YET THE BULKY manuscript of The German Ideology, abandoned to the “gnawing criticism of mice,” would like to prove to itself and us that things are very simple and that history has only one principle. Whoever wants to start off from earth, and not from the heaven of Ideas, must note this simple and constraining truth. One first must live in order “to make history”: “But life involves before everything else eating and drinking, housing, clothing and various other things. The first historical act is thus the production of the means to satisfy these needs, the production of material life itself. And indeed this is an historical act, a fundamental condition of all history, which today, as thousands of years ago, must daily and hourly be fulfilled merely in order to sustain human life.”1
“Daily and hourly”: a curious echo of the Platonic rule concerning the absence of time whose function is no longer to attach men of iron to their place but to recall this point to knights and philosophers who think themselves kings. In effect, the commandment of “nothing else” shifts its place as the worker’s rule of life becomes the golden rule, the very rationality of discourse. The impossibility of “anything else” becomes the general law of history that resounds obsessively through the rhetoric of The German Ideology or the Manifesto of the Communist Party. We know “only one science,” the science of history. History is “nothing but” the succession of generations, each exploiting the materials transmitted to it by the preceding generation. The history of every society down to our own day “has been merely” the history of class struggle. The ruling ideas are “nothing more than” the ideal expression of the dominant material relations. Modern government “is but a committee” managing the common affairs of the whole bourgeois class. Ideologues go “no further” in their thinking than the petty bourgeoisie in its practice. Communism is “only” the real movement that abolishes the present state of things. And these proletarians who “have nothing to lose but their chains” will simply be transforming their own condition into a general social condition when they eliminate property.
“Only,” “merely,” “nothing but,” “no further,” “simply”: these adverbs and similar phrases, if they are not to be the lonely agents of the monotonous labor of demystification, must form the other side of the positive principle that unifies the historical process, production.
This is where the grand affair of the reversal of heaven and earth must lie. Would it be worth the trouble, otherwise, to make such a commotion in proclaiming the simple discovery that human beings, in order to live, must eat, drink, have clothes and housing and do a few other things, which are not listed here in any more detail than in book II of the Republic? For the inflexible law of trivial necessity suffices to make the point. The novelty of the reversal cannot consist in the reminder of these evident facts, any more than in the reversed direction traveled on the road between heaven and earth. It lies wholly in the insistence on a concept that is posited as the essence of all “earthly” or “heavenly” activity, production. Humans differentiate themselves from animals “as soon as they begin to produce their means of subsistence.” “By producing their means of subsistence, human beings are indirectly producing their actual material life.” People “are the producers of their representations, their ideas.” They also alter, in “developing their material production and their material intercourse, along with this their real existence, their thinking and the products of their thinking.” The satisfaction of needs that is the “production of material life” is necessarily prolonged in the “production (Erzeugung) of new needs” and in the form of production known as procreation. All these productions are necessarily bound up with a mode of cooperation that is also a “productive force” and that must be studied before we arrive at consciousness, which is “from the very beginning a social product, and remains so as long as men exist.”2
Thus the reversal of heaven and earth does not lie simply in the inversion of the journey’s direction but in the persistence of the point of departure. There is no leap from the state fit only for pigs to civilized society, or from the seeding of soil to the formation of experts [savants]. The order of cities and the order of discourse are each as much products as the footwear of the shoemaker. Production is the essence of every activity, the measure of labor, war, and thinking, and it knows only transformations. From the worker’s labor to the development of the productive forces, from the productive forces to the interests of a ruling class, from ruling interests to ruling ideas, and from ruling ideas to the rule of ideas: one can always reconstruct the chain which guarantees that in the gold of thinking there will never be anything but a certain transformation of the iron of production. However, this transformation also apparently works to the advantage of the man of iron. The philosopher is a producer like everyone else, but his production is not like the others. It is the limit of a process in which production is transformed into its own imitation. Its gold is nothing more than a demonetized money, a vain reflection of the exchangeable metal of productive activity.
