AND REVOLUTION

(ili) Class and Revolution The *sociology elationogy be teen piany he relationship between and class, the state and revolution, the nature of the transition to socialism —all of these are involved in understanding Marx's answer to the questions we outlined previously on the preconditions and nature of the 1848 events in France. This complexity is characteristic of Marx's approach all such questions, and it is this which explains the importance in the history of Marxism of the disputes over "revisionism' on all questions, philosophical, historical, economic, and political.

We not deal in these articles with the later development of these questions by Marxists, in which Lenin and Trotsky, in their writings on the international developments during and after the First World War, particularly relating to the Russian Revolution, provided brilliant examples of the method elaborated by Marx. (cf. especially Trotsky, 'History of the Russian Revolution', 3 vols., and Lenin, 'Collected Works'.)

Trotsky turns on numerous occasions to the relationship between fluctuations in economic prosperity and working-class militancy and revolution. (cf. Trotsky, 'The First Five Years of the Communist International', 2 vols., and Le Mouvement Communiste en France', ed. P. Broué.)

As for the second self-criticism made by Marx and Engels, to expand on it would be to trace the development of Marxist thought for over a century, since the development of the proletarian revolution and revolutionary conscious. ness is, of course, the core of Marxism.

Classic work

Lenin's 'State and Revolution' is the classic work on that aspect of the question which came to the fore in the second decade of the 20th His 'What is to be Done?', even though written as a pamphlet directed to a particular crisis in the Russian Social-Democratic Party, is a development of the general principles involved in the other essential question: the relation between party and class, theory and practice.

Marx's analysis of the stages by which first the proletariat and then the revolutionary democracy of the petty bourgeoisie, followed by each more right' section of the i opposition were defeated, is presented in brilliantly concise, concrete and graphic form in Marx's two books on the period, and this summary cannot be a substitute for the works themselves.

The key to this process is in its first stage, the manifestation of the principal contradiction contained in the February victory.

It was the proletariat which, on the streets of Paris, established the new power, and there was no alternative to the pronouncement of a Republic with social emancipation inscribed on its banners. Respectable papers like the 'Moniteur' • had to propagate officially the "wild ravings" which up to that time lay buried in the apocryphal writings of the Socialists and only reached the éars of the bourgeoisie from time to time as remote, halfterrifying, half-ludicrous legends.' Since 'everyone' was prepared to identify the finance aristocracy with the enemy described in the socialist pamphlets, and since the bourgeois themselves were represented by ideologues whose explicit Republican programme attributed any class distinctions not to economic relations, but only to the effects of monarchy and aristocratic institutions, 'nobody was against the 'emancipation of the proletariat' and the 'social republic' and fraternite united all classes in a post-revolutionary euphoria. It was this air which the Provisional Government breathed ... for the duration of its very short life.

Marx's analysis shows that the necessities of bourgeois economy and particularly of the running of the state quickly made necessary a settlement with the extravagant promises given to the "The emancipation of the workers-even as a phrase became an unbearable danger to thè new republic, for it was a standing protest against the restoration of credit, which rests on undisturbed and untroubled recognition of the existing economic class relationships. Therefore, it was necessary to have done with the workers' Twenty-four battalions of Mobile Guards were formed from the Paris lumpenproletariat in order to be turned against the working class, working class which at first welcomed them as their own.

The National Workshops were set up and took in 100,000 workers. In reality nothing but workhouses, they yet bore the same name as the 'Ateliers' campaigned for by the socialists and Louis Blanc, who was in any case a minister in the Provisional government. The way in which petty-bourgeois public opinion was rallied consequently against the working class showed a pattern which has often since then been repeated.

'All the discontent, all the ill-humour of the petty bourgeois was simultaneously directed against these National Ateliers, the common target.

