Los estadios del desarrollo organizacional

In a few often overlooked paragraphs of the Philosophy of Right which have recently been given a central role in an important study by Frank Ruda,²⁴⁶ Hegel analyses the phenomenon that the poor – defined as those that lack the means to reproduce themselves ('natural means of acquisition' and 'bonds of kinship')²⁴⁷ – tend to become a

243 Ibid., 252.

244 On the concept of need in Marx, see appendix 3.2.

245 On the Roman genealogy of the concept of the 'proletariat', see appendix 3.4.

246 Frank Ruda, Hegel’s Rabble: An Investigation into Hegel’s Philosophy of Right (Continuum Publishing Corporation, 2011).

247 G. W. F. Hegel, Elements of the Philosophy of Right, ed. Allen W. Wood, trans. H. B. Nisbet, new

“rabble” (Pöbel), '[w]hen the activity of civil society is unrestricted, [and] occupied internally with expanding its population and industry.'²⁴⁸ The poor becomes a rabble when they fall out of the organic mediation of society, wage labour, and develop a subjectivity antagonistic to labour ('frivolous and lazy') and 'against the rich, against society, the government', etc.. Hegel describes this as a particular societal condition, not as natural poverty; it is thus a 'hardship … inflicted on this this or that class', which is a problem which 'torments modern societies especially.'²⁴⁹ The impoverished masses' refusal of work and the work ethic is produced by the lack of self-respect, motivation and skill produced by their initial expulsion from work, their unemployment itself.

However, putting them to work is no solution:

...their livelihood might be mediated by work … which would increase the volume of production; but it is precisely in overproduction and the lack of a proportionate number of consumers who are themselves productive that the evil consists … This shows that, despite an excess of wealth, civil society (bürgerliche Gesellschaft) is not wealthy enough – i.e. its own distinct resources are not sufficient – to prevent an excess of poverty and the formation of a rabble.²⁵⁰

While the problem of overproduction is theorised in its classical terms as one of excess and lack (underconsumption), the problem of the rabble is considered in terms of two excesses: excess wealth and excess poverty. Poverty is not merely a lack of wealth, but an excessive existence of an impoverished mass. This problem was not Hegel's discovery, and his originality can be exaggerated. Albert O. Hirschman claims that it is unlikely that Hegel – whose Philosophy of Right was published in 1820 – could have been aware of either Sismondi's theory of generalised overproduction, published in 1819, or Malthus' theory of over-population, published in 1820.²⁵¹ In any case, the central logic combining the dynamic antagonism of bourgeois society with the growth of the rabble is particularly interesting in Hegel because it is lodged within his systematic and dialectical understanding of the modern state. We can say that, in some sense, the methodological principle that the whole must be thought in its contradiction

ed. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991), 265 §241.

248 Ibid., 266, §243.

249 Ibid., 266f, §244.

250 Ibid., 267, §245.

251 Albert O. Hirschman, “On Hegel, Imperialism and Structural Stagnation,” in Journal of Development Economics 3 (1976), 3. For Sismondi's critique of Malthus, see appendix 3.3.

gave Hegel the sensitivity needed to appreciate the radicality of the relation between the production of wealth and of paupers, not just as a problem of civil society, but one for the state as well as the social body as such. Crucially, for Hegel the only remedies of this problem go against the very principles of civil society: poverty is a structural, we can say organic, feature of modern societies.

By establishing the insights developed in Hegel's rabble as the precondition of Marx's proposal of the proletariat, we can note that the problem of the proletariat is from its beginning – even if not introduced as such by Marx – not a purely economic or national one, but articulated with the state (in terms opening both to biopolitics and discipline), as well as with colonialism and globalising trade. Without noting the relation to Hegel's rabble, Étienne Balibar similarly notes that Marx's proletariat renders his orientation irreducible to the classical distinctions of nineteenth-century political thought:

state/society, politics/economics, public/private, etc.²⁵²

For Hegel, the problem of the rabble forces the state to intervene in civil society. Frank Ruda lists a number of such solutions, or ameliorations, to the problem of the rabble, arguing that they are all insufficient either for Hegel himself or for reasons of Hegelian logic:²⁵³ 1) There is the possibility that the poor can be taken care of by civil society itself. However, this contradicts the principle of civil society, which is accumulation; it makes civil society appear as a family, and annuls the need for labour as mediation in civil society. 2) The rabble could survive through public begging; however, this could instil in people the habit of not working and would also risk demoralising the working population, thus undermining a key principle of civil society, that of work. 3) The right of distress, i.e. the right to steal or withhold payment in a situation of urgent poverty.

This casts the poor as beasts, living and stealing from necessity rather than as free moral beings who can be required to respect the law. This contradicts both the principles of property and that of human freedom. 4) The problem of poverty could also be solved through the redistribution of labour. However, this means that the poor now produce what others would have produced; this either pushes the problem to other producers who become poor, or results in civil society producing too much; or both. 5) Another solution could lie in the corporation and its ethics (of responsible consumption). The corporations, Hegel's prototrade union,²⁵⁴ is an exclusive institution which only supports

252 Étienne Balibar, “In Search of the Proletariat,” in Masses, Classes, Ideas: Studies on Politics and Philosophy before and after Marx (New York: Routledge, 1994), 136.

