Fragments, 1933–1938

The situation in which we find ourselves is of an unprecedented gravity. The most progressive and best organized proletariat in the world has not only been vanquished, but has capitulated without resistance. This is the second time in twenty years. During the war, our elders could still hope that the Russian proletariat, by its magnificent uprising, was going to rouse the European workers. In our case, nothing entitles us to entertain similar hopes; there is no sign anywhere heralding some future victory capable of compensating for the crushing and unopposed defeat of the German workers. Never before, perhaps, since a working-class movement first started, has the relative balance of forces been so unfavourable to the proletariat as today, fifty years after the death of Marx.

What remains to us of Marx, fifty years after his death? His doctrine is indestructible; each one can seek it out in his works and assimilate it by thinking it out anew; and although, nowadays, a few barren formulas devoid of any real significance are hawked about under the name of Marxism, there are yet a few militants who go back to the source. But despite the fact that Marx’s analyses possess a value that can never perish, the object of those analyses, namely, the society contemporary with Marx, no longer exists. Marxism can only remain something living on one condition, which is that the precious tool constituted by the Marxist method should come down from generation to generation without getting rusty, each generation making use of it in order to define the world in which it lives. This is what the pre-war generation understood, as Lenin’s pamphlet on imperialism and a number of German publications show. All that is, unfortunately, very sketchy. But what have we, the post-war generation, done in this respect? Judging from the literature of the working-class movement, one would say that nothing new had turned up since Marx and Lenin. And yet there is, “over one-sixth of the globe”, an economic régime whose like has never before been known or envisaged; in the rest of the world, paper money, inflation, the increasing role played by the State in the economy, rationalization and a host of other changes have come to modify, and possibly transform, economic relationships; for over four years we have been living through a crisis such as has never been known before. What do we know about all this As for myself, I cannot enumerate these questions without realizing, with a bitter feeling of shame, my own ignorance; and unfortunately there is not, as far as I know, anything in the literature of the working-class movement to entitle one to think that there are, at the present time, Marxists capable of resolving, or even of formulating clearly, the basic questions posed by the present economic set-up. That is why we must not be surprised if, fifty years after Marx’s death, Marxists themselves in fact treat politics as though they formed a separate field, having little connection with the field of economic facts. In the communist daily press, the division into classes which, in Marx, was meant to explain political phenomena by relationships of production, has become the source of a new mythology; the bourgeoisie, in particular, plays in it the role of a mysterious and maleficent divinity, which brings about the phenomena that are necessary to its purposes, and whose desires and subterfuges explain almost everything that happens. More serious communist literature does not altogether escape such nonsense, and this is true even among the opposition groups, even in certain of Trotsky’s analyses. And, of course, since the political conceptions are not based on economics and can no more progress in a vacuum than a bird could fly without air resistance, they are those that the years before and during the war have bequeathed us. The reformist tendency remains what it has always been; so does the anarchist ideology; revolutionary trade unionists dream about the old C.G.T.; orthodox and oppositional communists argue together as to which of them imitates more closely the Bolshevik party of before the war. All behave like beings deprived of consciousness as they go through this new period in which we are living, a period which cannot be defined by any of the analyses previously made, and in which it seems that only men’s bodies are alive, while their minds are still moving in the pre-war world that has disappeared.

II

The question of the social structure can be reduced to that of classes.

Up to now, history has only shown us societies divided up into classes, except for altogether primitive societies in which no differentiation has yet occurred. As soon as production has become a little developed, society is split into various categories which oppose each other and whose interests are at variance. The most striking opposition is that which exists between non-producers and producers, or, in other words, between exploiters and exploited; for the non-producers necessarily consume what is produced by others, and consequently exploit them. The mechanism of exploitation defines the social structure in each period. Moreover, it is obvious that a materialistic theory can never consider the exploiters as mere parasites; in every society divided up into classes, the exploiting of other people’s labour constitutes a social function, rendered possible and necessary by the productive mechanism in that society. And a classless society will only be possible if a form of production is achieved which excludes such a function. Besides, no society is ever divided merely into exploiters and exploited, but into several classes, each of which is defined by its relationship to the fundamental fact of exploitation.

Three principal forms of society based on exploitation are known in history: the slave system, the feudal system and the capitalist system. We find only one form of society without exploiters, namely primitive communism, associated with a thoroughly backward technique. The vital question for us is whether, at a higher level, with a highly developed technique, production without exploitation is once again possible. In order to formulate the question correctly, one must know how to study scientifically, not only the various social structures, but above all the transformations which replace one structure by another.