With real fury they reckoned up the sums that the proletarian loafers swallowed, while their own situation became daily more unbearable. A state pension for sham labour, that is socialism! they growled to themselves. They sought the basis of their misery in the National Ateliers, the declarations of the Luxembourg, the marches of the workers through Paris. And no one was more fantastic about the alleged machinations of the Communists than the petty bourgeoisie who hovered hopelessly on the brink of bankruptcy.' In the months before the meeting of the new Assembly and the formal declaration of the Republic in May 1848, the working class continued to show its strength, but it went through no preparation equivalent to that of its enemy. The National Assembly of May now provoked the decisive struggle: to secure the republic for the bourgeoisie and to put the workers in their place.

The proletariat's representatives were removed from all government bodies, and the proposal for a Labour Ministry was rejected.

On . May 15, a workers' demonstration invaded the Assembly, attempting to call it to order, to the february order, but the only real result of this action was the arrest of Barbés, Blanqui and the other leaders.

Next must come the settlement on the streets: if the workers' confidence derived from their predominance in the street battles of February, then they must be given: practical demonstration of the real relationship of forces. A series of provocative decrees and speeches in the Assembly forced the workers into the great insurrection and defeat of June 22, 1848:

•... the first great battle between the two classes that split modern society. It was a fight for the preservation or annihilation of the bourgeois order. The veil that shrouded the republic was torn to pieces.' Once the proletariat was defeated, the 'middle sections' or petty bourgeoisie came more easily under attack. Their misfortune was that, having chosen to attack the working class during the latter's period of strength, they, were then forced to side with it only at the time of its defeat. The analysis of the role of the petty bourgeoisie in these events is one which retains validity as the guide to many subsequent historical situations.

The powerlessness of this class derived from its middle position, tassed between the two great classes, victim always of its illusions about the good society of small and hardworking citizens like themselves, only disturbed by the inordinate strength and greed of the bourgeoisie on one side and the proletariat on the other.

The experience of the proletariat in these defeats, however, is of a different kind, a rule of capital, the slavery of labour' Without here going into the later stages by which all the 'middle sections', , and finally the democrats of the big bourgeoisie themselves, were defeated, we note one other result of the june defeat of the Paris proletariat.

All over the rest of Europe, this demonstration of both the menace of the proletariat and the necessity of its suppression pushed the bourgeoisie into the arms of reaction as a 'lesser evil'.

And in those nations where the February victory had sparked off democratic revolt against the Russian, Austrian and Prussian yokes, the old powers once again turned with confidence to the imposition of their rule, sure that 'revolutionary' France would this time be too concerned with the suppression of the proletariat at home to encourage revolution in eastern and central Europe :

"The Hungarian shall not be free, nor the Pole, nor the Italian, as long as the worker remains a slave!' This was the essence of Marx's conclusions from the revolutions of 1848 and the defeat of the Paris proletariat:

until February 1848 the working class inevitably proceeded behind the banner of a revolution to change the form of the state.

That state was the monopoly of the finance aristocracy, of one section of the bourgeoisie. Through its "revolutionary practice' of overthrowing this state, the proletariat discovered that its banner had been a false device by which it lost its political independ• once to the bourgeoisie and its representatives.

After June, the aim of the proletariat must be the social revolution, overthrow of the social-economic system, political independence of the proletariat, smashing of the bourgeois state, dictatorship of the proletariat :

'Our battle-cry must be;

permanent revolution!' A Marxist view of any revolution would be of this type:

i.e., not simply to provide an explanation of the classes and their roles, but to make this explanation from the standpoint of the enrichment of the experience and knowledge of (iv) Classes and their political ideologists.

'Upon the different forms of property, upon the social conditions of existence, rises an entire superstructure of distinct and characteristically formed sentiments, illusions, modes of thought and views of life. The entire class creates and forms them out of its material foundations and out of the corresponding social relations. The single individual who derives them through tradition and education may imagine that they form the real motives and starting point of his activity.'° These general remarks are made by Marx by way of explanation of his insistence that the Legitimists and Orleanists in Paris were divided not only by their explicit attachement to different royal houses, but by the property relations which determined the lives of those making up the two groups: 'large landed proprietors, ruling through priests and lackeys', on the one nana; 'high finance, large-scale industry, wholesale trade, i.e., capital, governed with retinue of lawyers, professors and orators', on the other.