253 Ruda, Hegel’s Rabble, 15ff.

254 Ibid., 22.

the poor it knows; paupers migrating from other countries will, in particular, be excluded from it. 6) The last solution to the problem of poverty is the classical one of the police, and, in combination with it, religion (in the form of charitable institutions).²⁵⁵ This criminalises the paupers without dealing with the causes of poverty, and charity, again, produces lazy asocial people, i.e. people whose relation to society is not mediated by money/labour, and therefore contradicts the principle of civil society.

So the rabble cannot be abolished without going against the principles of civil society (points 1-3), nor without displacing and thereby perpetuating the problem (4), nor through exclusive or superficial measures (5-6). Finally, Hegel mentions the possibility of exporting of surplus-commodities to countries with lower productivity ('which generally lag behind ... in creativity'), and of exporting the poor through colonization:²⁵⁶

Civil society is driven to establish colonies. The increase of population alone has this effect; but a particular factor is the emergence of a mass of people who cannot gain satisfaction for their needs by their work when production exceeds the needs of consumers.²⁵⁷

Hegel does not provide a critique here, but, as Ruda notes, colonisation is not a solution to the problem, but a temporary postponement which function through a logic of 'bad infinity'; in other words, it does not lead to the sustainable self-positing of civil society, but drives it ahead in an expansionary thrust which must end.²⁵⁸ Although Hegel does not allude to this end himself, it is clear that he must have been familiar with theories that posited a limit to the growth of civil society. Indeed, the issue of an end to growth, of the market, production and population, was a common theme to classical political economists.²⁵⁹ Adam Smith, one of Hegel's primary resources in matters of political economy, had, in fact, predicted that the demographic growth and expansionary tendencies of manufacture and trade would eventually exhaust themselves allowing capitalism to peacefully arrive to a stationary state.²⁶⁰ Furthermore, as Smith did notice the social misery produced as a necessary effect of capitalist development, he readily

255 Ibid, §242. Note that police at the time of Hegel referred to any administrative body taking care of public order, including sanitation, urban planning, poverty relief and ambulance services, as theorised in the Polizeiwissenchaft of Johann Heinrich Gottlob von Justi (1717-1771).

256 Hegel, Philosophy of Right, 269, §248.

257 Ibid.

258 Ruda, Hegel’s Rabble, 20.

259 Kenneth E. Boulding, “The Shadow of the Stationary State,” Daedalus 102, no. 4 (October 1, 1973), 89–101.

260 Ege Ragip and Jean-Daniel Boyer, “A Seminal Source for Kant and Hegel” (presented at the Annual Conference of the European Society for the History of Economic Thought, Thessaloniki, 2009).

proposed the solution that the government must ameliorate the situation.²⁶¹ Thus Hegel's solutions to the problem of the rabble can be read as mutually complimenting mediations which do not abolish the problem but ameliorate it, and, precisely by doing so, allow the perpetuation of the 'solutions', providing the state, religion, charity with an inextinguishable raison d'être.²⁶² This is how for Hegel the contradiction between civil society and the state, and the sacrifice of human beings, is normalised, ameliorated, and rendered both productive and reproductive through the state itself. The state thus appears as the commensuration of history, conceived reflexively, retrospectively, systemically.

Marx's initial response to this formula of history takes the form of a purely temporal manipulation, generally by suggesting that we are not yet at the end of history, and particularly by presenting Prussian development as retarded, a remnant of the past rather than a modern state. This gives us unfinished actualisation on two levels: the level of the species and that of the state. While both Marx and Hegel speak of antagonism within civil society, and a contradiction between civil society and the state, they diverge on two crucial points. First, Marx's above mentioned recognition of the disruptive character of the dynamism of bourgeois society differs from the contradictions identified by Hegel in The Philosophy of Right. In the latter text these contradiction are containable within the state and the solution to the problems of society is a stable one: 'the true reconciliation, which reveals the state as the image and actuality of reason, has become objective', whereas for Marx the contradiction tends towards becoming explosive.²⁶³ Second, Marx adopts the partisan orientation of the subjective intolerability of the proletarian condition.

The situation is thus unsustainable both subjectively and objectively. As the objective tendency is determinant, it renders it impossible to solve the problem of poverty within its current systemic solutions – state welfare, charity, and full employment. Without a theory of the deepening contradictions of capital, the problem of the proletariat would merely persist, with the estates, the police, charity and colonisation acting as a countervailing tendencies. The notion of the revolutionary potential of the proletariat is not merely premised on the fact that charity and state policy cannot abolish it, or that

261 See appendix 6.3.

262 For such an 'ethical' reading of Hegel, see Joel Anderson, “Hegel’s Implicit View on How to Solve the Problem of Poverty - The Responsible Consumer and the Return of the Ethical to Civil Society,”

in Beyond Liberalism and Communitarianism: Essays on Hegel’s Philosophy of Right, ed. Robert Williams (Albany, NY: SUNY Press, 2001), 185–205.

263 Hegel, Philosophy of Right, 380, §360.

such proposals contradict the principles of civil society as in Hegel, but the thesis of the tendential deepening of these contradictions, whose force is ultimately greater than that of the countervailing measures.

This allows Marx to retain a hopeful orientation premised on the progress of bourgeois society, albeit one progressing by its bad side. However, structuring history around such a narrative of progress, or, alternatively, basing politics solely on the unfolding tendency, easily entails a certain blindness to those 'sacrificed and abandoned' by the 'cunning of reason'; it involves a blindness with regards to those that are not part of the partisan “we” that can be considered to be on the good side of the bad side of history. To see but one example illustrating the question of proletarian reproduction outside the wage-relation, we will now turn back the clock six months to the autumn of 1842.