III

What is nowadays called, by a term which seems to invite a good deal of explanation, the class struggle is, of all the conflicts that set human groups at variance, the one with the most serious objective before it. And yet here also purely imaginary entities sometimes intrude themselves which make all guided action impossible, bring nearly all efforts to nought, and almost by themselves alone create the danger of undying hatreds, useless destructions and perhaps unlimited massacres. The struggle of those who obey against those who command, when the mode of commanding entails destroying the human dignity of those underneath, is the most legitimate, most motivated, most genuine action that exists. There has always been this struggle, because those who command always tend, whether they realize it or not, to trample underfoot the human dignity of those below them; the function of commanding, in so far as it is exercised, cannot, save in exceptional circumstances, respect human qualities in the person of executive agents. If its exercise arouses no opposition, it inevitably comes to be exercised as if men were things, albeit exceptionally flexible and manageable things; for when man is under menace of death, which is in the last resort the supreme sanction of all authority, he can become far easier to handle than inanimate matter.

As long as there is a social hierarchy, be that hierarchy what it may, those below will have to struggle, and will struggle, in order not to lose all the rights of a human being. On the other hand, the resistance of those on top to the forces surging up from below, although it naturally invites less sympathy, is founded, at any rate, on concrete motives. In the first place, except in the case of a quite unusual generosity, the privileged necessarily prefer to keep their material and moral privileges intact. And, more especially, those invested with the functions of command have a mission to preserve that order which is indispensable to any social life, and the only possible order in their eyes is the established order. Up to a certain point they are right, for until a new order is in fact set up, no one can affirm that it will be possible; that is precisely why any social progress—great or small—is only possible if the pressure from below is strong enough actually to impose new conditions on social relationships. Thus, between the pressure from below and the resistance from above an unstable balance is continually being established, and it is this which defines at each moment the structure of a given society. However, the encounter of these two opposing forces does not constitute a war, even if here and there a little bloodshed occurs. It is bound to be marked by anger, but not hatred. It may develop into a process of extermination on one side or the other, or on both sides; but then this means that it has changed its nature, and that men’s minds have lost sight of the real objects of the struggle, whether because their minds are paralysed by a blind desire for vengeance, or because the intrusion of entities devoid of meaning gives the illusion—always a mistaken one—that a balance is impossible. There is then a catastrophe; but such catastrophes are avoidable. Antiquity has not only bequeathed us the story of the interminable and pointless massacres around Troy, but also the story of the energetic and pacific action by which the Roman plebeians, without spilling a drop of blood, emerged from a condition bordering on slavery and obtained, as the guarantee of their newly-won rights, the institution of the tribunate. It was in precisely the same way that the French workers, by their pacific occupation of the factories,[3] imposed paid holidays, guaranteed wages and workers’ delegates.

It is impossible to enumerate all the empty abstractions which today falsify the social struggle, certain of which are in danger of causing it to degenerate into a civil war fatal to both camps. There are too many of them. We can take only one example. Thus, what is going on in the minds of those for whom the word “capitalism” represents absolute evil? We are living under a system that carries with it sometimes crushing forms of coercion and oppression; very painful inequalities; hosts of useless sufferings. On the other hand, this system is economically characterized by a certain relationship between the production and circulation of goods and between the circulation of goods and money. To what precise extent do these two relationships condition the sufferings in question? To what extent are these due to other causes? To what extent would they be alleviated or aggravated by the setting up of this or that other system? If the problem were to be approached on this basis, we might be able perhaps to discern approximately to what extent capitalism is an evil. As we remain in ignorance on these points, we ascribe all the sufferings we have to undergo or that we observe around us to a few economic phenomena, which are, moreover, continually changing, and which we crystallize arbitrarily in an abstraction impossible to define. In the same way, a worker arbitrarily ascribes all the sufferings he undergoes in the factory to his boss, without asking himself whether under any other system of property the management would not still saddle him with a part of his sufferings or even aggravate some of them; in his case, the struggle “agin the boss” gets mixed up with the irrepressible protest of the human being weighed down by too difficult living conditions. In the other camp, an identical ignorance is responsible for causing all who contemplate the ending of capitalism to be looked upon as agitators, because it is not known to what extent and on what condition the economic relationships that at present constitute capitalism can rightly be considered as necessary to order. Thus the struggle between the opponents and defenders of capitalism is one between blind men; the efforts of the antagonists, on either side, are simply clasping empty space; which is why this struggle is in danger of becoming merciless.

The hunting down of imaginary entities in all spheres of political and social life thus appears as a task necessary in the interests of public health. The effort of clarification with the object of deflating the causes of imaginary conflicts bears no resemblance to the activities of those who use hypnotic charm in an effort to stifle genuine conflicts. It is in fact the exact opposite. The smooth talkers who, while preaching international peace, understand by that expression the indefinite maintenance of the status quo to the exclusive advantage of the French State; those who, while recommending social peace, are determined to preserve privileges intact, or at any rate to make any modification dependent on the goodwill of those who enjoy such privileges—such people are the worst enemies of international and civil peace. To discriminate between imaginary antagonisms and genuine antagonisms, to cast discredit on empty abstractions and analyse concrete problems—that, if our contemporaries were to consent to such an intellectual effort, would be to diminish the risks of war without forgoing struggle which, according to Heraclitus, is the condition of life.

[3] June 1936.

