We shall here examine what is given the name ‘law’ in the social formations that fall under the capitalist mode of production. It should be made clear in advance that we shall be making, for the moment, a purely descriptive analysis. We shall take up the same question in more theoretical form once we have acquired the means to do so (Chapter 11).
Law is a system of codified rules (consider the Civil Code, the Penal Code, Public Law, Commercial Law, and so on) which are applied, that is to say, both respected and circumvented, in day-to-day practice. To simplify our discussion, we shall focus on Private Law, contained in the Civil Code. Private Law is, moreover, the legal base from which the other sectors of law set out to systematize and harmonize their own notions and rules.
We can say, very schematically, the following.
Private law states, in systematic form, rules governing commodity exchange, that is, purchases and sales – based, in the last instance, on ‘property rights’. Those rights, in turn, are derived [s’explicite] from the following general legal principles: legal personality (civil personality, which defines individuals as legal persons endowed with defined legal capacities); the legal freedom to ‘use and abuse’ the goods one owns; and equality before the law (for all individuals endowed with a legal personality – in our present law, this means all human beings with the exception of a certain number of ‘rejects’, excluded from equality before the law).1
That said, what shall we say about law?
We should note three characteristics, on which, moreover, Marx and Engels (following Kant and, to some extent, Hegel) put the accent.
Law necessarily takes the form of a system which, by its nature, aspires to internal consistency and compehensiveness. We beg the reader’s pardon for introducing these two apparently technical concepts here. They are easy to understand.
Insofar as law is a system of rules that are applied – that is, both respected and circumvented – there has to be consistency among all the rules of the system, such that one cannot invoke one rule against another; if that were possible, the effect of the first rule would be cancelled by the effect of the second. That is why law tends to eliminate all possibility of internal contradiction, and why jurists engage in the extraordinary activity of systematization that has, from time immemorial, elicited the admiration of ordinary mortals. That is what makes jurists jurists, with a maniacal concern for rules and the cases to which they apply.
At the same time, however, law must be comprehensive [saturé]. In other words, it must represent a system of rules which, tendentially, cover every case that could possibly present itself in ‘reality’, so that one is not brought up short by something that is not juridically ‘covered’ and could allow non-juridical practices to make their way into the law itself, undermining the integrity of the system. Hence another ‘admirable’ aspect of the activity of jurists, who have from time immemorial striven to absorb the disparities of ‘customary law’ and the gaps and deviations of case law (application of the existing rules to ‘concrete’ cases that, often, go beyond them) in the law itself.
This activity of systematization is accordingly to be understood not only as elimination of the contradictions that can arise among the rules of existing law, but also, and above all, as elimination of the eventual contradictions that may arise between the rules already defined in the internal system of law and the paralegal limit-practices of case law, the essential role of which is to identify ‘cases’ that the law has not yet really integrated and systematized. In this regard, case law must obviously be brought into relation with law’s outside, the existence of which the history of law recognizes in the form of what is known as ‘customary’ as opposed to written legislation (every system of legal rules gives rise to a written codification). Let us, however, leave this point aside; it interests us only insofar as it indicates, from the standpoint of the security of the law itself, the existence of a more or less threatening outside of the law.
Law is necessarily formal, in that it bears not on the content of what is exchanged between legal persons in of purchase and contracts of purchase and sale, but on the form of these contracts regulating exchange, a form defined by the (formal) acts of legal persons who are formally free and equal before the law. It is to the extent that law is formal that it can be systematized as tendentially non-contradictory and comprehensive. Law’s formalism and its correlative systematicity constitute its formal universality: the law applies to – and may be invoked by – every person legally defined and recognized as a legal person.
The formalism of law is usually regarded as, and criticized for being, ‘formalistic’: thus it is judged and criticized from a moral standpoint. A moral standpoint is a moral standpoint: it produces approval or condemnation. But law is indifferent to whether it is approved or condemned: law exists and functions, and can only exist and function, formally.
