Читать книгу The Retreat from Class - Ellen Meiksins Wood - Страница 10

I

Class struggle is the nucleus of Marxism. This is so in two inseparable senses: it is class struggle that for Marxism explains the dynamic of history, and it is the abolition of classes, the obverse or end-product of class struggle, that is the ultimate objective of the revolutionary process. The particular importance for Marxism of the working class in capitalist society is that this is the only class whose own class interests require, and whose own conditions make possible, the abolition of class itself. The inseparable unity of this view of history and this revolutionary objective is what above all distinguishes Marxism from other conceptions of social transformation, and without it there is no Marxism. These propositions may seem so obvious as to be trivial; yet it can be argued that the history of Marxism in the twentieth century has been marked by a gradual shift away from these principles. The perspectives of Marxism have increasingly come to be dominated by the struggle for power. Where the achievement of political power was originally conceived by Marxism as an aspect or instrument of the struggle to abolish class, class struggle has increasingly tended to appear as a means toward the achievement of political power – and sometimes not even as a primary or essential means.

Changes in the Marxist tradition have not been confined to movements whose clear objective has been the attainment of office, rather than power, by ‘democratic’ or electoral means. Important divergences have also occurred in revolutionary movements which have accepted insurrectionary action as a possible, even necessary, expedient in the struggle for power. The major revolutionary movements of the twentieth century – in Russia and China – have in a sense been forced by historical circumstances to place the struggle for power above all else, and even to some extent, particularly in the Chinese case, to place the ‘people’ or ‘masses’ before class as the principal agents of struggle. In these cases, such developments have been determined by the immediate necessity of seizing power, of taking an opportunity that could not be refused, and doing so without a large and well-developed working class. The principles of ‘popular struggle’ and the primacy of the contest for power have, however, taken root in advanced capitalist countries in very different conditions and with very different consequences. Here, the struggle for power has increasingly meant electoral contests; and though the working class has been large and even preponderant, the ‘people’ or ‘masses’ has ceased to mean primarily an alliance of exploited classes, notably workers and peasants. Electoral strength has become the principal criterion of alliance, with little concern for whether the constituents of the ‘popular’ alliance can have as their objective the abolition of classes or even, more specifically, the abolition of capitalist exploitation, and whether they possess the strategic social power to achieve these objectives. The implications have been far from revolutionary and far more conducive to displacing class struggle and the working class altogether from the centre of Marxism.

These historical developments have had profound effects on Marxist theory. It might have been possible for theory to serve as a guiding thread through the complexities of historical change and the compromises of political struggle, a means of illuminating these processes in the constant light of class struggle and its ultimate goal, analysing changes in class structure and especially the development of new formations within the working class, laying a foundation for new modalities of struggle while keeping the revolutionary objective constantly in sight. Instead, Marxist theory, when it has concerned itself with matters of practice at all, has increasingly adapted itself to the immediate demands of the contest for political power, whether in the form of revolutionary action or electoral alliance.

In the more recent major developments in Western Marxism, theory has become in many respects a theorization of Eurocommunist strategy and especially its electoral strategy of ‘popular alliances’. While the ultimate objective of Eurocommunism is still the construction of socialism, presumably a classless society without exploitation, this objective seems no longer to illuminate the whole process of revolutionary change. Instead, the process is coloured by the immediate needs of political strategy and the attainment of political office. So, for example, Marxist theory seems no longer designed to enhance working-class unity by dispelling the capitalist mystifications that stand in its way. Instead, as we shall see in what follows, these mystifications have in effect been incorporated into the post-Marxist theory of class, which is now largely devoted not to illuminating the process of class formation or the path of class struggle, but rather to establishing a ground for alliances within and between classes as they are here and now, for the purpose of attaining political power, or, more precisely, public office.

