Aspects of history and class consciousness Edited by Istvan Mészaros Essays by Tom Bottomore David Daiches Lucien Goldman Arnold Hauser E. J. Hobsbawm Istvan Mészéros Ralph Miliband Rudolf Schlesinger Anthony Thoriby @ Routledge & Kegan Paul LondonFirst published in 1971 by Routledge & Kegan Paul Ltd Broadway House, 68-74 Carter Lane London, ECqV SEL Printed in Great Britain by Unwin Brothers Limited The Gresham Press, Old Woking, Surrey, England Set in Monotype Plantin 110 © Routledge & Kegan Paul Ltd 1971 No part of this book may be reproduced i any form without permission from the publisher, except for the quotation of brief passages in criticism, ISBN 0 7100 7022 5 Contents A note from Georg Lukies One "Introduction Tstvin Méseiros To Class consciousness in history E, J. Hobstawm Three Barnave: a case of bourgeois class consciousness Ralph Miliband Four Class structure and social consciousness Tom Bottomore Five Reflections on history and class consciousness ‘Lucien Goldmann Six Contingent and necessary class consciousness Istvén Mésziros ‘Seen Propaganda, ideology and art Arnold Hauser Fight Literature and social mobility David Daiches Nine Self-consciousness and social consciousness in literature Anthony Thorlby Appendis Historical setting of Lukies’s History and ‘Class Consciousness Rudolf Schlesinger Bibliography Contributors Index 49 65 85 128 152 173 192 199 206 209One Introduction Istvan Mészéros ‘The problems of history and social consciousness have occupied thinkers now for almest two centuries. ‘Philosophy of History’ 35 a discipline emerged towards the end of the eighteenth century and had its first great systematizer in Hegel at the beginning of the nineteenth, Hegel spoke, with profound insight, of the ‘cunning of reason’ (List der Vernunft) which prevails over against the limited and self-centred plans of particular individuals, thus producing an objective trend, notwith- standing the subjective bias necessarily involved in the individual wills. In this approach, individual and social consciousness were conceived as constituting a dynamic, dialectical unity. With this solution, one of the fundamental quests of philosophical thought had been put iato a radically new light: namely, the problem of the validity of human experience. Knowledge obtained on the basis of merely individual experience has always been considered rather problematical by philosophy, just as in the field of art and literature the artist's aim was never confined to registering the immediate impressions of the particular individual. Paradoxically, though, the fundamental object of knowledge—that which is concealed behind deceptive appearance—could only remain hopelessly elusive, from Plato's ‘forms? to the Kantian ‘thing-in-itsel”, so long as the problem could not be formulated in terms of ‘social consciousness’—which is an inherently historical concept. The great dificulry consisted in perceiving ‘universal validity’ in the actual, spatio-temporally limited experience of par- ticular haman beings. This necessarily appeared an insoluble dilemma so long as ‘the universal’ has been thought of as an ideal opposed to the actuality of lived experience. The introduction of the idea of a historically developing social consciousness (it does not matter, in this connection, under what name) cut through the Gordian knot of this paradox. For now ‘universality’ was conceived as inherent in, and not 8 opposed to, dynamically evolving particularity. Thus, the specific 12 Istodn Mésedros hhistocical identity of, for instance, a particular work of art, could be recognized to be not the negation of ‘universality’, but, on the contrary, its realization, For the work of att could achieve universality only and precisely in so far as it succeeded in grasping—by disposal of the artist in his unique medium of activity—the spatio temporally specific characteristics of actual experience as significant ‘moments of continuous social-historical development. The dialectical unity of the particular and the universal was, thus, conceived as ‘con tinuity in discontinuity” and ‘discontinuity in continuity’—an approach diametrically opposed to ‘noumenal forms” and statically permanent ‘essences’. Thus, history and permanence, as well as individual and social consciousness, appeared as inseparably interrelated in a dia- lectical conception. Significantly, this awareness of both the historical and the collective dimensions of consciousness emerged with an age of immense social turmoil: the French Revolution and its aftermath, the Napoleonic Wars, which involved virtually the whole of Europe—and not only Europe—in a series of violent confrontations and realignments. More crumbled then within the space of a mere few years than in centuries beforehand. With such elemental upheavals the floodgates to an incomparably more dynamic social development had swung wide open, and thinkers like Hegel took notice of this, even if in an abstract, speculative