The obvious effect of law’s formalism is to bracket, in law itself, the different contents to which the form of law is applied. But it by no means makes these contents disappear by enchantment. Quite the contrary: the formalism of law makes sense only to the extent that it is applied to defined contents that are necessarily absent from law itself. These contents are the relations of production and their effects.2
Hence we can begin to see that:
1) Law only exists as a function of the existing relations of production.
2) Law has the form of law, that is, formal systematicity, only on condition that the relations of production as a function of which it exists are completely absent from law itself.
This singular situation of law, which exists only as a function of a content from which it abstracts completely (the relations of production), explains the classical Marxist formula: law ‘expresses’ the relations of production while making no mention at all, in the system of its rules, of those relations of production. On the contrary, it makes them disappear.
The distinction between the relations of production on the one hand and law on the other is fundamental in Marxist theory. Confusing them gives rise not only to very serious theoretical mistakes, but also to the very serious political errors that follow from those theoretical mistakes.3
It is in fact imperative that we make this distinction not only in order to analyze what happens in the capitalist mode of production, but also in order to anticipate what will happen in the socialist mode of production.
It is perfectly obvious, to take just this one example, that it is wrong to define the socialist mode of production in terms of collective or socialist ownership of the means of production. It is wrong to define the socialist revolution as the ‘transition’ from one kind of ownership to another: from ownership of the means of production by individuals or monopolistic groups (reduced to a ‘handful’)4 to ownership of the same means of production by the collectivity … that is, the state on the one hand and cooperatives on the other.
For to talk about collective ownership of the means of production is to talk about, not socialist relations of production, but, let us say, socialist law, and to mistake (so-called) socialist law for socialist relations of production. If we stick to this purely legal definition of the socialist mode of production, we risk very serious disillusions. Experience is there to prove it.
We know that Marx always defined the relations of production constitutive of the socialist mode of production not in terms of collective (socialist) ownership of the means of production, but in terms of their collective or common appropriation by freely ‘associated’ men and women. Thus he refused to define in terms of law that which cannot be defined in terms of law, even if it is called socialist law. This refusal goes very far in Marx, for in his view all law, since it is in the last instance the law of commodity relations, is marked by this by this indelibly bourgeois defect: thus all law is by essence, in the last instance, inegalitarian and bourgeois. See on this question the admirable, but too brief, comments to be found in the ‘Critique of the Gotha Programme’.5
What, then, are we to understand by collective, common appropriation of the means of production by freely ‘associated’ ‘men and women’? Clearly, while the problem is posed by this programmatic formula, which eschews all reference to law and all legal domination, the solution is not provided. The debates that this problem has occasioned and continues to occasion in the history of the Marxist workers’ movement are well known (and far from over). Some do not go beyond state and cooperative ownership of the means of production; socialism then becomes a matter of economic planning. They claim that good socialist law and good planning realize, spontaneously and concretely, the ‘appropriation’ of the means of production of which Marx spoke. Others wish to move immediately to direct appropriation by the agents of production by establishing ‘self-management’, which, for them, is this appropriation. Slogans such as ‘workers’ power’ or ‘economic democracy’6 issue or have issued from this tendency. Things are not simple.
They are not simple because we must not confuse the socialist relations of production enabling common appropriation of the means of production, and, later, communist relations of production, with the relations to be established in the phase of the transition to socialism. For if socialism must not be confused with communism, the phase of the transition to socialism (of the construction of socialism) must a fortiori not be mistaken for socialism.
