We have no models. The history of past experiences serves only to free us of those experiences. — Mario Tronti, “Lenin in England”, 1964

What should we be doing today, if we are “for” the revolution? Should we build up our resources now, or wait patiently for the next rupture? Should we act on invariant revolutionary principles, or remain flexible, so we can adapt to new situations as they arise? Any response to these questions inevitably tarries with the history of revolutions in the twentieth century. The failure of those revolutions accounts for the fact that we are still here asking ourselves these questions. All attempts to account for our agency, today, are haunted by the debacles of the past. That is true even, or perhaps especially, for those who never mention the past in the first place. The reason for this is plain to see.

The history of communism is not only the history of defeats: taking risks, coming up against a stronger force and losing. It is also a history of treachery, or of what the Left has typically called “betrayal”. In the course of the traditional labour movement, there were many famous examples: of the Social Democrats and the trade union leadership at the start of World War I, of Ebert and Noske in the course of the German Revolution, of Trotsky in the midst of the Kronstadt Rebellion, of Stalin when he assumed power, of the CNT in Spain, when it ordered revolutionaries to tear down the barricades, and so on. In the anti-colonial movements of the mid-twentieth century, Chairman Mao, the Viet Minh, and Kwame Nkrumah were all called betrayers. Meanwhile, in the last major upsurge in Europe, it was the CGT in 1968 and the PCI in 1977, among others, who are said to have betrayed. The counter-revolution comes not only from the outside, but apparently also from the heart of the revolution itself.

That defeat is ultimately attributed to the moral failings of Left organisations and individuals, at least in leftist histories, is essential. If revolutions were defeated for some other reason (for example, as a result of the exigencies of unique situations), then there would be little for us to learn with respect to our own militancy. It is because the project of communism seemed to be blocked — not by chance, but by betrayal — that communist theory has come to revolve, as if neurotically, around the question of betrayal and the will that prevents it. The link between these two is key: at first glance, the theory of betrayal appears to be the inverse of a heroic conception of history. But betrayal delineates the negative space of the hero and thus of the figure of the militant. It is the militant, with her or his correct revolutionary line and authentic revolutionary will — as well as their vehicle: the party — who is supposed to stop the betrayal from taking place, and thus to bring the revolution to fruition.1

The origins of this thought-form are easy to identify: on 4th August 1914, German Social Democrats voted to support the war effort; the trade unions vowed to manage labour. The Great War thus commenced with the approval of socialism’s earthly representatives. A year after the war began, dissident anti-war socialists convened at Zimmerwald, under the pretence of organising a bird-watching convention, in order to reconstruct the tattered communist project. But even here, splits quickly emerged. The Left of that dissident group — which included both Lenin and representatives of the currents that would become the Dutch-German left communists — broke away from the main contingent, since the latter refused to denounce the Social Democrats outright. In their own draft proposal, the Left did not hold back: “Prejudiced by nationalism, rotten with opportunism, at the beginning of the World War [the Social Democrats] betrayed the proletariat to imperialism.”2 They were now “a more dangerous enemy to the proletariat than the bourgeois apostles of imperialism.”3 But this denunciation was only one instance of a trope repeated a thousand times thereafter. The organisations created for the purpose of defending working class interests — often doing so on the basis of their own notions of betrayal and the will — betrayed the class, time and again, in the course of the twentieth century.

Whether they call themselves communists or anarchists, those who identify as “revolutionaries” spend much of their time examining past betrayals, often in minute detail, to determine exactly how those betrayals occurred.4 Many of these examinations try to recover the red thread of history: the succession of individuals or groups who expressed a heroic fidelity to the revolution. Their very existence supposedly proves that it was possible not to betray and, therefore, that the revolution could have succeeded — if only the right groups had been at the helm, or if the wrong ones had been pushed away from the helm at the right moment. One becomes a communist or an anarchist on the basis of the particular thread out of which one weaves one’s banner (and today one often flies these flags, not on the basis of a heartfelt identity, but rather due to the contingencies of friendship). However, in raising whatever banner, revolutionaries fail to see the limits to which the groups they revere were actually responding — that is, precisely what made them a minority formation. Revolutionaries get lost in history, defining themselves by reference to a context of struggle that has no present-day correlate. They draw lines in sand which is no longer there.

THE PERIODISING BREAK

We might be tempted to read the runes again, to try to solve the riddle of the history definitively: what was the right thing to do in 1917, 1936, 1968? However, the purpose here is not to come up with new answers to old questions. Instead, our intervention is therapeutic: we aim to confront the questioners, to challenge their motivating assumptions. Any strategic orientation towards the past must base itself, at least, on the assumption that the present is essentially like it. If the present is not like the past, then no matter how we solve the riddle of history, it will tell us very little about what we should be doing today.

Our goal is therefore to introduce a break, to cleave off the present from the past (and so, too, to sever the relation between betrayal and the will). If placed successfully, this periodising break will allow us to relate to the past as past, and the present as something else. Of course, this periodisation cannot be absolute. The present is not wholly unlike the past. The capitalist mode of production remains. Indeed, the capital–labour relation defines the shape of our lives more than it ever did those of our ancestors, and it does so in at least two fundamental ways.

First, compared to the past, a greater share of the world’s population today consists of proletarians and semi-proletarians: they must sell their labour-power in order to buy at least some of what they need. Second, this “some of what they need” has expanded massively so that today, people’s lives are deeply submerged within market relations: in the high income countries, and also in parts of the low-income world, workers not only pay rent and buy groceries. They purchase ready-made meals, talk to their families on cell phones, put their parents in nursing homes, and pop pills in order live, or live better. They must continue to work in order to afford these things, that is, in order to maintain their social ties.

Many revolutionaries take this ever-deepening imbrication within market relations as a sufficient proof that the present is like the past, in whatever senses are relevant. The result is that they relate to the past through a screen. The past becomes a fantasy projection of the present. Often enough, that screen is called “the Left”. Debates about history become debates about the Left: what it was, what it should have done (and there are some who, on that same basis, come to see themselves as “post-Left”). What escapes notice, thereby, is the absence, in our own times, of the context that shaped the world in which the Left acted in the course of the twentieth century, namely, the workers’ movement and its cycles of struggle.

The workers’ movement provided the setting in which the drama of “the Left” took place. That movement was not simply the proletariat in fighting form, as if any struggle today would have to replicate its essential features. It was a particular fighting form, which took shape in an era that is not our own. For us, there is only the “latecomers’ melancholy reverence”.5 It is our goal, in this essay, to explore this totality as past and to explain its dissociation from the present.

Our contention is that, if the historical workers’ movement is today alien to us, it is because the form of the capital–labour relation that sustained the workers’ movement no longer obtains: in the high-income countries since the 1970s and in the low-income countries since the 1980s (late workers’ movements appeared in South Africa, South Korea and Brazil, but all now present the same form: social democracy in retreat). Indeed, the social foundations on which the workers’ movement was built have been torn out: the factory system no longer appears as the kernel of a new society in formation; the industrial workers who labour there no longer appear as the vanguard of a class in the process of becoming revolutionary. All that remains of this past-world are certain logics of disintegration, and not only of the workers’ movement, but also of the capital–labour relation itself. To say so is not to suggest that, by some metric, all workers are “really” unemployed, or to deny that there is an emergent industrial proletariat in countries like India and China.

It is rather to point out that the following. The world economy is growing more and more slowly, on a decade by decade basis, due to a long period of overproduction and low profit rates. That sluggish growth has been associated, in most countries of the world, with deindustrialisation: industrial output continues to swell, but is no longer associated with rapid increases in industrial employment. Semi-skilled factory workers can thus no longer present themselves as the leading edge of a class-in-formation. In this context, masses of proletarians, particularly in countries with young workforces, are not finding steady work; many of them have been shunted from the labour market, surviving only by means of informal economic activity. The resulting low demand for labour has led to a worldwide fall in the labour-share of income, or in other words, to immiseration. Meanwhile, the state, in an attempt to manage this situation, has taken on massive amounts of debt, and has periodically been forced to undertake “reforms”— a term which in our era has come to mean a falling away of social protections — leaving a larger portion of the population in a tenuous position.

The social links that hold people together in the modern world, even if in positions of subjugation, are fraying, and in some places, have broken entirely. All of this is taking place on a planet that is heating up, with concentrations of greenhouse gases rising rapidly since 1950. The connection between global warming and swelling industrial output is clear. The factory system is not the kernel of a future society, but a machine producing no-future.

These are not merely political consequences of neoliberalism; they are structural features of the capitalist mode of production in our time. Struggles within and against this world are just beginning to take on a greater global significance, but they have not found a coherence comparable to that which pertained in an earlier era. A key feature of struggles today is precisely that, although they remain the struggles of workers, they present themselves as such only when they remain at the level of sectional struggles, that is, struggles of particular fractions of the class, which are almost always defensive struggles against ongoing “reforms” and “restructurings”. When struggles take on a wider significance, that is, for the class as a whole, then the unity they present, both to themselves and to others, goes beyond a class identity. Workers find a shared basis for struggle, not by means of the class belonging they have in common, but rather, as citizens, as participants in a “real democracy”, as the 99 percent, and so on. Such forms of identification sharply distinguish these workers’ struggles from the core struggles of the era of the workers movement. They have also made it difficult to see the way forward, to a communist future.

It is this context — that of the disintegration of the capital–labour relation, and of the unrealised potential for struggles to generate new sorts of social relations — that distinguishes the epoch in which we find ourselves from the past.

THEIR PERIODS AND OURS

In the first issue of Endnotes we published a series of texts that we called “preliminary materials for a balance sheet of the twentieth century”. In this issue we draw up that balance sheet as it presents itself to us today. But before we do so it will be useful to contrast our approach with that of Théorie Communiste (TC), whose texts featured prominently in that first issue, and have continued to influence our thinking over the years.

The periodising break we present in this article has much in common with TC’S.6 Our perspective emerged, in part, out of an attempt to measure TC’s theory against the global history of the workers movement in the course of the twentieth century. One difference between our account and theirs is that TC try to ground their periodisation in Marx’s categories of formal and real subsumption. For Marx, these terms referred specifically to the transformation of the labour process; TC apply them to the capital–labour relation as a whole, and even to capitalist society.7 They place the break between formal and real subsumption around WWI, then divide the latter into two distinct phases. They then overlay this structural periodisation — of the “form” of the “capital–labour relation”— with a second periodisation — of communism, or what they call “cycles of struggle”— where the current phase, beginning in the 1970s, corresponds to a second phase of real subsumption:

However, somewhat strangely, the key break in one sequence does not match up with the key break in the other: a complete transformation in the “cycle of struggle” (the 1970s) corresponds to a minor transformation in the form of the “capital-labour relation”. This gives TC’s periodisation the tripartite form of a narrative structure, with beginning, middle and end. As usual in such structures, the middle term tends to dominate the others: TC define the first and last phases negatively in relation to the height of “programmatism” from the 1910s to the 1970s.8 Thus in their texts the ghost of programmatism, supposedly long slain, has a tendency to hang around and haunt the present moment. A more serious problem is that the schematism fits neatly, if at all, only in France (at best, it might apply to Western Europe).9 It can only with great difficulty be extended to the rest of the world, and is particularly inapposite to poor and late-developing countries.

In this article, we begin from what we consider to be the grain of truth in TC’s distinction between formal and real subsumption. Rather than two phases, we argue that their distinction roughly corresponds to two aspects of the world in which the workers movement unfolded. The first “formal” aspect had to do with the persistence of the peasantry — extended here to include the persistence of old regime elites whose power was based in the countryside — as a kind of outside to the capitalist mode of production. This outside was in the process of being incorporated into capitalist social relations, but this incorporation took a long time. The second, “real” aspect was the “development of the productive forces”, that is, cumulative increases in labour productivity and the accompanying transformations, both of the productive apparatus and of the infrastructure of capitalist society, on which it relies.

These two aspects in turn gave rise to the two imperatives of the workers movement: on the one hand, to fight against the old regime elites, who sought to deny workers the freedoms of liberal capitalist society (e.g., the right to vote, the freedom to choose one’s employer), and on the other hand, to set loose the development of the productive forces from the fetters that they encountered, particularly in late developing countries (those fetters often resulting, in part, from the persistence of the old regime).10 In each case our focus will be on the divergence between the expected and the actual consequences of capitalist development.

However, the concepts of formal and real subsumption are inadequate to the task of explaining the history of the workers’ movement. The two aspects of the movement that these concepts vaguely describe are not distinct periods, which could be precisely dated, but rather unfold simultaneously, much like the formal and real subsumption of the labour process itself. Nonetheless TC’s periodisation of communism remains close to our own. The key periodising break, for us as for TC, begins in the mid 1970s. The two aspects of the workers movement which we have described were both radically transformed in the last quarter of the twentieth century. Instead of a break between two “phases” of real subsumption, marked by “revolution” and “counter-revolution”, we see this transition in terms of the ongoing transformation of the labour process, the end of the peasantry, the slowing down of capitalist accumulation on a global scale, and the corresponding onset of a long period of deindustrialisation, all of which have transformed the conditions of workers’ struggles, for reasons explored in detail below. A communist horizon broke apart and dissolved in this moment, enclosing us, for a time, within a capitalist world seemingly without a vanishing point.

HORIZONS OF COMMUNISM

There is another distinction between our periodisation and TC’s, one more concerned with content than form. TC often refer to the workers’ movement (the era of “programmatism”) as a “cycle of struggle”. They thus fail to clearly distinguish between, on the one hand, cycles or waves of struggle, and on the other, the horizon of communism, within which cycles unfold. Both of these concepts are necessary to our balance sheet of the twentieth century.11

The concept of a cycle of struggle describes how the class clash takes place. The latter typically unfolds neither in long marches nor in short outbursts, but rather, in waves. There are times of reaction, when revolutionary forces are weak and episodic, but not entirely absent. These reactionary eras may last for decades, but they do end, at a moment that is extremely difficult to predict in advance. Revolt then breaks out, more and more frequently. Militants, who formerly made little impression on their fellows, now find their numbers swelling. Meanwhile, struggles take on a new content, evolve new tactics, and discover new forms of organisation (all three are won only through the frightening melée of suffering and retribution). Over time, struggles coalesce — but never in a linear way — in waves that ebb and flow over years. That is what makes revolution possible. Insofar as revolutions fail or counter-revolutions succeed, the cycle comes to an end, and a new period of reaction begins.

Revolutionary strategists have mostly concerned themselves with the high points of various cycles of struggle: 1917, 1936, 1949, 1968, 1977, and so on. In so doing, they usually ignore the context in which those cycles unfold. The workers’ movement was that context: it provided the setting in which distinct cycles unfolded: e.g. (in Europe) 1905–1921, 1934–1947, 1968–77. It was because each cycle of struggle unfolded in the context of the workers’ movement that we can say of their high points: these were not just ruptures within the capitalist class relation but ruptures produced within a particular horizon of communism.12 It is worth examining such ruptures in detail, although that is not the task we set for ourselves in this text.13 Our contention is that it is only by looking at the workers movement as a whole, rather than at distinct high points, that we can see what made these points distinct, or even, exceptional. The revolutions of the era of the workers’ movement emerged in spite of rather than in concert with overall trends, and did so in a manner that went wholly against the revolutionary theory of that era, with all its sense of inevitability.

Thus, for us, the workers’ movement was not itself a cycle of struggle. It made for a definite communist horizon, which imparted a certain dynamic to struggles and also established their limits. To say that the workers’ movement was a horizon of communism is to say that it was not the invariant horizon. It is necessary to reject the idea that communism could become possible again only on the basis of a renewal of the workers’ movement (which is not the same thing as organised workers’ struggle). We will here try to understand the conditions that, between the late 19th century and the 1970s, opened up the era of the workers’ movement, made for several cycles of struggle, and then irreversibly collapsed. We focus, in other words, on the longue durée of the movement.

TWO FALLACIES

The essential thing to understand about the workers’ movement is that it represented the horizon of communism during the era of the long rise of the capitalist mode of production, that is, an era in which “all fixed, fast frozen relations, with their train of ancient and venerable prejudices and opinions” were “swept away”. Marxists have often drawn the wrong conclusions from this passage in the Communist Manifesto. Thus, before we begin it will be helpful to first disabuse ourselves of two common fallacies.

The first fallacy is that capitalism is an inevitable or evolutionary stage of history. Marxists in the late 19th century often imagined that capitalist social relations were relentlessly spreading across the globe. They thought the city, the factory, and wage labour would soon absorb everyone. In actual fact by 1950, some two-thirds of the world’s population remained in agriculture, the vast majority self-sufficient peasants or herdsmen. Even in the high-income countries, some 40 percent of the workforce was in agriculture. It was not until the late 1970s and early 1980s that a tipping point was reached: the agricultural population of the high-income countries shrank to a vanishing point, and globally, for the first time in thousands of years, the majority of the world’s workers were no longer working in the fields. Thus, the global peasantry, and the “fast-frozen relations” with which it was associated, were not so quickly “swept away”. This house cleaning took longer than expected because — in contrast to what historical materialists imagined — there was no natural or automatic tendency for the global peasantry to fold into the proletariat, whether by the corrosion of market forces or by some tendency of capitalists to expropriate peasants en masse.

Indeed, capital did not inevitably draw peasants into its orbit. Whenever possible, peasants fought to secure their non-market access to land. In the 19th and most of the 20th century, peasants’ eviction from the land was necessarily a political act. But then, such acts were rarely undertaken by capitalists, who preferred to employ non-free or semi-free labour wherever it was available, in order to produce for world markets (where levels of inequality were high, domestic markets were tiny). In fact, when expropriation was undertaken, it was often by representatives of the labour movement, or at least, with their support.

Proletarians could support the project of de-peasantisation because peasants were embedded in pre-capitalist class relations with landlords. These patriarchal social forms, stratified into castes or estates, offered little opportunity for change or mobility. Old-regime elites, oriented towards military affairs, were to some degree interested in pursuing alliances with capitalists (often the children of those elites, facing up to a changing world); however, this amalgamated elite-class saw nothing to gain by extending the franchise. Elites often did not even consider workers to be of the same species, that is, human beings capable of managing the affairs of the polity, let alone deserving of doing so. Such elites did not give up their privileges without a fight. Observers in the nineteenth century — or for that matter, in the twenty-first — can be forgiven for imagining that “free labour” was the inevitable accompaniment of capitalist accumulation. The history of the twentieth century showed that “free labour” had to be won.

The second fallacy is that the development of capitalism tends to unify the workers. The labour market may be singular, but the workers who enter it to sell their labour power are not. They are divided by language, religion, nation, race, gender, skill, etc. Some of these differences were preserved and transformed by the rise of capitalism, while others were newly created. Such remixing had ambivalent consequences. Most divisions proved to be obstacles to organising along lines of class solidarity. However, some pre-existing forms of collectivity proved to be their own sources of solidarity, an impetus to mass direct-action.

Champions of the workers’ movement declared that the development of the forces of production would get rid of divisions among the workers. The dispersed masses, the “class in itself”, would be formed by factory discipline into a compact mass, which might then be capable of becoming the “class for itself”. Thus if the workers would only give up on their attempts to preserve the old ways, if they would only give in to the scientific (and constant) reorganisation of the workplace, they would soon find themselves positively transformed: they would be unified by the factory system into a “collective worker”. For a while, in the early part of the twentieth century, this vision seemed to be coming true.

But in fact, these transformations led to the integration of workers (for the most part, former peasants) into market society, not only at the point of production, but also in exchange and in consumption, where workers were atomised. It was this atomising feature of the new world, not the cooperative aspects of work in the factory, that would prove dominant. That was true not only in consumer markets, where workers exchanged wages for goods, but also in labour markets, where they exchanged their promise to work for a promised wage — and even in the factories themselves, since divisions among workers were retained and made anew. The resulting intra-class competition was only partly mitigated by unions, which acted as rival salesmen’s associations, attempting to corner the market in labour power.

Here is the unity-in-separation of market society. People become ever more interdependent through the market, but this power comes at the expense of their capacities for collective action. Capitalist society reduces workers to petty commodity sellers, providing them with some autonomy, but always within limits. In hindsight, it is clear that the dream of the workers’ movement — that an “actual unity” of workers, as opposed to their unity-in-separation, would be realised in the factories through the further development of the productive forces — was not true. Such an actual unity can come about only by means of a communist transcendence of capitalist social relations.

1. To give just one example, in 1920 at the Second Congress of the Communist International, Grigory Zinoviev asserted that: ‘A whole series of old social democratic parties have turned in front of our eyes ... into parties that betray the cause of the working class. We say to our comrades that the sign of the times does not consist in the fact that we should negate the Party. The sign of the epoch in which we live … consists in the fact that we must say: “The old parties have been shipwrecked; down with them. Long live the new Communist Party that must be built under new conditions.”’ He goes on to add: ‘We need a party. But what kind of party? We do not need parties that have the simple principle of gathering as many members as possible around themselves ... [We need] a centralised party with iron discipline.’ It is impossible to read these lines without remembering that, fifteen years later, Zinoviev would stand accused in the first Moscow show trial. He would be executed by the same party he had stalwartly defended. By then Trotsky, who stood by him in the second congress, had already been run out of the country and would soon be murdered.
2. Draft Resolution Proposed by the Left Wing at Zimmerwald, 1915.
3. Ibid.
4. ‘This was a political milieu where the minute study of the month-to-month history of the Russian revolution and the Comintern from 1917 to 1928 seemed the key to the universe as a whole. If someone said they believed that the Russian Revolution had been defeated in 1919, 1921, 1923, 1927, or 1936, or 1953, one had a pretty good sense of what they would think on just about every other political question in the world: the nature of the Soviet Union, of China, the nature of the world CPs, the nature of Social Democracy, the nature of trade unions, the United Front, the Popular Front, national liberation movements, aesthetics and philosophy, the relationship of party and class, the significance of soviets and workers’ councils, and whether Luxemburg or Bukharin was right about imperialism.’ Loren Goldner, ‘Communism is the Material Human Community: Amadeo Bordiga Today’, Critique 23, 1991.
5. ‘The more we seek to persuade ourselves of the fidelity of our own projects and values with respect to the past, the more obsessively do we find ourselves exploring the latter and its projects and values, which slowly begin to form into a kind of totality and to dissociate themselves from our own present.’ Fredric Jameson, A Singular Modernity: Essay on the Ontology of the Present (Verso 2002), p. 24.
6. See Endnotes 1, October 2008.
7. TC were not the first to do so: Jacques Camatte, Negation, and Antonio Negri did the same. See ‘The History of Subsumption’, Endnotes 2, April 2010, for our critique of these attempts.
8. For this thought, see ‘Error’ in the next issue of Endnotes.
9. Perhaps this is because TC seem to derive their structural periodisation from the work of Michel Aglietta, the Regulation School economist who sees French history mirrored in the US (Aglietta, A Theory of Capitalist Regulation: The US Experience, Verso, 1976). Aglietta ignores the growth of labour productivity and wages in the late 19th century, and imagines that ‘Fordism’ in the US had a state-led form similar to post-war France. See Robert Brenner and Mark Glick, ‘The Regulation Approach: Theory and History’, nlr I/188, July 1991.
10. TC touch on these two tendencies with their notion of a conflict between the demands for ‘autonomy’ and a ‘rising strength of the working class within capitalism’, but they fail to draw the connection with their categories of formal and real subsumption, as if the former were purely ‘subjective’ whilst the latter purely ‘objective’ features of the class struggle.
11. On communist horizons see ‘Crisis in the Class Relation’, Endnotes 2, April 2010.
12. On the idea of a ‘produced rupture’, see Théorie Communiste, ‘Sur la critique de l’objectivisme’, TC 15 Feb 1999.
13. See ‘Spontaneity, Mediation, Rupture’, Endnotes 3, September 2013, for a discussion of the concept of cycles of struggle and revolutionary strategy.