form. Similarly, the Marxian conception of history and social consciousness hhad arisen at the juncture of another great crisis, in an epoch when @ sew social agency, the working class, marked its appearance as an independent political force with a series of uprisings and revolutions in various parts of Europe. In the same way, the diffusion of Marxism in thenineteenth and twentieth centuries was inseparable from renewed social upheavals which many generations of men witnessed and con- tinue to witness all over the world. If periods of social upheaval helped the formulation and further elaboration of the Marxian historical and dialectical approach, periods of relative social immobility favoured the diffusion of ‘scientism’ and ‘economism’—both particularly strong in the writings of some leading ‘Marxists at the turn of the century. Lukics’s work—History and Class Consciousnest—contains a protound critical analysis of the theoretical and philosophical foundations of ‘scientism? and ‘economism’ which dominated the orientation of most working-class parties even after the First World War. Many aspects of Lukics's work are discussed in the resent volume. Here I merely wish to point to two important issues, ‘The frst is that Lukées’s work put the dialectical historicism of the ‘Marxian approach powerfully into relief, demonstrating the crude ‘mechanical character of both ‘economism’ and ‘scientism’ which—in Introduction 3 sharp contrast to Marx—eliminated ftom their sphere of interest the investigation of social consciousness. ‘The second point concerns an equally significant aspect of History and Class Consciousness: the author’s emphasis on the fundamental role of the workers’ councils as the institutional framework of a new mode of government—namely, the self-government of a conscious social agency. Lukics wrote on this qucstion: The revolutionary workers? council (not to be confused with its ‘opportunist caricatures) is one of the forms which the consciousness of the proletariat has striven to create ever since its inception ‘The workers’ council spells the political and economic defeat reification. Tn the period following the diceatorship it will climinate the bourgeois separation of the legislature, administration and judiciary. During the struggle for control its mission is two- fold. On the one hand, it must overcome the fragmentation of the proletariat in time and space, and on the other it has to bring economics and politics together into the true synthesis of pro- Jetarian praxis. In this way it will help to reconcile the dialectical conflict between immediate interest and ultimate goal. Ata time when the workers’ councils were being emptied of all practical significance by the Stalinist bureaucracy, Lukies’s approach to the problems of socialist development, in that it assigned to this new institutional form such a vital role, obviously lad to be condemned as dangerous heresy. On this point, a on several others-—from the question of broadly-based social alliances to the evaluation of ‘revolutionary romanticism’—Lukécs's position proved to be radically incompatible ‘with that of Stalinism. ‘The papers collected in this volume were originally written for a series of open lectures held at Sussex University in 1960-70 and, when necessary, revised by their authors in the light of the discussion that followed each lecture. The reception of the lectures was more than ‘encouraging: an unprecedented number of students followed them and took an active part in the discussions, confirming thus, week by week, the topicality of the subject. Indeed, their response was well in line with the growing awareness of the over-riding importance of the for~ ‘ation of an adequate social consciousness in a positive transformation of society. From the outset, the papers were planned for publication and every effort was made to outline the various aspects of this multi-faceted subject, in so far es was possible to do this within the limits of a single volume. Accordingly, the essays range from History, Political Theory, Philosophy and Sociology, to Art Criticism and Literary Criticism, and4 Istodn Mésedros Lukics’s controversial classic is discussed in more than one of them, ‘The contributions are complementary to one another thematically, but not necessarily as regards their approach to the subject. Naturally, however, no attempt has been made to iron out the differences in approach, For, considering the very nature of the issue at stake, ‘controversy about them is likely to remain with us for some time yet, If thie volume cucceeds in engaging others in a further elaboration of these important problems, it will have served its purpose. Two Class consciousness in history E. J. Hobsbawm ‘The title of this series of lectures is taken from the well-known but largely unread book by George Lukics, History and Class Consciousness, a collection of studies published in 1923, strongly criticized within the Communist