Now the man in the cave would be Plato’s chief imitator, reduced to the rank of the most backward of producers. For in the philosopher’s dereliction there is, apparently, something more to consider than the simple mechanism of inverting objects in the camera obscura of ideology. According to Marx, the German philosopher resembles the French peasant in his love for grottoes. The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte tells us, too, of the sixteen million French peasants who live in troglodyte dwellings. Marx’s correspondence repeats the tale of a visit that Bruno Bauer paid to him before returning to Germany to lead the life, far from the center of London, of a dirt farmer in the “pigsty” inhabited by his brother Edgar. The abode par excellence of the philosopher in chains is Berlin, since the city is surrounded by fields and has no outlet to the sea of industrial exchange. A wooden barrier (stone undoubtedly would be too much of a luxury for our troglodyte) detains him at a gate—not any gate but the one leading off to Hamburg, the industrial and commercial center where Marx will have Capital published. In that cave, the “pure thought” of the German philosopher boils down to its exact opposite, the pure drive of animality:
In the case of a parochial Berlin schoolmaster or author, however, whose activity is restricted to arduous work on the one hand and the pleasure of thought on the other, whose world extends between [the Berlin suburbs] Moabit and Köpenich and ends as if stopped by a crude wooden barrier behind the Hamburg Gate, whose relations to this world are reduced to a minimum by his pitiful position in life, it is certainly inevitable that his thought becomes just as abstract as he himself and his life. … In the case of such an individual the few remaining desires, which arise not so much from intercourse with the world as from the constitution of the human body, express themselves only through repercussion, i.e., they assume in their narrow development the same one-sided and crude character as does his thought, they appear only at long intervals, stimulated by the excessive development of the predominant desire (fortified by immediate physical causes such as, for example, [stomach] spasms) … 3
We find here the philosopher-slave enchained, his body and soul injured by the mechanics of his craft and the baseness of his condition. To Plato’s bald smith who washed himself at the public bath, dressed up as a bridegroom, and went off to court the noble orphan girl, there now corresponds the forlorn philosophy of “a widow of faded looks who puts on makeup and adorns her withered body now reduced to the most repugnant abstraction, and who heads out all over Germany in search of a suitor.” And to the “critical critic,” in whose eyes “the worker creates nothing” because his activity is enclosed in the singularity of need and its satisfaction, the young champion of materialism and the proletariat returns the compliment: “Critical criticism creates nothing, the worker creates everything; and so much so that even his intellectual creations put the whole of Criticism to shame.”4
But putting criticism to shame is not, perhaps, the heart of the matter. If the king has taken the place of the slave, we still need to know which attributes the slave received from royal power. And it is here that things become confused, due perhaps to a certain excess of “clarity.” For as soon as “any philosophical problem is resolved … quite simply into an empirical fact,” it is clear that “a self-sufficient philosophy [die selbständigige Philosophie] loses its medium of existence.”5 So there is no longer a philosophical order from which the shoemaker could have seen himself excluded, but neither is there one to which he could have had access. A place is no longer reserved for science, but perhaps science no longer has an assignable place in a universe where all are fabricators and imitators, where the abode of truth is identical to the abode of doxa. The absence of time to do anything else than his work may have become the absence of place to produce anything else than the illusion of his craft.
So now it is simply a matter of conceiving things “as they actually are, i.e., as they act, produce materially.” But the question is knowing who can devote himself to the “empirical observation” of this history. If everything is production and if people are producers of their ideas at the same time as their material life, it may be pointless to assure us that the phantasmagorias of the human brain are the simple results of the “empirically verifiable” process of material life. The human beings who “perceive” the process are also the ones who “appear to themselves” in the phantasmagoria produced by this process. In other words, there is no German ideology. Bauer and Stirner must see “things as they are.” Unfortunately, “you cannot have any experience of these things across the Rhine.” They misread history but the fact is that in Germany “history has stopped happening.”6 If there are only phantoms, then the philosopher of phantoms is a good observer. To see something different or to see the same thing differently, one has to be elsewhere, one has to examine the hubbub of the German scene “from a vantage point outside Germany.” Even if that means discovering in Paris that the reality of the class struggle is also the reality of political illusion, or discovering in London that the reality of modern industry is also the reality of economic illusion. While it is true that The German Ideology was written in Brussels, there is, apparently, less illusion there, but perhaps less to see as well.
Ideology, in other words, simply may be the fact that each does “his own business” in a universe where fabrication and imitation, truth and doxa, exchange their powers. Seeing, not seeing, and seeing upside down become here equivalent terms that also render equivalent the phantasmagoria of the imitator and the clairvoyance of the fabricator. So Proudhon “sees things upside down, if he sees them at all.”7 But this is also because he sees what is, not what will be. He sees in the machine the liberation it is not (recomposed labor) because he does not see what will be: the complete individual who will be born, instead, out of decomposed labor and the total loss of the worker’s status. But this faulty view of the ideologue is nothing but the short view that is the worker’s own virtue, the consecration of craft idiocy.
