Las dimensiones del campo institucional

The hopeful orientation, given with the prediction of a developing potential and need for revolution is, as we have seen, premised on the theory of the deepening and expanding contradiction inherent in civil society. The characteristics of the proletariat are, from the start, determined by the problematic of the actualisation of universality on

Social Justice 6 (Fall-Winter 1976), 5–16.

267 Ibid. For a broader historical outline of these issues, see Peter Linebaugh, The Magna Carta Manifesto: Liberties and Commons for All (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 2009).

268 Marx, “A Contribution to the Critique of Hegel’s Philosophy of Right. Introduction,” 248.Ibid.

269 Cf. appendix 1.5.

the level of society. For such an agency to be possible, a collective subject sharing needs and interests must be able to cohere. The proletariat is the answer to the need and interest of philosophy in finding an agent of the actualisation of freedom, a 'universal representative' of society, whose claims can be the claims of society itself.²⁷⁰ For Marx, the proletarian revolution is not an invariable possibility of bourgeois society. Instead, it relies on the creation of a class with radical rather than particular needs, that is a class whose interest is the expression not just of its own position, but of the whole of society.

Marx contrasts this with the merely particular character of the French revolutions.

Unlike the classes in France who through the revolutions of 1789 and 1830 became for-themselves, he considers the proletariat to be the 'passive element' of a German revolution. The proletariat is the name of the pure possibility of revolution, situated in the problem of the impoverished and exploited masses. It not a class in the usual sense, but a 'radical class', in Marx's terms. This class is universal, because it embodies the 'universal offence', 'a general limitation', and the 'notorious crime of the whole of society.'²⁷¹ This mass is the general negativity of society; it claims no particular right because it suffers wrong in general, its claim is not historical but 'merely human', suffering a 'total loss of humanity' in the nakedness of its existence.²⁷² The passivity of this element is not a passivity of its members, but the passivity of the class as a class, the masses produced by the 'emergent industrial movement', living not 'natural' but 'artificially produced poverty'.²⁷³ The concept of the proletariat does not correspond to the needs of an already existing and given population, but to the possibility of the conjunction of two needs, those of philosophy and those of a class in formation.²⁷⁴

Two readings suggest themselves forcefully here: this proletariat is not, contrary to how it has often been conceived, a sociological category (a class in the classical sense) naming a positively existing and productive population. Instead, it is the name of a certain embodied negativity vis-a-vis society, a mass that is a necessary exception to the social order, similarly to Hegel's rabble: 'The emergence of poverty is in general a consequence of civil society, and on the whole it arises necessarily out of it... A rabble arises chiefly in a developed civil society.'²⁷⁵ Second, it is precisely this negativity that

270 Marx, “A Contribution to the Critique of Hegel’s Philosophy of Right. Introduction,” 254.Marx, “A Contribution to the Critique of Hegel’s Philosophy of Right. Introduction,” 254.

271 Ibid., 254.

272 Ibid., 256 273 Ibid.

274 Ibid., 252, 254

275 Hegel, Philosophy of Right, 453, addition to §244. On Balibar's insistence on the need for reading the proletariat as both mass and class, see appendix 3.4.

makes the proletariat universal, the negative truth of society. These readings contain an important critique of the long tradition of substantialist, essentialist Marxist conceptions of the proletariat. However, I will briefly outline below how the evacuation of all proletarian positivity is in fact what enables Marx to develop the well-known more substantialist account. The problems with both conceptions will lead us to propose a more materialist theory of the problem of the proletariat in chapters 4-7.We will now examine the purely negative account of the proletariat.

Stathis Kouvelakis has pointed out that the proletariat first emerges in Marx's writings as a 'paradoxical protagonist' devoid both of the sociological substantiality and Feuerbachian positivity that was characteristic of the contemporary Engels' study of the Condition of the English Working Class.²⁷⁶ He productively interprets the proletariat, as presented in the 1844 Introduction, as 'the void that is constitutive of the existing order', and 'lacks any transcendent “guarantee”', and thus 'confronts that society with its own impossibility, its pure difference.'²⁷⁷ Such manoeuvres, which make it possible to reaffirm class antagonism and totality without invoking a positive communist project (in Kouvelakis' words, '[t]he problematic of the radical revolution and the constitution of the proletariat poses politics as permanent revolution'), had a certain strategic importance as levers against first Stalinist and then liberal triumphalism in the post-1979 and 1989 epoch (to choose two dates marking the exhaustion and end of the twentieth-century circle of struggles) – for instance, think of the political adoption of Lacan in Laclau, Mouffe and Žižek. While Kouvelakis' argument – which clearly draws on the early Žižek – usefully demonstrates the impossibility of a closure or 'suture' of the social totality, we get a sense of its limits through the simple question: who claimed this possibility of closure or homoeostasis in the first place? Clearly the negation here stays invested in the organicist conception it rejects. Take away the organicism and you lose the critique. In short, it operates as a critique of the fantasy of the closure of a more conservative organistic philosophy. This reading, while productive, functions primarily in the mode of ideology critique.