Both of the above-mentioned fallacies were elements in the story that the workers movement told about itself, via its leaders and theoreticians. The first fallacy, the stagist, progressivist view of history, was a staple of 19th century bourgeois thought, from Ranke to Comte to Spencer, and one that proved particularly attractive to the workers’ movement’s official scribes. Kautsky, Bernstein and Plekhanov, as well as Lenin, Luxemburg and Lukács, all took heart from the idea that their revolution inherited the baton from a previous one, the so-called “bourgeois revolution”, which they saw as the inevitable result of the development of the forces of production and the rising power of an urban bourgeoisie. In early writings Marx himself subscribed to this view of inevitable stages, but as we shall see in the postface, “The Idea of the Workers Movement”, he rejected it in his later writings on the Russian Mir.

In this section we show that the “final” Marx was right in repudiating the stagist perspective that he himself had promulgated. Except in England, capitalism did not develop in nuce within the old regime; the European bourgeois revolutions, when and where they took place, were not really bourgeois at all.1 Instead, they largely found their basis in the internal tensions of the old regime, that is to say, first of all, in an ongoing contest between peasants and the elites who extracted an income from their labours, and second, in contests among elite factions, vying for dominance. As we will see, these old regimes tried to modernise themselves in response to the onset of capitalist development in the UK, and the military expansionism with which it was associated. That eventually led to attempts to institute capitalist social relations, by decree, on the continent.

We do not claim that capitalist development failed to take place outside of the UK and US. It’s just that the political revolution which was supposed to accompany the economic revolution did not take place on European soil. Thus, the establishment of liberal norms — with assurances of universal (male) suffrage, individual freedoms, and government by laws debated in parliament — was not guaranteed. Instead, the old regime, with its system of privileges, largely preserved itself alongside an ongoing capitalist development. Elite privileges would be abolished only where the working class completed the political tasks that the bourgeoisie had not. Such was the social setting for the emergence of the labour movement, and also for the development of socialist and anarchist perspectives. The labour movement had to fight its way into existence in a world where both the peasantry and the old regime elites remained powerful forces.2

A NON-TRANSITION

According to the formerly prevailing stagist view of history, the rise of the absolutist state was already a symptom of the transition to capitalism, which was supposedly going on all across Europe in the early modern period. Towns were swelling with the commercial activity of the bourgeoisie; the revolutions of 1789 and 1848 were supposed to mark its rise to political power. But in fact, the peasant revolts at the heart of modern revolutions — which spanned the centuries from 1789 all the way down to the 1960s — did not usher in the political rule of capital; rather, they largely continued class struggle within the context of the old regime. Peasant communities were fighting to free themselves from the domination of feudal lords. However, the upshot of doing so “would not be the transition to capitalism, but the strengthening of pre-capitalist social property relations”.3 Peasant revolts had as their goal to strengthen the resistance of their communities to all forms of exploitation — both capitalist and non-capitalist.

The peasants could carry on without the lords for they were already constituted as a community: they had “direct access to factors of production — land, tools, and labour — sufficient to enable them to maintain themselves without recourse to the market”.4 Under these conditions, the removal of external domination by lords would not release peasants into capitalist social relations. For that to happen, their communities would have to be dissolved. But it was difficult to make that happen. On the one hand, peasant communities did not dissolve themselves. On the other hand, they fought tenaciously against attempts to separate them from the land. Therefore, peasants — like every other non-capitalist social formation — do not necessarily become imbricated in markets. There is no historically inevitable tendency to proletarianise the world’s population.

While it was important as a step towards the formation of the modern state, the emergence of absolutism in continental Europe was only indirectly related to the transition to the capitalist mode of production. Absolutism arose because, in the aftermath of the Black Death, peasant communities in that region were stronger. It was difficult for feudal lords to extract rent from the peasants: “suffering from reduced revenues, local lords were often too weak to stand up to the expansionist designs of those great lordly competitors, monarchs and princes, who extended their territorial jurisdiction at [the local lords] expense.”5 On that basis, the absolutist state was able to centralise lords’ rent-extracting activity as state taxation (though only in a highly conflictual process, which pitted elites against one another). Thus, the wealth of absolutist states was won by squeezing the peasants more severely. What commercial development took place in this context merely reflected age-old cycles of urban growth and decline. While this process laid bases for what would become the modern state, there was no transition to the specifically capitalist mode of production necessarily implied in these developments.

Likewise, elsewhere in Europe, the strength of old regimes remained a constant feature of the landscape. But outside of Western Europe, that was not because peasants were growing stronger. Rather, it was because their communities were weak. In Eastern Europe, where territories were more recently colonised, lords retained a tight grip on the peasants. Even in the aftermath of the Black Death, lords were able to keep peasants in conditions of servitude, in some cases into the twentieth century, without having to centralise lordly extraction.

And beyond Europe? Marx had expected European colonialism to bring capitalism to the rest of the world.6 However, colonial administrations, even as late as the 1920s and 30s, only ended up reinforcing the power of the local elites, who ruled, in different ways, over various agrarian societies. Where those elites did not exist, for example, in parts of sub-Saharan Africa, colonial powers designated certain individuals as “chieftains”, sometimes inventing this role out of whole cloth. The point of colonialism was not to proletarianise the population, initiating a transition to fully capitalist social relations. On the contrary, the point was to reinforce existing social relations in the countryside — pinning “natives” down and then partially proletarianising them — in order to secure the space and the labour needed for limited projects of resource extraction.

DEVELOPMENT AND LATE DEVELOPMENT

It was only in England that capitalist social relations emerged as an unanticipated development out of the old regime. Here, class struggle in that context had a novel result. After the Black Death, strong peasant communities won formal freedom, but well-organised lords secured the right to charge rent on the land peasants farmed. The latter became market-dependent for the first time. There followed a veritable agricultural revolution, marked by the consolidation of land-holdings and an adoption of new techniques, as well as the growth of the division of labour in the countryside. Agricultural productivity rose, and that, in turn, fostered demographic growth and urbanisation. It was unlike what was happening anywhere else in Europe, or anywhere else in the world.

This capitalist pattern of development swelled the military power of the state in Britain. The resulting European power imbalance drove a logic of territorial conquest through which the British Empire would eventually cover a quarter of the Earth’s landmass. In response, the absolutist states of continental Europe tried (and failed) to rationalise their empires, leading to fiscal and social crises, the most famous of which was the one that led to the French Revolution. For elites outside of Britain, regime change thus appeared a political necessity. Otherwise, they were going to fall further behind it militarily, as was proven in the course of the Napoleonic wars. Elites had to figure out how to introduce capitalist social relations by political design — and as fast as possible: “while Britain did not have a policy to ‘industrialise’, most countries since have had a strategy to emulate its success.”7 That strategy came to be known, at least in the economics literature, as “late development”.

The key point is that, in the mid-nineteenth century, late development was based on alliances between a capitalist class and old regime elites: “Iron and Rye”. In fact, it was often unclear whether there was any separation in the first place between these classes, from which alliances might be concluded: the emergence of a bourgeoisie was often merely a partial embourgeoisement of a section of the aristocracy. In regard to late development, “the decade of the 1860s was a fundamental conjuncture. It saw the US Civil War, the unification of Germany, the unification of Italy, the Russian serf emancipation and the Meiji Restoration in Japan.”8 While wars and internal conflicts in the 1860s served to consolidate the power of elites over territories, protectionism in the 1870s created a space for national industry. It also preserved peasantries against grain imports from the United States and Eastern Europe.

Some of the countries where elites made power plays on this basis were able to catch up with Britain, and thus to join the club of rich countries: “not only did continental Europe and North America overtake Britain in industrial output between 1870 and 1913, but they manifestly joined it in technological competence.”9 However, the nature of late development ensured that old regime elites and the peasantry persisted. On the continent, “industrialisation proved to be compatible with the preservation of a firmly entrenched agrarian ruling class and a dynastic state of a conservative and militaristic stamp. It took place without the destruction of the peasantry as a class and gave opportunities for the emergence of prosperous peasant strata producing for the market.”10 The old regime went into decline in Europe only following the First World War. Then, after limping back onto the scene, it was decimated in the Second: old regime elites were finally liquidated only by the Red Army, which — having already eradicated the Czar and the Russian aristocracy in the Civil War — now opened up a path of slaughter that marched all the way into Prussia, the heart of the old regime in Central Europe.

Yet even then, the old regime persisted in the rest of the world, strengthening itself by allying with other classes in the anti-colonial movements of the middle twentieth century. Without an international war (on the scale of the World Wars), which might have unified nations and strengthened the hands of developmentalists, it proved difficult to dislodge such elites. The task of doing so was made even more difficult in the global context of imperialist interventions: the US feared that any attempt at real land reform would lead inevitably to communist revolution and regional contagion. And indeed, where elites were not defeated by communist revolution, they managed to retain much of their control, both of politics and of the economy. It is still the case, even today, that many national economies in low-income countries are overseen by a few extended families and their retinues.

THE PERSISTENCE OF THE PEASANTRY

It was in the context of “the persistence of the old regime” that the new industrial cities first materialised in continental Europe, in the second half of the nineteenth century.11 In some places, cities emerged from the transformation of medieval towns; elsewhere, conurbations sprung up where only villages had been. In any case, by the end of the nineteenth century, the speed of urbanisation was unprecedented. That was true in spite of the fact that, throughout this period, there remained a substantial number of peasants. From great reservoirs in the countryside, peasants streamed into the towns — in a slow trickle or in a torrent — either because they had lost their land due to expropriation, or else because, on account of demographic growth, their parents did not have enough land to divide among all of their descendants.12

Nevertheless, individuals were not only pushed into the cities; they were also drawn to them. Cities offered a real if partial emancipation from rural patriarchy, from the law of the father as well as the lord. The total dependence of children on their fathers was grounded in the fact that land — not labour — was the limiting productive factor in rural areas, and so also the real source of social wealth. Men had to inherit land from their parents, or to acquire it with their parents’ resources; likewise, in order to marry, women needed dowries, which only parents could provide. That was the source of an overbearing paternal power: children couldn’t make decisions about their own lives. They couldn’t afford to upset their fathers. The prospect of finding work in a nearby city disrupted that age-old relation: the autonomy of the young was won via the wage. In that sense, capitalist social relations extended an existing feature of medieval cities, delimiting a zone of relative freedom in a world of strictures.

However, that freedom was secured only in a situation of immense danger. The facilities where proletarians worked were hastily constructed. Their jobs required them to handle lethal machinery, with little fresh air or daylight. Capitalists found that they did not have to worry about the working conditions they offered. For no matter how bad those conditions were, young proletarians, often fresh from the countryside, still lined up for work; they even fought over it. Internecine conflicts emerged between peasants arriving from different villages, speaking mutually unintelligible dialects of a national language, or different languages altogether. Capitalists played workers off one another to secure low wages and a docile workforce. The same sorts of conflicts and in-fighting then emerged in proletarian residences.

In this strange new world, laden with suffering, proletarian freedoms created openings for self-destruction: “if at the end of the week the worker had enough left to enable him to forget the hell he lived in for a few hours by getting drunk on bad liquor, it was the most he could achieve. The inevitable consequence of such a state of affairs was an enormous increase in prostitution, drunkenness, and crime.”13 Households were always one step away from penury, and thus could be pushed into begging, petty crime, or sex work when one of their members became an alcoholic.14 In the new industrial city it was easy to fall down and difficult to get up. That was all the more true, insofar as moving to the cities meant cutting the ties of support that existed in rural communities. Nor were capitalists going to help workers survive: under conditions of capitalist competition and an oversupply of labour, employers couldn’t afford to care whether any individual worker or family survived.

That was to be expected: after all, the working class would be emancipated only by the workers themselves.15 And yet, contrary to the narrative of the workers’ movement, the development of the productive forces was not tending to strengthen the working class by giving birth to the collective worker. The workers’ movement supposed that this collective worker would be a byproduct of the factory: it would stamp its universal form on its victims, annihilating their relationships to the past (which remained all around them, in the form of villages outside the city limits); the class in-itself would then become the class for-itself. But that did not happen automatically. Most workers were not even factory workers. And in any case, those who did work in factories were often divided, not only by skill, or position within the division of labour, but also by religion and customs. Many did not even speak the same language! Lacking a basis for solidarity, proletarians found it difficult to convince their co-workers to risk their jobs for the greater good by going on strike. The working class was a class that tended to express itself not by striking, but by rioting.

THE PERSISTENCE OF OLD REGIME ELITES

Periodic explosions of urban riots gave rise to what was known as the “social question”. What did the workers want? And what would it take to pacify them? In fact, it seemed, at first, that there was no need to pacify workers: as capitalists expanded production, their power over them only grew. Moreover, when proletarians did revolt, the ownership class found that it could call on the army and the police to beat or shoot them for disturbing the peace. Against these repressive interventions, proletarians had few resources on which to draw.

They needed to organise themselves. According to what became the prevailing revolutionary theory, workers needed to organise themselves to win rights that would help them in their further struggle. They needed the right to assemble and the freedom of the press. They needed to force the army and the police to remain neutral in the class struggle.16 To get all that — so the theory went — workers needed power at the political level: they needed to win the right to vote. On that basis, they could form a class party which would compete for power in national elections. This political perspective was reinforced almost everywhere by the failure of alternatives: “While strikes oriented toward extensions of suffrage were successful in Belgium and Sweden, the use of mass strikes for economic goals invariably resulted in political disasters: in Belgium in 1902 … Sweden in 1909 … France in 1920 … Norway in 1921 … and Great Britain in 1926 … All these strikes were defeated; in the aftermath, trade-unions were decimated and repressive legislation was passed.”17

The problem for workers, in trying the parliamentary route, was that the old regime controlled politics. The lower classes were “not supposed to share … the prerogatives of full-fledged human beings”, who made up the elite.18 There was a material basis underlying this perspective: elites feared that recognising the lower classes as equals, even formally, would undermine the basis of their power in the countryside: that power was based not on success in free markets, but rather, on strictly controlling access to limited resources — including the rights to own land, and the rights to mine, log, or graze animals on that land — all of which was determined by elite privileges.19

As it turned out, the bourgeoisie in Europe did not displace those elites as the workers’ movement had expected. Instead, factory owners grew up within the old regime, often taking on noble titles. In defending their interests, the ownership class appealed to privilege as much as liberal economics. There was a material basis underlying that perspective as well: capitalists benefited from workers’ lack of freedom. Particularly in agriculture and in resource extraction, aimed at international markets, employers did not need workers to be fully free in order to make a profit. Plantation owners, engaged in the production of all sorts of raw materials and agricultural products, profited handsomely from the employment of slaves. On the Russian steppes, exported grain was produced by quasi-serfs. Thus, capitalist development did not automatically lead to the double freedom that Marx described as its foundation: workers were not transformed into formally free commodity sellers who also happened to be free of access to means of production. Only some workers obtained the economic right to sell their labour-power; fewer achieved the political rights of equal citizens.

The old regime had only contempt for workers’ calls for full economic and political equality, arguing that they didn’t deserve it, for they lacked the self-control and independence that comes with owning property. Instead, proletarian neighbourhoods were rife with unconventional and ecstatic forms of religious belief. Drunks begged in the street, while in ports and public parks proletarian prostitution and male homosexuality disturbed refined sensibilities. These indecencies became the subject matter of newspaper exposés; elites gawked and laughed at the lawlessness and penury of proletarian life. Politically-minded workers could see that these were problems, not just for their image, but also for their capacity to organise: how were workers going to win the vote — let alone abolish class society — if they could not even keep their own houses in order?

THE AFFIRMATION OF A CLASS IDENTITY

In order to abolish class society, workers needed to win reforms, and in order to do that, they first needed to present themselves as capable and worthy of power. The difficulty they faced was twofold. In the cities, workers had to acclimatise to dangerous conditions of life. Coming from different villages (and having such diverse experiences), they had to figure out how to organise together. Meanwhile, in newly-constructed liberal states, workers faced the hatred of their social betters, who were looking for any excuse to exclude them from civil society. In response to these problems, the workers’ movement constituted itself as a project: proletarians would fight for their right to exist. They would show that there was dignity and pride in being a worker; the workers’ culture was superior to that of other social classes. Eric Hobsbawm suggests that “no term is harder to analyse than ‘respectability’ in the mid-nineteenth century working class, for it expressed simultaneously the penetration of middle-class values and standards, and also the attitudes without which working class self-respect would have been difficult to achieve, and a movement of collective struggle impossible to build: sobriety, sacrifice, the postponement of gratification”.20 This mid-century notion of respectability then matured into the more developed programs and projects of the late-nineteenth and early-twentieth century workers movement in all its forms: as socialist and communist parties, as anarchist unions, and as assorted other revolutionary forces.

Supporting workers’ claims to respectability was a vision of their destiny, with five tenets:

(1) Workers were building a new world with their own hands. (2) In this new world, workers were the only social group that was expanding; whereas all other groups were contracting, including the bourgeoisie. (3) Workers were not only becoming the majority of the population; they were also becoming a compact mass, the collective worker, who was being drilled in the factories to act in concert with the machines. (4) They were thus the only group capable of managing the new world in accordance with its innermost logic: neither a hierarchy of order-givers and order-takers, nor the irrationality of market fluctuations, but rather, an ever more finely-grained division of labour. (5) Workers were proving this vision to be true, since the class was realising what it was in a conquest of power, the achievement of which would make it possible to abolish class society, and thus to bring man’s prehistory to a close.21

This vision wasn’t something implanted from the outside, transforming a reformist movement into a revolutionary one. To muster the will to take risks and make sacrifices, workers needed to believe in a better world that was already in the process of realising itself. Their victory was supposedly guaranteed: it was a historical necessity but, paradoxically, also a political project. It is precisely the simplicity and self-evidence of these tenets, their immediate appeal, that explains the movement’s exponential growth in the years between 1875 and 1921.

As mentioned above, at the heart of the workerist vision lay a mythic figure: the collective worker — the class in-and-for-itself, the class as unified and knowing its unity, born within the space of the factory. The collective worker was presupposed in workers’ organising and posited through that organising effort. But, to a large extent, the collective worker did not exist outside of the movement’s attempts to construct it.22 The theorists of the labour movement could never have admitted that this was the case. They spoke of the factory system as if it came from the future: the development of the factory system was supposedly a consequence of the “progressive socialisation of the process of production”, which created “the germs of the future social order”.23 It was expected that the socialised factory system would also prepare the workers for a socialist existence, transforming them from a disparate set of working classes, into a unified fighting force — the industrial proletariat — drilled on the factory floor.

In reality, this transformation did not take place automatically. The factory system was not a time-traveler from the future. It was the form production took within developed capitalist societies. As such, it embodied not the “actual unity” of a world to come, but rather the unity-in-separation of this world. The factory system, in itself, did not tend to unify the workforce in a way that benefited workers engaged in struggle — or, at least, it did not do that exclusively. Capitalist development may have dissolved some pre-existing differences among workers, but it reinforced or created other divisions, especially as these emerged from the division of labour (that is, mostly around skill, but also around divisions of tasks by “race” and gender, as well as according to seniority, language, region of origin, etc).

Meanwhile, outside of the factory gates, workers continued to stand in conflict with one another. They had to look out for themselves, as well as their kin: “Similarity of class position does not necessarily result in solidarity since the interests which workers share are precisely those which put them in competition with one another, primarily as they bid down wages in quest of employment”.24 Given that there were never enough jobs for everyone (the existence of a surplus population was a structural feature of societies built around capitalist exploitation), allegiances of religion, “race”, and “nation” made it possible for some workers to get ahead at the expense of others. As long as workers were not already organised on a class basis — and there was no pre-given, structural necessity for them to be so organised — they had a real interest in maintaining their individuality, as well as their extra-class allegiances.

This was the melée into which the workers’ movement threw itself. The movement encouraged workers to forget their specificity and all that supposedly came from the past. Workers should turn their gaze towards the future; they should actively merge into the generality of the collective worker. Here was the essence of the workers’ movement. Trade unions and chambers of labour, as well as social organisations, brought proletarians together on the basis of trades, neighbourhoods or hobbies. A general workers’ interest was then cobbled together out of these local organisations. The Social Democratic and Communist parties and the Anarchist federations instantiated the collective worker at the national level.

These organisations could not have succeeded in their tasks without, at the same time, relying on an affirmable class identity. Insofar as they made sacrifices in the name of the labour movement, workers generally were not acting in their immediate interests. To say that they affirmed a shared identity is to say that the movement succeeded in convincing workers to suspend their interests as isolated sellers in a competitive labour market, and, instead, to act out of a commitment to the collective project of the labour movement.

To the extent that workers were willing to believe that having solidarity was morally necessary, they were able to realise — partially and fitfully — the slogan that “an injury to one is an injury to all”. This phrase never described a preexisting truth about the working class; it was, instead, an ethical injunction. But insofar as workers accepted this injunction, their interests as individuals began to change: those interests were simplified, narrowed, or even wholly redefined, but also partially fulfilled.25 By this means, competition between workers was muted, but only for as long as the shared ethic and identity could be preserved.

In that sense, the workers’ movement was an apparatus, an urban machine, which bound workers together and kept them so bound.26 Such binding did not only happen in the factories:

This remained one of the Left’s most perduring misrecognitions: ‘labour movements’ implied a socialism beginning from the workplace, centred on strikes, and borne by militant working men; yet those movements were actually more broadly founded, also requiring women’s efforts in households, neighbourhoods, and streets.27

The collective worker was cobbled together in towns, through an array of popular workers’ organisations: workers’ “savings banks, health and pension funds, newspapers, extramural popular academies, workingmen’s clubs, libraries, choirs, brass bands, engagé intellectuals, songs, novels, philosophical treatises, learned journals, pamphlets, well-entrenched local governments, temperance societies – all with their own mores, manners and styles”.28 Through these means, proletarians were made to forget that they were Corsican or Lyonnais; they became workers. The class came to exist as an abstract identity that could be affirmed, dignified and proud.

This is how the workers’ movement solved the problems of acclimatising the constant flow of new rural–urban migrants to the industrial cities, and of making them respectable. Respectability involved three operations. (1) The movement spread new behavioural codes, either appropriated from bourgeois culture, or directly opposed to it (heterosexual family norms, temperance). (2) The movement provided a sense of community, to help workers overcome the social dislocation involved in migrating to cities. Community organisations reinforced the new codes while providing for the spiritual needs of their members. And (3) the movement built up institutions that supported workers’ struggles to transform their material situation — and to prevent individuals or families from falling into disrepute (unions and parties fought not only for better wages and conditions, but also for public health interventions, welfare schemes, provisions for the old and sick, and so on).

The first two of these operations supported the third, while it was the third that brought the class into conflict with the legal and political frameworks of the era. The workers were compelled to struggle “against throne and altar, for universal suffrage, for the right to organise and to strike”.29 It was necessary to take risks and make sacrifices, but both could now be justified through the movement’s self-understanding — as a moral community, fighting to establish a better world, guided by the lights of rational production and equitable distribution.

THE PAST IN THE PRESENT

In truth this moral community was an ad hoc construction, supported by a beautiful dream. It was far from an ironclad reality: “what, from one point of view, looked like a concentration of men and women in a single ‘working class’, could be seen from another as a gigantic scattering of the fragments of societies, a diaspora of old and new communities.”30 Workers retained or preserved their links to the past, and did so in many different ways. Traditional artisan guilds shaded into the unions, ethnic and religious groups set themselves up in the new cities, and most new workers retained links to peasant families.

While workers did not so easily forget their links to the old communities, movement activists increasingly viewed those links as an obstacle: “world history cannot be turned back”, proclaimed the German Metalworkers Union (DMV), “for the sake of the knife-grinders” and their craft mentality.31 However, in many cases the culture of solidarity that activists were trying to build relied precisely on such holdovers, forged through the experiences of peasants and artisans. The idea that work was dignified — that one should identify with one’s essence — was itself an inheritance from artisans. The movement tried to transfer the bonds of the craft workers over to the “mass workers”, that is, the semi-skilled workers in the factories, who were supposed to identify with the class as a whole, while denying any attempt to preserve their specific trades.