The ideologue is not a person of leisure, the heavenly dreamer who falls into a well while looking up at the stars. He is someone who toils, a drudge who—like Proudhon, the modern Hippias: typographer, riverboat clerk, philologist, economist, and philosopher—tries painfully to raise scaffolding between the earth of work and the heaven of science. This backward fellow truly does not see that we are no longer living in the days of Thales, that truth no longer dwells in heaven. It is here on earth where it is only a matter of observing, but where no one sees.
For if “seeing” is not the production of illusion added by each category of producers to the production of “one’s own business,” then it has become an unassignable activity in a world where, moreover, the task is not to “contemplate” but to “change” things. Like Proudhon, the drudge will never get beyond the second level of the scaffold. He will always fall off the side. He will fabricate where he should see, and contemplate where he should change.
So the vice of the ideologue may be merely the worker’s virtue. His phantasmagoria reveals in magnified form the way in which all know-how [savoir-faire] forges a vision of the world. Any opposition between the “intellectual creations” of the worker and the wild imaginings of the philosopher in chains is completely illusory. Industry may well be “the open book of man’s essential powers,”8 but the letters that compose it cannot read themselves. All the nobility of humanity may shine on the brows of Parisian workers who meet for study, but the commodity itself presents a more obtuse face. It does not have written on it that it is the “sign of the division of labor that marks it as the property of capital” except in the form of hieroglyphics that cannot be read by workers who wear on their brows the sign of a people both chosen and condemned.9 The “intellectual creations” of tailor Weitling—he is the person in question—can always put criticism to “shame.” But that is all they can do: prove to the bourgeoisie that workers can do as well as, or better than, the professional ideologues. The proof is given only too well when it is addressed to workers. Taught by Weitling to the shoemakers and tailors of the League of the Just, repeated by some artisan suffering from intellectualism and then memorized by his proselytes, Weitling’s “creations” reveal themselves for what they are: fabrications produced and reproduced in the manner of petty bourgeois ideologues which, in turn, are no different from the needlework of the shoemakers and tailors who learn them by heart. In short, Beckmesser and Hans Sachs are one and the same character. Ideology is just another name for work.
So the chaining of the ideologue is also that of the worker. To escape from such constraint, there must emerge from the productive universe a philosopher who is no longer a philosopher and a worker who is no longer a worker: a scientist [savant] and a proletarian. To German poverty is hence opposed a view from exile that is its non-place.10 To the schoolmaster of the cave in Berlin is opposed his former fellow student, the scientist no longer narrowly confined to any place in the division of labor.
What this science lacks, however, is the explanation of its own course. If it keeps on accumulating “empirically verifiable” items of evidence, it is because it is unable to answer this question: what makes it possible for science to tear the tissue of the production of material life as well as of its imitations? The Communist Manifesto responds with an extravagant geology: when the class struggle approaches its crucial moment, the process effecting the decomposition of the old society detaches and drops into the militant proletariat “a small fraction of the ruling class … specifically, the portion of the bourgeois ideologists, who have raised themselves to the level of comprehending theoretically the historical movement as a whole.”11
This confusion of precipice and summit makes it clear enough that science is an inexplicable phenomenon. Ideology is explained, even overexplained. It is the fabrication of imitations, the imitation of fabrications, the banality of factory reality as social order. Science itself is an accident, an improbable throw of the dice in the orderly play of fabrications and imitations. It is the unlikely non-place of all places: the power to see not simply “truth” behind appearance but death in life and nonbeing in being. The power of dissolution. Doctor Marx does not write books of philosophy, history, politics, or political economy; he writes only books of criticism.
Only one text in all of Marx’s works proposes the theory concerning this power: “A Contribution to the Critique of Hegel’s Philosophy of Right: Introduction,” published in 1844 in the Deutschfranzösiche Jahrbücher. This paradoxical theory tells us that it is precisely the backwardness of Germany that makes solvent-criticism possible with its practical powers of dissolution. Prevented from living modern history in reality, Germany has had to live it in thought. Hegel fashioned the theory of the modern political state, a state that actually exists only in England or France. Hence the critique of his theory is already the critique of the quintessence of the modern world, the necessary anticipation of the human world to come. In short, German backwardness establishes philosophy as the absolute non-place of the old feudal world and the new bourgeois world. And the same backwardness that prevents any specific class from carrying out its own political revolution in the name of others also draws in outline the future subject of the human revolution, that is, the proletariat, which is the pure dissolution of classes, the pure identity of being and nonbeing.