This reconceptualization of the revolutionary project has served to reinforce a tendency that has come from other directions as well: the displacement of the working class from the centre of Marxist theory and practice. Whether that displacement has been determined by the exigencies of the power struggle, by despair in the face of a non-revolutionary working class in the West, or simply by conservative and anti-democratic impulses, the search for revolutionary surrogates has been a hallmark of contemporary socialism. Whatever the reasons for this tendency and whether or not it is accompanied by an explicit reformulation of Marxism and its whole conception of the revolutionary process, to dislodge the working class is necessarily to redefine the socialist project, both its means and its ends.

Revolutionary socialism has traditionally placed the working class and its struggles at the heart of social transformation and the building of socialism, not simply as an act of faith but as a conclusion based upon a comprehensive analysis of social relations and power. In the first place, this conclusion is based on the historical/materialist principle which places the relations of production at the centre of social life and regards their exploitative character as the root of social and political oppression. The proposition that the working class is potentially the revolutionary class is not some metaphysical abstraction but an extension of these materialist principles, suggesting that, given the centrality of production and exploitation in human social life, and given the particular nature of production and exploitation in capitalist society, certain other propositions follow: 1) the working class is the social group with the most direct objective interest in bringing about the transition to socialism; 2) the working class, as the direct object of the most fundamental and determinative – though certainly not the only – form of oppression, and the one class whose interests do not rest on the oppression of other classes, can create the conditions for liberating all human beings in the struggle to liberate itself; 3) given the fundamental and ultimately unresolvable opposition between exploiting and exploited classes which lies at the heart of the structure of oppression, class struggle must be the principal motor of this emancipatory transformation; and 4) the working class is the one social force that has a strategic social power sufficient to permit its development into a revolutionary force. Underlying this analysis is an emancipatory vision which looks forward to the disalienation of power at every level of human endeavour, from the creative power of labour to the political power of the state.

To displace the working class from its position in the struggle for socialism is either to make a gross strategic error or to challenge this analysis of social relations and power, and at least implicitly to redefine the nature of the liberation which socialism offers. It is significant, however, that the traditional view of the working class as the primary agent of revolution has never been effectively challenged by an alternative analysis of social power and interest in capitalist society. This is, of course, not to deny that many people have questioned the revolutionary potential of the working class and offered other revolutionary agents in its place: students, women, practitioners of various alternative ‘life styles’, and popular alliances of one kind or another, more recently the ‘new social movements’. The point is simply that none of these alternatives has been supported by a systematic reassessment of the social forces that constitute capitalism and its critical strategic targets. The typical mode of these alternative visions is voluntaristic utopia or counsel of despair – or, as is often the case, both at once: a vision of a transformed society without real hope for a process of transformation.

One well-known attack on the traditional Marxist view of the working class is symptomatic and worth a brief consideration to illustrate the strategic bankruptcy of these alternative visions to date. Andre Gorz’s Farewell to the Working Class is both utopian vision and counsel of despair. Gorz proceeds from the premise that, since the future of society must lie in the abolition of work, it must be the objective of the socialist project to determine the particular form in which work will be abolished – whether, for example, as the degradation of mass unemployment or as an emancipatory ‘liberation of time’. The goal he proposes is the creation of a ‘discontinuous social space made up of two distinct spheres’:¹ the realm of necessity, constituted by the demands of necessary material production to satisfy primary needs – a sphere that can never be fully escaped – and a realm of freedom outside the constraints of necessary social production, a sphere of autonomy which must be enlarged and to which the necessarily ‘heteronomous’ sphere of material production must be subordinated. The working class cannot by its very nature be the agent of this transformation because the abolition of work cannot be its objective. A class ‘called into being’ by capitalism,² the working class identifies itself with its work and with the productivist logic of capital. It is itself a replica of capital, a class ‘whose interests, capacities and skills are functional to the existing productive forces, which themselves are functional solely to the rationality of capital’. It is also a class whose power has been broken by the form and structure of the labour-process itself. The transformative impulse must, therefore, come from a ‘non-class of non-workers’ not ‘marked with the insignia of capitalist relations of production’,³ made up of people who, because they experience work as ‘an externally imposed obligation’ in which life is wasted, are capable of having as their goal ‘the abolition of workers and work rather than their appropriation’.⁴ This group includes all those whom the system has rendered actually or potentially unemployed or underemployed, all the ‘supernumeraries’ of contemporary social production, perhaps in alliance with the ‘new social movements’, such as the ecology and women’s movements.

