Utopia and Revolution

The Great Mystification.

Two concepts call for socialist meditation, because they imply problems of permanent urgency: utopia and revolution. Rarely have these two problems been examined in their relationship of reciprocal affirmation and negation, i.e., in their dialectical relationship, except to reject them wholesale or accept only one term: whoever posits revolution seems to exclude or reject utopia; and conversely, whoever posits utopia seems to reject revolution. Such, at least, was the attitude of nineteenth-century socialist thinkers. In the twentieth century, the debate had found some scope for confrontation up until the First World War, without going beyond the ideological quarrels periodically renewed between Marxists and non-Marxists, or between anarchists and Marxists. Since then, there has been silence: the tumult of contemporary history has rendered inaudible any voice urging renewed discussion. And yet, if ever the idea of a socialist humanism required reflection, it is today, when under the name of socialism, or even humanism, regimes are developing that reproduce and amplify the defects of capitalism, while trampling underfoot the democratic conquests of bourgeois revolutions, long considered the condition for socialism. It took an incredible perversion of language and logic to succumb, often with total good faith, to the most vulgar propaganda, and to believe that today's world is really divided into two camps, the “socialist” camp and the “capitalist” camp. All regimes, no matter how acute their conflicts of interest, propagate this alleged division as an article of faith. Western regimes eagerly acknowledge the socialist character displayed by their Eastern rivals, for they thereby gain a considerable propaganda benefit: they discredit socialism, by showing that so-called socialist regimes deceive the masses in their aspirations for a dignified and free life. In turn, these regimes spare no effort to make their people believe that the material and moral conditions in which they live are (or soon will be) superior to those of the masses under the yoke of capital. If religious consolation is much less the opium of Western peoples than it once was, the new narcotic offered to the peoples of Eastern Europe is called Marxism. Words neither live nor die like human beings; their meaning is transformed according to the intentions and interests of those who manipulate them. By a harmful and strange alteration of their meaning, words can mean the opposite of what they originally meant. Such is the case with the word socialism. Created at a time when industrial mechanization was ushering in the era of mass misery, it denoted the hope of a new society, the desire for a better way of life: utopia as tomorrow's reality. The nascent socialist and communist schools discussed and refined its content, and in February 1848, an anonymous pamphlet printed in London predicted, along with the fatal ruin of class society, the coming of the communist city defined in these terms: “An association where the free development of each is the condition of the free development of all.” (The Communist Manifesto.) Nothing resembles this definition less than the contemporary world. Yet we manage to make people believe that part of our globe is now communist or moving towards communism. And, in a supreme perversion, regimes where people are relatively less free and where the police state has more rights over the individual than in capitalist countries are called socialist. In this way, Utopia is desecrated and the values of socialism are scorned.

It is said and believed that, since the Russian Revolution of October 1917, the world has entered a new era: the era of socialism; that since the Second World War, a third of the world has become socialist, and that the two wars made this revolutionary transformation possible. Those who say or think this generally choose a single criterion to justify this thesis: the abolition of private property, known as the socialization of the means of production. This thesis is opposed by another: there is no socialism in today's world. What we call socialism, by misuse of language, is in reality nothing more than a new form of exploitation and oppression of man by man: state property, which is just as murderous as private property; we should call it state capitalism.

There is nothing to suggest that the legal regulation of property rights by state power is either the means or the end of a socialist order. If we disregard the legal forms that appear to regulate human relations, and stick to these relations themselves, what do we find? Simply that the human status of so-called socialist countries is fundamentally, essentially the same as that of capitalist countries.

If things have turned into a dialogue of the deaf, if this perversion of language has been able to take place so easily, it's because another word has suffered a similar fate: revolution. Revolutions have taken place; social structures have been violently overturned, but the character of these upheavals is obvious: in reality, they are nothing more than economic revolutions, which constitute an aggravation of the phenomena that the pioneers of socialism denounced as “the exploitation of man by man”. If the debate between the “free world” and the “socialist world” were merely a matter of words, it wouldn't be worth our attention. But behind this verbal quarrel lies a vital issue of our time. Can humanity survive without the disappearance of the social institutions that currently burden and regiment it? In other words, is human life still possible under the domination of the state and capital? This question, it seems to us, should be at the heart of any debate on socialist humanism.

Back to Basics.