The curious geology of the Manifesto is now explicable: it is the philosophical and political paradox of criticism planed and sanded by The German Ideology. The historical and materialist law of the “nothing else” forbids German poverty from producing anything other than a philosophy of poverty. But the emergence of revolutionary science has no other explanation to offer. Marx cannot change the interpretation of criticism; he can only erase it. As a consequence science remains based upon its unassignable difference, though now it runs the opposite risk of being nothing more than the science of things “as they really are,” the positive science of philistinism. It is instructive, of course, to explain to the bucolic Feuerbach that the cherry tree before his eyes was not always there; that it was imported in specific historical circumstances; and that it, like everything in this world, is hence the “result of the activity of a whole succession of generations, each standing on the shoulders of the preceding one, developing its industry and its intercourse, and modifying its social system according to its changed needs.”12 But at its limit the solid philosophy of these improvements in arboriculture is very close to a morality of history attacked by the young Marx: that of the philistine Plutarch, who related with satisfaction how the corpses of the “great and noble” Cimbri proved to be an ideal manure for the orchards and vineyards of “the philistines of Massilia.”13 According to Marx, histories of descent are often histories of decadence. Those who stand on the shoulders of giants, and sometimes on their backsides, are generally dwarves. And the demystification of bucolic vistas in the name of positive history can be left to the philistines, who will always know how to make use of them. That was already the trick of the jurists of the Romantic school to justify the state of things “as they were.” The ethics of demystification is that of preservation; the ethics of critical science is that of destruction.
In the history of production, then, one must recover the instance of decisive justice, not that of formative labor. If production recurs obsessively in The German Ideology, another reason may be the elimination of the concept that competed with it in the Economic and Philosophical Manuscripts of 1844: labor. From now on labor’s point of view is the theory of others, the theory of ideologues. It is the theory of the worker-sophist Proudhon. Making him the spokesman of an obsolete artisan class is but meager consolation. Creative labor will also be the first word of modern German social democracy, the word that will seal its fate: confidence in the unlimited accumulation of productive forces. Marx’s often iniquitous tenacity in dissecting one or another person’s words and underlying motives is, first of all, a way of exorcizing the inherent contradiction in the materialist theory of history. Marx tells us that in Feuerbach’s work, history and materialism never encounter each other; what remains to be seen is how the materialist history of superimposed generations will itself rejoin the revolutionary dialectic. For if history “is nothing but the succession of the separate generations, each of which exploits the materials, the capital funds, the productive forces handed down to it by all preceding generations,”14 it is hard to see how it will ever know the fire of division. The sole viewpoint of the “transformation of circumstances” is that of the bourgeoisie which, much to the detriment of Quixote-like spirits, never stops revolutionizing the instruments of production in creating wonders that surpass the Egyptian pyramids, the Roman aqueducts, and the Gothic cathedrals. It is the viewpoint of a bourgeoisie that will never stop making its revolution: the Absolute Bourgeoisie, in the manner of Hegel’s Absolute Spirit.
Curiously enough, it is there that some often look mistakenly to find the Hegelian ancestry of Marxism, there in the edifying theory of the formative work of culture: thus the slave, who at first submitted to serving an “alien being” out of fear, masters him through the discipline of labor, the instrument that the Aesthetics regards as superior to all the beauty of nature since it is an achievement of the spirit. The industrious happiness of the Dutch bourgeoisie is reflected in the brilliance of household objects shining in their still life paintings. Prometheus, citizen of Delft.15 There, too, is the labor of history in childbirth, the succession of too-fragile shells shattered by Spirit until the cunning of reason finds its “good infinity” in the Sancho Panzan prose of the bourgeois world: constitutional monarchy; the representation of economic interests; and the university realm of spirits where the philosopher scoffs at the beautiful souls who pursue no career, the young people who have finished their wild years of apprenticeship, and religious beliefs in the hereafter (though he derides the last only in whispers to a wary listener while looking around to make sure no one else can hear).16
The Hegelianism of master and slave is precisely that: the discreet charm of the radical bourgeoisie. After his Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts of 1844, Marx will give up trying to find the force of Hegelian negativity in labor. What interests him henceforth is the Hegelianism of the Logic, which does not talk any more about formative labor or reason in history but about the conflagration of being and nonbeing or the leap from quantity to quality; and where it matters little if one goes astray in hazardous anticipations of the philosophy of nature, or in speculations on electricity and magnetism. A thinking of fire and water, of a production whose force derives solely from bearing within itself the anticipation of destruction. The encounter between materialism and the dialectic, the socialized leisure of the great media of circulation and exchange born of industry, can occur only beyond the break [la coupure]. On the contrary, labor “forms” proletarians only by stripping them of all social property.
