The Undivided Past Read online

  Their claims for the importance of class as the preeminent form of collective solidarity were breathtaking in their historical scope, and they were no less audacious in their insistence that it would be the working class that would eventually bring into being a new future that had to be struggled for and won, yet that was also, paradoxically, predestined and foreordained. But as many would-be revolutionaries would later discover, this analysis and these predictions raised more questions than they answered. Why did Marx and Engels believe class was the most potent and portentous of all forms of collective identity? What did they mean by class, how had it fulfilled, and how would it fulfill, the momentous historic tasks that the authors had assigned to it? Why and how did later leaders take up their call to bring about a revolution against the bourgeoisie and in the name of the proletariat? Did their triumphs, beginning in Russia in 1917, conform to the Marxist model of revolutionary working-class solidarity, ushering in the proletarian millennium and the classless society? In what ways did the subsequent global spread of Communism also come to influence how history was written, or rather rewritten, as the story of class identities? What has happened to these class-based solidarities, and to these class-cased accounts, since the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989? And when all is said and done, has class ever been the most important and influential form of collective human identity and consciousness in the ways that Marx and Engels and their disciples, both practical and academic, repeatedly insisted that it was?

  CLASS AS IDENTITY

  By the time they had been put forward so forcefully and influentially in The Communist Manifesto, claims that class was the preeminent form of human aggregation and awareness were scarcely novel. Albeit less stridently and polemically, similar views had been anticipated and advanced by British political economists such as Adam Smith and David Ricardo, by German philosophers such as Hegel and Feuerbach, and by French historians and social theorists such as Thierry, Guizot, and Saint-Simon.8 But Marx and Engels were the first to assert the much larger claim that class identity and class conflict were the keys to understanding everything significant that had happened in the past, that was going on in the present, and that would occur in the future. In so doing, they offered a wholly new perspective on collective solidarities, for by asserting the primacy of class, they directly challenged the conventional—albeit competing—wisdoms which held that religion, or the nation, were of paramount importance. Instead, Marx and Engels maintained that class was of much greater salience and significance, in part because it was a secular rather than a faith-based identity, which recognized the primacy of material interests and circumstances, and also because it was potentially a global solidarity, transcending the petty parochialisms of national loyalties and national boundaries.

  In prioritizing the conflicts of classes over the confrontations of creeds, Marx and Engels were also rejecting the assumptions and practices of their own families and their faiths. Both had been brought up in the North German Protestant tradition, Engels because his forebears subscribed to the aggressive form of Pietism characteristic of Barmen and its neighborhood, and Marx because his parents had converted from Judaism to Christianity. He himself had been baptized at the age of six, and his senior thesis at his gymnasium had been entitled “Religion: The Glue That Binds Society Together.”9 But from the mid-1830s to the mid-1840s, both men were caught up in the heated debates among German intellectuals as to whether Hegel had successfully reconciled philosophy and religion; independently, Marx and Engels concluded that he had not. By now self-confessed atheists, they came to despise religion as irrational and as an illusion and, even worse, as a hypocritical justification for the prevailing economic, social, and political inequality.10 Thus understood, Christianity was no more than a “bourgeois prejudice”: Engels deemed it “as full of holes as a sponge,” while Marx dismissed it as “the sigh of the oppressed creature, the heart of a heartless world, and the soul of soulless conditions.” In short, it was “the opium of the people”—a regrettable narcotic engendering superstition and delusion, rather than a significant basis for human belonging, aggregation, and identity.11

  Likewise, by insisting that the solidarities and conflicts of class were more significant than the unity and struggles of nations, Marx and Engels rejected such contemporary theorists of nationalism as Mazzini in Italy, and Fichte and Treitschke in Germany, and with them the evolving political culture (and political cult) of the nineteenth-century nation-state.12 They were prepared to concede that the bourgeoisie had helped to bring it into being, but as rootless, exiled, itinerant intellectuals, Marx (who would die a stateless person) and Engels (who spent more of his life in Britain than in Germany) were no more sympathetic to nations and nationalism than they were to the middle classes. They thought it more significant, and more hopeful, that in addition to creating the nation-state, the bourgeoisie had brought into being a more extensive and cosmopolitan capitalism, which had called forth what was—or what must eventually become—a more extensive and cosmopolitan proletariat. This was what Marx and Engels meant when they claimed, in The Communist Manifesto, that workers “had no country” and that their natural concerns were “the common interests of the entire proletariat, independent of all nationality.” “National differences,” they went on, “are daily vanishing, owing to the development of the bourgeoisie.… The supremacy of the proletariat will cause them to vanish still faster.”13 Or, as Marx would put it in a later Manifesto Addressed to the Working People of Austria, “the age of division into nationalities is past, the principle of nationality survives only on the agenda of reactionaries.… The labour market knows no national frontiers, world trade crosses all language barriers.”14

