricted access to army officialdom to but a reduced sector of one of the estates of the order of free men—the nobility of the sword. This directly contradicts the analyses which, like the one proposed by Tocqueville, insist on the supposed modernizing vocation of French absolutism (Tocqueville, 1979). The process known as the feudal reaction in the French army began with the royal edict of 1758, which established that candidates for military schools required a title of nobility. In 1776, the French monarchy forbade the venality of offices in the army, cutting the path that the edict of 1758 had left for the bourgeois commoners to enter officialdom. Finally, in 1781, minister Ségur established a regulation requiring four degrees of nobility for candidates to military schools, thus barring the access even of the recent nobles of the robe to the army. On the eve of the 1789 Revolution, the influence of the estates on the military institution was intensified.12 The venality of offices is another feature indicating the pre-bourgeois character of the structure of absolutist states, and it was a current practice throughout Europe (Goubert, 1953). The monopoly on state functions by members of the ruling class is a basic norm of pre-bourgeois bureaucracy, allowing the existence of the venality of offices. Such practice attests to the validity in absolutist states of one of the secondary norms of pre-bourgeois bureaucratism, which is the non-separation between the material resources of the state and the assets belonging to members of the ruling class. In reality, only particularist state institutions could merge state positions and resources with the private patrimony of their holders, who appeared then as “worker-owners” of the state. This merger is unfeasible in formally universalist—i.e., bourgeois—state institutions.13 12 It is true that the entry of commoners into officialdom continued to exist, through the career developed in the army—the so-called “officers of fortune.” However, the number of commoners among the officers was small. In 1789, 90% of French army officers were nobles—9000 out of 10,000 officers in service. Among these 9000, it is most likely that some were ennobled through the purchase of an official position, which was allowed until 1776 (Bertaud, 1988). 13 On the venality of offices, see: Chaunu (1979), Febvre (1948), Durand (1969), Lapeyere (1979), and Goubert (1953).

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The venality of offices, together with the attribution of positions in the army according to the estates, increases (in the number of venal positions) and deepens (the holder’s ownership of the position becomes full) especially under the absolutist state. In the French case, by the edicts of 1467 and 1520, the office holder is declared immovable, except in cases in which a large sum is paid as reimbursement for the lost position, or in cases in which dismissal is authorized after a long time and a complex judicial process. In 1524, Francis I created the Treasury of Casual and Unexpected Parts, which served as a kind of “shop for the sale of this new merchandise,” in the words of R. Mousnier, author of a classic book on the venality of offices. Finally, in 1604, minister Paulet’s decree secured the right of the officeholder to transfer his office at will. As a result of this legislative evolution, in seventeenth-century France, no less than two-thirds of state positions were venal and held by officiers. Under absolutism, the progressive affirmation of a system in which a state position was private property that could be commercialized and transmitted by inheritance was another tendency contradicting the analyses that insist on the modernizing vocation of the absolutist state. Another practice of absolutist states that illustrates this non-separation between state resources and property owned by the ruling class was the granting of state fiscal authority to private companies. Neither the venality of offices nor this system of authority transfer was the object, unless we are mistaken, of an analysis that broke with empiricism. In fact, historians lack the concept of pre-capitalist bureaucratism to analyze these phenomena. The venality of offices is “explained” by the absolutist state’s need to increase its revenues. Between the need for money and the monarchy’s decision to expand the sale of offices, the fundamental link in the explanation is omitted: the state structure that allowed the king to resort to the sale of state positions. In certain studies, the absence of the concept of pre-capitalist bureaucratism leads the authors to an anachronistic moralism. They begin to denounce the “institutionalization of corruption” allowed by the practice of the venality of offices. This amounts to examining the feudal state through lenses provided by the bourgeois ideology of the state. Contrary to what Poulantzas claims, it is not possible to speak of “public functions” to characterize the institutions and functions of the absolutist state. As observed in his analysis of law, Poulantzas seems to confuse medieval decentralization with particularism, and absolutist centralization with universalism. However, the latter took place under the

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sign of the monopoly on state positions by members of the ruling class. Moreover, Engels seems to have lapsed into the same misunderstanding, by contrasting the army occasionally regimented by the feudal lord to the standing monarchical army, which would be, as a permanent institution, a bourgeois institution. The absolutist state, with its inequitable law and its particularist institutions, plays the role of reproducing feudal production relations. A government that sought to implement a policy of transition to capitalism would stumble on a precise structural limitation: the absolutist state prevents the development of a labor market, which presupposes the existence of an equitable right, i.e., the existence of a state whose structure is distinct from that of the absolutist state. Hence, the structure of the absolutist state determines the (feudal) character of the policies that this state is able to implement. The Mercantilist Policy The thesis that the (feudal) structure of the absolutist state determines the (also feudal) character of the policy of that same state immediately brings to mind the existence of mercantilism, a policy currently taken as an expression of a state project of transition to capitalism. Mercantilism does not stand for the whole development policy of the absolutist state, although it is usually cited as the greatest proof of the capitalist nature of that state. Poulantzas refers to mercantilism when he argues that the policy of the absolutist state destroys feudal relations of production and develops capitalist relations of production. This forces us to draw some considerations on this point.14 We believe that the very frequent assimilation of mercantilism to a policy of transition to capitalism is associated with two misconceptions. The first is a historiographical misconception: most historians attribute to mercantilist policy a practice that, in reality, it does not seem to have originated. Some historians have devoted themselves to correcting this factual error. They try to show that the mercantilist policy reiterated the feudal production relations, instead of giving rise, as is currently alleged, to the 14 The so-called enlightened despotism is another aspect of absolutist politics that is often associated with a transition project (in this case, a conservative transition) to capitalism. We do not intend to develop a critique of this thesis here. Albert Soboul (n.d.) has already done this, and very convincingly.

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practice of waged labor. As for the second misconception, it seems that the characterization of mercantilism as a policy of transition to capitalism is associated with a theoretical mistake: the identification of the genealogy of the elements of a mode of production with the structural implantation of that mode of production. Let’s elaborate a bit further. Mercantilism is the policy of commercial and “manufactural” development implemented, at different times, by the various absolutist states. The feudal character of this policy is manifested in these two aspects. First, and most importantly, it appears at the level of production relations: in the vast majority of cases, the so-called manufactures—created thanks to the incentives of the mercantilist policy—do not deserve this denomination, since they are establishments that use servile labor and not wage labor, as demonstrated by the investigations of the Soviet historian Joseph Koulischer (1931). Second, the feudal character of this policy is manifested at the level of commercial development: trade is stimulated by the mercantilist policy only within the boundaries allowed by the feudal production relations and feudal juridical-political structure. The current practice in the absolutist states of France, Germany, and Russia was the use of compulsory labor in “manufactures.” Vagabonds, beggars, criminals, soldiers, elderly people, sick people, and children were subjected by the institutions under whose care they lived—charities, jails, barracks, shelters, hospitals, and orphanages—to compulsory work in a “manufacture” in the service of its owner. Koulischer shows the existence of true “manufacturing shelters,” “manufacturing orphanages,” “manufacturing hospitals,” etc. He cites documents proving that these institutions were created with the express purpose of providing menial labor to the “manufactures” that the absolutist monarchies aimed to stimulate. Another very common figure, especially in Germany and Russia, was the “earning serf,” the peasant bound to the land that was borrowed by the lord to a “manufacture” owner. The dominance of compulsory labor in these establishments was not simply a result of the customs of the time. Rather, it stemmed from the operation of the feudal juridical-political structure of the absolutist state, an obstacle to the development of free wage labor. Given this scenario, it is difficult to accept Poulantzas’s thesis according to which the absolutist state disseminates capitalist production relations. Nicos Poulantzas also alludes to the practice of enclosing the fields in England, the enclosures, in his support of the pro-capitalist character of absolutist state policy. This is a very common argument, by the way.

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Judging from Marx’s chapter on primitive accumulation, there is a factual error in this argument. Before the English Revolution of 1640, the state established a series of laws that inhibited the practice of enclosures. Marx states that, under absolutism, the enclosure was a private practice discouraged by the state. It was only after the revolution, i.e., after the end of the absolutist state, that the state would start to stimulate the enclosing of the fields. This happened mainly after the Revolution of 1688. Marx would then speak of enclosures as a legal practice, stimulated by the state (Marx, 2015). The limitations imposed on commercial development—the second aspect of the mercantilist policy—are the indication of its feudal character. The absolutist state did not remove the barriers that the feudal mode of production had placed on commerce. The absence of a unified national market (maintenance of internal customs, strengthening and expansion of corporations and local monopolies) and feudal ideology (usury law and stigmatization of mercantile activities, for being considered demeaning), limited mercantile expansion and diverted part of the accumulated capital in commerce for the purchase of offices and noble lands—the common paths of ennoblement for a bourgeoisie that was limited in its action and attracted to the feudal world. The result was what many historians characterize as the “artificiality” of the “manufacturing” and mercantile development brought about by mercantilism. Most of the companies and “manufactures” created in France, Prussia, and Russia did not survive Colbert, Frederick the Great, and Peter the Great. This situation contrasts with the consolidation of commercial and manufacturing development verified in England and Holland, precisely the two countries where the absolutist feudal state had been destroyed by bourgeois political revolutions already in the seventeenth century. Despite the limitations we have mentioned, mercantilism did allow for the accumulation of capital in the hands of a few, giving rise to one of the elements of the capitalist mode of production. However, this fact cannot be offered as proof of the capitalist character of mercantilism. Mercantilism allows for the primitive accumulation of capital, but this is the kind of accumulation that precedes a specifically capitalist type of accumulation. While favoring the emergence of one of the elements of the capitalist mode of production, mercantilism guides this capital accumulated in commerce toward a non-capitalist application—the exploitation of servile labor. Mercantilism contributed to the formation of one of the elements of the capitalist mode of production, but, at the same time, it blocked

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the formation of the structure of the capitalist mode of production. We suspect this is the point in which there is a theoretical misunderstanding among scholars of the absolutist state. The genesis of an element of the mode of production cannot be confused with the process of formation of its structure. Commerce and the concentration of capital in the hands of a few people also took place in other social formations, such as those dominated by ancient slavery, and thanks to the policy of the slave state. Even so, a capitalist mode of production was not formed in the declining days of Antiquity. It is the formation of the structure of a mode of production, and not the genesis of each of its elements, that shapes the transition process to this mode of production (Balibar, 2015). The Crisis of the Absolutist State The same type of state may present distinct secondary characteristics in different socioeconomic realities. Characterizing the absolutist state as a feudal type of state does not imply denying that it shows important differences when compared to the also feudal state of the medieval period. The very term absolutism indicates one of these differences. Unlike the feudal state of the medieval period, in which a democracy is at work for the class of feudal landowners, the absolutist state takes a dictatorial form. The decision-making power is concentrated in the hands of the monarch, whose appointment for the command of the state does not depend on any consultation with feudal landowners, and who directly represents but a fraction of the ruling class, the fraction that integrates the so-called nobility of the court.15 However, a difference of this nature does not determine the type of the state and can be interpreted as a variation within the same feudal state structure. The same assertion is valid for the relative territorial unification and the centralization of the decision-making process—a phenomenon not identified with monarchical despotism—that is also found in absolutism.

15 On the functioning of the medieval parliament as an instrument of the feudal landowners’ democracy, see Poggi (1981, Chap. II and III). The fact that the absolutist state is a dictatorship (Hill, 1972) representing the political hegemony of the great feudal landowners (Lemarchand, 1978) explains the conflicts and divergences that arise, on one end, between the small nobility of the province and that of the court and, on the other, between the latter and the government in the revolutionary crisis in 1789 (Soboul, 1974).

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The transformation that did produce contradictions in the structure of the absolutist state was the emergence of professionalizingbureaucratizing components in the structure of that state. The absolutist state remains feudal, but unlike the medieval state, it is of a feudal type contaminated by the germ of bourgeois bureaucracy. The structure of the absolutist state develops contradictory norms of organization. This contradiction will be one of the active factors in the crisis of the absolutist state during the bourgeois political revolutions. Nevertheless, the existence of contradictory norms does not authorize the characterization of the absolutist state as neither feudal nor capitalist, a thesis that could be suggested by some passages of Poulantzas’s analysis. In fact, on p. 166, Poulantzas refers to the absolutist state as a “state presenting pronounced capitalist features,” although he characterizes it throughout the text as being capitalist and regularly uses this last denomination. It is worth noting that Max Weber also supports, in dealing with another theoretical issue, a homologous idea. In Weber’s opinion, we would have in the absolutist state a balance between contradictory components—patrimonial (archaic) and bureaucratic (modern) (see Weber, 1972). The groundlessness of the characterization of the absolutist state as being neither feudal nor capitalist is due, in our view, to two factors. First, the components of bourgeois bureaucratism found in its structure never developed in such a way as to fully bureaucratize any branch of the state apparatus. There was no more than the inception of bureaucratization. Second, as we are trying to demonstrate, this state does not perform the social function of directing the transition to capitalism. Once again, we will illustrate the point with the case of French absolutism. François Hincker and Perry Anderson (Anderson, 1974; Hincker, 1978) are compelling in attributing the outline of bureaucratization of the institutions in the absolutist feudal state to commercial and military conflicts that occurred in the so-called Modern Age amidst European feudal ruling classes. It was the Hundred Years’ War (1337– 1453) that imposed in France the creation of the taille royale (1439)—the first important national tax collected by the monarchy—and the formation of the Compagnies d’Ordonnance of Charles VII, the embryo of a standing army, with a still modest contingent of about twelve thousand men. The Thirty Years’ War (1618–1648) inflicted a tripling of state revenue. During the reign of Louis XIV (1661–1714), the successive military conflicts imposed the deepening of the tendency towards professionalization-bureaucratization of the French monarchical-feudal

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army: the function of an officer began to show characteristics of a profession. Military academies were created; uniforms and regular pays were introduced. The standing contingent of the army jumped from fifty thousand to three hundred thousand men. However, we must be on guard against a unilinear view of the evolution of absolutist state institutions. The bureaucratizing tendency is opposed by another tendency: the reinvigoration of that state’s feudal structure. On the one hand, as we have seen before, the feudal reaction in the army managed, in the second half of the eighteenth century, to regain positions lost to the embryonic process of professionalization of officers. On the other hand, the same causes that generated the professionalizing tendency—commercial competition and military conflicts—produced an opposite effect as well. The wars increased the absolutist state’s need for revenue and led it to increasingly resort to the sale of offices as a means of achieving budgetary balance, as allowed by its feudal structure. The same cause produces contradictory effects and, in this way, deepens the contradiction inscribed in the structure of the absolutist state. Such structural contradiction is reflected at the level of practice of the state agents. Two distinct types of officers emerge within the absolutist army. The first is the plebeian officer who aspires to reform the rules of the army. His watchword is that positions should go to those with talent and merit. Fulfilling this aspiration would require the completion of the embryonic professionalization existing in the army, with recruitment and promotion in the career being based exclusively on competence and no longer on the affiliation to an estate. It is thus an aspiration that implies the transformation of the particularist institutions of the absolutist state into formally universalist institutions. Because of specific motivations arising from the plebeian officers’ situation in the structure of the state, they seek the formation of a bourgeois state. The other type is the noble officer, linked to the feudal ruling class, who opposes the pressure for the professionalization of the army, as shown by the laws that configure the so-called feudal reaction. This struggle between two types of state agents over the norms of organization of the state apparatus itself was one of the active factors that led to the crisis in the functioning of the feudal state in 1789. In fact, the French monarchy was not able to effectively repress the people’s antifeudal insurrections of May–July 1789 because, among other reasons, plebeian officers refused to repress a movement in which they saw the possibility of implementing the complete professionalization of the

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army.16 The duplicity of criteria on which the structure of the absolutist state was based—professionalizing components versus criteria based on estates—introduced a contradiction at the core of that state. This contradiction erupted, in the form of a state crisis at the end of the eighteenth century, preventing the absolutist state from fulfilling its fundamental role of defending the feudal order threatened by the revolution. In this crisis of the absolutist state, two types of contradiction must be distinguished. One, already analyzed, places plebeian officers in opposition to noble officers and concerns the struggle for the complete professionalization of the army. The other contradiction cuts the military institution horizontally, placing its popular base, the mass of soldiers, against the contingent of officers. Unlike the officers who fight for professionalization, soldiers resist the order to repress the revolutionary masses not because of motivations arising from the position they occupy in the state apparatus, but due to the interests corresponding to their class situation—peasants, artisans, and merchants (according to Bertaud, 1988). This second contradiction is, therefore, a simple reflection within the state of the class contradiction that runs through society, and not a contradiction arising, like the first, from the conflict between internal norms of state organization. Conclusion: Political Revolution and Transition These notes should be read as an essay surrounded by limitations both theoretical (the incipient development of the concept of the feudal state) and historiographical (our limited knowledge of the history of absolutism). We decided to present them in spite of such limitations because we believe that our hypothesis combines, in an original way, part of the theoretical reflection and the historiographical material available. With this caveat in mind, we offer our conclusion. Due to its juridical-political structure and the politics it practiced, the absolutist state was a pre-capitalist state of a feudal type. We arrived at this (albeit tentative) conclusion by employing the Poulantzian concepts

16 “‘Places for talent and merit!’ ‘Equality! Equality!’ The demands of the Third Estate ran through the army, especially among the noncommissioned officers and the ‘officers of fortune’, as officers who were not nobles were called. The conflicts in civilian society appeared also in the regiments, and made it impossible for the authorities to use the army as a force of repression” (Bertaud, 1988, p. 15).

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of state types and contradicting the analysis that Poulantzas himself makes of absolutism in Political Power and Social Classes. Poulantzas characterized the absolutist state as a capitalist state, both because it moved away from his own concept of capitalist state (Poulantzas presented the (relative) political and administrative centralization promoted by the absolute monarchy as evidence or proof of the change in state type), and because he had a mistaken understanding of the facts and historical processes concerning the politics and the juridical-political structure of the absolutist state. In our view, being a feudal state, the absolutist state reproduced the feudal economic structure, blocking a capitalist-type development. From this perspective, the bourgeois political revolution—understood as a political process of transformation of the state structure and the corresponding change in the social class that holds the state power—gains decisive importance in the transition to capitalism. If, on the contrary, the absolutist state is considered to be a capitalist state, we are left with two options when approaching the theme of revolution. The first option is advocated by Alexis de Tocqueville, who considers the absolutist state as a “modern” state. For Tocqueville, the French Revolution did nothing more than give continuity to the work of political modernization that would have been initiated by the absolutist monarchy. Strictly speaking, and adopting the Marxist concept of revolution, for Tocqueville there would not have been a revolution in France between 1789 and 1794. Poulantzas suggests another approach. He considers that there was a process of the bourgeois revolution and that such a process was necessary. According to him, in the absolutist state, the feudal nobility would be the politically ruling class (Poulantzas, 1975). We would come, then, to the following conclusion: the absolutist state, which is a capitalist state and has the function of destroying feudal production relations, organizes the political domination of the feudal nobility. Thus, the price that Poulantzas paid to maintain the thesis that the bourgeois revolutions destroyed the absolutist state was to find himself entangled in a contradiction: the absolutist state would be a capitalist state that organizes the domination of the feudal class. Now, it is because the absolutist state was a feudal state, suitable for the reproduction of feudal production relations, that a bourgeois political revolution was necessary to carry out the transition to the capitalist mode of production. This revolution created the bourgeois state and, in doing so, merged new elements, both technological (agricultural revolution, manufacturing) and socioeconomic (development of commerce and

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cities, concentration of wealth, expropriation of workers, agglutination of new interests and ideologies) forged by a long historical development, into a new structural unit: the capitalist mode of production.

References Althusser, L. (1972). Montesquieu, Politics, and History. In L. Althusser (Ed.), Politics and History: Montesquieu, Rousseau, Hegel and Marx. New Left Books. Anderson, P. (1974). Lineages of the absolute state. N.B.L. Balibar, E. (2015). On the basic concepts of historical materialism. In L. Althusser et al. Reading Capital (The complete edition). Verso. Bertaud, J. P. (1988). The army in the french revolution: From citizen-soldier to instrument of power. Princeton University Press. Bloch, M. (1976). Les caractères originaux de l’Histoire Rurale Française. Librairie Armand Colin. Chaunu, P. (1979). L’État d’Offices. In F. Braudel & E. Labrousse (Eds.), Histoire économique et sociale de la France. Presses Universitaires de France. Dobb, M. (2008). Studies in the development of capitalism. Kessinger Publishing. Durand, G. (1969). Le Personnel Administratif. In État et Institutions XVIXVIIIème Siècle. Armand Colin. Engels, F. (1981). La decomposición del feudalismo y el surgimiento de los Estados Nacionales. In La guerra campesina en Alemania. Editorial Progresso. Febvre, L. (1948). La Venalité des Offices. In Annales, 3. Foignet, R. (1946). Manuel elémentaire d’histoire du Droit Français (14th ed.). Librairie Arthur Rousseau. Goubert, P. (1953). Un Problème Mondial: la Venalité des Offices. In Annales, 8. Hill, C. (1972). Comentário. In P. M. Sweezy et al (Ed.), Do feudalismo ao capitalismo (2nd ed.). Publicações Dom Quixote. Hincker, F. (1978). Contribuição à discussão sobre a transição do feudalismo ao capitalismo: a monarquia absoluta francesa. In M. F. M. Pereira (Ed.), (org) Sobre o feudalismo. Editorial Estampa. Koulischer, J. (1931). La Grande Industrie au XVIIème et au XVIIIème Siècles: France, Allemagne, Russie. In Annales, 3. Lapeyere, H. (1979). La Venalidad de los Cargos Administrativos. In H. Lapeyere (Ed.), Las Monarquias Europeas del Siglo XVI . Coleção Nueva Clio. Lemarchand, G. (1978). Feudalismo e sociedade rural na França moderna. In M. F. M. Pereira (org) Sobre o feudalismo. Editorial Estampa. Marx, K. (1852). The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte. Progress Publishers, 1972.

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Marx, K. (1887). Capital—A critique of political economy (Vol. 1). In Part 8, Chapter 27, Expropriation of the agricultural population from the land. Progress Publishers, 2015. Available (checked 11 August 2022) at: https://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/download/pdf/CapitalVolume-I.pdf Parain, C. (1978). Evolução do sistema feudal europeu. In M. F. M. Pereira (Ed.), (org). Sobre o feudalismo. Editorial Estampa. Poggi, G. (1981). A evolução do Estado Moderno. Zahar. Porchenev, B. (1972). Les soulevements populaires en France au XVII siècle. Flamarion. Poulantzas, N. (1975). Political power and social classes. Verso. Saes, D. (1985). A formação do Estado burguês no Brasil (1888–1891). Paz e Terra. Seligman, E. L. (1901). justice en France pendant la Révolution 1789–1792. Librairie Plon. Soboul, A. (1979). Sour la fonction historique de l’absolutisme éclairé. In Annales historiques de la Révolution française, 238, Available (checked 7 August 2022) at https://www.persee.fr/docAsPDF/ahrf_0003-4436_1979_ num_238_1_4104.pdf Soboul, A. (1974). A Revolução Francesa. Difel. de Tocqueville, A. (1979). O Antigo Regime e a Revolução. Editora Universidade de Brasília. Villey, M. L. (1949). Droit Romain. PUF. Weber, M. (1972). Feudalismo e Estado Estamental. In O. Ianni (Ed.), (Org.) Teorias da estratificação social. Companhia Editora Nacional.

CHAPTER 5

State and Transition to Socialism: Was the Paris Commune a Workers’ Power?

This chapter examines the question of the specific form of organization of workers’ power in the Paris Commune of 1871. It seeks to show that only an understanding of the transition process that surpasses economism allows us to see why Marx considered the Paris Commune as the first experience of a workers’ power. Precisely because they did not understand this, academic critics were able to support, against Marx’s analysis, the thesis that the Commune represented just another popular uprising like so many others in France in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Our ideas are presented concurrently with a critical evaluation of part of the bibliography on these historical processes. Although these processes have been widely discussed in specialized historiography, we believe that, because our analyses are informed by an issue ignored or rejected by historiographic research, we manage to shed some new light on them.

This text was prepared for the International Seminar 130 Years of the Paris Commune, organized by the Center for Marxist Studies (Cemarx) at Unicamp in May 2001. It was published in the book that collected the material from the seminar under the title “Comuna republicana ou Comuna operária? A tese de Marx posta à prova” [Republican Commune or Workers’ Commune? Marx’s thesis put to the test] (Boito Jr., 2001). © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2023 A. Boito, State, Politics, and Social Classes, Marx, Engels, and Marxisms, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-22046-3_5

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Several aspects related to the Paris Commune of 1871 and its consequences were and still are, to this day, a subject of debate. A particularly important topic is the more general question about the social, political, and economic nature of the Paris Commune, a question that is at once theoretical, historiographical, and political.

An Echo of the Eighteenth Century or a Harbinger of the Twentieth Century? The socialist tradition presented the Paris Commune as the first workers’ government in history. Karl Marx himself characterized it this way in the heat of events, in texts collected later in a book that became famous: The Civil War in France. Marx was a theorist and leader of the International Workingmen’s Association (IWA), whose French chapter played a leading role in the revolution and government of the Paris Commune. Twenty-three years before the Paris Commune, Marx and Engels had predicted, in the Manifesto of the Communist Party, the imminence of a workers’ revolution on the European continent. Three years after writing the Manifesto, Marx and Engels continued to affirm in their analyses and assessments of the revolutions of 1848 that a workers’ revolution was underway. In Marx’s analysis of the 1848 Revolution in France, registered in The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte, the episode of the workers’ insurrection of June 1848 in Paris is interpreted as the first action in which the proletariat would have emerged as an independent political force in a revolutionary struggle against the bourgeoisie. The immediate reason for this insurrection was the fact that the government threatened to close down the national workshops—productive units the French state had created under pressure from the Parisian working class to provide employment for workers in need of it. Some twenty years later, in the days of the Paris Commune, Marx readily recognized in it the workers’ revolution that he and Engels had been announcing for some time. This characterization of the events in Paris was not surprising by any means, and it could not have bewildered or astonished the informed observers. The Central Committee of the National Guard itself, an organ elected by the working population of Paris, when leading the insurrection of March 18, 1871, and initiating the government of the Commune, proclaimed, with all the pomp and solemnity that surround French political acts, that they organized the insurrection as a representative of the “Parisian proletariat.” Well, did the theory that Marx and Engels had been elaborating

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as they closely followed the course of European history allow them, since the 1840s, to foresee the facts? Or, conversely, did they try to shape the episode of the Commune according to the conveniences of a misleading theory? We cannot ignore the fact that the characterization of the Commune as a workers’ government has political consequences. In the human sciences, it is possible to be objective, but it is impossible to be neutral. The consequences of Marx’s thesis are clear. If the Commune was a workers’ government, this suggests that, at the end of the nineteenth century, the working class could be considered an “ascending social class,” having demonstrated the capacity to develop its own political program, to organize itself around it, and take over the government of the “capital of the world.” It also means that the theory and theses of the theorists and leaders of the IWA were correct. It is understandable that this analysis would be well received by the socialist movement, and that it would greatly disturb the bourgeois ideologues. If we leave aside the merely pamphleteering reactionary writings, it is possible to say that it was only a century later, in the 1960s, that another characterization of the Paris Commune began to develop. The French historian Jacques Rougerie, researching the proceedings taken by the victorious forces of the reaction against the surviving communards, started to support the thesis that the revolution and the government of the Commune would have been the last chapter of the bourgeois revolutions of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, and not the first chapter of an emerging process of the workers’ revolution (Rougerie, 1964). This thesis excited the academic world; it showed a way to deconstruct the “socialist myth” of the Commune. An Anglo-Saxon bibliography also appeared, presenting the Commune as the result of a struggle in some arrondissements of Paris, a struggle that would have indiscriminately brought together individuals from all social classes (Tombs, 1997). Summarizing a little, we could say that the historian Roger V. Gould maintains that the Commune was a neighborhood struggle, and not a class struggle—a struggle fought by some neighborhoods whose populations would have a strong sense of identity that went beyond social classes.1 To deconstruct the “socialist myth” of the Commune, however, the formulation that best thrived in French academic circles was put forward by Jacques Rougerie in 1 Gould’s book (1995) is summarized and criticized in the article by Tombs (1997) cited above. Tombs shows the inconsistency of Gould’s data.

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the following terms: “Twilight Commune” or “Dawn Commune”? And Rougerie himself replied, in Le procès des communards, that it would have been a twilight revolution, the last spasm of the romantic revolutions of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries.2 Denying the working-class nature of the Paris Commune also has political consequences, although these are obviously distinct from the political consequences of the previous thesis. This denial means greatly diminishing the political presence of the working class in nineteenth-century Europe and casting doubts on the political capacity of workers. There is nothing strange, therefore, in the fact that the concept of the “twilight revolution” has been so well accepted among liberals. Furthermore, this thesis provided the basis for a critique of Karl Marx’s political writings. Twilight revolution theorists maintain or suggest that Marx distorted the facts concerning the Commune so that they could fit into the theory he and Engels had been elaborating. Are we suggesting that everyone should choose, according to their political preferences, the thesis that best suits them? Should socialists take on the unconditional defense of the Commune’s working-class character, leaving it up to liberals to deconstruct, at all costs, this “socialist myth”? Certainly, resolving a historiographical question through political means is not a good methodological procedure, at least for Marxist historians and socialist intellectuals and activists. It is necessary to be aware of the political consequences of each thesis in question, not to take sides arbitrarily, but—among other reasons—to be able to control the effects of our political preferences in the debate of a theme that is above all historiographical. We need to go beyond the astronomical metaphor formulated in terms of twilight versus dawn. We can start to put this metaphor behind us by employing, at first, its own terms. The French historian Claude Willard, president of the association Les Amis de la Commune, stated, in a lecture given in Brazil on the occasion of the international colloquium 130 Years of the Paris Commune, that the Commune fed both on the setting and 2 The reader should be alerted to the fact that, according to our interpretation of Jacques Rougerie’s writings, he relativized his thesis a few years later and, subsequently, ended up abandoning it. We will talk about this up ahead, not least because we largely rely on Rougerie’s most recent research. For now, we remind the reader that Robert Tombs (1997), in the cited article, and Danielle Tartakowsk (2001) continue to defend Rougerie’s original thesis, which sees the Commune as the last episode of the Revolution of 1789.

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the rising sun. The Commune is, at the same time, an heir to 1789 and a herald of the workers’ revolutions of the twentieth century. It is an heir to 1789 in a double sense. In the first place, as we shall see, because the bourgeois revolution had not fulfilled all that it had promised. A revolutionary movement willing to go beyond bourgeois tasks, as was the case of the Commune, could see itself in the position of fulfilling, in a first phase and without mincing words, these unfulfilled promises. Secondly, because the revolutionary traditions of the working classes of pre-capitalist modes of production can, in countless ways, be incorporated by the proletariat in the context of a new program. It is well known that the revolution of 1789 was a bourgeois revolution strongly marked by the struggle of the popular element. Furthermore, we can observe the precocious and embryonic presence of a strictly proletarian element. Friedrich Engels always stressed the role of Babeuf, leader of the Conspiracy of the Equals in the bourgeois revolution in France, and the role of Winstanley, who organized the diggers, in the bourgeois revolution in England. Engels considered these leaders and these movements as the proletarian wing, avant la lettre, of these bourgeois revolutions. Hence, we can complete the terms of the problem: we must ask ourselves not only what is bourgeois in the Paris Commune, but also what is popular— liable to be reused by the socialist movement—and even proletarian in the French Revolution of 1789. Both questions are pertinent. However, while the setting sun and the rising sun are always the same and only sun, and the one aspect that varies is the observer’s point of view, this is not the case with revolutions. We must ask ourselves about the nature of 1871 and its dominant element. We understand that the Paris Commune was, as Karl Marx wrote, an insurrection and a government of the working class, the first experience of workers’ power, and, as such, a “dawn revolution,” announcing the workers’ movement and revolutions that would shape history in the twentieth century. Why do we think so? Why do we believe Marx’s analysis has resisted contemporary historiographical research? We shall answer this question in two steps. First, we will expose the situation of the workers’ movement in France at the time of the Commune, its ideas and organizations, and the social composition of the organs of power of the Paris Commune. For this purpose, we will recall some well-known information, but also bring to the fore a little-publicized study on this matter, which strengthens the thesis of the proletarian character of the movement that resulted in the Paris

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Commune. Next, resorting to the expanded concept of mode of production and to the problem of the transition to socialism, we will point to the socialist component of the Paris Commune—a topic that is the focus of heated debates among historians—and how this socialist component influenced the course of events. At this point, we will also highlight the exact content of Marx’s thesis on the proletarian nature of the Commune—as there are many misunderstandings over this issue—and how this content was confirmed, including in its details and nuances, by later historiographical research.

Insurrection and Workers’ Government The men and women who promoted the Paris Commune belonged to the working class and had been organizing themselves around ideas that tended toward socialism. The Paris workers of the 1870s cannot be assimilated into the artisans, apprentices, and shopkeepers who made up the sans-culottes movement of the great French Revolution of 1789. Two-thirds of the city’s economically active population were wage earners, mostly manual wage laborers, and more than half of this population worked in the industry. During the Second Empire (1852–1870), Paris had become an industrial and wageearning city. It had one million inhabitants in 1850 and reached almost two million in 1870. In 1866, a census counted 455,000 male and female workers, 120,000 employees, 100,000 domestic workers, and 140,000 employers in Paris. The sectors that employed the most were clothing and textile, art and luxury products, civil construction, and metallurgy. Most of these wage earners worked in small companies, but a significant number of them were already the typical modern wageworkers produced by the industrial revolution—civil construction and metallurgy grew tremendously during the Second Empire, operating in what was, for that time, modern capitalist standards. There were two factories producing locomotives and railway equipment, each with more than 1500 workers, and since 1848 the railway workshops in the north of Paris were considered to be “worker strongholds” (Rougerie, 1997). By 1870, the Parisian working class already had mass organizations and ideas of its own. It was unionized in the Federation of Workers’ Associations of Paris, which then had about 40,000 members (Gacon, s.d.). The French section of the International Workingmen’s Association (IWA) had an important political presence in this fledgling labor movement. In 1868,

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1869, and 1870, the working masses carried out major strikes marked by confrontations with the imperial police. The strike is a method of struggle that, by definition, cannot be used by small landowners or “urban plebs.” Furthermore, this working class had, at the end of the Second Empire, its “school of socialism.” With the aid of unpublished documents containing detailed police reports, historians Alain Dalotel, Alain Faure, and Jean-Claude Freiermuth made an important and careful study of the public meetings during the period of crisis of the imperial political regime (Dalotel et al., 1980). This study shows that people’s and workers’ opposition to the Second Empire was already strong before the disaster of the Franco-Prussian War of 1870. It also shows that the political and ideological content of this opposition went far beyond a bourgeois-democratic republicanism. A real program for building a socialist economy was taking shape in the public meeting halls of the popular districts of Paris. As part of that program in development, we find some fundamental points that were presented in an articulated manner: socioeconomic equality, elimination of private ownership of the means of production, establishment of collective ownership, and use of revolutionary action to achieve these goals. We can see that this is a collectivist program that has left behind the smallholder egalitarianism (= sharing private property) that was typical of the sans-culottes of the eighteenth century. Since the working class is not a mere collection of individuals who occupy the same place in the production process, but an organized collective of wage workers that fights against capitalism, we should dwell a little on how the communist program was discussed and outlined in public meetings at the end of the Second Empire. It is worth listening to the speakers of that time. The Blanquist writer Alphonse Humbert, speaking in November 1868 in the Grand Pavillon Ménilmontant, states: “Equality, I want it integrally”; Gaudoin, speaking at the Molière Hall, defends “the establishment of the egalitarian Commune”; Lefrançais, another important speaker at these public meetings, demonstrates, according to the police report, that “far from destroying human equality, the revolutionary Commune will develop it.”3 Unlike the smallholders, the communists by no means 3 Réunions publiques à Paris [Public Meetings in Paris] report, 800 manuscript pages, Bibliothèque Historique de la Ville de Paris, document NA 155, apud Dalotel et al. (1980, p. 240).

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think of this equality as a division of property: “The solution is communism, collective property”; after evoking Babeuf in La Redoute room, Lefrançais “preaches the replacement of individual property by collective property”; the flower seller Louis Moreau, in the Vieux-Chêne room, declares: “I am a communist and I do not want individual property. The solution we propose is not the destruction of property; it is collective property, property for all, and not property exploited by some at the expense of others.” The way to reach collective property, in turn, is through the class struggle: “It is necessary to split classes”; “Communism represents the future, it makes no concessions or compromise with our enemies. Against them, mortal war; deadly and merciless war (applause)”; “It is necessary to be tough and to suppress the bourgeoisie” (Dalotel et al., 1980, pp. 242–245). One can imagine the effect of speeches like these on the bourgeoisie and the police who followed and reported on the discussions at the public meetings. These public meeting halls would, shortly after the fall of the Second Empire and the proclamation of the Republic in September 1870, give rise to workers’ and popular clubs, many of them publishing their own newspapers and forming a network of mass organizations of Parisian workers. The most active clubs were precisely those in the working-class and popular districts of Paris, drawing an arc that went from the north to the southeast of the city, passing through its eastern region: Batignolles, Montmartre, Belleville, the 11th, 12th, and 13th arrondissements. Even before the insurrection of March 18, 1871, these neighborhoods and districts, with their clubs, newspapers, and National Guard battalions, had escaped state authority, becoming self-administered. It was this working mass that propelled the revolution of 1871. The socioeconomic profile of the Commune’s militants and fighters proves the statement above. Manual workers formed the majority of the group, with the new typically working-class sectors (construction, metallurgy, unskilled day laborers) having a presence well above their proportion in the active population of Paris. During the Semaine Sanglante and shortly after the defeat of the Commune, more than 35,000 Parisians who had participated in the revolution were arrested by the troops of Versailles. More than five thousand of them were construction workers, more than four thousand were unskilled day laborers, another four thousand were metallurgical workers, and thousands of others were workers from different economic sectors. Altogether, about 90% of the prisoners

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were of working-class and popular origin. It is remarkable the participation of workers who made up the modern working class at the time. All told, the construction workers, metallurgists, and unskilled day laborers accounted for 39% of the prisoners and 45% of those prisoners who were sentenced to deportation. This study was carried out by Jacques Rougerie himself, 15 years after having released his first book on the subject, in which he had sought to deconstruct the “socialist myth” of the Commune. In this new study, Rougerie has revised, albeit without saying so, his earlier analysis. After examining the data, he concluded that the Commune was the “Parisian labor revolution” (Rougerie, 1997). In addition to their predominance in mass organizations and in the Commune’s struggles, Parisian workers played a prominent role in the insurrection and the government of Paris. The body that commanded the insurrection of March 18, 1871 giving rise to the Paris Commune was the Central Committee of the National Guard. This committee was composed of 38 delegates elected from the districts of Paris, 21 of whom were workers; about 20 of them were affiliated with the French section of the IWA and the Paris Union Chambers. In addition to the majority of workers, there were ten writers, artists, and self-employed workers, three employees, three small manufacturers, and one rentier (ibid., p. 50). From the perspective of its social composition, it is understandable that the Central Committee of the National Guard proclaimed that it assumed power in the name of the Paris proletariat. The highest political body of the Paris Commune, the Council of the Commune, elected on March 26, eight days after the insurrection, was also composed of a majority of workers and members of the International Workingmen’s Association and the Union Chambers. This Council had, nominally, 79 members, of whom only about 50 attended the sessions. No less than 33 of the elected councilors were workers; the rest were intellectuals, smallholders, and self-employed workers. Jacques Rougerie, in the work cited above, calculates that the majority of the Council of the Commune—about 40 of its members—belonged to the IWA and the

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Trade Union Chambers.4 The Council of the Commune was a workers’ council. Operating together with the Council of the Commune, which was the municipal council elected by the inhabitants of Paris, was the “executive arm” of the revolution, the commissions, which we could call ministerial commissions. There was a marked proletarian component in these organisms. Just below the ministerial commissions were the large public and infrastructure services, where Paris workers also played a prominent role. Manual wageworkers, members of the IWA and of the Union Chambers, headed the ministerial commissions for finance and livelihood (Varlin), labor (Frankel), and the ministerial commission for education (Vaillant). Vaillant relied on the work of IWA members who occupied district administrations of Paris to initiate the implementation of a free, public, secular, compulsory education system that was open to both sexes—girls had been, until then, excluded from the school system. According to Jacques Rougerie’s assessment, in the Commune’s first executive body—maintained until April 21, 1871, when it was renewed— the Blanquists had the majority of the nine ministerial commissions. Here, a note is in order. Blanquism was marked, in the history of the workers’ movement, as a petty-bourgeois current. Engels and Lenin insisted particularly on this point: the Blanquists defended as strategy the formation of a rather disciplined vanguard that would take power through insurrection, in the name of the working class and in its place, to govern in a centralized, dictatorial manner until the workers educated themselves politically. This is, in fact, the petty-bourgeois component of Blanquism. However, in his correspondence with Louis Watteau, Marx stated that he considered Auguste Blanqui “the head and heart of the proletarian party in France.”5 To make this context comprehensible, we must consider, in addition to the Blanquists’ methods of organization and struggle, their social and economic program, which proposed an egalitarian society, without class domination and based on the collective ownership of the means of

4 Other Communes were proclaimed in France in 1871, as in Lyons and Marseilles. However, not all had an independently organized working class. This was the case of the Commune of Creusot—a city in the eastern region of France, close to Switzerland, a typical and traditional working-class region dedicated to mining and smelting. Creusot’s working class, still weakly organized, acted as the socialist wing of a republican party. See Ponsot (1957). 5 See the entry “Blanquisme” in Labica and Bensussan (1985).