Countless questions can be raised about Gorz’s analysis of the labour-process in contemporary capitalism and its effects on the working class. One critical point stands out: his whole argument is based on a kind of inverted technologism, a fetishism of the labour-process and a tendency to find the essence of a mode of production in the technical process of work rather than in the relations of production, the specific mode of exploitation. This, as we shall see, is something that he shares with post-Althusserian theorists like Poulantzas. In both cases, the tendency to define class less in terms of exploitative relations than in terms of the technical process of work may help to account for a very restrictive conception of the ‘working class’, which appears to include only industrial manual workers. This tendency also affects his perception of the working class and its revolutionary potential, since in his account the experience of exploitation, of antagonistic relations of production, and of the struggles surrounding them – i.e. the experience of class and class struggle – play little part in the formation of working-class consciousness, which seems to be entirely shaped and absorbed by the technical process of work. There have certainly been important changes in the structure of the working class which must be seriously confronted; but Gorz does little to illuminate them, because in the end his is a metaphysical, not an historical or sociological, definition of the working class and its limitations, which has little to do with its interests, experiences, and struggles as an exploited class.

Questions could also be raised about his utopian vision itself. What is important from our point of view, however, is not simply this or that objectionable characteristic of Gorz’s utopia, but the very fact that it is a utopia without grounding in a process of transformation – indeed, a vision ultimately grounded in despair. (It is no accident that Gorz’s account of the utopia begins with citizens waking up one morning and finding their world already transformed.) In the final analysis, Gorz offers no revolutionary agent to replace the working class. It turns out that the ‘non-class of non-workers’, this new revolutionary lumpen-proletariat which apparently ‘prefigures’ a new society, holds that promise only in principle, notionally, perhaps metaphysically; it has, by his own testimony, no strategic social power and no possibility of action. In the end, we are left with little more than the shop-worn vision of the ‘counter-culture’, bearing witness against the ‘system’ in an enclave of the capitalist wilderness. This is revolution by example as proposed in various forms from the fatuous ‘socialism’ of John Stuart Mill to the pipe-dreams (joint-dreams?) of bourgeois flower-children growing pot in communal window-boxes (while Papa-le-bourgeois sends occasional remittances from home).

Even if the objective of the Left were to be perceived as the abolition of work – and not as the abolition of classes and exploitation – it would be the destruction of capitalism and capitalist exploitation, and their replacement by socialism, that would determine the form in which the abolition of work would take place. What is significant about Gorz’s argument is that, like other alternative visions, his rejection of the working class as the agent of transformation depends upon wishing away the need for transformation, the need to destroy capitalism. It is a monumental act of wishful (or hopeless?) thinking, a giant leap over and beyond the barrier of capitalism, bypassing the structure of power and interest that stands in the way of his utopia. We have yet to be offered a consistent and plausible alternative to the working class as a means of shifting that barrier. Even for Gorz the question is not, in the final analysis: who else will transform society? He is effectively telling us: if not the working class then no one. The question then is whether the failure of the working class so far to bring about a revolutionary transformation is final, insurmountable, and inherent in its very nature. His own grounds for despair – based as they are on an almost metaphysical technologism which denies the working class its experiences, interests, and struggles as an exploited class – are simply not convincing. Much the same can be said about other proposals for revolutionary surrogates, including those implicit in the Eurocommunist doctrine of popular alliances.