The history of production, then, must be cracked in two. On the one hand there is the labor of generations, the accumulation of transformations, compost and grime. On the other there is revolutionary justice that “gets rid of” (beseitigt) labor—a justice executed by a class that is no longer a class, not only to overthrow the ruling class but also to “succeed in ridding itself of all the muck of ages and become fitted to found society anew.”17
That is how we must understand “the stern but steeling school of labor.”18 It is not labor but its disappropriation that forms the proletarian. What he learns at work is to lose his status as a worker. The apprenticeship comes to an end where labor has become completely an alien power—a lot of good this may do him! If the proletariat comes to be the agent of history, it is not because it “creates everything” but because it is dispossessed of everything—not only of the “wealth” it “created” but especially of its “creative” power, i.e. the limits of the “dedicated” worker realizing himself in “his” product:
When socialist writers ascribe this world-historic role to the proletariat, it is not at all, as Critical Criticism pretends to believe, because they regard proletarians as gods. Rather the contrary. Since in the fully formed proletariat the abstraction of all humanity, even of the semblance of humanity, is practically complete … since man has lost himself in the proletariat, yet at the same time has gained theoretical consciousness of that loss … it follows that the proletariat can and must emancipate itself. … It is not a question of what this or that proletarian, or even the whole proletariat, regards as its aim at the moment. It is a question of what the proletariat is and what, in accordance with this being, it will historically be compelled to do.19
So nothing could be more grotesque than imagining a class consciousness based on the virtue of the laborer. It is not “doing” that determines being, but the opposite. The proletarian is someone who has only one thing to do—to make the revolution—and who cannot not do that because of what he is. For what he is, is the pure loss of every attribute, the identity of being and nonbeing, which is not at all the empty identity of Hegel’s Logic but an identity that has gone through the school of labor, i.e. through the opposition between the nothing of the laborer and the everything of wealth. This pure coincidence is presented here with all the bluntness of the dialectical pivot: at the same time (zugleich). It is this same coincidence that Marx will oppose to Proudhon’s culture of labor: “The moment that every special development stops, the need for universality, the tendency toward an integral development of the individual begins to be felt.”20
“At the same time,” “the moment that”: the locutions of the revolutionary dialectic come along to redress the “nothing else” and the “only” of materialist history. The other time of the revolutionary dialectic is the pure time of the reminiscence of the negative. The proletarian is Meno’s slave: the tabula rasa, the blank surface on which—on the condition that the Manifesto gives him existence as a subject—the Revolution will inscribe itself with the same necessity as the diagonal of a square.
Thus the proletarian is nothing else than the negation of the worker. He is the anti-ideologue precisely insofar as he is the antiworker. By the same token, the worker who is not yet a proletarian can be baptized with a variety of names that are all equivalent: artisan, lumpen, petty bourgeois, ideologue … Supposed to interject itself between the worker and the consciousness of his state, this baleful third party has no consistency. The worker-fabricator and the ideologue-imitator are brothers, like the “liberated” student and the robust mechanic who share the favors of a Berlin midwife and the paternity of a little bastard named Proudhon-Fourier.21
If it amuses them, some may indulge in the grave recital of the “objective conditions” delaying the development of proletarian consciousness, but delay is not a historical category. The “consciousness” in question does not belong to the development of “objective conditions.” Artisan, petty bourgeois, lumpen: these sociohistoric categories are merely comic masks disguising the distance between worker and proletarian, the noncoincidence of the time of development and the time of revolution.
Thus are redistributed the terms of the prohibition of the “nothing else” that linked the specific virtue of the artisan to the absence of time. In principle, Plato’s commandment had been overturned in the promotion of technē. But technē divides itself immediately into two. It will become what it is in itself, production, only through the fire of destruction. And this fire is not that of the worker’s forge. To gain access to the communist realm of the Many where his free activity will be identified with the leisure of the philosopher, the artisan first must become the pure negation of himself. The barrier that separated him from the philosopher is now the barrier of the revolution he must carry out. But access to this barrier involves confrontation with its own paradox, with the exigency of a self-subtraction that is even more devious than the one that was supposed to change the hairy man into a bald one. When will the artisan be sufficiently stripped of his status to become the subject of the nothing else of the revolution?
Thus the barrier of the orders forms itself again inside the materialist “reversal.” No one erects it before the artisan except the artisan himself. The worker-artisan of the development of productive forces, the proletarian-warrior of the revolution, and the producer-philosopher of the communist future are three personages belonging to different times.