  In trying to understand, explain, and predict the evolution of past, present, and future solidarities and societies, Marx and Engels accordingly believed that it was essential to deal with the lives and consciousnesses of entire populations, not just with those of their religious or political or military leaders. But how were the deeds and identities of whole peoples to be comprehensively described and convincingly understood? Following the interpretation earlier advanced by Adam Smith and developed by David Ricardo, Marx and Engels began by classifying individuals into distinct collective categories, according to neither their religious faith nor their nationality, but as determined by their relations to the “means of production.” On this basis, they derived three such groupings: feudal landowners, who drew their unearned income from their estates as rents; bourgeois capitalists, who obtained their earned income from their businesses in the form of profits; and proletarian workers, who made their money by selling their labor to their employers in exchange for their weekly wages. According to Marx and Engels, these three classes and the conflicts and battles among them, which ultimately derived from their divergent relations to the means of production, and which had raged unabated across the centuries, had been the essential dynamo of the historical process.15

  These primordial classes, as Marx and Engels discerned them, and as delineated in The German Ideology, could be understood in two distinct but complementary ways: as what they termed class “in itself,” and also as what they called class “for itself.”16 Class “in itself” was no more than an objective social category, which grouped individuals together on the basis of their shared economic characteristics: the source of their income, the extent of their wealth, and the nature of their occupation. Thus regarded, these classes had no collective identity or shared sense of their own solidarity, history, prospects, or objectives. On the contrary, they were merely inert social and inanimate statistical aggregations; they did not do, feel, desire, or achieve anything together; they were not locked in perpetual struggle with other classes; and so they neither made history nor changed its course. As such, these classes anticipated and resembled the groupings in the national census. They also lie behind the work of sociologists who continue to refine and debate the number and nature of the classes to be found in modern societies, and the degree of social m
obility between them. Such classes will always be with us, as long as there remain inequalities in income, differences in occupation, and variations in wealth, which can be objectively observed and precisely measured.17

  But Marx and Engels were less interested in class as objective social description than as a subjective social formation; thus they sought to explore and explain how, why, and when class “in itself” became energized and vivified into class “for itself.” By what processes, on what occasions, and with what results, they asked, did these supine social categories become enlivened and transformed into a community of historical actors, who became aware of their common circumstances, shared identity, collective history, group trajectory, and mutual objectives? According to Marx and Engels, the answer lay in the perpetual tussle among landowners, capitalists, and laborers over rents, profits, and wages. Sooner or later, they believed, this economic contest for the spoils and the gains of production was bound to result in social conflict, which would in turn lead to political confrontation.18 Thus regarded, these struggles were both caused by and helped to consolidate that active, adversarial sense of collective solidarity known as class “for itself” (Marx’s original formulation), or as “class consciousness” (the fashionable phrase of the 1960s, earlier popularized by Georg Lukács), or as “class identity” (as we would most likely put it today).19 Class formation, or the making of a class, was the shorthand term employed to describe this shared process of self-discovery and self-actualization. Thus transformed, energized, and brought into being, classes ceased to be lifeless and inert sociological categories: over time, they became active forces and historical agents, as they acquired a sense of shared identity, discovered where their rational self-interests lay, and did battle with each other in order to promote them and realize them.

  According to Marx and Engels, the climax of these class conflicts was the sudden, dramatic upheaval of revolution, when the structure of society was completely transformed, when a ruling class was vanquished and overthrown, and when the balance of economic, social, and political power shifted irrevocably from the defeated class on the way down and toward the triumphant class on the way up. Moreover, these revolutions would happen in an ordered and preordained sequence, with bourgeois revolutions (which had already taken place in some countries, and would soon occur elsewhere) followed by proletarian revolutions (which had not yet happened anywhere, but would eventually take place everywhere). Bourgeois revolutions had previously occurred when the new, rising capitalist middle class had overthrown the traditional, declining landed aristocracy, thereby ending “all feudal, patriarchal, idyllic relations” between people. This had first happened in England during the 1640s, then in North America in the aftermath of 1776, and most recently in France following the events of 1789. The modern bourgeois world, of which Marx and Engels were themselves both privileged products but also fierce critics, and which they grudgingly recognized as an extraordinary accomplishment and unprecedented achievement, was essentially the creation of these earlier upheavals. Hence their hostile yet admiring observation that in transforming the modern world, “the bourgeoisie, historically, has played a most revolutionary part,” and their certainty that in 1848 another bourgeois revolution would take place, this time in Germany.20