II

The single most influential school of Western Marxism in recent years has been a theoretical current that derives its principal inspiration from Louis Althusser. The innovations of Althusser himself have been located by Perry Anderson in the general tendency of Western Marxism toward the ‘rupture of political unity between Marxist theory and mass practice’ occasioned by both ‘the deficit of mass revolutionary practice in the West’ and the repressions of Stalinism.⁵ Hence the ‘obsessive methodologism’ that Althusser shared with other Western Marxists as questions of theoretical form displaced issues of political substance; hence the preoccupation with bourgeois culture and the ‘retroactive assimilation’ into Marxism of pre-Marxist philosophy, notably in its idealist forms (in Althusser’s case, especially the philosophy of Spinoza),⁶ as ‘bourgeois thought regained a relative vitality and superiority’⁷ in the face of a retreating socialism in the West; hence, too, Althusser’s linguistic obscurity. Althusser’s theoretical academicism has existed in uneasy tandem with his active political involvement in the PCF, and the precise connection between his theory and practice has been a matter of hot dispute. There is in any case a certain incoherence in attempts to combine political practice, especially revolutionary practice, with a theory that acknowledges no subjects in history. The theoretical work of Althusser’s pupils and successors has, with a few exceptions, been no less prone to scholastic abstractionism, ‘obsessive methodologism’, philosophical idealism, and obscurity of language; but their development has been much more clearly and concretely tied to the political movements of the West in the sixties and seventies and especially to the shifting programmes of Eurocommunism.

Eurocommunists insist that their objective, unlike that of social democracy, is not merely to manage capitalism but to transform it and to establish socialism. Their strategy for achieving that objective is, essentially, to use and extend bourgeois-democratic forms, to build socialism by constitutional means within the legal and political framework of bourgeois democracy. Eurocommunist theoreticians generally reject strategies that treat the bourgeois democratic state as if it were impenetrable to popular struggles and vulnerable only to attack and destruction from without, from an oppositional base in alternative political institutions. Eurocommunist parties, therefore, offer themselves both as ‘parties of struggle’ and as ‘parties of government’ which, by achieving electoral victories, can penetrate the bourgeois-democratic state, transform it, and implant the conditions for socialism. More particularly, their strategy is based on the conviction that, in the ‘monopoly phase’ of capitalism, a new opposition has emerged alongside – and even overtaking – the old class opposition between exploiters and exploited, capital and labour. In ‘state monopoly capitalism’, there is a new opposition between monopolistic forces, united and organized by the state, and the ‘people’ or ‘popular masses’. An absolutely crucial, indeed the central, principle of Eurocommunist strategy is the ‘popular alliance’, a cross-class alliance based on the assumption that a substantial majority of the population including the petty bourgeoisie and even elements of the bourgeoisie, not just the traditional working class, can be won over to the cause of socialism. It is precisely this new reality that makes possible a ‘peaceful and democratic’ transition to socialism. Communist parties, therefore, cannot be working-class parties in any ‘sectarian’ sense; they cannot even merely open themselves to alliances with, or concessions to, other parties or groups. They must themselves directly represent the multiple interests of the ‘people’.

The general strategy of Eurocommunism, then, seems at least implicitly to be built upon a conflict other than the direct opposition between capital and labour and a moving force other than class struggle. Its first object is to rally the ‘popular’ forces against ‘state monopoly capitalism’, to create the broadest possible mass alliance, and then to establish an ‘advanced democracy’ on the basis of this popular alliance, from which base some kind of socialism can be gradually constructed. The force that drives the movement forward is not the tension between capital and labour; in fact, the strategy appears to proceed from the necessity – and the possibility – of avoiding a confrontation between capital and labour. Insofar as the strategy is aimed at anti-capitalist goals, it cannot simply be guided by the interests of those who are directly exploited by capital but must take its direction from the varied and often contradictory ways in which different elements of the alliance are opposed to monopoly capitalism. It can be argued, then, that the movement need not, indeed cannot, in the first instance be motivated by specifically socialist objectives.

