The Undivided Past Read online

  The reality of these more complex and varied patterns of economic development also meant the existence of other anomalous classes and groups whose existence Marx and Engels were grudgingly compelled to recognize, yet whose relations to the means of production did not fit into their simple tripartite scheme. There were the agrarian peasantry, rural laborers and farm workers, who were compelled to endure what Marx and Engels dismissed as “the idiocy of rural life”: they were neither urbanized nor industrialized proletarians, yet they formed the largest single occupational group in the mid-nineteenth century, not just in Europe, but around the world, and they would continue to do so well into the twentieth century.29 There were the petty bourgeoisie, who were urbanized but not industrialized, and who were neither wholly proletarian (though some worked with their hands) nor fully bourgeois (though others, on a small scale, did own means of production), and whose numbers greatly expanded during the closing decades of the nineteenth century. And at the very bottom of society was the “lumpenproletariat,” who had given up on finding employment altogether, and whom Marx and Engels wrote off as “that passively rotting mass.”30 None of these classes, they concluded, had any serious revolutionary potential, but this would not matter, since Marx and Engels predicted they would all disappear as industrial capitalism inexorably advanced. It was a view of the future that would prove completely mistaken.31

  The efforts of Marx and Engels to endow their three chosen classes with collective identities and clear trajectories as the drivers of past, present, and future change owed more to their powerful but reductive imaginations and to their engaged and impassioned rhetoric than to the refractory and complex nature of historical reality; and for the same reasons, their understanding of the recent past was equally flawed. They interpreted the French Revolution of 1789 as a major historical discontinuity, by arguing that a rising and increasingly unified middle class had overthrown a declining and enfeebled nobility, and had “abolished feudal property in favour of bourgeois property.”32 Yet in reality there was no such stark division between the middle and upper classes, and there was no such burgeoning capitalist class, eager to pioneer industrial progress, while those few who were formally described as bourgeois were “a legally defined social category which granted the non-noble elites of many towns privileges similar to the aristocracy.” In 1789 and across the ensuing decade, none of the major players in the Revolution and its aftermath claimed to be bourgeois or to be acting on behalf of a social grouping to which that name was applied. As late as the 1830s, industry had made little progress, and France remained a predominantly agrarian nation, governed by—and in—the interests of a largely traditional elite of landed notables. Only during a brief period, from the 1820s to the 1840s, did a body of literature emerge, produced by liberal politicians and writers such as Thierry and Guizot, implausibly casting the French bourgeoisie as the anti-aristocratic heroes of 1789.33 Yet it was this flawed and polemical interpretation, written with immediate political objectives in mind, that Marx and Engels mistakenly accepted and exaggerated and wrote into their own work.34

  In the same way, their hopeful predictions that 1848 might witness a continent-wide proletarian revolution, in the aftermath of the German bourgeois revolution, were based on Engels’s serious misreading of the situation in Manchester, which Marx had uncritically accepted. Following his initial sojourn in the city, Engels had taken away an exaggerated picture of proletarian and bourgeois class solidarity and of the conflict between them. Beyond doubt, Manchester was the largest industrial metropolis devoted to the manufacture of cotton, and it had grown with unprecedented rapidity since the 1800s. But the economic and occupational structures were more varied than Engels appreciated, for there were also many retail, service, construction, and distribution businesses.35 Moreover, the social cleavages were less marked than he claimed, and they would lessen still further when the economic downturns of the 1840s were past and the workers became (contrary to his hopes and expectations) better off. Relations between employers and their men were also more nuanced and less distant, thanks to common religion, shared political loyalties, and the local celebration of civic milestones or great national events.36 The two separate, sundered collective aggregations Engels claimed to discern in Manchester were in reality neither wholly homogeneous nor invariably antagonistic, for as was also the case with the assumed solidarities and antagonisms of religions and nations, there were many connections and conversations across these allegedly all-encompassing identities and impermeable boundaries of class.

  Engels also confused the broader implications of developments in Manchester with the process of industrialization that was already taking place in Britain, and was now starting to happen elsewhere in Europe. To begin with, he failed to appreciate that Manchester was unusual among large British industrial cities, for in many of them, such as Birmingham, the units of production were small workshops rather than factories, which meant relations between men and their masters were correspondingly closer. In addition, Engels did not realize that industrial cities (and industrial production) were not typical of mid-nineteenth-century Britain. Scarcely 10 percent of the nation’s working population was factory-employed, and since Britain boasted the most advanced economy in the world, this meant the percentage was even lower across the continent. Despite the hopes of Marx and Engels to the contrary, neither the whole of Britain nor the whole of Europe was in the process of becoming like Manchester, and it was a serious mistake to inflate the unique history of this small part of the British working class into a universal template of global proletarian development. Yet it was only on the basis of such an unrealistic view that they could ever have entertained the implausible hope that in 1848 vast numbers of industrial workers across the whole of the continent would emerge from their factories to stage a unified proletarian revolution against the bourgeoisie, and thereby usher in the socialist utopia.37