Resistance to the project of the workers’ movement often took place on this basis; a conflict thus opened up between the class and its organisations. It was often workers resisting incorporation into the generality of the collective worker who undertook the most militant actions. In many places the most radical current of the workers’ movement was associated — against the prevailing theory of the Social Democrats — with a defense of shopfloor autonomy, that is, with the right of workers to make decisions about the organisation of production, even when those decisions slowed the development of the productive forces. Conflict was apparent in rapidly growing cities like Solingen, in western Germany: “Where groups like the Solingen cutlery grinders clung to older ideals of a locally rooted cooperative commonwealth based on craft autonomy, the new DMV strategists [that is, the strategists at the German Metalworkers Union] celebrated technical progress, mass material improvement, and an industrial unionism proper to the structures of a continuously rationalising capitalism”.32 Socialists and communists did not see that it was only insofar as workers had a hand in determining how production took place that they were able to identify with their work as what defined who they really were. Once that right and its corresponding experience disappeared, so did the workers’ identity.

1. Neil Davidson has recently attempted to save the notion of the bourgeois revolution by dropping the (now widely rejected) claim that these revolutions were led by a bourgeoisie intent on spreading liberal democracy. He claims instead that, without necessarily intending it, they gave rise to states that ‘promoted capitalist development’. That may be true of the ‘passive revolutions’ (Italy, Germany, Japan), but it is not true of the classic case, the French revolution, which consolidated peasant land rights and the tax-office state. See Davidson, How Revolutionary Were the Bourgeois Revolutions? (Haymarket 2012).
2. The stalling out of what Théorie Communiste has called the ‘formal subsumption’ of society played a key role in determining what shape the workers’ movement took. However, unlike TC, we do not think this phase ended with the conclusion of WWI. Even in Europe, the restructuring of social relations along capitalist lines carried on into the post-WWII era.
3. Robert Brenner, ‘Property and Progress: Where Adam Smith Went Wrong’, in Chris Wickham, ed., Marxist History-Writing for the Twenty-First Century (British Academy 2007), p. 89. We are heavily indebted to Brenner’s thesis concerning the historical origins of the capitalist mode of production. See T. H. Aston and C. H. E. Philpin, eds, The Brenner Debate: Agrarian Class Structure and Economic Development in Pre-industrial Europe (Cambridge 1987).
4. Brenner, ‘Property and Progress’, p. 63.
5. ibid., p. 92.
6. ‘England, it is true, in causing a social revolution in [India], was actuated only by the vilest interests’, but ‘whatever may have been the crimes of England she was the unconscious tool of history in bringing about that revolution.’ Marx, ‘The British Rule in India’, New-York Daily Tribune, 25 June 1853.
7. Robert Allen, Global Economic History: A Very Short Introduction (OUP 2011), p. 41 – a much more important book than its title suggests.
8. Goldner, ‘Communism is the Material Human Community’.
9. Allen, Global Economic History, p. 43. As we will see, Russia and Japan were unsuccessful in their attempts to catch up with Britain by means of late development. For them, catch up would come only via ‘big-push’ industrialisation, and only in the middle decades of the twentieth century.
10. Tom Kemp, Industrialisation in Nineteenth Century Europe (Routledge 2014), p. 104.
11. For the best account of this phenomenon, see Arno Mayer, The Persistence of the Old Regime (Pantheon 1981).
12. It is important to note that it was not until the public health interventions and medical innovations of the last quarter of the 19th century and the beginning of the 20th that demographic growth within the cities displaced migration as the main source of urban growth.
13. Rocker, Anarcho-Syndicalism: Theory and Practice – An Introduction to a Subject Which the Spanish War Has Brought Into Overwhelming Prominence [1937] (AK Press 2004).
14. The notion that poverty was pushing proletarian women, against their will, into sex work, was a major theme of the socialist literature of the late nineteenth and early 20th century.
15. Although, in fact, early labour legislation was not won by workers, but rather, by teams of factory inspectors and their supporters in government.
16. These reforms had nothing to do with ‘reformism’ –the belief that the working classes could become full and equal members of the capitalist polity, thus making revolution unnecessary. On the contrary, such reforms were seen as essential weapons for the coming class war.
17. Adam Przeworski, Capitalism and Social Democracy (Cambridge 1985), p. 12.
18. G.M. Tamás, ‘Telling the Truth about Class’ in Socialist Register, vol. 42, 2006; available on grundrisse.net.
19. ‘No landlord-dominated government will happily vote itself out of landowning status and various other privileges without strong pressure from other socio-political groups.’ Russell King, Land Reform: A World Survey (Westview 1977), pp. 9–10.
20. Hobsbawm, The Age of Capital, 1848–1875 (Penguin 1984), p. 224.
21. This last tenet sometimes expressed a will to see the proletariat become the only class; at other times, it expressed a will to see all classes abolished and working time dramatically reduced (see afterword).
22. False consciousness supposedly hid the class from itself, but false-consciousness was a false concept.
23. Luxemburg, ‘Reform or Revolution’ (1900) in The Essential Rosa Luxemburg (Haymarket 2008), p. 45.
24. Przeworski, Capitalism and Social Democracy, p. 20.
25. See the addendum to this part, p. 103 below.
26. The US presents only a partial exception to this story. Its distinguishing features are (1) the early achievement of universal manhood suffrage, and (2) the fact that it drew its industrial workforce not from its own agricultural periphery, but from that of Europe. Engels, in a letter to Weydemeyer, grasped the key to both phenomena, writing of the ‘ease with which the surplus population [in the US] is drained off to the farms’. Free land on the frontier (ethnically cleansed of its initial inhabitants) stimulated the largest transoceanic migration in human history. States extended the franchise to all men in order to attract these immigrants (whilst women and free blacks were disenfranchised). Urban political machines quickly arose in US cities to manage the white male vote along the lines of ethnic, religious and regional identity. These structures were only shaken in the 1920s, when the tap of immigration was turned off, and US industry for the first time began to draw on its own rural hinterland. It was only during this period of tight immigration, from 1932 to 1974, that the US came to approximate a European social democracy.
27. Geoff Eley, Forging Democracy: The History of the Left in Europe, 1850–2000 (Oxford 2002), p. 58.
28. Tamás, ‘Telling the Truth about Class’.
29. Ibid.
30. Hobsbawm, Age of Empire, p. 119.
31. Quoted in Geoff Eley, Forging Democracy, p. 78.
32. Ibid., p. 78–79.
33. ‘Misery and Debt’, Endnotes 2, April 2010.
34. Rosa Luxemburg, ‘The Mass Strike’ [1906] in The Essential Rosa Luxemburg (Haymarket 2008), p. 114.
35. Marx, ‘The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte’ (MECW 10), p. 198.
36. Hobsbawm, Age of Empire, p. 140.
37. Kautsky, The Class Struggle (1892), chapter 5, available on marxists.org.

The workers could have failed in their essay to defeat the old regime; we’ve certainly dwelled on the many obstacles that they faced. But in spite of all that, the movement was successful in achieving some of its goals. The labour movement shaped history (if not always as it had intended). That it did so, we argue, had everything to do with the emergence of infrastructural industries, that is, industries producing goods whose use depended on the construction of massive networked infrastructures: roads, electricity grids, plumbing, radio towers, etc.

If the persistence of the old regime set the scene or provided the stage on which the workers’ movement was born, then these infrastructural industries supplied the dramatic action. It was in and through their growth that the drama of the workers’ movement played out. These new industries came online just as those of the first industrial revolution — e.g., food processing, textiles, ironworks and railroads — were maturing. Taking their place at the leading edge, the infrastructural industries included, at first, everything to do with electrification and steel: safety razors, sliced bread, radios, and precision machines. There followed the heyday of so-called “Fordism”: cars, refrigerators, washing machines, and all manner of consumer durables. Altogether, these industries employed huge masses of semi-skilled workers.

It was because they employed so many workers, and made their employment so central to the functioning of the wider economy, that the infrastructural industries determined the course of the workers’ movement. The growth of these industries meant that, for a time, the development of the productive forces really did swell the size and power of the industrial workforce. Workers were also unified within massive factory complexes, which employed thousands of them at a time. Development therefore seemed to represent the growing strength of the proletariat and the shrinking relevance of its old-world enemies.

However, this growth in unity and power turned out to be a temporary phenomenon. Both were washed away in the 1970s, as industrialisation became deindustrialisation. Meanwhile, the expansion of infrastructural industries did not unify the wider class as expected. On the contrary, it deepened the imbrication of the proletariat within the unity-in-separation of capitalist social relations. Unity-in-separation was, at first, merely a formal feature of market exchange. But over time, this formal feature was “realised” in the transformation of the earth — a mess of steel and glass, concrete and asphalt, high-tension wires — taking place not only within the space of the factory, but also beyond the factory gates.

INFRASTRUCTURAL INDUSTRIES, SEMI-SKILLED WORKERS

Production in infrastructural industries was not tendentially automated. That made these industries unlike the ones Marx was thinking of in his famous fragment on machines: once chemical plants had been constructed, for example, they mostly needed to be maintained or monitored. Unlike chemicals production, the industries of the second industrial revolution required huge quantities of labour, not only for the construction of the plants, but also, once constructed, for the assembly of goods. The result was, from the standpoint of Marx’s theory, a wholly unexpected support for the growth of labour demand.1 On that basis, two waves of strong industrial employment growth took place in the 100 years after Marx’s death: from the 1880s to 1914, then again from the 1950s to 1973. Both the fin-de-siècle upturn and the postwar boom seemed to confirm workers’ sense that the fate of capital and of labour were tied together: accumulation of capital was multiplication of the proletariat.

This proletariat was, increasingly, a respectable class. It became respectable in the figure of the male, semi-skilled, heavy industrial worker (which is not to say that all such workers were male, only that they were imagined to be so, ideally). This figure became hegemonic in the course of the workers’ movement: like the artisan, he really could define himself in relation to his work. That was because — at least until the 1960s, when the loss of shopfloor autonomy reached a tipping point — he was able to see his work as a source of growing collective power. He provided a model for the rest of the class: what it could be, what it was becoming.

Semi-skilled workers not only provided a model, they also had a measure of security denied to other members of the class. They were difficult to replace on a moment’s notice, and they set in motion huge quantities of fixed capital, which were worthless when left idle. That security provided a firm basis from which to fight for freedoms for the class as a whole. The time of the workers’ movement was simply the time of the rise and decline of the semi-skilled male worker and of the industries where he worked. Together they made it possible to imagine that capital was tendentially unifying the class by means of an affirmable workers’ identity. But it was only insofar as those industries were expanding that the workers’ movement could see the semi-skilled worker as its future being realised in the present. Once those industries went into decline, the glorious future declined as well.

THE ROLE OF THE STATE

But we will come to that later. For now, it is important to point out that, on the continent, the new industries emerging in this era did so only in the context of late development. As we saw above, late development was rooted in alliances between aristocratic and capitalist elites. Those alliances allowed European powers to institute “the American system”.2 The American system had four essential components. Late-developing regimes had to: (1) erect external tariffs to protect infant industries; (2) abolish internal tariffs and support infrastructure building, to unify the national market; (3) fund big banks, both to stabilise inflation and provide a boost to national capital formation; and (4) institute public education programmes, to consolidate allegiance to the state, standardise the national language, and promote literacy (literacy was a prerequisite for a lot of semi-skilled factory work, as well as office work).

Late development commenced in the 1860s and early 1870s. Then, in the course of the First Great Depression (1873–96), many states dropped pretenses to Manchestertum; they began to intervene extensively in national economies. That they did so made it possible to build a vast infrastructure, on which the new industries ran. Here were the canals, railroads and telegraph wires; here, too, the roads, telephone wires, gas lines, plumbing, and electrical grids. At first, this infrastructure was one dimensional: railroads and canals cut through the landscape. Then, it became increasingly two (or even three) dimensional: networks of roads, electrical grids and radio towers covered entire areas.

These latter necessitated some sort of urban planning. For example, the laying down of tram lines was associated with the separation out, on the one hand, of working class neighbourhoods, and on the other hand, of industrial zones (it was no longer the case that workers had to live within walking distance of their places of work).3 Such residential and commercial districts had to be designated in advance, when the infrastructure was laid.

This sort of undertaking was often too difficult for capitalists, and not only because of the huge scale of investment required. To build a massive infrastructure requires an army of planners: to promote a wide reach, to prevent wasteful duplication and to decide on industry standards. That meant a growing role for the state, as the only part of society capable of becoming adequate to this task — the task of planning society. Late development occurred alongside a burgeoning state apparatus, at once more centralised and more dispersed than ever before (although this apparatus remained relatively small until the World Wars spurred its growth).

The changed role of the state dramatically transformed proletarian visions of communism. In Marx’s theory, there had been no role for the state to play, either before or after the revolution. Free-market capitalism was to be replaced by socialism: that is, the “conscious planning of production by associated producers (nowhere does Marx say: by the state).”4 Marx’s model of planning was not the state, but the workers’ cooperative on the one hand, and the joint-stock company on the other. Likewise, Engels famously suggested in Origins of the Family, Private Property and the State that after the revolution, the state was to find its place in “a museum of antiquities, by the side of the spinning-wheel and the bronze axe.”5 Neither anticipated the massive role that states would play in the near future, in capitalist societies. Nor did they therefore anticipate the role the state would play in the socialist imaginary. Here’s Kautsky:

Among the social organisations in existence today there is but one that has the requisite dimensions, that can be used as the requisite field, for the establishment and development of the Socialist or Co-operative Commonwealth, and that is the modern state.6

State-led infrastructural development revealed the irrationality of capital, but in a particular way. It seemed irrational to consume commodities privately when they ran on an efficient public infrastructure. Why sell cars to individuals, when it was possible to build networks of collectively utilised trams? Why not just plan everything? Socialism became a vision of the endless extension of the state — from partially to totally planned society.7

This new vision generated debates among revolutionaries: how would this total planner state come about, through nationalisation or socialisation? Would everything be directed from above, by national parliaments, or would it be necessary to wholly replace that bourgeois apparatus with one more appropriate to proletarians, for example, a federation of workers’ unions? In either case, the problem was to figure out how separate units — still organised around economic activity, and thus surviving more or less intact from the capitalist era — would exchange their products with one another, while putting aside a portion of their output for the growth of the productive apparatus. Of course, automation would eventually solve these problems, but what about in the meantime? There were no easy answers:

On the one hand, as Korsch … Wigforss … and others pointed out, direct control of particular firms by the immediate producers would not remove the antagonism between producers and consumers, that is, workers in other firms. On the other hand, transfer to centralised control of the state would have the effect of replacing the private authority of capital by the bureaucratic authority of the government.8

How one saw the future role of the state affected one’s strategy in the present. Is the state a committee for managing the affairs of the bourgeoisie, or a neutral instrument, reflecting the balance of class forces? This question was not merely theoretical. Alliances between Iron and Rye seemed to suggest the state could strike a balance between classes. Would it be possible, then, for the working class to enter the fray, to reform capitalism on the way — or as the way — to socialism? Such debates gave rise to fundamental splits within the workers’ movement, and later, to its fragmentation.

THE CONTAINER OF THE NATION

The workers’ movement was born not only in the context of a growing role of the state, but also of the nation: late development was national development. That explains why, when the Great War arrived, socialists were largely willing to jettison their internationalism. They justified their support for war by reference to the movement’s success, following the wars of national consolidation in the 1860s and 70s.9 Most assumed that the return of war merely presaged another wave of national consolidation, which would remix the interstate framework and set up the conditions for the further expansion of the industrial proletariat. By supporting the war effort, workers would prove themselves respectable. They would inch closer to power, or maybe even obtain it for the first time, during the next cycle of economic growth.

Luxemburg bemoaned this interpretation of the war in her Junius Pamphlet. She saw — almost uniquely among Social Democrats — that the 1914 war would be different: it would be a long one, and it would leave massive destruction in its wake. She scolded her comrades for their failure to understand the changing nature of war: “Today war does not function as a dynamic method of procuring for rising young capitalism the preconditions of its ‘national’ development. War has this character only in the isolated and fragmentary case of Serbia.”10 The implication was that war really had functioned that way in the past.

Indeed, in the 1860s and 70s wars of national consolidation had ushered in a period of rapid growth for the labour movement. Social Democratic parties and Anarchist federations were founded throughout Europe (and even beyond, e.g. in Argentina). Movement strategists knew their success was tied to the framework of the nation. If the accumulation of capital was the multiplication of the proletariat, then the strength of the nation was the degree of organisation of its working class: “the alternative to a ‘national’ political consciousness was not, in practice, ‘working class internationalism’, but a sub-political consciousness which still operated on a scale much smaller than, or irrelevant to, that of the nation-state”.11 The labour movement swelled with the consolidation of national languages and cultures, both of which were in large part effects of public education (and the associated growth in literacy), as well as of rail networks. The link between the fate of the nation and that of the class was clearest for those sections of the workers’ movement that were able to contest national elections. Of course, these were the very same sections that patriotically voted for war credits in 1914.

Here is the point: in many ways, it was state-led infrastructure building, in the context of national development, that created a growing role for parliaments. Those parliaments had the power of the purse. They controlled taxation. It was because states were able to raise taxes regularly, via parliaments, that they were able to borrow on bond markets to fund their infrastructure projects: “The maintenance of the special public power standing above society requires taxes and state loans”.12 Thus, it was in the interest of the old regime to share power with national parliaments, in order to foster development. In return, the old regime got a massive boost to its military power. As a result the importance of parliament rose steadily (even though the levels of taxation involved remained low, compared to what would become possible in the course of the World Wars).

That was why it was worthwhile for the workers’ movement to break into parliaments. From the perspective of the middle of the nineteenth century, that workers might have representatives in government was a fool’s dream. However, by the century’s end, Engels was publicly calling for a peaceful transition to socialism. The ballot box replaced the barricade: “the two million voters whom [the SPD sends] to the ballot box, together with the young men and women who stand behind them as non-voters, form the most numerous, most compact mass, the decisive ‘shock force’ of the international proletarian army.”13 The peaceful victory of socialist electoral parties seemed all but assured (even if it might be necessary to rout the counter-revolution by force):

It was only a question of time, according to systematic and statistically minded German socialists, before these parties would pass the magic figure of 51 percent of the votes, which in democratic states, must surely be the turning point.14

That hope survived down to the Great War. After the war, attempts to roll back constitutionalism and democracy proved successful (especially in Central, Eastern, and Southern Europe, where both were of recent vintage); by contrast, before the war, the expansion of the franchise through struggle had seemed inevitable. Social Democracy became the dominant form of the workers’ movement in countries where workers had been enfranchised. In states where workers had not won the vote, they could look to those where workers had, in order to see their own future emerging in the present. In that way, stagism extended itself: Russia looked to Germany as a model, both economically and politically.

As it turned out, the trajectories of late-late developing countries did not actually replicate those of the late developing ones. Outside of Western Europe, movements had to have a more revolutionary orientation, since the old regime was more resistant to recognising workers’ interests. Anarchism was strongest in Southern and Eastern Europe for that reason (and also because, there, advance was impossible without the peasantry). But stagism was also wrong for another reason: with the further advance of the technological frontier, catch-up was no longer possible on the basis of late development: “In the 20th century, the policies that had worked in Western Europe, especially in Germany, and the USA proved less effective in countries that had not yet developed.”15 The only way forward was through big push industrialisation. As we will see later, the latter required not alliances with the old regime, but rather its liquidation as the very precondition of catch-up growth.

INTEGRATING WORKERS INTO THE POLITY

As the workers’ movement developed within national zones of accumulation, it also fractured (that was true even before the Great War broke the movement apart). The movement became destabilised because — at least in the most “advanced” capitalist countries — it proved possible to ameliorate workers’ conditions via national development in a way that dispelled workers’ revolutionary energies. Reform and revolution split off from one another. Social Democrats had initially argued that such a split was impossible:

The elevation of the working-class brought about by the class-struggle is more moral than economic. The industrial conditions of the proletariat improve but slowly, if at all. But the self-respect of the proletarians mounts higher, as does also the respect paid them by the other classes of society. They begin to regard themselves as the equals of the upper classes and to compare the conditions of the other strata of society with their own. They make greater demands on society [which society is unable to fill] … increasing discontent among the proletarians.16

According to Kautsky, it was a “children’s disease” to think that reforms would make exploitation more palatable; reforms were necessary for the revolutionary effort — they afforded workers a little security, so they could focus on organising for the final battle.17

Kautsky could say so only because, like all Second Internationalists, he still believed in the Kladderadatsch, the coming collapse of the system, which was going to unfold regardless of what reforms were won. The onset of the First Great Depression, in 1873, seemed to confirm that belief. In the course of the Depression, capital centralised to an extreme degree; it concentrated in industrial combines, linked together through cartels. On that basis, socialists announced that proletarians — along with most capitalists, peasants, artisans and small-business owners — would soon find themselves thrown out onto the street.

The connection socialists perceived between industrial concentration and unemployment was the key to their revolutionary position: technical development would force capitalists to replace men with machines. In societies organised around the capitalist mode of production, that reduction necessarily issued in unemployment for many people. As it turned out, further technical development in the infrastructural industries did not generate unemployment, especially in large manufacturing combines. Instead, the growth of the productive forces created jobs — and even more so after the end of the First Great Depression in 1896.

Simplifying somewhat, we can explain this phenomenon as follows. Although there were huge technical advances in production in the course of the nineteenth century, few such advances took place in assembly. Here, human hands were still needed. As a result, infrastructural industries absorbed huge quantities of both capital and labour. They required a small army of engineers, but also a large army of hired hands, who actually put together all the precision-made parts. Moreover, the infrastructural industries were organised in such a way that whenever those hands obstructed the assembly process, they forced machines worth huge amounts of money to stand idle. Development thus created not impoverishment, but the possibility for some workers to win higher wages through work stoppages.

Under these changed economic-political conditions it was moreover the case that some workers were able to win dignity while remaining tethered to capital. Thus, the working class was no longer the class with radical chains — the class as a purely negative force which was going to rise up and negate society. Instead, the working class was integrated, slowly and haltingly (and, it should be added, far from completely), into society as a positive force for change. As Paul Mattick argued in 1939: “consciously and unconsciously, the old labour movement [came to see] in the capitalist expansion process its own road to greater welfare and recognition. The more capital flourished, the better were the working conditions.”18

The consequences of this new situation were immense: the organisations of the workers’ movement were able to gain recognition as part of society, and they won gains for their members on that basis. However, to accept social recognition required that they no longer promote revolution as their goal. It wasn’t possible to accept the constitutional framework and simultaneously, to argue for its overthrow. That risked the possibility that the movement might lose its recognition and therefore also the gains that it had won: “the choice between ‘legal’ and ‘extra-parliamentary’ tactics had to be made.”19 This dilemma was clearest in the case of the unions, the key molecules that make up the collective worker.

LABOUR LEADERS AND THE RANK-AND-FILE

The main problem faced by unions was the same as that faced by every organisation of workers: “class interest is something attached to workers as a collectivity rather than as a collection of individuals, their ‘group’ rather than ‘serial’ interest.”20 Workers’ class interest had to be instantiated in some way. Towards that end, unions created organs to punish behaviours that maximised individual well-being (e.g. scabbing) at the expense of the collective. They then began to exert power by threatening to withdraw collective labour, and sometimes, by actually withdrawing it. Here was the crux of the issue: in a context where unions set out to improve workers’ wages and conditions, while remaining roughly within the bounds of legality, unions needed to demonstrate not only a capacity to strike, but also a capacity not to strike, so long as their demands were met. Otherwise, they could not gain leverage.

For that reason, unions had to develop disciplinary mechanisms which, in addition to suppressing behaviour that maximised workers’ serial interests, ensured that the collective acted in line with negotiated settlements. Developing such mechanisms did not necessitate a stable separation between an organisational leadership and the rank and file. However, that separation could be avoided only where rank and file militancy was continuously operating. Since struggles tended to ebb and flow, the only way for unions to remain effective, over time, was to build formal structures that allowed negotiators to appear as if they had the capacity to turn rank and file militancy on and off at will (when in fact, they could do neither).