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production. Therefore, it is incorrect to identify, based on formal similarities in the methods of centralizing and revolutionary political action, the Blanquists with the Jacobins. It is worth presenting some facts in this regard. In the great public meetings at the end of the Second Empire, the Blanquists were very active, mainly in the halls of the working-class districts of the north and east of Paris. Speaking to an audience that often exceeded three thousand people, the Blanquists called themselves communists, criticized the socialists for their reformist positions, and preached the need to seize political power to implement the “revolutionary Commune.” Contrary to what many suggest or assert, the proposal to fight for the Commune was present in the labor movement before the Franco-Prussian War, was widely discussed in public meetings, and was understood, at the same time, as the organization of local power and of an egalitarian society. The proposal for a revolutionary Commune unified different currents of the French workers’ movement.6 For the Blanquists, seizing power was the means to eliminate private ownership of the means of production, transform them into a collective property, and achieve social equality. It was these Blanquist militants, who quite aptly called themselves communists, who formed the majority in the “executive arm” of the Council of the Commune until the end of April.7 6 We therefore disagree with a thesis widespread in France suggesting that the Paris Commune was an “involuntary revolution.” In Brazil, historian Daniel Aarão, defended this idea in a text that circulated on the internet during the event celebrating the 130 Years of the Paris Commune (Reis Filho, 2001). Well, circumstances play an important role in any revolution. No revolution is the complete realization of a project created by a subject who would have unveiled the supposed march of history. The Paris Commune, to this extent, can also be considered a child of circumstances, but not an involuntary one. The historical research already cited by Dalotel, Faure, and Freiermuth shows that a mass socialist platform was forged in the public meetings of the final period of the Second Empire. This platform included as one of its central objectives—which, unlike others, unified almost all trends—the struggle for the “Social Commune.” In 1868, 1869, and 1870, all proletarian groups in Paris debated and desired this Commune, which “will manage itself.” It was not a simple unpredictable product of the Franco-Prussian War. See Dalotel et al. (1980, pp. 257ff.). 7 The Blanquists were in their element in the halls of the proletarian districts of Paris.

In the 18th, 19th, and 20th arrondissements, they were active in halls such as Salle des Martyrs, Bal de la Reine-Blanche, Salle de la Révolution, Salle de la Marseillaise, FoliesBelleville, Grand Pavillon Ménilmontant, and others. Among the Blanquists who declared themselves communists were Emile-Victor Duval, a 30-year-old blacksmith and a member of the IWA; Louis-Eugène Moreau, a 23-year-old metallurgist; Emmanuel Chauvrière, a

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As far as major public and infrastructure services are concerned, it was workers organized in trade unions or in the International who managed the National Press (Debock), the Mint (Camélinat), and the Post Office (Theisz). Theisz was an example of talent and dynamism, having ensured the proper functioning of the postal service even amid the revolution and despite the boycott of the Post Office administration, who fled to Versailles, and part of its employees.8

Is the Commune Socialist? Economics and Politics in the Transition Period Thus, we can say that the social composition of the rank-and-file fighters and the leaders of the Paris Commune was markedly working class. They were not just workers. Self-employed workers, smallholders, shopkeepers, and artisans, who were very numerous in the population of Paris, had an important role in the governing bodies of the Commune, as we have mentioned briefly. In fact, Marx speaks of an “essentially working-class government,” and not merely a working-class government. Moving on, from the available data, it is also legitimate to say that workers were absorbing and developing, mainly with the intervention of the Blanquist and internationalist (IWA) vanguards, the concept of an anti-capitalist world in the conjuncture of the crisis of the Second Empire and taking advantage of the exceptional revolutionary experience of the Parisian workers. These two observations are fundamental given the current operation of “deconstruction” of the “socialist myth” of the Commune. Nevertheless, they do not close the discussion. It remains to be seen what the policy implemented by the Paris Commune was. Was it purely and simply a bourgeois republican policy? Or a republican bourgeois policy plus social reform measures—a kind of outline for a welfare state avant la lettre? Or did the Commune really implement a socialist policy? The communards fought for the “social republic,” took various steps to protect labor and the poor, but few of these steps heralded a socialist-type economy. The most cited—and rather important—socializing initiative was the decree that determined that every factory abandoned by the

19-year-old employee; Abel Peyrouton, a 29-year-old lawyer; Raoul Rigault, a 23-year-old medical student; Alphonse Humbert, a 26-year-old writer, and many others. 8 See Paul Chauvet (n.d.) and Jean Gacon (n.d.).

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owner—a common phenomenon in times of revolution—should be passed to the control of those who worked in it. However, that is not enough to claim that the Commune government was socialist. During a debate on the occasion of the centenary of the Paris Commune, French historian Ernest Labrousse insisted on an important point: no official document of the Paris Commune makes a solemn, doctrinal proclamation presenting socialism as a government goal (Labrousse, 1971). Karl Marx himself, whose thesis on the working-class nature of the Commune is the reason for all this political and historiographical discussion, when returning to the subject of the Commune some ten years after the events in Paris, observed in a letter to a correspondent that most of the leaders of the Paris Commune were not even socialists. Some scholars, commenting on this letter from Marx, suggest that he would be, with this observation, reviewing the analysis he had made in the aforementioned The Civil War in France. This work, written in the heat of the moment, would have been irremediably contaminated by an unrealistic enthusiasm and the political goals of the IWA. We disagree with this assessment. When commenting on works and their authors, it is necessary to read them carefully. Marx claimed in The Civil War in France that the Commune was the first experience of a workers’ government, but he did not state it was a socialist government. The most that Marx says about socialism is that the Commune “carried it within,” just tending toward it. Let us see how we can understand the coexistence of the thesis of a working-class government with the idea that the Commune would only tend to be socialist. We cannot lose sight of an elementary fact: the immediate objective of the Paris Commune was to overthrow a government that had displayed signs of national betrayal and a monarchist bent. Out of fear of the Parisian proletariat, which was organized and in arms, the French government accepted a forced peace with Prussia, a peace that restricted the sovereignty of France and mutilated its territory. As for the monarchists, by preaching the signing of the peace treaty to a population that was tired of the horrors of war, they won a majority in the parliamentary election of February 1871. Hence, the Commune faced the tasks of assuring national sovereignty, which was threatened by the Prussian occupation and the armistice, and preventing the restoration of the Bourbon monarchy or, in other words, it faced typically bourgeois tasks. It also faced other bourgeois tasks that emerged as a promise in the Revolution of 1789 and that had not been fulfilled. The most important examples of these tasks that

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had not been carried out, or that had only partially been so, were the separation of Church and state and the implementation of free, public, secular, compulsory, open-for-women education. The development of the principle of citizenship, typical of the bourgeois revolution, depends on the implementation of such measures, and the Commune tried to carry out these two tasks. In short, the Commune had to conduct the unfinished bourgeois transformations to “level the ground,” in Engels’ words, so it could begin the work of socialist transformation of the old society.9 For this task of “leveling the ground,” it was possible to count on a large part of the Parisian petty bourgeoisie, such as artists, self-employed workers, and some radicalized sectors of bourgeois republicanism. Many defended the Commune purely and simply to defend the occupied homeland. That is why, when Marx presents his characterization of the Paris Commune, he uses the expression “essentially, a government of the working class,” indicating the existence in the Commune of a government by a popular front, composed predominantly of workers. Nevertheless, the Paris Commune is not just a popular revolution that inherits and takes over tasks from the revolutionary waves that shook France in 1789, 1793, 1830, and 1848. There is also an important socialist component in the Commune’s policy. This component is known as a historical fact but is poorly dimensioned at the political and theoretical levels. Scholars, for the most part, are faced with this fact but do not think of it as an integral part of the socialist project of social transformation. We refer to the new form of organization of political power, the new type of democracy created by the Commune, and which Lenin will call a “semi-state.” Most Marxists and historians who discuss the Commune base themselves on a conception of socialism grounded on economism, which is still largely hegemonic today. Such hegemony makes historians look for Commune socialism only in its economic policy. Well, the new type of democracy that the Paris Commune established is also an integral and inescapable part of socialism. This new type of democracy represents a socialization of political power which, as such, enables and induces the socialization of the means of production (politics and economics must be

9 “[The Commune] decreed reforms which the republican bourgeoisie had failed to pass solely out of cowardice, but which provided a necessary basis for the free activity of the working class – such as the realization of the principle that in relation to the state, religion is a purely private matter.” Friedrich Engels, introduction written in 1891 for the publication of The Civil War in France. Quote taken from Karl Marx (2009, p. 6).

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seen, in this case, as sides of the same coin). This is true regardless of whether the leaders of the Commune were aware of this fact or not.10 It is worth listing the steps that shaped this new type of democracy: election, not only for government positions, but also for military, administrative, and judicial positions in the state; imperative mandate, revocable at any time by voters; dissolution of the standing army and creation of a workers’ militia; transfer of countless other tasks from the state to the organized working population; civil servants’ wages not higher than that of the workers (the Commune was the “cheapest government” in history). These and other measures constituted a new type of democracy, which combined representative democracy with direct democracy, and represented the beginning of the process of extinction of the bureaucracy and of the state apparatus itself, as a special apparatus placed above society. This issue is pertinent in a theory regarding the transition to socialism because this apparatus is an insurmountable obstacle to the socialization of the means of production. State bureaucracy tends to convert its authority and political influence into material advantages, expropriating manual workers from the means of production they seek to socialize. Its destruction by the Paris Commune and the beginning of the process to extinguish the state in general removed this obstacle and, at the same time, stimulated, as we will see below, a policy that outlined a process of socialization of the means of production. It was this outline, this tendency toward the socialization of the economy, that Marx glimpsed in the course of events, and he provided the theoretical key to explain it. Let us examine how Marx summarized his thesis on the Paris Commune in the book The Civil War in France.

10 Only a few were aware of that. Marx was the one to recognize the fact. Even so, he hesitated on terminology. He presented “the finally discovered political form,” i.e., a new type of democracy, as a condition for socialism, and not, strictly speaking, as an integral part of it. Despite this hesitation, which was more about terminology than conceptual, Marx showed the Commune fighters the profound content of their action. After the Paris Commune, all the leaders and fighters who reflected on what had happened and published analyses and memoirs about the events of 1871 considered that the Commune was moving toward socialism. This is what Jean Bruhat concludes after taking stock of the writings of the Commune’s leaders and combatants. See Bruhat (1971).

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Its true secret was this: It was essentially a working-class government, the product of the struggle of the producing against the appropriating class, the political form at last discovered under which to work out the economical emancipation of labor … The political rule of the producer cannot co-exist with the perpetuation of his social slavery. The Commune was therefore to serve as a lever for uprooting the economical foundation upon which rests the existence of classes, and therefore of class rule. (Marx, 2009, p. 41)

Reading the text above, we observe that the Commune is a political form that brings “within itself” the “economic emancipation of work.” In other words, the socialization of power induces the socialization of the means of production. As the workers’ movement exercised power democratically (imperative mandate, dissolution of the standing army, etc.), it can be said that a mismatch—or imbalance, or contradiction—is created between socialized power, on the one hand, and a capitalist economy based on private property, on the other. This mismatch is formulated in the following terms by Marx: the “political domination of the workers” is “incompatible” with their “social slavery.” Hence, it is possible to base theoretically the prospective analysis that follows Marx’s reasoning: the Commune (political reality) “would have to serve” (future tense) as a “lever” for the elimination of class exploitation (economic reality). This prospective analysis, which appears in Marx as an indication of a theoretically grounded tendency, has been fully confirmed by twentiethcentury historians in the most detailed and sophisticated historical studies. One of these historians is precisely Jacques Rougerie. Invited to give a lecture at the University Colloquium in Celebration of the Centenary of the Commune, held in Paris in May 1971, Jacques Rougerie, based on documents from the historical archives of the Franco-Prussian War, maintained that the measures of the “Ministerial Labor Commission and Exchange” led by Frankel, a member of the International Workingmen’s Association, was undoubtedly outlining a path of socialization of the means of production. After examining the documents, Jacques Rougerie quoted approvingly the passages from The Civil War in France in which Marx upheld, in the heat of events, the tendency of the Commune to implement socialism. We would add, the tendency of the Commune,

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already organized in socialist patterns at the political level, to implant a socialist economy based on the socialization of the means of production.11 This tendency to organize a socialist economy cannot be confused with the steps taken by the Commune to meet the Parisian workers’ immediate interests: the suspension of the payment of rents and debts, the free return of items pawned by the poor, the prohibition of night work by bakers, the implementation of insurance for the unemployed, the beginning of the process to implement a free, public, secular, compulsory school that was open to both sexes. Such steps, while important and urgent, can at best point to a welfare state, not to socialism. They may indicate the presence of people of working-class origin exercising government functions, but not the existence of a socialist form of organization of the political power. The tendency toward socialism appears in the policy of the “Ministerial Commission” of Labor and Exchange to place production under the control of the workers’ associations—workers’ cooperatives and trade unions. Historian Jacques Rougerie characterizes this as a policy of socialization of the means of production through the “unionization of the means of production.” This path of socialization can have limitations and contradictions. Nevertheless, placing production under the control of the workers’ associations must not be seen simply as an embryonic, still “artisanal” way of conceiving a socialist economy. On the contrary, the twenty-first-century reader must be more humble while examining the experience of the Commune. Socialism guided by the model of the Soviet Union lost its way precisely because of its statism, for identifying socialization with the nationalization of the means of production. The “unionization of the means of production” was claimed by all cooperative and union associations. They demanded that the Council of the Commune hand over the work it had to the cooperative and union associations. This claim was made by associations of bookbinders, tailors, shoemakers, tallow workers, and fur and leather workers. The Commune’s Labor Commission accepted these workers’ proposals, which pointed to a general reorganization of the economy. What seemed to prevail was 11 Crítica Marxista magazine published a translation of this much important lecture by Jacques Rougerie. The historiographical and even historical value of this text is all the greater because, in addition to the conference, we have a heated debate between Jacques Rougerie and other great French historians, such as Albert Soboul and Ernest Labrousse. The latter asserts, based on the fact that the Commune government did not claim to be socialist, that it is correct to say that the Commune was a workers’ government, but not a socialist one. See Crítica Marxista, #13, São Paulo, Boitempo, 2001.

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the idea that, with the political and financial support of the Council of the Commune, the workers’ associations would impose the gradual socialization of the means of production. Jacques Rougerie concludes: The Labor Committee complied, if I may say so. I calculated at least ten associations to which it passed the work, through a certificate. The movement should continue. A socialist achievement was underway here … There was no time.

Another fact to remember is the decree of April 16, which authorized the Union Chambers to organize the workers so that they could restart the factories that had been abandoned by the capitalists who had fled to Versailles. The workers’ associations saw in this decree the beginning of a process to implant socialism. We transcribe some of the reactions to the decree of April 16. Never has a more favorable occasion been offered by a government to the working class. Those who do not participate will be betraying the cause of the emancipation of the work … (Tailors Trade Union Chamber). … For us, workers, this is a great opportunity to establish ourselves permanently and finally put into practice our persevering and laborious studies from recent years … (Mechanics Chamber). At a time when socialism is asserting itself with a vigor unknown until now, it is impossible for us, workers in a profession that has suffered to the greatest degree the weight of exploitation and capital, to remain impassive to the emancipation movement … (Jewelers Chamber).

Later in May, as a result of the decree, the Trade Union Chambers organized themselves in the Commission for Investigation and Organization of Labor. The Commune government and the Chambers assigned to this Commission the following tasks. Abolishing the exploitation of man by man, the last form of slavery. Organizing labor through cooperative associations of collective and inalienable capital.

According to Jacques Rougerie, ten unions got to the point of surveying the abandoned workshops. It so happens that the Commission for Investigation and Organization of Labor concluded its constitution process, with the elaboration of statutes and other formalities, on May

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18, 1871, when the Semaine Sanglante massacre was about to begin. The defeat of the Commune interrupted a path that had already begun to be treaded. Therefore, it is possible to theoretically substantiate and empirically detect the existence of the Commune’s tendency to direct a transition process to socialism, completing the work of socialization of political power with the work of socialization of the means of production. It is also possible to affirm that the tendency was for the Council of Commune and the workers’ organizations to become increasingly aware of the process they were, to a certain extent, inventing. That is why it is correct to repeat, 150 years later, Marx’s idea that the Paris Commune contained socialism “within itself” or that it “carried it within.” That is what Marx said, with the acuity and precision that characterize his work.

References Boito, A. Jr. (Org.). (2001). A Comuna de Paris na história. Xamã. Bruhat, J. (1971). Les interpretations de la commune. Nouvelle Critique, special issue about the Paris Commune. Chauvet, P. (n.d.). Comment la Commune a administré Paris. In R. Mero (Ed.), Paris, la Commune (CD-ROM). Mémoire/Les Amis de la Commune/Temps des Cerises. Dalotel, A., Faure, A., & Freiermuth, J.-C. (1980). Aux origines de la Commune: Le mouvement réunions publiques à Paris 1868–1870. François Maspero. Gacon, J. (n.d.). Le premier pouvoir ouvrier. In R. Mero (Ed.), Paris, la Commune (CD-ROM). Mémoire/Les Amis de la Commune/Temps des Cerises. Gould, R. V. (1995). Insurgent identities: Class, community and protest in Paris from 1848 to the commune. Chicago University Press. Labica, G., & Bensussan, G. (Org.). (1985). Dictionnaire critique du marxisme. 2nd ed. PUF. Labrousse, E. (1971). Colloque Universitaire pour la Commémoration de la Commune de 1871. Paris: Éditions Ouvrière. Marx, K. (1972 [1852]). The eighteenth brumaire of louis bonaparte. Progress Publishers. Marx, K. (2009). The civil war in France. Dodo Press. Ponsot, P. (1957). Les grèves de 1870 et la Commune de 1871 au Creusot. Éditions Sociales. Reis Filho, D. A. (2001). Comuna de Paris: última revolução plebéia ou primeira revolução proletária? 130 Anos da Comuna de Paris. Espaço Marx. Rougerie, J. (1964). Procès des communards. Julliard.

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Rougerie, J. (1997). Commune de 1871. PUF. Tartakowsk, D. (2001). Balanço da historiografia da Comuna de Paris. In Boito, A. Jr. (Org.) A Comuna de Paris na história. Xamã. Tombs, R. (1997, Apr/Jun). Les communeux dans la ville: des analyses récentes à l´étranger. Le Mouvement Social, No. 179, p. 105.

CHAPTER 6

The Concept of Revolutionary Crisis: France in 1789

This chapter develops the concepts of political process and revolutionary crisis, showing the specificity of the Leninist tradition in this matter and comparing it with the thought of other Marxists such as Trotsky and Rosa Luxemburg. Our objective is also to examine the scope of the Leninist concept of revolutionary crisis, showing the fruitfulness of applying it to the analysis of the French Revolution and, more generally, of the bourgeois revolutions of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, and not only to analyses of the workers’ and popular revolutions of the twentieth century.

Political Crisis and Revolution Both for theoretical studies of and practical interventions in processes of transformation of society and the state, crisis and political change constitute fundamental topics. Among the theories that have addressed this matter, Marxism is one of the most traditional—which is undoubtedly

Article originally published under the title “Crise política e revolução: o 1789 de Georges Lefebvre” [Political Crisis and Revolution: Georges Lefebvre’s 1789], Revista de Sociologia e Política, Federal University of Paraná, n. 1, 1993. © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2023 A. Boito, State, Politics, and Social Classes, Marx, Engels, and Marxisms, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-22046-3_6

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due to its theoretical and methodological assumptions, i.e., the dialectical conception of society and history that underlies Marxist theory. The commentary we present here is motivated by the classic, brilliant essay by French historian Georges Lefebvre, published in France long ago, in 1939. We intend to show that his work as a historian of the French Revolution realizes, in Althusserian terms, the Leninist notion of revolutionary crisis, even though he does not do so consciously—a plausible hypothesis given the fact that Lefebvre does not refer to Lenin. We also intend to draw attention to the possibility of applying the Leninist notion of revolutionary political crisis to the analysis of the classical process of bourgeois revolution, despite Lenin having only referred, when he created that concept, to the socialist and popular-democratic revolutionary processes that occurred in Europe during the first decades of the twentieth century. As a whole, our commentary intends to contribute to the clarification of the concepts of political crisis and, particularly, revolutionary political crisis. We will try to indicate, on the one hand, that such concepts are linked to a specific aspect of Marxism, marked by a particular conception of historical materialism and dialectics, and, on the other hand, to explore the realization of the concept of revolutionary crisis in the context of 1789, in order to verify the enrichments that such realization may bring to the conceptual matrix.1

Mao Zedong, Dialectics, and Political Crises Among theorists and political leaders affiliated with the Marxist tradition, there is no single understanding of political crises. There is a tradition, usually associated with a voluntaristic political practice, which offers a simplistic conception of crisis and change. Rosa Luxemburg, in her texts on the Revolution of 1905 in Tsarist Russia, describes the revolutionary crisis and the revolutionary action of the masses as an unpredictable phenomenon, exempting herself, as a result of this definition, from a systematic reflection on the objective preconditions for the occurrence of a revolution (Luxemburgo, 1978). In The Transitional Program, Trotsky

1 The reciprocal relationship of mutual clarification between a concept and its application in historical analysis, a relationship designated by the term realization, is explained by Louis Althusser in On Theoretical Work: Difficulties and Resources (1990). This essay by Althusser was originally published in La Pensée magazine, n.132, April 1967.

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suggests that a previous, practically unique objective condition for a revolution to occur would be capitalism having entered an era of decadence, characterized by a supposedly definitive stagnation in the growth of the productive forces (Trotsky, 1938). The idea of the revolutionary crisis as a unique, complex, and conjunctural phenomenon is dissolved in the broader notion of a historical period prone to ignite crises and revolutions. However, it is well known that within Marxism there is a different approach to the phenomenon of crisis and political change, which seeks to detect, in all its complexity and extent, and as accurately as possible, the objective conditions that characterize a given conjuncture as a conjuncture of crisis, and that tries to differentiate the various types of political crisis. The works of Lenin and Mao Zedong fall within the latter tradition. In our evaluation, the work that presents the most systematic and developed theoretical and epistemological conception that this Marxist strand proposes of the political process and its crises is Mao Zedong’s classic essay On Contradiction, written in 1937. Mao’s intent is to develop the dialectical conception and, in particular, the concept of contradiction, which he considers to be its fundamental core. Hence, his theses extrapolate the field of the historical process, as they claim to be also valid for the physical universe. However, understandably, it is on society and political change that Mao Zedong focuses his reflection. Mao begins with Lenin’s reading of Hegel, using an article by Lenin entitled “On the Question of Dialectics,” written in 1915, and the notebook where we find “Conspectus of Hegel’s book The Science of Logic,” Lenin’s study notes taken between September and December 1914. Mao’s starting point is this formulation by Lenin: In brief, dialectics can be defined as the doctrine of the unity of opposites. This grasps the kernel of dialectics, but it requires explanations and development. Dialectics can be briefly defined as the theory of the unity of opposites. (Lenin, apud Mao Zedong, 1937, note 2)

In his essay, Mao seeks to formulate these explanations and this development. He successively sets out his theses on the universality of contradiction, the particularity of contradiction, the antagonistic or non-antagonistic character of contradiction, the principal or secondary position occupied by contradiction in a given process, the struggle and unity of opposites in contradiction, and, in a decisive point for the study of political crises, the shift from the state of relative rest, in which the

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contradictions undergo only quantitative changes, to the state that Mao calls “conspicuous change,” when the contradictions undergo qualitative modifications. Mao’s essay describes the political process as the result of the development of a complex, articulated set of various types of contradiction. The fundamental idea is that there is a set of particular and specific contradictions that develop quantitatively and cumulatively and change their position in a hierarchical relationship of importance, marking with these inversions different stages in the political process, and which are unified in a whole, so that the development and changes in one or more contradictions have repercussions on the others. According to our understanding, Marx and Engels had not arrived at this type of theoretical formulation or, in other words, they had not presented these theses in a systematic, deliberate, developed way. However, according to our reading, they had put this theoretical and epistemological conception of the process and of the political crisis into practice in their works on the 1848 revolutions in Germany and France. These texts, among which the classic The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte stands out, describe the conjuncture of political crisis in the middle of the nineteenth century in Western Europe as the result of the accumulation, development, and displacements of an articulated set of diverse and specific contradictions among social classes, class fractions, and distinct social categories—the bourgeoisie, the working class, the urban petty bourgeoisie, the peasantry, the lumpenproletariat, the landowners, the financial fraction of the bourgeoisie, the remaining noble estate, the civil and military bureaucracy of the state, etc. In these analyses, there is not one simple clash between the bourgeoisie and the proletariat, but, as Mao Zedong would write, a series of contradictions articulated among themselves, contradictions whose existence and articulation are independent of the will of each of the forces considered, and that therefore constitute the objective conditions in which these forces have to act. Such sectors of the population—classes, class fractions, and social categories— act on the political scene through political parties, parliamentary blocs, newspapers that concentrate “currents of opinion,” and other groupings, although, as a rule, they do not so explicitly. In other words, the parties do not proclaim in their programs which class and class fractions’ interests they defend, and the members of these parties have but a practical and instinctive notion of their representational relationship with this or that social sector—and in this matter, the revolutionary party of the proletariat is an exception. The interests and contradictions of classes and class

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fractions form a kind of infrastructure of the political process whose relationship with the superstructure of the party political scene is up to the analyst to detect. The political crisis erupts when the complex and articulated set of distinct contradictions of classes and class fractions that drive the political process reaches a breaking point. This is what happened in 1848.

Lenin and the Revolutionary Crisis Even before Mao’s theoretical formulation, Lenin had also practiced this conception of the process and of the political crisis. He also presented the thesis that it is necessary to make a distinction between the different types of political crisis, in creating the concept of revolutionary situation. In a well-known and much quoted passage from the essay entitled The Collapse of the Second International, Lenin defines the revolutionary situation as follows: To the Marxist it is indisputable that a revolution is impossible without a revolutionary situation; furthermore, it is not every revolutionary situation that leads to revolution. What, generally speaking, are the symptoms of a revolutionary situation? We shall certainly not be mistaken if we indicate the following three major symptoms: (1) when it is impossible for the ruling classes to maintain their rule without any change; when there is a crisis, in one form or another, among the “upper classes”, a crisis in the policy of the ruling class, leading to a fissure through which the discontent and indignation of the oppressed classes burst forth. For a revolution to take place, it is usually insufficient for “the lower classes not to want” to live in the old way; it is also necessary that “the upper classes should be unable” to live in the old way; (2) when the suffering and want of the oppressed classes have grown more acute than usual; (3) when, as a consequence of the above causes, there is a considerable increase in the activity of the masses, who uncomplainingly allow themselves to be robbed in “peace time”, but, in turbulent times, are drawn both by all the circumstances of the crisis and by the “upper classes” themselves into independent historical action. Without these objective changes, which are independent of the will not only of individual groups and parties but even of individual classes, a revolution, as a general rule, is impossible. The totality of all these objective changes is called a revolutionary situation […]it is not every revolutionary situation that gives rise to a revolution; revolution arises only out of a situation in which the above-mentioned objective changes are accompanied by a subjective change, namely, the

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ability of the revolutionary class to take revolutionary mass action strong enough to break (or dislocate) the old government, which never, not even in a period of crisis, “falls”, if it is not toppled over. (Lenin [1915], Chapter II)

Firstly, the most general thesis in this formulation is that the possibility of a revolution is the result of objective conditions that characterize, not a broad and undifferentiated historical period, but a specific political conjuncture. Revolution, i.e., the effective struggle to replace the social class in power, may or may not occur in a revolutionary situation, and its occurrence will depend on a subjective factor: the conduct of the political driving force(s) of the revolutionary class(es). In the quoted passage, one can get the impression that Lenin neatly separates objective factors (which characterize the revolutionary situation) and subjective factors (which are decisive in the outbreak of the revolution). The remainder of the booklet on the Second International deals, however, with the effects of the subjective factor on objective conditions. Lenin considers that the conduct of the political driving force can accelerate, delay, or inhibit the formation of the objective factors that characterize the revolutionary situation. We should also add that a revolution that occurs in a given revolutionary situation may or may not be victorious. The conditions necessary for its victory go beyond those necessary for the possibility of its occurrence, i.e., the conditions that characterize a revolutionary situation.2 Secondly, Lenin emphasizes that it is a complex and articulated set of contradictions—not any contradiction in particular taken in isolation— that characterizes a revolutionary situation. Thirdly, the concept highlights the particularity of the contradiction and the type of relationship that exists between the contradictions that are active in the conjuncture of crisis. The contradiction that divides the ruling classes is a specific contradiction: it creates the need to change the form of ruling. The contradiction between the popular classes and the ruling classes is also observed in a specific situation. There is an increase in the activity of the masses, and the text suggests that this intensification tends toward antagonism: the masses are drawn into independent historical action. The relationship between these two contradictions has a particularity: it favors the development of the contradiction between the 2 “It is necessary not to confuse the conditions for a revolution to break out with the conditions for its triumph” (Harnecker, n.d., p. 99).

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masses and the ruling class. The division at the top only promotes a revolutionary situation if it “paves the way” for the struggle of the popular classes, or even, as Lenin considers further below, if there is an extreme situation in which sectors of the ruling classes “draw,” due to the contradiction “at the top,” the popular classes “into an independent historical action.” Revolution is impossible without an autophagic action by sectors of the ruling classes. Finally, there is the idea of an aggravation of the “oppressed classes’ misery and want” that suggests that current and individual patterns cannot accommodate the situation of deprivation—it is as if the system’s escape valves were clogged. Nevertheless, this occurrence only contributes to the creation of a revolutionary situation if, like the division at the “top,” it instigates the development of the contradiction between “those below” and “those above.” The misery that produces the political passivity of the masses blocks the way to revolution. Marx, Engels, and Lenin practiced, in their historical analyses, the conception of political crisis that was later on theoretically developed by Mao Zedong, in part based on those very analyses. Hence, Mao’s formulation represents a qualitative leap in the history of the concept of political crisis within one of the Marxist traditions. Above all, Marxists must perceive the general notion of political crisis—understood as the rupture provoked by the development of an articulated set of contradictions—and the specific notion of revolutionary crisis—understood as a specific articulation of given contradictions that makes it possible to replace the old ruling class in power—as general indications that require further theoretical development (specifications, corrections, systematization) that can only be carried out based on historical research on crises and revolutions. Such development is necessary not only for a more accurate understanding of the process of political change in general and revolutionary change in particular, but also for a more effective practical intervention in crises.

Lefebvre’s Essay on the French Revolution Georges Lefebvre (1874–1959) was a socialist, a member of the French Section of the Workers’ International of Jean Jaurès and Jules Guesde, who recognized in A Socialist History of the French Revolution, a work by his party fellow Jean Jaurès, the most decisive intellectual influence on his historical research. When it comes to theory, Lefebvre is considered

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by many to be a historian influenced by Marxism and positivism, and, in practical politics, an intellectual who was much closer to the Jacobin republican ideal than to Marxist socialism.3 Lefebvre published his Quatre-vingt-neuf on the sesquicentennial of the French Revolution, in 1939, two years after Mao had written the essay on contradiction—a text unknown in France, if we are not mistaken, unlike Lenin’s writings on crises and revolutions. We do not know whether Lefebvre was aware of Lenin’s texts. He would likely have read them, but this information is not important for our commentary. He may have had contact with texts that presented the Leninist concept of the revolutionary situation and may have tried to deliberately apply this concept to the analysis of the French political crisis of 1789, or he may have, through his own inferences, detected the basic lines of the dynamics of the 1789 revolution by analyzing the revolutionary political process itself. What we want to point out is the correspondence between the Leninist concept of revolutionary situation and the situation in France in 1789, as Lefebvre analyzes it.

The Revolutionary Situation of 1789 Lefebvre highlights, in the first place, a basic contradiction whose quantitative growth occurs over centuries—the entire period of the socalled Modern Age, between the fifteenth and eighteenth centuries—and becomes pronounced by the end of the eighteenth century: the growth of the productive forces enabling the emergence and development of a new social class—the bourgeoisie. As Mao would write, this quantitative growth, in which the process was in a state of relative rest, ignites a period of crises and revolutions after a certain degree of development, when it introduces a characteristic situation of disequilibrium within the structure of the French feudal social formation. However, this does not shape the particular conjuncture of political crisis that gave rise to the Revolution of 1789.

3 Quatre-vingt-neuf was first published in English with the title The Coming of the French Revolution, in 1947. The English edition used here was published in 1989, by Princeton Classics.

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The ultimate cause of the French Revolution of 1789 goes deep into the history of France and of the Western world. At the end of the eighteenth century the social structure of France was aristocratic […] Meanwhile the growth of commerce and industry had created, step by step, a new form of wealth, mobile or commercial wealth, and a new class, called in France the bourgeoisie […] [The nobility] preserved the highest rank in the legal structure of the country, but in reality economic power, personal abilities and confidence in the future had passed largely to the bourgeoisie. Such a discrepancy never lasts forever […]. But this deeper cause of the French Revolution does not explain all its distinctive features. (Lefebvre, 1989, pp. 1–2)

Lenin also inserts his concept of the revolutionary situation into the more general notion of the revolutionary era, which for Lenin is, in the contemporary world, the era of imperialism and declining capitalism. Lefebvre characterizes the revolutionary era of transition from feudalism to capitalism the same way Marx does it in texts such as the Manifesto of the Communist Party, in which the growth of the productive forces is the material basis of the crisis of feudalism. We find in Lefebvre’s brief characterization, in addition to the more general theoretical inspiration, a unilateral emphasis on the emergence and strengthening of the bourgeoisie. The growth of the productive forces also led to the growth of the free urban working population, mainly the small landowners, which, as Lefebvre himself will show, will be—as a popular sector not personally subject to the feudal landowners—one of the main driving forces of the Revolution of 1789. Then, still in the introduction to the book, the author thus announces the fundamental thesis he plans to develop: There would have been no French Revolution – such as actually took place − if the king, “handing in his resignation, had not convoked the EstatesGeneral. The immediate cause lay in a government emergency for which Louis XVI could find no other solution […] the people were not the original motive force. […]. It is these bodies [the privileged groups] that forced the king’s hand […].The first act of the Revolution, in 1788, consisted in a triumph of the aristocracy, which, taking advantage of the government crisis, hoped to reassert itself and win back the political authority of which the Capetian dynasty had despoiled it. But, after having paralyzed the royal power which upheld its own social preeminence, the aristocracy opened the way to the bourgeois revolution, then to the popular revolution in the cities and finally to the revolution of the peasants – and found itself buried under the ruins of the Old Regime. (Lefebvre, 1989, pp. 2–3)

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This description of the dynamics of the revolutionary process is, in fact, the great thesis of Georges Lefebvre’s essay. According to Lucien Febvre’s contemporary testimony, it represented a historiographical breakthrough in the study of the French Revolution.4 Lefebvre also attaches great importance to the economic crisis in the configuration of the revolutionary situation of 1789. Although he makes no reference to it in this initial formulation, the economic crisis, with its accompanying grain shortages, famine, unemployment, and beggary—is presented by the historian, along with the governmental crisis, as the “immediate cause” of the French Revolution. Would the mass of the people have been less stirred by such hopes and terrors if a grave economic crisis had not been making their lives almost unbearable? Discussion of this question will never end. The fact is, in any case, that in most cities the motive force in the riots of 1789 was usually material want […]. It is therefore beyond dispute that the economic distress should be included among the immediate causes of the Revolution. (Lefebvre, 1989, pp. 101–102)

These are the first two points of the Leninist concept of the revolutionary situation: the contradiction at the top that paves the way for the popular movement and the extreme aggravation of the misery among the popular classes. Lefebvre is clearly aware that the revolution cannot take place without these objective preconditions, an idea that was synthesized by Lenin with this formula: “it is not enough that the base no longer wants to live as before, it is also necessary that the top can no longer do so.” The awareness of the great analytical scope of this idea, which some may consider trivial and of little importance, induces Lefebvre to present it as the specific difference that distinguishes his essay from the existing analyses of the revolution until then.

4 “Rien de plus clair, de plus net, de plus neuf que le simple schéma de la Revolution en 89, tel que d’une main sûre le trace Georges Lefebvre, connaisseur entre tous qualifié de notre histoire révolutionnaire” [There is nothing clearer, sharper and newer than the simple scheme of the Revolution in 89, as that drawn with a steady hand by Georges Lefebvre, one of the most qualified experts of our revolutionary history] (Febvre, 1940).

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But the Third Estate was by no means the first to profit from the emergency, contrary to the general opinion, taken over from the Revolutionists themselves, who declared ad nauseam that “the people rose up and overthrew despotism and aristocracy”. No doubt it did end that way. But the people were not the original motive force. (Lefebvre, 1989, pp. 2–3)

The third objective element of a revolutionary situation, the intensification of the activity of the masses and their tendency toward independent historical action, is not listed by Lefebvre as an “immediate cause” of the revolution. This element appears, though, in the course of his analysis, actively integrating the general characterization of the revolutionary situation of 1789. This point must be considered in the context of a classic bourgeois revolution, i.e., in a historical phase of fledgling capitalism and no imperialist system. In other words, it would not be appropriate here to look for something like the more or less spontaneous formation of a workers’ power that operated as an alternative to the state power of the exploiting classes—a network of Workers’ Councils vying with the state for the control of society—as it happened during the Russian Revolution of 1905, which is Lenin’s main reference in the text we are using. In fact, artisans, shopkeepers, workers, and peasants even came close to a situation of dual power, mainly in 1793 and 1794, thanks to the creation and functioning of the Parisian District Committees and the peasant revolt in the province (Soboul, 1968). However, this approximation does not allow us to identify historical situations that were quite different. In general, the popular classes in 1789 France took an independent historical action when they protested or when they took direct and illegal action against feudal lords and agents of the feudal state: the protests and popular uprisings in Paris against famine and agents and institutions of the state, the invasion of the feudal lords’ castles by the peasants followed by the destruction of documents that supposedly recorded the lords’ privileges over the lands and labor of the peasant, etc.

The Nature of Contradictions This introductory passage of Lefebvre’s book describes or simply points out the contradictions that drive the revolutionary crisis of 1789 and the fundamental relationship among them—the relationship that ensures the shaping of a situation of revolutionary crisis.

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First, we have the contradiction between the feudal nobility and the absolutist feudal monarchy. The monarchy ensures, in Lefebvre’s expression, the “social preeminence” of the feudal nobility—the French monarchy is a feudal monarchy. The absolutist state maintains the social domination of feudal landowners in the countryside and ensures the political privileges of the nobility and clergy. However, the feudal nobility no longer has the wider participation in the decision-making process they had during the medieval monarchy, as they were “despoiled of their political authority”; the decision-making process is now concentrated in the hands of the king and his advisers and ministers—the French monarchy is an absolutist monarchy, i.e., a dictatorship. Furthermore, the absolutist monarchy allowed the development of what we could consider the seeds of the bourgeois bureaucratism within the French feudal state apparatus: it promoted a partial and limited professionalization of public offices, notably in its armed forces, with the creation of military schools. Such measures, in addition to the practice of venality of offices, opened to plebeians, in different ways, administrative positions in the state apparatus. Well, the interest of the feudal nobility is to “monopolize the higher public employments” and “take part in the central power” (Lefebvre, 1989, pp. 19–20). Therein lies the contradiction that sets the feudal nobility in opposition to the absolutist monarchy. A less sophisticated analyst would become lost—and many did, in fact—in the face of this complex relationship of unity and struggle between the two opposite poles of this contradiction: the absolutist feudal monarchy and the feudal nobility. Lefebvre, however, made an illuminating distinction: “social preeminence” is different from “political authority.” The feudal nobles kept the first and lost the second, so they wanted to get it back. “Still restless at being merely his [the king’s] ‘subjects’, they remained privileged persons” (Lefebvre, 1898, p. 1). The king’s 1788 convocation of the Estates-General represented a victory for the feudal nobility that felt eager to control the monarch’s actions, in a context in which the monarchy sought to raise taxes to overcome its financial crisis. The other contradictions, only pointed out in the quoted passage, are those that set the bourgeoisie in opposition to the feudal nobility, as well as the popular classes in opposition to the ruling classes as a whole. Lefebvre presents the content of these contradictions throughout his study.

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According to Lefebvre, the bourgeoisie wanted to carry out a legal revolution: to institute equality for all before the law, wiping out the aristocratic society. In this characterization, there is an oscillation: it is not clear enough whether the plebeian bourgeoisie intended only to abolish the estates , i.e., to end the fiscal, political, and honorific privileges held by the clergy and the nobility, thus politically equating themselves with the feudal and bourgeois nobles; or if they intended to go further and abolish the orders as well, i.e., to eradicate civil privileges and inequalities, which would be a legal revolution in the full sense of the term. At the core of this oscillation are some conceptual problems of Lefebvre’s essay. Firstly, Lefebvre does not distinguish clearly enough social class from order, or order from estate.5 The nobility is an estate of the order of free men. The bourgeoisie and the feudal lords are social classes. It is well known that there were ennobled bourgeois. The Third Estate is a front formed by different classes and class fractions operating under bourgeois leadership and belonging to a privileged order—the order of free men—but to a lower estate of this order—the plebeians. The intertwining of these differentiations of order, estate, and class makes the political struggle rather complex, and Lefebvre was not precise in his characterization of the action of the plebeian bourgeoisie. Secondly, Lefebvre does not offer a theoretically clear characterization of the peasant’s situation, thus leaving open the possibility of denying the existence of orders—free men and serfs—in eighteenth-century French society. Thirdly, Lefebvre maintains that the bourgeoisie carried out a legal revolution, establishing the equality of all before the law, and contradictorily, at the same time he shows that the bourgeoisie conciliated with the nobility, accepting, at least in 1789, the maintenance of the main feudal rights. Lefebvre states that the vast majority of peasants were free, except for a small portion of serfs, concentrated mostly in the Franche-Comté and the Nivernais. However, he shows that the majority of the supposedly free peasants were subject to hereditary, mandatory, and perpetual tributes—i.e., they were not freely contracted—which the lord received as the eminent owner of the land. He also shows that manorial justice subsisted in the feuds. When analyzing the decrees of August 5–11, 1789, Lefebvre asserts that they would have extinguished the feudal regime. Yet, when he addresses the peasant struggle, he suggests that these decrees 5 G. Lemarchand stresses the coexistence of orders and social classes in modern France (Lemarchand, 1978).