In the transitional phase in question, the phase of the dictatorship of the proletariat, one does not yet have to do, as Lenin repeated a thousand times, with socialist relations of production, but with transitional relations in which so-called socialist law remains, by its form, inegalitarian and therefore bourgeois law, and in which state ownership and cooperative ownership are merely transitional forms that the dictatorship of the proletariat must utilize as such in order to prepare in them, patiently, tenaciously, over a long period, the constitution of the future socialist relations of production. Lenin repeated this incessantly, against all those who, ignoring the need to proceed step by step and, to boot, proposing petty-bourgeois solutions already quite classic in utopian socialism, wanted to establish ‘workers’ power’, ‘self-management’ and ‘economic democracy’ or ‘the democracy of production’.7
If, however, we can agree to leave the problems of the transitional phase of the dictatorship of the proletariat to that phase (the first of them consists in knowing whether or not one has gone beyond the phase of the dictatorship of the proletariat …)8 and not confuse them with the problems of already constructed socialism, we can pose the question of the nature of collective, socialist, appropriation of the means of production in its own right. We can ask, to begin with, what Marx meant by this programmatic term.
Marx obviously meant something like the withering away of law, a correlative of the withering away of the state. The withering away of law can only mean the withering away of commodity exchange, exchanges of goods in the form of commodities (naturally including, first and foremost, the commodity that labour-power becomes in capitalist commodity relations) and their replacement by non-commodity exchange. We are thus inevitably led to the question as to how such non-commodity exchange is to be realized. The classic response runs: through socialist planning. But what is socialist planning?
It is plain that this is a burning question today, but it is one that bears the terrible mark of the very particular form that Stalin’s politics impressed on Soviet planning from the 1930s on. We shall call it state [étatique] planning rather than ‘bureaucratic’ planning (since the bureaucracy effect is a secondary effect of a more general politics).
All those trying, in the USSR, Czechoslovakia, Hungary and other countries, to make planning more ‘flexible’ by introducing ‘liberal’ measures are, even today, thrashing about within the limits established by this very particular form. The effect of such measures is to acknowledge and extend commodity relations at the very heart of these countries’ economies.
Likewise posed within the limits established by this very particular form are the ‘theoretical’ problems over which theorists in these countries are agonizing and arguing, and also proposing methods for resolving key questions: for example, the question of how ‘prices’ should be determined.9 The labour theory of value, placed at the heart of these ‘theoretical’ questions, as proper Marxist doctrine requires, is, if I may say so, put to a hard test in these debates!
At the limit, an appeal is made to the double myth of automation and electronics, which are together supposed to make it possible, thanks to a hyper-centralization facilitated by gigantic computers, to ‘resolve’ all these problems by magic mathematical planning,10 with a little ‘help’ (which just happens to be indispensable) from the ‘profitability criterion’ in the enterprises … I doubt that this technocratic solution, tempered with a dose of economic liberalism (which is uncontrollable in the long run) and the requisite sort of right-thinking ‘humanist’ ideology (the necessary counter-point), will provide us with the kind of socialist planning capable of materializing relations of appropriation of the means of production by ‘freely associated men and women’.
We would do well to take a big step back from the form of planning imposed by Stalin’s politics, which still commands these ‘problems’, in order to put things into historical, political and theoretical perspective and re-examine them from a more correct point of view. That, at any rate, is my personal opinion; I offer it as such. But this step back and its effects presuppose political and theoretical conditions which, if the present course of events is any indication, are not likely to prevail any time soon and will not come about without serious transformations that it will be painful to carry out. For very serious questions lurk behind these problems, even in the socialist countries: questions of class and the class struggle, a circumstance that should not surprise Marxists.
However that may be, it is clear that by way of the various experiments in progress – the Yugoslav experiment, from which we may already draw the certain conclusion that it is only a stage in a transition-regression towards capitalism; Soviet planning, marked by Stalin’s conception; Chinese planning (the form and spirit of which are considerably different) – in these various experiments, I say, it is well and truly a question of a search for unprecedented forms in which these much discussed relations of socialist production may one day exist as relations of real appropriation. It is also clear that the search for such forms is not just a theoretical question, even if theory has a very important part to play in it (the theory of Marx and Lenin, of course), but an eminently political question that can be settled only after the conclusion of political struggles (at bottom, economic, political and ideological class struggles) of which we are now experiencing just the beginnings.