At this point, the interests of leaders and of the rank and file diverged. Rank and file militancy became a liability, except when under the strict control of the leadership. Meanwhile, the leadership became a permanent staff paid from union dues, and no longer depended on employers for wages. Leaders’ interests were increasingly identified, not with the defense of union members, but with the survival of the unions. Leaders thus tended to avoid confrontations with employers that put the future of the union at risk. In this way, substantive reform, let alone revolution, became an increasingly distant goal.

The very organisations that workers had built up to make the revolution possible — the organisations that instantiated the collective worker — became an impediment to revolution. For “a party oriented toward partial improvements, a party in which leader-representatives lead a petit-bourgeois lifestyle, a party that for years has shied away from the streets cannot ‘pour through the hole in the trenches’, as Gramsci put it, even when this opening is forged by a crisis.”21 From here on out, revolution emerged not as an internal tendency of capitalist development, but rather, as an external effect of geopolitics. Revolutions occurred only where capitalist development destabilised national frameworks of accumulation, pitting nation-states against one another.

In the background was also this gnawing predicament: as the productive forces developed, it became increasingly difficult to know what it would mean to win, to run all these massive apparatuses in the interest of the workers. Just as the galaxy, when seen dimly, appears as a single point of light, but when seen up close turns out to consist mostly of empty space — so too the productive forces of capitalist society, when seen in miniature, appeared to give birth to the collective worker, but on a larger scale, gave birth only to the separated society.

ADDENDUM ON CLASS IDENTITY

The workers’ movement promoted the development of the productive forces as a means of pressing the collective worker into being, as a compact mass. As it turned out, the extension and intensification of the factory system failed to have the desired effect; the collective worker really existed only in and through the activity of the workers’ movement itself. But the mediations of the workers’ movement did make workers’ collective interest into something real. As we have argued, unions and parties constructed a working class identity as a key feature of their organising efforts. This is not to say that class unity, or the identity with which it was associated, was somehow merely imposed by union and party leaderships; that unity and identity were integral to the project of the labour movement itself, in which millions of workers participated.

Within the labour movement, workers claimed that the class identity they promoted and affirmed really was universal in character. It supposedly subsumed all workers, regardless of their specific qualities: as mothers, as recent immigrants, as oppressed nationalities, as unmarried men (and at the outermost limit: as disabled, as homosexuals, and so on). In fact, the supposedly universal identity that the worker’s movement constructed turned out actually to be a particular one. It subsumed workers only insofar as they were stamped, or were willing to be stamped, with a very particular character. That is to say, it included workers not as they were in themselves, but only to the extent that they conformed to a certain image of respectability, dignity, hard work, family, organisation, sobriety, atheism, and so on.22

Earlier, we examined the historical genesis of this particular class identity — in the struggle against the old regime, and with the expansion of the infrastructural industries. It is possible to imagine that, in changed conditions, certain particular features of this identity may have turned out differently. To be sure, even within Europe, one would find many completely contradictory characteristics ascribed to workers as a class in different national and regional contexts. In that regard, however, we should exercise some caution. Even in the United States, where universal manhood suffrage was achieved early, and there was no old regime to defeat, a worker’s identity was still constructed in the late nineteenth century around a similar set of markers: productivity, dignity, solidarity, personal responsibility. In a nation of immigrants, where African and Native Americans were at the bottom of the social hierarchy, whiteness represented an additional marker, sometimes complimenting class identity and sometimes competing with it. The latter partly explains the weakness of a worker’s identity in the US, and its earlier demise. But it also points to the deeper structural factors that gave rise to that identity, in spite of vast national and cultural differences.

There was something necessary, something spontaneous, in the narrowing of the class identity that took place in the workers’ movement. The key point here is that the collective interests of workers cannot be determined simply by adding up their serial interests as individuals. This fact distinguishes workers from capitalists, and also puts the former at a disadvantage in negotiations. After all, the collective interests of capitalists are, to a large extent, simply a matter of arithmetic (or more accurately, a matter of solving complex systems of equations): costs must be kept as low as possible, while keeping profits as high as possible. There aren’t, for example, environmentalist capitalists and feminist capitalists, who come to blows with other capitalists over the way a company should be run. Such considerations come into play only insofar as they do not affect a company’s bottom line.23

Workers, by contrast, face much harder sorts of calculations: “how much in wages, for instance, can ‘rationally’ be given up in exchange for which amount of increase in job satisfaction? The answer to this question cannot be found by any calculus that could be objectively applied; it can only be found as the result of the collective deliberation of the members of the [workers’] organisation.”24 The answers that any particular workers might give to such a question depend on their individual preferences, as well as on the vagaries of their situations: young unmarried men have different interests from single mothers.

And yet, to deliberate every point, to reach some sort of consensus or compromise, which would ensure that every worker got at least something they wanted, would make workers’ organisation difficult. The “costs” of organising would be too great. The solution is to be found in the formation of a collective identity: “only to the extent that associations of the relatively powerless succeed in the formation of a collective identity, according to the standards of which the costs of organisation are subjectively deflated, can they hope to change the original power relation.”25 That is precisely what the unions achieved, by promoting the workers’ identity: by getting workers to perceive their interests through this identity-lens, the unions “simultaneously express[ed] and define[d] the interests of the members.”26

Individual workers had to recognise the union as acting in their interests, in a broad sense, even when their own, particular interests were not being served by the union’s bargaining strategies. This is a feature of all routinised, demand-based struggle: insofar as a collective wants to make demands, and in that sense, to engage in a sort of bargaining, the members of that collective must either share an immediate interest, or else they must be capable of forming an identity to plug gaps among their overlapping interests (paradoxically introducing a non-utilitarian element into a demands-based struggle).27 It is because workers’ organisations had to partly redefine interests in order to meet them that they were forced to rely on “non-utilitarian forms of collective action”, based on “collective identities”.28 Indeed, the capacity for demand-making in a given struggle may be grasped as structurally linked with its capacity to draw upon an existing — or forge a new — collective identity; demand-making and composition are two sides of the same coin.29

In the context of the workers’ movement, this point applies not only to negotiations with bosses, but also to the expansion of political parties, and to the growth of all other organisations existing in urban environments full of ex-peasants and/or recent immigrants. The sheer number and diversity of situations makes it hard to decide on common “intermediate” goals (that is, prior to the conquest of power). But even if this wasn’t a problem, the costs of organising remain high in other ways. Workers have few monetary resources; they pay the costs of the class struggle mostly with their time and effort (joining a demo, attending a meeting, striking). If one has to work 12 hour days, or to look after children, as most women workers did, all of this is extremely difficult. Moreover, there is no way for workers to monitor each other’s contributions. Together with the sheer size of the movement, that creates massive collective action problems. We see this in the moral centre of the workers’ movement — cultivating a sense of duty, solidarity — but also in the means of discipline — the closed shop, attacks on scabs. Even with these assets, the attraction of workers’ organisations varied greatly, as did their organisational capacities. It still usually took a tragedy, such an industrial fire or a massacre by company goons, to bring the majority of workers out onto the street.

1. On Marx’s theory see ‘Misery and Debt’ Endnotes 2, April 2010.
2. Allen, Global Economic History, p. 80. The list that follows also comes from Allen’s text.
3. See Wally Seccombe, Weathering the Storm (Verso 1993). Seccombe shows the extent to which capitalism really came into its own only with the ‘second industrial revolution’. Until then, proletarian homes were not only located in the vicinity of factories, but also frequently functioned as extended sites of production for sale: families did ‘finishing work’ at home. The modern wage contract, which employed individuals rather than families to work outside the home, was generalised only at the end of the nineteenth century. Seccombe argues that, as a result, married women were increasingly relegated to non-income-earning activities.
4. Ernest Mandel, ‘Karl Marx’ in John Eatwell et al., eds., The New Palgrave Marxian Economics (Norton 1990).
5. Friedrich Engels, Origins of the Family, Private Property and the State, 1884 (MECW 26) p. 272.
6. Kautsky, The Class Struggle. This was of course the thesis that Pannekoek and Lenin contested.
7. This vision of the total planning of society, as opposed to its partial planning, somehow mirrors the vision according to which the workers obtain not a portion, but the full value of the products of their labours.
8. Adam Przeworski, Capitalism and Social Democracy, p. 33.
9. Engels had written about those wars retrospectively: ‘the irony of history had it that Bismarck overthrew Bonaparte, and King Wilhelm of Prussia not only established the little German Empire, but also the French Republic. The overall outcome, however, was that in Europe the independence and internal unity of the great nations had become a fact... on a scale large enough to allow the development of the working class to proceed.’ Engels, ‘Introduction to The Class Struggles in France, 1848–50’, (MECW 27) p. 506.
10. Rosa Luxemburg, The Junius Pamphlet, 1915. Earlier than anyone else, she saw precisely what was coming: ‘Another such world war and the outlook for socialism will be buried beneath the rubble.’
11. Eric Hobsbawm, Age of Capital (Vintage 1996) p. 93.
12. Lenin, State and Revolution. (Haymarket 2015) p. 48.
13. Friedrich Engels, ‘Introduction to Karl Marx’s The Class Struggles in France, 1848–50, 1895, (MECW 27) p. 522.
14. Hobsbawm, Age of Empire, p. 117.
15. Allen, Global Economic History, p. 2.
16. Kautsky, The Class Struggle (Norton 1971)
17. This is, of course, where Lenin gets his idea that left communism is an infantile disorder: he sees it as an early form of socialist consciousness, rather than a late one.
18. Paul Mattick, ‘Karl Kautsky: from Marx to Hitler’ (1939), in Anti-Bolshevik Communism (Merlin 1978), p. 4. In this dark moment, Mattick claimed: ‘Science for the workers, literature for the workers, schools for the workers, participation in all the institutions of capitalist society – this and nothing more was the real desire of the movement.’
19. Przeworski, Capitalism and Social Democracy, p. 15.
20. Przeworski, Capitalism and Social Democracy, p. 20.
21. Ibid, p. 15.
22. ‘It is always in the heart of the worker aristocracy that a hegemonic fraction forms, presenting itself as the proletariat and affirming the proletarian capacity to organise another social order, starting with the skills and values formed in its work and its struggle.’ Jacques Ranciere, ‘Les maillon de la chaine’, Les Revoltes Logiques #2, Spring–Summer 1976, p. 5.
23. Capitalists can also express their particular interests in philanthropic settings: they damage or destroy in one moment that which they, with great fanfare, attempt to remedy in the next.
24. Claus Offe and Helmut Wiesenthal, ‘Two Logics of Collective Action’ in Offe, Disorganized Capitalism (MIT 1985), p. 179.
25. Offe and Wiesenthal, ‘Two Logics of Collective Action’, p. 183.
26. Offe and Wiesenthal, ‘Two Logics of Collective Action’, p. 184.
27. Anyone who participated in Occupy can see that: if unity of demands is to be obtained across diverse sections and then presented to the world – without a shared identity – that can be achieved only through an endless deliberation, and/or at the cost of many people not getting what they want.
28. Offe, ‘Two Logics of Collective Action’, p. 183.
29. For a development of this point in relation to a specific contemporary struggle, see ‘Gather Us From Among the Nations’, in this issue, pp. 210-14.

Workers believed that if they partook in the terrifying march of progress, then the slaughter bench of history would cut down their enemies. The development of industrial civilisation would propel workers into a position of power. It was certainly true that in the decades before the Great War, trends seemed to be moving in the right direction. In the first decade of the 20th century, workers streamed en masse into organisations built around an affirmable workers’ identity. Social Democratic parties went from netting thousands of votes — as a minority formation within the workers’ movement — to acquiring millions, as that movement’s main line.

Meanwhile, in some countries, union membership surged: “By 1913, British unions had added roughly 3.4 million, German unions just under 3.8 million, and French around 900,000 workers to their membership of the late 1880s. Unions finally invaded the factory floor, as against the building site, coal mine, and small workshop, where they already had a presence.”1 The class had become a force to be reckoned with, and knew it.

Revolutionaries’ belief that trends would continue to move in their favour was enshrined in the policy of abstentionism. Social Democratic parties became the largest factions in parliaments, even if they remained in the minority; but those parties abstained from participating in government. They refused to rule alongside their enemies, choosing instead to wait patiently for their majority to arrive: “This policy of abstention implied enormous confidence in the future, a steadfast belief in the inevitable working-class majority and the ever-expanding power of socialism’s working-class support.”2 But that inevitability never came to pass.

THE EXTERNAL LIMITS OF THE WORKERS’ MOVEMENT

The industrial workers never became the majority of society: “Even as industrial labour reached its furthest extent, long-term restructuring was already tipping employment toward white-collar and other jobs in services.”3 That was the movement’s external limit: it was always too early for the workers’ movement, and when it was not too early, it was already too late.

It was too early because the old regime persisted, in all its forms, despite the growing strength of the industrial working class. At the end of the 19th century, “it was undeniable that, except for Great Britain, the proletariat was not — socialists confidently claimed, ‘not yet’ — anything like a majority of the population.”4 The stalled growth of the working class was reflected in the obstinate continuance of peasants in the countryside, and in the tenacious holding-on of artisans and small shopkeepers in cities. It was also reflected in apparent quantitative limits to the movement’s growth: the unions were far from organising the majority of the population; Social Democratic voting percentages remained below 51 percent. Looking over these numbers, the parties decided to wait. And wait they did, even during those moments when the class bucked and tried to trample its riders. Supposedly, history would take its course — this was guaranteed. However, history took an unexpected turn.

Almost as soon as the old regime was cleared away, the semi-skilled industrial working class stopped growing. It then went into an unarrested decline. At first it did so only relative to the total workforce. But then, in the 1980s and 90s, and in nearly every high-income country, it declined absolutely. As a result, the industrial workers never made up more than, at most, 40–45 percent of the total workforce.5 A growing mass of private service workers expanded alongside the industrial workers and then overtook them as the largest fraction of the workforce.6 Likewise, many urban-dwellers came to find employment in the public sector — civil servants, teachers, etc — or else lived by neither wage nor salary: students, benefits claimants etc. All these groups were supposed to fall into the proletariat, but instead the proletariat fell into them.

That was the case, in spite of the fact that more and more of the world’s population was made dependent on the wage. But for the most part, this wage-earning population did not find work in industry. The appearance of factories in some places did not presage their appearance everywhere: “Dynamism actually required backwardness in [a] dialectic of dependency.”7 The success of the workers’ movement — in single-industry towns, or industrial cities — was not the realisation of the future in the present. The co-existence of massive factories and small shops was not a bug, but rather, a permanent feature of the system.

However, the deeper reasons for workers’ abiding non-majority are to be found in the “laws of motion” of capital’s dynamic. The key point, here, is that capital develops the productive forces in and through a massive increase in labour productivity. This has contradictory results with respect to the demand for labour: rising output causes employment to grow; rising productivity causes it to shrink. The balance between the two then determines the growth of the demand for labour. In the heyday of industrialisation, labour productivity rose quickly. However, industrial output rose more quickly, so industrial employment expanded. As we explore below, this overall relationship was reversed in the latter half of the twentieth century: output growth rates fell below rates of productivity growth; industrial employment growth steadily declined as a result. But even in the earlier period the balance between growth of output and growth of productivity presented real limits to the workers’ power.

Employment in many of the leading-edge industries of the pre-WWI period — such as textiles and steel, where workers had achieved the most gains — ceased to keep pace with the growth of the labour force after WWI. Some industries even laid off more than they hired. Meanwhile, new sectors, like consumer goods and automobiles, picked up some of the burden of generating employment in industry, but it took time for unions to organise them. Moreover, since they began at a high level of mechanisation, the expansion of these industries was less employment enhancing than the growth of earlier industries had been, for example, in the mid and late nineteenth centuries. Here was the phenomenon of technological ratcheting, and relatively declining demand for labour, which Marx, in the first volume of Capital, termed the rising organic composition of capital.8 In every country the industrial share of total employment remained resolutely below the 50 percent mark required to achieve a majority. Even in the most industrialised countries (the UK, Germany), it did not inch above 45 percent.

THE INTERNAL LIMITS OF THE MOVEMENT

External limits set boundaries on the growth of the workers’ movement by limiting the size of the movement’s constituency. However, the movement faced internal limits as well: only a portion of the proletariat ever identified with the programme of the workers’ movement. That was because many proletarians affirmed their non-class identities — organised primarily around race and nation, but secondarily around gender, skill and trade — above their class identity. They saw their interests as adding up differently, depending on which identity they favoured.

To speak of a “class identity” in this way would have seemed to the theorists of the workers’ movement to be a sort of contradiction in terms. They saw identity and class as opposed concepts. Class was supposed to be the essence of what people were; to identify primarily with one’s class was to have “class-consciousness”. To identify oneself along some other line was to have “false consciousness”. Non-class identities were seen as inessential traits which divided workers against one another, and so also as against their real interests (that is, their class interests). But it was only from inside the workers’ movement that the horizontal struggle between political groups, organised around different identities, was perceived as a vertical struggle between a depth category — the class essence — and a variety of surface categories.

The worker’s identity could function as a depth category because it seemed to be at the same time both a particular and universal identity. The particular identity was that of the semi-skilled, male industrial worker: “The working class was identified too easily with the wage relationship in a pure form: the authentic worker, the true proletarian, was the factory worker”, and we might add, more specifically, the male factory worker.9 Although it often held their needs to be secondary, the movement did not ignore women: among workers, Engel’s Origins of Private Property, the Family and the State, and August Bebel’s Women and Socialism were more popular than Marx’s Capital. Of course, women did work in factories, particularly in light industry (textiles, electronics assembly), and were often important labour organisers.

Yet it remained the case that the particular identity of the semi-skilled, male industrial worker was seen as having a universal significance: it was only as the industrial working class that the class approximated the collective worker, the class in-and-for-itself. This significance was not just political. During the ascendency of the workers’ movement it seemed that all non-class identities — even gender, insofar as it served to separate out certain tasks into male and female labours — were dissolving in the vast army of semi-skilled factory workers.

The theorists of the workers’ movement saw the collective worker emerging from the bowels of the factory and envisaged the extension of this dynamic to society as a whole. Due to the division of labour and the deskilling of the worker, the sort of work that industrial workers did was expected to become ever more fungible. The workers themselves would become interchangeable, as they were shuffled from industry to industry, in accordance with an ever changing demand for labour and for goods. Moreover, in the factories, workers would be forced to work with many other members of their class, irrespective of “race”, gender, nationality, etc. Capitalists were expected to pack all sorts of workers into their gigantic combines: the capitalist interest in turning a profit would overcome all unprofitable prejudices in hiring and firing, forcing the workers to do the same. As a result, workers’ sectional interests would be short-circuited. Here were the solids melting into air, the holies profaned.

In reality, the homogenisation that seemed to be taking place in the factory was always partial. Workers became interchangeable parts in a giant machine; however, that machine turned out to be vastly complex. That in itself opened up many opportunities for pitting different groups against each other. In US auto plants, black workers were concentrated in the foundry, the dirtiest work. Southern Italians equally found themselves segregated from Northerners in the plants of Turin and Milan. Such segregation may appear inefficient, for employers, since it restricts the pool of potential workers for any given post. But as long as the relevant populations are large enough, employers are able to segment the labour market and drive down wages. If differential sets of interests among workers could be created by the internal divisions within the plant (as in Toyota-isation), so much the better. Capitalists were content for the labouring population to remain diverse and incommensurable in all sorts of ways, especially when it undermined workers’ organising efforts.

Given that the expected homogeneity of the semi-skilled workforce failed to fully realise itself, it became part of the task of the workers’ movement to realise that homogeneity by other means. As we saw above, organisation requires an affirmable identity, an image of working class respectability and dignity. When workers failed to fit this mold, the champions of the workers’ movement became champions of self-transformation. The workers’ movement was a sect — with DIY, straight-edge sensibilities, a particular style of dress, etc.10 Yet the predicates of the dignified worker (male, disciplined, atheist, expressing a thirst for scientific knowledge and political education, etc.) were often drawn by analogy to the values of bourgeois society. “The party activists wanted to live worthy, upstanding, moral, moderate, and disciplined lives: on the one hand, to show the workers who were not yet organised a good example; on the other hand, to show bourgeois society that one was up to all tasks, that one deserved good standing and respect.”11 In other words, party activists were quite often killjoys.12

It is easy to point out that there were many workers to whom such a self-understanding could never appeal. The internal limit of the workers’ movement was the limit of workers’ capacity or desire to identify as workers, to affirm that identity as something positive, but more than that, as something essential, something that fundamentally defined who they were. That meant that the workers’ movement came to include always only a fraction of the working class. On the outside there forever remained “the superstitious and religiously devout, the sexually transgressive, the frivolous young, the ethnically different and other marginalised minorities, and the rough working class of criminal subcultures, casualised labour markets and the migrant poor.”13 Political factions arose that tried to appeal to workers on the basis of some of these identities, which the workers’ movement left out. Thus the movement found itself competing with nationalist, Christian or Catholic parties. But it was nevertheless the case that, in the era of the workers’ movement, all those factions found that they had to define themselves with respect to the workers’ identity in order to matter at all. The workers’ movement hegemonised the political field (even if from the sidelines of official politics).

STRATEGIES AROUND THE LIMITS

It was primarily in response to its external limit that the workers’ movement developed divergent strategies. How were the workers going to overcome this limit and become the majority of society? In retrospect, we can see the external limit as an absolute barrier, but it was impossible to make that judgement during the era of industrialisation. For workers, it seemed likely that in one way or another industrialisation would take its course, or else that by various means the forces of production could be made to expand, thereby increasing the size and unity of the proletariat. Of course, those who believed that the project of the workers’ movement would never realise itself under existing conditions simply left the movement, entering one or another utopian tendency lost to history, or giving up on politics.

For those who remained, the external limit presented itself as a set of strategic quandaries. These debates mostly concerned forms of struggle, as opposed to its content: (1) the form of revolution — insurrection or the ballot box? (2) the form of the organisation — direct action or parliamentary and union representation? and (3) the form of the state — tool of the ruling classes or a neutral instrument reflecting the balance of class forces?

In any case, the point for us is to see that the key strategic debates of the workers’ movement emerged in relation to the specific limits that movement faced. Our own strategic debates, in our time, stand in relation to the limits we face or will face, which are rather different (this intuition should not be read as implying, pessimistically, that our limits will also turn out to have been insurmountable barriers). Any attempt to reactivate the strategic horizon of the workers’ movement today is either based on a false reading of a similarity between eras, or else it is a delicate and difficult leap across the chasm of time, which knows itself to be such.14

1. THE WAITING ROOM

On the right of the workers’ movement, the social democrats were compelled to face the facts. They were waiting for their time to come, but everywhere they hit ceilings in terms of voting percentages, often significantly below 51 percent. They decided that they needed to prepare for the long road ahead. That meant, in particular, holding their membership in check when the latter tried to jump the gun by risking the organisation’s gains too soon in a “test of strength”.15 Social democrats (and later, communist parties) were always motivated by this fear of the too soon. Instead of jumping the gun, they would bide their time and moderate their demands in alliance with other classes. In the past, social democratic parties had been strong enough to have a share in power but did not take it based on the policy of abstention. Now, they would begin to use the power they had: it was time to make compromises, to cut deals.