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did not in fact extinguish the feudal regime in the countryside, insofar as they required peasants to pay compensation for the redemption of feudal rights. He considers that only the Jacobin decrees of 1793 would have abolished such rights. In general, as the theses are contradictory, it is possible to opt for a selective reading by dismissing Lefebvre’s general statements—most peasants were free men, the decrees of 1789 abolished feudal rights and instituted equality among citizens—in favor of what works more broadly in his analysis—the bind of the peasant to the land, the conciliatory character of the decrees of August 5–11, 1789, which indicates the limitations of the contradiction that set the bourgeoisie in opposition to the feudal nobility.6 The bourgeoisie struggles to extinguish the estates, but shows little determination to extinguish the orders. Their legal revolution looks more like an attempt to reform French feudal law than a revolution that would establish full legal equality in the city and in the country. In Lefebvre’s analysis, the urban popular classes were driven by egalitarianism and anti-state democratism. They rebelled against legal inequalities, opposing the existence of orders and estates. Still, it would be a mistake to identify, because of this, their egalitarianism as a legal egalitarianism. The struggle of the popular classes pointed to an “egalitarianism of usufruct,” i.e., the egalitarian division of the produced wealth. It is in this direction that the urban popular revolts of May/July 1789 point and, in the case of the rural areas, the struggle of peasants for the extinction of feudal rights: ending tributes, ending monarchical and manorial corvées , and obtaining full ownership of the land they cultivated. The contradiction of the popular classes with the feudal monarchy is part of a broader contradiction that did not fully develop in the context of the year 1789: the contradiction of these popular classes with the state in general, that is, with the very existence of a specialized bureaucratic apparatus that concentrates the activity of political unification of the society. Lefebvre stresses the practice of direct democracy by the urban popular classes in the Parisian District Committees. This practice can be considered the most advanced expression of popular anti-statism during the French Revolution. After the storming of the Bastille and the election of a Common Council for Paris,

6 Soboul, a disciple of Lefebvre, will take over on his own the task of developing this second possible reading of Lefebvre’s work (see Soboul, 1974).

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the district assemblies continued to meet every day, claiming to have to discuss, confirm or reject the policies of the municipal government. In this way, not the laboring class but the lesser bourgeoisie of skilled craftsmen and shopkeepers sought to institute a direct democracy. (Lefebvre, 1989, p. 118)

Articulation of the Contradictions and Crisis Dynamics What Lucien Febvre considered to be Georges Lefebvre’s clear and original “scheme” is nothing more than a realization of the Leninist concept of revolutionary crisis and, moreover, a characterization of the dynamics and periodization of the revolutionary crisis in which the theoretical criterion devised by Mao Zedong is employed: the main contradiction changes from one phase of a process to another, determining the nature of each of its phases.7 Georges Lefebvre names the first four chapters of his book as follows: “The Aristocratic Revolution,” “The Bourgeois Revolution,” “The Popular Revolution,” and “The Peasant Revolution.” Each of these chapters segments a phase of the process. In the first two, the main contradiction, “the one playing the leading role,” is indicated by the title of the chapter itself. In the two next chapters, although there are no new shifts in the main contradiction, the intensification of the contradiction between the popular classes and the feudal monarchy changes the political scene in a specific way, justifying the distinction of the periods examined in these chapters as different stages of the revolutionary process. The chapter entitled “The Aristocratic Revolution” deals with the phase in which the main contradiction of the process puts the feudal nobility in opposition to the feudal monarchy. This period extends from August 8, 1788, when Minister Loménie de Brienne convoked the assembly of the Estates-General for the following year, to May 4, 1789, when the Estates-General met. This is the phase preceding the outbreak of the revolution, and, as Albert Soboul has already alerted us, the expression aristocratic revolution is inappropriate, since the feudal nobility was not

7 “There are many contradictions in the process of development of a complex thing, and one of them is necessarily the principal contradiction whose existence and development determine or influence the existence and development of the other contradictions […] at every stage in the development of a process, there is only one principal contradiction which plays the leading role” (Mao Zedong, 1937, Chapter IV).

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aiming at a revolution. This impropriety aside, the chapter is enlightening as it analyses this contradiction in its historical specificity (a contradiction is not an abstraction, warns Mao Zedong when addressing the historical specificity of the contradiction), in its development, and in the effects it produces on the secondary contradictions of this phase of the process. On the one hand, we have the monarchy that intends to solve its financial crisis by increasing tax collection. On the other hand, we have the nobility, “despoiled of political authority” by the monarchy, reacting when their fiscal privileges are threatened. Hence, the monarchy’s financial crisis affects the contradiction, sharpening it. There is a leap in the development of this contradiction when the nobility decides to extend the struggle from within the government and the Court to a scope that extrapolates the framework of the current state. The struggle to convoke the Estates-General is a struggle to replace an absolutist feudal monarchic regime with a constitutional feudal monarchic regime. Thus, it is after August 1788, when the assembly of the Estates-General is convoked, that this contradiction at the top takes on the specificity of a contradiction that can lead to a revolutionary crisis, insofar as it became “impossible for the ruling classes to maintain their rule without any change” in Lenin’s terms. This struggle to change the form of the state created the “fissure” through which social classes that had distinct contradictions with the feudal nobility could “burst for.” To impose the convocation of the Estates-General on the king, the feudal nobility appealed to the bourgeoisie, the middle-class professionals—such as lawyers and the military—and the small rural landowners. Once the summons was made, the process of electing the delegates, which included the preparation of the Grievance Books, draws bourgeois, middle-class professionals, artisans, peasants, and workers into political action. The action of the plebeian bourgeoisie and the popular sectors that they influenced in the electoral meetings chose as their objective the duplication of the representation of the Third Estate and, later, the vote by head instead of the vote by order. Therefore, we see the outline of independent political action not of a dominated class, but of an exploiting class, part of the bloc in power, which has under its influence sectors of the popular classes and envisions the possibility of altering its position within this bloc in power, taking advantage of the division between the monarchy and the feudal nobility. At the other end of the main contradiction of this phase of the revolutionary crisis, the monarchy also played with fire, adopting, for reasons

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opposite to those of the feudal nobility, the same tactic of drawing into the struggle the classes and fractions belonging to the Third Estate. Instead of defending the political privileges of the higher orders—as it will do later, but too late…—the monarchy prioritized its contradiction with the nobility and tried to instrumentalize the claim of the plebeian bourgeoisie: Necker therefore inclined toward strengthening the Third Estate, without, however, committing himself to its cause. Necker thought that all might be reconciled by a doubling of the Third and by granting the vote by head for financial questions only; thus tax exemptions would disappear, but the orders would come to blows over constitutional reforms, leaving the king in the position of arbiter. (Lefebvre, 1989, p. 57)

Lefebvre understands that Necker’s political incompetence was one of the countless factors that determined the choice of this dangerous path for the fate of the monarchy. Whatever the causes of such a choice, it is political decisions like this that keep the contradiction between the monarchy and the feudal nobility as the main contradiction throughout the period marked by the convocation of and elections for the assembly of the Estates-General. Therefore, the main contradiction of this phase has a specific nature and goes through a process of accumulation and development that will affect the secondary contradictions present in the same process, sharpening them. The first disruption in the process took place at the beginning of May 1789, at the meeting of the assembly of the Estates-General. There is an inversion of positions in the system of contradictions. The main contradiction is shifted to a secondary level, while the hitherto subordinated contradiction—the opposition between, on the one hand, the front of plebeian classes and fractions hegemonized by the bourgeoisie, and, on the other hand, the feudal front as a whole (monarchy and nobility)— assumes the position of main contradiction. Such rearrangements are not a matching game. They depend on the specific historical nature of each contradiction, on its development in the conjuncture, on their specific relationships with each other, and on the political decisions made by the political leadership of the social forces in question. In May 1789, the monarchy and the nobility revised their autophagic tactics and sealed a tacit agreement of reconciliation. Lefebvre points out this displacement of the main contradiction during the meeting of the Estates-General in these terms:

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[…] it [the Court] seems to have been roused by news from the provinces to a state of annoyance with the Third Estate and with Necker, regarding him as an accomplice. The Court forgot its grievances against the aristocracy, while the latter reciprocated by not pressing its demands. Court and aristocracy came together in common defense of the traditional social order. (Lefebvre, 1989, pp. 74–75)

The Revolution of 1789 In 1789, France experienced not only a revolutionary situation, but an actual revolution. More than that, this revolution was victorious. For Lefebvre, the French Revolution, as a bourgeois political revolution, is a prolonged process that extends from 1789 to 1830. However, he considers that in 1789 the fundamental stage of the revolution both begins and ends—a stage he calls the legal revolution, whose main product is the Declaration of the Rights of Man and of the Citizen. Doubts can be cast on Lefebvre’s thesis according to which the fundamental stage of the bourgeois revolution would have started and ended in 1789. The bourgeois revolution is understood by Lefebvre as a political revolution that brings about a juridical-political transformation—establishing that human beings are equal and opening the state institutions to the participation of all individuals.8 We could consider that this revolution, understood in this manner, only ended in 1793—and we have

8 See Lefebvre (1989, pp. 155–181). Albert Soboul, in his preface to Lefebvre’s book,

denies the juridical-political character of the French Revolution and introduces, in our view, a confusion. On the one hand, Soboul emphasizes that Lefebvre highlights the social and economic foundations of the revolution, i.e., the class struggle at the base of the revolutionary political process, a procedure that is, in fact, present in Lefebvre’s work. However, on the other hand, Albert Soboul ends up suggesting that the French Revolution was a global, simultaneous process of social, political, and economic transformations. Well, this second idea cannot be confused with the first and it is not found in Lefebvre’s book, contrary to what Soboul suggests. (See the preface by Soboul, especially pp. 13, 16, 19, 21, and 23 of the Brazilian edition of 1789.) François Furet offers a critique of Soboul’s thesis on the social-political-economic character of the French Revolution (1978). Marxist authors who recognized the validity of this specific critique by François Furet began to apply to the French case the analytical distinction between, on the one hand, the socioeconomic transformations of the multi-secular period of transition from feudalism to capitalism and, on the other hand, the moment—relatively concentrated in time—of juridical-political rupture: the bourgeois political revolution itself. Issue n.187 of La Pensée magazine, of June 1976, is dedicated to this debate.

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already indicated that Lefebvre himself leaves space for this interpretation. However, we cannot deny, even from this point of view, that the decrees of August 5–11 and the Declaration of the Rights of Man and of the Citizen of 1789 ended up constituting the first stage of an upward movement that destroyed the institutions of the feudal state and built the modern bourgeois state in France. In 1789, the first serious blow was struck against the absolutist feudal state, and that blow was delivered through the action of the masses. In this sense, one can speak of an outbreak of the revolution. Nevertheless, the outbreak of a revolution stems from a subjective transformation in the objective conditions given by the revolutionary situation. What led to the formation of the subjective element that made the revolution possible in the context of 1789? In a feudal country like France, the popular classes did not normally have organizations of their own, and they were not organized on the eve of the revolution. As for the bourgeoisie, they also did not have a party or association that could allow them to intervene in an effective, organized manner in the conjuncture. Now, deliberate drive and will are requisites for a revolution, and Lefebvre is clear that without this drive the revolution cannot break out. He notes with great sagacity that, in the case of the French Revolution, it was the very contradiction between the feudal nobility and the monarchy that ended up providing the Third Estate both drive and political organization: the bourgeois delegates elected to the assembly of the Estates-General and the popular committees created to elect representatives to the same assembly. The bourgeoisie, having no legal means of expression, was in no position to force the king to appeal to the nation. Still less were the peasants and working classes. The privileged groups did have the necessary means: the clergy in its Assembly, the nobility in the Parliaments and Provincial Estates. It is these bodies that forced the king’s hand. (Lefebvre, 1989, p. 3)

The subjective factor that allowed the revolutionary situation to become a revolution was provided, in the specific case of the bourgeois revolution in France, by the unfolding of the struggle between the feudal reactionary forces: at the request of the feudal nobles, the king convened the party of the revolution.

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The Estates-General assembled on May 4, 1789. From that date until the days of October 5 and 6, when the population forced the king and the National Assembly to move from Versailles to Paris, the contradiction dominating the political scene was between, on the one hand, the class front under bourgeois hegemony coalesced in the Third Estate, and on the other hand, the feudal monarchy and nobility. However, between July 14, 1789, when the Bastille was taken, and the days of October 5 and 6, when the people practically captured the king in Versailles and forced him to transfer his residence to Paris, a new emerging element led to a particular phase of the revolution. Although there was no displacement of the main contradiction, the opposition between the set of popular classes— self-employed workers, middle-class wageworkers, artisans, shopkeepers, workers, and peasants—and the feudal monarchy became exceedingly fierce, and the bourgeoisie, within certain limits, encouraged popular insurrection to resolve their contradiction with the feudal nobility. In this new phase, direct action of the masses was always what, in critical, decisive moments—such as the military siege of Paris—ensured the defeat of the feudal monarchy and the continuity of the revolutionary process. Just as the feudal nobility had done when it decided to fight for the convening of the Estates-General, the bourgeoisie, by using a new method to resolve their contradiction with the feudal nobles, contributed to the deepening of the crisis and to the acceleration of the revolution. There were not many options. The rapprochement between the king and the privileged estates left no other way for the bourgeoisie than to appeal to those below. This was the extreme situation contemplated in Lenin’s definition, in which a ruling class or part of a ruling class draws the popular classes toward “independent historical” action. Such a situation is the basis of what liberal historians later called the “slippage” of the revolutionary process. As Albert Soboul’s studies show, particularly in the second half of 1793, the popular masses came to jeopardize the hegemony of the bourgeoisie in the revolutionary process (Soboul, 1968). Between May 4 and July 14, there was the first important victory of the bourgeoisie, on June 27: the nobility and clergy were forced to participate in the National Assembly, renouncing the vote by order and accepting the vote by head. From July 14 onward, the direct action of the masses became decisive in solving the contradiction between the plebeian bourgeoisie and the feudal monarchy. On July 14, when the people stormed the Bastille, revolutionary power was asserted in the city of Paris—the election of a mayor and the consolidation of the National Guard were

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initiatives with which Paris intended to respond to the military siege that the king, from Versailles, sought to establish around the city. Between July 20 and August 6, there was the period of the so-called Great Fear and peasant revolts—the invasion and burning of feudal castles and the invasion of noble lands. Lefebvre considers that this was the lethal blow to the Old Regime. It was under the impact of these popular actions that the bourgeoisie passed the decrees of August 5–11—abolishing some feudal rights and making others redeemable—and the Declaration of the Rights of Man of August 26, 1789, which abolished the estates’ privileges.

Conditions that Enabled the Victory of the Revolution At the level of the parliamentary struggle, the unity and daring of the Third Estate parliamentarians and the division in the political representation of the upper estates were decisive. However, with regard to the popular revolts, which were the main engine of the revolution, their success was ensured, among other factors, by the division within the repressive apparatus of the monarchical-feudal state. This division, which reflects a crisis within the feudal state, can be considered, in its specific form, as one of the constitutive elements of the processes of the bourgeois revolution. Such division stemmed from two distinct contradictions that permeated the feudal armed forces. The first contradiction was the reflection within the state of the contradiction that put the popular classes, from where the soldiers originated, in opposition to the feudal nobles, who commanded the Army. It represented a horizontal cut in the armed forces, reflecting a class opposition and separating the base of the military apparatus from its top. This type of contradiction and the crisis it can generate were also present in the processes of the workers’ and people’s revolution of the imperialist era—the formation of clandestine committees of soldiers, and the affiliation of soldiers, in a situation of dual power, to the revolutionary power in progress. Yet, another contradiction divided the officers, i.e., the top of the military apparatus, vertically. This contradiction is characteristic of the processes of bourgeois revolutions. Décio Saes, in his analysis of the bourgeois political revolution in Brazil, described how the contradiction between the pre-capitalist criterion of recruitment for the state apparatus (which is openly particularist), and the capitalist criterion (which is formally universalist), can generate a

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crisis in the pre-capitalist states that subordinately harbor capitalist norms for the recruitment of state personnel (Saes, 1985). This was precisely the case of the French absolutist state. Inside it, the noble officers, owners of their posts and regiments—and who represented, according to an expert, 90% of the ten thousand existing officers in the year of the revolution— were in opposition to the plebeian officers whose careers were barred by the estate-based character of the state and particularly of the absolutist army. Each of these two sectors was led to defend, by its own position, antagonistic criteria of organization of the military bureaucracy. Noble officers claimed the maintenance of the estate status of the army—the regulation advanced by Minister Segur tightening the estate requirements for entry into the absolutist armed forces dates back to 1781. Meanwhile, plebeian officers claimed, in line with bourgeois legal egalitarianism, the opening of state positions to all individuals, thus constituted as citizens (Bertaud, 1988).9 Finally, it is certain that some bourgeois encouraged indiscipline in the army. They had little difficulty in doing so, for nobles monopolized the higher ranks, subordinate officers had almost no chance of promotion and the soldiers, who had to buy their own subsistence from their pay, suffered from the prevailing high prices. The French Guards in Paris, dispersed in small stations, constantly mingling with the townspeople and in some cases intermarrying with them, were at heart with the Third Estate. (Lefebvre, 1989, pp. 97–98) […] Thus fell the Bastille, through the ineptitude of its governor, the defection of royal troops and the heroic tenacity of a few hundred assailants. (Lefebvre, 1989, p. 116)

Conclusion: for the revolution to be victorious, the existence of a revolutionary situation or crisis is not enough. As a rule, a state crisis also seems to be necessary. In feudal states of the transition periods to capitalism, this crisis presented different characteristics from those found in the crises of the bourgeois states at the time of the socialist revolutions. In the first case, the crisis stemmed from internal contradictions within the state apparatus. In the second case, the state crisis has always been 9 “Places for talent and merit!” “Equality! Equality!” The demands of the Third Estate ran through the army, especially among the noncommissioned officers and the “officers of fortune,” as officers who were not nobles were called (Bertaud, 1988, p. 15).

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synonymous with a situation of dual power—bourgeois state versus Workers’ Councils or bourgeois state versus People’s Army. In other words, the crisis results from contradictions that go beyond the scope of the state apparatus. The revolutionary process of 1789 ended, for Lefebvre, with the October days (October 5 and 6 of that year), when the crowd took the royal family from Versailles to Paris in a triumphal and unusual march. The royalty subsisted, but the king would now be hostage to the revolution. The population believed that in Versailles he was the prey of the “aristocratic plot.” In Paris, he should then be sensitive to popular interests and submit to the decisions of the National Assembly. These illusions took three years to dissipate. In August 1792, in the face of the king’s counter-revolutionary action, 47 of the 48 popular district committees in Paris demanded the king’s downfall. Finally, in September, the monarchy was abolished and the republic was proclaimed.

Misery and Revolution Lefebvre’s analysis contributes to another important precision in the concept of revolutionary crisis. We will close our commentary by exploring this point. Lefebvre develops the following reflection on the relationship between the economic crisis and popular uprisings in the course of the revolution. As we saw earlier, he maintains that the economic crisis contributed decisively to the instigation of the popular uprisings. For this very reason, he lists the economic crisis as one of the “immediate causes” of the revolution. The economic crisis leads to grain shortages, famine, unemployment, and a disproportionate increase in beggary and vagrancy. He points out the fact—to be extensively studied by the quantitative history of the revolution in subsequent years—that there were growing grain shortages and famine in the instances of the main urban insurrections in Paris throughout 1789. These insurrections always merged protests and attacks on the centers of the feudal monarchical power with the demand for bread—a fundamental component of the popular classes’ diet at the end of the eighteenth century. In Lefebvre’s analysis, however, the relationship between the economic cause and its political effect is not mechanical, nor is it conceived in line with economism. This relationship is mediated by a decisive subjective component: the masses saw the economic crisis as the work of the feudal

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nobility and the officials and authorities of the feudal monarchical state. Implicit in his analysis is the idea that not every economic crisis leads to the intensification of action by the masses—such crises can also demoralize, demobilize, and induce political passivity. Lefebvre highly values the way the people perceived the crisis: The small people never resigned themselves to explaining scarcity and high prices simply by the weather. They knew that tithe owners and manorial lords who collected dues in kind had considerable stores of grain, which they withheld from sale while waiting calmly for higher prices. […] All were suspected of withholding, or hoarding, to precipitate or encourage a price increase. There was the same suspicion of purchases made by the government and local authorities, who were thought to make a profit either for their budgets or for their own pockets. […] It is not surprising that want and high prices were frequent causes of rioting. Sometimes the attack fell on those thought to possess stores of grain or be trading in it; their establishments were pillaged or they themselves were put “to the lantern,” i.e., hanged by the cord from which a street lamp usually swung. […] Lastly, the administrative and social authorities were assailed. A municipality was in as much danger as a tithe collector or manorial lord of falling victim to a mob. (Lefebvre, 1989, p. 105)

Therefore, the mechanical, economistic view of the relationship between economic crisis and revolution must be avoided. The perception by the popular classes that the economic crisis and its destructive effects stem from the current economic and political system and, moreover, that those at the top can profit from the crisis is a subjective element that, in our opinion, must be thought of as an element without which one of the objective conditions that characterize the revolutionary situation cannot be verified: the intensification of the activity of the masses against the ruling classes and their political agents. This observation elicits a distinction between the subjective elements of a revolutionary process, as well as a precision regarding the effects of the subjective elements on the objective elements that characterize the revolutionary situation. The way the popular classes perceive the crisis is a subjective element that differs from the subjective element that is essential for the outbreak of the revolution: the existence of an organized political drive that assumes a revolutionary tactic. The popular classes’ perception of the economic crisis and their state of mind in the face of it are largely the result of general and

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structural conditions that go beyond the very context of the revolutionary situation. The revolutionary tactics of the vanguard and particularly the initiative to unleash the final attack on state power are more directly linked to the revolutionaries’ decisions of the moment. However, the masses’ perception of the economic crisis is a subjective factor on which the action of the vanguard has important effects. The party (or parties) of the revolution can contribute to the formation of the very objective conditions that characterize a revolutionary situation. From this perspective, just as it is wrong to think of the revolution as the result of the will of a party or even of a social class (an error that we have criticized since the beginning of this commentary), it would also be wrong to conceive of the role of the revolutionary party (or parties) as that of a simple spectator who passively waits for the formation of objective conditions to, only then, act in a revolutionary manner. Also in periods of stability, the so-called final objective can condition, in different ways, the action of the party (or parties) of the revolution.

Conclusion The political process is driven by an articulated set of contradictions among classes, class fractions, and social categories, and the political crisis results from the development and shifts of these contradictions. However, there are several types of political crises. The crisis that makes the revolution possible is the revolutionary crisis, a specific kind of political crisis. The revolutionary situation or crisis is an objective, highly complex conjuncture phenomenon. Its characterization requires a meticulous analysis of the concrete situation, of the contradictions at stake, and of the specific relationships these contradictions maintain with each other. It takes a general theoretical understanding of the political crises and of the revolutionary crisis to determine a situation in which revolution is possible. Yet, the concept of revolutionary crisis, when manipulated abstractly, dispensing with the concrete analysis of the historical situation, is useless. Divisions at the top, economic crises, or increases in the activity of the masses do not necessarily characterize a revolutionary situation. They can characterize the crisis of a political regime or simply of a government. The concept of revolutionary situation does not yet have all the rigor and clarity that can be demanded at the theoretical level. Its development requires, on the one hand, developments in the Marxist theory

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of history and political change, and, on the other, historical research on political crises and revolutions. Once the revolutionary crisis has been characterized, we do not yet have enough elements to determine the moment to unleash decisive offensive action against the state power. Deciding on the suitability of such action requires knowledge of the conditions necessary for the victory of the revolution, not just knowledge of the conditions necessary for its occurrence. The concept of revolutionary crisis, developed by Lenin to analyze the socialist and popular revolutions of the twentieth century, can be applied to classic bourgeois revolutions because these revolutions do not dispense with an action by the masses. The main driving force of the classical bourgeois revolutions seems to have always been the popular classes. In some countries as well as in some phases of the revolutionary process, the popular classes have managed to lead the bourgeois revolution, often despite the inertia or even the opposition of the bourgeoisie—which, as an exploiting class, always sought to integrate into the dominant form of exploitation in some way, as Maurice Dobb shows in his studies on the development of capitalism.

References Althusser, L. (1990). On theoretical work: Difficulties and resources. In L. Althusser (Ed.), Philosophy and the spontaneous philosophy of the scientists & other essays. Verso. Bertaud, J. P. (1988). The army in the French Revolution: From citizen-soldier to instrument of power. Princeton University Press. Febvre, L. (1940). Quatre-vingt-neuf. Review of Georges Lefebvre’s essay published in Annales d’Histoire Sociale, no. 2, p. 147. Furet, F. (1978). Ensaios sobre a Revolução Francesa. Edições A Regra do Jogo. Harnecker, M. (n.d.). A revolução social, Lenin e a América Latina. Global. Lefebvre, G. (1989). The coming of the French Revolution. Princeton University Press. Lemarchand, G. (1978). Feudalismo e sociedade rural na França moderna. In M. F. M. Pereira (Org.), Sobre o feudalismo. Editorial Estampa. Lenin, V. I. [1915]. The collapse of the second international. Marxists Internet Archive, n.d. Available (checked 18 June 2022) at: https://www.marxists. org/archive/lenin/works/1915/csi/index.htm#i Luxemburgo, R. (1978). Huelga de masas, partido y sindicatos. 5.e. Siglo XXI.

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Mao, Z. [1937]. On Contradiction. In Z. Mao (Ed.), Selected Works of Mao Zedong, n.d. Available (checked 18 June 2022) at: https://www.marxists.org/ reference/archive/mao/selected-works/volume-1/mswv1_17.htm Saes, D. (1985). A formação do Estado burguês no Brasil (1888–1891). Paz e Terra. Soboul, A. (1968). Les Sans-culottes, mouvement populaire et gouvernement révolutionnaire (1793–1794). Éditions du Seuil, Paris. Soboul, A. (1974). A revolução francesa. Difel. Soboul, A. (1990). Prefácio. In G. Lefebvre (Ed.), 1789, O surgimento da Revolução Francesa. Paz e Terra. Trotsky, L. [1938]. The transitional program. Labor Publications, n.d. Available (checked 18 June 2022) at: https://www.marxists.org/archive/trotsky/193 8/tp/

CHAPTER 7

The Political Scene and Class Interests in Capitalist Society: Marx’s Analysis

In the final chapter of this first part of the book, we examine the concept of “political scene,” which designates the space in which class interests and conflicts are present in a way that is disguised by the discourse and programs of bourgeois and petty-bourgeois political parties. This conception, which is typical of Marxist political theory, contrasts with homologous notions of other currents of contemporary political thought, such as liberalism—Alexis de Tocqueville, John Stuart Mill, and John Rawls—and the theory of elites—Gaetano Mosca, Joseph Schumpeter, and Charles Wright Mills. Marx’s theoretical work in social, political, and economic analysis employs the distinction between an apparent or surface reality and an essential or deep reality. It is well known that this distinction is not unique to Marxism. In its various modalities, it has been present for millennia in the history of both philosophy and science. However, only

Text presented at the colloquium “150 Anos da obra O Dezoito Brumário de Luís Bonaparte” [150 Years of the work The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte] by Karl Marx, organized by the Center for Marxist Studies (Cemarx) of the University of Campinas in November 2002. The text was originally published in Crítica Marxista magazine, São Paulo: Boitempo, n.15, 2002. © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2023 A. Boito, State, Politics, and Social Classes, Marx, Engels, and Marxisms, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-22046-3_7

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those conceptions that present surface reality as a veil that performs a particular function—the function of hiding deep reality—are on territory close to Marxism. The way this distinction is presented at the beginning of volume 1 of Capital, more precisely in the passage from the second part (“Transformation of Money into Capital”) to the third (“The Production of Absolute Surplus-Value”), is well known and frequently commented on. By analyzing the relations between the worker and the capitalist as relations between a seller and a buyer of goods, Marx begins with the surface and misleading reality of the market, an economic reality that is regulated by bourgeois law. In this respect, all the owners of commodities, including the worker who sells his labor power, appear as free and equal people who are exchanging equivalents. Next, Marx introduces the reality of the process of capitalist production and, at that point, class exploitation dismantles freedom, equality, and the exchange of equivalents. We then realize that the workers, far from enjoying the freedom to come and go, are prisoners inside the productive unit; their time and steps are controlled; far from being treated as equals, they are subordinates who owe obedience to the capitalists and their agents; and the use of their labor power, instead of generating only a value corresponding to what was paid to them as wages, generates a surplus value that is appropriated by the capitalists. Wage workers are, in fact, legally free, which distinguishes them from slaves and serfs. The proclamation of freedom is, in Althusser’s words, an allusion to reality (Althusser, 1972). However, this same proclamation is also and mainly an illusion, insofar as it hides the relations of exploitation and class domination. It is, therefore, an ideological illusion, because it disorganizes the working class and serves the interests of the capitalist class. Scientific analysis can reveal the deep reality hidden by the surface reality. If the observer, like the vulgar economist, sticks to the sphere of circulation, the result will be superficial and mystifying ideas. This general distinction, which is present in the majority of Marx’s mature work, has an important—although perhaps not sufficiently stressed or developed—role in his analysis of the political scene in capitalist societies. In fact, until the 1970s, the leaders and intellectuals of the communist—and, to a lesser extent, the social-democratic—lines of thought were careful to distinguish in the political scene of capitalist societies the world of appearances, where each contender proclaims their noble principles and their so-called universal values, from the profane world of economic and political interests, where values and interests

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are exchanged for one another—not because no one has principles, but because all principles are bound to interests. However, over the last few decades, with the crisis and decline of the old socialist and communist movements, the vulgar bourgeois conception of the political scene in capitalist societies has spread widely, having even been smuggled into the field of socialist intellectuals. Today, most of the time, the intellectual effort to detect the class interests hidden behind the currents and political parties that vie for power is considered unnecessary or unfounded. At a conjuncture like this, it is worth revisiting the issue. Marx’s well-known The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte, whose publication is completing 150 years,1 offers the matter a pioneering and exemplary treatment. It closes a phase of Marx’s colossal work of founding the scientific analysis of politics and, in particular, the analysis of politics in capitalist societies—the phase that began with the theoretical rupture of The German Ideology and ended with the political balance of the experience of the revolutions of 1848. Let us, then, use this sesquicentennial to draw some lessons.

The Political Scene Conceals Interests and Class Conflicts In The Eighteenth Brumaire and also in his preceding book The Class Struggles in France, which served as its basis, Marx conceives of the political scene in capitalist societies—the space of struggle between political parties and organizations—as a kind of superstructure for the struggle of class and class fractions, which form what we could call the socioeconomic basis of the political scene. The political scene is a superficial, misleading reality that must be demystified, stripped of its own terms, so we can obtain access to the deep reality of class interests and conflicts. Here, we can detect a difference between the political scene and the representative institutions of pre-capitalist societies. The Roman Senate or the Estates-General of medieval France, being pre-capitalist parliaments with the slaveholding and feudal characteristics of the Roman and the French states, were particularist institutions whose social ties were self-evident. In the Roman Senate, before the creation of the figure of the tribune, only

1 It was Danilo Martuscelli who called our attention to the sesquicentennial of the publication of The Eighteenth Brumaire, which inspired us to write this text.

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patricians were allowed to enter, and in the French Estates-General, only free men had a seat. However, the characteristics of the political scene in capitalist societies stem from the general traits of the capitalist state; thus, the universalist appearance of this state—the fruit of egalitarian law and professional bureaucracy formally open to all classes—infects all bourgeois and petty-bourgeois political parties as well as all currents of opinion. Bourgeois society is anonymous and its political parties must maintain such class anonymity. To clarify this idea and, at the same time, draw a critical reference to the Gramscian concept of civil society, we would say that the basic figures of the ideology of civil society are produced and disseminated by the repressive apparatus of the state itself (through law and bureaucracy). Well, bourgeois and petty-bourgeois parties do not openly announce the interests they represent and organize. In fact, they represent and, at the same time, disguise class interests. The ideas, values, and programs of these parties fulfill the dual function of organizing their constituents and deceiving the working class. At the end of this commentary, we will see that the relationship between the workers’ parties and the class they represent is (and must be) different. For now, however, it is important to emphasize that the Marxist political analysis of capitalist societies begins when, and only when, the analyst highlights the complex ties that unite the political scene to economic interests and class conflicts. To practice political analysis by designating the agents present on the political scene by the names and objectives they give themselves is to remain on the deceptive surface of the phenomenon, and many Marxists make this mistake, typical of vulgar political science.2 In the space of this brief commentary, it is not possible to analyze all the multiple relationships between, on the one hand, the parties and groupings of the French political scene of the mid-nineteenth century and, on the other hand, the interests of each class (bourgeoisie, petty bourgeoisie, peasantry, and working class), class fractions 2 It would be pointless to refer here to the analyses that are restricted to the names of professional politicians or their party acronyms. Nevertheless, let us remember that even those analysts who try to take a step further, characterizing currents of opinion and lines of thought—a procedure so common in Brazilian leftist thought—are victims of this superficial and misleading reality. They imagine that political struggles simply set left against right, progressives against conservatives, developmentalists against liberals, nationalists against pro-imperialists, and so on. They never ask what class or class fraction’s interests these currents represent or why.

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(industry, finance, agriculture, etc.), and social layers (the lumpenproletariat), with the same richness and level of detail found in the works The Eighteenth Brumaire and The Class Struggles in France. Therefore, it is worth presenting, at the outset, a general and schematic picture of these relationships. It may serve as a reference for the reader and for our argument.3 In Table 7.1, the third column lists what Marx would consider evidence of the relationship of representation existing between, on the one hand, certain political parties, parliamentary groups, associations, and currents of opinion and, on the other hand, certain interests of classes, class fractions, and social layers. Looking at this third column, we can see that Marx works at two levels to detect the relations of representation of interests. At an objective level, he seeks to establish correspondences between, on the one hand, the programs and practices of political parties and, on the other hand, the potential or actual interests of classes and class fractions; at a subjective level, he seeks to detect the existence of identification between parties, on the one hand, and certain classes and class fractions, on the other. In reality, he considers two types of (subjective) identification. The peasantry identifies with Bonaparte because it sees in him the possibility of restoring a mythical past; consequently, they vote for him; the Mountain represents the petty bourgeoisie because its hesitations and bravado correspond to the petty bourgeoisie’s situation of intermediary class, torn between the two antagonistic classes. Having made these observations, let us move on to the point that interests us. Marx makes extensive use of the theatrical metaphor in his text, as several commentators have already pointed out: drama, comedy, tragedy, act, interlude, character, scene, proscenium, etc. Metaphors are often an indicator of the existence of ideas and concepts of a new theory, not fitting into traditional notions and terminology. Such figures of speech err on the side of imprecision, but they help to advance faster into the wild territory of a new form of science. The metaphors of The Eighteenth Brumaire indicate at all times that the political scene of capitalist societies must be considered in reference to something that lies outside it. Questioning the democrats’ vision of the Revolution of 1848 in France and the subsequent struggles, Marx seeks to demystify the conflicts between republicans and 3 There is a broad and detailed analysis of the relations between classes and parties in The Eighteenth Brumaire in Nicos Poulantzas’ book Political Power and Social Classes (1975).

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Table 7.1 Class struggle and the political scene, France (1848–1851) Classes, class Parties and trends fractions, and social layers

Evidence of the party’s relationship to the class or class fraction

Parliamentary Political group platform

Proletariat

Blanqui, Cabet, Raspail, Blanc, Albert, Barbés, left wing of the social democracy

The left wing of the New Mountain

Social republic

Petty bourgeoisie

Social democracy

The Mountain

Democratic republic

Republican bourgeoisie

Pure republicans

Pure republicans

Parliamentary republic

Big financial, industrial, and commercial bourgeoisie

Orleanist monarchists (Louis Philippe d’Orléans, the Count of Paris)

Radical republicanism, creation of the National Workshops and the Ministry of Labor, and insurrectionary action Conciliation, triumphalism, and hesitations Republican ideology and social composition Politics of the constitutional monarchy of the Orléans, 1830–1848

Agrarian bourgeoisie and landowners in general

Legitimist monarchists (the Count de Chambord, disputably Henri V)

Conservative peasantry, lumpen, and the army

Bonapartists, Band of the 10th of December

Tradition and politics of monarchy of the Bourbons between 1815 and 1830 Bonapartist tradition, elections, and political regime

Orleanists, Doctrinal Party of Orde defense of the monarchy, practical acceptance of the republic Legitimists, Doctrinal Party of defense of the Order monarchy, practical acceptance of the republic Bonapartists, Restoration Party of of the empire Order

Sources Marx, The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte and The Class Struggles in France, 1848–1850. Elaborated by the author

monarchists and, within the monarchist field, between legitimist monarchists and Orleanists (see Chapter III of The Eighteen Brumaire). In these two cases, the struggles that appear on the political scene between parties

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and currents of opinion—dividing republicans and monarchists and subdividing the latter between legitimists and Orleanists—are real, but at the same time they hide the deeper reality of the struggle between classes and class fractions. Marx announces, with the simplicity of the classics, his scientific and revolutionary discovery in the following terms: Before we pursue parliamentary history further, some remarks are necessary, in order to avoid common misconceptions regarding the whole character of the epoch that lies before us. Looked at with the eyes of the democrats, the period of the Legislative National Assembly is concerned with what the period of the Constituent Assembly was concerned with: the simple struggle between republicans and royalists [...] If one looks at the situation and the parties more closely, however, this superficial appearance, which veils the class struggle and the peculiar physiognomy of this period, vanishes wholly. (Marx, 1972, pp. 36–37)

The task of analyzing the political scene in capitalist societies is an act of unmasking. Marx’s argument for dismantling the dissimulation is clear. The monarchists accepted the republic as long as it proved suitable for bourgeois domination. Marx says: “they come forward as republicans, and not as royalists ” (p. 39); or “as representatives of the bourgeois worldorder, not as knights of errant princesses (p. 38).” We would add that they act as a class, not as a current of opinion. The monarchists talk plenty about restoring the monarchy but postpone sine die the monarchic restoration. Marx goes down to the details of the political chronicle in his argument. He points out that each time legitimist and Orleanist parliamentarians visited members of their respective dynasties, the Bourbons and Orleans expressed the feeling that they were being betrayed by those who should fight for the restoration of the throne. Let us now see how much the great republican principles were worth. Marx indicates that the so-called “pure republicans” joined the monarchists to quell the workers’ insurrection of June 1848 and also the petty-bourgeois insurrection of June 1849. Now, if the struggle between republicans and monarchists in fact divided French politics, such an alliance would be inconceivable. As Marx observes, this political practice shows that republicans were keen on preserving a “value” greater than the republic, a value that was actually only valuable in the financial sense of the term. Marx says:

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The defeat of the June insurgents […] had shown at the same time that in Europe the questions at issue are other than that of “republic or monarchy”. (Marx, 1972, p. 18)

Hence, the choice between republic and monarchy is, in the first place, limited. Moreover, the petty-bourgeois insurrection of June 1849 was republican, and yet the so-called pure republicans joined the monarchists against it. In summary: according to Marx, if monarchists accept the republic, if republicans form an alliance with monarchists to fight against republicans, if the workers’ and popular revolt goes beyond the choice between republic and monarchy, the division between republicans and monarchists must be rethought and referred to its class base. Bourgeois monarchists can unite with bourgeois republicans to defeat petty-bourgeois republicans because the first two are bourgeois and the latter are petty-bourgeois, i.e., because they all live in alignment with their class positions. The action of these parties and currents of opinion showed that what they considered fundamental was their class interest, not the political doctrine and abstract commitment to this or that form of state (monarchy or republic). This unmasking is not an arbitrary imputation, but a conclusion resulting from the analysis of the discourse and practice of political parties.