IV

Marxism is the highest spiritual expression of bourgeois society. Through it this society attained to a consciousness of itself, in it to a negation of itself. But this negation in its turn could only be expressed in a form determined by the existing order, in a bourgeois form of thought. So it is that each formula of Marxist doctrine lays bare the characteristics of bourgeois society, but at the same time justifies them. By dint of developing a criticism of the capitalist system of economy, Marxism ended by providing the laws of this same economic system with broad foundations; opposition to bourgeois politics ended by claiming for itself the possibility of achieving the old ideal of the bourgeoisie—that ideal which it has realized only in an ambiguous, formal and purely legalistic manner—but of achieving it by fighting against the bourgeoisie, in a truly concrete and more consistent way than the latter; the doctrine which in the beginning was to have served to destroy all ideologies by laying bare the interests which they concealed became itself transformed into an ideology, which was later to be misused for the purpose of deifying the interests of a certain class of bourgeois society.

Thus the same phenomenon has been repeated as at the time when the youthful bourgeoisie began its struggle against feudal and ecclesiastical society. To begin with, it had to cloak its opposition in the religious accoutrements of that same society, and, in order to combat the Church, to claim kinship with primitive Christianity. In the course of its struggle against the two other orders, the bourgeoisie came to recognize the fact that it formed a distinct order, and thereby showed that, despite its opposition to the feudal system, it was conscious of forming an integral part of it (exactly in the same way as the class-consciousness of the modern proletariat, which has arisen to compensate for an unsatisfied propensity to own property, is simply the manifestation of the bourgeois spirit animating proletarians; for the fact of thinking in terms of classes is precisely characteristic of bourgeois society).

The bourgeoisie was only able to free itself of this religious, ecclesiastical and feudal ideology in proportion as feudal society fell into decadence. But it only purified the representation of God of the dross that had accumulated around it since the time when there had been a natural economy; it fashioned for itself a sublimated God who was no longer anything but a transcendent Reason, preceding all events and determining the direction they were to take. In Hegel’s philosophy, God still appears, under the name of “world spirit”, as mover of history and lawgiver of nature. It was not until after accomplishing its revolution that the bourgeoisie recognized in this God a creation of man himself, and that history is man’s own work.

It was Ludwig Feuerbach who clearly formulated this idea; but he was incapable of explaining how it is that “man” comes to make history. For only a mixture of actions can proceed from a juxtaposing of men considered simply as natural beings, but not a regular and ascending development of humanity. Marx’s primary and decisive discovery consisted simply in that he went beyond Feuerbach’s abstract man and began seeking for the explanation of the historical process in cooperation between individuals, in union and struggle, in the manifold “relationships” that exist between them. However, this progress in thought is still being paid for now, from another point of view, by an unconscious regression. Karl Marx only managed to rise above Feuerbach’s isolated “human being” by re-introducing into history, under the name of “society”, the God whom Feuerbach had eliminated from it.

Indeed, Marx begins by presenting the new divinity to us in harmless form, as the “totality of social relationships”, that is to say as the union of all individual relationships between concrete and active men. He emphasizes on more than one occasion that these “relationships” are, of course, empirical products of human activity, that their “totality”, if one absolutely insists on giving a special name to the changing relations which act as a bond of union between active men, must be regarded simply as an abbreviated term designating the result of the historical process. But the deeper Marx’s analysis penetrates into the course of history and economic laws, the more his point of view is modified, until, surprisingly, the “collectivity” becomes an hypostasis, the condition of individual actions, an “essence” which “appears” in men’s action and thought and is “realized” in their activity. It constitutes, by the side of the “private” sphere of bourgeois individualism, a separate sphere, that of the “general”, and, in its capacity as an independent substance, forms the basis of the first; for example, the value of a product is already determined by it, before becoming “realized” in the actual, empirical market price. And under a socialist system, too, there will still be a certain separation between the two spheres. One has only to consider the formula: “individual property on the basis of a collective possession of the land and of the means of production”, the formula which defines the future economic order in a well-known passage of Capital. The distinction between a general and an individual sphere is here expressly formulated; but it is only possible to visualize a “collective possession” if one regards the collectivity as a particular substance, soaring above individuals and acting through them.

If all this is disputed, one has but to examine closely the Marxist formula: social existence determines consciousness. There are more contradictions in it than words. Seeing that what is “social” can have an existence only in human minds, “social existence” is itself already consciousness; it cannot in addition determine a consciousness which would in any case remain to be defined. To posit in this way a “social existence” as a special determining factor, divorced from our consciousness, hidden no-one knows where, is to make a hypostasis of it; and it constitutes, furthermore, a beautiful example of Marx’s tendency towards dualism. But if one wants to consider this enigmatic “existence” as an element of the relationships between men, which depends on certain institutions, such as money, one will clearly perceive at once that this element operates only as a result of conscious acts performed by individuals, and consequently, far from determining consciousness, is dependent on it. Moreover, if Marx, as opposed to all the thinkers who preceded him, considers it necessary to set on one side a particular form of existence, which he calls “social”, it means that he tacitly places it in opposition to the rest of existence, that is to say nature.