  Marx and Engels believed that another stage in this class-based process of revolutionary historical change was still to come, for in creating the modern world of industrial capitalism, the bourgeoisie had unwittingly “called into existence” those very people that would turn out to be its own nemesis, namely “the modern working class, the proletariat.” For the result, as was daily made plain to Engels in contemporary Manchester, was that “society is more and more splitting into two great hostile camps, into two great classes directly facing each other.”21 As relations between capitalists and laborers became more antagonistic and confrontational, and as wages were driven inexorably downward so as to increase profits, Marx and Engels believed the new, expanding, factory-based working class would eventually rise up and overthrow the hated and hostile bourgeoisie in a second sequence of revolutions that next time would be proletarian—and universal. Just as the bourgeoisie had been predestined to vanquish the aristocracy, so too the industrial working class was predestined to overthrow the bourgeoisie: “its fall and the victory of the proletariat are inevitable.” Judging the time to be ripe in early 1848, once the bourgeois revolution had taken place in Germany, it was to this portentous task of remaking society for a second and final time that Marx and Engels now exhorted the “workers of the world.” And when the proletariat succeeded in this final, global revolution, the result would be a socialist utopia, in which the state structure and class identities would become redundant and wither away, to be replaced by “an association in which the free development of each is the condition for the free development of all.”22

  Despite the passion and force of their rhetoric, Marx and Engels never fully worked out their ideas about class as the preeminent form of collective identity and as the prime mover of change over time. Nor could they have done so, for their attempts to explain, and to predict, all of human history on the basis of the three distinct classes they believed to be in perpetual, sequential, and revolutionary conflict were deeply flawed.23 One of their underlying suppositions was that economic activity and economic growth proceeded in an essentially linear way, driving social change in one direction only, namely toward class formation, class identity, and class conflict; yet the patterns of economic development, and of transformations in the mode of production, have never been that neat or coherent. The growth of the medieval economy, the advent of capitalism, the coming of the Industrial Revolution, the rise of new technologies during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, the subsequent expansion of consumer-oriented industries, the decline of traditional heavy industry since 1945, and the IT revolution of recent decades: all these phases of economic change were complex, varied, localized, and often gradual developments. “Even if,” as the sociologist W. G. Runciman puts it, “the story is a story about the success of Europe only, to tell it as a unilinear progression from ‘ancient’ slavery to ‘medieval feudalism’ to ‘modern’ capitalism is to oversimplify it far beyond what the evidence can bear.”24 And this, in turn, meant that changes in the economy were never so momentous, straightforward, or pervasive as to bring about those homogeneous, collective consciousnesses among landowners, or capitalists, or laborers, much less the perpetual conflict that Marx and Engels and their heirs said made history go.25

  A further problem was their lack of precision concerning these three classes and the relations among them. Was the aristocracy exclusively supported by rental income from their estates, or did its members also enjoy the profits from capitalistic enterprises? Had they been vanquished by the bourgeois revolutions, or were they still in the nineteenth century a force to be reckoned with? As for the bourgeoisie, was it primarily national or cosmopolitan in its geographical salience? Were those who belonged to it so distinct from the aristocracy, even as they bought their way into land and married their children off to patricians? Were they financiers or industrialists or professionals? How had they become, or did they ever become, revolutionary? Were self-styled intellectuals members of the bourgeoisie (despite the fact that they did not control the means of production), or might they decide to join the proletariat (even though they were not industrial laborers)?26 As for the proletariat, the vagueness of this concept and categorization is well exemplified in the concluding sentences of The Communist Manifesto, which have been described as “a transparent falsehood in the interests of rhetoric.”27 Who were these “workers,” did they all share the same relationship to the means of production, and what were their connections to their economic and social superiors? In which parts of “the world” were they to be found, and how might it be possible to “unite” and unify such disparate and disconnected groups? Would their leaders be proletarian, or would they come from another class? What were the “chains”
with which the workers of the world were imprisoned, and how would they be broken? The answers to these important questions were more varied and complex than Marx or Engels would ever allow.

  This in turn meant they failed to understand that most societies comprised a complex hierarchy of ranks, levels, and gradations, which melded and merged imperceptibly one into another across the boundaries of what Marx and Engels believed were these three impermeable and antagonistic class identities. As the complex residential patterns of cities, towns, and villages made plain, people were rarely cut off from each other in homogeneous, hermetically sealed suburbs or settlements, which meant there were many internal divisions within their three ostensibly uniform and united classes that Marx and Engels ignored: between aristocrats and landed gentry, between bankers and businessmen, between industrialists competing for the same market, and between the many different layers of skilled and unskilled labor. Nor could the aristocracy, bourgeoisie, and proletariat be directly elided into partisan political activists or organizations, and there would never be one single historical example of “all” the bourgeoisie or “all” the proletariat embracing revolutionary doctrines. Finally, Marx and Engels were mistaken in asserting that their three classes, based on specific relationships to the means of production, were more important than individual identities more usually expressed in patterns of consumption. For most people, work has only ever been part of their life (especially when it is seasonal, casual, or intermittent), and has never been the sole determinant of how they see themselves, or themselves in relation to others.28