The Political Scene Represents and Articulates Class Interests and Conflicts It is also interesting to follow the unveiling of the conflict within the monarchic camp—a conflict that put legitimists against Orleanists— because, in this case, Marx indicates that the characters believe in their own fantasy. Marx does not think that the relationship between appearance and essence is as simple as that between lie and truth. Appearance is part of reality, having its own “thickness.” In Marx’s analysis, each of these currents represents a fraction of the ruling classes. They defend competing economic interests and not the right that this or that dynasty would have to occupy the throne. The legitimists represent the interests of the big landed property, whereas the Orleanists represent the interests of capital (financial, commercial, and industrial). Charles X, a Bourbon monarch (1824–1830) who belonged to the branch defended by the legitimists, had radicalized during his reign the policy known as Restoration, in defense of the interests of the great

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landowners—indemnification of the emigrated aristocracy for the losses caused by the Revolution, suppression of voting rights for traders and industrialists, and suppression of freedom of the press. The Orleanists opposed Charles X, and, when they took power thanks to the July Revolution of 1830, they placed Louis Philippe I on the throne and ruled in the name of the bourgeoisie—they implemented an electoral reform broad enough to integrate the bourgeoisie into the electoral body of the chamber of representatives, but restricted enough to keep the peasants, workers, petty-bourgeois, and self-employed excluded from the electoral system. They suppressed both the inheritance of posts in the aristocratic chamber (Chambre des Pairs) and the royal prerogative to issue ordonnances (decrees-law). Marx certainly has this sort of evidence in mind when he states that, in the reign of Charles X, rural properties were the “hegemonic” force in the state, while in the reign of Louis Philippe I this position would be occupied by the bourgeoisie. Nonetheless, the attachment to either dynastic house is not considered by Marx as a mere trick manipulated by the monarchist parliamentarians. Such attachment works, in fact, as an element of cohesion for each of the rival factions. Each dynasty does in fact organize a fraction of the ruling class. These fractions are differentiated also thanks to the political action of the royal families. To illustrate this situation, it is worth making another long quotation. In this passage, Marx starts from the surface reality of the dynastic conflict, points to the conflict between bourgeois fractions that is hidden on a deeper level and finally returns to the surface conflict to indicate that it is also part of reality. Legitimists and Orleanists, as we have said, formed the two great factions of the party of Order. Was that which held these factions fast to their pretenders, and kept them apart from one another nothing but lily and tricolour, House of Bourbons and House of Orleans, different shades of royalism, was it at all the confession of faith of royalism? Under the Bourbons [1815-1830], big landed property had governed, with its priests and lackeys; under the Orleans [1830-1848], high finance, large-scale industry, large-scale trade, that is, capital, with its retinue of lawyers, professors and smooth-tongued orators. The Legitimate Monarchy was merely the political expression for the hereditary rule of the lords of the soil, as the July Monarchy was only the political expression of the usurped rule of the bourgeois parvenus. What kept the two factions apart, therefore, was not any so-called principles, it was their material conditions of existence, two different kinds of property, it was the old contrast between

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town and country, the rivalry between capital and landed property. That at the same time old memories, personal enmities, fears and hopes, prejudices and illusions, sympathies and antipathies, convictions, articles of faith and principles bound them to one or the other royal house, who denies this? [...] The single individual, who derives them through tradition and upbringing, may imagine that they form the true motives and the starting point of his activity. (Marx, 1972, p. 37)

Relative to this dialectic between surface and deep reality, Marx’s analysis of the attempts undertaken by several legitimist and Orleanist parliamentarians to unify the two dynastic houses, i.e., to unite the monarchists around a single aspirant to the throne to be restored, is very illustrative. According to Marx, they failed because the problem was more complicated than simply convincing this or that aspirant to the throne to abdicate in favor of the other. The root of the problem would have been the impossibility of reconciling capital with the big landed property. In other words, many monarchist parliamentarians do really believe that it is only the family claims of two rival dynasties that would divide them. However, the dynamics of the game of interests, whose deep nature can escape the consciousness of the agents involved, takes precedence over this belief. The surface reality is indeed part of reality, but it is subordinated to the deep reality, regardless of the parliamentarians’ awareness. The diplomats of the party of Order believed they could settle the struggle by an amalgamation of the two dynasties, by a so-called fusion of the royalist parties and their royal houses. [...] This was the philosopher‘s stone, to produce which the doctors of the party of Order racked their brains. As if the Legitimist monarchy could ever become the monarchy of the industrial bourgeois or the bourgeois monarchy ever become the monarchy of the hereditary landed aristocracy. As if landed property and industry could fraternize under one crown, when the crown could only descend to one head. [...] If Henry V should die tomorrow, the Count of Paris would not on that account become the king of the legitimists, unless he ceased to be the king of the Orleanists. The philosophers of fusion, however [...] considered the whole difficulty to be due to the opposition and rivalry of the two dynasties. [...]The fusionists perceive too late that the interests of the two bourgeois factions neither lose exclusiveness nor gain pliancy when they become accentuated in the form of family interests, the interests of the two royal houses. (Marx, 1972, pp. 83–84)

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The “diplomats” of the legitimists and Orleanists, those parliamentarians who carried out missions between one dynastic house and another as messengers and artisans of the merger, were unaware, according to Marx’s analysis, of the economic interests of the class fractions they represented, which separated them. The representatives were not completely aware of the interests they represented. The monarchist parliamentarians who defended the proposed merger of the two dynasties supposed that only values, personal relationships, customs, and symbols distinguished the two monarchist currents. It was because they were oblivious to the material basis of the conflict in which they were involved that these individuals proposed the merger of the monarchic parties. However, in Marx’s analysis in The Eighteenth Brumaire, the dynamics of the two fractions’ economic interests end up “correcting” the action of the parliamentarians who are in favor of the fusion of the dynastic houses. The determination of the political scene by the interests and conflicts of classes and class fractions also makes itself manifest in the changes that occur in the political process. Parties, organizations, and currents of opinion that ignore the interests of the class or class fraction they represent, either because they abandon old political positions without a justification, or because they remain attached to old positions at a time of change affecting their social base, can be condemned to decline and disappearance—something that did happen in 1851, when most of the bourgeois class abandoned the republicans, the legitimists, and the Orleanists, as well as the parliament that these bourgeois currents controlled, and started to support a dictatorial solution to the political crisis, a solution represented by Louis Bonaparte—a process that Marx analyzes in Chapter VI of The Eighteenth Brumaire.

Political Scene: Marxism, Liberalism, and the Theory of Elites The unveiling of the political scene in capitalist societies is a methodological procedure typical of Marxism, but only if such unveiling exposes the class and class fraction interests at the base of partisan struggles and ideas. Liberal thinkers conceive of the political scene as being transparent. Let us think of John Stuart Mill, a classic of nineteenth-century liberalism, and John Rawls, a classic of the twentieth century. For these liberal thinkers, the parties and currents of opinion that appear on the political scene are truly what they claim to be, representing nothing hidden or dissimulated.

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By means of debate and voting, the voter, a rational individual, chooses from the transparent window that is the political scene the current that best adapts to their values and objectives.4 We then have the struggle between conservatives and reformists, liberals and authoritarians, monarchists and republicans, etc. Each of these currents brings together free and rational individuals, partisans by mere choice and personal conviction of the values that characterize them as currents of opinion. The political scene is the space of dispute between currents or projects, and that is all. It is very instructive and timely for our discussion to compare Marx’s analysis of the French political scene in 1848–1851 with that made by Alexis de Tocqueville. Tocqueville was a conservative-liberal, a monarchist representative in the French National Assembly, who bequeathed us his analysis of the 1848 Revolution in the well-known work Souvenirs.5 Tocqueville, like other great liberal historians of the French Revolution such as Guizot (Rosanvallon, 1998), employs the concept of class and class struggle. Such concepts, as we know, are not the hallmark of Marxism. For this liberal thinker, the Three Glorious Days of 1830, when Charles X was deposed, were a revolution of the bourgeoisie struggling against the aristocracy, whereas the Revolution of 1848 was a revolution “of the classes that work with their hands” (Tocqueville, 2016, n.p.). However, in Tocqueville’s analysis, classes and class struggle do not appear organically on the political scene. In this sphere, there are many currents of opinion: the “conservatives,” the “radicals,” the “dynastic opposition,” the “republican opposition,” the “moderate opposition,” the “centerleft,” the “left,” the “crown,” and, in the background, the amorphous noise from the streets—the “rabble,” the “mob,” the “riffraff,” the “classes that work with their hands.” For Tocqueville, there may be a class struggle, but the political scene is not an integral part of that conflict. The supporters of the theory of elites, on the other hand, reverse the signs of the liberal conception of the political scene. They present themselves as realistic thinkers and as scathing critics of the liberal conception, which they consider idealistic and naïve. They eliminate the rational individual and the transparent politics and introduce instead the irrational mass and the constantly opaque political scene. In a democracy, the political proposals and party programs, far from defending values, ideas, and

4 See the ideas developed by John Stuart Mill (2008) and John Rawls (1995). 5 English edition: Tocqueville (2016).

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proclaimed objectives, would be mere gestures, manipulated by professional politicians, with the sole objective of garnering votes from the electorate. The elites compete for the vote of the common person and turn party programs into an instrument of mass manipulation. The electorate, for supporters of the theory of elites, does not act rationally nor even has the intellectual conditions to grasp the information necessary to form a position rationally grounded on political matters.6 Marx, as the analysis of The Eighteenth Brumaire should have made clear, differs from both the liberal and the elitist conceptions. Like the supporters of the theory of elites, Marx rejects the liberal conception. He considers the political scene as a superficial and misleading reality and does not believe that individuals act with freedom and awareness. Therefore, in our opinion, the direct and mechanical affiliation of Marx’s work to the Enlightenment philosophy would be problematic. However, Marx’s conception is also different from that of the elitists. The opacity of the political scene refers to the dissimulation and representation of class interests, thus not limiting itself to the universe of interests of professional politicians—a “political class” or an “elite” with its own exclusive interests. Individuals are shaped by their situation of class and class fraction. They make choices, but these choices also reflect interests and conditions which, more often than not, they themselves ignore. It is a non-transparent practice, contrary to what liberals intend, but in which individuals, following their “class instincts” can, contrary to what the elitists intend, end up situating themselves in a “rational way.” The party represents interests that are outside itself and the political scene, rooted instead in social production. However, on the one hand, members of that party—the representatives—and, on the other hand, the individuals that integrate the social classes—the represented—might all be unaware of the deep reasons for this relationship of representation. Neither liberal nor elitist, Marx’s conception of political representation and the political scene is sophisticated and, it is important to note, revolutionary.

6 This is the thesis developed by Joseph Schumpeter in his well-known Capitalism, Socialism, and Democracy, in which he criticizes the liberal conception of politics. To prevent misunderstandings, we clarify that Stuart Mill, when analyzing the behavior of manual workers, ends up introducing, through the back door of his system, this same elitist notion of the irrational mass. Such doctrinal deviation, however, does not compromise the essentially liberal character of the work Considerations on Representative Government (Mill, 2008; Schumpeter, 2003).

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We say it is revolutionary because, for Marx, the criteria for analyzing the political scene are not the same as those used in the analysis of the workers’ parties. The opacity of the political scene can be overcome, contrary to what the supporters of the theory of elites claim. The parties of the proletariat, to represent the interests of this class, need to do so openly. Their representational relationship excludes any relationship of dissimulation. In doing so, the workers’ parties shed new light on the political scene as a whole. They make each party appear, in the eyes of the organized working class, as what it really is, despite the work of ideology that hides the deep interests of each party and each bourgeois and pettybourgeois political current. In the memorable and pioneering episode of the Paris Commune of 1871, the Central Committee of the National Guard, elected by the working class, in organizing the March 18 insurrection and taking power, openly proclaimed that it was doing so in the name of a social class—“in the name of the Paris proletariat.” That says everything—about themselves and everyone else.

References Althusser, L. (1972). Montesquieu, politics, and history. In L. Althusser, (Ed.), Politics and history: Montesquieu, Rousseau, Hegel and Marx. New Left Books. Marx, K. (1972). The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte. Progress Publishers. Mill, J. S. (2008). Considerations on representative government. The Electric Book Company. Poulantzas, N. (1975). Political power and social classes. Verso. Rawls, J. (1995). Political liberalism. Columbia University Press. Rosanvallon, P. (1998). Le moment Guizot. Gallimard. Schumpeter, J. A. (2003). Capitalism. Routledge. de Tocqueville, A. (2016). Recollections: The French Revolution of 1848 and its Aftermath. University of Virginia Press.

PART II

Politics and Economy in the Formation of Working Classes

CHAPTER 8

Pre-capitalism, Capitalism, and Workers’ Resistance—Elements for a Theory of Union Action

This chapter deals with the relationship between, on the one hand, the global structure (economy, politics, ideology) of the modes of production in which there is class exploitation and, on the other hand, the possible forms of resistance by direct producers in these modes of production. The text seeks to show that only the structure of the capitalist mode of production, including its economic infrastructure and its juridico-political superstructure, allows the permanent organization of direct producers. As a consequence, and differently from what happened in pre-capitalist modes of production, the modern working class, who is educated and accumulates strength in the reformative struggle, can be transformed into the leading class of a revolutionary process.

This chapter was originally published in Crítica Marxista, São Paulo: Boitempo, n. 12, 2001. I would like to thank João Quartim de Moraes for his attentive reading of this article and for his criticisms and suggestions. Some of these criticisms were incorporated in the article; others, even if they were not, were also useful since they helped me better develop my argument. The final result is my entire responsibility. This text is a revised version of Professor Sean Purdy’s translation of the text in Portuguese. 151 © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2023 A. Boito, State, Politics, and Social Classes, Marx, Engels, and Marxisms, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-22046-3_8

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Pre-capitalism, Capitalism, and Workers’ Resistance---Elements for a Theory of Union Action In the Marxist tradition, unionism has been analyzed from distinct angles. An important and recurrent theme has been the relationship between the union movement and the wider workers’ and socialist movements, i.e., the relationship between unions and workers’ parties and between reform and revolution. This theme is thus situated within the context of organizational practices and political strategies. Leaders and theorists of the Second and Third Internationals such as Kautsky, Lenin, Trotsky, and Luxemburg, among others, intervened in this debate. Another important and recurrent question is the limits that the process of accumulation of capital imposes on unionism. The situational aspect of the capitalist economy interferes in the correlation of forces between the union movements and employers. Marx himself considered this question. In Capital, he noted that the existence and weight of the industrial reserve army of labor limited the strength of unions. The same question appeared in Value, Price and Profit where Marx showed how cyclical economic phases (revival, prosperity, overproduction and recession) shaped the effectiveness of union struggles. A third theme is the role of unionism in the development of the productive forces of capitalism. In Capital, Marx wrote that workers’ struggle for the reduction of the workday was one of the motors for the shift of exploitation founded on absolute surplus value to that based on relative surplus value. Yet the theme of this chapter is distinct. To a certain extent, it is a theme that precedes all the others, since it refers to the very social conditions of existence of movements such as trade unions. The general question that the chapter poses is this: in what conditions is unionism possible? This question leads to another: what is the nature of this movement— conservative, reformist, revolutionary? To respond to these questions, we will examine the relations between the structure of the capitalist mode of production and union action. Generally speaking, the union movement is a stable, organized, and socially legitimate reformative movement of the fundamental dominated class, aiming to negotiate the conditions of exploitation of the worker by the owner of the means of production. Yet why does this type of movement only exist in social formations dominated by the capitalist mode of production? Phrased in a simplified and almost paradoxical way: why did slave workers not “go on strikes” or why did

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the serf peasantry not possess “unions”? We will defend the thesis that in all class societies there is a correspondence between, on the one hand, the structure of the mode of production and, on the other, the forms that the practices of resistance by the workers assume or could assume, i.e., the struggles that aim to improve the conditions of the direct producers within the limits molded by the mode of production. Our central interest is the relationship between the structure of the capitalist mode of production and the union movement. However, this analysis may be widened and perhaps deepened if we also consider the relations between precapitalist modes of production and the resistance of workers who form the fundamental dominated class in such modes of production. Evidently, given the theme of this chapter, it does not make sense to analyze precapitalist modes of production that are based on the collective ownership of the means of production with no divisions into antagonist social classes. Within pre-capitalist modes of production that allow class exploitation, we will thus take into consideration ancient slavery, modern slavery, and feudalism, ignoring the Asiatic mode of production. Therefore, the general idea of the chapter is to show how the structures of the modes of production condition the practices of resistance of direct producers. In the case of unionism, it is clear that this movement was formed and developed due to the determined efforts of the workers and in spite of bourgeois resistance. It is well known that the French Revolution, rightly considered the most extreme process of a bourgeois revolution, banned the right of workers to form unions and go on strike through the Le Chapelier law. In England, workers only won such rights in 1824 after many struggles; in France, such a conquest came much later in 1884. Yet bourgeois resistance to unionism does not invalidate the thesis that only in the capitalist mode of production do we find elements and relations that are conditions, and even stimuli for a type of working-class organization and permanent reformative struggle. By the same token, the bourgeois position in favor of unequal or selective suffrage does not nullify the fact that only the capitalist state does permit the conquest of equal and universal suffrage for the direct producers. First, it is necessary to make a conceptual clarification. We use the Althusserian Marxist concept of mode of production, distinguished by a wider notion of the concept that does not just include economic relations. This characterization is fundamental to this chapter. If the concept of mode of production is merely thought of as a “manner of producing” or as “the economic level of societies,” it would be impossible to

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explain the originality of the existence in capitalism of a stable and socially legitimate working-class reformative movement of direct producers. The mode of production must be thought of as a macrostructure that articulates within the same totality the economic infrastructure as well as the juridical-political superstructure. The former is comprised of productive forces and relations of production, and the latter of law and bureaucracy, both of which are part of the state. Infrastructure and superstructure are articulated within a totality: the juridical-political superstructure of any mode of production has the function of reproducing the economic infrastructure of this mode of production. A second important characteristic of this concept of mode of production, and one that is directly relevant for our argument, is the fact that such a concept does not designate any specific historical reality. Althusserian authors always insist on a distinction between mode of production and social formation. The former is a theoretical concept formulated at a high level of abstraction and, therefore, is a simpler concept. From this perspective, a work such as Marx’s Capital focuses on the mode of capitalist production and not this or that capitalist society. To be more exact, Marx examines just the economic infrastructure of the capitalist mode of production and not the totality of this mode of production. The concept of social formation, in turn, is formulated at a lower level of abstraction, incorporates a larger number of determinations and, for this reason, is a more complex concept. Although it is an “ideal reality,” as the reality of any concept is, it is a concrete concept since it designates historically existent societies: for example, the English capitalist social formation in the middle of the nineteenth century, from which Marx drew the majority of his historical material used to analyze the infrastructure of the capitalist mode of production. Social formations, as Lenin shows in his classic The Development of Capitalism in Russia, articulate, in the same historical space and time, elements and relations of different modes of production, subordinated to the dominant mode of production in the formation. The concept of mode of production is an abstraction produced on the basis of analyses of historically existent social formations. Throughout this chapter, we will operate with this distinction between mode of production and social formation. In relation to our overall argument, this distinction signifies the following: we may indeed find stable workers’ reformative movements in certain pre-capitalist social formations. For example, in the modern slave social formations of Brazil and the United States in

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the nineteenth century, there were embryonic union movements due to the presence in these social formations of capitalist-type production relations (see Foot & Leonardi, 1982). However, such movements did not encompass the fundamental dominated class of these social formations— the class of rural slaves—and, since modern slavery was the dominant mode of production in these social formations, the development of the union movement of free workers was hindered.

Pre-Capitalist Modes of Production: Direct Producers Between Disorganization and Uprising The history of the practice of resistance by direct producers in precapitalist modes of production, such as ancient and modern slavery and feudalism, presents more or less long periods of disorganization and passivity punctuated by abrupt actions of local revolt or generalized insurrections.1 At a lower level, we have passivity or the individual and diffuse resistance of the direct producers; at a higher level, open rebellion. There is no “intermediate level,” which would be a stable reformative movement, such as the union movement, organized by rural slaves and peasant serfs. Let’s see why this profile of the struggles of slave workers or serfs is conditioned by the structure of the pre-capitalist modes of production. For what interests us here, it is possible to group together diverse modes of pre-capitalist production (ancient slavery, feudalism, modern slavery) in a reasonably coherent set of general and abstract elements and contrast this set with the capitalist mode of production. Such elements, characteristic of pre-capitalist modes of production, are the following: (a) a low level of development and socialization of the productive forces; (b) personal subordination of the direct producer to the owner of the means of production, a subordination established in pre-capitalist law; and (c) the express prohibition of the participation of direct producers in the

1 This affirmation, with a distinct formulation and substantiation, revisits the thesis presented by Alain Badiou and François Balmès in the essay De l’Idéologie. It also represents a re-elaboration, from the theoretical problematic of historical materialism, of some known formulations of Weberian inspiration. T. H. Marshall, for example, in his influential collection of essays on social stratification, wrote: “Where status rules, bargaining, which belongs to contract, cannot prevail. […] There is no middle course between acquiescence and rebellion” (Marshall, 1963, p. 178).

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apparatus of the state, whose positions are monopolized by individuals belonging to the dominant class. There are differences in pre-capitalist modes of production, as we will see later, with respect to the personal subjection of the direct producer to the owner of the means of production. The slave worker, as much in ancient as in modern slavery, did not possess legal capacity and was defined as the property of the master. Serf peasants bound to the land possessed a limited legal capacity that moderated the authority of the master over their person. These differences, codified by slave and feudal laws, while they did not abolish the personal subjection of the slave worker or the peasant serf to the owner of the means of production, correspond to differences existent at the level of production relations in slavery and feudalism. The feudal peasant, endowed with some legal capacity, could have a part of the means of production and engage in a relatively independent economic production. Rural slaves, having no legal capacity, could only work with the means of production of others, and their work was conducted under the control of the owner of the means of production or their agents. In ancient slavery, the rule was for the agent of the master to be also a slave. Such differences in production relations correspond in turn to differences in the productive forces. Feudal economy, in its typical form, distributed and dispersed the direct producers in small plots of land. Surplus production was transferred to the feudal lord under the form of payments in products (tributes), in labor (corvée) and, sometimes, in money. Slave economy, both ancient and modern, brought together squads of slaves under the unified command of the same master in the same place of work. But both in slavery and feudalism the low level of socialization and development of the productive forces kept, in general, direct producers distributed in small productive units whose production was separated, even isolated, from one another. In addition, there was only an incipient division of labor within each of these units. Although it did not completely derail possibilities, this dispersion and isolation created obstacles for all collective action, reformative or revolutionary, by serf peasants or rural slaves in normal conditions of production within slavery and feudalism. In Classical Antiquity, the slave mode of production brought together a small number of slaves in productive units, either in rural properties or in manufactures. It is clear that a larger concentration of slaves was mobilized for the construction of public works or, in rare cases, for the provision of public services. A similarly large concentration also occurred

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in mining activities. Yet these were local or occasional cases. As a rule, the dispersion of direct producers prevailed. In Greece and Rome in the classical era (respectively, the fifth to the fourth century BC and second century BC to the second century AD) the slave mode of production was dominant, having peasant economy as a complementary mode of production. The majority of slaves was made up of the class of rural workers. There were sectors that presented large concentrations of slave workers. The silver mines of Athens in Attica and the Roman silver mines in Spain, for instance, concentrated as many as 30,000 slaves in the same region. Nevertheless, as a rule the ancient slave mode of production was characterized by the dispersion of direct producers. Even in agriculture, dispersion predominated. In Greece, slave agriculture was conducted in small- and medium-sized properties from 12 to a maximum of 24 hectares in area. In general, there was a small number of slaves on rural properties. It was in classical Rome that slave latifundia emerged, but these were subdivided and territorially discontinuous even though they were the properties of the same landowner (Anderson, 1977). Slavery in the cities had peculiar characteristics. With respect to the concentration of workers, there were situations that permitted the formation of relatively large workforces. The water-supply system in Rome in the first century AD comprised, under the control of the state, a permanent workforce of 700 slaves. In the Roman factories and brickworks, the largest number of workers known was between 60 and 120 slaves in the same establishment (Finley, 1999). Yet the most important factor in the case of urban activities is that there was a class difference between urban and rural slaves. The urban slave—domestic and artisan—enjoyed a different treatment from that dispensed to the rural slave. Domestic slaves were favored by the fact that they provided personal services to the master and to the artisans due to their technical knowledge. Charles Parain argues that this class difference divided the slave order: […] slaves occupied extremely distinct posts in the social system of production: there was an abyss between the slave who, submitted to ruthless discipline, suffered the hardest conditions in the great rural properties or the most frightful conditions in the mines, and the slave who was the confidant of a master. Generalizing, the slave who was employed in the city, in

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an urban family, appeared to enjoy a relatively desirable destiny in the eyes of the slave relegated to the field. (Parain, 1963, p. 14)2

Such class differences had repercussions on the social practices of these agents. Historian M. I. Finley stresses that urban slaves did not participate in the slave revolts of antiquity, which were the work of rural slaves. As a Marxist historian of Antiquity observes about the history of Rome: Among the class antagonisms that spanned Roman society, the sharpest involved the two principal classes: the slaveholding landowners and the rural slaves. Relative to slave society, the class struggle here reached its highest level and strongest cruelty. Spontaneous uprisings and more or less important revolts became the characteristic forms of struggle of rural slaves who formed the most isolated social group and were exploited through the most typical methods of the slave order. (Staerman, 1978, p. 192)

In the modern slave mode of production, Jacob Gorender shows that productive units were, in the majority, small, though slave workforces displayed variable sizes (Gorender, 1980). Small mills in the northeastern Brazilian hinterland possessed between twelve and fifteen slaves. In the cotton plantations, there were many small enterprises with approximately ten slaves each. In addition to cotton cultivation, there were also many small enterprises in the sugar and tobacco sectors with small slave workforces. Yet the mills in the Brazilian state of Bahia in the sixteenth century possessed at least 60 slaves and the majority of them comprised a workforce of 100 and 200 slaves. In the seventeenth century, there are records of plantations with 100 and 300 slaves in the states of Ceará and Paraíba. But the largest concentration of slaves was found in the coffee plantations in the Paraíba Valley and Western region of the state of São Paulo in the nineteenth century. It is not rare to find references to coffee plantations with 200–400 slaves.

2 On this same point, Jean-Pierre Vernant affirms: “…the mass of the slaves did not form such a homogenous group as we are inclined to imagine…the real conditions of work and life showed, behind the apparent identity of the juridical statute, considerable differences. What did the domestic slave as presented in the comedies or a slave who managed an artisanal operation in the name of the master and those who labored chained up in the mines of Laurion have in common? Between the agricultural slave, the preceptor of a rich family and the employee in state administration?” (Vernant, 1989, p. 84).

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Summarizing, in both ancient and modern slavery, the concentration of a large number of slaves in the same plantation, mill, manufacture, or public works existed, but it was rare. Small, dispersed, and self-sufficient productive units prevailed. Control over direct producers was unified; in opposition to serf peasants, their labor was collectively subordinated to the slave owner or his agent. In a short chapter such as this, we may disregard situations in modern slavery in which the slaveholding farmer conceded a plot of land for the slaves to cultivate, where a part of slave labor was dedicated to subsistence production in a relatively independent manner. This situation, known in Brazil as the “peasant breach” (brecha camponesa) or the “Brazilian system,”3 was an unlikely historical event of societies dominated by the modern slave mode of production and, as such, may be abstracted from the conceptual framework of this mode of production. We may then consider that the workers were grouped in a collective in each locale of production. In theory, this would favor the organized action of rural slaves; yet we need to counter this with the fact that each collective of workers was isolated from all the others. At the level of the productive forces, the very productive units were isolated from each other since there was no socially integrated production. Thus, a chance and isolated action by direct producers in one unit of production could not provoke any chain reaction that would affect the others. At the level of production relations, a decisive aspect is that each slave workforce was confined to its productive unit, since direct producers did not enjoy personal freedom. There was no contact between direct producers in different productive units. Therefore, the collective action of these producers was hampered as much by the low level of the development and socialization of the forces of production as by the productive relations that converted the direct producer into an instrument of production. In medieval and modern Europe, the feudal mode of production distributed the masses of peasant serfs into isolated plots of land with each peasant family assuming control of agricultural production in the plot to which they were bound. This system of isolation was a fundamental and constant characteristic of feudalism, though there were secondary variations throughout European history.4 3 On the “peasant breach” see Ciro Cardoso (1988). 4 João Quartim de Moraes alerted me to the role that the exploitation of communal

lands and the peasant village could play in the unification of the peasantry. The force of the peasant movement in Russia, where the communal land and the village had a more

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In the Early Middle Ages, feudal exploitation was based, fundamentally, on the corvée. Although important, feudal tributes in crops and, sometimes, money, played a secondary role, Marc Bloch estimates that, summing up all the agricultural services rendered on the master’s land (day work under the control of the feudal lord, or piecework organized by the serf and his family) and manufacturing services (labor in the workshops of the feudal lord, in the manor kitchens rendered by peasant women, or in the very houses of the peasants with material provided by the lord), dependent peasants had to provide 150 days of corvée per year to the feudal lord. This meant that in at least a part of these 150 days per year, that is, on the days in which they provided agricultural corvée per day and corvée in the kitchens, the peasants were congregated in the lord’s manor or at the workshops working under the orders of the feudal lord and his agents (in the same way that in ancient slavery the overseer was a slave, in feudalism the administrators of the feuds belonged, as a general rule, to the class of serfs. In France, the serf administrator was known as the “sergeant ”). During the Late Middle Ages and the Early Modern Age, even this temporary and partial clumping of peasants ceased to exist. Feudal tributes substituted the corvée as the dominant form of feudal income. The surface area of the seigneurial manor was reduced, the feuds that were divided into plots of land under peasant cultivation were amplified and the corvée declined to just 15 days per year. Dispersion and isolation of the peasants in their plots of land were accentuated (Bloch, 1976). A very rudimentary social and technical division of labor corresponded to the low level of development and socialization of the productive forces. There was little cooperation and dependency between the productive units and between workers within the same unit. The direct producer, accompanied by his family, was not part of a collective of producers such as the modern collective worker created by capitalism. This socioeconomic isolation generated obstacles for the formation of collective movements among the direct producers in feudal social formations, and reduced the impact of any act of resistance in the same way as had occurred in slavery: a work stoppage in one productive unit did not have a chain effect in the other units. important role than in Western Europe, is perhaps an indication of the necessity to reflect on this hypothesis. However, I do not believe that communal lands annul the isolation characteristic of the peasantry in the feudal period.

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Up to this point, we have spoken of the economic infrastructure of the slave and feudal modes of production. However, the obstacles created by this infrastructure for the organization and collective struggle of direct producers are not the only factors to be considered. Pre-capitalist law should also be taken into consideration. The juridico-political infrastructure of pre-capitalist modes of production prohibited direct producers from any type of collective action, including, therefore, mere reformative actions. If direct producers organized themselves and struggled, they put themselves, independently of the objectives of the struggle, in open opposition to the mode of production. It is certain that slaves or serfs could, in an act of rebellion, make demands collectively. Yet this fact does not alter our contention. This is so because slave masters or feudal lords could not, in this or in any other action, initiate negotiations with direct producers. No reformative movement of workers may exist in a stable form without the participation of the opposite side, the owners of the means of production. Unionism can only exist as a stable social movement because the owners of the means of production, the capitalists, engage, even against their own will, in negotiations with the representatives of the workers. The rebellious acts of direct producers in pre-capitalist modes of production did not succeed in establishing negotiations with the owners of the means of production and, for this reason, did not consolidate themselves as reformative movements against working conditions and the rate of exploitation. We have already referred to the well-known fact that in the slave and feudal modes of production the direct producer was personally submitted to the owner of the means of production, even if this personal submission assumed various forms. In the case of slavery, it was a relation of complete ownership. In the classic form of “commodity slavery,” the slave was subject to the absolute authority of the master and was a freely alienable commodity. In general terms, slave law and ideology treated the slave as a thing without his/her own proper will, legally incapable and object of the will of others—the free man who was their lawful owner.5 It is necessary to make a clarification in this respect. Jacob Gorender has demonstrated that in concrete slave societies—those that we would denominate slave social formations—the legal process of making the slave a thing may not be complete. In these social formations, norms that conceded partial and

5 “Slaves do not have a juridical personality” (Villey, 1949).

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local juridical capacity to the slave could exist in determined circumstances and within the limits imposed by the necessity of maintaining the slave order (see Gorender, 1980). It is necessary to clarify, therefore, that it is at the conceptual level of the mode of production, which retained just the fundamental relations of the social formations under consideration, that it is possible to state that slave law did not attribute any juridical capacity to the slave. In the case of serfdom, personal subjection assumed an attenuated form.6 Peasant serfs who occupied a plot of land, for example, were bound to the land and could not be bought or sold. They were not subject, therefore, to the absolute authority of the lord. Foignet distinguishes three types of serfs, using as an implicit criterion the level of restriction of the serfs’ juridical personality: serfs “of body and persecution,” prisoners of the seigneury who could be forcibly repatriated in the case of abandonment; serfs of “personal servitude,” who possessed the right to choose a seigneury, but remained prisoners to the person of the lord; and serfs of “real servitude,” whose bondage was based solely on the land that they occupied and who could gain their freedom if they abandoned this land. Marc Bloch denominates this last type as “villein” in the strict sense and the first two types as serfs without specifications (Bloch, 1976). Charles Parain, based on a text by Engels, considers the servile condition as a situation in which the producer was the limited property of the lord; he established a gradation of this condition, speaking of both “heavy” and “attenuated” servitude. In the Early Middle Ages, heavy and personal servitude would have prevailed, by means of the corvée. In the Late Middle Ages and Early Modern period in Western Europe, attenuated servitude, based on tributes, would have been dominant. If direct producers did not have a juridical personality, or only possessed it in a limited form, the institutions of the pre-capitalist state, contrary to those of the capitalist state, explicitly and formally prohibited the participation of members of inferior orders. The members of the fundamental dominated classes, the rural slaves and the serf peasants, were excluded from these institutions. Individuals who belonged to a superior order (free men) monopolized posts in the state apparatus. Actually, the majority of such posts ended up in the hands of individuals who belonged 6 “The slave does not have a juridical personality and, therefore, does not even have the right to a family or rights to patrimony…Serfs enjoy only a restricted juridical personality… with family rights and uncontested patrimonial rights” (Foignet, 1946).

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to the dominant class because, in pre-capitalist states, wealth was a condition to assume the state functions of administration, tax collection, and warfare. Indeed, a majority of the installations and equipment destined for this end was furnished by the very occupants of the state apparatus. Thus, the intertwining of class condition (place in the process of production) and condition in the legal order (place in the civil juridical hierarchy) allowed for the monopoly on state posts by the dominant class, impeding the existence of a bureaucratic body whose recruitment could formally be made in all social classes. The slave landowners and the feudal lords were themselves the “employees” of the state, including in the repressive apparatus of the state, a point that most interests us in this discussion. The direct producer in ancient and modern slavery and in feudalism was submitted, therefore, to the person of the owner of the means of production. Such a condition transformed any reformative action or demand, independently of its content, into an act of negation of the law and the ideology that guaranteed the exploitation of labor in these modes of production. To protest or demand concessions meant to affirm oneself as a subject of rights, and therefore to negate the condition of personal submission that obliged the direct producer, in pre-capitalist modes of production, to provide surplus labor to the owner of the means of production. As already said: slaves and serfs could engage in reformative actions. After all, they might not accept their condition of submission to the will of others. However, if this were to occur, the owners of the means of production could only offer as a response, under the risk of overthrowing all the existing social edifice, pure and simple repression, and never negotiation. The consequence of this fact is that the direct producers were returned—unless there was a revolutionary transformation of the slave or feudal order—to the previous and normal situation of disorganization (Badiou & Balmès, 1976). This does not mean that direct producers were condemned to total passivity even in moments of stability in the slave and feudal order. They could act at the individual level, whether adapting “advantageously” to the system, or attempting to individually free themselves from oppression. Despite being very restricted, there were more or less advantageous forms of individual adaptation to pre-capitalist oppression and exploitation, forms that have been quite emphasized by the recent bibliography on Brazilian and North American slavery (Gorender, 1990). “Standard slaves” could try to obtain a “transfer” from work on the land to personal services in the master’s house, or attempt to acquire, already at the end of

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their lives, an uncertain and restricted writ of emancipation. This type of individual adaptive action is only a historical fact because it contributed to the reproduction of the system of exploitation as a whole. There were also diffuse forms of individual resistance to pre-capitalist exploitation and oppression. Rural slaves or peasant serfs could individually resist the slave masters and feudal owners. Botched work, aggression or assassination of the slave owners or their relatives and agents, escape from the slave plantation or feud, and many other forms of expression of individual non-conformism by direct producers were constant in periods of political stability in pre-capitalist societies. This diffuse and individual resistance, depending on the historical situation and the amplitude that it assumed, could generate real and important transformations in the organization of the economy and society and thus become significant historical facts. E. Staerman points to what he calls the “latent forms” of slave resistance. He sustains that slave escape was a wide and permanent phenomenon in ancient Rome, adding that the slaves were not just content to flee, but they also killed their masters and destroyed their goods. Charles Parain considers that the diffuse resistance of slaves was one of the factors responsible for the most important transformation that occurred in productive relations in the ancient world—the gradual replacement of slave labor by the “settlement” labor regime (Parain, 1963; Staerman, 1978). In the case of feudalism, Maurice Dobb reports that the flight of serf peasants to the cities oftentimes acquired catastrophic proportions for the economy of the feuds as much in England as in the other European countries. He presents reports that show that in French feuds where the lords were inflexible, their land was abandoned, sometimes in the form of an “exodus of the entire village.” He cites the twelfth-century example of the Île de Ré, whose inhabitants “deserted en masse due to the severity of their lord, who was obliged to make concessions to maintain a few workers.” In the twelfth and thirteenth centuries, the masters began to establish agreements of cooperation for the search for fugitive serfs. Dobb concludes: ...[So] considerable did the problem of fugitives become and so great the hunger for labor, that, despite treaties and mutual promises, an actual competition developed to entice and steal the serfs of a neighboring domain – a competition that involved the making of certain concessions,

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and the existence of which imposed its own limits on the further increase of feudal exploitation. (Dobb, 2008, pp. 46–47)

Following the same line of thought, Charles Parain sustains that the transition from personal serfdom based on the corvée, typical of the Early Middle Ages, to the land servitude based on tributes, typical of the Late Middle Ages, represented a retreat of the feudal lords in the face of the dissatisfaction and pressure of the peasants (Parain, 1978). Therefore, even without an organized reformative movement, rural slaves and peasants could obtain, thanks to diffuse resistance, reforms in the ancient slave and feudal economies. As for modern slavery, Antônio Barros de Castro argues convincingly that actions of individual rebellion and the diffuse pressure by rural slaves, together with the preventive action of slave owners against rebellions, were responsible—perhaps the main responsible—for the development of the “peasant breach.” The author contests a merely economic explanation of the “Brazilian system,” which attributes the grant of a plot of land for the peasants’ own cultivation exclusively to the interests of the slave master in cheapening labor costs (Castro, 1980). Therefore, as in the cases of ancient slavery and feudalism, the lack of a permanent organization by direct producers and of negotiations on the conditions of work does not mean that the contradiction between producers and owners failed to influence the forms and paths that pre-capitalist societies assumed.7 In light of what we have argued, it is worth making a critical reference to the work of João José Reis and Eduardo Silva, Brazilian historians who, similarly to what American historians did, have proposed a new vision of slavery (see Reis & Silva, 1989). According to these authors, it is necessary to overcome what they believe is a simplistic and Manichaean vision in which the slave is either a great rebel like Zumbi or an Uncle Tom. Beginning with this metaphor to characterize in a sketchy and imprecise mode the historiography that criticizes slavery, the authors advance the thesis that there was a permanent “negotiation” between the slaves and their masters. To arrive at this conclusion, they arbitrarily amalgamate in the study of

7 Many authors erroneously believe that the particularity of the slave mode of production consists of the fact that the slave mass did not have any influence on society and history. This is the case of Fernando Henrique Cardoso, for whom the slaves are “[…] mute testimonies of a history in which they are only a type of passive instrument.” (Cardoso, 1975, p. 112).

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Brazilian slavery the individual strategies of adaptation to the slave system with individual and collective actions of resistance. They speak, in an inadequate and indistinct manner, of negotiation and agreement in referring to these phenomena, aiming to advance the idea of the existence of a kind of “slavery contract” that allowed “discussion” between “the parts.” This explains why the title of their book refers to negotiation and conflict in slavery. The result of this anachronism is fanciful. J.J. Reis and E. Silva consider, for example, the advantages that a female domestic slave could obtain in return for sexual and culinary services for their owner as a form of successful negotiation between slaves and masters. Between the rebel Zumbi and the passive Uncle Tom, we would thus have the “negotiation” represented by Chica da Silva, a Brazilian slave woman who achieved a high social status in the eighteenth century. Anyway, it is significant that they deal here with domestic slaves. As we have already argued, in the slave mode of production it was the class of rural slaves that constituted the antagonistic pole in slave production relations. In any case, the authors do not cite one single example of negotiation between a collective of slaves and the slave owner over conditions. We have said that direct producers might sometimes put forth collective demands to the owners of the means of production for which they worked. This type of initiative could, if the master did not manage to control the workers, develop into an insurrection. We would then have a sequence: pacific collective demands, inefficient repression, and insurrection. Sometimes, however, the reformative demands already began as an armed insurrection. This inversion is elucidative. Through their practical experience, the producers knew that the owners would repress them. As a consequence, instead of peacefully presenting their demands, they rebelled, generally armed, and, during the insurrection, launched their platform of demands. We could call this phenomenon, which was not rare in some pre-capitalist social formations, reformative demand through insurrection, or “insurrectionary reformative demand.” In modern Europe this phenomenon was common. Analyzing the peasant revolts in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, Emmanuel Le Roy Ladurie observes many movements such as these we are designating with the expression “insurrectionary reformative demands” (Ladurie, 1974). In colonial Northeastern Brazil, at the end of the eighteenth century, a well-known and widely discussed “insurrectionary reformative demand” occurred among the rural slaves of the Santana de Ilhéus mill, in which slaves rebelled, fled, and then presented a “Peace Treaty” that

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specified several detailed demands as a condition for their return to work.8 At the end of the nineteenth century, in the coffee-producing region of the southeast of Brazil, Ronaldo Marcos dos Santos found many examples of this phenomenon, which he called “reformative revolts” (dos Santos, 1980). In all of these cases, the master or lord responded with repression to return the slave or the serf to a condition of personal subordination. Let´s assume, for the purposes of argument, that the owner of the Santana de Ilhéus mill agreed to negotiate the “Peace Treaty” proposed by the slaves. After all, an individual may transcend or contradict their class situation. First, if this occurred, it would have been an exceptional behavior, distinct from the standard behavior that ruled the majority of the individual members of the class of masters in slave mills. Second, this deviant behavior would have to consolidate itself in the face of the positions of other owners of slave mills. In pre-capitalist modes of production, the dominant class monopolized the positions in the repressive apparatus of the state and the individuals who constituted it also had their own repressive force. The opposition of the other slave mill owners would, therefore, have to be conquered by arms. The defeat of the deviant mill owner would thus be a more probable outcome. We would now like to consider the relations between slave masters or feudal lords with their workers. The slaves of the Santana de Ilhéus mill made the following demands: they wanted to possess a plot of land for their own cultivation, their own work tools, two days of the week to work their own land, a reduction in the workday in the mill, the detailed regulation of working conditions, days off and the right to choose their supervisors in the mill. These slaves aspired, on the one hand, to become peasants and, on the other, admitted to wanting to continue providing surplus labor on the lands of the master of the mill as long as conditions were created that were closer to the conditions of the modern wage worker. Indeed, they sought nothing less, nothing more, than “a legislation of the mill” and a “union commission.” In this case, there is no doubt what the outcome of a possible negotiation would be. The content of the demands was incompatible with slavery and the repressive response of the mill master appears natural. Also in the 8 The revolt of the Santana de Ilhéus mill was revealed by the research of the Brazilianist Stuart Schwartz. He analyzed the documentation related to this episode in the article “Resistance and Accommodation in Eighteenth-Century Brazil: The Slaves’ View of Slavery” (1977).