The doctrine of cross-class alliance proposed by Eurocommunism is, therefore, something more than simply an electoral strategy. It embodies a particular judgment about the source of the impulse for historical transformation. There are two ways of looking at the extension to other classes of the historic role formerly assigned to the working class. One is to stress the optimism of Eurocommunism, concerning the possibility of ‘democratizing’ the capitalist state. The other is to stress their pessimism, concerning the revolutionary potential of the working class. There can be little doubt that, however optimistic its claims, Eurocommunist strategy is ultimately grounded in the same historical reality that has so profoundly shaped Western Marxist theory and practice in general: the disinclination of the working class for revolutionary politics. It must be added that the Eurocommunist solution has been deeply affected by the experience of the Popular Front. And it is even possible that there is more in this political strategy than simply pessimism about the working class. For example, the strategy for transforming the capitalist state by a simple extension of the bourgeois-democratic forms, by the proliferation of representative institutions as against a system of direct council democracy, may reflect a more profound lack of interest in, or suspicion of, popular power.⁸ However the doctrine of popular alliances is conceived and explained, the effect is the same: it displaces the working class from its privileged role as the agent of revolutionary change and diminishes the function of class struggle as the principal motor of social transformation.

Here is the crux of Eurocommunism. We cannot get to the heart of the matter simply by equating Eurocommunism with social democracy. It is unhelpful merely to dismiss the professions of Eurocommunists that their objective is to transform, not to manage, capitalism. To do this is to avoid the real challenge of Eurocommunism. Nor can the issue be reduced simply to the choice of means – revolutionary insurrection versus constitutionalism, electoral politics, and the extension of bourgeois-democratic institutions. The critical question concerns the source and agency of revolutionary change. It is this question that, finally, determines not only the means of socialist strategy but also its ends; for to locate the impulse of socialist transformation is also and at the same time to define the character and limits of socialism itself and its promise of human emancipation.

III

Two aspects of Eurocommunist doctrine have figured most prominently in post-Althusserian theory: the conception of the transition to socialism as an extension of bourgeois-democratic forms and, more fundamentally, the doctrine of the cross-class ‘popular’ alliance. Accordingly, the chief theoretical innovations of this Marxism have occurred in the theory of the state and the theory of class, in which the question of ideology has assumed an increasingly pivotal role. In the process, there has occurred a fundamental reformulation of Marxist theoretical principles in general. In the final analysis, the doctrine of cross-class alliances and the political strategy of Eurocommunism have, it can be argued, demanded nothing less than a redefinition of class itself and of the whole conceptual apparatus on which the traditional Marxist theory of class and class struggle has rested, a redefinition of historical agency, a displacement of production relations and exploitation from the core of social structure and process, and much else besides. In particular, there has been a tendency increasingly to depart from Marxist ‘economism’ by establishing not only the autonomy but the dominance of the political, and then of ideology. The function of these theoretical devices in sustaining the strategy of popular alliances and ‘democratization’ should become evident as we examine some of the principal transformations in Marxist theories of the state and class at the hands of the post-Althusserians.

But the autonomy and dominance of politics and ideology has earlier roots in Maoism, which may help to explain the relative ease with which many of our new ‘true’ socialists travelled the route from Maoism to Eurocommunism and beyond, with the help of Althusser. To understand the logic of that journey and the ambiguous conception of democracy and popular struggle that informs it, something needs to be said about the attractions which the Maoist doctrines of ‘cultural revolution’, the ‘mass line’, and anti-economism have held for many people, especially students and intellectuals, in the European left, something that explains the unlikely transposition of these doctrines from China to the very different conditions of Western Europe.

Faced with the ‘backwardness’ of the Chinese people and an undeveloped working class, the CPC asserted the possibility of ‘great leaps forward’ in the absence of appropriate revolutionary conditions – i.e. class conditions – by dissociating revolution from class struggle in various ways. Not only did the masses – a more or less undifferentiated mass of workers and peasants – replace class as the transformative force, but the rejection of ‘economism’ meant specifically that the material conditions of production relations and class could be regarded as less significant in determining the possibilities of revolution. It became possible to conceive of political action and ideology as largely autonomous from material relations and class, and to shift the terrain of revolution to largely autonomous political and cultural struggles. The later Cultural Revolution was the ultimate expression of this view, and of the extreme voluntarism which necessarily followed from this auto-nomization of political action and ideological struggle.