  The arguments that Marx and Engels advanced for the primacy of class identities over those of religion or nation, and for the unique importance of class conflict in driving the historical process, were thus highly tendentious. As the (formerly Marxist) historian Gareth Stedman Jones has written, “much of what was first put forward in the Manifesto and later accepted as a commonsense understanding of the making of the modern world belongs more to the realm of mythology than fact.”38 By the end of 1848, the year when it was predicted with quasi-millenarian anticipation that everything would change in Europe as a bourgeois revolution in Germany would be followed by its proletarian successor, the traditional forces of authority successfully reasserted themselves across the continent, and Marx grudgingly admitted that it had been premature to claim in the Manifesto that the “formation of the proletariat into a class, [the] overthrow of the bourgeois supremacy, [and the] conquest of political power by the proletariat” had been imminent.39 Pace The Communist Manifesto, even bourgeois revolution was not inevitable, and nor did the proletariat of 1848, such as it was, evince much enthusiasm for giving history a helping hand in the direction of the ultimate classless society.

  Marx and Engels were not only mistaken in their predictions of an imminent revolutionary future, initially bourgeois and subsequently proletarian; they were also suspiciously light on detail when they described the nature, the working, and the institutions of the postbourgeois world—and of the postbourgeois identities—that the triumphant revolutionary proletariat was expected eventually to bring into being.40 They offered no considered guidance as to how private property would be abolished, how the state would wither away, or how class would disappear—their vague imaginations carrying them no further than an unspecified “association” in which “the free development of each is the condition for the free development of all.”41 But this was naïve verbiage, for if all capital, property, and productive resources were initially centralized in the hands of the state, then they would have to be administered and allocated by those in authority (in which case both the state and a ruling class, far from wither
ing away, would still exist), or they would have to be given over to the workers (in which case private property, albeit redistributed among new owners, would continue in being).42 Either way, there would still be economic (and political) inequality, and according to the criteria devised and deployed by Marx and Engels, this would mean that the class differences and class identities they believed they had discerned would survive and endure rather than vanish and disappear.

  CLASS AS POLITICS

  Given its manifold limitations, blind spots, exceptions, and outright errors, it is not surprising that the view of class-based identity and conflict developed by Marx and Engels during the late 1840s made little immediate impact. The Condition of the Working Class originally appeared in German, but was not translated into English until 1885 (in the United States) and 1892 (in the United Kingdom). The German Ideology was never completed, and only appeared in print in 1932. A limited edition of The Communist Manifesto was initially published in German in 1847, but plans to translate it into English, French, Italian, Flemish, and Danish were postponed indefinitely.43 After the failed revolutions of 1848, the Communist League, which had commissioned the Manifesto, was disbanded, and although Marx later tried to make the First International (which he helped found in London in 1864) into a vehicle of global working-class solidarity, it was for most of its existence little more than a “paper organization,” riven by doctrinal disputes, and disbanded in 1876.44 By then new socialist parties were coming into being, but they were more concerned to further the participation of organized labor within the existing political system than to bring about a continent-wide proletarian revolution. On Marx’s death in 1883, Engels claimed that “just as Darwin discovered the law of development of organic nature, so Marx discovered the law of development of human history”; but he had done no such thing, and few besides Engels believed he had. In an era of growing (albeit still limited) national consciousness and solidarities, class as an alternative form of collective identity possessed very limited appeal, while the idea that it was the most important aggregation of all had gained little traction.45

  During the twenty years after Marx’s death, Europe urbanized rapidly, industry and factory employment proliferated, the Second International was founded in 1889, socialist parties spread across the continent, and The Communist Manifesto belatedly achieved a global readership in translation (Engels died in 1895, his deeds as Marx’s friend and funder, collaborator and champion soon forgotten). But of what new relevance were the teachings and predictions of the Manifesto under the changed conditions of the fin de siècle? The philosopher Karl Kautsky, who would be referred to by some as the pope of Marxism, insisted that Marx’s doctrines of class identity, social polarization, and proletarian revolution retained their value and urgency. But the German politician Eduard Bernstein argued that such “orthodoxy” needed significant “revising,” since relations between the bourgeoisie and workers had significantly improved since 1848, which meant the prospects for a proletarian revolution were dwindling, and that “evolutionary” socialism was the more likely path forward.46 Contemporary social developments would largely vindicate Bernstein’s revisionist view: the new, factory-based proletariat was still a minority of the working class, while the growth of reformist trade unions, which preferred to get a better deal for their members than overthrow the capitalist system, cast doubt on the likelihood of a workers’ revolution anywhere or anytime soon. Moreover, Europe’s socialist parties were nationally rather than internationally constituted, and for all their claims to have espoused the revolutionary doctrines of Marxism, they accommodated themselves to “bourgeois” parliamentary politics and the significance they attached to the Manifesto was “mainly emblematic.”47