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coffee regions of the Southeast, numerous “insurrectionary reformative demands” presented to the master the “demand” for freedom. They were willing to continue working on the farm as long as they had the conditions of free workers. The objective was revolutionary, however, contradictorily, the form of presenting it—a demand to the master—was not. And what of the cases in which the demands of the producer were more modest? Ronaldo Marcos dos Santos found many cases in which slaves fled as a group and presented themselves to the police chief to complain about the violent behavior of the supervisors. They did not demand freedom or even complain against the master, just against the supervisor. The chief could arrest the fugitive slaves and call for reinforcement if necessary, something which frequently happened. Many times, however, the police chief, acting as an intermediary and counting on the active support of a part of the population, served as a canal of negotiation between the fugitive slaves and the farmer. This occurred when the abolitionist movement was strong in the city. Santos’ study refers to the period between 1885 and 1888, the last three years of slavery in Brazil. But we should not conclude that the moderation of the demand meant that the possibility of negotiation became real. Another conclusion is to be drawn: if the slaves had, even exceptionally, the possibility of negotiating their working conditions, this signifies that in the decade of 1880 Brazil witnessed, in fact, a general crisis of the slave mode of production. Pre-capitalist class societies did not comprise, therefore, reformative social movements by direct producers. The producers were limited to passivity and diffuse resistance, more or less individualized, or, in favorable historical circumstances, rose up whether at the local level to obtain reforms or at a wider level in a civil war that could or could not be integrated into a revolutionary process. We have exposed the reasons for this oscillation between disorganization and revolt. The wider concept of mode of production is effective in explaining them since such reasons are to be found both in the economic infrastructure and in the juridico-political superstructure of pre-capitalist modes of production. The productive forces of pre-capitalist modes of production thwart, but do not exclude, any type of organization and collective struggle by these producers. For their part, the relations of production and the juridicopolitical superstructure of these same modes of production impede the organization of the producers, even if for mere reforms. To demand, independently of the content of the demand, is to affirm oneself as a subject of right and, therefore, contest personal subjection, which is exactly what

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guaranteed the exploitation of class in pre-capitalist modes of production. If, in a pre-capitalist social formation, historical circumstances propitiated the formation of reformative movements of the direct producers, this fact, external to the structure of the pre-capitalist modes of production, meant that this social formation would find itself in a crisis: either the movement would be repressed and suffocated, or it would end up promoting a revolution even if such a movement only intended to pursue reforms.

The Capitalist Mode of Production: The Direct Producers Organized to Make Demands The contrast between the pre-capitalist and capitalist modes of production corresponds to the contrast between the profiles of resistance and struggle of the direct producers in these distinct modes of production. Our analysis in the last section, in which we provided evidence that the resistance and struggle of rural slaves and peasant serfs was structured by the slave and feudal modes of production, already suggests to the reader the path we will follow in the second part of this article. As a result, we may proceed more quickly. The economic infrastructure of the capitalist mode of production is characterized at the level of the productive forces by the use of machines and the collective worker. We will highlight in this respect what is most pertinent to our analysis. In contrast to the tool that is “an extension of the body of the worker,” and whose use is limited by the strength and skill of who uses it, the machine allows for the overcoming of the organic limitations of the human being in the production process. The utilization of machines is linked to a division of labor that requires the employment of the collective worker. The employment of the collective worker is a constant in capitalist production. Not even the recent and localized reforms of Taylorism-Fordism, which introduced the “enrichment of tasks” and “islands of production,” practices that established restrictions on the assembly line, have overcome this basic practice of capitalism. In certain respects, it has even reinforced them. “Just in time” production reinforces the cooperative character of labor within and outside the factory so that, to avoid production shutdowns and delays, understocking and overstocking in the supply chain of the productive process, fine synchrony and maximum precision are required in the flux of demands and delivery of components and raw materials between sections of the

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same company and between different companies. Within production relations, we have, on the one side, the private owners of the means of production and, on the other, the collective worker, operating a system of production composed of a myriad of socially integrated productive units whose labor inside each of them is divided in a detailed, cooperative, and centrally organized manner. The form in which the direct producer is incorporated in the productive process depends on the juridico-political superstructure of the capitalist mode of production. The capitalist incorporates the producer in the organism of the collective worker, which, as we have observed, works within the context of a socialized production process based on a contract of the rent of the labor power of the worker which is, contradictorily, an individual contract. At the formal legal level, the direct producer is a free individual with full juridical capacity just as the owner of the means of production with whom workers sign labor contracts. This characteristic of bourgeois law, unique in the whole history of class society, formally equates the owner and the producer, leading workers to perceive exploitation as a free contractual relation between equal individuals, and ignore their own situation of class. Bourgeois law, therefore, produces an illusion, not because workers are not legally free to choose for whom they will work. Although limited by the economic circumstances of the moment, this freedom is real. It distinguishes, in fact, the modern proletarian from the worker of the past, slave or serf. Yet it should also be considered an illusion: while the workers are free to choose the capitalist for which they will work, they are not completely free since they are separated from the means of production and thus cannot choose between working or not working for the capitalist class. This formal equalitarian law produces what Poulantzas calls an “effect of isolation”—the conversion, in the dominant ideology, of class agents into socially rootless individuals, allowing the peaceful reproduction of the wage relation (Poulantzas, 1975). It is clear that the fact that workers are separated from the means of production, as Marxists traditionally highlight, represents an economic coercion that obliges them to rent their labor force in order not to starve to death. Capitalist society, however, is not a society in permanent crisis. Workers do not permanently struggle to “retrieve” the means of production from which their ancestors were dispossessed. It is precisely the illusion of the labor contract that allows for the more or less peaceful reproduction of that separation and for the act of workers selling their labor force. Therefore, class exploitation reproduces itself because it is hidden from social

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agents. Exploitation of labor in pre-capitalist modes of production was manifest. A division into orders (free humans and slaves or serfs) forced the direct producer to provide surplus labor to members of the dominant class. Such provision of surplus labor was presented as the unswerving obligation of the producer. In the capitalist mode of production, exploitation is concealed. The orders disappeared and the direct producer, who is a free human being, provides surplus labor to the owner of the means of production apparently by free choice. At the level of the institutions of the capitalist state and, again, in contrast to pre-capitalist states, the bureaucracy of the state is formed: a professional corps of employees with their own internal unity, organized in a hierarchical manner, and formally recruited from all social classes. Societies in which the capitalist mode of production rules are class societies without being societies of orders as in pre-capitalist social formations. Formally equal rights require that the institutions of the state be apparently universal, that is, devoid of class particularism or of social orders. This led to the rise in the capitalist mode of production of what Poulantzas calls “a popular class state,” a class state, as all states, but endowed with a popular façade. This popular appearance contributes to the reproduction of the exploitation of labor because it unifies, at the ideological level, the agents of production, distributed in classes, in a collective imaginary of the “people-nation.” Poulantzas denominates this the “effect of representation of unity”: individuals, atomized by bourgeois law, are ideologically unified in a collective above social classes, the nation, that is produced by the apparent universalism of the institutions of the bourgeois state. The existence of a stable, organized, and socially legitimate reformative movement of the direct producers in the capitalist mode of production is a possibility contained in the macrostructure of this mode of production. There is an articulation between the economic infrastructure endowed with a socialized production by the collective worker and the juridico-political superstructure that produces the illusion of a national collective of free and equal individuals. The reformative movement of direct producers is potentially contained in this macrostructure, but to impose itself on the bourgeoisie it depends, it is worth repeating, on the persistent struggle of the direct producers. This struggle is not the mere realization of that which is contained in the structure. It works through an effort to shift and transform the norms and practices of bourgeois law.

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At the level of the law and the market, social classes do not exist, nor does the distinction between labor force, which is the capacity to work, and work, which is the effective utilization of that capacity by the capitalist. In the normal conditions of capitalism, therefore, everything appears as if the rent of labor force by the capitalist were a free contract of buying and selling in which an individual provides, in return for the payment of wages, their labor, which is their own property, to another individual. Now, in the act of selling, every owner of goods should receive in payment a fair price in the market. Thus, the practice of the individual worker negotiating with the capitalist the price of labor, their salary, is merely an actualization of the juridico-political structure of the capitalist mode of production. This does not mean that the worker always has the real conditions to individually negotiate a work contract. Workers are equal to capitalists just in the letter of the law, and do not enjoy the same freedom as capitalists. They also cannot treat capitalists as their equals since, among other reasons, the existence and weight of the industrial reserve army of labor is a threat to their survival. But the simple legal possibility of realizing this elementary act of individual negotiation of their working conditions and their wages already differentiates wage workers from the slaves and serfs who preceded them. The union movement takes advantage of this possibility to legitimate their collective reformative movement. The socialization of the productive forces that articulates the productive units in an integrated economic organism and the existence of the collective worker facilitates, rather than hampering, the collective organization and struggle of direct producers in capitalism. Workers maintain a cooperative relationship inside each company and form a collective that, in turn, is economically linked to the collectives of workers in other companies. The actions of each one of these collectives may have repercussions on the others, giving the initiative of one group of workers the capacity, due to a chain reaction, to affect a more or less wider section of the productive apparatus, thus providing unprecedented social visibility to their actions. Bourgeois law, which confers full juridical capacity to the direct producer and presents the relation of exploitation as a contractual relation, stimulates, instead of impeding, negotiations around working conditions and wages. It is clear that bourgeois law establishes the contract as an individual relation. Its spontaneous effect, therefore, is to individualize the work relation, presenting obstacles to union organization. Even in societies where there is a relatively large labor movement, many workers may

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remain unorganized due to the effect of isolation typical of bourgeois law. Yet the collective organization and struggle of the workers, facilitated by the economic infrastructure of the capitalist mode of production, may overcome this individualism and promote shifts in bourgeois law, reestablishing the idea of contracts celebrated with various collectives of workers, and no longer at the individual, socially uprooted level. The strike, a collective action of workers, may be practiced and perceived as an event between free and equal parts—workers and capitalists—who circumstantially find themselves united by a contract in which the collective cessation of labor would not be considered an act of rebellion, but a mere rupture or temporary suspension of the contract, a perfectly acceptable initiative in current contractual practices. The ideology of the contract may thus be maintained even when the agents have been changed–the individual is replaced by the collective of employees of a company, by the collective of workers of a determined profession, by the workers of a determined area of production, etc. This shift provoked by union practices in bourgeois law does not break with the superstructure of the capitalist mode of production. Here it is worthwhile addressing some polemical observations. There is a tradition in the literature that sustains the thesis that, with union organization and struggle, the workers’ movement would have started to overcome bourgeois law. Tarso Genro, following and revising an argument of Karl Korsch, is one of the authors that maintain this position (Genro, 1979; Korsch, 1980). For such authors, union laws–fundamentally, legislation related to the right to union organization, to strike, and to collective contracts–and labor laws–the regulation of the workday, salaries, and working conditions–would have ceased to be bourgeois laws. According to Karl Korsch, the old private bourgeois law, in which ruled the free and individual work contract, a juridical relation that concealed class exploitation, would have been overcome by union and labor laws, with their protective norms limiting capitalist exploitation. As such, the law would no longer hide exploitation, but, in reality, name it and limit it. Korsch then stresses the difference in the content of the norms of private law and labor law, as well as the ideological effects of such content. In a different manner, Tarso Genro advances an argument that is present in Korsch, but only secondarily. For Genro, a Brazilian jurist, the fundamental point is the transformation in the formal structure of the

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law.9 At the formal and ideological level, bourgeois law individualizes and equalizes agents belonging to opposite social classes. Labor law, however, creates the opposite situation. On the one hand, the juridical inequality typical of labor law, a result from the imperative and protective character of this type of law, would effectively overcome that formal equality, whose only function would be, according to Genro, to give free rein to the social and economic power of the capitalists, favoring them as a contracting party. On the other hand, Genro continues, labor law creates a collective legal subject and, therefore, instead of isolating the agents of production, unifies them, stimulating workers’ organization. Genro’s conclusion is not identical to Karl Korsch’s for whom labor law is already a fully workers’ law. For Genro, labor law, operating together with private law, inserts a worker’s element into the body of bourgeois law, creating a contradictory situation in the juridico-political superstructure of the capitalist mode of production. His political conclusion is that the strategic objective of the workers’ movement should be to defend and widen “workers’ legality” present in labor law. In our opinion, this argument contains two mistakes. The work contract does not cease to be individual due to the fact that union and labor laws have created a “collective juridical subject.” It is evident that the imperative character of the norms of labor law nullifies any individual work contract that is contrary to them. However, workers only gain access to the norms of labor law or to those resulting from a collective contract through the signing of an individual contract. Only the individual work contract enables the worker to enjoy the collective rights of labor law.10 This individual contract, under the law, is undertaken as an individual right if workers choose to do so; and, under the law, no one may oblige workers to maintain it if they choose not to. The defenders of the thesis that labor law is a workers’ element within the superstructure of the capitalist mode of production could argue that the autonomy of the contracting parties, at the level of the individual 9 Tarso Genro also makes an argument related to the historical origins of union and labor law. He regards them as conquests of workers’ struggle. We will not enter into the merit of this historical analysis. We would just affirm that from our perspective, which conceives of the mode of production as an integrated structure, even if it were correct to affirm that labor law was imposed on the bourgeoisie by the working class, this would not be enough to characterize such a right as a workers’ right. Marxist historical research has shown that the bourgeois revolutions were frequently “historical conquests” of the workers—peasants, the urban petty bourgeoisie, liberal professionals, and wage workers. 10 For a technical reference, see Camerlynck (1968).

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contract, has disappeared or almost so. With respect to this, we offer the following two observations. The first is that the “autonomy of will” in the act of contracting, whether it is a labor contract or not, is always a limited autonomy. In the norms and doctrine of bourgeois law, no contract that breaks the law and “good customs” has legal validity (Gounot, 1912).11 The second observation is that the question of “autonomy of will” should be examined from the angle of its ideological effects on the workers. The fundamental question is to know if there are minimal conditions for the workers to see the labor contract as an engagement of their free will through which they exercise free choice, an exchange with the owner of the means of production. This can occur if the integration of direct producers in the production process depends on an individual contract and if they, under the law, possess the right to individually and unilaterally break the labor relation.12 In these conditions, the personal freedom of the direct producer as well as the illusion of contractual liberty are maintained. The first mistake, therefore, consists in ignoring that the labor contract remains an individual contract. The second mistake is related to the unequal treatment that labor law gives to workers and capitalists. Labor law would supposedly break with the principle of juridical equality typical of bourgeois law. Now, bourgeois juridical equality concerns the fact that bourgeois law confers full juridical capacity to all the agents of production and not that it dispenses equal treatment to all agents in all circumstances. A progressive tax system does not break with bourgeois law because it taxes high-income earners more. Actually, juridical inequality in labor law may, in effect, restore at the level of appearances equality between the worker and the capitalist. Since its formation, the workers’ movement has criticized the merely formal equality between the producer and the owner of the means of production. Historians have revisited key details of 11 Moreover, the autonomy of will never existed in the sphere of production. The labor contract is a convention by which “[…] a person commits themselves to put their activity at the disposition of another, under their subordination, by means of remuneration.” Put in another way: “The employer is, legally, safe to give orders that the salaried worker is obliged to fulfill. In the execution of the service—and this is the actual labor contract— the wage workers put themselves in a relation of subordination that obliges them not only to execute the task, but also to obey orders” (see Despax, n.d.). 12 Camerlynck perceives this in his own way. He highlights that even when the individual labor contract obliges the adhesion to a pre-established collective regulatory statute, the “agreement of free will” continues to have a psychological value (Camerlynck, 1968).

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this criticism.13 Bourgeois reformers reacted by proposing legal reforms. The very papal encyclical Rerum Novarum of Leo XIII, a pioneering and fundamental document of the conservative defense of social and labor rights, is one example of this argument. The defense of labor rights by bourgeois reformers always followed the argument that it would be necessary to give unequal juridical treatment to unequal parties—and this aspect is decisive—to restore a supposed equality between the contracting parties. A bourgeois critic of classical liberal ideology, in the first phases of the struggle for social and labor legislation, argued against the “fictive character of a contract between unequal parties,” and advocated “the necessary appeal, to reestablish the equilibrium of the forces in presence, whether to state intervention or to the association of workers” (Morin, 1968, p. 16, our emphasis).14 Contrary to the argument of Tarso Genro, what is fundamental in bourgeois juridical equality is not that it gives free rein to the economic and social power of the capitalist in detriment to the worker. This fact is important and the juridical inequality that attenuates this socioeconomic inequality has a progressive character defended, moreover, by bourgeois reformers. However, the juridical inequality implanted by labor law is a superficial inequality that restores and consolidates, at a deeper level, bourgeois juridical civil equality, which in fact allows it to preserve the illusion of a contractual relation, masking the relation of class exploitation.15

13 E. P. Thompson cites the clarifying testimony of an English weaver that contains the

following reflection: “These two distinctions between the nature of labour and capital, (viz. that labour is always sold by the poor, and always bought by the rich, and that labour cannot by any possibility be stored, but must be every instant sold or every instant lost), are sufficient to convince me that labour and capital can never with justice be subjected to the same laws” (Thompson, 1966, p. 297). 14 This is the doctrine of the majority of bourgeois reformers who defend labor laws. In

Brazil, the most influential jurist to use this argumentation was Cesarino Jr., a professor of the Faculty of Law at the University of Sao Paulo. Cesarino Jr. recognizes that capitalists enjoy economic superiority over workers. As a consequence, the former would be, in the terminology of the author, “hyper-sufficient” and the latter, “under-sufficient.” The function of labor law, which would be a “class right” of the workers, is exactly to compensate for the inferiority of the worker, reestablishing the equilibrium between the contracting parties. See Cesarino (1980). 15 Ruy Fausto also sustains that social law hides the class contradiction, but he argues in a different way than what we have presented. See Fausto (1987). This author argues that the collective contract and the protective norms of labor law overcome, in fact, both the atomistic character and the presupposition of equality between the parties, which were

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Unionism is a form of resistance of the direct producer that is made possible by the structure of the capitalist mode of production. The economic infrastructure of this mode of production facilitates the collective organization of the workers. Its juridico-political superstructure, to the contrary, stimulates individualism and also permits the negotiation, at an individual level, of the conditions and rate of the exploitation of labor. Induced by capitalist production itself and despite bourgeois resistance, the collective action of workers in defense of their immediate interests may exploit bourgeois law, transforming it within its own limits. Since there is supposedly no class exploitation, but only a contractual relation of sale, a segment of the working class may negotiate the conditions of the sale of this good that is their labor force.

Final Considerations: Unionism and Class Struggle As Lenin already showed, unionism is fundamentally resistance against the effects of capitalist exploitation. It is a reformative movement of workers that aims to obtain the best conditions of the use of and remuneration for their labor power, but it does not eliminate the conditions that make labor power a commodity. Marx had already expressed this idea in Value, Price and Profit when he qualified the slogan “struggle for a just wage” as conservative, observing that the proletariat should assume the struggle for the end of wage work. In this chapter, we have seen how union resistance may occur within the bourgeois juridico-political order. Therefore, unionism is not yet class struggle. The class struggle of the proletariat is a struggle for the overcoming, and not reform, of capitalism. This does

aspects typical of the “old civil law.” This overcoming would “…reveal, though under a mystified form, the essence of the system” (p. 319), in exposing the class difference and, at the same time, hiding the class contradiction. We argue, to the contrary, that both atomism and juridical equality remain as fundamental elements of social law, and we arrive at the conclusion that the “essence of the system” remains hidden—the “mystified revelation” of the “essence” appears to me, moreover, as a confusing idea. Ruy Fausto uses this idea to indicate that social law is an “appearance closest to the essence” (p. 318). For us, the “appearance” is always “close” to the “essence.” For the analysis of ideology, it is worthwhile citing the old popular saying that “only a lie that contains some truth in it will prevail.” The old civil law was also a mystification with a truthful part, that is, it was also an “appearance” that was “close” to the “essence”: individualization and juridical equality, in fact, differentiate capitalist society from the feudal society that preceded it.

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not mean that unionism cannot link up with the workers’ struggle and socialist revolution. In reality, the fact that the capitalist mode of production is the first mode of production that contains a stable and legitimate reformative movement of the direct producers, which is the case of the union movement, is one of the reasons that explain why the working class is the first fundamental dominated class that can conduct a revolutionary process. The union movement can function as the mere diffuser of bourgeois (juridical) ideology. We have already seen how this may occur: inasmuch as it limits itself to struggle for a good collective contract, unionism remains within the structure of the capitalist mode of production. Yet, in the first place, through maintaining the working class minimally organized and possibly linked to socialist movements and parties, unionism may allow the accumulation of forces, the formation of leadership, and the education of the masses. It can function, in the apt expression of Lenin, as a “school of war.” It can also, in second place, participate, as an auxiliary movement, in the war itself. Through its actions in moments of revolutionary crisis, the union movement may, in distinct manners, articulate itself to the struggle to take power. The history of revolutions is rich in diversified experiences in this respect. There were spontaneous and conscious forms of the union movement supporting revolution: in Tsarist Russia, the general strike in Petrograd in 1905, which developed from economic strikes repressed by Tsarism, was at the base of the workers’ insurrection and the formation of the soviets during the first Russian Revolution; in Latin America, both in the Cuban and the Sandinista Revolutions, the insurrectional general strike, promoted in an organized and conscious way by the union centrals, served—and this was its very objective—to support the victorious attack of the guerrillas against the capitals Havana and Managua (Boito, 1991). These phenomena do not occur in pre-capitalist societies, something particularly notable in the case of slavery. There was no prolonged process of accumulation of forces that made it possible to turn rural slaves into a revolutionary class. Both Charles Parain and Jean-Pierre Vernant treat this situation with the following formulation: the opposition between rural slaves and landowners and slave owners in the ancient world, despite being the fundamental contradiction of the slave mode of production, did not constitute, except in exceptional situations, the principal contradiction

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in the political history of Antiquity.16 The social forces that participated in the political process of Antiquity were constituted on the basis of a complex social division of class, class fractions, and diverse orders and estates. In this process, there were at least two working classes—the peasantry and the urban plebes, but not the fundamental working class—the rural slaves. Perhaps, the main conflict throughout the greatest part of ancient history has been that between big landowners and the peasantry, two social classes that belonged to the same order—the order of free humans—even though in the case of Rome, these classes were situated in distinct estates of this order (patricians and plebeians).17 However, the fundamental working class, the rural slaves, were absent from the political process during slavery. And, in the very special and rare circumstances when a part of the rural slaves took up arms, they did not have any accumulated political and strategic knowledge about slave society since each generation started the struggle against slavery from scratch and could not count on a rearguard of organized workers who could support the insurrectional movement, to the contrary of what happened in the workers’ and popular revolutions of the twentieth century. Finally, it is worth remembering that the obstacle for the constitution of rural slaves into a revolutionary class was not related to the inexistence of a stable reformative movement by the direct producers. We have seen that the superstructure of pre-capitalist modes of production, inasmuch as it did not grant full juridical capacity to direct producers, marginalized them from the institutions of the state and the political scene. Just as they could not organize a reformative movement, rural slaves could not organize a party. Only the bourgeois state, with its apparently universal institutions, at least under its bourgeois-democratic form, allows the organization of the direct producers in their own political party. Union organization and political parties favor in capitalism, but not in pre-capitalism, the possibility of the constitution of a fundamental dominated class into a revolutionary class. 16 “The slaves did not constitute in any part an active and united social force…Is this to say that the opposition between the slave and their owners did not have an essential role in the evolution of ancient societies? By no means. But this opposition did not assume the form of an organized struggle that operated at the level of social and political structures” (Vernant, 1989, p. 84). Charles Parain develops the same thesis. See Parain (1963). 17 The idea that the patrician and plebeians estates corresponded, grosso modo, to distinct social classes—the slave landowners (patricians) and the peasantry and the urban commoners (plebeians) is developed by G. E. M. de Ste. Croix (1997).

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In these times that are dominated by cynicism, if not by the pure and simple abandonment of the banner of revolution, we would like to conclude by highlighting a political consequence of this chapter. If the ideas we developed are correct, we may affirm that as long as class exploitation, the collective worker, and the personal freedom of the direct producer exist, it is very difficult to conceive of a situation in which the historical possibility of socialist revolution is eliminated.

References Anderson, P. (1977). Les passages de l´antiquité au féodalisme. François Maspero. Badiou, A., & Balmès, F. D. (1976). l’Idéologie. François Maspero. Bloch, M. (1976). Les caractères originaux de l’histoire rurale française. Librairie Armand Colin. Boito Jr., A. (1991). O sindicalismo de Estado no Brasil: uma análise crítica da estrutura sindical. Hucitec/Editora da Unicamp. Camerlynck, G. H. (1968). Contrat de travail. Cardoso, C. F. S. (1988). The peasant breach in the slave system: New developments in Brazil. Luso-Brazilian Review, 25(1 Summer). Available (checked16 June 2022) at http://www.jstor.org/stable/3513110 Cardoso, F. H. (1975). Classes sociais e história: considerações metodológicas. In F. H. Cardoso (Ed.), Autoritarismo e democratização. Paz e Terra. Castro, A. B. de. (1980). A economia política, o capitalismo e a escravidão. In J. R. Lapa, A. do (Org.), Modos de produção e realidade brasileira. Vozes. Cesarino Jr., A. F. (1980). Direito social. LTr. Croix, G. D. S. (1997). The class struggle in the ancient Greek world (3rd ed.). Despax, M. (n.d.). Direito do trabalho. Difel. Dobb, M. (2008). Studies in the development of capitalism. Kessinger Publishing. Fausto, R. (1987). Sobre o Estado. In Marx, lógica e política. Brasiliense, t.II. Finley, M. (1999). The ancient economy. University of California Press. Foignet, R. (1946). Manuel elémentaire d’histoire du Droit Français. (14e.ed.). Librairie Arthur Rousseau. Foot, F., & Leonardi, V. (1982). História da indústria e do trabalho no Brasil. Global. Genro, T. (1979). Introdução à crítica do direito do trabalho. L&PM. Gorender, J. (1980). O escravismo colonial (3rd ed.). Ática. Gorender, J. (1990). A escravidão reabilitada. Ática. Gounot, E. (1912). La doctrine de l‘autonomie de la volonté. Korsch, K. (1980). Lucha de clases y derecho del trabajo. Ariel. Ladurie, E. L. R. (1974). Révoltes et contestations rurales en France de 1675 à 1788. Annales, (1).

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Marshall, T. H. (1963). Sociology at the crossroads and other essays. Heinemann. Morin, G. (1968). La revolte des faits contre le Code. In G. H. Camerlynck (Ed.), Contrat de travail. Dalloz. Parain, C. (1963). Les caractères spécifiques de la lutte des classes dans l´Antiquité Classique. La Pensée, (18). abr. Parain, C. (1978). Evolução do sistema feudal europeu. In M. F. M. Pereira (Org.), Sobre o feudalismo. Editorial Estampa. Poulantzas, N. (1975). Political power and social classes. Verso. Reis, J. J., & Silva, E. (1989). Negociação e conflito: a resistência negra no Brasil escravista. Companhia das Letras. dos Santos, R. M. (1980). Resistência e superação do escravismo na Província de São Paulo (1885–1888). Instituto de Pesquisas Econômicas da Universidade de São Paulo. Schwartz, S. (1977). Resistance and accommodation in eighteenth-century Brazil: The slaves´ view of slavery. The Hispanic American Historical Review, 57 (1). Available (checked 13 August 2022) at https://www.jstor.org/stable/ 2513543#metadata_info_tab_contents Staerman, E. A. (1978). luta de classes no final da República. In Staerman et al. Formas de exploração do trabalho e relações sociais na Antiguidade Clássica. Editorial Estampa. Thompson, E. P. (1966). The making of the english working class. Vintage Books. Vernant, J. P. (1989). A luta de classes. In J. P. Vernant & P. V. Naquet (Eds.), Trabalho e escravidão na Grécia Antiga. Papirus. Villey, M. L. (1949). Droit Romain. PUF.

CHAPTER 9

The (Difficult) Formation of the Working Class

This chapter presents the idea that the organization of workers into a class is the result of multiple contradictions and conflicts in particular circumstances, which have the power to bring into being a class that exists only potentially in the economic field. Is the struggle of the working class a consequence of production relations? The general topic of our discussion, the theory of social classes, contains many different aspects and knots of great complexity. Within this vast theme, we intend to present some ideas on a specific matter: the question of the formation of workers into a class. Having great importance for socialists and for Marxists in particular, the theory of social classes concerns the formation of the political agent who is capable of directing the revolutionary process of replacing capitalism with socialism. Despite its importance, we can say that, on the theoretical level, this topic has not received much attention from Marxists. Why are there times and countries in which the working class remains

Text presented at the 2nd Marx and Engels Colloquium, organized in November 2001 by the Center for Marxist Studies (Cemarx) at Unicamp and originally published in the book that reproduces the texts of this colloquium (Catani et al., 2003). © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2023 A. Boito, State, Politics, and Social Classes, Marx, Engels, and Marxisms, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-22046-3_9

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politically disorganized, without its own party, and acting only in the field of trade union reformative struggle? Why in other places and times does the working class organize into pro-capitalist reformist parties? Why is the organization of workers into a revolutionary socialist movement a relatively exceptional event? In our view, the lack of interest in examining this matter is not accidental. It is a consequence of the theoretical orientation predominant both in the old socialist tradition, represented by the Second International, and in the communist tradition, represented by the Third International. This flaw stems from the theoretical orientation that dominated organized, militant Marxism during the twentieth century. This orientation consists in defining the working class on a strictly economic basis—the position of the agents in the production process—and, as a result, considering as theoretically solved the problem of the process of formation of the working class as a collective organized around its own political program. From this theoretical perspective, the process of formation of the working class would be a necessary consequence of the situation of the agents in the production process. Of course, such formation would depend on the action of “the party”—twentieth-century Marxism has always used this term in the singular form. However, as the problem of the existence of “the party” was already resolved, the formation of the working class as a revolutionary socialist collective would be just a matter of time. At the risk of employing a cliché, we can—with a critical intention, we admit, but without the intention of disqualifying opposing theses— call this conception “economism.” In the economistic conception of social classes, the formation of a socialist workers’ movement would just complete what already existed in the economic field.

The Historical Context of the Economistic Conception of Working Class For a long time, this conception might have seemed plausible, at least on the European continent. For six or seven decades, between 1880 and 1950, the growth of capitalism in Europe was accompanied by the growth, albeit irregular, of the workers’ and socialist movements. During the last quarter of the nineteenth century, Germany, having just completed its process of unification, entered a prolonged period of rapid industrial growth. In the political aspect, the German state opened

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a process of expansion of voting rights. The German working class, favored by these two factors and with a new theory and a new program (Marxism), was able to promote the growth of cooperatives and unions and organize a socialist workers’ party. Germany was seen as an example by the entire European labor movement and seemed to point to the future of other industrialized nations. In 1914, when social democracy voted the war credits, exchanging socialism for chauvinism, the resulting crisis and the dismantling of the socialist movement were soon settled by the Russian Revolution and the formation of the Third International. The center of the socialist movement shifted to a country where capitalism was still in its infancy, but there was still a large socialist movement in Europe. The story is well known. The 1920s, 1930s, and 1940s were decades of wars and revolutions. Old-style fascist or dictatorial movements and regimes shared the European political scene with the revolutionary communist movement, and liberalism lost momentum in all the continent. The working class seemed to be organized forever, and the idea that the history of the socialist movement would be linear and ascending, as a result of the expansion of capitalist economy on an international scale, took hold of many socialist theorists and leaders. The class struggle seemed to be a direct result of production relations and the expansion of capitalist productive forces. However, even at that time, the situation of the working class in the United States was at odds with this conception. Many Marxists wondered at the time about the failure of the socialist movement in the country that was unanimously recognized, since the end of the nineteenth century, and even by Marx and Engels, as the most advanced capitalist country. In 1906, Werner Sombart published some studies collected under the title Why is There No Socialism in the United States? (1976). In this work, the author indicated social, political, and economic factors that would have prevented the American working class from affiliating with socialism: the prospect of the ascension of the immigrant worker, mobile agricultural frontier, exacerbated individualism, and the existence of a rigid two-party system, which made it difficult for any third party—a workers’ party or any other—to be formed. In fact, some of those explanations, which resort to specific factors of the American capitalist formation in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, had already been advanced by Marx and Engels to explain the difficulties of the socialist movement to establish itself in the U.S. Soviet historian Svetlana Askoldova cites Marx’s letters that mention the existence of free land on the agricultural frontier and

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the two-party system that made it unfeasible to form a third party— inducing the American working class to make use of “tactical voting”— as major obstacles to a socialist workers’ movement in the United States (see Askoldova, 1981). Decades later, Seymour Martin Lipset and Gary Marks returned to the same question posed by Werner Sombart (Lipset & Marks, 2000a).1 In the first chapter of their work, these authors chronicle the assessments of the main leaders and theorists of German social democracy—Engels, Kautsky, Bebel, Bernstein, and others—about what was considered by many to be the “American paradox”: the country with the most advanced capitalism and the largest working-class lacks a mass socialist movement. Engels, for example, attributed the conservatism of a large part of the American working class to the fact that the United States had not experienced a feudal past: “It is quite natural that bourgeois prejudices should have taken root so strongly in the working class of a country so young, which never knew feudalism, and grew from the very beginning from a bourgeois foundation” (apud Lipset & Marks, 2000b). Therefore, even in the period between 1880 and 1950, when the European continent had a socialist labor movement, the situation in the United States disallowed any economistic reasoning about the formation of the working class as a politically autonomous and anti-capitalist collective. We should add that, along the second half of the twentieth century, the situation changed even in Europe. The memory of a working-class organized in a struggle for socialism remained, but the reality of the trade unions and the European socialist and communist parties was, thanks to the development of the welfare state, increasingly moving away from the image retained in that memory. The transformations that capitalism underwent at the end of the twentieth century and the neoliberal offensive ended up disorganizing even the reformist labor movement. Currently, the reflux of the international workers’ and socialist movement shows even more strongly the theoretical impropriety of wanting to define and deduce the working class from the place occupied by workers in the production process. Wage employment is widespread on a world scale as never before, and the exploitation of workers, according to the most reliable indicators, has intensified. However, the independent labor movement 1 The quotations here are based on the Portuguese translation of the book, Lipset and Marks (2000b).

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no longer exists as an international mass phenomenon. The class struggle has regressed to the lowest levels. Capitalism’s current situation requires, more than ever, a review of the economistic conception of social classes.

The Theoretical Impasses of the Economistic Conception of Working Class Currently, the most evident mismatch between the economistic conception of social class and the reality of capitalist society requires a critique of economism within the class theory. Also regarding this concept, it is necessary to renew Marxism. There is a central idea in the texts that identify the social class as an economic phenomenon. This type of analysis is based on the assumption that, in the field of (capitalist) economy, there is always a radical and insurmountable contradiction between the bourgeoisie and the working class. This is why the social class is considered to be a phenomenon of the economy: there we have all the conditions for class organization and struggle. The workers’ organization, ideas, and struggles reflect their objective economic situation. Kautsky and the Second International developed this strictly economic view of social classes. For these socialist authors and leaders, “class consciousness” came to be a more or less spontaneous result of the position occupied by workers in production. The Second International consolidated the idea that class consciousness would be the result of the sociodemographic growth of the working class and of the supposed process of homogenization and simplification of the socioeconomic situation of this class, which would be a natural result of the development of capitalism.2 During the Third International, this vision born from economism also had a strong presence. It obtained a classic formulation in the well-known essay by Lukács called “Class Consciousness” (Lukács, 1967). The theoretical impasse of this essay, which Lukács will continue to dismiss in the self-criticism he made in the 1967 preface to History and Class Consciousness —illustrates the insurmountable difficulties of 2 This social-democratic conception is currently applied, with inverted signals, in analyses—such as that of Clauss Offe—that maintain that the labor movement has entered a crisis due to “heterogenization,” “complexification,” and the reduction of the working class. Several authors have disseminated this analysis in Brazil. For example, Rodrigues (2000) and Antunes (1996).

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presenting the capitalist economy as something sufficient to define the working class. For Lukács, the working class is an objective fact of the capitalist economy. Therefore, he maintains that the working class exists as such even when the workers themselves are unaware of its existence. As is well known, Lukács believes in the Hegelian distinction “in itself”/ “for itself”: from the moment in which the working class, which already exists as such in the field of economy, acquires the consciousness of its own existence and, thus, of the specificity of its interests, it will stop being just a “class in itself” and will become a “class for itself.” Objective existence will be complemented by subjective existence, provided by “class consciousness.” However, the working class already exists as such throughout the process. Aware of the fact that in many countries and at different times the working class does not exist as an organized class fighting for what would be its interests, Lukács will then establish the famous distinction between “false consciousness” and what would be “true consciousness” of the working class. For the first, Lukács reserves a series of characterizations that aim to show the falsity of that consciousness: it would be empirical, psychological, ephemeral, and inadequate; the latter, the “true consciousness,” Lukács would characterize as rational, political, lasting, and adequate to both the objective position occupied by workers in the production process and the interests arising from that position. The theoretical impasse consists of the following: “false consciousness” is an aberration that should not exist, if the thesis that social class is a given fact in the field of economy were true. For this very reason, Lukács tells us only what “false consciousness” is not. And he only tells us what we already knew: it is not the “true consciousness,” rational and adequate, but strangely, non-existent.

Another Concept of Social Class Albeit simplified, this presentation of the economistic determinism in the discussion of the concept of social class allows us to draw a contrast with the initial terms of another orientation, which consists, firstly, in conceiving of social class as a simultaneously economic, political, and cultural, objective, and subjective phenomenon; and secondly, in the analysis of the formation of social classes, it consists in distinguishing

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the dominant class, whose formation is already given, from the dominated class, whose formation is, under normal conditions, only an actual possibility. In capitalism, the bourgeoisie, as the dominant class, is already formed as a social class. The bourgeois state is the bourgeoisie organized as a class. It establishes and legitimizes the private ownership of the means of production, the exploitation of wage labor, inequality of wealth, and all other conditions necessary for the perpetuation of capitalism. In such conditions, all capitalists “spontaneously” know their class interests and, as a rule, act within the limits given by these interests. They can and do act according to the particular interests of either their company or the branch or sector in which their company is inserted. This is the phenomenon of the formation of bourgeois fractions—large and middle bourgeoisie; industrial, commercial, and financial bourgeoisie, etc. However, as the capitalists know—thanks to the existence of the bourgeois state—the general conditions necessary for the state to be reproduced as capitalist state, their actions tend to remain within the limits of their class interest. The bourgeoisie, as the dominant class, is thus an active class, which is simultaneously present in both the economy and the political field of capitalist society. Things were different when the bourgeoisie occupied a subordinate position in the economy and in the state, i.e., before the bourgeois revolution. In absolutist Europe, the monarchical-feudal state ensured feudal landowners were the ruling class. The absolutist monarchy established, developed, and legitimized the division of society into orders (free men and serfs), thus guaranteeing the pre-capitalist exploitation of the peasant serf bound to the land (who was obliged to provide surplus labor in the form of corvées and tributes); also, by maintaining the estates (nobility, clergy, and plebs), it ensured the political supremacy of the feudal nobility in the state. This state represented the feudal landowners organized into a ruling class.3 The bourgeoisie, dispersed and divided, sought to be integrated as best as possible into the feudal economy and society. Its place in the economy made it a potential class, but it did not organize itself as an active class.4

3 On the absolutist state, see Chapter 4 of this book. 4 Louis Althusser and Maurice Dobb maintain that the bourgeoisie had an adaptive

behavior during feudalism. See Althusser (1972) and Dobb (2008).

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It would be incorrect to say that the bourgeoisie was, in feudalism, a dominated class, since it was not an exploited working class. Nevertheless, the bourgeoisie was not a class organized around its own interests, just as, under normal conditions, the working class is not organized under capitalism either. The process of the bourgeois revolution was what transformed the bourgeoisie from a potential class, latently present in the economic process, into an active class functioning as an organized collective on the political and social scene.