The fact that loyalty to one or the other royal house predominates in the conscious motives of individual representatives of the class, that a whole political party takes its decisions according to the degree of fervour aroused from time to time on this question, does not alter the fact that the royal houses are only titles for class groupings, forms by which the class interest is held together for certain purposes, but not the determinant of the content and social composition of the groups, despite a number accidental adherents attached purely by loyalty to the dynasty.

These different sections of the ruling class will under some circumstances (degree of strength of the opposed class, etc.) draw closer together and even merge their material interests and their ideological outlooks.

Two general points are important in this context: firstly, the conformity of the whole ideological superstructure with the economic base is a process, working through the survival of older historical forms of thought represented in the lives of certain classes; secondly, the individual ideologists have their own unique experiences and starting points in politics, but they make this experience in the matrix of conditions common to their class, with its characteristic emphasis within the ideology of the society.

(Marx, "The 18th Brumairé of Louis Bonar irte', 'Selected Works', Vol. II.

The individual will tend to regard the ideological expressions of his class interests as his own 'real' starting point, since that is in fact where he starts, but the material class interests themselves, and the impetus they give to a particular emphasis within the ideology of the society, create the ideological conditions within which the individual works at his ideas.

Marx gives the example of the petty bourgeoisie. It cannot break from the rule of the bourgeoisie or challenge any of its basic categories, but its class position leads it always to pose its own class interests as the general interests of society, of 'the people' . The content of its policies is :

• the transformation of societ: y in a democratic way, but a transformation within the bounds of the petty bourgeoisie. Only one must not form the notion that the petty bourgeoisie, on principle, wishes to enforce an egoistic class interest. Rather, it believes that the special conditions of its emancipation are the general conditions undér which modern society can alone be saved and the class struggle avoided. Just as little must one imagine that the democratic represéntatives are all shopkeepers or enthusiastic champions of shopkeepers.

According to their education and their individual position they may be separated from them as widely as heaven from earth. What makes them representatives of the petty bourgeoisie is the fact that in their minds they do not go beyond the limits which the latter do not go beyond in life, that they are consequently driven theoretically to the same tasks and solutions to which material interest and social position practiçally drive the latter. This is in general the relationship of the political and literary representatives of a class to the class that they represent.""

A sort of process of 'selection' is involved, rather than the direct 'production' by each class of its own ideological representatives.

(Here Marx issues his own corrective in advance against any temptation to apply mechanically his formulation in relation to the Orleanists and Legitimists, quoted earlier, and occurring only three pages before passages we have just cited at length.)

Such ideological representatives of the class must not be mistaken for the class itself, which is held together by its particular historical basis in property in the means of production. Marx brings this home in describing the phase following the defeat of the June 1848 insurrection.

(lIbid.

Now the bourgeoisie must consolidate its rule, first through raising its Republican' political representatives to the head of state, and then liquidating these same bourgeois Republicans. These politicians, with their organ the 'National', had formed the official opposition under Louis Philippe.

Their political programme was 'realized', in the sense that June 1848 brought them into office, but in a manner determined by the real play of class forces and not at all by their own idea of how they would attain political office. Thus their political illusions fitted them very well for the specific role required by the bourgeoisie after June 1848, but only because they were real victims of these illusions:

"The republican bourgeois section, which had long regarded itself as the legitimate heir of the July monarchy, thus found itself successful beyond its hopes; it attained power, however, not as it had dreamed under Louis Philippe, through a libéral revolt of the bourgeoisie against the throne, but through a rising of the proletariat against capital, a rising laid low with grape-shot. What it had pictured to itself as the most revolutionary happening turned out in reality to be the most counterrevolutionary. The fruit fell into its lap, but it fell from the tree of knowledge, not from the tree of life.

In this relation between a class and its political representatives we have a striking illustration of the relation between 'being and consciousness' which dominates the earlier writing of Marx.