  These acrimonious and arcane controversies within the dwindling ranks of Marxist believers about whether, when, and how the proletarian revolution might occur were rendered abruptly irrelevant by the outbreak of the First World War, when it became apparent that they had mistaken the identities and misjudged the aspirations of the European working class, in whose name and interests they had presumptuously claimed to speak. As the international crisis ran its course during the summer of 1914, Marx’s die-hard followers expected that the proletariat would rise up against their bourgeois leaders who were hell-bent on war and, refusing the nationalist ardor and patriotism that had been foisted upon them, would choose instead continent-wide revolution. Yet the very opposite occurred, as the overwhelming majority of workers volunteered in their hundreds of thousands, as the leaders of the socialist parties declared their support for war, and as the Second International collapsed.48 In direct refutation of the claims and predictions of Marx and Engels, it turned out that the early-twentieth-century workers of Europe were very strongly attached to their respective countries and fatherlands, and that the belligerent patriotic identities ascribed to them, however oversimplified and misleading, were more important to them than any shared, transnational solidarities as members of the working class. “Seen from the perspective of August 1914,” Eric Hobsbawm notes, “one might have concluded that nation and nation-state had triumphed over all rival social and political loyalties.”49 Indeed one might, and many certainly did at the time.

  In one of his last prefaces to The Communist Manifesto, written in 1890, Engels had claimed that “the eternal union of the proletarians of all countries … is still alive, and lives stronger than ever.”50 But the immediate future did not bear him out: in 1914, as in 1848, the revolutionary politics built around proletarian class identity and visceral hostility to the bourgeoisie, which were meant to have ushered in the socialist utopia, failed to materialize. Yet despite this missed opportunity, and notwithstanding the flaws in the writings of Marx and Engels about the collective identities, political significance, and historical trajectories of class, the subsequent years from 1917 to 1989 would be dominated by attempts to remake the world on the basis of The Communist Manifesto. In the end, most of these experiments, which amounted to totalitarian repression and a denial of basic liberties rather than “the free development of all” that had been promised, would fail, collapsing under the weight of their internal contradictions, as well as the assaults of competing identities and ideologies, and as they were ultimately rejected by the very people in whose name they were supposedly instituted. Nevertheless, during the period from the Bolshevik Revolution to the fall of the Berlin Wall, the most significant theme in the history of Europe, and of many other parts of the world, was the effort to construct a new form of politics and a new form of society based on the ideas derived (albeit in developed and distorted form) from Marx and Engels concerning the collective identities of class and the revolutionary potential of the urban, factory-based proletariat.51

  Dismayed in 1914 by the failure of the European working class to assume its putative historic role and carry out the proletarian revolution, Marx and Engels’s remaining followers faced some seriously challenging questions: if the workers of the world showed no inclination to unite and revolt in circumstances as propitious as those that had briefly obtained when war broke out, then how should they be helped, by whom could they be persuaded, and by whom must they be commanded to take up this essential and momentous task? The most portentous answers were offered by a self-styled revolutionary named Vladimir Ilyich Lenin, who argued that the prediction of a decisive class war between a monolithic capitalist bourgeoisie and a monolithic industrial proletariat, leading inevitably to revolution in France, Germany, and Britain, needed significant modification, especially farther east in his tsarist Russian homeland. (Marx and Engels had themselves briefly entertained such a modification of their arguments in their preface to the second Russian edition of The Communist Manifesto, published in 1882, in which they hinted that Russia might undergo a revolution led by the agricultural rather than the industrial workers, and that this might become a “signal” for the proletarian revolution in the West; but after Marx’s death, Engels reverted to the original story, casting the industrial prole
tariat in the vanguard of revolutionary transformation.)52

  As Lenin recognized, in such a vast, backward, and preponderantly agricultural country as early-twentieth-century Russia, whose peasantry constituted more than 80 percent of the population, even a bourgeois revolution had not yet taken place, while the industrial proletariat that had recently grown in cities such as St. Petersburg and Moscow formed a smaller minority of the working class than anywhere else in Europe. Marx and Engels had believed that the bourgeois revolution must come first, and that a subsequent proletarian revolution must be patiently (if confidently) awaited. Lenin, by contrast, concluded that in Russia there must soon be a single revolution, which at one audacious stroke would propel the country almost overnight from backward feudalism to futuristic socialism.53 In such an endeavor, Lenin reasoned, the participation of the urban-industrial proletariat would be essential, but they would also need the sort of vigorous, ruthless, secretive, and conspiratorial leadership that could only be provided by members of the very class that was the proletariat’s sworn enemy, namely the bourgeoisie. Instead of revolution resulting from a struggle between two massive, homogeneous classes, as Marx and Engels had insistently predicted, Lenin’s Bolshevik model proposed a very different vision: a high-level coup, led by an elite vanguard of committed, disciplined bourgeois professionals, willing to resort to violence and terror if circumstances required, and ready to persuade as many as possible of the (still relatively small) factory-based proletariat to follow them.54