The Social Class as a Phenomenon that is Simultaneously Economic, Political, and Ideological Let us, then, make an effort to define the concepts. Production relations are truly the ultimate reference of social classes. The places occupied in the production process—basically the great division between owners who do not work and workers who do not own property—is the fundamental division that makes possible the organization of collectives with opposing interests. That is a possibility, though. We also find in economy itself other characteristics that can enable the formation of a field of common interest between owners and workers. In capitalist societies, workers can, to preserve their job or increase their earnings, have an interest in the growth of the company or sector in which they work, forming a common front with capitalists of that company or sector and, at the same time, competing with workers who work in other companies or sectors. Trade union corporatism, in the Gramscian sense of fraction egoism, is the clearest and most general manifestation of this phenomenon. Therefore, in a certain economy, it is possible to find both antagonistic classes and groups that cooperate with one another in defense of a company or sector—as an example, we could mention the common front established in Brazil between labor unions and employers’ associations of large vehicle assemblers to preserve and expand the automobile industry in the 1990s. A possible pro-capitalist consciousness on the part of workers may be a reflection of their particular economic situation, and not an illusion without an economic foundation, contrary to what the notion of “false consciousness” suggests. The antagonism between owners and workers is only latent, potential. For the working class, which

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only potentially exists within capitalist economy, to conquer an active existence, a combination of several factors of political, economic, and ideological order is necessary—the situation of employment and wages, the situation of the system of alliances that sustains the bourgeois bloc in power, the effectiveness of the socialist ideology and program to respond to the problems posed on the agenda by capitalist society at a certain stage of its development, etc. The social class will only exist in the strong sense of the term—in other words, as an organized and active collective—when the latent antagonism becomes manifest.

The Particular Historical Conditions that Enable the Formation of the Working Class Under what conditions can the working class organize itself as a class? Strictly speaking, this problem cannot find a place in the economistic problematic of social classes. The acquisition of “true consciousness” is a mere adjustment between the primary reality (of the economy) and the reality derived from consciousness (which should have always reflected the economy). By definition, the occurrence of such an adjustment cannot constitute a problem. On the contrary, taking the process of acquiring “true consciousness” as a problem would mean, at the same time, recognizing that “false consciousness” is rational (not irrational), lasting (not ephemeral), social (not psychological), and adequate (not misplaced). Let us look again at Lukács’s essay. In it, the author states that the economic crisis provides the opportunity for the working class to ascend to true class consciousness. However, it should be noted that the economic crisis has this effect because it makes clear for the working class that capitalism is a system, a totality, which is not possible to reform. In other words, the economic crisis does not strictly add anything truly new. It only makes more visible what has always been there. In the Leninist approach to the process of acquiring “socialist consciousness” (a term that Lenin symptomatically prefers to “class consciousness”), the crisis is something entirely new. It shakes up everyone’s politics, economy, and former way of life. It puts them in a very different situation from the one they live in during normal capitalism. Lenin stated: (a) if the unity among those above is broken; (b) if the living conditions of the masses deteriorate; and (c) if there is a development of historical actions that are independent of workers, if all this happens, this crisis could be configured as a revolutionary crisis. The

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revolutionary class is constituted, as a result of a set of factors, during the crisis, in a singular scenario, distinct from the situation of normality. The revolutionary situation is typical of the constitution of the proletariat into a class. It is interesting to remember that in the Manifesto of the Communist Party Marx and Engels place the expectation of a socialist revolution not in England, which had the most developed capitalism and the largest working class of its time, but in Germany, which, as the Manifesto emphasizes, found itself on the verge of a revolutionary crisis, despite its still-fledgling capitalism.5 If we go back to examine the reasons why Marx and Engels thought the American working class was not able to overcome the condition of a potential class, we will see that they all refer to particular conditions of the United States’ previous history (absence of a feudal past), economy (free lands on the agricultural frontier), and politics (rigid two-party system). In other words, it is in the field of social formations in specific conjunctures that the organization of workers into a class is decided. At the level of production relations and capitalist productive forces—a level that represents the economic level of the capitalist mode of production—there is nothing that guarantees the formation of the working class as an active class, contrary to what economism suggests.6

Potential Existence of the Working Class in the Economic Structure of the Capitalist Mode of Production Nor is there a formation of the working class only at the level of social practices. The very economic structure of the capitalist mode of production potentially contains the working class. It is the struggle that, in the circumstances of a revolutionary crisis, will explore this potential and define, in an action linked to the mass, the interests, and precise limits of the proletariat. 5 On this topic, see the next chapter of this book. 6 Here it is worth remembering that Lukács relies on the young Marx to maintain that

the organization of workers into an active class is inevitable. It is well known that he selected as the epigraph of his essay a passage from Marx’s The Holy Family in which it is stated that it does not matter what the working class thinks, but what, “due to its being a class”, it is historically obliged to do.

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Talking about a potential existence is different from talking about “an actual class.” In this latter sense, the class is already objectively given, lacking only self-awareness. The process of class formation adds nothing but class consciousness. The “actual class” remains the same throughout the entire process. The idea of potential class, on the other hand, conceives of class as a potentiality of the economy that needs to be worked on, discovered, and defined in a process of struggle. The class formation is a relatively open process, not some subjective complementation of what is objectively given. We repeat, though, that the potential exists in the economic structure. By dismissing this, important authors like Thompson fall into a paradox. Thompson claims that social class is a historical event. To his credit, he criticized economism and unlocked the analysis of class and class struggle. In certain conjunctures, Thompson claims, men and women behave “in a classist manner” (Thompson, 1998).7 However, what is classist behavior? This answer can only be found if we presuppose that class potentially exists at the level of economic structure. Manual wageworkers are the potential working class in capitalism. The concrete historical situation and the action of socialist political parties will, or will not, convert this potential class—given at the level of economic structure—into an active class. During the process of building the working class, its interests and precise limits will be defined and tested in the struggle. Its place in production provides general—indeed too general—parameters for defining its interests: end of private property, end of labor exploitation, etc. However, the development of this definition and the strategy to implement such interests depend on the struggle and application of a mass line that links a vanguard to the mass of the class. The background reference, although insufficient, is the capitalist economy. If we omit the potential existence of the working class at the economic level, then any and all collectives can be presented as a class collective, as long as they present themselves as such. As Marx and Engels stated in the Manifesto of the Communist Party, the proletariat must be constituted as a class. In other words, the proletariat is not yet a class in the strong sense of the term; it must be constituted as such. Nevertheless, it somehow precedes, as the phrase 7 See in particular the essays “As peculiaridades dos ingleses” [The Peculiarities of the English”, and “Algumas observações sobre classe e ‘falsa consciência’” [Some Observations on Class and ‘False Consciousness’].

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itself indicates, its existence as a class, so much so that it, which is already there, needs to be constituted into something that it is not yet—properly a social class.

References Althusser, L. (1972). Montesquieu, politics, and history. In Politics and history: Montesquieu, Rousseau, Hegel and Marx. New Left Books. Antunes, R. (1996). Adeus ao trabalho? Cortez. Askoldova, S. (1981). Le tradeunionisme américain. Éditions du Progrès. Catani, A. et al. (2003). Marxismo e ciências humanas. Xamã. Dobb, M. (2008). Studies in the development of capitalism. Kessinger Publishing. Lipset, S. M., & Marks, G. (2000a). It didn’t happen here: Why socialism failed in the United States. W. W. Norton. Lipset, S. M., & Marks, G. (2000b). Por que não vingou? História do socialismo nos Estados Unidos. Instituto Teotônio Vilela. Lukács, G. (1967). Class consciousness. In: History and class consciousness. Merlin Press. https://www.marxists.org/archive/lukacs/works/history/lukacs3.htm Rodrigues, L. M. (2000). O destino do sindicalismo. Edusp. Sombart, W. (1976). Why is there no socialism in the United States? Palgrave Macmillan. Thompson, E. P. (1998). As peculiaridades dos ingleses e outros artigos. Instituto de Filosofia e Ciências Humanas da Unicamp.

CHAPTER 10

The Constitution of the Proletariat into a Class in the Manifesto of the Communist Party: Polemicizing with Some Classic Interpretations

In addition to the general discussion on the topic in the prior chapter, this chapter presents a reading of the Manifesto of the Communist Party that differs from the current readings and resumes some controversies that this text has raised among important leaders and theorists of the labor movement in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries.

Current Interpretations The Manifesto of the Communist Party presents and develops, albeit briefly, two theses related to the theory of history, which, combined, will continue to guide Marx and Engels’s political and economic analyses: in

Text presented at the international seminar 150 years of the Manifesto of the Communist Party—theory and history, organized by the Center for Marxist Studies (Cemarx) at Unicamp in April 1998. It was originally published with the title “A constituição do proletariado em classe—a propósito do Manifesto Comunista de Marx e Engels” [The constitution of the proletariat into a class—regarding the Manifesto of the Communist Party by Marx and Engels (Crítica Marxista, n.6, São Paulo: Xamã, 1998)]. © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2023 A. Boito, State, Politics, and Social Classes, Marx, Engels, and Marxisms, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-22046-3_10

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this text, the process of historical change is described as the result of an increase both of productive forces and the class struggle. These two factors influence each other in different ways. On the one hand, the development of productive forces can create new social classes and change the economic base of the struggling classes. The Manifesto shows us that the development of machinery and large-scale industry strengthens the bourgeois class, makes the proletariat grow, and ruins handicrafts and the traditional petty bourgeoisie. On the other hand, the class struggle interferes with the characteristics and growth rate of productive forces. This latter aspect has gone mostly unnoticed in readings of the Manifesto. However, this text shows, firstly, that the bourgeoisie had to “bring down” the feudal order to liberate the development of the capitalist productive forces, and, secondly, that this same bourgeoisie waged a struggle—a class struggle—against artisans and factory workers to replace the tool with the machine; or, in other words, to develop the productive forces in such a way as to disqualify the worker’s labor, to convert it into a mere appendage of the work tools, to make possible the employment of women and children in production, and reduce wages. However, the reciprocal influences between the development of productive forces and the class struggle should not conceal the specificity of each of these phenomena. After all, productive forces, production relations, and class struggle are clearly distinguished in the Manifesto of the Communist Party. Marx and Engels’s idea in this text is that the development of productive forces, at a certain stage of the historical process, creates a crisis for the existing production relations. The development of productive forces is described as the dynamic element; the production relations, which in the initial phase of the constitution of a given mode of production had stimulated the development of productive forces, become an obstacle to such development and begin to function as the inertia factor of the historical process. In Chapter 1 of the Manifesto, Marx and Engels apply this thesis in their analysis of the transition from feudalism to capitalism when addressing the revolutionary role of the bourgeoisie, and also, in the same chapter, when analyzing capitalism’s crises of overproduction—crises provoked by the contradiction between the narrowness of capitalist production relations and the growth of productive forces. This growth is thus the economic, spontaneous, and unconscious factor of the historical change. This factor is also insufficient, though. For such a change to occur, a second factor is necessary: the existence of a social actor interested in

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it and capable of promoting it. It is here that the role of class struggle is decisive. This struggle involves both objective aspects of political and economic order, and subjective aspects of political and ideological nature. The social class interested in historical change will need to organize itself to promote it and will also need to win over the classes interested in preserving the current mode of production. Well, in the Manifesto, there is a reflection on the necessary conditions so that the dominated class of the capitalist mode of production, the proletariat, can organize itself as an autonomous social force around a communist program and present itself as the leading force of the revolution. This is the process referred by Marx and Engels as the “constitution of the proletariat into a class” and the “development of the proletariat.” The two expressions are suggestive because, on the one hand, they presuppose the objective existence of the proletariat and, on the other hand, because they suggest that its development or constitution as a class is not a simple reflection, at the political and ideological level, of what would already be present at the economic level. This constitution, considered in other texts by Marx to be the transition from the class “in itself” to the class “for itself,” is linked in the text of the Manifesto to the reflection on the economic and political conditions necessary for the proletariat to be able to (try to) make the revolution. How and why can workers act as a unified class? The process of constitution of the proletariat into a class is described in the Manifesto as an irregular, cumulative, but reversible process, marked by ruptures and leaps in quality. It is also presented as a process that has two fronts. The economic resistance of the proletariat in the direct struggle against the capitalists who exploit it is not quite a unified class action, although it can serve as a basis for this type of action. The trade union struggle is not yet the communist struggle. The action of the proletariat as a class takes place, according to the Manifesto, in the political field, putting the proletariat in relation to all the other classes that make up capitalist society. In this sense, the correct reading of the Manifesto is a Leninist reading, as the Manifesto distinguishes the struggle for state power from the union reformative struggle. It is Leninist, too, for another reason. Marx and Engels outline some of the elements that Lenin would later use to shape the concept of revolutionary crisis: the Manifesto attributes to the political struggle of the bourgeoisie against the decaying feudal class and the competing bourgeoisies of other countries a decisive role in the constitution of the proletariat into a class. The struggle among “those above,” as Lenin would later say when listing the characteristics of a revolutionary

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situation, can politically educate the working class and create a political crisis that allows the proletariat to conquer power. Numerous variants of economism ignore or reject this analysis present in the Manifesto. Harold Laski, in a long and important text on the Manifesto, disregards the role that Marx and Engels’s text attributes to the struggles led by the bourgeoisie in the process of constituting the proletariat into a class. For Laski, the capitalist industrialization, the growth of the working class, the union resistance, the formation of a socialist party, and the potential seizure of power are successive links in a linear, gradual, cumulative process, the process of constituting the proletariat into a class.1 Unlike Laski, Jean Jaurès points out, in a classic and exquisite text of social-democratic reformism, the importance that Marx and Engels attribute to the struggle among “those above” for the constitution of the proletariat into a class. However, Jaurès’s goal is to make a systematic critique of this thesis of the Manifesto.2 Currently, economism is again in vogue. It has informed a large part of the analyses of the crisis of the socialist movement at the end of the twentieth century, attributing it mainly or exclusively to changes that took place within the factories and in the labor market, and identifying it with the crisis of the union movement. Let us then examine the analysis presented in the Manifesto and see what can be said of its effectiveness.

What Commentators Ignore The Manifesto discusses the condition of workers in the market and production, paying attention as well to the social composition of the working class.3 Workers are the producers constrained (since they do not own property) to sell themselves at retail, that is, to sell their labor time in installments (since they are not slaves, whose very person is the

1 Harold Laski’s article, entitled “Communist Manifesto,” was written in 1947 by order of the Labor Party to commemorate the centenary of the publication of the text by Marx and Engels. See Laski (2015 [1947]). 2 The article by Jean Jaurès, entitled “Le Manifeste Communiste de Marx et Engels,” was written in 1901 for the newspaper Petite République (see Jaurès). 3 The considerations that follow are fundamentally based on Chapter 1 of the Manifesto, entitled “Bourgeois and Proletarians,” and on Chapter 4, entitled “Position of the Communists in relation to the Various Existing Opposition Parties.” It is in these two chapters that Marx and Engels address our subject directly.

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object of purchase and sale) as a commodity. As a commodity, the workers’ labor is subject to the fluctuations of the market, and workers are placed in competition with one another. In production, the workers are an appendage of the machines; they are subject, as foot soldiers in industry, to the despotism of the officers and sub-officers of the modern factory. To a certain extent, the machine dispenses with physical force, disqualifying and cheapening the workers’ labor. The working class begins to welcome women and children into its ranks more and more. The development of industry increases the number of workers, concentrates them geographically, and brings their interests and living conditions closer together. Therefore, the development of the industry favors the formation of coalitions for the defense of wages. In the course of the struggle, these coalitions can improve the unity and organization of the proletariat. However, the competition among workers undermines and obstructs the process of constituting the proletariat into a class. In most cases, those who comment on the Manifesto stop here in their considerations about the text’s treatment of the process of constitution of the proletariat into a class. It is as if such a process were confined to the terrain of economy. However, a good part of Chapter 1 of the Manifesto is written to show that the constitution of the proletariat into a class would not be possible without the peculiarities of politics and class struggle in capitalist society. In the words of Marx and Engels, the bourgeoisie “drags” the working class into the political struggle. The bourgeoisie finds itself involved in a constant battle. [...] In all these battles, it sees itself compelled to appeal to the proletariat, to ask for help, and thus, to drag it into the political arena. (Marx & Engels, 2000, Chap. 1)

Marx and Engels refer, first of all, to the struggle of the bourgeoisie against the feudal aristocracy. They write the Manifesto at a time when Germany and Italy had not carried out their bourgeois revolution. The bourgeoisie in France and England, even after making the revolution, were still struggling against the remnants of the feudal order and the decadent aristocracy. Secondly, they refer to the struggle of the industrial bourgeoisie against the bourgeois portions that block the development of the industry. Thirdly, they refer to the struggle of each national bourgeoisie against rival bourgeoisies in foreign countries. Finally, Marx and Engels speak of the defection of sectors of the bourgeoisie that may pass

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to the socialist movement. Specifically, they have in mind some of the bourgeois intellectuals who, having understood the process of historical evolution as a whole, could turn to the side of the proletariat in the most severe moments of the struggle. All this may seem banal. Nevertheless, this dynamic in which the ruling class introduces or accepts the organized participation of the dominated class in the political struggle is a particularity of the capitalist mode of production and is one of the factors that explain the fact that the proletariat is the first dominated class in history with conditions to hegemonize a revolutionary process. In the three types of struggle mentioned above, if the bourgeoisie can “drag” the proletariat into the political movement, providing its organization and education, it is because capitalism is the first mode of production in human history that grants full legal identity to the exploited direct producer—in legal terms, the worker is free. The modern worker is neither a slave nor a peasant serf bound to the land. As a result, the bourgeoisie can, without subverting the existing social order, appeal to the proletariat: it appeals to a citizen like any other. The ruling classes of pre-capitalist modes of production could not form alliances with slaves or serfs. On the one hand, these producers, given their situation of personal subjection, did not have any type of permanent organization and did not constitute a minimally organized force that could be coveted by sectors of the ruling classes that fought among themselves. On the other hand, to try to form an alliance would mean recognizing in the direct producers legal capacity and free will, thus denying the entire legal and ideological basis behind compulsory labor and, by extension, any slave or feudal economy.4 The desertion of part of the bourgeois intelligentsia is also connected to the particularities of capitalism. In pre-capitalist modes of production, the intelligentsia is merged with the ruling class, without forming a specific social layer endowed with a relative autonomy. Hence, in all examined aspects, the matrix of the capitalist mode of production is an important factor in the process of constituting the proletariat into a class. Returning to the constant battles of the bourgeoisie, two points should be highlighted. First, Marx and Engels consider that the contradictions within the ruling classes can promote not only, as we have said, the constitution of the proletariat into a class and the opportunity for revolution but 4 In pre-capitalist modes of production, there can be no permanent movement and organization of the dominated class. See Chapter 8 of this book.

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also the achievement of reforms in capitalism. They claim that the proletariat takes advantage of internal divisions in the bourgeoisie to force it to recognize certain workers’ interests legally. They cite as an example the division in the English ruling classes that led to the parliament’s approval of the law of the ten-hour working day, an example that Marx will take up again in detail in Chapter 8 of Capital. Secondly, the division that Marx and Engels favor within the ruling classes is, quite understandably, the division typical of the period of the bourgeois revolution on the European continent. The Communists turn their attention chiefly to Germany, because that country is on the eve of a bourgeois revolution that is bound to be carried out under more advanced conditions of European civilisation and with a much more developed proletariat than that of England was in the seventeenth, and France in the eighteenth century, and because the bourgeois revolution in Germany will be but the prelude to an immediately following proletarian revolution. (Marx & Engels, 2000, Chap. IV)

It is not toward England, the country of modern capitalist industry and the most developed working class in Europe, that Marx and Engels direct their anticipation of a revolution. This fact emphasizes the merely relative importance they give to the size and concentration of the working class; it also highlights the misstep of the commentators who ignore the political process sensu stricto as a fundamental element in the constitution of the proletariat into a class. The proletarian revolution could start in a country that, among the great European nations, had the least developed capitalist economy and labor movement. The hypothesis is that the German working class could leap forward in its process of constituting itself as a class thanks to the revolutionary crisis that would occur in that country. It is a situation in which the proletariat is constituted into a class through an abrupt leap, without gradual accumulation, and as a result of a political crisis, not of economic development. This shift of the revolution’s center of gravity to Germany foreshadows once again a Leninist concept. Germany appears, in the Manifesto, as the “weakest link” in the European capitalist chain, just as Russia will appear later, for Lenin, as the “weakest link” in the international imperialist chain. What is essential in this matter is the revolutionary crisis opened up by the process of the bourgeois revolution in Germany, in the course of which the proletariat

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could not only rapidly constitute itself into a class but also seize power in a revolutionary way, diverting the initial course of the revolution. This approach to the Manifesto suggests some important conclusions. First, it allows us to say that, in this text, not only the proletariat, created by the development of capitalism, can make the revolution as long as the conditions allow it but also the revolution—i.e., the revolutionary crisis— can make the proletariat; in other words, it can lead to its constitution into a class with its own political program. Secondly, such an approach implies that the labor movement should be analyzed in terms of its connections with other political struggles taking place in capitalist societies. The socialist movement must be seen as a movement that grows together with the other progressive social struggles, not as something isolated in the factory, the union, or the socialist party. In Chapter 4, entitled “Position of the Communists in Relation to the Various Existing Opposition Parties,” Marx and Engels propose that communists in different European countries should ally themselves with the democratic, peasant, and national liberation struggles.

The Topicality of the Polemic with Jean Jaurès Jean Jaurès, as we have mentioned, criticizes this conception of the process of constituting the proletariat into a class and of the seizure of power by the working class. For Jaurès, the working class advances toward communism through a gradual, cumulative process, without leaps, and based, at the economic level, on industrial development and the growth of unions; and, at the political level, on universal suffrage and democracy. It is an economistic view of the process of constituting the proletariat into a class and a legalist view of the transition to socialism (see Jaurès, 1998). Jaurès argues that Marx and Engels’s analysis is mistaken in its formulation and refers to a historical reality that would no longer exist by the beginning of the twentieth century. He calls the theory of Marx and Engels the theory of “parasitic revolution”: the revolution of a class (the working class), still immature and incapable, that depends on the revolution unleashed by the enemy class (the bourgeoisie). The error of this theory of “parasitic revolution” would be in ignoring that, if the working class is incapable of unleashing the revolution, it would also be incapable of deflecting the revolution from its bourgeois course. On the need of the workers’ movement to have the

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bourgeois revolution as a “crutch,” Jaurès is incisive: if an important characteristic of utopian thought is to ignore the working class’ own strength, the Manifesto still belongs to the utopian period. Jaurès asserts that for Marx it is the bourgeoisie itself that, having to complete its own revolutionary movement, will signal the collapse (1998, p. 141) […] Thus, it is based on a victorious bourgeois revolution that the proletarian revolution will be grafted. (p. 142) […] Robert Owen and Fourier count on the generosity of the upper classes. Marx and Engels hope the proletariat will gain the favor of a bourgeois revolution. (p. 143)

Regarding the dependence of the working class on the “favor” of the bourgeois revolution, it is worth remembering, first of all, that the Manifesto shows, in its criticism of the “true socialists,” that prioritizing the struggle against the bourgeoisie at a time when the latter struggles with the feudal nobility is playing the reaction game—this is why Marx and Engels include the “true socialists” in the category of “reactionary socialism.” Secondly, it is important to point out that the “grafting” of a revolution into a movement that is foreign to it does not constitute the primacy of the proletariat. The bourgeoisie also depended, to carry out its revolution in France, on the “favor” of the revolt of the feudal nobility against a feudal monarchy that, through authoritarian means, sought to impose sacrifices on it. It was the revolt of the feudal nobility against Louis XVI’s attempt at fiscal reform, and the consequent convocation of the Estates-General, that “dragged” the bourgeoisie and, on its trail, the petty bourgeoisie and the peasantry, into the political struggle (see Lefebvre, 1989).5 The political process is full of such “paradoxes.” Class or class fraction egoism can cause blindness: the feudal nobility refused to yield its stance on the tax reform and lost everything in the agrarian reform carried out by the revolution. Such “paradoxes” do not indicate, contrary to what Jean Jaurès claims, any immaturity or incompetence on the part of the classes that take advantage of the breaches opened up by the action of their enemies.

5 This point is addressed in Chapter 6 of this book.

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Jaurès’s second criticism consists in stating that the theory of the “parasitic revolution” has already been, in 1901—when he writes his article—surpassed by history. The revolutionary period of the bourgeoisie has ended. […] Now, it is without cover, in the broad terrain of democratic legality and universal suffrage, that the socialist proletariat prepares, extends, and organizes its revolution. (Jaurès, 1998, p. 149)

Well, it is possible to argue that, a few years after the publication of Jean Jaurès’s text, the theory of “parasitic revolution” worked in tsarist Russia. A bourgeois-democratic revolution turned into a proletarian and popular revolution. This does not mean that history has confirmed the whole analysis of Marx and Engels, nor does it exempt us from showing the point on which Jean Jaurès went wrong. Marx and Engels erred in their assessment of capitalism’s expansion potential in the mid-nineteenth century. The proletarian revolution did not become a real possibility in any European country during the revolutionary crisis of 1848. However, their method of analyzing the process that constituted the proletariat into a class, as well as the conditions for the proletariat to become a ruling class proved to be correct. Industrial development and the number of workers may be of primary importance in the formation of the trade union movement, but they prove to be only relatively important when it comes to the formation of the socialist movement. In this field, the factors that bring about the growth of socialism and the proletarian revolution are the contradictions that divide the set of classes at play and the crises arising from these contradictions, as well as the importance and positioning of the intelligentsia. During the second half of the nineteenth century, England, the country with the greatest capitalist development was the homeland of trade unionism and it disregarded the socialist movement. At the beginning of the twentieth century, Russia, a country with low capitalist development and incipient and weak trade unionism, became the main center of the international socialist movement. And this socialism developed inextricably linked to the peasant, democratic, and national liberation struggles. Perhaps the greatest contrast between a great capitalist development and a weak socialist movement arose in the United States. Strictly speaking, it was only in Germany at the beginning of the twentieth century that industrial development, trade unionism, and socialism walked together;

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but not necessarily in that order: as we know, in Germany, it was the social-democratic party, which had grown due to the implementation of universal suffrage, that created labor unionism. Jaurès’s mistakes were, in the first place, to consider the bourgeois revolution only in Western Europe. Now, the twentieth century was the century of bourgeois revolutions in countless countries in Central Europe, Asia, and Latin America. In some of these countries, a proletarian or popular revolution was grafted onto the bourgeois revolution. Furthermore, the transfer of political power to the bourgeois class is the crucial moment of the bourgeois revolutionary process, but it does not exhaust it. The black civil rights movement in the United States of the 1950s and 1960s must be seen, strictly speaking, as an extension of the U.S. bourgeois revolution, and it is unnecessary to recall how that movement pushed the popular struggle forward in that country. The struggle for agrarian reform in Brazil is also part of the bourgeois revolution, even if it develops on new bases. Secondly, Jean Jaurès underestimated the importance of the struggle of each national bourgeoisie against the rival bourgeoisies of foreign countries. The Franco-Prussian War was at the origin of the Paris Commune. The First World War was at the origin of the Russian Revolution and gave rise to revolutionary scenarios in some European countries. The Second World War favored the national liberation struggle and the workers’ struggle in peripheral countries, in addition to having favored the Chinese Revolution. The working class was also able to take advantage of the conflicts between the imperialist bourgeoisies to obtain important reforms, retracing a path already explained in the Manifesto. Indeed, the English bourgeoisie, to win the support of “its” working class in the fight against the aggression of German imperialism, was forced to draw up the program of the welfare state, something similar to what Gaullism was forced to do in France to weld the class front of the French Resistance movement. Thirdly, Jaurès overlooked the fact that the contradictions between the different bourgeois fractions—Marx and Engels cite the contradiction between the industrial bourgeoisie and the bourgeois sectors that hinder industrialization, but we could mention here the contradiction between large and medium capital, between the national bourgeoisies and imperialism, etc.—have not disappeared with the development of capitalism.

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In short, the twentieth century has shown that the statement that “the bourgeoisie lives in constant battle” does not belong to an outdated historical reality. The revolutions and reforms carried out and obtained by the labor movement also showed the validity of the thesis according to which the struggle between “those above” favors the constitution of the proletariat into a class. We should add that the approach outlined in the Manifesto offers important clues to understanding the ebb of socialism and revolution at the end of the twentieth century. However, that would be a topic for another essay.6

References Jaurès, J. O. (1998). Manifesto comunista de Marx e Engels. In: O. Coggiola (Org.) Manifesto comunista. Boitempo. Laski, J. (2015 [1947]). Communist manifesto socialist landmark: A new appreciation written for the labor party. Routledge. Lefebvre, G. (1989). The coming of the French revolution. Princeton University Press. Marx, K., & Engels, F. (2000). Manifesto of the communist party [1848]. Available (checked 14 July 2022) at: https://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/ works/1848/communist-manifesto/

6 On this topic, see the next chapter of this book.

CHAPTER 11

The Exhaustion of the Twentieth-Century Revolutionary Cycle

This chapter deals with the decline and exhaustion of what we call the “revolutionary cycle of the twentieth century,” a historical period between 1910 and 1979 in which different types of revolution strengthened each other. In the mid-1990s, many important authors who wrote about the economic and social changes in capitalism in the last quarter of the twentieth century and about the social and ideological impacts of these changes on the working class ignored the political element. This was the case in works by authors such as Claus Offe and André Gorz and even in many of their critics, who were unable to break away from the economism of the authors they intended to criticize. We intervene in the debate to highlight the need to understand that the reflux of the workers’ and socialist movement at the end of the twentieth century was an expression of the exhaustion of this epoch’s long revolutionary cycle, whose determinations far exceeded the relations between workers and capitalists in the production process. …the abstract, but comfortable and reassuring idea of a pure, simple ‘dialectical’ schema,

Text originally entitled “O economicismo oculta a revolução” [Economism hides the revolution], Crítica Marxista, n.2, São Paulo: Brasiliense, 1995. © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2023 A. Boito, State, Politics, and Social Classes, Marx, Engels, and Marxisms, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-22046-3_11

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[…] and faith in the resolving ‘power’ of the abstract contradiction as such: in particular, the ‘beautiful’ contradiction between capital and labor. (Louis Althusser)

The debate on the topicality of the socialist movement and the revolution has evolved largely on a mistaken basis. Intellectuals of different political positions who have debated the future of socialism and the revolution generally confined themselves to the narrow terrain of technology and the labor and market situation of the working class. Economism, typical of neoliberal ideology, has spread to various areas of the human sciences. According to these approaches, the workers’ and socialist movements would belong to the past due to new technologies, new forms of labor force management, unemployment, and a fragmentation of the working class. The socioeconomic bases for the unification of the working class in a class movement would have disappeared. Many left-wing critics have rightly argued that economic and technological transformations do not point to the elimination of the collective wage worker, either manual or non-manual. The fact is that they use this argument within the same theoretical framework to which belongs the analysis they intend to criticize. They consider this argument sufficient to demonstrate the historical possibility of revolution. Indeed, everything happens as if workers’ and socialist movements could be deduced from the labor and market situation of the working class, i.e., from the “narrow universe” (Lenin) of the relations between workers and employers. Now, the labor movement and the revolution have been, throughout the twentieth century, the result of a broad, complex, and heterogeneous set of relations and contradictions among different social classes, nationalities, and states, a set that, although it went beyond the capitalist system, was articulated around it on an international scale. It is from the global political process, from this set of relations and contradictions, that we must start in order to understand the conditions under which the working class can unify into a class collective and the conditions in which revolutions can occur.

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Diversity and Unity of the Twentieth-Century Revolutions The long revolutionary wave of the twentieth century began in Mexico in 1911 with a bourgeois-democratic revolution and, after passing through Europe, Asia, and Africa, ended in Nicaragua in 1979 with a populardemocratic revolution. The cycle initiated and ended in Latin America, comprising various types of revolutions on the four continents. What provoked these revolutions were contradictions typical of the capitalist system but also, broadly speaking, contradictions typical of pre-capitalist modes of production, arising mainly from the imperialist system Capitalism was not consolidated in many countries at the beginning of the twentieth century: in most of Western Europe, the United States, and perhaps Japan. However, even in these countries, pre-capitalist (feudal and slave) survivals were prominent. In most Latin American countries (which includes Brazil), despite the existence of bourgeois states, agriculture— the livelihood of most of the population—was based on pre-capitalist production relations, characterized by several forms of personal subordination of the worker to the landowner. In Asia, communal forms of land use coexisted with systems of castes and orders and typically precapitalist big landed property. In Black Africa, the tribal organization still predominated. The peasant struggle for land and against various forms of pre-capitalist rent was one of the fundamental components of the revolutions of the twentieth century. The twentieth century was also the century of the formation of the new international imperialist system: the dispute among central countries for the partition of the periphery and the struggle for liberation in dependent countries were at the root of crises and revolutions. On the periphery of the system, the imperialist domination was articulated with all kinds of pre-capitalist economies and states, introducing new contradictions in the peripheral countries—class contradictions typical of capitalism and others arising from imperialist domination over states and national economies. These new contradictions added to the ones specific to those social formations. The revolutions of the twentieth century were all linked to this general picture: uneven development of capitalism, imperialist system, and precapitalism still prevalent in a large part of peripheral countries. The revolutions in Russia (1917) and China (1949), and the bipolarization of international politics between the United States and the Soviet Union

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generated new contradictions and instigated revolutionary movements on an international scale. In central capitalist countries, the labor movement was, for the most part, a movement for reforms, resulting in the extension of citizenship from the civil level—where the bourgeoisie sought to confine it—to the political (democracy) and social (welfare state) levels. The workers’ movement in the central capitalist countries turned into a revolutionary movement in specific conjunctures of crisis, propitiated, most of the time and in different manners, by disputes and wars between the imperialist and neocolonial national bourgeoisies (Russian and German revolutions) and by the national liberation struggles in the colonies (Portuguese Revolution). Wars demand a lot from the masses, degrade their living conditions, cause an “immoderate” and abrupt growth of the “proletarian and popular” base of the bourgeois army, and can divide and demoralize the ruling classes. The United States, a capitalist power whose territory has never been on the stage of an inter-imperialist war conflict, has never been threatened by a revolutionary socialist workers’ movement. In peripheral countries, national or popular revolutions have always been linked to the struggle against imperialist domination and, especially in the cases of Africa and Asia, against neocolonial domination. In most of these revolutions, the peasantry was the main driving force. What varied from one to another was their leading force: sometimes the national bourgeoisie, sometimes the petty bourgeoisie and the urban middle classes, and sometimes reduced nuclei of the working class that acted represented by a particular type of workers’ political party, forged by the Third International. The struggle for national independence, which prolonged throughout the system’s periphery, took the political crisis to the center of the imperialist system, creating for the working class of the central countries opportunities for more offensive and even revolutionary action. In the same way, on the periphery, the popular classes and national bourgeoisies benefited from the contradictions and struggles that divided the central countries. On the one hand, the national liberation struggle was able to play with the contradictions that divided the imperialist powers and, after World War II, to explore the contradiction that opposed the two superpowers—the USA and the USSR. On the other hand, the liberation movement appropriated, in its own way, the social criticism and strategic knowledge accumulated by the European labor movement. This appropriation, moreover, created one of the typical ideological figures of this century: a “peripheral socialist” ideology that in reality was the

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expression of a national and popular movement. In fact, perhaps only in China and the Soviet Union there existed – and even then only in the early stages of those revolutions, a proletarian socialist line differentiated from the national and popular lines. It is true that the revolutionary process in the Soviet Union and China, after a period of struggles, redefinitions, and setbacks, took the path of bureaucratic capitalism—without, it should be stressed—revoking all the conquests of the revolution. However, the more general—and in many cases indirect and involuntary—result of this revolutionary wave and of the reformist movements that in various ways were favored by such revolutions was positive for the popular classes: the end of neocolonialism (China, Egypt, Algeria, Guinea-Bissau, Mozambique, Angola, etc.), the democratization of access to land in numerous countries (Mexico, China, Vietnam, Nicaragua, etc.), the expansion of capitalism in the most important countries of the periphery (India, Brazil, Mexico, Argentina, etc.), the creation of the welfare state in the central countries, the democratization of the bourgeois state on a planetary scale, and the integration of a vast number of the popular masses into industrial consumption.

The End of a Cycle and the Current Situation Since the end of World War II, these transformations, which took place at unequal times, gradually converged into a new situation that closed that revolutionary cycle. The contradictions at play in the system as a whole found, at different moments and unevenly from country to country, temporary solutions or accommodations, and new contradictions that have emerged have not reached, at least so far, a critical level. The expansion of the political democracy and the welfare state in the capitalist center, the absence of major war conflicts among imperialist powers, the formation of new national states in Europe, allowing the organization of oppressed nationalities into nation-states, the disintegration of the Soviet Union and the consequent elimination of the bipolarity in the international system, the end of neocolonialism in Africa and Asia, the dependent capitalist industrialization in Latin America, and the agrarian reforms in many countries of the periphery resolved or at least temporarily accommodated the contradictions that were at the basis of the revolutions. Such contradictions took place: (a) between the workers’ movement and the bourgeoisie, mainly in the central countries; (b) among the imperialist powers for the partition of the periphery; (c)

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between the superpowers (USA and USSR), which split international politics after World War II; (d) between, on one side, the national bourgeoisies, the petty bourgeoisie and the urban middle classes of peripheral countries and, on the other, neocolonialism; (e) between the peasantry and big landowners; (f) between the urban populations of the peripheral countries and the old international division of labor that blocked their access to industrial-type consumption; (g) between the peripheral state bureaucracies (civil and military), which aspired to the juridical autonomy of the state they embodied, and neocolonialist domination, a contradiction that played a central role in national revolutions such as that of Egypt. The top of the imperialist system completed the transition to a period in which political unity prevails among the great powers—organized around the solitary and absolute political-military hegemony of the United States.1 The relationship between the center and the periphery found a new accommodation and the main political-ideological references of the revolutionary struggle vanished with the bureaucratic capitalist course taken by the main revolutions. The historical picture in the last decade of the twentieth century displayed a relative political stability of capitalism and the imperialist system. More than that we witnessed a general offensive of the conservative forces. As the revolutionary struggle receded, the decline and final disintegration of the Soviet Union was consummated, and the international scene became occupied only by the choice between reform and reaction, reformism was overcome by the conservative forces of neoliberalism. As for the overcoming of the bipolarity between the USSR and the USA, the result for the reformists was the opposite of what they had expected. Some believed that the end of the Cold War would remove the alleged “pretext” on which the United States and the right wing relied to fight reforms, hence creating better conditions for the reformist left to advance. However, what happened was the opposite: the end of the “Red Peril,” i.e., of the ghost of state autonomous national capitalism that had terrorized the Western imperialist private bourgeoisie, favoring both reforms and revolution in the center and periphery of the system, freeing the right wing to go on the offensive. History did not repeat itself; but under new conditions and with particular characteristics, the bourgeoisie and imperialism did seek to undo much of the advances achieved 1 The reader should bear in mind that this text was written before China’s economic and political ascension on the international stage. See the Article Note.

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in the previous period: they threatened the welfare state, the industrialization achieved in the periphery, and even decolonization—why not start thinking about a new colonialism commanded by the US under the UN flag? Revolution is not currently on the agenda. Does it mean that revolution is historically overcome? We do not believe so. Capitalism and imperialism have not resolved the contradictions that can generate revolutions. We emphasize that our conviction does not come from the refutation of arguments such as those referring to statistics on the number of workers. Many Marxists base themselves on the erroneous thesis of the sociodemographic polarization between the bourgeoisie, which would tend to become progressively smaller, and the proletariat, which would grow by incorporating the disqualified from other social classes—a thesis defended by Marx in The Manifesto of the Communist Party. They ignore the deeper and more sophisticated analysis of volume I of Capital, in which, breaking with the thesis present in the Manifesto, Marx demonstrates that the increase in the organic composition of capital can lead to a relative or absolute decrease in the working class. We must remember that large industrial countries such as the United States have never been seriously threatened by revolution. Moreover, the movement is uneven: with the internationalization of capitalist production, the contingent of workers may decrease in some countries of the center and grow in others of the periphery. Besides that, we do not consider that the level of employment is decisive: revolutionary Russia and Germany were not “labor societies,” but societies of unemployed, and the former had a rather meager working class. It is necessary to bear in mind that, if the labor and market situation has a direct impact on the trade union movement, the same does not apply to the revolution. In fact, part of the processes that have affected the current labor and market situation of the working class is much more the effect than the cause of the retreat of the revolution. The decisive question regarding the situation of the working class and its possibility of leading a revolutionary process is whether manual, collective, and wage labor is in a process of extinction—either because of the disappearance or reduction to insignificance of living labor in productive processes or through a process of regression to piecemeal and independent labor. Research indicates that none of this is occurring. If this is so, it remains up to national

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and international politics to define whether the working class will be able to unify into a revolutionary movement. The new growth spurt of the productive forces is the bearer of new contradictions and can sharpen old unresolved contradictions. This growth has caused an increase in poverty in the periphery and the center. The welfare state, which was part of the European workers’ movement, is in crisis. Vast sectors of the middle classes find themselves amid a process of socioeconomic degradation, after having secured, in an unequal way, some improvement through the welfare state at the center, and with dependent industrialization on the periphery. The organization of the poor and uprooted populations of the large metropolises will be able to compensate the revolutionary forces for the partly temporary reflux of the peasant movement on an international scale. Such reflux resulted from victories in the struggle for agrarian reform and the advance of the wage labor system in the countryside. Today capitalism alone—both in reality and, most importantly, in the perception of social agents—occupies the historical scene. The masses can more easily blame this system for the worsening of living conditions. The unity at the top of the imperialist system may break down. Since the 1980s, the tendency of the imperialist powers has been to group into competing blocs. Within each of these blocs, there is great inequality among the associated powers. Disputes over markets and debts, like those witnessed in the United States, are not exempt from becoming more serious, even military conflicts. Localized wars, like in Iraq and Bosnia, are only localized because of the current international framework. Only an idyllic view of twentieth-century history and imperialism can rule out the possibility of a worsening in international relations. The situation of accommodation between the center and the periphery may deteriorate. Imperialist powers have been pressing, since the 1980s, for policies of deindustrialization on the periphery, and for a global process of financial and technological reconcentration at the center of the system. Such pressures could reactivate, on new bases, the contradiction between imperialism and sectors of the peripheral national bourgeoisies, the middle classes, and the popular masses. It can be hypothesized that, in the new historical situation, revolutions that could arise would point much more to the future than to the past, unlike those from 1911 to 1979, which to a large extent have been around feudalism and the old-style imperialism of the neocolonial powers. If this is correct, there is one more reason for socialist intellectuals to take

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on the task of developing Marxism, based on the critical study of the texts and the revolutionary experience of the twentieth century. In the twenty-first century, in contrast to the twentieth century, socialism may become the practical goal for a large number of revolutions.