The Marxist tradition identifies that heterogeneity with the simple weight of the past, with the hold of the dead on the living. The obstacle would come from backward artisans attached to crafts swept away by modern industry, and to little shops condemned by the world market. The Weitling tailors who debate whether they should chain down their communal knives and forks, the joiners who repeat by heart theories that their leader learned from Grün, who got them in turn from Proudhon: these all would be false proletarians, artisans of the old mold who want to return to the time of the journeymen of yesteryear known in Germany as Straubinger.22
This explanation is ridiculous and Marx knows that very well. What attracts tailors to Weitling or joiners to Grün is neither the prospect of sewing or planing fraternally nor of taking their finished clothes to a counter to receive in exchange some finished pieces of carpentry. It is the desire to do something else besides making clothes or casement windows, to establish themselves as a society of friends of wisdom. Marx himself noticed this in Paris with all the enthusiasm of a revelation: “When communist artisans associate with one another, theory, propaganda, etc., is their first end. But at the same time, as a result of this association, they acquire a new need—the need for society—and what appears as a means becomes an end. … Association, society and conversation, which in turn has association for its end, are enough for them; the brotherhood of man is no mere phrase with them, but a fact of life, and the nobility of man shines upon us from their work-hardened bodies.”23
But here is the problem that is likely to transform the enthusiasm of the communist into the despair of the revolutionary—the nobility of humanity already shining on brows that should have lost even the appearance of it in order to produce the future nobility of humanity. The propagandist Friedrich Engels, who comes along two years later looking to persuade these shining brows of humanity, could know what to expect. The principal obstacle to his mission is not the influence of his petty bourgeois rivals. It is the very nature of this new need which, not content to add where it should subtract, had also the impertinence to find its satisfaction hic et nunc. The obstacle to the transformation of Straubinger communists into revolutionary proletarians is not their status as artisans but their status as communists—not the heavy weight of their journeyman past but the lightness of their anticipation of the communist future.
In short, Marx’s science has exactly the same problem as Cabet’s utopia: how is one to make a new world with those who desire it?24 For Cabet this involves squaring the circle. To build Icaria Cabet needs men of order and fraternity, but only Icaria could educate such people. Those who present themselves to found Icaria are disordered and combative, revolutionaries that the old world had fashioned in its own likeness. Icaria will die, then, without ever having begun. The communist revolution faces the same problem from the other end. Those who intend to effect it have the fault of already being communists. They are not necessarily fools who argue in the land of plenty about their knives and forks; they are, simply, men who transform means into ends and ends into means, who pretend to be already living the ideal of the future to which the young revolutionary science has not yet found anything superior: the Swabian, sentimental, south German—in a word, Schillerian—ideal of the aesthetic education of humanity.
The propagandist’s mission, then, resembles a game of “loser takes all.” Engels will leave the tailors to Weitling the Straubinger and wrest the joiners from the petty bourgeois Grün. But what good does that do if the new goal he gets them to vote for (by a margin of 13 to 2) immediately becomes, for these natives of Swabia, the means to imitate the sociability of the future? The only result will be to have enlarged the Straubinger army in the party of the proletariat, which will never lack for them.
For all these “backward” joiners, tailors, and shoemakers are only too inclined to hear modern theory preaching farewell to the “old rubbish” of needle, plane, and shoemaker’s pitch. They will always be eager to depart for a world in which machines will produce large quantities all by themselves. The problem for the theory does not come from journeymen set in their ways in the practice of their craft, for they will always be the best soldiers of organization and production. It comes from workers whose sense of the vanity of their trade has carried them farthest along in the stripping away of the old artisanal character from those who fit most closely the definition of a proletarian. The problem thus comes not from those who combat theory but from those who adopt it enthusiastically and are always ready to abandon tool and workshop to propagate it. We need only note the pleasure with which the best of the Straubinger, the London communists, follow the mission of a propagandist who had set out to spread their doctrine in Scandinavia:
From an emissary sent from here, who went from Helsinger to Sweden and traveled the country on foot, we have received a letter from Uppsala dated May 23. Since he had no possessions, he had filled his bag with communist tracts that he was fortunate to get over the border into Sweden. He writes us that in all the cities where there are German workers, he paid visits to the latter in their workshops, handed out our literature, and found a big response to his propagandizing. Unfortunately, since he found no work, he could not remain anyplace long enough to found communes. In Stockholm he handed over to the local branch (our communist outpost in the North) the first two circulars of the central authority, and that news fanned the ardor of our brothers there. From Stockholm he went to Uppsala, and from there to Gävle where he labored for a time. He is now on route to Umeå and Torneå. A communist emissary among the Lapps!25