Furthermore, this underdetermination of the problem of the proletariat is exactly what lends a certain universality to its negativity. The capacity of the proletariat to carry the

276 Kouvelakis, Philosophy and Revolution, 329–30.Ibid.

277 Marx, “A Contribution to the Critique of Hegel’s Philosophy of Right. Introduction,” 256.Ibid.

Ernesto Laclau and Chantal Mouffe, Hegemony and Socialist Strategy: Towards a Radical Democratic Politics, 2nd ed (London: Verso, 2001); Slavoj Žižek, The Sublime Object of Ideology, The Essential Žižek (London: Verso, 2008).

abstract humanism of philosophy is premised on the erasure of its positive traits. Frank Ruda thus argues that the pure indeterminacy of the dehumanised masses is what makes them most generically human, i.e. least marked by mere particularity, most capable of the 'universal production' of species-essence.²⁷⁸ Unlike the 'working class', a term only adopted by Marx slightly later on, particularly from Engels, the proletariat is not a positive socio-economic determination of the social whole, but an excess or residue with respect to the organisation of society, a notion of the impossibility of the closure of the social whole, in short an 'inorganic element' – as Marx writes, without a claim on history, it has only a claim on humanity.²⁷⁹ Thus the proletarian revolution is not the mere revolution of a class affirming itself, but the 'total redemption of humanity' at the point of 'society's acute disintegration.'²⁸⁰ Whilst there is much to this reading of species-essence as purely generic and a principle of infinite differentiation, the question of how this potentiality is actualised remains unanswered in Marx's as well as Ruda's text. Like Agamben's homo sacer, which Ruda refers to, the tabula rasa of dehumanised humanity easily becomes a pure inscription-surface for the ideas of the philosopher.

Marx's pedagogico-political self-understanding shines through in the gendered metaphors with which he describes this paradoxical actualisation of the non-body of the proletariat: the material weapons of the proletariat must be supplied by the intellectual weapons of philosophy. If the lightning of thought 'struck deeply into this virgin soil of the people, emancipation will transform the Germans into men.'²⁸¹

The head of this emancipation is philosophy, its heart the proletariat.

Philosophy cannot realize itself without the transcendence [Aufhebung] of the proletariat, and the proletariat cannot transcend itself without the realization [Verwirklichung] of philosophy.²⁸²

In the universal victim the philosopher finds a muted body-without-mind that can be spiritualised and moved only by philosophy and the basest of physiological needs. The actuality of revolution only comes about through the combination of the trajectory of philosophy with that of the proletariat, a combination focused around the metaphor of the life-giving lightning. This actualisation takes the form of a paradoxical idealist

278 Ruda, Hegel’s Rabble, 172.

279 Frank Ruda convincingly connects Marx’s introduction of the proletariat to Hegel’s notion of the rabble. Ibid., 170.

280 Marx, “A Contribution to the Critique of Hegel’s Philosophy of Right. Introduction,” 252.

281 Ibid., 257.

282 Ibid.

reversal: it is not the actualisation of real potentialities, but the actualisation of a potential precisely because this potential has been absolutely curbed, a body redemptive because crucified, as it were. If what is struggling is the human species, not understood as one particular class in a social body, but precisely in its inorganicity and negativity as an excretion of that society, then it is 'nothing' and yet it 'must be everything.'²⁸³ The relative socio-economic pauperisation of the proletariat becomes an absolute poverty in comparison with the infinite potentiality of the human species as revealed in the abstract infinity imputed to God and experienced in the false infinity of the expansion of capital.²⁸⁴ There is in this negative proletariat something like a Christology, a kind of kenosis, an emptying out which leads to the absolute receptivity to the message of philosophy.²⁸⁵ Just as the Messiah is always a figure of theological orientation, the proletariat is an orientating figure of radical philosophy. But whereas theology pushes the Messiah ahead of it into an unknown future, radical philosophy looks in the present for the potentiality of the realisation of freedom. What will be a Messiah is now a mass whose historical mission must be communicated to it from without, or for whose uprising the prophet philosopher must wait silently. The proletariat thus takes the form of the male fantasy of the feminine body, which can give birth to all of humankind, but can only do so passively and under the condition of her impregnation by philosophy.