CHAPTER 12

Middle Class and Unionism

While discussing the notion of the “middle class” and its unionism, this chapter emphasizes the importance of ideology and class struggle in determining social classes. We try to show that the typical ideology of the middle class, the meritocratic ideology, gives rise to a particular type of unionism that differs from the unionism of manual workers in its objectives, ideology, forms of organization, and methods of struggle. Middle-class unionism is currently a reality on an international scale. It is true that ten or fifteen years ago this movement was more active. The neoliberal offensive of the 1980s and 1990s created difficulties for workers and unionism in the public sector, where middle-class unionism is concentrated. Despite this blow, the strength of middle-class unionism at the beginning of the twenty-first century contrasts sharply with the weakness that characterized it until the mid-1960s. The expansion of

Text produced from material from the course entitled Theory of Trade Union Action, offered to postgraduate students at the Institute of Philosophy and Human Sciences (IFCH) at Unicamp in the early 1990s. A shorter and preliminary version was presented in the IX National Congress of Sociologists, held in 1992, and published under the title “Classe média e sindicalismo: uma nota teórica” [Middle class and trade unionism: a theoretical note] (In: Junqueira, 1994). © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2023 A. Boito, State, Politics, and Social Classes, Marx, Engels, and Marxisms, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-22046-3_12

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middle-class unionism draws even more attention because it took place in a context of stagnation or decline in unionization rates and union struggle in strictly working-class sectors in several central countries and in Latin America (Mouriaux, 1993). There has been a mutation in the union scene. While part of the industrial and service proletariat—such as miners, metallurgists, and rail and port workers—had their unionism weakened in several countries, wage earners such as teachers, doctors, nurses, as well as office, administration, and public services workers strengthened their associative entities and adopted typical union practices—strikes, street demonstrations, signing of collective agreements, etc. The growth of middle-class unionism invites us to revisit an old theoretical (and also political) polemic in sociology: would it be correct to separate a sector of salaried workers that do not belong to the working class and label them as “middle class,” or should we deal with the broad notion of the “working class,” considering the wage-earning status sufficient to define the class situation? There are two answers to this question that deviate from the one we will present. Firstly, we have the answer provided by authors who never accepted the notion of “middle class.” These authors have presented the emergence and expansion of the unionism of “office workers” as a proof that the correct sociological procedure would be to gather all wageworkers into a single social class. Secondly, there is the answer suggested by authors who accept the concept of “middle class,” but, in the current situation, consider that the unionization of “office workers” indicates that these workers are in the final phase of a process of proletarianization and thus, of a politicalideological fusion with the labor movement. This is the thesis of the proletarianization of the middle class. Our analysis differs from both approaches indicated above. We consider it important to conceptually distinguish middle-class workers and, in the case of the unionism phenomenon, we believe the notion of “middle class” to be indispensable to explain the attitudes of large groups of wageworkers toward the union movement. “Office workers ,” whether when they reject unionism—as they did most of the time during the first half of the twentieth century—or when they join this movement—as they started to do, to a large extent, since the 1960s—are moved by interests, values, and conceptions that are different from those that typically drive the action of manual wageworkers organized in unions. Moreover, this difference in terms of interests, values, and conceptions is enough to allow us to speak of a class difference between the “office worker” (middle class) and

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themanual wageworker (working class), although such a class difference is not of the same type as that which distinguishes the fundamental and antagonistic classes of the capitalist mode of production—the bourgeoisie and the working class. Before developing these theses, let us see how the relations between the middle class and trade unionism were addressed in part of the bibliography that dealt with the subject.

Three Recent Standpoints in the Debate Over the Middle Class The notion of “middle class” has some tradition in Marxist thought. At the beginning of the twentieth century, Rudolf Hilferding (1981) dedicated the last chapter of his classic work, Finance Capital, to a reflection on the middle class. Hilferding distinguished middle-class workers by the fact that they had a career and could take command over the work of others. However, it was not among Marxists that the notion of “middle class” thrived. On the contrary, in mid-twentieth-century academic circles, the notion of “middle class” emerged outside Marxist sociology and, to some extent, in opposition to Marxism. This concept was used to criticize the alleged simplicity of the Marxist theory of social classes, i.e., the idea that the development of capitalism should produce a growing sociodemographic polarization between bourgeois and proletarians. The authors who developed the concept of the middle class, linked either to Weberian sociology or to the North American sociology of stratification, rejected the idea of sociodemographic polarization, stressing the differences between middle-class workers and the working class. Studies such as those by Wright Mills, David Lockwood, and Adolf Sturmthal, published in the 1950s and 1960s, highlighted the difficulties in unionizing the middle-class workers, whose individualism contrasted with the strong associativism of manual wageworkers (the labor sector in the strict sense of the term) (Lockwood, 1989; Mills, 1969; Sturmthal, 1967). Mills and Lockwood used this difference in terms of the practice of organization and struggle for demands to criticize the Marxist notion of social class. They argued that the fact that office, commerce, and public sector employees occupied an identical position in the economy to that of the working class—since they were also propertyless workers—and, at the same time, held such a distinct position concerning the organization and the struggle for demands, would prove the limitations of the Marxist theory of social classes. The behavior of the “white collars” could only

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be explained if one considered not only their situation in the production process but also their social status; i.e., if, in addition to the class structure, the system of social stratification was also taken into account. In other words, following Max Weber, these authors applied the idea that class conflict, which they judged to be a conflict in the market over income distribution, would be just one of the dimensions of social conflict. The other dimension would be the conflict between status groups, generated by the unequal distribution of “honor and prestige.”1 Mills and Lockwood argued that the attainment of higher prestige and the permanent aspiration for more prestige would be the main distinguishing mark of the “white collars” in comparison to manual workers. In Mills and Lockwood’s analysis, middle-class workers, who for them form a status group within the working class, are reluctant to commit to organizing and collective struggle because middle-class workers fight individually for their ascension in the scale of social prestige. Mills and Lockwood’s analysis did not stop there. These authors, and perhaps more Lockwood than Mills, pointed out that, at the same time, a trend of approximation between “white collars” and manual workers was to be expected. This trend would stem from a series of factors, such as the spread of wage-earning in activities until then reserved for the performance of self-employed workers, the spread of work socialized and concentrated in large production and service units, the bureaucratization of—formerly paternalistic—work relations that involved the “white collars,” their salary losses, and, above all, the loss of prestige of occupations in commerce, in the office, or in the public service. This approximation in terms of economy and, also and mainly, of status between the work in the office and in the factory would result in a growing unionization of the “white collars.” Regardless of the merits of the explanation provided by these authors, at least on the factual level, twentieth-century history has confirmed their prediction. In the field of Marxist sociology, the dominant standpoint consisted— and perhaps still consists today—in rejecting the notion of the middle class. This position reflects, as we understand it, the intellectual hegemony of Soviet Marxism in the period after the Second World War and the ambition to assert the thesis that the development of capitalism would

1 For these distinctions, see the well-known essay by Max Weber “Class, Status, Party” (1946).

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lead to a sociodemographic polarization between the bourgeoisie and the proletariat. The leaders and intellectuals of the communist parties worked with an expanded notion of the working class. This standpoint is well illustrated by a collection organized by Alexei Rumiantsev that brought together some twenty European communist intellectuals to discuss the composition of the working classes in countries of central capitalism (Rumiantsev, 1963). These intellectuals defend an expanded conception of the working class, establishing only a distinction between what would be the core of the working class, composed of industrial workers, and its peripheral fringe, composed of office workers. The procedure is simple: anyone who receives a wage is a worker. The capitalist division of labor, which unequally distributes workers in the positions of conception, direction, control, and execution, would not be relevant to the theory of social classes. This communist tradition, which stemmed from the Soviet model of a planned economy, argued that the capitalist division of labor would be a technical datum—the rather simplistic argument was that “every society needs engineers” (p. 31). If the periphery of the working class, i.e., the “office workers,” did not participate in the trade union and political movement of the rest of “their” class, it was because they were prisoners of a “displaced conscience” in relation to their objective economic situation (wage-earning) (p. 47).2 The “office worker” would be part of the working class despite not being aware of it, and moreover, despite rejecting such classification. Still in the field of Marxist sociology, and already in the 1970s, the classic work Labor and Monopoly Capital by Harry Braverman resumed the expanded notion of the working class, arguing that there would be a fusion of the class situation of salaried office workers with manual workers (Braverman, 1975). Braverman presented a more sophisticated argument than that of the aforementioned communist intellectuals, though. He did not confine himself to the wage-earning argument to unite all propertyless workers into the same social class. He presented a more complex

2 Trotskyist intellectuals, despite their important political and theoretical differences with

the old communist parties, have a similar analysis on this issue. Just as an example, we mention Ernest Mandel, who presented the spread of wage earning and the growth in the number of non-manual wage earners replacing the old liberal professions—doctors, lawyers, engineers, architects, etc.—as a proof of the growth of the working class on a world scale. See Mandel (n.d.).

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characterization of the working condition and argued that office workers were increasingly subject to the three basic attributes of this condition: (a) wage-earning, (b) simplified, repetitive, and third-party controlled work, and (c) permanent threat of unemployment. Braverman concluded that only a highly restricted sector of wageworkers, those who enjoy autonomy in the workplace and exercise some kind of authority over the work of others, could still be considered middle-class workers, but he added that even this small sector would tend to be proletarianized. It was from the experience of the Cultural Revolution in China that Marxist authors came to admit there is a class distinction in the set of wageworkers. In the Soviet experience, there was an early recognition of the compatibility between socialism and the maintenance of the despotic authority of administrators, managers, and bureaucrats within the production units and in the global planning of the economy. For this conception of socialism, the capitalist division of labor could not be criticized. Within the working classes, only the urban petty bourgeoisie and the peasantry were considered, due to their attachment to the private ownership of the means of production, as possible obstacles to be overcome in the struggle for the construction of socialism. The non-manual workers’ resistance to the socialization of the means of production was hidden. Let us try to explain our reasoning. The socialization of the means of production is the collective control of these means by freely associated direct producers. Hence, the defense of the maintenance of inequalities in the world of labor, of the inequality of participation in the decision-making process within the production units and in the process of global planning of the economy—to which so many inequalities in wages and working conditions should correspond—this defense constitutes an opposition to the socialization process. While the petty-bourgeois opposition to socialization opposes private property to collective property, the middle-class opposition may accept, for all appearances, collective property, but will be advocating, in reality, a new form of private property—the property of the state bureaucracy and administrators over the means of production. In the Soviet model, this phenomenon was hidden by the ideological discourse about “socialist ownership” or “property of the whole people.” In the rare occasions that the topic of the particular positions of non-manual workers was critically discussed, they were presented, at best, as a simple attachment of some of these workers to certain salary advantages, a position that could generate, at most, small inequalities in income distribution.

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Well, the Chinese Cultural Revolution placed this thought in the crosshairs of revolutionary criticism and, according to our understanding, influenced a whole generation, directly or indirectly, of Marxist—or just leftists—sociologists who reflected on the question of the working classes in monopoly capitalism. The main idea was that, in some way or another, non-manual workers would be committed to the capitalist division of labor, insofar as they benefit from this division, and, consequently, for reasons that are different from those that motivate small landowners, would be against socializing the means of production. It was in this intellectual context, marked by the Chinese criticism of the Soviet model, that some Marxist authors recovered the more restricted notion of the working class and began to discuss from a new perspective the problems implied by the notion of the middle class. However, they did so based on different theoretical criteria. We shall refer here only to the two significant contributions that interest us more closely—the works of Nicos Poulantzas and Décio Saes (see Poulantzas, 1976; Saes, 1978). Poulantzas does not speak of a middle class, but of the “new petty bourgeoisie.” He enumerates a series of attributes that would distinguish the “new wage petty bourgeoisie” from the working class. Such a set of attributes could be present in its entirety or only in part in the different fractions of this “new petty bourgeoisie.” These are the attributes listed by Poulantzas: performing unproductive labor, occupying functions of direction and control of the work of others, performing intellectual labor—or labor socially considered as such—and adopting an individualist and reformist political-ideological practice. Salaried engineers or administrators who organize production in a capitalist factory carry out productive work, but, because they organize and control the work of direct producers, they would be part of the new petty bourgeoisie. On the other hand, a professor from a public institution, despite not controlling the work of others, would be part of the new petty bourgeoisie because he/she performs unproductive work that is socially valued as intellectual work. Décio Saes criticized this concept of Poulantzas, arguing that nonmanual wageworkers are distinguished from both the working class and the petty bourgeoisie. Saes considers that the trait that distinguishes these workers from manual wageworkers—the working class—is their attachment to meritocratic ideology, and not to petty-bourgeois individualism, which is a smallholder individualism. The middle class would be a

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“practical notion” indicating a specific political and ideological behavior, guided by a “meritocratic conscience,” typical of a sector of wageworkers, a behavior that would distinguish them from manual workers. As Saes argues, the meritocratic conscience, found in middle-class workers, conceives of the social and economic differences existing in capitalist society as a hierarchy based on individual gifts and merits. For our analysis, it is interesting to add that the labor hierarchy established by the meritocratic ideology has a qualitative cut and a quantitative gradation. Firstly, it praises non-manual work, stigmatizing manual work, which is described as a degraded and degrading activity. Secondly, this hierarchy comprises a kind of meritocratic scale of non-manual “professions,” a scale that, as we shall see, is important in defining the patterns of middle-class union action.

Specifications About the Concept of “Middle Class” We will close the conceptual discussion above by addressing three questions that will help us define and develop the concept of meritocracy and its role in the constitution of the middle class. The first question is: in taking the standpoint that meritocratic ideology distinguishes the middle-class worker from the working class, would we not be abandoning Marxism and taking the standpoint of its critics (Wright Mills, Lockwood) on this important issue? Second question: would not the valorization of intellectual work to the detriment of manual work be typical of an ideology of the bourgeoisie and not of the middle class? Third question: would the middle class be defined in terms of ideology (the “meritocratic conscience”)? Regarding the first question, it is necessary to recognize that, by accepting the idea that the meritocratic ideology separates the middle class from the proletariat, we are accepting the relevance of a problem raised by the sociology of social stratification. However, this problem, which in Wright Mills and David Lockwood was discussed regarding the concept of prestige, appears in our essay designated and transformed by the concept of ideology. This does make a difference. Mills and Lockwood turned to Weber to use the notion of “unequal distribution of prestige.” We, on the other hand, are talking about ideology—the meritocratic ideology—which entails at least three important changes. Firstly, if we link meritocratic values and ideas with the concept of ideology, it is because we

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understand that such values and ideas hide the true origin of social inequalities. These inequalities appear, in the meritocratic discourse, as a result of differences in individual gifts and merits. Like any ideological discourse committed to class society, meritocracy is, thus, mystifying. Secondly, this set of ideas and values is an ideology because it seeks to legitimize the particular interests of a social sector—in this case, non-manual workers who describe any advantages they may enjoy in comparison to manual workers as a fair reward for the gifts and merits of those who “work with their heads.” The merits of the winners correspond to the demerits of the losers. That is why the meritocratic ideology necessarily stigmatizes and segregates manual work (and workers). Thirdly, affirming that meritocracy is an ideology also means affirming that meritocratic values and ideas assert themselves in the struggle and can go beyond the limitations of their own class. They can be incorporated, to a greater or lesser extent and with all manner of results, by different social sectors. Nevertheless, the result of such incorporation varies from one class to another. Meritocracy is functional for the interests of middle-class workers but dysfunctional for the interests of the working class. The middle-class workers take advantage of the meritocratic ideology and are interested in professing and spreading it. On the other hand, manual workers under the impact of meritocracy, recognizing the alleged superiority of non-manual work over manual work, will be led to accept a social and economic hierarchy that is detrimental to them. As for the second question presented above, which refers to the hypothesis that meritocracy is a bourgeois ideology, it is worth noting that it has fundamental consequences for the discussion of the concept of the middle class. If meritocracy were bourgeois, it would not be correct to use it to distinguish a middle class. The fact that a portion of the workers professes the meritocratic ideology would merely indicate that this portion would be under the impact of the dominant ideology, and not expressing ideas and values that would justify considering it a separate social sector. It so happens that the bourgeois ideology is an ideology of exaltation and mystification of labor in general, and not specifically of non-manual work. In pre-capitalist societies, notably slaveholding societies, work (in general) was considered a demeaning activity. The aristocratic estate in these societies asserted itself as a superior estate by favoring idleness. Capitalist society valued work and, at the same time, surrounded it with mystification. It is important to remember this fact in a context where a

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good part of the left has been dedicating itself, with the good intention of reacting to the critics of Marxism, to exalt “labor” and the “labor society.” Marx’s caustic criticism of the draft program of the German sociodemocracy prepared for the Gotha unification congress is well known. This project opens with the following statement: “Work is the source of all wealth….” Marx stresses, first, the theoretical inaccuracy of the phrase. The source of all wealth, i.e., of use-value, is nature. Labor, in addition to being a natural force, can only be carried out with instruments and objects of production whose primary source is nature. Next, Marx indicates the—not at all socialist—interests hidden behind this exaltation of work: The bourgeois have very good grounds for falsely ascribing supernatural creative power to labor; since precisely from the fact that labor depends on nature it follows that the man who possesses no other property than his labor power must, in all conditions of society and culture, be the slave of other men who have made themselves the owners of the material conditions of labor. (Marx, (1875 [1970], n.p.)

The bourgeois ideology of exalting labor suggests that social and economic inequalities stem from the individuals’ unequal labor capacity. The rich man is rich because he has worked hard. There are even edifying tales about the self-made man, of capitalists who made themselves out of nothing, thanks to their own labor. The poor man is poor because he does not work or works little. Do we not also hear constantly the tale about the unemployed being lazybones? In short, the “labor society”—a bourgeois notion that hides that capitalist society is the “capital society”—wants to present labor as the source of all wealth; but labor in general, not intellectual work. It is a fact that middle-class workers resort to the valorization of the bourgeois mystification of work, i.e., that these workers are ideologically dependent on the bourgeoisie. However, they arrive at a specific result: the valorization of intellectual work at the expense of manual work, or in other words, they produce a particular, middle-class variant of the cult of labor. Something similar happens with the petty bourgeois, who produce a variant of the bourgeois ideology of valuing the private property. The petty-bourgeois values the bourgeois notion of property, but can, at the same time, distinguish legitimate (small) from illegitimate (large) property. Meritocratic ideology specifically extols non-manual work, setting it in opposition to manual work.

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Therefore, it is neither the bourgeois ideology of ascending through work—an ideology that surrounds in mystification the power of work in general—nor the proletarian ideology, which extols work as a criterion for political and economic participation in opposition to property owners and social parasitism. The third and final question concerned the role of ideology in defining the concept of the middle class. Here, we will also touch on a more general problem: the role of politics, economics, and ideology in defining social classes, and not just in defining the middle class. Let us advance our position: politics, economy, and ideology are all relevant to the constitution both of the middle class and the working class as active, collective forces in the social struggle. Let us see how these three factors combine in the constitution of the middle class. If we look at the economic situation of middle-class workers, we will see that they participate in social production in different ways. The working situation of the different fractions of this class varies greatly, depending on different factors: the level of socialization of the work they perform, the forms and amount of remuneration they receive, the formal qualifications required for the exercise of the profession, and the content of the work they perform—complexity of tasks, greater or lesser autonomy in the workplace, the activity of directing or controlling other workers, etc. The employee in the retail trade, dispersed in small businesses and paid by commission on accomplished sales; the teacher in public schools, whose job guarantees stability and requires a university degree; the office worker in large private companies in the industrial sector, whose opposition to the production worker seems to be greater precisely because of the need to be distinguished from the manual workers nearby; in short, the variety of work situations is so striking that some authors prefer to speak of the middle classes, in the plural. Would it really be appropriate to unify such disparate sectors under the concept of the middle class? In reality, these different work situations have a common characteristic, which consists in somehow placing non-manual workers in a different situation from that experienced by manual workers in the factory, agriculture, civil construction, or capitalist services. However, this common characteristic is not only negatively defined through opposition, but is also overly generic, proving to be imprecise and somewhat inefficient for certain types of occupation. Clerks in the banking sector receive a low salary, perform simplified and repetitive tasks, have their work controlled

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by their superiors, work in cooperation with dozens or hundreds of other workers, and are permanently under the threat of unemployment. Why is it possible, though, in certain historical situations, to consider these clerks as middle-class workers? Because clerks like such will be able—either through the social perception of the work they perform, surrounded by objects and symbols typical of intellectual work, or through the correlation of political forces and the ideological conjuncture—to conceive of themselves as non-manual workers who deserve a differentiated social treatment, or in other words, they will be able to profess a meritocratic ideology and, to that extent, integrate the middle class. It is important to think of the process of formation of classes, and therefore of the middle class, as something that transcends the economic level, i.e., that accomplishes but also transforms what is only potentially present at the economic level. As a matter of fact, there is no fixed, objective, rigorous boundary that would separate the situation of the middle class from that of the working class in terms of process and work situation. This boundary is also defined by the intervention of the class struggle, which is displayed as something relatively loose and mobile, and its mobility depends both on the work situation and on the specific context of the class struggle. To make it simple, let us consider two extreme situations. At the top of the world of middle-class workers, there are work situations that bring together the attributes that make its workers more attached to a meritocratic ideology, or, seeing the same phenomenon from another angle, more resistant to a policy of socioeconomic equalization of work. Control over the work of others, autonomy in the workplace, possession of university degrees, and high income or salaries are some of these attributes. This worker, even in a political scenario that favors the growth of the workers’ socialism, will hardly abandon the meritocratic ideology, or in other words, will hardly break with the situation of the middle class. At the bottom of the world of middle-class workers, there are work situations that bring together the attributes that make its workers more likely to abandon meritocracy and assume an egalitarian point of view. Simplified and controlled work, low wages, and an activity that is less socially valued and does not require a high level of education are some of the attributes that characterize the work situations that can be more easily affected by the class struggle, so that the boundary of workers who can be considered middle class can be pushed back and, at the same time, that of the working class can be expanded.

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Therefore, distinct work situations connect to the meritocratic ideology in different ways. There are work situations that strongly predispose workers to cling to this ideology, while others do not stimulate meritocracy so intensely. Hence, there is a gradation in the attachment to the meritocratic ideology, which is determined by the economic situation of the sector considered and the historical context. The work situation and the meritocratic ideology are the two fundamental factors to be considered in the analysis of the relationship between the middle class and trade unionism.

Middle-Class Workers and Unionism We will not say much about the relationship between the work situation and trade unionism. We merely wish to draw attention to the fact that some work situations facilitate the union organization of middleclass workers, while others make such organization very difficult. Since non-manual workers in the public sector have, in contrast to those in the private sector, greater freedom of movement in the workplace, job stability, and bureaucratic standardization of work relations and remuneration, they also display a greater propensity to union organization. In fact, we can go further: until now, middle-class unionism has been fundamentally the unionism of the public sector. Many middle-class professions, such as teachers and doctors, only become organized in the public sector, and never in the private sector.3 The situation of non-manual workers in the public sector differs immensely from that of workers such as those in small retail trade. Scattered through a myriad of small shops, earning commissions on their sales instead of a fixed salary, these workers face great difficulty in organizing unions due to their work situation (see Trópia, 1994). Regarding meritocracy, this ideology is a fundamental factor in determining the basic attitudes of middle-class workers toward unionism. The importance of the meritocratic ideology in the attitude of middleclass workers toward unionism is dismissed by the vast majority of the bibliography on the subject. Hence, this idea is worth developing.

3 Reflecting on this particularity of middle-class unionism, Márcia Fantinatti drew a pessimistic picture for the future of this unionism due to the advance of neoliberal privatization. See Fantinatti (2000).

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We conceive of two basic situations in this regard. On the lower end, due to their meritocratic convictions, middle-class workers tend to purely and simply reject the organization and the union struggle. If the existing inequalities in the world of labor correspond to the individual gifts and merits of each worker, organization and collective struggle do not make sense and can be stigmatized, as we will see later. However, meritocratic ideology is not an insurmountable obstacle. Middle-class workers who are attached to the concept of meritocracy can join unionism under certain conditions. In doing so, they will not necessarily be crossing the threshold defining the middle-class situation. It is possible to practice middle-class unionism: one marked by the meritocratic ideology, which is associated with some demands, forms of organization, and methods of struggle that are very common in middle-class unionism. Let us look at this in detail. Middle-class unionism is a late phenomenon when compared with workers’ unionism. Meritocratic ideology was one of the factors that, throughout the first half of the twentieth century, kept middle-class workers away from the trade union movement. This is because there is a contradiction between meritocracy and unionism. In any of its aspects and even though in varying degrees, unionism conceives of the workers’ wage level and conditions of work and living as a result of organization and collective struggle. In other words, what for unionism is the result of the correlation of forces is, for middle-class workers, the fruit and distinctive sign of their personal gifts and merits. That is why middle-class workers have remained impervious to unionism for so long. In the conception of a worker attached to the meritocratic ideology, the union movement would be something appropriate for manual workers, i.e., for workers who have to compensate for the lack of personal merits and for the simple work they perform by using collective force.4 The meritocratic ideology then produces an effect of particular isolation: middle-class wage earners are not unified in a struggle collective and remain atomized because joining union action would be to admit personal incapacity and social relegation—identifying them as the same as manual workers. This is an attitude that stigmatizes the trade union movement, which is considered as a kind of “movement of the incompetent.”

4 This idea is advanced in the work O sindicalismo de Estado no Brasil: uma análise crítica da estrutura syndical [State syndicalism in Brazil: a critical analysis of the union structure] (Boito Jr., 1991).

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We mentioned that this isolation effect produced by meritocratic ideology is of a specific sort. Indeed, there are other isolating effects in capitalist society. All social agents, regardless of the class to which they belong, may be subject to the isolation effect arising from bourgeois law (Poulantzas, 1975). This law, unlike the slave and feudal law that personally submitted the direct producer to the owner of the means of production and thus divided social agents into hierarchical orders, grants personal freedom to all individuals and proclaims formal equality among them. Such a legal structure can hide from social agents their class membership, inducing them to isolation, i.e., to individualistic behavior. Therefore, this phenomenon affects both the working-class and the middle-class worker and even individuals belonging to the bourgeoisie. Thus, this individualism is a real obstacle to the union organization of both middle-class workers and manual workers. Nevertheless, depending on the social class considered, other factors that contribute to the same result can be added to this isolation effect, which is widespread in capitalist society. In Marx’s classic analysis, found in his essay The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte, the author explains the incapacity of peasants to organize politically due to their situation as small landowners.5 The peasants work with their families on their plots of land and do not put themselves, when it comes to production, in a cooperative relationship with the other members of their class. This generates a smallholder individualism that adds to the isolation effect of bourgeois law and creates an additional difficulty in organizing the peasantry when compared to the situation of the working class.6 Without ignoring the obvious differences, something similar happens with middle-class workers. Like all workers, they are subject to the isolation resulting from bourgeois law, and also to the isolation resulting from the meritocratic ideology (Boito Jr., 1986). We 5 Marx develops this analysis in the last chapter of The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte. 6 As we write this text, the Movimento dos Trabalhadores Rurais Sem-Terra (MST) [Landless Rural Workers Movement] is one of the most important popular movements in Brazil. However, historians and sociologists show that, considering the history of the twentieth century as a whole, the organization of the peasant struggle, which played a very important role in the revolutions in Asia and Latin America, as a general rule depended on the intervention of an “external force” from the cities. It is currently well known the importance of the progressive sector of the Roman Catholic Church in the organization of the peasantry in Brazil.

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have already indicated the reasons why this ideology causes an isolating effect—it encourages workers interested in improving their economic situation to an individual effort for “the development of gifts and acquisition of merits,” and not to a collective struggle. Let us clarify now that this isolation effect is confined to the union field. The peasantry faces a structural difficulty in achieving collective organization both in the field of the struggle for demands and in the field of the struggle for state power. Middle-class workers do not encounter the same problem. Participation in the organization and in the politicalparty struggle is not seen by such workers as something demeaning. On the contrary, under certain historical conditions, middle-class workers may see politics as the activity that, par excellence, ennobles those who practice it, serving even as a factor of social distinction in comparison to manual workers. Politics, in a liberal conception, is the struggle for ideas and values or, in other words, an activity of intellectual creation and decision-making very close, in principle, to the intellectual work that middle-class workers perform or imagine to perform. That is why such activity can, under certain historical conditions, serve as a distinction in comparison to that of the manual worker.7 The isolating effect of meritocracy occurs, therefore, only on the terrain of the organization and trade union struggle. Even today, contrary to what most of the bibliography suggests, countless fractions of the middle class remain impervious to organization and union struggle. However, numerous factors have influenced other fractions of this social class to join unionism. The incidence and effectiveness of these factors vary according to the work situation and the particular branch of the economy to which each fraction of the middle class belongs. The spread of wage-earning, the concentration of middle-class workers in large service or production units, the bureaucratization of labor relations and wage degradation have induced part of the middle class to seek unionism. Nevertheless, these factors alone do not signify the proletarianization of the middle class, i.e., the overcoming of the meritocratic ideology.

7 In Brazil, this was how the liberal upper middle class conceived of the political party activity during the First Republic and the period of populist democracy. Such conception led the upper middle class to make an elitist, exacerbated critique of populism, which, from their point of view, was contaminating the political activity by encouraging the participation of the “populace.” On this point, see Saes (1985).

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Despite its characteristic isolating effect, meritocracy can articulate with trade unionism thanks to the shift in emphasis from individual merit to professional merit. The cult of the individual’s merit is extended and completed by the cult of the profession’s merit. This shift, attained by means of an ideological struggle in specific historical conditions, started to encourage individuals from some sectors of the middle class to organize themselves for the collective (union) struggle. The phenomenon is complex: once the emphasis is shifted to the merits of the profession, the same ideology that atomized the worker begins to stimulate a particular type of collective organization. Now it is a matter not only of defending the purchasing power of wages but also of defending the relative position of the profession’s wages in the salary hierarchy. In the recent history of Brazilian unionism, the often-repeated protest of teachers’ unions is emblematic: “The primary school teacher earns less than a maid!” This protest, which undervalues manual work, is highly ambiguous. What does it demand? A salary increase for teachers or a reduction in the salary of domestic workers? Hence, a form of unionism that we could characterize as meritocratic is born. It presents some intertwined characteristics that refer, all of them, to the meritocratic ideology and the economic interests that this ideology hides and legitimizes. This meritocratic unionism is particularly notable among professions whose exercise requires a diploma awarded by the school system. Our hypothesis, however, is that it is practiced, albeit in different ways, in all fractions of the middle class that joined the union movement without ceasing to be middle class, or in other words, without breaking with meritocracy. As for the content of the demands, this unionism assumes the defense of what we would call relational wage, i.e., the defense not only of the purchasing power of the wages but also of the relative position that a given profession’s wages “should occupy” in the “social scale of professions” conceived by meritocracy. At the organizational level, this unionism prioritizes professional corporatism. Professional unions—of doctors, engineers, teachers, researchers, sociologists, lawyers, dentists, etc.—proliferate. Often, within the same profession or branch, hierarchical segmentations form rapidly: there are unions of workers of the school system who are not teachers; elementary and high school teachers; school principals; university teachers, etc. Such unionism induces a restricted collective identification, closed in the universe of the profession, being thus impervious to the politicization of

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the union struggle. Each of these professional unions seeks to spread an image of the special merits of the profession it represents. It is worth asking: would not we be witnessing the affirmation of the workers’ dignity in a society that exploits them? Middle-class union discourse may contain this popular, progressive aspect, and it usually does, but it is not limited to it. The merit of the profession is, more often than not, affirmed in opposition to the supposed demerit of other professions or manual work: teachers, whose dignity is indeed denied by the capitalist state, but who seek to assert it by protesting against earning less than housemaids; teachers who, victimized by the same state, and with the same objective and motivation, compare their salary to that of bus drivers or street vendors; engineers who refer pejoratively to small traders, etc. It should be repeated that these and other comparisons in the discourse of middle-class unionism might aim to affirm the dignity of the workers in a society in which the abstract and hypocritical valorization of work only hides the exploitation that victimizes them. These comparisons, however, also aim to illustrate the idea that the “natural order” of the hierarchy of the world of labor is being threatened or turned “upside down.” In addition to the content of demands and form of organization, meritocratic unionism has particularities in terms of fighting methods. Middle-class unionism may assume mild forms of union struggle or, at least, demarcate some ground to differentiate itself from worker unionism. A decisive point here is the issue of pickets. The recognition of the right to strike is a late feature of bourgeois citizenship and workers had to fight long and hard for it. However, having recognized the right to strike, the bourgeoisie did not cease to hinder its effective enjoyment. They closed ranks in interdicting pickets. Bourgeois law sets in opposition to the picket the strikebreaker’s right to work and the freedom to come and go. Taken to the extreme, it is as if workers could strike, but only if they did it alone.8 Because of this, picketing can be an act of confrontation and disrespect for legality. Picketing is a current practice of workers’ unionism and is very little accepted in middle-class unionism. In the latter, it ranges from a position of rejection, as a matter of principle, of moral or physical coercion of the minority of strikebreakers to a position of embarrassed picketing, disguised as a cultural or recreational activity. 8 A systematic bourgeois critique of pickets is made by Hayek, a well-known ideologue of neoliberalism. A critical analysis of how bourgeois law treats strike action is made by Bernard Edelman (see Edelmann, 1978; Hayek, 1983).

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Such characteristics of the platform for demands, forms of organization, and methods of struggle of the meritocratic middle-class unionism hinder, although they do not prevent, the alliance with workers’ unionism. The situations vary according to each country, historical moment, and middle-class sector considered. In the Scandinavian countries, middle-class unionism openly assumed a reactionary and defensive position against the social-democratic policy of reducing wage differences.9 In several European countries, even today, part of middle-class unionism is organized in exclusive union centers of middle-class workers. However, as the aforementioned work by David Lockwood shows and as the recent history of Brazilian trade unionism teaches, the affiliation of broad sectors of middle-class workers to the trade union movement can later on—sometimes after a phase of reluctance and hesitations—be followed by their entry into a union center that also integrates workers’ unionism. Hence, it is possible to see a gradation in how middle-class unionism and worker unionism are drawn together. This gradation stems both from the working situation of the fraction of the middle class considered and the general situation of the political and ideological struggle in the country, which affects the very definition of class membership of non-manual wage earners. The social, political, and ideological effects of meritocracy on middleclass unionism will be greater or lesser according to the political scenario, the union struggle in question, and the fraction of the middle class being considered. There are situations in which a large union front of wageworkers prevails, and the differences in conception and interests between manual workers and middle-class workers are deemed to have little importance. In such situations, the notion of meritocratic unionism may seem superfluous. However, in other situations, such differences come to the fore, with union meritocracy hindering or preventing the workers’ action. Such division and the motivation behind it may appear openly in the trade union scene or may remain veiled by ideological discourse. The critical point in the relationship between workers’ unionism and middle-class meritocratic unionism is the defense, by middle-class unionism, of relational wages, i.e., of the wage hierarchy supposedly based on individual gifts and merits.

9 See Gilles Martinet’s interesting essay of comparative analysis (1979).

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Rejecting the union movement or joining it from a meritocratic perspective—both positions conditioned by middle-class ideology—define the worker’s position concerning what we could call basic union attitudes—remaining in a situation of isolation or organizing in a union collective of some kind (by profession, company, economic sector, region, etc.). However, these two basic union attitudes do not exhaust the characterization of the specific political role that a given sector of the middle class and/or its unionism can play in a given conjuncture. The position of trade unionism in the face of problems such as the democratization of the political system, the content of the state’s social and economic policy, and the agrarian national issue is not directly determined by the meritocratic ideology. It depends on the global political situation and the fraction of the middle class under consideration. Furthermore, the combinations between unionism and politics are complex. It is possible to reject unionism for elitist reasons and, at the same time, take a progressive political position at some conjuncture. University-educated professionals may have an anti-union attitude for elitist reasons, but due to their work situation, among other things, they may take a progressive political position in one or more important aspects of a given situation. The lawyers who controlled the Order of Attorneys of Brazil in the 1970s, despite being impervious to unionism, took a position contrary to the military dictatorship political regime, joining forces with the labor movement in the struggle for democratic freedom; the engineers who controlled the associations of their professional sector, also due to their work situation and despite their anti-union attitude, took a position against the surrender and submission of Brazilian economic policy to international interests. It is important to remember that meritocracy can affect all these positions, but it does not determine the evaluation of the political role played by a certain fraction of the middle class in a specific historical scenario. The moment in which meritocracy becomes the main aspect to be considered in the behavior of the middle class is the conjuncture of socialism building. Then, the middle-class resistance to the socialization of the means of production, together with resistance from the petty bourgeoisie and the peasantry attached to small properties, will inevitably divide the world of labor. The meritocratic conscience cannot accept the social equalization of workers—be it in the production process (overcoming the division between management work and execution work), in terms of consumption (overcoming the wage hierarchy), or in politics

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(overcoming the division between mass and vanguard). In the process of building socialism, hiding this contradiction between the middle class and the working class, conveying thus a generic discourse in defense of the interests of the “working class” or of the “world of labor,” means playing the game of the non-manual workers against the manual workers. Nevertheless, the contradiction between the middle class and the working class must be considered, to recall a concept developed by Mao Zedong, a contradiction within the ranks of the people which, as such, must be dealt with through democratic methods. If the workers’ power treats its contradiction with the middle class in the same way as it treats its contradiction with the bourgeoisie, this may cause the contradiction to become antagonistic and bring the process of building socialism to ruin.

References Boito, A, Jr. (1986). O populismo no Brasil. In: Anais da Primeira Semana do Instituto de Ciências Humanas e de Letras. Universidade Federal de Juiz de Fora. Boito, A, Jr. (1991). O sindicalismo de Estado no Brasil: uma análise crítica da estrutura sindical. Hucitec/Editora da Unicamp. Braverman, H. (1975). Labor and monopoly capital. Monthly Review Press. Edelmann, B. L. (1978). Légalisation de la classe ouvrière. Bourgois. Fantinatti, M. (2000). Sindicalismo de classe média e neoliberalismo. In: Temáticas. IFCH-Unicamp. Hayek, F. (1983). Os fundamentos da liberdade. Universidade de Brasília. Hilferding, R. (1981). Finance capital. Routledge & Kegan Paul. Junqueira, L. A. P. (Org.). (1994). Brasil e a nova ordem onternacional. Edição do Sindicato dos Sociólogos do Estado de São Paulo. Lockwood, D. (1989). The blackcoated worker (2nd ed.). Oxford University Press. Mandel, E. (n.d.). Marx, la crise actuelle et l’avenir du travail humain. Quatrième Internationale. Martinet, G. (1979). Sept syndicalismes. Seuil. Marx, K. [1875] (1970). Critique of the gotha programme. Progress Publishers. Available (checked 5 August 2022) at https://www.marxists.org/archive/ marx/works/1875/gotha/ Mills, W. C. (1969). White collar, the American middle classes. Oxford Univesity Press. Mouriaux, R. (1993). Le syndicalisme dans le monde. PUF. Poulantzas, N. (1975). Political power and social Classes. Verso. Poulantzas, N. (1976). Classes in contemporary capitalism. Verso.

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Rumiantsev, A. (Org.). (1963). La estructura de la clase obrera de los países capitalistas. Editorial Paz y Socialismo. Saes, D. (1978). Classe média e política de classe – uma nota teórica. Contraponto, n. 2. Saes, D. (1985). Classe média e sistema político no Brasil. T.A. Queiroz. Sturmthal, A. S. (1967). White-collar trade unions. University of Illinois Press. Trópia, P. (1994). Classe média, situação de trabalho e sindicalismo: o caso dos comerciários de São Paulo [Master’s thesis]. IFCH Unicamp. Weber, M. (1946). Class, status, party. In: H. H. Gerth & C. W. Mills (Eds.). From max weber: Essays in sociology. Oxford University Press.