Those are some of the reasons for which the Marxist distinction between the relations of production and legal relations is of the first importance.
Law is necessarily repressive. Kant sees and states this very clearly in his Metaphysics of Morals (a work that has very little of the metaphysical about it, its title notwithstanding). In this regard, the Hegelian conception of Law, with its delirious idealism, trails far behind Kant’s.
Law is repressive in that it could not exist in the absence of a corresponding system of sanctions. In other words, there can be no civil code without a penal code, which is the realization of the former at the level of the law itself. This is easy to grasp: a legal contract can exist only on condition that it is applied; in other words, on condition that the law is respected or circumvented. Hence there must be a law of the application (or non-application) of law, that is, of the observance (or non-observance) of the rules of the legal contract.
In a contract, two legal persons promise to make certain defined exchanges. At the same time, they promise to submit to sanctions if they fail to observe the terms of the contract.11
By way of the essential legal complement to law comprised by the system of legal rules for the sanction of (non)observance of the terms of a contract, by way of the legal complement of the civil code comprised by the penal code, law recognizes, internally, that it could not ‘exist’, that is, be practiced by legal persons, without rules of repressive constraint.
This is what Kant very clearly sees in his Metaphysics ‘of law’: law entails constraint. Naturally, however, he sees it from the standpoint of morality, hence as a difference between law (a formal, non-contradictory-comprehensive repressive system) and morality (a formal, non-ontradictory-comprehensive system that includes an obligation – Duty – which is without sanction and thus without repression). No one will be surprised to learn that our viewpoint on law is not Kant’s (the viewpoint of its difference from morality), but an altogether different viewpoint (that of its difference from the relations of production).
Things are now simple. Constraint implies sanction; sanction implies repression, and therefore, necessarily, an apparatus of repression. This apparatus exists in the Repressive State Apparatus in the narrow sense. It is called courts, fines, prisons, and the various detachments [corps] of the police. It is by virtue of this that law is inseparably bound up with the state [fait corps avec l’Etat].
At the same time, however, it is clear that the practice of law is not exclusively based on repression in actu. Most of the time, repression is, as the expression goes, ‘preventive’. It intervenes in legal-state forms in a very small number of cases, over against the infinite number of contracts that are respected without the intervention in propria persona of the repressive apparatus or the initiation of a repressive process. In the vast majority of cases, things go without a hitch: the terms of the contract are observed.
We must, however, pay close attention here.
Common sense (that Almanac Vernot12 of public asininities) will burst out laughing, with its coarse laugh: it is ‘fear of the gendarme’ which makes the parties to a contract respect the promises they make in the articles of a contract! For, as everyone ‘knows’, fear of the gendarme is the ‘beginning of wisdom’.
To which ‘decent people’13 will respond, to all appearances with good reason, that if the gendarme is plainly on the horizon of legal obligations, he is by no means present on the horizon of the consciousness/conscience of the contracting parties. Better; he is absent in person.
The ‘decent people’ are right. Indeed, they are always right; but one must understand the reasons for which they are right. In the present case, we need only listen to what they say: ‘If we observe the terms of the contract we sign, it is not – God forbid! – out of fear of the gendarme, but “out of simple decency”.’
There do in fact exist honest people who sign contracts, people who do not at all need the fear of the gendarme to be honest. They are honest for reasons of simple ‘professional conscience’ or simple ‘moral conscience’, and they sometimes derive a certain pride from this, when they do not derive (more or less discreetly) commercial advantages from it, for everyone in the national or international market ‘knows’ that such-and-such a ‘Company’ is perfectly ‘law-abiding’ and punctual, or even that such-and-such a people is (Germans, Japanese, and so on), whereas other companies or peoples do not know how (properly) ‘to behave in business matters’, that is, how to ‘honour their promises’ (Honour!).
We had better take the ‘decent people’ at their word. For, in spite of all the sarcastic remarks of a latent Poujadism and the petty-bourgeois bitterness that does not imagine that it (the petty bourgeoisie) could ever have gone to ruin if it had not been swindled, the decent people are fundamentally in the right, for good reason. Let us call that right reason by its name.