Marxism is not the entire ideology of socialism. Nor is it all its thought. Both in its ethical aspects and in its theoretical claims, socialist thought can be traced back to the industrial revolution that began in England in the last third of the 18th century. From the outset, it had all the hallmarks of a new gospel, a message of earthly liberation and salvation, in a word, a new ethic. However, however visionary the first socialists or communists of the industrial age may have seemed, they had a fairly clear conception of the means that could lead to the realization of their dream goal. Thus, for William Godwin, social metamorphosis could only result from a revolution of reason, whereas for Gracchus Babeuf, reason could only be imposed by violence, and therefore folly: proclaimed at first as a legal action, the revolution, because of the closure of the Pantheon club, became the business of a “secret directoire”, charged with acting “by and for the people”. Babeuf's plan was to seize power “in order to hand it over to the people”. But steps had to be taken, as the people, called to the polls, were capable of bringing back tyranny. It was therefore necessary to make them capable of exercising sovereignty.

Irresistibly, once on this slope of impatience and “provisional” authority, Babouvism thinks of revolution as organized warfare, conducted according to the rules of the art: hierarchy, discipline, obedience, command, specialist strategy and so on. It's a revolution directed from above, by a general staff or a group of experts, in the expectation that it will be remade from below, or at least that those below will take over once the enemy has been defeated and power conquered. Such is the ambition of Babouvism, and it will reappear with Auguste Blanqui and his followers: honesty and good intentions are given as pledges to the still ignorant people, reduced to the state of inert matter or, more precisely, a mass of maneuver in the battle to defeat the enemy. Violence organized and directed from above is the essence of the Babouvist credo. Its humanism is in the intention, the goal, the utopia; it's not in the means, unless you consider the acts of vengeance perpetrated by the revolting masses as manifestations of a will to liberate: it's the purpose of violence that humanizes violence, since it aims to establish a society without violence.

The danger and weakness of this conception lies in the impossibility of foreseeing and judging, of choosing and evaluating methods and attitudes from a humanist perspective. From Babouvism to Bolshevik Marxism, the lineage is direct and sometimes openly acknowledged. Utopian socialism returns to the tradition of humanist rationalism that predates the French Revolution. For Saint-Simon, the spiritual heir of the Encyclopedists, political power, capable of reason and reform, plays only a secondary role. The “New Christianity” is the ethics of power, which will no longer be political, but administrative (stewardship). This economic-social Christianity, the science of production, is, in short, industrialism for the benefit of mankind, the guarantee of bread, politics replaced by industrial organization, whose sole aim is to “ensure the freest development of the faculties of all men”. This is Saint-Simon's spiritual testament.

Utopians claim to reform society in the name of reason and science. Robert Owen has a sense of reality, and his socialism is experimental: cooperation is the beginning and the end of the solution to social problems. Owen lacked the sumptuous delirium of Charles Fourier; he was unimaginative and his doctrine was reduced to a few elementary ideas, one of which was essential: man is what his environment makes him. Yet this pioneer of cooperative socialism was always in the breach, calling for spontaneous effort, distrust and even hostility towards the powerful, the rich and the rulers. If socialism means cooperation, then Owen was the first socialist. And if Marx's socialism is ultimately the cooperative system or mode of production, it's because he was Owen's disciple.

Karl Marx.

Marx did not abolish utopia; on the contrary, he renewed its meaning, broadening its sphere of application. For him, utopia becomes a single, two-stage process: revolution-creation. Before him, utopians had imagined and thought about creation independently of the men by whom the new city was to be built; at most, they had counted on an elite. Marx saw men first: “We know that to do useful work, the new forces of society need to be mastered by new men: such are the workers.” (Address to a Chartist meeting, April 1856).

Initially a disciple of Fourier and Owen, and soon deeply involved in the political struggle, Marx never broke the spiritual ties that bound him to the socialist utopia. In this respect, it's enough to read the clarification he was about to provide, two years before his death, to the Russian populists who asked him for his opinion on the chances and prospects of the peasant commune in the face of the threat of capitalism's penetration of Russia. At no point in this long and painful reflection does Marx tackle properly political problems, such as class constitution or party organization. Instead, he concentrates on the original characteristics of the archaic institution of the rural commune, and its importance as a “regenerative element of Russian society” and as an “element of superiority over the countries enslaved by the capitalist regime”. It's easy to recognize, in this apology for the “localized microcosm” that for Marx is the Russian commune, the final tribute he pays to Robert Owen, pioneer of cooperative and communitarian socialism. Marx, like his utopian predecessor, puts all his trust in the creative spontaneity of those who produce society's wealth without really enjoying it. He attributes to the primitive commune the virtues of a social microcosm. In this idealization of a still little-known institution, we recognize the projection into the future of a desire-image. It's no coincidence, then, that Marx embraced the Owenian utopia. The cooperative commune he imagined responds to the problem we posed above, that of the opposition between the Jacobin (political) conception and the conception we now call, for greater clarity, communalist of the workers' movement. In the former, the initiative for awareness and action is attributed to' political avant-gardes placed at the head of easily-maneuverable crowds; in the latter, any political elite is deemed superfluous, as the reduced dimensions of the action group allow it to dispense with any stable, and therefore “professional”, representation. The delegation of power is not the abandonment of a right, but the handing over of a temporary and imperative mandate for well-defined representative tasks.