It was this compromising tendency that split the workers’ movement. To many workers, giving up on abstentionism and making alliances was a “betrayal”, signaling in particular the corroding influences of other classes (petit-bourgeois intellectuals), or of certain privileged, pro-imperialist sectors of the working class (the labour aristocracy). In fact, this turn within social democracy had more prosaic roots. In the first instance, it was the only way to give the voters something to celebrate, once voting percentages stopped rising so quickly. Second, and more importantly, once the social democrats could see that they couldn’t reach the crucial numerical majority on the basis of workers alone, it made sense that they would begin to look for voters elsewhere: socialists had to “choose between a party homogeneous in its class appeal, but sentenced to perpetual electoral defeats, and a party that struggles for electoral success at the cost of diluting its class character.”16 Increasingly, all social democratic parties chose the latter. The “people” tended to be substituted for the working class (although social democratic rhetoric also tended to flip back, at crucial moments), with victory over the old regime within grasp, democracy became an end in itself. Socialists dropped any reference to violence, and then eventually, to revolution, in order to establish themselves in parliament, hunkering down for the long road ahead.

The problem is that appealing to the people requires diluting the programme.17 Their expanded constituency of small shopkeepers, peasants, and so on experienced the problems of modernity in a number of different ways that were difficult to add up. The parties became containers for a set of sectional interests, tied together more by political maneuvering than by any internal coherence. The social democrats were forced to fight over the centre with other parties, nationalist and religious: “as class identification [became] less salient, socialist parties [lost] their unique appeal to workers.”18 Thus even with an expanded constituency, they still struggled to attain the elusive 51-percent majority.

The social democratic parties initially justified their reformism by saying the time was not yet ripe, but starting from the 1950s they gradually dropped the idea of socialisation of the means of production altogether. They had come to see this move as not necessarily a retreat. This is because, for many social democrats, a working class party at the helm of the state is socialism, or at least, all that is left of this idea: the state organises all the activities of the working class, not via their separate interests as workers in different factories or sectors, but rather, as a whole, as the collective worker, which then hands down orders to the different sectors. The workers’ world, from this perspective, is not a far off dream, but an actually existing social democracy.

2. THE ROMANTIC REVOLUTIONARIES

In the centre of the workers’ movement were the romantic revolutionaries. They argued that power should be seized now, precisely in order to complete the transition that capitalism failed to produce. Thus the Bolsheviks in Russia and the Maoists in China took it as their task to ensure that the working class became a majority, in spite of rather than in line with capitalist dynamics in their “backward” countries. In order to achieve this goal, the workers would have to complete the bourgeois revolution in place of a weak and servile bourgeoisie.

In undertaking this task, the revolutionaries in the poor countries confronted a real problem. Due to ongoing capitalist development in the West, the technological frontier had continued to be driven outward. Catch up became much more difficult to achieve. It was no longer possible to catch up to the technological leaders in the West by means of the “American System”. Allowing capitalist industries to develop on that basis would simply take too long: catch up would take hundreds of years, rather than decades.19 Under these conditions, the only way to advance was to suspend the logic of the market completely. All the infrastructure and fixed capital had to be built at once. Prices had to be artificially deflated to their expected future level, a level that would not really be achieved until the whole interconnected industrial system had been more or less entirely built up. This very complex industrial strategy has been termed “big-push industrialisation”.20 It was only possible in countries where extreme forms of planning were permissible.

Yevgeni Preobrazhensky, in essence, discovered the possibility of big-push industrialisation, based on his analysis of Marx’s reproduction schemes.21 He developed his findings into a new sort of anti-Marxist Marxism: catch-up development via central planning. Thus, in an emerging “communist” bloc the figure of the technocrat-planner came into its own. However, setting up a technocratic planner state meant uprooting traditional agrarian relations, something old regime elites, as well as many peasants, would bitterly oppose. Marxism-developmentalism thus depended on getting rid of the old elites and reorganising life in the countryside; compromises were no longer an option.

In the end it was this aspect of the strategy that would pay off. In the twentieth century, only countries that wiped out the old regime elites were able to catch up: Russia, Japan, South Korea and Taiwan.22 Of course, Japan, South Korea and Taiwan were able to achieve this result without turning communist, but their ability to do so had everything to do with a wave of revolutions that swept East and Southeast Asia (the main sites of victorious peasant wars), and also with assistance received from the US. Where romantic revolutionaries did not come to power, and old regime elites were not deposed, in India and Brazil, etc, developmentalism ran aground. They had to do it in the old way, via compromise and corruption, and that just wouldn’t cut it.

We can see in this tendency the extreme form of the paradox of the workers’ movement. Under the social democrats support for the development of the productive forces primarily meant constructing the image of the collective worker, calling for discipline, building the institutions to see workers through the long haul. With the romantic revolutionaries we find the workers’ movement not merely waiting for the development of the productive forces, having faith that they will develop, but actively developing them, with the iron discipline of a centralised state apparatus.23

3. THE COULD-HAVE-BEENS

Lastly, there was the left-wing: the anarcho-syndicalists and council communists. The left began from the fact that the working class was already a majority in the industrial towns, where the social democrats and unionists held power. In this narrow context, the external limit was invisible. To workers in these areas, it was clear that they were the ones building the new world. All that was left to do was seize control of the production process directly — not through the mediation of the state, but by means of their own organisations.

In this way, the left rejected the problem of adding up the class to get a 51 percent majority at the national level. There was no need for compromises with other parties, no need to appeal to the people instead of the class. That explains the increasingly anti-parliamentary character of a sizable fraction of the workers’ movement after 1900: they rejected the parliament as the place where the entire country is added up and somehow the workers come up short. The left rejected the problem of the real majority — but they did so only in favour of so many local ones.

That was because the anarchists and the communist left, more than anyone else, really believed in the collective worker.24 They saw the mass strike as the stirring of a sleeping giant, tugging at the ropes with which formal organisations had diligently bound it. The collective worker had to be encouraged to throw off the mediations that divided it, that trapped it in unions and parties, with their fixed focus on this world and winning gains for workers qua commodity sellers.

In that sense, the left implicitly recognised that the development of the productive forces was leading to the separated society. They rightly saw this as, in part, the work of the workers’ own organisations, their attempt to empower the class via integration with the state.25 The left criticised the realities of the workers’ movement in terms of its ideals, taking refuge or finding solace in the logic of Marx’s purer, more revolutionary analyses. But in doing so, they sought mostly to turn back the clock. They didn’t see that it couldn’t have been otherwise: it was impossible to build the collective worker without, on the one hand, defeating the old regime, and on the other, building up class power through all these different mediations. They saw the mass strike as a revelation of the true essence of the proletariat. But what were those strikes for? Mostly, they either sought to secure political rights for workers’ parties and unions, or else they sought to renegotiate, rather than overturn, the relationships between workers and their leaderships.

1. Eley, Forging Democracy, p. 75.
2. Ibid., p. 83.
3. Ibid., p. 48.
4. Eric Hobsbawm, Age of Capital, p. 136.
5. In many countries, the peak was much lower, at around 30–35 percent of the workforce.
6. On the specificity of service labour, see section 5.2 below.
7. Geoff Eley, Forging Democracy, p. 48.
8. On this concept, see ‘Misery and Debt’ in Endnotes 2, April 2010.
9. Geoff Eley, Forging Democracy, p. 51.
10. See the importance of Methodism for the English labour movement. Prohibition was a key plank of Keir Hardie’s original Labour party.
11. Eley, Forging Democracy, p. 82.
12. The movement opposed itself to all forms of mainstream popular culture, which were only just appearing at the time, since the latter kept proletarians at home, rather than out on the streets, where they were susceptible to soap-box sermons and entreaties to enter socialist or anarchist meetings. The success of mainstream forms of entertainment – above all the cinema, radio and television – goes a long way to explaining the eventual death of those forms of life on which the affirmation of a workers’ identity was based.
13. Eley, Forging Democracy, p. 83.
14. This is not, of course, to say that all tactics and strategic devices of that movement are uniformly, absolutely moribund. Unions obviously still exist and identities and tactics forged in a previous era can be mobilised in particular cases. But it is clearly no longer the case that those particular instances can be inserted within a large-scale narrative at the other end of which lies some sort of workers’ society, to be arrived at via either reform or revolution.
15. Anton Pannekoek discussed the debates around this phrase in ‘Marxist Theory and Revolutionary Tactics,’ 1912.
16. Adam Przeworski, ‘Social Democracy as a Historical Phenomenon’. NLR I/122, July-August 1980
17. C.f. Amadeo Bordiga, ‘The Revolutionary Programme of Communist Society Eliminates All Forms of Ownership of Land, the Instruments of Production and the Products of Labour’ (Partito Comunista Internazionale 1957).
18. Przeworski, Social Democracy as a Historical Phenomenon. ‘Social democratic parties are no longer qualitatively different from other parties; class loyalty is no longer the strongest base of self-identification. Workers see society as composed of individuals; they view themselves as members of collectivities other than class; they behave politically on the basis of religious, ethnic, regional, or some other affinity. They become Catholics, Southerners, Francophones, or simply “citizens”.’
19. Robert Allen, Global Economic History.
20. Ibid.
21. See Robert Allen, From Farm to Factory: A Reinterpretation of the Soviet Industrial Revolution (Princeton 2003).
22. One might also mention the settler-colonial state of Israel, which got rid of local elites in a different manner.
23. Their support for the development of the productive forces involved a vision of communism as a world of plenty. Theoretically the dissolution of the state would take place alongside that of class. But to get there it had to be paradoxically enlarged and empowered.
24. The Italian left complicates this picture, for they didn’t reject unions and parties in the same way as the anarcho-syndicalists and German/Dutch Communist Left. The mediations they opposed (mass party, united front, anti-fascism) were more particular, their dissent from the main line of worker’s movement less pronounced. Yet Bordiga’s critique of councilism would become the basis for a critical rupture with the ideology of the worker’s movement (see Afterword).
25. The left kept faith with the early period of the workers’ movement, rejecting not only the parliament, but the state apparatus as a whole, advocating its replacement with the federation of workers. The collective worker would not constitute itself through organs of the state, handing down orders, but bottom up, in a direct democratic manner. However, the ‘adding up’ problem was thereby shifted to the relation between individual productive units. How would conflicts of interest between these units be resolved? The left imagined a magical resolution, through the direct exchange between productive units, money replaced by labour-chits – labour mediating itself. Instead of overcoming of alienation, they envisaged a lessening of its sphere.

The workers’ movement survived WWII and even thrived in its aftermath. It did so by sticking to one safe strategy: to whatever extent possible, workers’ organisations supported the war effort. They presided over a labour peace for the war’s duration, hoping to gain power and recognition in the war’s aftermath. Where fascists took power, no such peace was possible. All above-ground organisations of the workers’ movement were annihilated. It was thus communists, rather than social democrats, who took the leading role, giving their lives in the Resistance. Following the war’s conclusion, this Resistance served as a temporary irritation to the social democratic and communist leadership: armed revolutionary organisations, formed beyond the control of established parties and unions, had their own visions for post-war reconstruction. But these organisations were quickly disarmed, and then fell away. The same developmental strategy could then be pursued after the wars as before.

The postwar period was a triumph for communism in the East and social democracy in the West (although the latter often failed to obtain parliamentary majorities). The old regime was defeated on European soils, and in some cases, even in the wider world. Workers finally gained recognition as a power within society. And yet, in spite of these victories, it was becoming more difficult to see the way forward. The path from the development of the productive forces to the triumph of the class was becoming more obscure.

For the collective worker, product of the factory system, was ever more dispersed across a complex productive apparatus. As it turned out, the real links forged among workers were not found in their lived connection within workplaces. For the most part, their real links were formed outside of the factory gates: on the roads, in electricity lines, in the supermarket, on television. Instead of the “great evening” of the industrial worker triumphant, we got the groggy morning of the suburban commuter. The atomised worker revealed itself as the truth of the collective worker. Here was the unity-in-separation of capitalism, corroding the bases of workers’ solidarity, not just in the factory, but also across the city. Instead of the Workers’ Chorus there was Soul Train. Instead of the Thames Ironworks Football Club, there was West Ham on Match of the Day. Instead of neighbours filling up parks and seasides there were family holiday packages with Club Med. All this — it should go without saying — proved much more entertaining than a socialist meeting. Yet it wasn’t to last. The strange victories of the postwar period turned out to be only a temporary respite from the ravages of capitalist society. Crisis tendencies re-emerged, already in the mid 1960s and early 1970s. The glorious advances in production became overproduction, and full employment became unemployment.

THE DEFEAT OF OLD-REGIME ELITES

World War II finally decapitated the European old regime. The Red Army marched through the central European blood-lands, making itself the inheritor of the opulent classes’ wealth. Along the way, large landholdings — which still formed the material basis of elite power in countries where more than half the population was engaged in agriculture — were confiscated. Initially, some attempts were made to distribute this confiscated land to peasants, but these efforts were quickly abandoned in favour of large-scale agricultural collectivisation. Meanwhile, Prussia, historic stronghold of the old regime in Central Europe, was wiped off the map.

In Western Europe, too, the aristocracy went into an unarrested decline. Outside of Italy and Greece, this decline was not the result of land reform. Instead, the end of the old regime was a consequence of interwar and wartime turbulence. Stock market crashes, followed by rapid inflation, wiped out fortunes that had long ago been disinvested from the countryside and then invested in modern forms of wealth-accumulation (in particular, government bonds).1 The loss of colonies and nationalisation of industries also wreaked havoc on upper class finances. This leveling down of wealth was then secured, politically, by high-rates of taxation.

Such material transformations were accompanied by cultural ones. Any lingering deference to established families was smashed in the war. The notables were no longer so notable, especially since so many had collaborated either with occupying forces or with discredited but home-grown Fascist regimes. From here on out, classes would no longer be distinguished by the head coverings (top hat, worker’s cap) they wore. The wars thus completed one of the main tasks of the European workers’ movement. They cleared the way for a further development of the productive forces, and, so too, for the expected triumph of the working class. In reality, Europe was now merely going to catch up to the United States, in terms of the commercialisation of life and the integration of all into the fully separated society.

It is true that, outside of Europe, old regimes remained in place, blocking the progress of such modernisation projects. However, precisely due to the war, colonial empires were significantly weaker, while socialist and capitalist models of development, within national zones of accumulation, were much stronger. By the 1950s, movements of national independence were sweeping through the world, extending the nation-state model to the edges of the earth (of course, there were holdouts: South Africa, the Portuguese colonies, etc). In the colonies, as in the metropoles, an attack was mounted against lingering economic backwardness.

Yet, among the victorious independence movements — which unfolded alongside peasant insurgencies in Latin America — it was only the few that were led by romantic revolutionaries and inspired by Russia and then by China that were able to overturn the domination of rural elites decisively. Revolutionaries reabsorbed elites’ landholdings into collective farms, creating the conditions for Russian-style big-push industrialisation (even if their success, in that regard, was usually rather limited): the removal of old regime elites freed technocratic communists to focus on the developmental tasks at hand — namely, breaking up peasant communities and displacing peasants to the cities, where they could be put to work in gigantic mills.2

Everywhere else, where the red flag was defeated — either because peasant insurgencies were too weak, or because peasants were drawn into anti-colonial alliances with local elites — movements for land reform either failed completely, or were so watered down as to become largely inconsequential.3 As a result, old regime elites survived the transition to national-developmental capitalism, just as they had in the Europe of the nineteenth century, except that now, late development under “Iron and Rye” alliances was no longer viable.

Of course, the persistence of the old regime was not only a matter of elites: there was also a large remainder of the peasantry in the global countryside. Not only was this peasantry still a large minority in Western and Central Europe. In Southern and Eastern Europe, as well as in East Asia, the peasants accounted for the majority of the population. Where the old regime was cleared away, real domination unfolded rapidly in the countryside: within twenty to forty years (depending on the region), the peasantry had all but disappeared. That was partly a matter of reduced political protections for agricultural producers, and partly the result of new technologies that allowed the real subsumption of agricultural production to proceed rapidly. After the war, agriculture began to look more like a branch of industry.

Still, technical developments in agriculture could not have annihilated the heavy remainder of the peasantry worldwide by themselves. That task was left to demographic growth. Postwar developments in public health — including antibiotics, immunisation and DDT — led to an unprecedented drop in infant and child mortality levels. The resulting boost to population growth undermined the peasantry on a global scale. It was also associated with urbanisation. Today the majority of the world’s population lives in cities. The urban proletariat, numbering more than three billion people (more than the global population at the end of WWII) is entirely dependent on market production and exchange to survive. We have yet to see full communism but, in the last hour, we are finally approaching full capitalism.

THE MOVEMENT TRIUMPHANT

With the old regime defeated in Europe — and at risk of revolutionary overthrow across the world — the workers’ movement seemed to have triumphed, even where its parties were kept from power. By showing themselves to be valiant soldiers and capable co-managers of the war economy, the workers not only defeated the old regime: they also won recognition within national zones of accumulation. Workers’ dignity was enshrined in law.4 Not only were unions recognised as workers’ official representatives; union bargaining was given legal support. Corporatism reigned, in the US from the 1930s, and then throughout Europe after the war.

Meanwhile the very success of big-push industrialisation put the romantic revolutionaries in the East on the same footing as the social democrats, if always a few steps back. The 1950s were, according to some, the Golden Age of socialist planning; consumer goods finally became more widely available. Yet at the same time, any remaining appeal to a working class identity or class solidarity was reduced to a kitsch aesthetic, the source of many bitter jokes. The workers’ movement thus tendentially completed (or participated in the completion of) the project of proletarianising the world’s population, in “First”, “Second” and “Third” world variants.

Paradoxically, at least from the perspective of the workers’ movement, this same process depleted revolutionary energies, for two reasons. (1) The past, which the workers’ movement set out to annihilate, turned out to be a fundamental support of its revolutionary vision. (2) The future, when it finally arrived in the form of a highly developed productive apparatus, turned out not to give birth to the collective worker; instead, it reinforced the unity-in-separation of capitalist society. The workers’ movement persisted as a social force, but in a sclerotic form. It could probably have gone on forever had it not been defeated from an unexpected corner — that is to say, by the reactivation of capital’s fundamental contradiction.

1. WITHOUT A PAST, THERE IS NO FUTURE

It was the lived experience of the transition — from peasant and artisan communities to capitalist society — that gave the workers the sense that another transition was possible — from capitalist society to the cooperative commonwealth. In some sense, this “transitional” perspective was simply about the visibility of ways of life that were not founded solely on the cash nexus.5 But the transitional impulse was not just about the existence of alternatives.

It was also about the experience of history unfolding. The immediate obstacles to the arrival of that future — the persistence of the old regime — had provided a focal point around which to rally workers at the national level. Indeed, the privileges retained by lords reminded everyone of the failure of the bourgeoisie to stand up for its liberal values. That empowered workers to take the lead in a cross-class coalition: in defense of secularism, democracy and (formal) equality. The idea of “hegemony”, made famous by Gramsci, extended the key question of 19th century French politics into the 20th century: which class can represent to other classes their true interest? And in the period in which social democrats and communists alike were running up against the impasse of the workers’ movement, this interest appeared as a national one. As long as the “bourgeois revolution” appeared to be stalled, the workers could claim this mantle for themselves. That was their historic mission. Of course, it didn’t hurt that it was easy to find hatred for the “high-born” among the lowest orders — and that the distinction between the aristocrat and the capitalist was often rather slim.

However, it was not only the myth of workers’ historic destiny that had depended on the existence of the old regime. Many aspects of working-class culture were inherited from proletarians’ direct experience of old-world forms of life. The workers’ movement told former peasants to forget the past, but in spite of these entreaties, recent urban migrants found ways to build a new culture of resistance on the old foundations of face-to-face community and an uncompromising solidarity. Likewise, the workers’ movement admonished the artisans — who knew the whole production process and really identified with their work — for their unwillingness to give up control over that process, which was the real basis of their pride in their work (and so also of their affirmation of their class identity). Spanish anarchism in particular drew on old world resources for its political intransigence. Once those resources were gone, so too was the most intransigent wing of the workers’ movement.

2. THE PRESENT WAS NOT WHAT THEY HAD IMAGINED

In order to survive into the post-WWII era, the Social Democratic parties and the trade unions found themselves forced to disempower their own memberships as a means of steadying their course on the road to power. During the wars, the workers’ organisations had become organisations for managing labour-power. Indeed, at key moments those organisations showed that they were willing to put down the radical wings of their own movements in order to demonstrate their capacity to rule within the bounds of capitalist society. But success in repressing memberships only tended to undermine the power of the leaderships in the long run.6

That was because the further development of the productive forces, in which the workers’ movement put its faith, undermined the very basis of that movement. More and more workers were employed in industry, as the movement had hoped. However, the increasing fragmentation of the industrial labour process made it ever more difficult for workers to identify with their work as a source of dignity and pride. What each worker did was increasingly just one step in a large process, unfolding across multiple production sites, which individual workers could not possibly hope to understand. Factory work was both boring and unfulfilling, especially for young workers entering modern factories built in the 1950s and 60s.7 The falling away of an affirmable working-class identity did not need to wait for deindustrialisation to begin. New anti-work, or at least, anti-factory-work sentiments within the factory led some theorists to question not only the form of the revolution (that is to say, the role of the party, or that of the state), but also “the content of socialism”:8 a better form of life had to be something else than the endless development of machinery and large-scale industry.

That workers would lose their ability to understand their work, and also their sense of fulfilment in work, had been anticipated by many movement strategists. Nevertheless, workers were expected to take pride in the fact that — even if they could no longer understand the entirety of the production process themselves — their understanding was still somehow embodied in the savoir-faire of the workforce as a whole, that is, the collective worker.9

In spite of the development of the productive forces, labour, it was insisted, remained the source of all wealth, its latent power and knowledge reflected precisely in that development. That turned out not to be true: knowledge of the production process was no longer located in the place of the collective worker, but rather (if anywhere), in the place of the collective technician. That was a key point because — while it upended the foundation-stone of the workers’ movement — it also finally confirmed Marx’s perspective in the “fragment on machines” (reproduced more soberly in Capital).

Here was the real obsolescence of the value form, of a social relation which measured wealth in terms of labour time. It was increasingly the case that human labour was no longer the main productive force; science — often applied to the worst ends of industrial “development”— took labour’s place. That profoundly affected workers’ self-understanding, their experience of what they did and their place in the world: workers could no longer see themselves as building the world in the name of modernity or a better, more rational way of living. On the contrary, that world was already built, and it was entirely out of their hands. Modernity presented itself as this imposing thing, which workers’ confronted, not as subject, but rather, as an object to be regulated and controlled.

The factory was only one part of this new reality. It was in the total transformation of the environment, both human and ecological, that the fully separated society really came into its own. Society is no longer just the means of production, a set of factories that can be taken over and self-managed by the workers who run them. Those factories, as well as everything else about modern life, rely on a massive infrastructure. One cannot hope that workers will storm the bosses’ offices as if they were so many winter palaces. The bases of social power are now much more dispersed. They are located not just in the repressive apparatuses of the police, the jails and the armed forces and the so-called “ideological” apparatuses of schools, churches, and television. They include also power stations, water-treatment plants, gas stations, hospitals, sanitation, airports, ports, and so on. Just like the factories themselves, all of this infrastructure relies on a legion of engineers and technicians, who keep the whole things running from minute to minute. These technicians possess no collective workers’ identity, nor were they ever included in the programmes of the workers’ movements.10

In this new context, the role of the socialist state could no longer be simply to add up the federated workers (a role it retained in the vision of council communists). The socialist state had to embody the technical rationality of the whole system, in all its complexity. It would have to become the central organ of coordination, handing down directives, but without replicating the authoritarianism of the USSR. Social democrats were at a loss in terms of figuring out how to achieve this new goal. Hence the growing identification of social democracy with a form of technocratic planning that would manipulate but not displace markets, in order to ensure full employment. This new vision owed much to military planning in the world wars and the (negative) example of the Soviet Union. But it was possible because of the Keynesian Revolution. We will discuss the promises of that “new macroeconomics” shortly.

Before we do, however, it is worth reiterating this point. The postwar technocracy wasn’t simply an ideological effect of an era that deified the scientist and engineer. It was a real problem of management that arises in a world that embodies the separation of each from each — and their reunification through markets — that is the value-form. This separation is first and foremost one between workers, a literal division of labour. This division means that workers can only come together on the basis of their prior separation, as so many operatives, as representatives of this or that workplace, in order to somehow decide what to do. In this context, getting rid of the state — without some degree of simplification of life — is extremely difficult to imagine.