Since, a moment ago, we gave the repressive apparatus (part of the state apparatus) required by bourgeois law its name, let us give its name to this right reason as well. It is legal ideology, and also moral ideology, which serves legal ideology as a ‘supplement’.
The vast majority of legal persons observe the terms of the contracts they sign, and they do indeed do so without the intervention of, and even without preventive threats from, the specialized repressive state apparatus. They do so because they are ‘steeped’ in ‘the decency’ of ‘legal ideology’, which inscribes itself in their behaviour of respect for law and, in the proper sense, enables law to ‘function’ – enables, that is, legal practice to ‘go all by itself’, without the help of repression or threats.
But we must pay close attention here, too.
Legal ideology is obviously required by the practice of law, and therefore by law (law that is not practiced is not law at all), but it is not the same thing as law.
Law says (writes in its Codes), for example: every individual (except for the rejects comprising the exceptions we mentioned earlier) is legally free (to sign contracts or not, to use and abuse his or her property, and so on). This is a legal definition of freedom, that is, a definition of freedom by law, by the system of its rules – a perfectly precise definition of freedom that holds only within the limits of law and has nothing to do with moral or philosophical freedom, or even, as we shall see, with the freedom of legal ideology.
Law says, for example: all individuals (except for the rejects, and so on) are legally equal before every contractual act and its consequences (especially its penal consequences). This is a legal definition of equality, that is, a definition of equality by law, by the system of its rules – a perfectly precise definition of equality that holds only within the limits of law and has nothing to do with moral, political or metaphysical equality, or even, as we shall see, with the equality of legal ideology.
Law says, for example, that we must respect the obligations we have signed. This is a legal definition of obligation, that is, a definition of obligation by law, by the system of its penal rules – a perfectly precise definition of obligation that holds only within the limits of law and has nothing to do with moral obligation or metaphysical obligation, or even, as we shall see, with the obligation of legal ideology.
If we wish to talk about legal ideology with a modicum of respect for the facts and with some rigour in our terminology, we must say that, while it does indeed take up the notions of freedom, equality and obligation, it inscribes them, outside the law and thus outside the system of the rules of law and their limits, in an ideological discourse that is structured by completely different notions.
To sum up the essence of these basic notions of legal ideology, we must pay attention to the following ‘little difference’.
Law says: individuals are legal persons, legally free, equal and bound to honour their obligations as legal persons. In other words, law does not leave the domain of law: it brings everything back to law, ‘honestly’. It should not be reproached for this: it honestly plies its ‘trade’ as law.
Legal ideology, for its part, utters a discourse that is apparently similar, but in fact altogether different. It says: men are free and equal by nature. Thus, in legal ideology, it is ‘nature’, not law, which ‘founds’ the freedom and equality of ‘men’ (not of legal persons). That is a little different …
There remains, obviously, obligation. Legal ideology does not say that men are bound to honour their obligations by ‘nature’. It needs a little supplement on this point – very precisely, a little moral supplement. This means that legal ideology can stand upright only if it leans on the moral ideology of ‘Conscience’ and ‘Duty’ for support.
The reader will have understood what we wanted to show. Law is a formal, systematized, non-contradictory, (tendentially) comprehensive system that cannot exist all by itself.
On the one hand, it rests on part of the state repressive apparatus for support. On the other hand, it rests on legal ideology and a little supplement of moral ideology for support.
On the horizon of every legal practice there is, doubtless, a gendarme who keeps an eye on things and intervenes (part of the state apparatus) when he must. Most of the time, however, he does not intervene and is even completely absent from the horizon of legal practice.
What, then, is present, not on the horizon of this space, but in this space itself? Legal ideology plus the little supplement of moral ideology. It is quite as if legal and moral ideology played the role of the absent gendarme and were his ‘representative’ in the space of the legal practice of contracts.
