Communism and Strategy: Rethinking Political Mediations by Isabelle Garo

Author:Isabelle Garo
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Verso

The Political Construction of the Proletariat

A major stage in this evolution as steered by circumstances interpreted for their revolutionary potential, the Introduction intended to open the Kreuznach manuscript but, written after it, affirmed the major historical role of the proletariat. Its sudden appearance, in a theoretical context still marked by Hegelian and Young Hegelian philosophy,45 has led a number of commentators to regard it as a still wholly theoretical encounter with the real working class, with Marx deducing the historical vocation he assigns it. However, what is prepared and made possible by this reflection, at the point when Marx registers the subordination of critique to the historical moment that includes it, is an actual encounter with the working class. Marx would note this himself in The German Ideology, thus consigning his own experience as an attentive journalist to social conflict: ‘The existence of revolutionary ideas in a particular period presupposes the existence of a revolutionary class.’46 Thus, theory’s relative capacity for anticipation manifests itself prior to being stated, far removed from any reduction of ideas to some merely mechanical reflection of a social state of affairs.

That is why it is wrong to read this brief text as a sacralization of the proletariat as exclusive historical subject, idealized and invested with a redemptive mission – a reading that continues to fuel the thesis of Marx’s incorrigible ‘messianism’. On the contrary, marking an opening to real history, Marx’s reflection reached a decisive turning point in identifying what, at the heart of this history, represents its effective part, at once adopting and going beyond the Hegelian definition of actuality.47 The term proletariat names the working class in struggle, bearer of a political and social alternative. This distinction between proletariat and working class lost its sharpness in subsequent texts, as Marx further explored the conditions for a politicization whose possibility is immanent in the condition of being exploited. The mysterious ‘dynamic principle of the immediate future’ mentioned in the Economic and Philosophical Manuscripts found its political embodiment here, while paring right down a class analysis that would be considerably clarified thereafter. In the immediate present, the proletariat was the social state that embodied ‘the dissolution of all estates’, replacing Hegel’s false mediation and converting reconciliation into revolution. In effect, Marx’s definition of the proletariat seems to be a substitute for the Hegelian ‘universal class’, precisely inverting its role. According to Hegel, civil servants have the mission of effecting the institutional mediation of the private interests of the other social ‘estates’ on the basis of the state. Against this representation from above, which led Hegel to denounce the subversive principle of universal suffrage, Marx pitted a representation emanating from society itself, a transformative power and not an expressive duplicate. It was imperative that ‘a definite class, proceeding from its particular situation, undertake the general emancipation of society’. But it was also necessary for it to be ‘perceived and acknowledged as [society’s] general representative’.48

This original political representation, rich in strategic implications that retain their fertility, was conceived by Marx over and above its institutionalized forms, as what overflows and challenges them.

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