LUMBERING ON

In the aftermath of WWII the socialists still expected that they would win. They imagined a glorious future would soon wash over them. But if they could deliver the goods in the meantime, by being better managers of capitalism than the capitalists themselves, then all the better. Indeed, for the workers’ parties and unions in Europe, the post-war years were filled with promise. Having already (long before the war) diluted their class character to gain votes — embracing the bourgeois notions of “the people” and “the nation”— these parties (the British Labour Party, the SPD in Germany, the French SFIO) were in a position to capitalise on popular resentment for the old political establishment (and to draw on the apparent success of the planned war economies and the New Deal), to put forward a state-led reconstruction effort under the banner of Keynesian economics.

Keynesianism allowed socialists to maintain their ideological role as champions of the working class, but to shift away from the problems of power and autonomy on the shopfloor, towards policies that would affect wealth and income distribution at the national level. This move also coincided with a transfer of power and influence from union representatives to electoral representatives. Yet, in office, the latter were forced to behave like any other party — respecting the interests of those who control investment, and thereby their chances of re-election. Having abandoned all dreams of “revolution” in the name of “reform”, the social democrats were increasingly forced to abandon all hope of “reform” in the name of “peace” and “stability”.

The result was a hollowing out of the old workers’ movement, the gutting of the collective identity that had undergirded it. There were two dimensions to this, prior to the revenge of the external limit in the 1970s. First of all, new forms of government stimulus to consumer demand were often taken directly from the workers’ movement: unemployment benefits, pension schemes, collectively subsidised health care. When the state adopted these measures, workers could be forgiven for believing that they had won. But without these key elements of its programme — and having meanwhile abandoned the project of socialisation of the means of production — the social democrats were at a loss as to what to do. The same was true of the unions: “trade unionism lost its credentials as a progressive force,” since “workers’ well-being” now derived from “a wider public charge” (that is, the welfare state); consequently, “collective bargaining slid more easily into sectionalism, less attentive to a general working-class interest or to effects on other unions and categories of workers.”11 As wages were bolstered by post-war growth, unions were left to hash out the contractual fine print in each sector.

However, in taking on this management role, the distance between union leaderships and the rank-and-file widened to a chasm. State recognition of unions ended up putting officials at yet another remove from their memberships, while simultaneously increasing their responsibilities as accepted co-managers of society. Under new conditions, the optimal size of unions increased; as a result formal grievance procedures were substituted for shop-floor militancy. At the same time, union officials had more and more functions to perform above and beyond the representation of workers to the employer: unions provided accident and unemployment protection, as well as pensions. While the partial de-commodification of labour power associated with government-recognised unions (and extensive labour regulations) gave workers more bargaining power, it simultaneously rendered union organisations more conservative in outlook. Management of ever more gigantic pension funds and insurance schemes turned unionists into bureaucratic functionaries, fearful of any disturbance that might hurt their — and they could reasonably claim, also the workers’ — bottom line.

Whether they act as liaisons of state functionaries, or as quasi-state functionaries themselves, the pressure for union leaders to behave “responsibly” increased, and the distance from their base widened. Thus organisations formed in the defense of workers become organisations that co-manage labour markets on behalf of the regulated economy, ensuring labour peace on the one hand, and protecting wage gains on the other, all in the name of stabilising the business cycle. This move, on the part of unions, was not really a selling-out. Unions were pursuing the same course they always had, and to its logical conclusions: attempting 1) to preserve the organisations, and 2) to defend the membership, in a context in which most of the formal rights they had fought for had been won (the old elites had been destroyed) and the wage-earning population was less new, less unstable, and increasingly differentiated.

Combined with the fact that workers had much more difficulty identifying the world around them as “made” by them (rather than the machines, the engineers, or the state-planners), these transformations spelt the decline of a shared, affirmable workers’ identity, even prior to the downfall of the workers’ movement.

1. Thomas Piketty, Capital in the 21st Century (Harvard 2013).
2. Two exceptional cases, which did not fly the red flag but still developed along these lines – and in fact, did so much more successfully, since they had the support of the US and access to its domestic market – followed a similar model of big-push industrialisation. South Korea and Taiwan were garrison states, meant to serve as models to East and Southeast Asian populations of what the latter could achieve with capitalist development. Here, too, successful big-push industrialisation was dependent on radical land reform programmes, which knocked out old regimes in the countryside early on in the postwar period. In these cases, radical land reform programmes were only implemented as last ditch, counter-revolutionary efforts, to stop the spread of communist revolution (the South Vietnamese regime refused to implement a similar programme of radical land reform, ensuring its defeat). As a result, state managers in these countries, like the romantic revolutionaries elsewhere, were able to institute barracks-style capitalist development.
3. Rehman Sobhan, Agrarian Reform and Social Transformation (Zed Books 1993).
4. The first article of the 1948 Italian constitution, co-written by the PCI, declares ‘labour’ the foundation of the Italian republic, the rock upon which the post-War state was built.
5. Fredric Jameson, A Singular Modernity (Verso 2002), p. 142.
6. See Robert Brenner, ‘The Paradox of Social Democracy: The American Case’, in The Year Left: an American Socialist Yearbook (Verso 1985).
7. See Paul Romano and Ria Stone, The American Worker (Facing Reality 1969) and Bill Watson, ‘Counter-Planning on the Shop Floor’, Radical America, May-June 1971
8. Cornelius Castoriadis released three articles under the title ‘On the Content of Socialism’ between 1955 and 1958.
9. The concept of the ‘collective labourer’ was first outlined by Marx in his discussion of manufacture: ‘The collective labourer possesses, in an equal degree of excellence, all the qualities requisite for production, and expends them in the most economical manner, by exclusively employing all his organs, consisting of particular labourers, or groups of labourers, in performing their special functions.’ Capital, vol. 1 (MECW 35), p. 354.
10. These issues will be explored at greater length in ‘Error’, in Endnotes 5, forthcoming.
11. Eley, Forging Democracy, p. 402. The negative implications of this turn for class solidarity were soon apparent: ‘poverty now became demonised into the pathologies of decaying regions and inner cities, from single mothers and ethnic minorities to violent and drug-abusing youth, in hidden economies of casualisation and permanent underemployment. In this racialised and criminalising discourse, movements shaped historically by appealing to white male workers in regular employment had less and less to say.’

Left to its own devices, the workers’ movement might have gone on indefinitely in a sclerotic form. Yet, as it turned out, the triumph of the workers’ movement in the great post-war settlements was a Pyrrhic victory — and not because the workers, in ‘68, came to reject the best that capitalism had to offer. The end of the postwar compromise was the result of the re-emergence of capital’s objective crisis tendencies after 1965. This is what we above called the “external limit” of the workers’ movement, and it played out as 1) a global dynamic — in competition between regional blocs of capital, and 2) sectoral shifts within each bloc.

1. GLOBAL DYNAMIC

In the course of the twentieth century, the number of national zones of accumulation multiplied. Each zone developed its own factory system, and, moreover, the productive capacity of the factories was compounded exponentially over time. These were not automatic tendencies of an expanding world capitalism. As we have seen, late development was politically mediated; given prevailing class dynamics, in which old regime elites and colonial administrations played starring roles, ongoing industrial development was an uncertain prospect, even in parts of Europe. Moreover, late development became more difficult to pull off over time, since the technological frontier was always being driven outward and the necessary infrastructural support for industrial expansion became increasingly technically complex.

In the postwar period, new geopolitical realities helped some states overcome these impediments. During the war, Stalinism had expanded its sphere of influence; then the Chinese Revolution opened a new era of communist insurgencies, across the low-income world. Both encouraged the US and European powers (except Portugal) to relinquish strategies of isolationism and — after 1960 — empire, and instead to promote industrial development within the bounds of the “free world”. International trade was encouraged and industrialisation promoted (although programmes of radical land reform were crushed). The gap that had opened up between advanced capitalist countries and the rest of the world did not close; however, it was no longer expanding. Yet these changed global conditions were momentous only in Western Europe and in developing East Asia, where increasingly large, regional “blocs” of capital rapidly expanded their reach.

Twentieth century economists imagined that national zones of accumulation were the proper space for late development. In truth rapid economic expansion in the mid-nineteenth and early twentieth centuries was already predicated both on exporting industrial goods to foreign markets, and on importing raw materials and sources of energy, usually from other markets in the low-income world. Nevertheless, a qualitative transformation took place in the postwar period. The expanding industries of the second industrial revolution pushed against national boundaries, in search of new markets, to be sure, but also eventually in search of new sources of industrial parts production and sites for industrial assembly. The evisceration of old-world elites in the World Wars and the threat of a creeping Stalinism permitted the establishment of new regional zones of accumulation, as new containers for these industries, for it weakened protectionist interests.1

Thus much of the world was divided between an American bloc under US management, a European bloc under Franco-German management, an East Asian bloc under Japanese management, and a Soviet bloc under Russian management. Tying these together were transnational institutions like the UN, NATO, the GATT, etc. The brief triumph of the workers’ movement was partly due to a transnational component: in the influence of Russia on its opponents during the cold war, the military-industrial expansion of the state (enabling various experiments in social planning), and the extension of industrial firms into new regional markets without yet offshoring production itself. The workers could get a seat at the table both because of their strategic position in the heart of this growth machine, and because “state capitalism” was, for a brief moment, really on the cards.

Yet without the possibility of war between these regional blocs, their simultaneous growth inevitably led to a saturation of export markets. Competition between national blocs of capital — centered in the US, Western Europe and East Asia — intensified, in the mid-1960s. Global markets became increasingly oversupplied, eventually making it so that no one bloc could grow quickly unless it did so at the expense of the others.2 The result was a decline in rates of industrial output growth, which fell below rates of labour productivity growth in the 1980s.

This point should be emphasised: de-industrialisation was not the result of a miraculous technological discovery, pushing productivity growth-rates to new heights. Rather, it was due to chronic overproduction, which pushed output growth-rates down, with less severe effects on productivity. The same trends of slowing global output growth, and mediocre productivity growth, have continued down to the present, even taking into account Chinese expansion. On this basis, industrial employment growth finally went into reverse, not only on a temporary, business cycle basis, but permanently, over crests as much as busts. De-industrialisation replaced industrialisation as a worldwide tendency, although like industrialisation, it was never a simple secular trend. Capital’s trajectory was thus different from what the workers’ expected. The development of the productive forces turned out to mean not the becoming majority of the industrial working class, but rather, its tendential dissolution.

2. SECTORAL SHIFTS

Of course, this did not signal the end of the working class. Along with the above-mentioned technical and infrastructural innovations came the enormous growth of administrative, bookkeeping, logistical, service, communication and instructional labour: “white collar” jobs. These jobs grew even as industrial jobs were disappearing. Thus whilst the new industries (contra Marx’s prediction) created jobs and temporarily saved the industrial working class from decline, it was this latter sector which absorbed most of the decline in the agricultural workforce. And whilst the old unions could organise this new sector, victories were far less consistent, for the hegemonic working class identity tended to dissolve on this new terrain. However, this is explained less by the nature of these jobs, and therefore not by their absolute growth, than by the fact of a sluggish demand for labour.

In part, service jobs grew because most services are not internationally tradable. There cannot be international overproduction in services, as there can be in both industry and agriculture. But the non-tradability of services is part and parcel of the fact that services, almost by definition, are only formally but not really subsumed. That is to say, the production process in services is resistant to the sort of capitalist transformation that would make those services amenable to regular increases in labour productivity. In other words, services aren’t produced in factories (where direct human labour gives way to machine production).

It is the resistance of economic activities to real subsumption that makes them into lasting sources of employment growth. That was why, within industry, assembly processes saw the greatest increase in employment, in the course of the twentieth century. More rarely, whole industrial sectors resisted real subsumption, past a certain point. Those sectors saw massive employment growth, too: in the apparel industry, the sewing machine was the last great technological development. Clothing is still mostly sewn with those nineteenth-century machines in sweatshops across the world.

But most of what was resistant to real subsumption was not industry at all — but rather services. With notable exceptions, it has generally proven difficult to transform service-making processes, to make them amenable to constant increases in labour productivity. In fact, “services” is something of a false category. Services are precisely those economic activities that get left behind: they consist of all the activities that prove resistant to being transformed into goods (that is, self-service implements). To be transformed into a good is the typical way that an economic activity becomes really subsumed: carriage drivers are replaced with cars, washerwomen are replaced by washing machines. Because services are not really subsumed, productivity growth remains modest. Even if output grows more slowly in services than it had in industry (during the latter’s heyday), it is nevertheless the case that the number of service jobs steadily increases. Here is the long-term tendency of capitalism: to produce a post-industrial wasteland, where employment grows slowly, and workers are very precarious.

The growing segment of the working class who occupied these not-yet-really-subsumed jobs had an experience of work and the capitalist mode of production that differed from the industrial workers who formed the core of the workers’ movement:

1. Real subsumption is what makes workers’ jobs alike, across industries. It is the process of mechanisation that reduces all workers to semi-skilled factory hands. Without mechanisation, labour processes retain their specificity, in terms of the skills required (making coffee versus programming versus teaching versus caring). Service jobs are less homogeneous. For the same reason, the wage scale is more dispersed. Here is the difference between the experience of industrial workers, becoming a compact mass, and the experience of service workers, confronting an endless differentiation of tasks.
2. Real subsumption concentrates workers into massive combines, where they work with huge quantities of fixed capital. That is what gives industrial workers the power to stop society by refusing to work. There are many bottlenecks in the industrial production process: stopping work in one place can sometimes shut down an entire industry. The opposite is true in services: many service workers are littered across innumerable shops, and most of those are involved in final sales to consumers (a major exception is distributional services).
3. Real subsumption is the potentially limitless growth in labour productivity. Workers experience those productivity gains as a contradiction: we produce a world of freedom, but we know that freedom to mean, potentially, our own unemployment, and therefore unfreedom. By contrast, the service workers’ experience is not linked to the triumph of free time. On the contrary, it is the failure to generate free time that creates employment. Endless busy-work, which is nevertheless essential for valorisation, is what creates jobs and generates incomes. Direct human labour remains central to the work process; it is not a supplement to the power of machines.

WORKERS AT THE LIMIT

The response of the workers to this change in fortune was — against the standard interpretation of May ’68 — in fact quite weak. The relatively low-amplitude of the wave of struggles in the advanced industrialised countries from 1968 to 77, the fact that they never directly challenged the mode of production, is largely explained by the depletion of rank-and-file-militancy in the earlier period. When confronted with the external limit, the unions proved to be hollow monoliths, unable to appeal either to the membership they had systematically dis-empowered, or to the state on which they had become increasingly dependent. It was the prior incorporation of aspects of the workers’ movement into the state that dampened the response of the workers to capital’s restructuring. But that defeat was inevitable, since the very industries on which the workers’ movement had been based were the ones that were undermined by the restructuring.

All that remains of the workers’ movement are unions that manage the slow bleed-out of stable employment; social democratic parties that implement austerity measures when conservative parties fail to do so; and communist and anarchist sects that wait (actively or passively) for their chance to rush the stage. These organisations have hardly been consigned to the dustbin of history. Yet none is likely to rejuvenate itself on the world scale. The workers’ movement is no longer a force with the potential to remake the world. That it was such a force was what gave life to these currents within the workers’ movement: they no longer make sense; their coordinates have been scrambled.

But of course the end of the workers’ movement is not the same thing as the end of either capital or the working class. Even as more and more workers are rendered superfluous to the needs of capital, the relation between these two terms continues to define what counts as a life worth living. Thus, the class relation has outlived the real movement that was supposed to destroy it. Indeed the class relation has only become more dominant since the end of the workers’ movement: for women everywhere, for peasants, etc.

What has changed in this period is that the diverse fractions of the working class no longer shape themselves into a workers’ movement. Except in reactionary ways (when one part of the class defends its access to a diminishing pool of stable jobs), workers rarely affirm their shared identity as workers. There are a number of reasons for this transformation, all of which have followed from the “restructuring” of the class relation in the 1970s. As the profit rate declined after 1973, a surplus of workers and capital swelled into existence. It became possible to attack workers’ material existence, and necessary to do so, since competition among capitals was intensifying. Because they were under attack, nationally situated workers’ movements found themselves unable to score the material gains that had been their final reason for existence. Workers abandoned the organisations to which they had — even as those organisations proved to be counter-revolutionary — formerly clung.

Everywhere, the working class is less homogeneous — it is stratified across high- and low-income occupations; its work is more precarious; and it switches jobs more frequently. More and more workers feel like work has no purpose; for more and more are employed in dead-end service jobs, or are unemployed or unemployable. Like the housewives of an earlier era, they produce little more than the everyday reproduction of the class relation itself. For these reasons, we cannot follow the autonomists in supposing that an “objective” recomposition of the class will find its correlate in a new “subjective” affirmation of class identity.

It’s not that it’s impossible today to glorify work or workers; it’s that those who can do so are necessarily a minority. They can no longer pose their activity, or the activity of any concrete fraction of the class, as having universal significance. The workers’ movement rested on a vision of the future that turned out to be a dream. In the second half of the twentieth century workers awoke from this dream to discover that all that was supposed to bring them together had actually separated them.

CONCLUSION: THE METAPHYSICS OF CLASS STRUGGLE

The machinery of accumulation is breaking down. As yet, no revolutionary force appears ready to oppose its global reign. It makes sense then that we mourn the workers’ movement, that we look back nostalgically on a time when that movement presented itself as a counter-force, even if a problematic one. How could one not feel a nostalgia for the past, living in a time when there is little to stop the ravages of capitalist social dynamics? But we must not let nostalgia cloud our understanding, making us believe that it would be possible to renew the struggles of an era that has come to an end. People do not make history under self-selected circumstances, but rather under existing ones. Humanity has survived the era of the birth of capitalism, although not without trauma. Now, we must get on with its destruction.

How is this task to be accomplished? The workers’ movement embodied a certain idea about how it was to be done. At its heart was a metaphysical conception, that of the collective worker, which has since dissolved.3 Society is still the product of all these working people: who grow and distribute food, who extract minerals from the earth, who make clothes, cars, and computers, who care for the old and the infirm, and so on. But the glue that holds them together is not an ever more conscious social solidarity. On the contrary, the glue that holds them together is the price mechanism. The market is the material human community. It unites us, but only in separation, only in and through the competition of one with all. If the world’s workers stopped working — turning their attention instead to routing the capitalists and their goons — they would not find at their disposal a ready-made mode of social organisation, born of their “actual” unity (that is, the collective worker). Instead, they would be thrown into a social void, within which it would be necessary to construct human relations anew.

The reason it is no longer possible to believe in the collective worker as the hidden truth of capitalist social relations is simply this: the extension of capitalist social relations to the ends of the earth was not associated with an ever more class-conscious workforce; quite the opposite. In the period immediately following World War I, a number of theories emerged to explain why this was the case.4 After all, revolution had taken place in “backwards” Russia but failed to come off in “advanced” Germany, where the working class had been more industrialised. Why had industrial organisation failed to generate class consciousness?

One set of explanations focused on the role of bourgeois ideology: the emergence of a class consciousness had been blocked by a false consciousness, which was implanted in workers’ minds by the apparatuses of bourgeois society: its presses, its schools, its churches. This institutional machinery was putting drugs in the workers’ drinking water. Another set of explanations focused on the role of mediating institutions of the working class itself. Trade unions and parties were supposed to shape workers’ wills into an immense hammer, with which the old world would be smashed. Instead, this hammer either sat idly by, or else was turned against the class itself (such betrayals were frequently explained as a matter of a certain embourgeoisement of party and union leaderships).

In reality, it was neither bourgeois ideology nor the mediation of workers’ organisations that was to blame, most fundamentally, for the failure of a revolutionary consciousness to generalise. As it turned out, the extension of capitalist social relations gave birth not to the collective worker, but rather to the separated society. The more workers’ lives were imbricated in market relations, the more they were reduced to the atomised observers of their own exploitation. In the course of the twentieth century, socialist revolutions did not emerge where the full efflorescence of capitalist social forms had been achieved. Rather, they emerged where those relations had only recently extended themselves.5 With time, revolutionary potentials appeared to diminish everywhere that capitalist society developed. At that point — except in rare circumstances, which we will come to momentarily — workers could embody their combative will only in mediated forms, such as trade unions and parties. These institutions were part of this society, and as such, reflected its basic character. It took almost half a century after 1917 for this reality to clarify itself. For all its inadequacies, Guy Debord’s Society of the Spectacle intuited at least this sad reality: the extension of capitalist social relations was reflected in the increasing separation of workers from one another, even as they became increasingly dependent on one another for their survival.

Constructing an “actual” unity, under these conditions, had to be a political project: it was that of the workers’ movement itself. Acting within this society — against a current that became ever more intense — the movement pressed forward. It became lost, however, in a sea of differential interests: those of women and men, young and old, “white” and non-“white”, and so on. Workers could bridge the gaps among their sectional interests only insofar as they believed, and convinced others to believe, in a shared identity: the collective worker. However, the unity thereby named was not a “real” unity, given immediately by the full flowering of capitalist social relations. It was a fiction presupposed and posited by the movement itself.

On this basis of shared identity, workers’ day-to-day struggles — from which many workers benefited only indirectly, if at all — appeared to be universally utilitarian: “an injury to one” became “an injury to all”. By some measures, this project was wildly successful. By means of solidarity and sacrifice, workers were able to win social protections for the unemployed, the elderly, and the destitute. Furthermore, by limiting the circumstances under which they were obliged to sell their labour, workers also compressed wage hierarchies. However, their efforts did not produce a revolutionary rupture. Eventually, the corrosive character of capitalist social relations dissolved the fictive unities of the workers’ movement. And here we are, today.

Today there is everywhere a commonly felt absence of the institutional forms of solidarity that formed the backbone of the workers’ movement. When we need to find a job, or when we have problems with a landlord, there are no chambers of labour, no mutual aid societies to which to turn. We are left with nothing but the state and its ancillary charities. Today’s strategic thinkers thus urgently try to invent new organisations of this kind (places to dwell and share), or seek to revive those of the past (union, party, co-op). But these new or revived structures lack staying power, for they are built on the shifting sands of the fully separated society: no matter how much water one pours on them, they refuse to cake up.

It’s true that in many ways the differences among workers that the labour movement had to overcome, in the first half of the twentieth century, have been significantly reduced. In the high-income countries, and in many low-income countries as well, the vast majority of workers live in urban areas. Their only country of residence is commodity-land. They obtain almost everything they need — paying mortgages or renting apartments, buying food, clothing, and assorted gadgets, and purchasing entertainment — by selling their capacity to labour. In this context, subcultures emerge and die off, but these are all overlaid on an abiding cultural flatness. For many people, national identity has become little more than a matter of national languages and cuisines. National monuments stand in for any more engaging historical awareness. Meanwhile, there are women CEOs, black CEOs, gay CEOs, and so on.

Yet even so, certain social differences have hardened. The wage scale continues to instantiate a hierarchy among workers, generating differential life chances for workers and their children. These life chances are also determined by differential accumulations of assets: the children of some workers inherit handsome sums, which may not allow them to stop working, but at least ensure that they will live no less well than their parents did in their later years. For most workers, however, there is no such personalised safety net. Nor are unemployment and underemployment randomly distributed across the class. They continue to correspond to differences of gender, race, nationality, immigration status, etc. Interests among workers tend to diverge most strongly when the economy is growing slowly, or stagnating. Of course, in most countries the economy has not grown quickly for a very, very long time.6

Today crises are more frequent. More and more people are shunted into an existence defined by low-pay, irregular work, and informality, in other words, everything we have called surplus populations. The division between the still regularly employed and the fractions of the surplus population is becoming the key division within struggles, today. Because we reiterate this point, our analysis is often taken to imply that we think things are looking up because everything is getting worse: la politique du pire. It is certainly unlikely that revolutions will take place in a time when things are simply getting better — nor when they are statically bad.