In all likelihood, this propertyless worker no longer counts on meeting any German workers in Umeå and Torneå, for whom he would not have any tracts remaining anyway. As for his finding work there, it is rather his pure being as a communist that he is showing off in the solitude of the north. Communist propaganda finds there its truth: a headlong rush to fraternity, travel satisfied with its own enjoyment [ jouissance]. A Lapp himself, this traveler of the “bad infinity” finds the privileged place of his wandering in the expanses of Scandinavia viewed as the land of barbarism by the people of the Rhine. See what Engels tells his friend Marx: “The whole country has only two proper towns, à 80,000 and 40,000 inhabitants respectively, the third, Norrköping, having only 12,000 inhabitants and all the rest perhaps 1,000, 2,000, and 3,000. At every post station there’s one inhabitant. In Denmark things are scarcely better, since they have only one solitary city there, in which the guilds indulge in the most ludicrous proceedings, madder even than in Basel or Bremen … There’s also a frightful number of Hegelians there.”26
One need not be a Danish Hegelian to understand the dialectical necessity of the reversal that links infinite dispersion to corporatist narrowness. The territory of the bad infinity is also that of the immediate, and the propagandist who delights in traversing it belongs to the same world as the most barbarian Scandinavians, among them the Norwegian who “rejoices in the fact that at home in Norge exactly the same stupid peasant economy is dominant as at the time of the noble Canute,” or the Icelander who “continues to speak exactly the same language as the unwashed Vikings of anno 900, swills whale oil, lives in a mud hut and goes to pieces in any atmosphere that does not reek of rotten fish.”27
That, then, is the basis for the backwardness of the Straubinger—nothing else than their communism. The first obstacle on the road to the communist revolution is posed by the communists themselves, and apparently one can do nothing about it. From his relations with the London communists Engels draws his disabused conclusion: “We have learnt from this business that in the absence of a proper movement in Germany, nothing can be done with the Straubingers, even the best of them. … Vis-à-vis ourselves, these lads declare themselves to be ‘the people,’ ‘the proletarians,’ and we can only appeal to a communist proletariat which has yet to take shape in Germany.”28
It is too hard a task, even for the best dialecticians, to prove to communist proletarians that they are not communist proletarians by invoking a communist proletariat whose only fault is that it does not yet exist. So the materialist takes over with his solution, the materialist solution par excellence: waiting. It is futile to refute theoretically communists who have no theory. The only thing to do is to leave things alone, put communist workers and communist correspondence on ice, and wait for the coming communist proletariat and its organized movement.
Like every materialist solution, this is a simple one. But like them, too, it is ineffective. The artisan’s barrier is also the philosopher’s. If we must wait for modern industry to produce a communist proletariat, then the scientist may be no more advanced than fraternity’s pedestrian. Industrial development could certainly create a modern working class. Yet what is needed is not a class, even a modern one, but a non-class. Every class is itself a caste, a survival from the feudal and slave-based past. The proletariat will be a revolutionary “class” only to the extent that it is the dissolution of all classes and above all the “young” working class itself.
So let our nostalgic friends celebrate today, near the end of the twentieth century, the “fusion” of “Marxist theory” and the “labor movement.” Before the end of 1847 Marx and Engels, for their part, realized that they were faced with a different task, the union of the formation of a class and its dissolution.
For a question is very much in order: why did they change their minds? Logically, the Manifesto of the Communist Party should never have existed. Marx and Engels should have quietly let their correspondence with the Straubinger of London go dormant. And yet Marx and Engels join with those very people to publish with great fanfare the manifesto of the communist party. What communist party? The party of the as yet nonexistent proletariat? The party of the Straubinger? Some might suggest that in the interval the Straubinger mended their ways and assimilated Marxist ideas. And then? After all, a Marxist Straubinger still remains a Straubinger. This perverse breed is characterized by its very ability to “assimilate” every idea that comes to hand. As a disabused Saint-Simonian priest put it, they are “eaters of ideas.” People who “digest” things quickly tend, periodically, to worry Marx and Engels.
So why make a party with people who decidedly will never be true proletarians? Perhaps precisely because they never will become such. Because first of all the purpose of a party is not to unite but divide: “Proletarians of all countries, unite!” That also means: “Workers of each country, divide!” The alliance of science with this ridiculous vanguard is, first, division in actu. The party is essentially the point at which is materialized the principle of the proletariat as division, under its double aspect. It represents the proletariat as absolutely One, constituted as such by the hatred of all the powers of the old world. But it is also the dissolution of this One, the non-class that attacks class from within.