Someone who is absent is someone who is absent. The representative of the one who is absent is not the one who is absent, but his representative. (Our diplomats know well – and thank God! for they would otherwise be crushed under the weight of France – that, unlike De Gaulle, they are not ‘France!’, but only its ‘representatives’. This allows them to have a little life of their own, a family, holidays and prospects, career prospects included.)
Legal-moral ideology thus stands in for the gendarme; but insofar as it stands in for the gendarme, it is not the gendarme.
This is not nitpicking or an idle distinction. This distinction is manifest in fact, very precisely, in the circumstance that the gendarme is a repressive force of physical intervention. He is accredited after taking an oath empowering him to arrest a delinquent and bring her (handcuffed, if necessary) before the proper legal authority [à qui de droit] who will require that she give an account of herself, with detention, jail, a trial and condemnations, at the end of the process. The gendarme is the violence of the state cloaked by an inoffensive (or not so inoffensive) uniform; operettas are composed about him precisely so as to ‘forget’ that he exists only by violence. We shall say that, in the guise of the gendarme, legal practice functions ‘on the violence’ (the regulated violence) of the state apparatus.
However, as a general rule, in the vast majority of cases, there is no need for state violence to intervene. For legal practice to ‘function’, legal-moral ideology is sufficient, and things go ‘all by themselves’, since legal persons are steeped in the glaringly obvious ‘self-evident truths’ that men are free and equal by nature, and ‘must’ respect their promises by virtue of simple legal-moral ‘conscience’ (baptized ‘professional conscience’ to mask its ideological grounds). We shall therefore say that the practice of law ‘functions’ in the vast majority of cases ‘on legal-moral ideology’.
Of course, the consequence of the way law thus ‘functions’ (on state ‘violence’ and, at the same time, on non-violent ‘ideology’) are incalculable, as far as both the relations of production and the forms of existence of the relations of production in the division and organization of labour are concerned. We shall obviously have to come back to this. But for the moment we shall leave this crucial question in suspense in order to focus our attention on the following remark.
Our analysis of the nature and ‘functioning’ of law has brought us face to face with two realities (although we have made no special effort to seek them out) in whose absence the existence and functioning of law are literally unintelligible. These ‘realities’ are the state on the one hand and ideology on the other. It is time to discuss them.
1 Because of pathologies – mentally ill individuals who have been involuntarily detained; as a penal measure; or in accordance with non-statutory rules applying to children, minors, foreigners, women (to a certain extent), and so on.
2 The law recognizes that all people, as equal legal subjects, have a right to own property. No article of the law code, however, recognizes the fact that certain subjects (the capitalists) own the means of production, while others (the proletarians) have no means of production at all. This element (the relations of production) is accordingly absent from the law which, at the same time, guarantees it. See Chapter 11.
3 [EN: The manuscript includes the following crossed out passage: ‘For example, a formula seeking to define socialism as founded on “collective ownership” (as opposed to individual – capitalist – ownership) of the means of production remains caught up in legal relations (collective ownership) in that it maintains the basic principle of bourgeois law: legal personality (collective legal personality – the state – or collectives such as the kolkhozes – instead of individual legal personality).]
‘This definition can be of some rough use when, starting from bourgeois law, we try to anticipate what will “happen” in the socialist mode of production. However, precisely because it confounds the relations of production with (bourgeois) legal relations, it completely misses its object: socialist relations of production.
‘It is easy to understand the kind of theoretical and practical aberrations such a formulation can induce among those who are building socialism, since if the capitalist relations of production themselves can under no circumstances be confused with bourgeois law, it is a fortiori scandalous to define socialist relations of production not only in terms of law, but, to boot, in terms of bourgeois law.