However, there is no hope in things getting worse, by themselves. Revolutionary hopes are found only in revolts, which tend to emerge out of a frustrated optimism. That is, revolts follow a disruption of everyday life, or a series of such disruptions, that fractures the dream by which humanity is cowed into believing that the rigged game of social life will work out in their favour. The picture of calm and unanimity presented by the forces of order breaks down; conflicts among elites are suddenly on display before the people. Anger building up for years or even decades rises and spills out onto the surface. There is hope, then, only in the opening of a new cycle of struggle, in the flight of populations into ungovernability.

Indeed, the real unity of the class lies neither in some organic unity given by the development of the forces of production, nor the mediated unity achieved by means of the unions and parties. Rather, that unity has and always will be forged in self-organised struggle, when workers overcome their atomisation by creatively constructing a new basis for collective activity. In the previous issue of Endnotes, we tried to find a way to describe that unity without appeal to a pre-existing metaphysical entity, the collective worker. We showed how a historically specific form of struggle emerges out of the historical specificity of class relations in capitalist society (determined by the unity-in-separation of the exploited).7

This way of understanding struggle — grounded in but also taking leave of the perspectives of left communists — can be applied equally to the past as the present. But it is important to recognise, here, the chasm that separates us from the past. The creative generation of new forms of organisation, new tactics, new content — all immanent to the unfolding of struggle — is orientated toward a given horizon of communism. In the past, revolutionary rupture was orientated towards a particular project, which we have described in detail in this article. We have also shown why this project is no longer given today.

Thinking through the new context in which struggles are taking place requires a pivot at the deepest level, in the very categories of communist theory. We can no longer appeal to the notion of class consciousness, with all it implies. We are forced to confront the fact that the working class is a class of this mode of production, unified only in separation. Of course there are still moments when, in their struggles, workers come together in a mode that interrupts their unity for capital, allowing them to organise both within and across lines of division. However, today when they come together they no longer do so as a class, for their class belonging is precisely what divides them. Instead, they come together under the name of some other unity — real democracy, the 99% — which appears to widen their capacity to struggle. In such moments a conflict can open up between this ideal unity of the class, as something other than a class, and the fact of the actual disunity of the class, as a class of this mode of production.

It is in such diverse and diversified conflicts that the communist horizon of the present may announce itself, not in a growing class consciousness, but rather, in a growing consciousness of capital.8 At present, workers name the enemy they face in different ways: as bad banks and corrupt politicians, as the greedy 1%. These are, however, only foreshortened critiques of an immense and terrible reality. Ours is a society of strangers, engaged in a complex set of interactions. There is no one, no group or class, who controls these interactions. Instead, our blind dance is coordinated impersonally, through markets. The language we speak — by means of which we call out to one another, in this darkness — is the language of prices. It is not the only language we can hear, but it is the loudest. This is the community of capital.

When people make the leap out of that community, they will have to figure out how to relate to each other and to the things themselves, in new ways. There is no one way to do that. Capital is the unity of our world, and its replacement cannot be just one thing. It will have to be many.

1. Also, the development of the atom bomb itself radically diminished, and perhaps even ended, the possibility of full-scale war between developed nation-states.
2. For the best account of this phenomenon, see Robert Brenner, The Economics of Global Turbulence (Verso, 2006), especially the preface to the Spanish edition: ‘What’s Good for Goldman Sachs is Good for America’.
3. As is hopefully clear from the argument laid out, above, this metaphysic was not simply a ‘wrong idea’, which could have been otherwise. It emerged more or less organically out of workers’ struggles within a particular social and political frame, which no longer pertains.
4. See Anton Pannekoek’s World Revolution and Communist Tactics, V.I. Lenin’s Left-Wing Communism: An Infantile Disorder, Herman Gorter’s Letter to Comrade Lenin, and Antonio Gramsci’s prison writings.
5. Of course, none of these revolutions led to anything remotely like communism.
6. A deeper transformation has occurred, as well, which has further diminished the chances for a resurgence of a class-based politics of shared interest: being a worker is no longer one’s essence, even if one is poor. Society tries to convince those at the top of the wage hierarchy that they can work at what they love, and that therefore they may identify the totality of their lives with their working lives. That is also true of certain jobs – nurses or teachers – where workers could imagine a different form of social organisation, in which they could be more useful, and even recognised as such. For most people, however, work is what they do to survive. The work they do is the sort of work they hope their children will never have to do.
7. ‘Spontaneity, Mediation, Rupture’, Endnotes 3, September 2013.
8. This point has been made by Théorie Communiste. See, for example, ‘Théorie Communiste Responds’ in Aufheben 13, 2005.

After all, the socialists and communists of the late nineteenth and twentieth centuries did not take as their final goal to hoist the proletariat into the position of a new ruling class. Their final goal was to abolish all classes, including the proletariat. This aim was stated in the Erfurt Programme of 1891, which became the model for many revolutionaries, across the world: “the German Social Democratic Party … does not fight for new class privileges and class rights, but for the abolition of class rule and of classes themselves.”2 Towards that end, the SPD fought against “not only the exploitation and oppression of wage earners” but also against “every manner of exploitation and oppression, whether directed against a class, party, sex, or race”.3 To focus on the transition period only — the so-called dictatorship of the proletariat — is to miss its intimate connection with this final goal — the abolition of class society.

Some might respond that, when the SPD spoke of the abolition of classes, they meant something very different than we do. What did the SPD mean by the abolition of “classes themselves?” In his commentary on the Erfurt Programme, published as The Class Struggle in 1892, Karl Kautsky provides the following gloss: he says, “it is not the freedom of labour” for which the socialists are fighting, but rather the “freedom from labour”.4 They are fighting to bring “to mankind freedom of life, freedom for artistic and intellectual activity”.5 Kautsky did not see socialist parties as fighting to preserve or extend an already grey world, a world of choking smog, a world of mental and physical exhaustion brought on by years of work.

On the contrary, the goal of socialism was to reduce the role of work in everyone’s lives, to create time for other pursuits. This goal was already given in the major workers’ struggle of Kautsky’s time, the campaign for the eight-hour day: “the struggle of the proletariat for shorter hours is not aimed at economic advantages … the struggle for shorter hours is a struggle for life.”6 In Kautsky’s estimation, only socialism could realise this goal. The party programme claimed that only socialism could transform “the constantly growing productivity of social labour … from a source of misery and oppression into a source of the greatest welfare and universal harmonious perfection.”7 Productivity growth was widely seen as the source of present-day misery, but also of a potential liberation, which could not but be the liberation of humanity.

Kautsky’s own vision of productivity-based liberation was of a world of art and philosophy not unlike ancient Athens. Whereas Athenian culture was based on the slavery of men, socialism would be based on the work of machines: “What slaves were to the ancient Athenians, machinery will be to modern man.”8 Socialism would thus realise the dream of Aristotle, who imagined that “if every instrument could accomplish its own work, obeying or anticipating the will of others, like the statues of Daedalus, or the tripods of Hephaestus” there would no longer be any need for the debasement of the many to create free time for the few.9

THE PRIMARY CONTRADICTION OF THE WORKERS MOVEMENT

So, was Kautsky the original theorist of anti-work? How did this liberatory perspective turn into its opposite in the twentieth century? That is to say, how did the liberation from labour become a liberation of labour? What we need to recover here is the primary contradiction of the labour movement. The socialists and communists of the late nineteenth and twentieth centuries wanted to abolish the working class and with it class society. However, they believed this abolition could be achieved only through the universalisation of the proletarian condition. To end a world of hard labour, most of humanity had to be transformed into labourers: they had to be set to work according to the latest techniques and technologies of production.

Today, most of humanity has been proletarianised. Across the globe, huge masses of people must sell their labour in order to buy what they need to survive. That is true in spite of the fact that, for many, proletarianisation has taken place without an accompanying integration into modern capitalist enterprises: a large portion of the world’s labour force consists of workers without (regular) access to work. It is obvious that this situation has not brought us any closer to being liberated from a world of work. Indeed, it is difficult to imagine how anyone might have thought otherwise, in the past: how could you seek to end domination by spreading one of its forms to the ends of the earth? Yet this idea animated an era of revolutionary energies: to usher in a world of workers became the order of the day.

That explains why, almost half a century after the publication of the Erfurt Programme, Leon Trotsky could look back on his interventions in Russian history as having pushed towards the realisation of the socialist project, in spite of the Stalinist nightmare that the USSR became. He thought he had contributed to this project, not because the Bolsheviks had reduced the amount of work the Russian people performed, but rather, because they had increased it: “socialism has demonstrated its right to victory, not on the pages of Das Kapital, but in an industrial arena comprising a sixth part of the Earth’s surface — not in the language of dialectics, but in the language of steel, cement, and electricity.”10 It was a massive increase in production, not a reduction in labour hours, that was the measure of socialism’s success.

Although he did not himself oversee it, it was in this vein that Trotsky praised the war against the Russian peasants — undertaken in the course of the collectivisation drives of the early 1930s — as a “supplementary revolution” to that of 1917.11 This supplementary revolution had been demanded since “the kulak did not wish to ‘grow’ evolutionarily into socialism” (by this Trotsky meant that the peasants had refused voluntary proletarianisation, and thus subjection to the will of the central planner and local bureaucrat).12 Trotsky saw a fuller proletarianisation as a necessary step before any reduction in labour time was possible.

Indeed, he believed that the threshold at which work could be reduced was still far in the future, even in advanced capitalist countries: “A socialist state, even in America … could not immediately provide everyone with as much as he needs, and would therefore be compelled to spur everyone to produce as much as possible. The duty of the stimulator in these circumstances naturally falls to the state, which in its turn cannot but resort … to the method of labour payment worked out by capitalism.”13 Not only a world of work but also a system of wage payments would have to be retained for the time being!14 We take Trotsky, here, as one key example (he is not necessarily representative of the range of socialist perspectives).

The point is that, in any case, the extension to the world of the English factory system (later, the American one displaced the English) — with its frightful pace, its high rate of industrial accidents, its periodic speed-ups, and its all-round subjugation of human beings to the needs of the machine — this was the dream of many revolutionaries.15 On that basis, it is easy to see why socialism, in its seemingly interminable, intermediate stage of development, came to seem to many people to be not so different from capitalism. Indeed, many socialists saw themselves as doing the work that capital had not done or had refused to do. The incompletion of capitalist development presented itself as a communist problem.

THEIR FUNDAMENTAL VISION

In the vision of the future laid out in the Communist Manifesto, the development of the productive forces was supposed to bring about heaven on earth. As we have seen, the socialists looked forward to a time, not far in the future, when machines — moving by themselves and producing a cornucopia of goods according to designs of scientists — were going to bring about an end of suffering, and so also of the conflict born of that suffering, which made man into a wolf for other men. The fuller development of the productive forces was not going to end suffering immediately: all this productive power would as yet remain concentrated in the hands of capitalists, who used it for their own ends (hence the impoverishment of the masses in a world of plenty). Nevertheless, in stoking development, what these capitalists were producing “above all” was their “own grave-diggers”.16

Here we come to the as yet unmentioned key to the labourist vision of the future. The fuller development of the productive forces was expected to propel the workers into the leading role. The development of the productive forces was simultaneously “the multiplication of the proletariat”, its becoming the majority of bourgeois society.17 Crucially, proletarians were not only becoming the majority; they were also made over into a compact mass: the Gesamtarbeiter, or collective worker. The factory system was pregnant with this collective worker, which was born of bourgeois society in such a way that it would destroy that society.

Antonio Gramsci captured this vision best when, in his pre-prison years, he described the collective worker in terms of workers’ growing “consciousness of being an organic whole, a homogeneous and compact system which, working usefully and disinterestedly producing social wealth, arms its sovereignty and actuates its power and freedom to create history.”18 Of course, in order to become conscious of themselves as an “organic whole”, workers would have to give up various particularising identities related to skill, ethnicity, gender, etc. Coaxing them to do so turned out to be more difficult than socialists supposed.

Yet in spite of such difficulties, workers were confident that history was moving in their favour. Theirs was no free-floating vision. It was grounded in an experience of history’s unfolding. The working class could feel history unfolding, in stages: the old world begets capitalism, and capitalism begets socialism. The transition through these stages could be read off the landscape, as the countryside gave way to cities. The same disjunction was reflected in the surface of British steel: one could compare its straightness to one’s own crooked instruments. The factories of England were supposedly the most advanced point in history. They had traveled the furthest along a linear trajectory. All of England was being made over by the factories; all of Europe was becoming England; and all of the world was becoming Europe.

This allegorical reading of the English factory system grounded a fervently held belief that the future belonged to the working class: “The proletariat was destined — one only had to look at industrial Britain and the record of national censuses over the years — to become the great majority of the people”.19 It was inevitable. By contrast, every other social stratum was doomed to disappear: peasants, artisans, small shopkeepers, etc. On that basis, many socialists felt no need, at least at first, to take a stand against colonialism, or against the genocide of faraway populations, in settler-colonial countries, to make space for Europeans. History was going to stamp these peoples under its boots and march on.

SOME PROBLEMS

Yet history marched at a halting pace. The Marxist understanding of history turned out to be only partially correct. The entire world was not made over in the image of the English factory. Industrialisation took place in some regions; however, it largely failed to give birth to the collective worker as a compact mass. We have provided a historical account of these problems, above. Here, we focus on internal debates among socialists and communists. At issue was the question: would capital eventually give rise to a working class that was large and unified enough to take over and then to destroy bourgeois society — and how quickly?

Kautsky made the clinging-on of the moribund classes into a centerpiece of his commentary on the Erfurt Programme. He admitted that there was still a large remainder of peasants, artisans, small shopkeepers in Europe (to say nothing of the world as a whole, where these classes were preponderant). Kautsky explained this reality as follows: in capitalist society, “private property in the means of production fetters the small producers to their undeveloped occupations long after these have ceased to afford them a competence, and even when they might improve their condition by becoming wage workers outright.”20 In essence, smallholders refused to become wage-workers because to do so would require that they subject themselves to the insecurities of the market and the despotism of the factory director. In the face of these dire prospects, smallholders did whatever they could to retain their autonomy.

Of course, Kautsky still thought these smallholders were doomed. But he now supposed that capitalism would snuff them out much more slowly than Marx and Engels had expected. Socialism, once achieved, would have to complete the process of proletarianisation. In socialism, to be a proletarian would no longer mean a life of insecurity and subordination. For that reason, socialism would be able to coax the remaining smallholders into the factory: they would willingly give up their small pieces of property to join the proletariat, thereby reducing economic irrationality and bringing us ever closer to communism. Kautsky thus conceived the leveling down of the new world as a precondition for absorbing the remainder of the old world.

In his revisionist critique, Eduard Bernstein argued that smallholders would never get the chance to partake in these sorts of socialist schemes. Bernstein, too, began from the argument that, in fact, “the industrial workers are everywhere the minority of the population.”21 At the turn of the century — and even in Germany, one of the leading industrial powers — the remainder of peasants, artisans, and shopkeepers was very large. Industrial wage-earners, “including industrial home-workers”, represented merely “7,000,000 out of 19,000,000 people earning incomes”, or in other words, about 37 percent of the workforce.22 Below the 50-percent hurdle, it was flatly impossible for the class to obtain a majority in parliament.

Even more problematic, for Bernstein, was the fact that these “modern wage-earners are not a homogeneous mass, devoid in an equal degree of property, family, etc., as the Communist Manifesto foresees.”23 That is to say, the factory system was not giving birth to the collective worker as a compact mass. Between workers of different situations and skills, it might be possible to imagine a “lively, mutual sympathy;” however, “there is a great difference between … social political sympathy and economic solidarity.”24 Moreover, the factory system was tending to accentuate divisions between workers, not reduce them.

Bernstein argued that socialists would have a hard time maintaining equality among workers, even if they managed the factories themselves. For as soon as a factory “has attained a certain size — which may be relatively very modest — equality breaks down because differentiation of functions is necessary and with it subordination. If equality is given up, the corner-stone of the building is removed, and the other stones follow in the course of time. Decay and conversion into ordinary business concerns step in.”25 Bernstein’s solution to these embarrassments was to to give up on the goal of a revolutionary transition to socialism altogether and to try to find a more inclusive, liberal-democratic way forward.

For the mainstream of the socialist movement, it was not yet time to give up on the goal. One part of the movement drew the conclusion that it was now necessary to bide one’s time: they should allow capitalism to mature, and await the further integration of the population into the modern industrial workforce; meanwhile, they should continue to organise that workforce into a conscious, coherent mass through the mediations of the trade unions and the social democratic parties. By contrast, for the romantic revolutionaries — including Trotsky — there was no time to wait. History had stalled, half-complete. The revolutionary communist international would thus constitute itself in the decision to de-arrest the dialectic of history. What was supposed to be a historical inevitability would now become an act of will. Everyone is being proletarianised, and so, to achieve communism, we must proletarianise everyone!

Regardless of which faction they joined, socialists shared this overall perspective. As the catastrophes of history piled ever higher, they put their faith in the full development of the productive forces. Movement strategists saw that development, and the class power it would bring, as the only way to break out of the penultimate stage of history and into the final one.

A COLLAPSED PERSPECTIVE

Before we go any further, it is important to recognise that what we have called the primary contradiction of the labour movement — that the generalisation of one form of domination was seen as the key to overcoming all domination — eventually resolved itself in a “collapsed” perspective, which fused the two sides of the contradiction together. Thus, the universalisation of the proletarian condition was identified directly with the abolition of class rule, rather than as a precondition of the abolition of all classes. In fact, this collapsed perspective — we might call it “Lasallian”— was hegemonic before the Marxist vision displaced it, and it also became popular once again in the middle of the twentieth century. Lasallianism had its root in the defensive struggles of artisanal workers against capitalist industrialisation.

For artisans, capital appeared as an external parasite: artisans did the same amount of work as before, but instead of receiving all of the income from the sale of the products of their labour, they received back only a portion of those revenues as wages. Hence the nearly universal slogan among struggling craft workers was that labour was entitled to its “full product”. Artisans’ struggles were not only about resisting “the wages system”. Craft workers also fought battles over shopfloor control. They resisted employers’ efforts to rationalise the labour process, to increase the division of labour and to introduce labour saving technical change.26

Although the artisans were eventually defeated (in fact, the battle dragged on for a long time), their vision of skilled workers’ self-management was adapted for an industrial era. What “semi-skilled” workers lost in terms of skill and control, they gained in terms of numbers: they formed — to a greater extent than any other set of workers — a compact mass in large-scale workplaces, which could be seized as strongholds. Workers dreamed that, once they were in control, they would be able to run the now-established factory system in the interest of the workforce, without the capitalists. In terms of both wages and shopfloor control, class conflict was perceived more or less as a zero-sum game: it was class against class, with the possibility that the exploited class might take the “full product”, eliminating the capitalist.27

This Lasallian perspective was the one that Marxism defeated, in the last quarter of the nineteenth century: a Marxist story about dynamic productivity growth displaced the Lasallian one about a zero-sum contest between classes. However, such a static perspective was later revived in the early twentieth century, above all in the radical current of the labour movement called anarcho-syndicalism (which is not to suggest that syndicalists were pro-market, like Lasalle, just that they came to see communism as a sort of workers’ paradise).

This sort of perspective also became the de facto position of the socialists and communists, if not their de jure position, throughout the first half of the twentieth century, and into the mid 1960s, when the goal of wholly or nearly automated production — having already receded towards the horizon — fell below that horizon and disappeared completely from view.

The dynamic given by growing productivity, and the tendency towards automation (which was so central to Marx and the socialists of the late nineteenth century) thus fell out of the story, once again. Only the struggle to end capitalist exploitation remained. As Rudolf Rocker explained, “For the Anarcho-Syndicalists, the trade union is by no means a mere transitory phenomenon bound up with the duration of capitalist society; it is the germ of the Socialist economy of the future, the elementary school of Socialism in general.”28 Here, it really was explicit that the working class was to be the ruler of society. Taking over society was to inaugurate a transition, not to a world without work, but rather, to a workers’ world.

A History of Separation has attempted to explain why the primary contradiction of the labour movement resolved itself into this collapsed perspective. The key was that, for a long time, the development of the productive forces really did tend to increase the size of the industrial workforce. Like Marx, Kautsky and the other socialists expected a second phase of industrial development to arrive and sooner rather than later: rising productivity was supposed to bring about a reduction in the demand for labour and hence the ejection of the workers from the space of the factory, leading to widespread unemployment. In fact, this second phase did not arrive until the 1970s.29 When it finally did, it spelled doom for the labour movement.

A PARTIAL CRITIQUE

Rummaging around in our theoretical toolbox, we might be inclined to retrieve the following critical perspective. The socialists lacked a proper theory of value, as well as of the possibility and the inner tendency of its self-abolition.30 According to this critique, the labour movement failed to conceive of a real break with the value-form. It therefore ended up reinforcing the categories of the capitalist mode of production, not least the category of productive labour. Hence, finally, the labour movement “affirmed the proletariat”, instead of abolishing it.

The mistake of the theorists of the labour movement was as follows. They often described capitalist social relations in terms of a foundational fracturing: the separation of peasants from the land generated a propertyless proletariat. However, the class relation is not only established through a foundational fracturing; it also confirms that fracturing in every moment. Capitalism realises the fracturing of social existence as the “unity-in-separation” of market society, an interdependence of everyone on everyone else, which nevertheless reduces individuals to isolated atoms, facing off against one another in market competition.31 This is especially true for proletarians, whose very survival depends on competing with other proletarians, and who therefore face the most barriers to collective organisation (as we have argued elsewhere, it is not the eventual decline of working class identity, but rather its emergence despite these barriers, which needs to be explained).

The cleaving off of human beings from their capacities — the expropriation of “workers” set against the “means of production”— is simultaneously the social separation of individuals from one another, of the sphere of production from that of reproduction. It is also the separation of the economy from politics. All that is given in the phenomenon of market dependence and market exchange: we are cut off from nature and from other people, in such a way that we relate to both almost exclusively through the mediation of markets, overseen by states. We remain dependent on one another, but in a way that keeps us separate from one another. This practical unity-in-separation instantiates itself in a set of ideas, which come to seem self-evident: “a fair day’s work for a fair day’s pay”; “he who does not work shall not eat”.

All of these separations, together, would have to be overcome in order to achieve communism, that is, a world in which the connection between how much one “works” and how much one “eats” has been definitively broken. For the labour movement, only the initial separation of workers from means of production came clearly into view as something to be overcome: this they hoped to achieve by abolishing private property in the means of production, and replacing private exchange with centralised planning of production and distribution.32 By contrast, the commodity — as “use-value” but not as “exchange-value”— appeared to be neutral and transhistorical; it was the same in every era. And so, they thought, the more the better: if more wheat will feed everyone, then why not more of everything else? That can only be a good thing.33 Commodities, heaped together in great piles (an “immense collection of commodities”), were seen as the overcoming of alienation, not its realisation. More importantly, the factory system — as “labour process”, but not as “valorisation process” — was to survive the end of the capitalist mode of production. It was understood as the foundation of socialism, not as the material embodiment of abstract domination.

To call these notions “productivist” or “progressivist” is to mark out the obviousness of our disconnection from a former era. But neither of these epithets should be taken to mean that, today, we think the dream of freeing human beings from existential insecurity is not a beautiful dream. Nor would we question the human needs, however apparently frivolous, which such production was imagined to satisfy (the critique of consumerism is itself an outgrowth of productivism). It is simply to point out that the identification between the realisation of this dream — that “no-one shall go hungry any more”34 — and the extension of capitalist social relations, or the massive expansion of the factory system, is not only false; due to global warming, it now has the potential to bring extreme harm to humanity as a whole.