In a sense, Marx is the most utopian of utopians: unconcerned about future society, he is solely concerned with the destruction of present society. But he elevates revolution to the level of a total requirement.

It is the mechanism of this imaginary or imagined revolution that is utopian: it presupposes men capable of thinking the whole of social criticism, the whole of socialism, men aware of their “golden” misery.

For Marx establishes the economic law of pauperization, which is harder to grasp than naked, unphrased misery. He implants the utopia of the future in the struggle of the present, and proposes a dialectic of workers' revolution: if the proletariat is capable of wanting and making its revolution, socialism will be given to it by surcroît, in other words: by becoming aware of their state of alienation (in the profound sense that Marx gave to this Hegelian term), workers are both capable of destroying capitalist society and building utopia: a society without state, without classes, without money. From then on, Marx's conception of revolution contained a strange paradox: it was at the height of misery that workers were supposed to become aware of the need for total revolution, for a regenerated society. Strange “materialism” that conceives of such a spiritual metamorphosis of the slave broken by a pitiless machine, reduced himself to the state of a cog in the great industrial mechanism operating with a single aim: profit.

It was from these masses of disinherited people, and not from an intellectual elite, that “communist consciousness” was supposed to “emanate” (The German Ideology). The psychological process is thus reversed: bourgeois intellectuals can only become communists by rising to the level of the revolutionary consciousness of slave-workers.

Such is the paradox of the workers' movement. Yet the theory remains coherent: Marx distinguishes between socialist consciousness and socialist science. This science (theory) is only possible and necessary as a function of the real movement of the working class, which is a two-faceted process: awareness and political action.

By giving itself political representatives, the proletariat proclaims its determination to overturn the existing established order, by recourse to the force of law or the laws of force, depending on the circumstances: “The proletariat constitutes itself as a class and therefore as a political party”, declares the Communist Manifesto, clearly showing that this is a spontaneous act of creation and awareness by the proletarians, in no way an adhesion to constituted parties outside their ranks. The bourgeoisie is a constituted class whose unity is cemented by the profit motive. The proletariat constitutes itself as a class by forging its unity and cohesion through the struggle to defend its immediate interests and its awareness of a revolutionary goal. This is what Marx formulated in a single sentence that is the implicit postulate of all true socialist thought, enunciated as early as 1844 by Flora Tristan: “The emancipation of the workers will be the work of the workers themselves.”

Unions, parties and councils are all forms of working-class organization, which only exist as spontaneous, conscious creations of the working class. The proletariat constitutes itself by organizing its struggle, but the workers who make it up must not abandon themselves to elite bodies (or parties) that claim to guide them and prescribe their political and social objectives.

This is the idea frequently taken up by Marx and Engels in their criticism of party men who, coming from the bourgeois intelligentsia, set themselves up as political guides for the workers. Certainly, intellectuals have a role to play in the workers' movement, but they can only fulfill it effectively by bringing to the movement “elements of culture”, and by no means a ready-made theory or philosophy, an esoteric doctrine of the march and ends of history, a dialectic of revolutionary action. This was Marx's deepest thought, even if his attitudes as a man and as a “party leader” did not always conform strictly to the principle of workers' self-emancipation, even if, through the use of certain political means, he sometimes betrayed this principle.

Marxism judged by Marx.

The real problem lies not in antinomies such as anarchism and Marxism, Marxism and reformism or Marxism and revisionism; it lies in the opposition of Jacobinism and self-emancipation. It lies in the following question: can social classes retain the autonomy of their action and consciousness by relying on representative organizations, chosen and appointed to express and defend their interests?

This question contains a dangerous equivocation: can a social class have a conscience, a will, an action? In other words, can it think, will and act in any way other than through “democratically” elected representatives, commonly appointed to represent, i.e. express, the will and thoughts of a collectivity? If so, isn't formal or tacit approval of the delegates' decisions and actions the only proof that the group's will and the behavior of its representatives are in accord?

To ask the question in this way is to answer it. But this answer does not provide the whole solution. Indeed, it implies the answer to another question, a corollary of the first: under what conditions of effectiveness can the delegation of a mandate result in a real “representation of interests”?