This conception of revolution inevitably entailed an ambiguous relation to the masses and to democracy. On the one hand, there was an insistence upon the necessity of massive popular involvement; on the other hand, the Maoist revolution was necessarily conducted by party cadres for whom popular involvement meant not popular democratic organization but rather ‘keeping in touch’ with the masses and constructing the ‘mass line’ out of the ‘raw material’ of ideas and opinions emanating from them. The revolution was no longer conceived as emerging directly out of the struggles of a class guided and unified by its own class interests. Instead of a class with an identity, interests, and struggles of its own, the popular base of the revolution was a more or less shapeless mass (What identity do the ‘people’ or the ‘masses’ have? What would be the content of a revolution made by them ‘in their own name’?) to be harnessed by the party and deriving its unity, its direction, and its very identity from autonomous party cadres. In the later ‘Cultural Revolution’, when the regular party apparatus was itself set aside, the autonomization of political and ideological action was taken to its ultimate extreme.

The transportation of these principles to the advanced capitalist countries of the West, to be adopted especially by students and intellectuals, was clearly no easy matter and required significant modifications – given the existence of well-developed and large working classes with long histories of struggle, not to mention the less than ideal conditions of intellectuals in China itself. Nevertheless, it is not difficult to see the attractions exerted by this view of revolution, with its delicately ambiguous synthesis of democratic and anti-democratic elements. On the one hand, Maoist doctrine, with its insistence on keeping in touch with the masses, its attack on bureaucratic ossification, its mass line, and its Cultural Revolution, seemed to satisfy the deepest anti-statist and democratic impulses. On the other hand (whatever its actual implications in China), it could be interpreted as doing so without relegating declassed intellectuals to the periphery of the revolution. The dissociation of revolution from class struggle, the autonomization of ideological and cultural struggles, could be interpreted as an invitation to them to act as the revolutionary consciousness of the people, to put themselves in the place of intrinsic class impulses and interests as the guiding light of popular struggles. After all, if there is any kind of revolution that intellectuals can lead, surely it must be a ‘cultural’ one.

Maoism, never more than a marginal and incoherent phenomenon in the context of advanced capitalism, could not long survive transportation; but the themes of cultural revolution, the autonomy of political and especially ideological struggles, and in particular the displacement of struggle from class to popular masses did survive in forms more appropriate to a Western setting. At least, some of those who had been attracted to Maoism for its adherence to these doctrines seem to have found in Eurocommunism a reasonable substitute: an alternative to Stalinism which promised both democracy or popular involvement and a special place for elite party cadres and declassed intellectuals. In particular, here, too, class was increasingly displaced by the more flexible ‘popular masses’ – though, of course, in a very different form. And here, too, political and ideological struggles were rendered more or less autonomous from material relations and class. Maoist influences need not, of course, be invoked to explain Eurocommunist doctrine. European Communism has traditions of its own on which to draw – the legacy of the Popular Front with its cross-class alliances, suitably modified versions of Gramsci’s theory of hegemony with its stress on ideological and cultural domination, etc. But for one important segment of the European left, the transition from ‘Maoism’ (in its Western variant) to Eurocommunism had a certain comfortable logic. It is therefore not surprising to find certain continuous themes figuring prominently in the academic theoretical systems that have grown up side by side with Eurocommunism.

_______________

¹ André Gorz, Farewell to the Working Class: An Essay on Post-Industrial Socialism, Boston 1982, p. 96.

² Ibid., p. 15.

³ Ibid., p. 68.

⁴ Ibid., p. 7.

⁵ Perry Anderson, Considerations on Western Marxism, London 1976, p. 66.

⁶ Ibid., p. 64–5.

⁷ Ibid., p. 55.

⁸ Ralph Miliband, ‘Constitutionalism and Revolution: Notes on Eurocommunism’, Socialist Register 1978, pp. 165–7.