As few were able to see in advance, the machinery and products of the capitalist production process were not neutral; they reproduced all the separations of capitalist society.35 It is perhaps surprising that contributions towards a critique of the neutrality of the factory system did not emerge within the workers’ movement until the 1950s (in the writings of Phil Singer and Grace Lee Boggs, as well as Raniero Panzieri and Cornelius Castoriadis).36

Among the few who did see this side of things, in an earlier moment, was Marx himself. Quoting Fourier, he equated the factories to “mitigated jails”.37 For the factory is the very embodiment of capitalist domination, of the separation of human beings from their capacities and from one another. It is the perfect realisation of the topsy-turvy world of capital in which man is dominated by the products of his own labour. Marx failed to finish Capital, his masterwork on these phenomena of alienation and embodied domination (or real subsumption). However, based on the volume he did finish, it is hard to see how the factory could be thought to have a liberatory content. In her critique of Bernstein, Rosa Luxemburg conceded this point: “It is one of the peculiarities of the capitalist order that within it all the elements of the future society first assume, in their development, a form not approaching socialism, but, on the contrary, a form moving more and more away from socialism.”38

A SELF-UNDERMINING TRAJECTORY

That the factory was part and parcel of the unity-in-separation of capitalist society made it difficult for the collective worker to struggle its way into existence. In spite of rhetorical statements to the contrary, it turned out that the “actual unity” of factory workers — as opposed to their unity-in-separation — could be achieved only through the mediations of the trade unions and the parties, as well as through their myriad cultural organisations (we will come to the problems associated with unifying through those mediations, as opposed to directly on the factory floor, a little later). We can go beyond this critique.

The theorists of the labour movement expected that the unity of workers within the four walls of the factory would cut against the tendency of capitalist society to atomise workers and to oppose them to one another outside the factory (in labour-market competition and in the isolation of household reproduction). Yet this strategy seems likely to have been effective only in the early phases of industrialisation, that is, during the phases of what Marx, in Capital, called “cooperation” and “manufacture”.39

During these phases, capitalists took workers from many small shops and collected them together in gigantic combines, where they were able to see and experience themselves all working in concert, producing all the materials of a new world. Thus, it was in these early phases that workers appeared to be the ultimate source of material wealth (as we showed, above, remnants of these phases tended to last a very long time, much longer than Marx expected). Bernstein dismissively pointed out that it was precisely “cooperative” work that people usually thought of when they imagined the collective worker’s self-actualisation: “What one usually understands by associated labour is only a mistaken rendering of the very simple forms of cooperative work as they are practiced by groups, gangs, etc., of undifferentiated workers.”40

With the advent and extension of “large-scale industry”, this sort of imagining lives on only as nostalgia.41 Machines, designed according to the latest scientific knowledge, become ever more central to the production process. The very centre of society shifts: science and, perhaps more than that engineering, replaces labour at the heart of the production process, as the key source of material wealth. Indeed, here is the fundamental, self-undermining tendency of the capitalist mode of production: social life continues to be founded on the exchange of labours; yet with the extension and development of the fixed capital base, labour is no longer the key to production. Direct human labour plays an increasingly subsidiary role in production, even though the exchange of equivalents continues to be measured in terms of labour time.

The development of large-scale industry expresses itself, finally, in the extrusion of workers from the factory — deindustrialisation. Beyond the factory gates, workers find themselves wandering in an immense infrastructure, that of modern life, which reflects back to them not their growing power, but rather, their impotence. They see not a world of their making, but rather a runaway world, a world beyond their control, perhaps beyond anyone’s control.

Insofar as they put their faith in the development of the productive forces (insofar as they themselves contributed to that development), industrial workers actually undermined the basis of their power. The fuller development of the productive forces did eventually lead to everything Marx imagined: worsening crises, the expansion of surplus populations, and the immiseration of vast numbers of people in a world of plenty. But at the same time, that development made it impossible for workers to experience themselves as an aliquot part of the collective industrial worker, and hence as the savior-destroyer of society. In short, atomisation won out over collectivisation (and did so in the USSR as much as in the US).42

WAS THERE AN ALTERNATIVE?

In the above sections, we have noted a gap between Marx’s late critique of political economy and the theories of the labour movement, towards which Marx otherwise expressed an infinite fidelity. Some have described this gap in terms of an “exoteric” and an “esoteric” teaching. Evidence for their perspective can be found in Marx’s critique of the Gotha Programme, an 1875 pre-cursor to the Erfurt Programme of the 1890s, quoted above. The first line of the Gotha Programme affirmed that “labour is the source of all wealth and all culture”, to which Marx replies, no! “Labour is not the source of all wealth. Nature is just as much the source of use values (and it is surely of such that material wealth consists!) as labour.”43 It is only within a value-producing society that labour becomes the centre of social activity, and nature is pushed into the background as something to be used, but not really valued in itself. Marx is confident that the further development of capitalist economies will render this Lasallian perspective moot.

But do Marx’s later writings really present us with an alternative to the path taken by the labour movement? In the Critique of the Gotha Programme, Marx goes on to lay out his vision of the stages by which capitalism will actually be overcome. In the “first phase of communist society”, he explains, the same principle will apply as in bourgeois society, except that “content and form are changed, because under the altered circumstances no one can give anything except his labour, and because, on the other hand, nothing can pass to the ownership of individuals, except individual means of consumption.”44 Marx here expresses the same sort of contradictory position that Kautsky and Trotsky expressed in their writings: to achieve the abolition of the proletariat, it is first necessary that each individual be reduced to a proletarian. The universalisation of this form of domination is the precursor to the end of domination.

For Marx, it is only in the higher stage that domination is actually overcome. This overcoming is, once again, apparently possible only on the basis of a fuller development of the forces of production: “after labour has become not only a means of life but life’s prime want; after the productive forces have also increased with the all-around development of the individual, and all the springs of co-operative wealth flow more abundantly — only then can the narrow horizon of bourgeois right be crossed in its entirety and society inscribe on its banners: From each according to his ability, to each according to his needs!”45 Marx’s statement is, to be sure, a beautiful one, laden with mysteries worthy of further consideration. For our purposes, it is pertinent simply to note that, even according to Marx, it is not until we achieve a state of abundance that we can hope to break the link, inaugurated by capitalism, between the amount of work one does for society and what one receives back from it.46

THE FINAL MARX

Yet very late in his life, Marx called this whole stagist perspective into question. Indeed, he came to believe that the theory of the succession of modes of production, which he had laid out in the Communist Manifesto, as well as his vision of the stepwise transition to communism, was incorrect. Instead of finishing Capital, Marx became increasingly obsessed with non-capitalist communities, among them the Russian peasant commune, the Mir.47 Marx’s insight was that, while there were classes in the Russian countryside, the domination of one class over another was not achieved on the basis of “private property”; on the contrary, domination was imposed externally on a community that retained “common property” in the land.48 Within the Mir, relations were not mediated by markets, but by communal decisions made in accord and in conflict with local customs. That was of course true outside of Russia, as well, in the vast global countryside beyond the European continent.

On the basis of these investigations, Marx upended the stage-theory of history. Maybe universal proletarianisation was unnecessary. In areas where proletarianisation was not yet achieved, it might be possible to move directly from the rural commune to full communism, without an intermediate stage. In a draft letter to Vera Zasulich, Marx suggested as much: the rural commune “may become a direct starting-point of the economic system towards which modern society is tending; it may open up a new chapter that does not begin with its own suicide; it may reap the fruits with which capitalist production has enriched humanity, without passing through the capitalist regime”.49 It is important to note that Marx is not looking backwards here, or imagining some alternate reality in which capitalism had never arisen; the point is that communes could take on capitalist innovations, without proletarianising.

The same idea was expressed publicly in the corrective preface to the Russian edition of the Communist Manifesto, published in 1882, that is, just one year before Marx died. With Engels, he wrote: “If the Russian Revolution becomes the signal for a proletarian revolution in the West, so that both complement each other, the present Russian common ownership of land may serve as the starting point for a communist development.”50 The hopeful note Marx sounded, here, on the role that the peasant communes might play in the coming Russian revolution was echoed — at least initially — in the spontaneous activity of the peasants themselves, in the course of the revolutionary era that opened in 1917.

According to Jacques Camatte, in his 1972 text, “Community and Communism in Russia”, the communes, which had undergone a process of dissolution in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, were actually revived in the course of the Russian Revolution.51 Camatte suggests — woefully considering what was about to happen — that “this could have been the beginning of the reformation of the communities on a higher level, on the condition that the peasants were supported by the new state, which had to remove the elements harmful to the development of the communes, as Marx had stated in the drafts of his letters to Zasulich.”52 Perhaps there would have been a way forward, here, for the world as a whole, a new sort of revolution, which would have made possible the “reconciliation of men at various moments of their development, without necessarily putting these on an axiological scale.”53

It is not clear how this new revolution would have been achieved, when Russia was decimated by the Civil War, and when revolutions in Europe failed to come off. Ignoring these impediments, Camatte simply notes: “the victory of Marxism hindered the realisation of this solution.”54 Camatte is surely right that, instead of being repudiated by events on the ground, Marx’s earlier, stagist perspective was hereby “codified in the name of Marxism”, as a programme of economic development and then put into practice by the Bolsheviks.55 The latter determined that “everything archaic and Asiatic had to be eliminated over the whole huge empire (and given that the revolutionary flood affected the peripheral countries, this took on a global importance).”56 Realising that the peasants could not really be coaxed into this modern world in formation, the Bolsheviks eventually set out to destroy the commune, to proletarianise the peasants, and to develop the forces of production as Russian capital had not. This programme became that of communist revolution in the twentieth century.

A MOMENT FOR REFLECTION

For Camatte, humanity had “the possibility of leaping over the CMP [capitalist mode of production],” but has now “lost” that possibility.57 We have paused to consider this “lost” possibility for a few reasons. First, among all the vaunted red threads of history — which trace their way back to an initial moment of betrayal, and hence to an unrealised potential for salvation — this one seems to go back furthest: to the conflicts within Marx’s own conception of the pathway to communism. But more than that, this alternative vision seems to us to get closer than any other to the heart of the matter, that is, the primary contradiction of the labour movement: to end all domination supposedly required the extension of one form of domination, namely proletarianisation, to the ends of the earth, with all the violence this process necessitated.58 The proletarian class — unified in and through the extension of the factory system — was thought to be the only class powerful enough to make the revolution.

In fact, instead of being a century of proletarian revolution, the twentieth century turned out, like the centuries that had passed before it, to be largely a century of peasant revolts. These revolts were aimed, initially, at securing a renewed access to non-market means of existence, which had been eroded both by the capillary action of capitalism and by the violent impositions of colonial administrations. Peasants were often backed by communists, who adopted peasant slogans while simultaneously turning them towards the new goal: industrial development, with the aim of creating the preconditions for full communism. Communists aimed at the maximal programme: freedom from want, freedom from labour, “freedom of life”, to be achieved, first of all, through the incorporation of humanity into the industrial proletariat, and only later by the abolition of that class and by the withering away of the state.59

As mentioned above, the premise behind this project proved false. Universal proletarianisation has now been achieved: through the combined action of capitalist and socialist development, as well as by means of other, unforeseen forces (the spread of the demographic transition). Consequently, there is no longer an outside to capitalist social relations. Almost everyone has been incorporated into the modern world, at least tendentially, although frequently without finding employment within capitalist enterprises. Yet the train wreck of world history has not arrived at communism, nor even come nearer to it. Universal proletarianisation did not give rise to the collective worker, as a “real unity” to stand against the unity-in-separation of capitalist society. And of course the peasants — on to whose revolts this project was grafted — were defeated even when their revolts were victorious.

REFLECTIONS CONCLUDED

In his texts — which to our mind pose the greatest challenge to Marxist history — Camatte seems almost exasperated that false ideas, or in other words, the Marxist-developmentalist project, somehow won out over the true ideas, based in Marx’s repudiation of stagism. This exasperation signals his failure to supercede an idealist perspective, which is the primary perspective that revolutionaries have taken with respect to their own history. In fact, history is not made by ideas, whether true or false, but rather, only in a clash of forces. There is one force that Camatte did not include in his discussion..

The peasantry, the peasant commune, persisted well into the twentieth century, that much is true. But almost everywhere the persistence of peasant communities also meant the persistence of old regime elites, whose massive power was also based in the countryside. These elites did not really form one class, but a set of overlapping power-structures. Their power was based, not in successful competition, but rather, on privileged access to resources, such as land and credit, and rights, such as the right to streams of income deriving from their ownership of, e.g., mines or positions in government.

As it turned out, these same elites were not displaced by bourgeois factory owners, with their purportedly enlightened, liberal ideals. Instead, the bourgeoisie was largely absorbed into the sabre-rattling old regime. This amalgamated ruling class typically set out to exclude workers from the polity. In some regions, they wanted more: they tried to turn back the clock, to “re-introduce caste society, that is, human groups with radically different entitlements and duties”, and so to re-establish regimes of personal domination in place of abstract ones.60 Such was true not only of the fascist parties of the mid-twentieth centuries. It was the notion of a whole range of political groupings, basing themselves on Social Darwinist ideas.

As long as these amalgamated elites retained power — in fact, their power was often augmented by what modernisation took place — the overall development of the productive forces was blocked outside of the core capitalist states. Trotsky makes precisely this point, at the start of The Revolution Betrayed, which we quoted above: “the history of recent decades very clearly shows that, in the conditions of capitalist decline [they were actually just a middling phase of capitalism’s rise], backward countries are unable to attain that level which the old centres of capitalism have attained.”61 He attributes this to the persistence of the old regime: “the overthrow of the old ruling classes did not achieve, but only completely revealed the task,” namely to undertake proletarianisation, as the precondition of communism.62 This task was not otherwise going to be undertaken, according to Trotsky, due to “the insignificance of the Russian bourgeoisie”, and the consequent weakness of the proletariat.63

Indeed, wherever the old regime remained at the helm, the peasantry persisted, while the proletariat remained small and weak, unable to play a decisive role in history. This peasantry, while sometimes willing to rise up against its oppressors, was at other times obedient to its overlords, particularly in the context of (often rigged) parliamentary elections. The same could be said of small but formally employed industrial workforces, which were often conciliatory towards the forces of order. All of this is clearly on view in the histories of low-income countries — particularly in Latin America, the Middle East, and South and Southeast Asia, but not in East Asia — where old regime elites retained much of their power.

It was in this context that, as we mentioned before, the strategists of the labour movement came to see history itself as blocked, and the unblockage of history as an urgent task. That task would require a further development of the productive forces, whether within capitalist society or in a planned, socialist developmentalist one. In either case, further development seemed to be the only way to strengthen and unify the proletariat against its enemies, which were legion (and this in spite of the fact that, in reality, that development spelled the doom of the labour movement itself). Meanwhile, old regime elites, backed by imperial powers — later including the United States — were actively engaged in turning back any movement in a liberatory direction.

Without condoning or condemning, we claim that these facts grounded the workers’ movement. Marx’s idea had been that the industrial working class would come to exist, and that circumstances beyond its control would force that class to call itself into question. But really, in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, the question was whether the class would exist at all, as a class of free commodity sellers, outside of a few centers in Northern Europe and among whites in the white-settler colonies. The world was changing rapidly, and it did so in ways that tended to enhance the power of the oppressors, both in the factories of Europe and in the colonies. In this context, fighting to exist became a revolutionary position.

1. ‘Editorial’, SIC 1.
2. The Erfurt Programme, 1891; available on marxists.org
3. The Erfurt Programme. That the SPD vowed to fight oppression directed against parties is presumably a reference to the passage of the 1878 Anti-Socialist Laws in Germany, which limited organising around social democratic principles.
4. Karl Kautsky, The Class Struggle, 1892; on marxists.org. We will quote from Kautsky a lot here. Much more than Marx, and precisely because he interpreted him for a broader audience, Kautsky laid out the basic theoretical perspective of the the labour movement. Insofar as Lenin, Trotsky, or even Pannekoek reacted against Kautsky, it was usually on some basis that they shared with him. See Masimo Salvadori, Karl Kautsky and the Socialist Revolution (Verso 1990); Paul Mattick, ‘Karl Kautsky: from Marx to Hitler’, 1938 in Mattick, Anti-Bolshevik Communism (Merlin Press 1978); Gilles Dauvé, ‘The “Renegade” Kautsky and his Disciple Lenin’, 1977. In Lenin Rediscovered: What Is to Be Done? in Context (Brill 2006), Lars Lih has recently made similar arguments whilst drawing the opposite political conclusions.
5. Kautsky, The Class Struggle.
6. Ibid
7. Ibid.
8. Ibid.
9. Aristotle, Politics 1:4 in Complete Works (Princeton 1984).
10. Leon Trotsky, The Revolution Betrayed, 1936 (Socialist Alternative 2013).
11. Ibid. p. 59.
12. Ibid. p. 59.
13. Ibid. p. 64.
14. As Lenin says, ‘The whole of society will have become a single office and a single factory, with equality of labour and pay.’ Vladimir Lenin, State and Revolution, chapter 5, 1917; available on marxists.org. Lenin imagines this office-factory as organised ‘on the lines of the postal service’, with all technicians, as well as workers, receiving a ‘workman’s wage’.
15. Antonio Gramsci not only popularised the term ‘Fordism’, he also identified with it. Fordism was the ‘ultimate stage’ of the socialisation of the means of production, based on the primacy of industrial capital and the emergence of a new kind of morality. Such intimations of the ‘new man’ could emerge in America because the US lacked the unproductive classes that formed the social base of European fascism. The moral depravity of the latter conflicted with the new methods of production, which ‘demand a rigorous discipline of the sexual instincts and with it a strengthening of the family’. Prison Notebooks (International Publishers 1971), p. 299.
16. Marx and Engels, The Communist Manifesto, 1848 (MECW 6), p. 496.
17. Karl Marx, Capital, vol. 1, (MECW 35) p. 609 (Fowkes trans.). See ‘Misery and Debt’, Endnotes 2 for a more thorough discussion of this famous line from Marx.
18. Antonio Gramsci, ‘Unions and Councils’, 1919. Gramsci thought that the council was the proper form for this collective worker, and also the germ of a future society. See ‘A Collapsed Perspective’, below.
19. Eric Hobsbawm, Age of Empire (Weidenfeld & Nicolson 1987) p. 117.
20. Kautsky, The Class Struggle.
21. Eduard Bernstein, Evolutionary Socialism, 1899; available on marxists.org.
22. Ibid.
23. Bernstein, Evolutionary Socialism.
24. Ibid.
25. Ibid.
26. See David Montgomery, The Fall of the House of Labour (Cambridge 1989).
27. ‘[T]he craftsmen pushed together in the manufacture ... could dream of an industrialisation that would turn its back on the big factory and return to the small workshop, and to a private independent property freed of money fetters (for example, thanks to free credit à la Proudhon, or to Louis Blanc’s People’s Bank). In contrast, for the skilled electricity or metal worker, for the miner, railwayman or docker, there was no going back. His Golden Age was not to be found in the past, but in a future based on giant factories… without bosses. His experience in a relatively autonomous work team made it logical for him to think he could collectively manage the factory, and on the same model the whole society, which was conceived of as an inter-connection of firms that had to be democratically re-unified to do away with bourgeois anarchy.’ Gilles Dauvé and Karl Nesic, ‘Love of Labour, Love of Labour Lost’, Endnotes 1, 2008.
28. Rudolf Rocker, Anarcho-Syndicalism: Theory and Practice, 1938. Rocker’s summary of anarcho-syndicalism does not mention productivity-enhancing technical change.
29. It was probably difficult to see the collapse of 1929/30 as having its source in automation, but it would be worthwhile to examine that period’s politics carefully.
30. For a reading of Endnotes along these lines see Matthijs Krul, ‘Endnotes: A Romantic Critique?’, The North Star, 28 January 2014. For a critical response see Atë, ‘Romantic Fiction: Notes on Krul’s critique of Endnotes’, Endnotes blog, February 2014.
31. ‘Separation is itself an integral part of the unity of this world’, Guy Debord, The Society of the Spectacle, 1967, ¶ 7.
32. Socialists often spoke about a future moment when the separation between mental and manual labour would be overcome, but they saw this overcoming as a technical matter.
33. ‘When Spanish anarchists speculated about their utopia, it was in terms of electricity and automatic waste-disposal machines.’ Hobsbawm, Age of Empire, p. 138.
34. Theodor Adorno, Minima Moralia (Verso 2005), p. 156.
35. Orthodox Marxism tends to see technology as neutral between alternative socialist and capitalist uses, c.f. Lenin’s interest in scientific management and his definition of communism as ‘soviets plus electrification’. In fact, the capitalist transformation of the labour process does not take place simply as a means of increasing productivity, but also as a means of increasing the control of the capitalist over the workers.
36. Paul Romano and Ria Stone, The American Worker (Facing Reality 1969)and Raniero Panzieri, ‘The Capitalist Use of Machinery’ in Phil Slater ed., Outlines of a critique of technology (Ink Links 1980).
37. Marx, Capital, vol. 1 (MECW 36), p. 553.
38. Rosa Luxemburg, ‘Reform or Revolution’ (1900) in The Essential Rosa Luxemburg (Haymarket 2008), p. 92.
39. Marx, Capital, vol. 1 (MECW 36), chapters 13 and 14.
40. Bernstein, Evolutionary Socialism, chapter 3.
41. Marx, Capital, vol. 1 (MECW 36), chapter 15.
42. ‘Because the production relations are transparent, most individuals in inferior social positions are dissatisfied with the system … The only way the system can be maintained is through the effective atomisation of the population.’ Hillel Ticktin, ‘Towards a Political Economy of the USSR’, Critique, vol. 1, no. 1, 1973, p. 36.
43. Karl Marx, Critique of the Gotha Programme, 1875 (MECW 24), p. 81. Marx is here explicitly expressing his frustration with the Lasallian perspective, which lacks the dynamic given by the tendency towards automation.
44. Ibid. p. 87.
45. Marx, Critique of the Gotha Programme, p. 87.
46. Even more than Kautsky, George Plekhanov was the one who developed these ideas into a fully fledged stage-theory. See, for example, his ‘The Development of the Monist Theory of History’ (1895).
47. See Kevin B. Anderson, Marx at the Margins (Chicago 2010).
48. Karl Marx, draft letters to Vera Zasulich, in Theodor Shanin, Late Marx and the Russian Road (Monthly Review 1983), p. 100.
49. Shanin, Late Marx and the Russian Road, p. 112.
50. Marx and Engels, The Communist Manifesto, 1882 Russian Edition (MECW 24), p. 426.
51. Jacques Camatte, ‘Community and Communism in Russia’, Part II. See also Loren Goldner, ‘The Agrarian Question in the Russian Revolution’, Insurgent Notes 10, July 2014.
52. Camatte, ‘Community and Communism in Russia’, Part II.
53. Ibid.
54. Ibid.
55. Ibid.
56. Ibid.
57. Camatte continues: ‘We have been most incapable of conceiving of [the leap over the CMP], infested as we were by the idea that progress is for all people the development of the productive forces. i.e. in the end, capital, which was the affirmation inside the proletariat of the interiorisation of capital’s victory. Thus it is natural that, before the peoples whom we have forced to submit by our agreement with the deadly enemy, the infamous path of the passage to the CMP, we should stand accused (violent criticisms of Marx’s ethnocentrism have been made by various ethnologists originating among these people).’ Camatte, ‘Community and Communism in Russia’.
58. ‘Alas, we who wished to lay the foundation for kindness, could not ourselves be kind.’ Bertolt Brecht, ‘To Posterity’.
59. It’s easy enough to denigrate this project retrospectively, but it was only terrible insofar as it failed to achieve its goal. If it had succeeded, it would have been worth it. The sufferings of humanity, already an omnipresent reality, but augmented by the communists, would have been redeemed by the victory of communism. That redemption never came.
60. G.M. Tamás, ‘Telling the Truth about Class’, Socialist Register 2006, p. 24.
61. Trotsky, The Revolution Betrayed.
62. Ibid.
63. Ibid.