The French bourgeoisie as a class is involved in the making of history through the totality of its relations with other classes (particularly the proletariat) and its internal relations; these again are part of development of world capitalism, including the completion of capitalism's progressive struggle against the remnants of feudal absolutism (as we saw in Marx's analysis of the foreign relations of the 1848 Republic and the consequences of the June insurrection's defeat).

The conscious representatives of the class, however, do not develop their ideas, programmes and policies on the basis of a direct and total translation of all these relationships.

Knowledge always represents only an approximation to reality, and in this case only through the specifically pollucal relationships which the parties take to be their lifesubstance; this in addition to the fact that ideological, nonscientific thinking always takes as its material the historically given and does not penetrate to the preconditions and processes which produced that 'given' and prepare its dissolution.

When rapid changes take place in the lite ot a class, as in the torrent of 1848, or in the undetected developments at the economic base of society, the political representatives of the class will tend to persist in the framework of ideas in which they have always worked. They are not the class itself, and are not immediately subject to all the changes aflecting the life of the class; on the contrary, they play a specific role, a political role, in the division of labour' within the class.

At times (June 1848) this very conviction of the self-contained charaoter of their own principles fits them for a dominant historical role, though, as we have seen, not in the way they expect. At other times (1849-1850) they pay the penalty of their ideas being tied in the past.

What was this republican section of the bourgeoisie?

(LIbid. 327-328.)

'Under the bourgeois monarchy of Louis Philippe it had formed the official Republican opposition and consequently a recognized, component part of the political world of the day. It had its representatives in the Chamber and a considerable sphere of influencé in the press. Its Paris organ, the "National", was considered just as respectable in its way as the "Journal des Débats".

Its character corresponded to this position under the constitutional monarchy. It was not a section of the bourgeoisie held together by great, common interests and marked off by specific conditions of production."'3 In combination with our earlier quotations from Marx on class and ideology (The Materialist Conception of History') these remarks must suffice. In general, Marx's writings on 1848 remain the finest exposition of this relationship.

What was in his polemic against Proudhon a theoretical explanation of the class source of petty-bourgeois ideology here becomes concrete in the history of the vacillating role of these middle strata in a revolution, covered over always with their tendency to earnestly express their own class interests in the guise of solutions for society as a whole. One of the prime conclusions drawn by Marx from the 1848 experience was the need for the proletariat to strive for its complete political independence from the petty bourgeoisie.

Only on that basis would individuals or sections from the petty bourgeoisie then attach themselves politically to the proletariat. Marx and Engels carried this fight into German Social-Democracy to the end of their lives.

1848 provided for Marx a living fulfilment of his characterization of the type of social and economic reform put forward by Proudhon as 'petty. bourgeois • Now the petty bourgeoisie moved to the acceptance of already outdated Utopian socialist schemes, as it sought for some way to express its specific complaint against capitalism:

'Capital hounds this class chiefly as its creditors, so it demands credit institutions;

capital crushes it by competition, so it demands associations supported by the state;

capital overwhelms it by concentration, so it demands progressive taxes, limitations on inheritance, taking over a large growth by the state, and other measures that forcibly stem the growth of capital.

Since it dreams of the peaceful achievement of its socialism—allowing, perhaps, for a second February lasting a brief day-naturally the coming historical process appears to it as the application of systems, which the thinkers of society, whether in companies or as individual inventors, devise or have devised. Thus they become the eclectics and adepts of the existing socialist systems, of doctrinaire socialism, which was the theoretical expression of the proletariat only so long as it had not yet developed further into a frée historical self-movement.

Experience at the same time ive the proletariat a sense of s own 'free historical selflovement', and 'the proletariat rallies more and more round revolutionary socialism, round communism, for which the bourgeoisie has itself found the name of Blanqui. This socialism is the declaration of the permanence of the revolution, the class dictatorship of the proletariat as the inevitable transit point to the abolition of class differFences generally etc."5 (lIbid. p. 326.) (Marx, 'The Class Struggles in France 1848-1850*, 'Selected Works II', pp. 288-289.) ("Ibid.).