‘One should beware of a potential trap for the imagination of readers who may be tempted to say: granted, we must abandon the standpoint of bourgeois law and adopt that of socialist law. This comes down to repeating the same mistake in different terms: for if law must necessarily subsist in the period of transition from capitalism to socialism, the law that subsists, even if it is called “socialist” because legal persons are “collective”, is still bourgeois law, for law as such is the law of commodity relations and thus bourgeois. The socialist mode of production will abolish all law. Marx understood this perfectly. He states it in his own terms in a passage of his “Critique of the Gotha Programme” that is often quoted, but rarely understood.’
4 [TN: As in many other passages of ‘The Reproduction of the Relations of Production’ and ‘Note on the ISAs’, Althusser is alluding to ideas defended by the French Communist Party (PCF) or leading PCF theorists. The immediate target here is the theory of ‘state monopoly capitalism’.]
5 [TN: As a parenthetical phrase in the manuscript shows, Althusser intended to include passages from the ‘Critique’ and related in an appendix.]
6 The slogan ‘economic democracy’ is social-democratic. From the standpoint of Marxist theory, it is a piece of nonsense. As Lenin reminds us, democracy is a political concept that concerns politics – and has nothing to do with the economy.
7 Here [in a planned appendix, see n. 5 above], Lenin, Oeuvres, vol. 32, p. 19 [Moscow, 1962].
8 Khrushchev very imprudently declared that the dictatorship of the proletariat had been transcended in the USSR and that the USSR was on the way to constructing communism …
9 On these debates and the dead-end to which they lead, see Charles Bettelheim [‘Les problèmes des prix dans les pays socialistes d’Europe’], La Pensée, [no. 133, June 1967, and no. 134, August 1967].
10 To get to the bottom of the question involved here, beyond all the theoretical-technical discussions of the means of ensuring planning, it seems to me necessary to make the following observation. Basically, people think, or rather hope, that the essential aim of planning is to realize, to constitute, in short, to create socialist relations of production, the celebrated relations of real appropriation. In fact, to the extent that planning tends to be assigned sole responsibility, or the main responsibility, for solving this gigantic problem, its real function is misunderstood, which is less to create socialist relations of production than to organize, in the most ‘rational’ way possible, the existing productive forces, and, essentially, the productive forces alone. Here we once again encounter a politics I discuss in the Appendix: that of the primacy of the productive forces over the relations of production. This politics is false in its very principle and at odds with Lenin’s famous slogan: ‘Socialism is the Soviets plus electrification’. With this pithy phrase, Lenin states an accurate, fundamental thesis. Neglecting it always has fatal consequences. Lenin affirms, with this phrase, the primacy of the Soviets over electrification, and, thereby, the political primacy of the problem of the relations of production over the productive forces. I say the political primacy. For the Soviets are the masses’ political organizations, and socialist relations of production will not be established as a side effect of the planning of the productive forces (here symbolized by electrification), but, rather, by the political intervention of the masses (here, the Soviets). Planning (the primary objective of which is to organize the productive forces) is one means of political intervention and of the political line that must constitute or ‘invent’ (the masses ‘invented’ the Soviets in 1905, after all) the new socialist relations of production. Planning, its conception and methods included (I say nothing about its objectives: that is self-evident), is thus not the solution, but a means subordinate to a political line based on the primacy of the relations of production that the (political) dictatorship of the proletariat has to put in place. This is a long and exacting business, the business of the class struggle. At any event, the question has to be posed in the right terms and, against the tendency towards economism-humanism, politics has to be put in command, so that the primacy of the relations of production is ensured in actual fact.
11 Unless, obviously, they can find (legal) means of circumventing them, either by discovering (thanks to legal experts who are paid for the purpose) a legal rule that ‘covers’ their operation, or by discovering (the same way) an absence of legal rules, a loophole in the law that puts them beyond the reach of any appeal whatever to law (either law in the proper sense or case law).
12 [TN: A conservative, folksy almanac with a mass readership, launched in 1886.]
13 [TN: The contrast is between honnêtes gens (‘decent people’; honnête can also mean ‘honest’) and gendarmes, which was earlier written gens d’armes (‘people of arms’) and meant ‘knights’.]