In a sense, then, the party can be summed up in the trenchant words of the philosopher. The pure power of division finds its universality in the opposition of its singularity to all the forces of the old world: “I told them straight out that we owed our position as representatives of the proletarian party to nobody but ourselves; this, however, had been endorsed by the exclusive and universal hatred accorded us by every faction and party of the old world.”29 The philosopher is himself the party only as the tragic power of the negative. Whatever gathers around him—this irresolute mixture of Straubinger with intellectual pretensions and half-pay intellectuals—is doomed comically to repeat a text that is not its own and that it can only distort. A court filled with jesters whom the philosopher-king in exile would gladly let pass. Note Engels’s jubilation when it comes time to bury quietly the party that had been baptized with so much solemnity: “At long last we gain the opportunity—the first time in ages—to show that we need neither popularity, nor the support of any party in any country. … Haven’t we been acting for years as though Cherethites and Plethites were our party when, in fact, we had no party, and when the people whom we considered as belonging to our party, at least officially, sous réserve de les appeler des bêtes incorrigibles entre nous [French in original: “with the reservation that between ourselves we called them incorrigible fools”—Trans.], didn’t even understand the rudiments of our stuff? … And what have we … to do with a ‘party,’ i.e. a herd of jackasses who swear by us because they think we’re of the same kidney as they?”30
But the philosopher cannot bypass those incorrigible fools. The pure nonbeing of division must have a body to anticipate the proletariat that has not yet been formed in Germany, but it also must divide this class that will always be quick enough to constitute itself with its common interests and their modern representatives. The International is perhaps that, first of all: the union of workers as a non-class, a weapon against the modern organizations which—in England, France, or Germany—express only too well the interests of workers as a class. For that purpose, nothing could be better than the clowns of the party in general and the Straubinger in particular. To counter the organization of German worker associations, the sentimental south German ass, Liebknecht, will go to Leipzig. To check on Liebknecht, who has distributed no more than six membership cards for the International throughout Germany, the old conspirator Becker in Geneva. To keep an eye on Becker, the tailor Eccarius (the Marxist Straubinger par excellence), this “son of toil” who in his London exile has learned how to write but not yet how to punctuate, and who is only too happy to find in his new life as a leader and publicist his revenge for a life lost in “the hell of needlework.”
They are clowns, assuredly, but for their respect due to the indomitable Becker. They can hardly undertake any initiative without botching it. But for this reason they can be trusted to do the job of representing nothing. They are irreplaceable for playing the role of the people in the burlesque way that their colleague, the joiner Snug, plays the lion in A Midsummer Night’s Dream. They are poets, daimonic men. So it is with the tailor Ulmer, a nondescript man under the inspiration of a certain “genius.” And when indignation turns him into a poet, his genius sends him into trances and has him sow terror at meetings of democrats: “And what is more, the communist’s fierceness has made him infallible.”31
Promoting dissolution and undermining codes of representation, such men are Shakespearean individualities in contrast to the types employed by the Schillerian Lassalle, in whose play Franz von Sickingen “the principal characters are representatives of specific classes and tendencies.” Engels may well be thinking of his own “party” when he reproaches Lassalle for omitting from his drama the whole “Falstaffian backdrop”—the “vagabond beggar-kings, hungry mercenaries and adventurers of all kinds” characteristic of “this period’s dissolving feudal ties.”32 The literary question of tragedy is also the political question of revolution in the 1850s, when the bourgeoisie “has for the second time experienced its 16th century.”33 To arrive at the tragic dimension of the revolution, the bourgeois drama of representation—Schillerian, Lassallean, and social democratic—must be doubled with the Shakespearian tragicomedy of dissolution. The legitimacy of “the first-born sons of modern industry” must be doubled with the bastardy of the mendicant philosopher-kings and mercenaries—Straubinger—of communism. Similarly, the rationality of the development of productive forces must be doubled with the legend of the mole of revolution. The latter, who is sometimes confused with his Hegelian companion, the cunning of reason, is also a Shakespearean character. But there has been a shift of scene. Hegel borrowed his mole from the tragedy of Prince Hamlet, in which he saw the first tears in the fabric of the new bourgeois individuality. The materialist Karl Marx seems to prefer fairies. At a banquet honoring the “first-born sons” of English industry, he rebaptized and rejuvenated the old mole. Its name, he said, is Robin Goodfellow, or Puck, the sprite of A Midsummer Night’s Dream.34 The modern figure of the daimon Eros, son of Poros and Penia, Puck is the genius of a history that is no longer cunning but simply ironic.