CHAPTER 13

Citizenship and Social Classes

This chapter examines the relationship between the development of citizenship and the class struggle, carrying out a critical analysis of the bourgeois notion of citizenship and indicating, at the same time, the complex and contradictory relations that citizenship maintains with the interests of the working classes. The title of the colloquium organized by our colleagues from Goiânia, “Citizenship: Myth or Reality,” displays an alternative with two mutually excluding options, creating some difficulties for the speakers. Our first reaction as we read it was perplexity. Is myth not part of reality? The

Text prepared for our conference at the Semana de Ciências Sociais [Social Sciences Week] at the Pontifical Catholic University of Goiás, Brazil, in October 1998. It was originally published under the title “Cidadania: ‘mito ou realidade’ ou ‘mito e realidade’?” [“Citizenship: ‘myth or reality’ or ‘myth and reality’?”], Fragmentos de Cultura, Universidade Católica de Goiás, vol. 8, n.5, Sept./Oct. 1998. The general theme of the week was Myth or Reality, and our conference should address this dichotomy in relation to the concept of citizenship. Hence the complicated title of the original version of this chapter, which made a polemic reference to the myth/reality duality contained in the title of the Social Sciences Week organized by the colleagues from Goiás. © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2023 A. Boito, State, Politics, and Social Classes, Marx, Engels, and Marxisms, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-22046-3_13

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beliefs of a society or the ideas and values of a specific social group— whether or not they relate to facts that have actually occurred, and whether or not they properly reflect the social relations they purport to represent—are, as an ideology, part of social reality. Thus, myth could not be set in opposition to reality. It should be thought of as a dimension of social reality. Of course, in pondering further about the title, we came to the conclusion that the colleagues intended to contrast the notion of myth, conceived as a false idea whose content would not properly reflect the prevailing economic and social relations, with such relations. In this case, myth—i.e., a type of representation—and social relations would both be part of the social reality, in which the former, as a phenomenon belonging to the symbolic or ideological dimension, falsifies the nature of social relations that it intends to represent. However, even if that is how we interpret the title of the colloquium, the problems do not end. In class societies, or at least in a capitalist society, it often happens that the ideas that are part of the dominant ideology, which in the case of capitalism is the bourgeois ideology, have a complex relationship with the social relations they purport to represent. The bourgeois ideological discourse—and citizenship is a central part of this discourse—properly reflects aspects of social relations but, at the same time, does so in a way that distorts the nature of social relations in the eyes of the agents involved in them. The French Marxist philosopher Louis Althusser (1971) in a short essay entitled “Ideology and Ideological State Apparatuses,” sought to characterize this complex relationship between ideology and social relations by stating that ideological discourse plays a game of allusion/illusion: it alludes to social relations while deceiving about their content. Althusser believes the game of allusion/illusion occurs in ideology in general. We consider that this game operates in the bourgeois ideological discourse, and we will try to show its workings in the case of the (bourgeois) ideological notion of citizenship. In the first two parts of this intervention, our approach is fundamentally theoretical. In the third part, we offer some indications about the situation of citizenship in Brazil today and ask the question of how, in our understanding, the labor and popular movement should position itself in the face of this issue in the present conjuncture. In the ambit of political practice, the main risk faced by the labor movement today is that of despising bourgeois citizenship, unlike in the previous period, when the main risk was to mystify it.

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The Ideology of Citizenship Reflects Typical Social Relations of Capitalism In antiquity and the medieval period, in Europe, Asia, and colonial America, class societies were at the same time societies of orders. It was the bourgeois revolutions of the seventeenth, eighteenth, and nineteenth centuries that changed this situation, creating a new type of class society, the capitalist society, in which the implementation of citizenship suppressed the orders, although social classes subsisted. Hence, we begin with the statement that the emergence of citizenship represented a rupture in the history of humanity. In fact, it marked the political disruption that, in connection with economic transformations accumulated over centuries, made it possible to trigger the transition from pre-capitalist modes of production to the capitalist mode of production. And, to make a political observation, we state that citizenship represented a progressive change that did not only contemplate the exclusive interests of the bourgeoisie but also the interests of the popular classes. Let us explain the concepts with which we are dealing so that we can clarify our thesis. Social classes are defined in the realm of economy, or more precisely, of production. They consist of collectives of men and women who maintain specific relations with the means of production. They are owners or non-owners of the means of production and, as a result of these relationships, they are placed in opposite sides: either as non-worker owners who appropriate the work of others or as non-owner workers, who provide surplus labor (i.e., labor in excess of the minimum necessary to reproduce the workers themselves and the material conditions of production) to the former. This definition of social classes, which configures a bipolar class system, is found in the general and simplified level of the mode of production, dismissing the complexities and variations of concrete social formations , but it is sufficient as a starting point for what we need. Well, a key aspect of every class society is the mechanism that ensures the appropriation of the surplus labor of the direct producers by the owners of the means of production. In pre-capitalist class societies, this mechanism was precisely the distribution of production agents in hierarchically organized orders. Orders are defined in the realm of the state, more precisely of the law. They are collectives of men and women to whom the law assigns duties and privileges. The higher order is that of free men, made up of individuals recognized as subjects of law endowed with full legal capacity, while

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the lower order can be composed of slaves or servants, belonging to the state or private individuals, and its members’ legal capacity is either limited (in the case of serfs) or inexistent (in the case of slaves). At the conceptual level, i.e., when dealing with the mode of production, we have, in the field of economy, only two—symmetrically opposite—social classes: a dominant class, which appropriates the work of others, and a dominated class, which supplies surplus labor. In the field of law, we have only two orders, a superior one, endowed with rights that are also privileges, and an inferior one, devoid of rights and burdened with obligations toward the superior order, starting with the obligation to provide it with surplus labor. However, considering historically existing social formations, the complexity increases. Simple oppositions disappear. A feudal social formation can, in its decadent phase, have a bourgeoisie and a class of free workers in formation. A slave or feudal social formation may contain several classes and intermediate levels that do not belong to any of the fundamental classes of the dominant mode of production. The scenario is no less complicated when it comes to orders. In certain pre-capitalist social formations, orders could be subdivided into estates. In Medieval Europe, there were nobles, clerics, and plebeians—the Third Estate—as estates of the order of free men, estates that were distinguished by the political, fiscal, and honorific privileges they held or were deprived of. In Ancient Rome, the order of free men was also subdivided into estates. The orders—with their occasional estate subdivisions—and social classes—in their historical variety and complexity—combine in different ways, giving rise to complex intersections. To draw an example from the era of the bourgeois revolutions in Western Europe, it is worth remembering that although the Third Estate, i.e., the plebeian and inferior estate of the order of free men, had many bourgeois in its ranks—especially the middle bourgeoisie, as shown by the research of historian Albert Soboul (1984)—it also had free peasants, masters, and apprentices from the cities and even feudal landowners without any title of nobility. In other words, different social classes, which are collectives defined by their economic situation, belonged to the same estate, which is a collective defined by law. In the upper estate of the order of free men, the nobility, there were, in addition to the great feudal landowners, the great bourgeoisie that purchased titles of nobility, and self-employed workers, artists, and intellectuals that were awarded titles

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of nobility by the monarch. In the order of serfs, there were the peasants, the administrators or overseers of the manors, servants of the lord and his family, etc. This intertwining between belonging to a class and belonging to order and estate had relevant effects on the political process. In France, the plebeian bourgeoisie, i.e., the part of the bourgeois class that belonged to the lower estate of the order of free men—the Third Estate—had a position in the revolutionary process that differed from that of the ennobled bourgeoisie. In England, the revolutionary role played by small feudal landowners in conflict with the court nobility is well known. The same complexity of intersections is found in the relations between order and social class in antiquity, as shown by the great historian of the ancient world Moses Finley, in his work The Ancient Economy. In Rome, there was also a division of estates in the higher order of free men and, within this order, there were also different social classes—slave landowners, merchants, urban artisans, etc. As for the order of slaves, rural slaves formed a distinguished social class, different from those represented by slaves on domestic or productive work (Finley, 1999). Despite this complexity, it is necessary to pay attention to the fact that the class/order relations displayed an invariant aspect. Members of the ruling class belonged to the higher order, and members of the fundamental dominated class belonged to the lower order. A slave or feudal owner was always a member of the order of free men, even if he belonged to a lower estate of that order. If he was not a free man, i.e., if he did not have full legal capacity, he could not even fully own land or men. The order situation, which conferred full legal capacity, was a condition for integrating the collective of owners of the means of production. As for the direct producers who formed the fundamental dominated class in slavery and feudalism, they were rural workers belonging to the order of slaves or peasants bound to the land. In the slave or feudal social formations, which existed in Europe and America with considerable variations, classes of free rural workers could develop during certain periods, such as the free peasants of modern slavery in America or of decadent feudalism in Europe in the same period. However, the order situation interfered with the class situation. If the direct producer was a free landowner, his relations with the means of production and the other social classes would be different from those entertained by slave workers or peasants bound to the land. While every member of the ruling class belonged to the higher

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order and every member of the fundamental dominated class belonged to the lower order, in historically existing social formations there could be individuals belonging to intermediate classes situated in both the higher and lower orders. In other words, not every individual belonging to the higher order was part of the dominant class, and not every individual belonging to the lower order belonged to the fundamental dominated class of the dominant mode of production in a given social formation. Due to the pre-capitalist mechanism for extracting surplus labor, it was inevitable that the members of the ruling class would belong to the higher order and that the members of the fundamental dominated class would belong to the lower order. The non-owner worker, if a slave, provided surplus labor compulsorily to the non-worker who owned the means of production, as a result of the use of legal violence that the slave owner or the slave state exerted on him; if a serf, in European feudalism, he would carry out the corvées and pay the tributes in the name of religion. In both cases, as Marx shows in Capital , the transfer of surplus labor was visible to the agents involved. In the case of the corvée, which was the main form of overwork in the High Middle Ages, the serf worked for the feudal lord in a place and period different from those in which he worked for himself. He was aware that part of the work was done for himself and that another part, separated in time and space, was done for the feudal landowner. The slaves, both in antiquity and in colonial America, worked as human tools belonging to third parties. As such, being considered things devoid of will and incapable of exercising any right, they never worked for themselves since they could not exercise the right of ownership even over part of the work they performed. The ration that kept them alive appeared as a donation of the fruit of the slaves’ labor to themselves, offered by their owner. Exploitation was then visible and the inequality of orders imposed and justified such exploitation. Order and class were so indissolubly linked that many contemporaries of the first bourgeois revolutions believed—with fear, in the case of the exploiters, or with hope, in the case of the exploited—that the end of inequality of orders would mean the end of all inequality, including class

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inequality.1 This explains in part the popular enthusiasm and the bourgeois hesitation in the face of a (bourgeois) revolution. Against these fears and hopes, what the bourgeois political revolutions have shown is that it is possible to maintain social classes and thus the exploitation of one class by another even dispensing with orders; in other words, it is possible to maintain socioeconomic inequality in the absence of legal inequality. Capitalism has shown that class exploitation can coexist with legal equality between the owners of the means of production and the workers after both groups have become citizens. Therefore, capitalist society is a society of classes, and not a society of orders. This is one of the reasons why Marx and Engels claim in the Manifesto of the Communist Party that capitalism has simplified class conflict: it has distilled this conflict by detaching it from the conflict of orders and estates. The law produced by the bourgeois political revolutions grants to all individuals, regardless of their class status, full legal capacity, establishing the equality of all before the law. This legal equality is the basis of citizenship. A society divided into orders has no citizens in the modern sense of the term. Citizens are legally equal among themselves and members of a homogeneous national collective unified in the state—the modern bourgeois or capitalist state. This is the first reason why we can say that the notion of citizenship alludes properly to capitalist social relations: where there was legal inequality, the bourgeois political revolution implemented legal equality; where there were dynastic states with openly particularist institutions monopolized by members of the ruling class and founded on the hierarchy of orders, the bourgeois political revolution implemented the nation-state, with formally universalist

1 We offer as an example of this bourgeois and aristocratic fear this excerpt from a speech by Alexis de Tocqueville to the National Assembly: “The French Revolution, which abolished all privileges and nullified all exclusive rights, nevertheless allowed one to remain: the right of property. Owners of property should be under no illusion about the strength of their position […].When the right of property was merely the fons et origo [source and origin] of many other rights, it was easily defended, or, rather, it was not attacked. It then stood as society’s outer wall, and all other rights served as defensive outposts. No blow ever struck the wall itself. Today, however, the right of property is merely the last vestige of a destroyed aristocratic world, and it stands alone, an isolated privilege in the midst of a leveled society, unprotected by numerous other more contestable and hated rights, and is therefore in greater peril. Now it must absorb alone, daily, direct and constant shocks of democratic opinion” [i.e., egalitarian opinion—added by the author] (Tocqueville, 2016, Chapter 1).

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institutions open to members of all social classes and founded on the equality of conditions among individuals living in the same territory. The notion of citizenship alludes to this real historical disruption that separates pre-capitalist modes of production from the capitalist mode of production. And it designates a vital reality for the working classes: with the end of orders and the consequent advent of citizenship, workers are no longer absolute (slave) or partial (servant) property of the owner of the means of production. They acquired personal independence, ensured by the minimum civil rights that are the basis of citizenship, thus constituting a class of workers such as had never existed in the history of humanity. Moreover, the fact that such a change interests the popular classes explains the participation of the peasantry and urban workers as the most consistent social force in the processes of bourgeois revolutions, while the bourgeoisie itself, the main long-term beneficiary of such processes, displays hesitancy and dissension as it joins them. The second proper allusion that the notion of citizenship makes to social relations concerns the later developments of citizenship. The bourgeois political revolutions resulted in limited citizenship; the ensuing class struggle forced the development of an expanded form of citizenship. It is well known that the original bourgeois citizenship centered on the minimum civil rights—the right of property, the right to come and go, the right to sign contracts, especially the employment contract, as well as, more precariously, freedom of thought, expression, and association. The classical liberal state granted workers neither political rights (to vote and earn votes) nor social rights (factory legislation, health, education, and social security). The property-owning or high-income strata monopolized political rights. Social rights did not exist. The first ideologues of liberalism, such as Benjamin Constant, justified the census vote based on property or income by arguing that only property owners or the wealthy had interests to defend in their country—see his work Principles of Politics (2003 [1815]). Others, such as Stuart Mill in his Considerations on Representative Government (2008), admitted universal suffrage, but on the condition that it was unequal, claiming that the vote of manual workers should be worth less due to their lack of culture. All of them warned against the implementation of what we now call social rights, resorting to the argument that such rights would injure property rights and distort the free play of market forces. At least one classical liberal thinker realized the precariousness of this situation. Alexis de Tocqueville, in his renowned Democracy in America (2010), warned his contemporaries and partners

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that it would be impossible to keep equality confined to a single sphere of social life. Implemented at the civil level, equality would spread to the political, economic, and social domains, predicted Tocqueville. In the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, European and American workers gradually conquered the right to vote and earn votes. As T. H. Marshall (1963) shows, political rights were followed by social rights. These began to emerge after the Russian Revolution and World War I. The workers’ and popular struggle in Europe and America, the affirmation of the Soviet Union—with its broad welfare state and in opposition to US imperialism—and the renewed intensification of interimperialist conflicts, which led to the Second World War, gave rise to an unprecedented push in the implementation of social rights, resulting in the emergence of the welfare state in Western Europe and populist social policy in Latin America. The very bourgeois ideology of citizenship and the structure of bourgeois law virtually contained the possibility of expanding citizenship into the political and social realms. Workers could and did use this bourgeois ideology, turning it against the bourgeoisie, bringing capitalism to an expanded form of citizenship. If all citizens are equal at the civil level, how is it possible to admit that they are unequal at the political level? If citizenship is an attribute of all individuals who inhabit the same territory, how can it be admitted that part of the citizens, equal in civil and political terms, are condemned to economic and social “marginality” in the event of misfortunes or natural events that prevent them from work—unemployment, illness, old age? Bourgeois citizenship is, therefore, the result of a complex, prolonged, and differentiated process of class struggle. In its restricted form, it grew out of class struggles in decadent feudal societies, struggles that characterized the bourgeois revolutions; in its expanded form, it developed thanks to the workers’ and popular struggle under capitalism, as a direct result of reformative movements or as an indirect result of revolutionary movements, in moments of crisis of the imperialist system, shaken by revolutions (1917), a general crisis (1929), and wars between the great powers (First and Second World Wars). Hence, citizenship is not a simple illusion: it reflects a fundamental reality of capitalism. In its more advanced and extended version, it establishes a type of equality (of civil, social, and political rights attributed to all citizens) that did not exist in pre-capitalist societies. It is the basis of the modern nation-state, which is the capitalist or bourgeois state.

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The Ideology of Citizenship Mystifies Social Relations Typical of Capitalism Therefore, citizenship is not a creation of the bourgeoisie. Once created, however, it proved to be functional for the maintenance of bourgeois domination. In the capitalist mode of production, equality of civil, social, and political rights coexists with class inequality. Hence, this equality is indeed formal. Class inequality denies the equality proclaimed in terms of rights, blocking and contaminating legal egalitarianism; moreover, this egalitarianism, i.e., citizenship, can hide from workers the exploitation and class domination that victimize them. To this extent, although citizenship represents a progressive transformation when considered in the process of transition from feudalism to capitalism in Europe and Asia, and in the process of transition from slavery to capitalism in the case of America, it plays a conservative role in the process of transition from capitalism to socialism. Let us emphasize from the outset that this does not mean that the workers’ and popular movement must employ, in capitalist societies and in any situation, a strategy of denouncing and overcoming citizenship; after all, the struggle for the constitution of a socialist power is only posed as a practical and immediate task for the workers’ movement in scenarios of revolutionary crisis. Let us examine this in detail. Civil equality, which destroyed the orders, grants personal independence to the worker but conceals class exploitation. The capitalist, who owns the means of production, and the worker, deprived of property, appear in the market as subjects with full rights, free and equal, able to sign a (labor) contract. Egalitarian law hides class inequality and the exploitation that will occur at the level of production and leads workers to see exploitation as being their own choice. Workers indeed have a choice, which did not exist for slaves or serfs: they can, within the limits established by the economic situation, choose the capitalist for whom they will work, but they cannot choose whether or not to work for a capitalist. Equitable civil law does not impose exploitation, contrary to what happened with the inequitable law of pre-capitalist modes of production, but hides it and, in this way, contributes to its reproduction over time. Equality of political and social rights is contaminated by class inequality. Freedoms of thought, expression, assembly, and association are enjoyed unequally by individuals belonging to the capitalist class and the

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working class. The former own and control the press and other material means necessary for the full enjoyment of such freedoms; the latter will only be able to partially enjoy such freedoms through a collective effort, whose viability depends on the situation. Furthermore, even if they manage to assert, to the limit of their possibilities, the political rights that the bourgeois democracy guarantees them, workers cannot, within the law and the institutions of the bourgeois state, implement a policy of socialization of the means of production and extinction of social classes. In terms of social rights, although access to public and free education allows for a general improvement in the culture of workers, it does not put them on an equal footing with the bourgeois in social and economic life. The school system is organized to reproduce bourgeois ideology and capitalist social relations. It selects and segregates students according to their class status. Studies such as that by Daniel Bertaux, in the book Destins personnels et structure de classe, show that social mobility is an exception even in European societies that have an advanced welfare policy (Bertaux, 1977). Even in capitalist societies with a democratic welfare state, social classes are collectives that reproduce themselves in a predominantly endogenous manner. Citizenship is, therefore, mystifying in each of its aspects. In general, it plays a conservative political and ideological role. The illusion of equality that it can and usually does produce dissolves, in the eyes of workers, the idea of class belonging. Unlike the structure of orders, which aggregates individuals into differentiated and hierarchical collectives in a system of privileges and duties, citizenship individualizes the agents of production, dissolving, at the ideological level, the reality of classes and class struggle. Perceiving themselves as citizens, workers cease to perceive themselves as a social class. Free citizens, inhabitants of the same nationally unified territory, can perceive themselves as members of another collective: a supra-class collective, the nation. This occurs thanks to the ideological function performed by the apparently universalist institutions of the bourgeois state, which are, at least on a formal level, open to the participation of individuals from all social classes, and not only to individuals from the ruling class. This ideological functioning of the institutions of the bourgeois state applied to social classes was detected and analyzed by Nicos Poulantzas (1975), who described it in terms of two effects: the isolation effect (individualization of class agents) and the effect of representation of unity (unification of class agents in a national collective), in his classic treatise on Marxist political theory Political Power and Social Classes. These

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effects of the bourgeois state were historically produced in different ways. At the beginning of capitalism, civil equality alone was enough, but with the strengthening of the labor movement, such effects began to demand an expansion of citizenship so that they could maintain their effectiveness. The welfare state has exorcised the specter of revolution in Europe. The contradiction between class inequality and legal equality can only be resolved by the extinction of social classes. That is the task of a socialist revolution. The bourgeois revolution signified, by implanting legal equality between individuals belonging to antagonistic social classes, a historical rupture with humanity’s millenary past. Something hitherto unthinkable turned out to be possible: the maintenance of class exploitation in (legally) egalitarian societies. The socialist revolution, if it comes to occur, could represent a break with a no less millenary past—one that has associated, since the oldest civilizations, the growth of productive forces with class exploitation.

The Present Conjuncture Constitutes a Bourgeois Offensive Against Expanded Citizenship The bourgeoisie cannot extinguish the basis of citizenship, which is civil equality, without extinguishing capitalism itself. This does not mean that the bourgeoisie, the ruling class of the capitalist mode of production, is the vanguard in the struggle to defend civil equality. The history of bourgeois revolutions shows, as we have already seen, that the bourgeoisie displayed hesitancy and dissension when it came to destroying the orders. In the French revolutionary process, the bourgeoisie was consistent in the struggle for the extinction of the estates, since a large portion of this social class belonged to the plebeian estate of the order of free men, but it aligned with the feudal nobility to maintain the hierarchy of orders, as shown by the legislation passed in August 1789, which required a payment in cash so that the peasants could free themselves from serfdom. The works of Albert Soboul reveal that it was the petty bourgeoisie, organized in the sans-culottes movement that, supported by the spontaneous civil war maintained by peasants in the countryside between 1789 and 1793, established the unconditional extinction of feudal law—see his booklet published in Brazil, A revolução francesa [The French Revolution]. In the Brazilian revolutionary process, it was the urban workers, and not any sector of the ruling classes, who, supported by the struggle of rural slaves, organized the abolitionist movement, which extinguished

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the orders of free men and slaves that divided Brazilian society, as shown in A formação do Estado burguês no Brasil [The Formation of the Bourgeois State in Brazil] by Décio Saes (1985). Even after the completion of the bourgeois revolution, Marx describes in Chapter VIII of Capital —on the struggle to reduce the working day—that English capitalists sought to redeploy forms of compulsory labor through the most diverse ways. It was the workers’ movement and the bureaucracy of the bourgeois state, that guardian of the general conditions of reproduction of capitalism, that imposed free labor and factory legislation on the capitalists. However, once civil equality has been consolidated, the bourgeoisie tends, in the face of conditions created by the historical development in general and by the development of the labor movement in particular, to adapt to the existence of such equality and thereby allow the exploitation of class to be reproduced according to the capitalist pattern of exploitation of free labor. Nonetheless, the same cannot be said of political and social rights. There were moments in the history of capitalism when bourgeois democracy was threatened by the bourgeoisie and indeed suppressed in countless countries. In Western and Central Europe, we had fascism and dictatorships in the middle of the twentieth century; in much of Mediterranean Europe, dictatorial regimes lasted until the 1970s. In Latin America, the 1960s and 1970s were characterized by military dictatorships. In conjunctures like these, socialists learned that the political aspect of bourgeois citizenship is important to the labor movement and they knew how to defend it. In the late twentieth century, it was mainly social rights that were being suppressed and threatened. Neoliberalism has been revoking the reforms that the workers’ and popular movements imposed on capitalism. This reactionary offensive is dismantling the welfare state in Western Europe and suppressing the few social rights that exist in Latin America. This is occurring due to changes in the economy and politics on an international scale. We could list in a rather synthetic way the changes that contributed, each in its own way, to stimulate this offensive by the bourgeoisie, ensuring the success it has achieved. Moderate economic growth, punctuated by recessive circumstances, strengthened the position of the bourgeoisie in defense of its profit rate, inducing capitalists to try to lower the direct and indirect wages of workers. As the inter-imperialist conflicts, which were of low intensity by the end of the twentieth century, cooled off, a relative reunification of the bourgeoisie on an international scale became possible,

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increasing its political strength. The break-up of the USSR eliminated the polarization of the international political system and had a negative impact on the entire labor and socialist movement. US hegemony reunited the imperialist camp. This situation as a whole has placed the workers’, socialist, and anti-imperialist movements in crisis and on the defensive. In a conjuncture like this, it is necessary to defend the expanded bourgeois citizenship that is under attack by the bourgeoisie and imperialism. Some left-wing currents do not realize this. They advocate as a slogan for the left the organization of a “socialist offensive.” This leftism diverts workers from the only thing they are able to do at the moment, which is to defend themselves and the bourgeois citizenship as well—in the expanded sense that such citizenship acquired throughout the twentieth century, especially in Western European countries. To conclude, we would say in short that citizenship, especially when considered in its expanded version, is a contradictory phenomenon. Depending on the situation and the political correlation of forces, it is up to the labor, popular, and socialist movements to defend it.

References Althusser, L. (1971). Ideology and ideological state apparatuses. In L. Althusser (Ed.), Lenin and philosophy and other essays. Monthly Review Press. Bertaux, D. (1977). Destins personnels et structure de classe. Presses Universitaires de France. Constant, B. (2003 [1815]). Principles of politics applicable to all governments. Liberty Fund. Available (checked 29 August 2022) at: https://oll.libertyfund. org/title/constant-principles-of-politics-applicable-to-all-governments Finley, M. (1999). The ancient economy. University of California Press. Marshall, T. H. (1963). Sociology at the crossroads and other essays. Heinemann. Mill, J. S. (2008). Considerations on representative government. The Electric Book Company. Poulantzas, N. (1975). Political power and social classes. Verso. Saes, D. (1985). A formação do Estado burguês no Brasil (1888–1891). Paz e Terra. Soboul, A. (1984). A Revolução Francesa. Difel. De Tocqueville, A. (2010 [1835 & 1840]). Democracy in America. Signet Classic. De Tocqueville, A. (2016). Recollections: The French revolution of 1848 and its aftermath. University of Virginia Press.

Index

A Absolutist state, 51, 56, 61–67, 69–83, 118, 128 Abstraction, 40, 47, 48 Africa, 209–211 Agrarian reform, 211, 214 Aleatory materialism, 5, 38–40, 50 Algeria, 211 Alter-globalist movement, 27 Althusser, Louis, 3–5, 8, 9, 11, 26, 32, 39, 40, 43, 48, 50, 58, 61, 65, 108, 136, 240 Anderson, Perry, 66, 80, 157 Angola, 211 Anti-imperialist struggle, 13 Anti-racist struggle, 12 Appearance, 138, 141, 142 Argentina, 211 Asia, 209–211

B Babeuf, Graco, 91, 94 Badiou, Alain, 155, 163

Balibar, Etienne, 48–52, 54, 56, 57, 62, 63, 79 Balmès, François, 155, 163 Bebel, August, 186 Bernstein, Eduard, 186 Bloch, Marc, 71, 72, 160, 162 Bottomore, Tom, 56, 57 Bourdieu, Pierre, 26, 27 Bourgeois and petty-bourgeois political parties, 135, 138 Bourgeois ideology, 240, 247, 249 Bourgeoisie, 64, 71, 78, 88, 94, 100, 110, 114, 115, 118–123, 125–127, 132 Bourgeois law, 67–69, 170–175, 177, 247 Bourgeois political revolution, 61, 65, 78, 80, 83, 245, 246 Bourgeois revolution, 53, 55, 57, 199, 201, 203, 205, 209 Bourgeois state, 66–68, 73, 81, 83, 247, 249–251 destruction, 9, 10 Bratsis, Peter, 9

© The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2023 A. Boito, State, Politics, and Social Classes, Marx, Engels, and Marxisms, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-22046-3

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INDEX

Braverman, Harry, 221, 222 Brazil, 209, 211 Bureaucracy, 64, 66, 69, 73, 74, 80 Bureaucratism, 66–69, 73–75, 80

C Camerlynck, G.H., 174, 175 Capitalist division of labor, 221–223 Capitalist enterprise, 22, 25 Capitalist mode of production, 151–155, 169–174, 177, 178, 241, 246, 248, 250 Capitalist production relations, 61, 64, 67, 69, 77 Capitalist state, 21–27, 32, 62, 63, 83, 153, 162, 171 Capitalitst mode of production, 65, 67, 78, 79, 83 Cardoso, Ciro Flamarion, 159, 165 Chaunu, Pierre, 74 China, 209, 211, 212 Citizen, 68 Citizenship, 239–241, 245–252 Class struggle, 3, 11–13, 89, 94, 140, 146, 158, 177 Clergy, 68, 70, 71 Cohen, Gerald, 42, 58 Collective worker, 160, 169–172, 180, 208 Communism, 94, 202 Communist movement, 137 Conception, 221, 222, 230, 232, 235 Constant, Benjamin, 246 Contradiction, 40, 43–46, 49, 50, 208–214 accumulation, 110, 123 antagonistic contradiction, 109 development, 109, 110, 112, 113, 121–123, 131 displacement, 110, 123, 126 main contradiction, 121–123, 126

non-antagonistic contradiction, 109 secondary contradiction, 122, 123 unity of opposites, 109 Control, 221–223, 227, 228, 236 Corvée, 71, 72, 120, 156, 160, 162, 165 Council of the Commune, 95–97, 103, 104 Court nobility, 243 Cultural Revolution, 222, 223 Cultural Revolution (China), 32

D Dalotel, Alain, 93, 94, 97 Darwin, Charles, 57 Deep reality, 135–137, 144 Derivative contradiction, 50 Dialectic/Dialectics, 41, 108, 109 Direction, 221, 223 Direct producers, 151, 153–157, 159–166, 168–172, 175, 177–180 Division of labor, 156, 160, 169 Dobb, Maurice, 72, 132, 164, 165 Domestic slave, 157, 158, 166

E Economism, 38, 39, 53, 54, 198, 207, 208 Economistic, 184, 186–188, 191 Effect of representation of unity, 249 Egypt, 211, 212 Enclosures, 77, 78 Encounter (Althusser), 50 Engels, Friedrich, 63, 72, 76, 88, 90, 91, 96, 100, 162, 183, 185, 186, 192, 193 England, 243 Enlightened despotism, 76 Essence, 142

INDEX

Estates, 52, 53, 68–71, 73–75, 81, 82, 110, 119, 120, 125–128 Estates-General, 115, 118, 121–123, 125, 126 Europe, 241–243, 247, 248, 250, 251 Execution, 221, 236

F Family, 21, 22 Faure, Alain, 93, 97 Fausto, Ruy, 176, 177 Federation of Workers’ Associations of Paris, 92 Feminist struggle, 13 Feudal law, 66, 68, 69, 71, 120, 156 Feudal mode of production, 78, 159 Feudal monarchy, 118, 120, 121, 126 Feudal nobility, 118, 120–123, 125, 126, 130 Feudal production relations, 64–66, 68, 76, 77, 83 Feudal state, 37, 62, 64–67, 69, 70, 75, 78–83, 117, 118, 125, 127, 128 Feudal tributes, 160 Finley, Moses, 157, 243 Foignet, René, 68, 70, 162 Foucault, Michel, 15–33 Fourier, Charles, 203 France, 243 Franco-Prussian War, 93, 97, 102 Fraser, Nancy, 11–13 Free peasants, 242, 243 Freiermuth, Jean-Claude, 93, 97 French Revolution, 107, 108, 114–116, 120, 124, 125 Freud, Sigmund, 57 Furet, François, 124

255

G Gallas, Alexander, 9 Germany, 213 Giddens, Anthony, 33 Gorender, Jacob, 158, 161–163 Goubert, Pierre, 74 Gounot, Emmanuel, 175 Gramsci, Antonio, 25, 32 Greece (classical era), 157 Grievance Books, 122 Guesde, Jules, 113 H Hayek, Friedrich, 234 Hegel, Georg Wilhelm Friedrich, 39–43, 46, 55, 62, 109 Hegemony, 126 Higher order, 241, 243, 244 Hilferding, Rudolf, 219 Hill, Christopher, 65, 79 Hincker, François, 65, 80 Historical materialism, 38–40 Hobsbawm, Eric, 42 I Ideology, 21, 23, 25–27, 32, 138, 140, 148, 240 citizenship, 247 Imperialism central countries, 211 dependent countries, 209 neo-colonialism, 210 peripheral countries, 209, 210 periphery, 209, 212–214 uneven development, 209 Imperialist powers, 210, 211, 214 Imperialist system, 209, 210, 212, 214 India, 211 Institutionally concentrated (power), 15, 20

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INDEX

Institutionally diffuse (power), 18, 20 Insurrection, 155, 166, 178 International Workingmen’s Association (IWA), 88, 89, 92, 95–99, 102 Isolation effect, 231, 232, 249 Italy, 199

J Jaurès, Jean, 113, 198, 202–205 Jessop, Bob, 9 Juridical-political structure, 38, 52, 62, 63, 65–67, 77, 82, 83

K Kautsky, Karl, 186, 187 Korsch, Karl, 173, 174 Koulischer, Joseph, 77

L Labor power, 136, 170, 177 Ladurie, Emmanuel Le Roy, 166 Laski, Harold, 198 Last stance of determination, 5, 6 Latin America, 209, 211, 247, 251 Lefebvre, Georges, 108, 113–121, 123–125, 127–130, 203 Legal equality, 245, 250 Legal inequality, 245 Legitimists, 140–145 Lemarchand, Guy, 70, 79, 119 Lenin, Vladmir, 23, 24, 108, 109, 111–117, 122, 126, 132 Liberalism, 135, 145 Lipset, Seymour Martin, 186 Lockwood, David, 219, 220, 224, 235 Lower estates, 243 Lower order, 242–244 Loyseau, Charles, 71

Lukács, Georg, 187, 188, 191, 192 Lumpenproletariat, 110 Luxemburg, Rosa, 107, 108

M Machines, 169 Manual work, 224–226, 233, 234 Manual worker, 208, 217, 220, 221, 224, 225, 227, 230–232, 235, 237 Mao, Zedong, 108–110, 113, 121, 122 Marshall, T.H., 155, 247 Martinet, Gilles, 235 Marxism–Marxist sociology, 219 Marx, Karl, 17–20, 22–24, 26, 29, 38–42, 63, 72, 78, 87–92, 96, 98–102, 105, 135–137, 139, 141–148, 152, 154, 177, 185, 192, 193, 226, 231, 244, 245, 251 Capital , 244 criticism of the Gotha program, 226 The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte, 135, 137, 140 Value, Price and Profit , 152, 177 Mercantilism, 64, 76–78 Meritocracy, 224, 225, 228–230, 232, 233, 235, 236 Meritocratic ideology, 217, 223–226, 228–233, 236 Meritocratic unionism, 233–235 Mexico, 209, 211 Middle-class unionism, 217, 218, 229, 230, 234, 235 Miliband, Ralph, 8, 22 Mill, John Stuart, 135, 145–147, 246 Mills, Wright, 219, 220, 224 Mode of production–structure, 153 Mozambique, 211

INDEX

N Nation, 249 National Guard, 88, 94, 95 National liberation, 210 Nation-state, 245, 247 New technologies, 208 New type of democracy, 100, 101 Nicaragua, 209, 211 Nietzsche, Friedrich, 20 Nobility, 68, 70, 71, 74, 79, 83 Non-manual work, 224–226 Non-manual worker, 208

O Offe, Clauss, 187 Office workers, 218, 221, 222, 227 Old regime, 115, 127 Orders, 38, 45, 52, 53, 68, 70, 71, 73, 119, 120, 123, 241, 242, 244–246, 248–251 Original contradiction, 55 Orleanists, 140–145 Owen, Robert, 203

P Parain, Charles, 157, 158, 162, 164, 165, 178, 179 Paris Commune, 55, 87–92, 95, 97–101, 105 Parisian District Committees, 117, 120 Paris Union Chambers, 95 Parsons, Talcott, 33 Pashukanis, Evgeni, 24, 25 Peasant breach, 159, 165 Peasant movement, 214 Peasant revolt, 117, 127 Peasants bound to the land, 243 People-nation, 64, 68, 73, 171 Philosophy of history, 39, 40, 43–45

257

Plebeian/Plebeians, 81, 82, 118, 119, 122, 123, 126, 128 Political change, 107, 109, 113, 132 Political crisis, 107–111, 113, 114, 131 Political process, 107, 109–111, 114, 124, 131 Political representation, 147 Political scene, 135–140, 142, 145–148 Political scene in capitalist societies, 136–138, 141, 145 Political theory, 3, 8, 10, 11 Pontalis, Jean-Bertrand, 57 Popular movement, 211, 240, 248, 251 Porchenev, Boris, 65 Portuguese Revolution, 210 Poulantzas, Nicos, 3–10, 24, 25, 61–69, 73, 75–77, 80, 83, 170, 171, 223, 231, 249 Power–dual power, 117, 127, 129 Pre-capitalist societies, 137 Problematic, 19, 39, 40, 45, 46, 48–50, 52, 56 Production relations, 37, 41, 42, 44, 51, 52, 58, 155, 156, 159, 166, 170, 185, 190, 192, 196 Productive forces, 40–42, 44, 46, 56, 152, 154–156, 159, 160, 168, 169, 172, 196 Productive forces–development, 196 Productive forces (development of), 41–44, 51, 54, 55, 58 Professional corporatism, 233 Proletarianization, 218, 232 Proletariat, 177 Public sector, 217, 219, 229 R Rawls, John, 135, 145, 146 Reformative struggle, 197

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INDEX

Reformism, 212 Relational wage, 233, 235 Repression, 19, 21, 23, 31, 32 Rerum Novarum, 176 Revolution bourgeois-democratic, 209 popular-democratic, 209 types of, 207, 209 Revolutionary crisis, 178 Revolutionary crisis of 1789, 117 Revolutionary era, 115 Revolutionary movement, 210, 214 Revolutionary political crisis, 108 Revolutionary situation, 192 Revolution in China, 211 Revolution of 1789, 114, 115, 124 Revolution of 1848, 139, 146 Revolution of 1905, 108, 117 Rodrigues, Leôncio Martins, 187 Rome (classical era), 157, 158, 164, 179 Rougerie, Jacques, 89, 90, 92, 95, 96, 102–104 Rumiantsev, Alexei, 221 Rural slave, 155–159, 162, 164–166, 169, 178, 179 Russian revolution, 117, 185, 210

S Salary hierarchy, 233 Sans-culottes , 92, 93 Santos, Ronaldo, 167, 168 School, 22, 26–28, 32, 33 Schumpeter, Joseph, 135, 147 Schwartz, Stuart, 167 Second and Third Internationals, 152 Second Empire, 92–94, 97, 98 Second International, 184, 187 Serf/Serfs, 52, 119, 136 Serfdom, 71–73 Serf peasants bound to the land, 156

Slave, 136, 152, 154–167, 169, 170, 178, 179 Slave law, 161, 162 Slave mode of production, 156–159, 165, 166, 168, 178 Soboul, Albert, 72, 76, 79, 103, 117, 120, 121, 124, 126, 242, 250 Social class, 24 active class, 190, 193 bourgeois fractions, 189 bourgeoisie, 110, 114, 119, 138, 196, 213 class consciousness, 187, 188, 193 class for itself, 188, 197 class fractions, 110 class in itself, 188, 197 class interests, 147 class struggle, 196, 197 corporatism, 190 dominant, 242 dominated class, 189, 190 feudal lords, 119 fractions, 138–141, 145, 147 lumpenproletariat, 139 middle class, 210, 212, 214, 217–219, 227, 232 middle-class fractions, 233, 235, 236 national bourgeoisie, 199, 205, 210, 212, 214 new petty bourgeoisie, 223 peasantry, 110, 138, 210, 212 peasants, 115 petty bourgeoisie, 110, 138, 196, 203, 210, 212 potential existence, 193 proletariat, 140, 148, 192, 193, 195, 196, 198–202, 204, 206, 213 ruling class, 189 socialist consciousness, 191 struggle, 112, 122

INDEX

theory, 183, 187, 219, 221 working class, 110, 125, 183, 187, 188, 190, 191, 198, 199, 201–203, 205, 207, 208, 210, 213, 214, 218–225, 227, 228, 231, 237 Social formation, 47, 48, 52, 53, 241–244 Socialism, 38, 39, 46, 51, 54, 55 Socialist movement, 137, 184–186, 207, 208 Socialist revolution, 39, 208, 211 Socialization of political power, 100, 105 Socialization of the means of production, 222, 236 Socially diffuse (power), 17, 18, 28 Social stratification, 220, 224 Sombart, Werner, 185, 186 Soviet Union, 209, 211, 212 Spirit of a people, 41 Staerman, E.M., 158, 164 State, 15–33 national, 211 welfare state, 210, 211, 213, 214, 247, 249–251 State crisis, 128 State in general-extinction, 101 Status, 218, 220 Ste. Croix, G.E.M. de, 179 Strikes, 93, 153, 173, 178, 218, 234 Structural reading of Marxism (Althusser), 4 Sturmthal, Adolf, 219 Surface reality, 135, 136, 143, 144 Surplus labor, 163, 167, 171, 241, 242, 244 T Theory of elites, 135, 145–148 Theory of history, 38–40, 42, 47, 49, 55–57

259

Theory of transition, 49, 50 Third Estate, 117, 119, 122–128, 242, 243 Third International, 184, 185, 187 Thompson, E.P., 176, 193 Tocqueville, Alexis de, 74, 83, 135, 146, 245–247 Tombs, Robert, 89, 90 Transition, 61–63, 76, 77, 79, 80, 82, 83 Transition from capitalism to socialism, 52 Transition from feudalism to capitalism, 48, 52 Tributes, 119, 120 Trotsky, Leon, 107–109

U Union action, 152 Unionism, 152, 153, 161, 177, 178, 217–219, 229, 230, 232–236 Union struggle, 197 United States, 185, 186, 209, 210, 212–214 Universal Spirit, 40, 41, 43, 44 Upper estate, 242 USSR, 210, 212

V Venality of offices, 74, 75 Vernant, Jean-Pierre, 158, 178, 179 Vietnam, 211 Villey, Michel, 68, 161

W Wage, 170, 172, 177 Wage work, 177 Wage worker, 167, 172, 174, 175, 218, 219, 222–224, 235 Weber, Max, 21, 47, 80, 220, 224

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INDEX

White collars, 219, 220 Winstanley, 91 Work contract, 172–174 Workers’ government, 88, 89, 92, 99, 103 Workers’ movement, 202, 210, 214, 248, 251 Workers’ power, 87, 91

Workers’ resistance, 151 Workers’ revolution, 88, 89, 91 Workers’ unionism, 230, 234, 235 Working class, 88–93, 95, 96, 100, 104 Work situation, 227–229, 232, 236 World War II, 210–212