Pre-Marx socialist thought focused primarily on resolving this question. Its solution was the description and definition of the “ideal” society. Marx accepted this legacy, and enriched it. His protest was not directed at the substance, but at certain aberrant aspects of so-called utopian socialism. The producers' commune, the cooperative enterprise, the unity of work and culture - in a word, the city liberated from the state and money - represents, in Marx's eyes, the resurrection, at the level of modern technology, of the archaic rural commune, the basis of primitive communism.

As for the Jacobin conception of the workers' movement, in both its reformist and revolutionary forms, the historical experience of the first half of our century has confirmed its definitive bankruptcy. When Lenin broke the ties he had maintained with Karl Kautsky's ideas until the First World War, he invoked the impotence of the workers' movement in the industrially advanced countries, where the proletariat had been “betrayed” by an aristocracy drawn from its own ranks. The material and moral conditions for a revolutionary movement, on the other hand, were given in an industrially backward, mainly peasant country like Tsarist Russia. It was here, as in countries under colonial yoke, that the process of socialist revolution could be triggered, if not completed: the misery of the masses was a sufficient guarantee against the “betrayal” of ambitious, comfort-hungry workers' avant-gardes. To theoretically justify this recourse to classical conceptions of the role and vocation of the social elites, the concept of “permanent revolution” was borrowed from Marx's terminological arsenal. This concept, reinforced by Lenin's idea of the “law of uneven development”, became the key to the new ideology with its Marxist flavour.

In truth, Lenin's and his party's theoretical and practical approach was simply the artificial grafting of a revolutionary-minded elite of bourgeois intellectuals onto a convulsing social mass. Its genuinely revolutionary aspirations could easily be exploited by an apparatus of professional revolutionaries for whom Jacobin methods of government held few secrets. The result was not long in coming: having established the presence of a state of “dyarchy” in Russian society liberated from tsarism, and having won the confidence of the soviets, which had spontaneously formed in opposition to the official government, the Bolshevik party succeeded in establishing itself as a monolithic state power. As in countries with an old capitalist tradition, a political “aristocracy” aware of its interests and objectives had succeeded in replacing the “social microcosms” which, according to Marx's theory and utopia, arise spontaneously from the soil of any society in a state of evolution and historical transformation.

Marx may often have overestimated the political factor in the workers' movement, but he never thought for a moment that the working class should surrender to the dialectical wisdom of a party or an elite of political professionals. As we have seen, for Marx, the utopia of revolution is an ethic of revolutionary behavior. The economic and spiritual alienation of the workers is the fundamental cause of the revolutionary act, as well as the central motive for the creative action of the new social order. The proletariat is the direct subject of this transformation, but it is also its object, since it abolishes itself as a wage-earner.

Today, “Marxist empires” are founded on the exploitation of proletarianized masses, forced to perform economic tasks dictated by state plans which, as in liberal capitalist regimes, maintain and reinforce the hierarchy of functions and incomes.

Every line of Marx, as of his precursors and masters, belies the so-called socialist regimes of our twentieth century.

Conclusion.

Utopia and revolution are the two historical coordinates of the workers' movement, the two modes of intuition of socialist thought: utopia is the dimension of space; revolution is the dimension of time. In other words, to become a reality, the socialist movement must think of itself as utopia and revolution, one inseparable from the other. It also means that socialist man must assert himself simultaneously as utopian and revolutionary. Revolution and utopia appear as the normative foundations of the socialist ethic, inseparable from each other. To be a socialist, you have to want revolution and utopia; you have to want the abolition of existing types of society and desire the creation of the new city. Implicit in most socialist doctrines, this ethic has marked and continues to mark many thinkers who claim to be socialists, communists or anarchists. To varying degrees, it has enriched the thinking of Owen and Fourier, Marx and Engels, Proudhon and Bakunin, Sorel and Kropotkin, Oscar Wilde and Gustav Landauer.

But it must not be confused with the thought — explicit or implicit — of a single mind, however brilliant. Socialist ethics is the spirit of the entire workers' movement, of the socialist movement as a whole. To confuse it with the work or thought of a single individual is to betray the impersonal spirit of the ethic of the workers' movement.

Socialist humanism is the ethic of revolution and utopia. Socialism is a historical necessity only insofar as it is thought of and willed as an ethical necessity. This is what Marx meant when he posed the dilemma: “The proletariat is revolutionary or it is nothing!” And we add, to give socialist ethics its full meaning: socialism is utopian consciousness or it is nothing.