The idea that the actualisation of freedom can only come about through an embodiment of spirit and a spiritualisation of the body attests to the experience of their separation and a desire to reunite them which is common among thinkers friendly to the events of 1789. Another figure is perhaps more useful to look at from the point of view of the question of organisation. Think of the logic of Mary Shelley's Frankenstein – The Modern Prometheus for one, a logic very much with us in Marx's discourse above.²⁸⁶ This analogy opens for a consideration of the separation and daily sacrifice of proletariat, as the bodies of which a monster might be composed. The question becomes how two 'inorganic' and radically negative elements of society, the radical intellectual

283 Ibid., 254

284 Cf. Feuerbach, appendix 2.3.

285 It is tempting to take this kenosis, Entäusserung in the translation of Luther and Hegel, as the moment where – like Christ at Calvary – the proletariat empties itself of the particularity of its own suffering and universalises it. We are here reminded of the last paragraph of the Phenomenology of Spirit, where comprehended history (the unity of contingency and comprehended organisation) internalises this suffering 'as the actuality, truth and certainty of his own throne, without which he would be lifeless and alone'. G. W. F. Hegel, Phenomenology of Spirit, trans. A. V. Miller, New Ed (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1977), 493

286 For a reading of the proletariat as a monster along the model of Mary Shelley's Frankenstein, see David McNally, Monsters of the Market (Chicago: Haymarket Books, 2012).

and the dispossessed masses, can combine and organise themselves into a new social body. But this concept of idealisation or spiritualisation fails to consider organisation and rationality as immanent and emergent. It appears the problem is not so much the empty negativity of the proletariat as the problem of the isolation of the philosopher from the proletariat, which makes it appear unthinking. Marx himself implicitly questioned this conception, which repeated the organicist non-critique of the division of labour between 'hands' and 'head', as early as 1844 when he hailed the rebellious Silesian weavers, and metonymically the German proletariat as such, as the 'theoretician of the European proletariat'.²⁸⁷

The negative conception of the proletariat importantly stresses the truth of antagonism in bourgeois society, and thus the truth of partisan orientation within it. It does so against the flat sociological conception of classes according to which there are only particular interests, and the bourgeois foreclosure of antagonism and its reduction of all conflict to negotiable conflicts between particular interests. The proletariat is the universal truth of bourgeois society both in its sacrifice and its thinking. However, how does this orientate revolutionary practice? It merely holds up the image of enforced impotentiality on the one side, and full self-actualisation on the other, a real suffering contrasted with an utopian image. In the absence of a concept of practices of organisation and actualisation, the only actualisation of communism possible is messianic.

The need for a concept of a force which would be able not just to destroy a world, but to actualise itself and build a new world leads Marx to retain the concept of the infinite productivity of the species (which was later transformed into the affirmation the productivity of the working class against the lumpenproletariat).²⁸⁸ Moving beyond the purely negative definition of the proletariat, Marx began to study the world-building capacity of the workers under the impression of Feuerbach's concept of the human species-essence. In other words, he became critically interested in the productive actuality of the workers, not the pure possibility, or indeterminacy of the species, but the effective, developing potentiality of the working proletariat. Where money and the wealth of civil society are merely the products and representations of the workers, the task is to find it as the basis of both the workers and the unemployed the common

287 Marx, Early Writings, 415.

288 For Engels' and Marx's position on the lumpenproletarian, and the problem of lumpen 'parasitism', see appendices 3.5.-3.6.

productive power. Whereas for Hegel the division between the rabble and the employed producers is produced by the tendency of the activity of civil society to specialised and limit work,²⁸⁹ Sismondi, whom Marx studied in Paris in 1844,²⁹⁰ had already in 1819 insisted that, in the words of Marx, '[t]he Roman proletariat lived at the expense of society, while modern society lives at the expense of the proletariat.'²⁹¹ From here on, Marx became interested in how the workers produce both civil society and their own poverty. Where Hegel had seen the rabble as a product of civil society, Marx reversed Hegel's formula, just as he had reversed the relation between the sovereign and the people (chapter 2).²⁹²