movement, and virtually unobtainable for some thirty or forty yeats thereafter. Infact, since no English version of it was in print ‘until recently, itis still itde more than a title to most people in this country. My task in this introductory lecture is, however, rather wider than that of providing a simple commentary ot ctib to Lukécs’s book. I want to reflect as a historian, on the nature and role of class consciousness in history, on the assumption that we are all agreed about one basic proposition: that social classes, class conffict and class ‘consciousness exist and play a role in history. We may well disagree on what role they play, or on its importance, bat for the sake of the present argument further general agreement is not necessary. Nevertheless, in fairness both to the subject and to the thinker whose name is 50 ob- viously associated with it, I ought perhaps to begin by explaining where my own reflections connect with Lukice’s own extremely interesting argument (which is, of course, derived from Mars) and where they do not. ‘As most people with a moderate acquaintance with Marxism know, there:is @ certain ambiguity in Marx’s treatment of social classes, which is perhaps due to the fict that he never wrate systematically about this subject, The manuscript of Capital breaks off at the very point where this systematic exposition was due to begin, so that Chapter 52 of ‘Volume III of Capital on Classes cannot even be considered an outline or torso. Elsewhere Marx used the term ‘class’ in two rather different senses, according to context, First, it could stand for those broad ag- ‘gregates. of people which can be classified together by am objective criterion—because they stand in a similar relationship to the means of production—and more especially the groupings of exploiters and 56 EJ. Hobsbacom exploited which, for purely economic reasons, are found in all human societies beyond the primitive communal and, as Marx would argue, ‘until the triumph of proletarian revolution. ‘Class’ is used in this sense in the celebrated opening passage of the Communist Manifesto (‘The history of all hitherto existing society is the history of class struggles") and for the general purposes of what we might call Mars’s macro-theory. Ido sot clain: that dhis simple formulation exhausts the meaning of ‘class’ in the first scase of Marx's usage, but it will at least serve to distinguish it from the second sense, which introduces a subjective clement into the concept of class—namely, class consciousnesr. For the purposes of the historian, ie. the student of micro-history, or of history ‘as it happened? (and of the present ‘as it happens?) as distinct from the ‘general and rather abstract models of the historical transformation of societies, class and the problem of class consciousness are inseparable, ‘Class in the full sense only comes into existence at the historical moment ‘when classes being to acquire consciousness of themselves as such. It is no accident that the Jacus classics of Marx’s discussion of class conscious ness isa piece of contemporary history, dealing in years, months, or even weeks and days—namely, that work of genius, Te Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte, The two senses of ‘class? are not, of course, in conflict. Each has its place in Marx’s thought. Lukics’s treatment, if I understand him correctly, starts with this” duality. He distinguishes between the objective fact of class and the theoretical deductions from this which could be and/or which are drawn by men. But he makes a further distinction: between the actual ideas which men form about class, and which are the subject matter of historical study! and what he calls ‘ascribed’ (eugerechmetes) class consciousness. This consists of ‘the ideas, sentiments, etc., which men ina given situation of life would have, if they were able to grasp in its entirely this situation, and the interests deriving from it, both as regards immediate action and as regards the structure of society which (would) ‘correspond to those interests)? In other words, itis what, let us say, an ideally rational bourgeois or proletarian would think. It is a theoretical construct, based oa a theoretical model of society, and not an empirical generalization about what people actually think. Luikics further argues that in different classes the ‘distance’ between actual and ascribed class consciousness is Jarger or smaller, and may be so large as to constitute not only a difference of degree, but one of kind. ‘Lukics derives some very interesting ideas from this distinction, but these are not my concern here. I do not say that the historian qua historian must only be concerned with the actual facts. Ifheis a Marxist of indeed if he tries to answer any of the really significant questions about the historical transformations of society in any way, he must also have at the back of his mind a theoretical model of societies and Class consciousness in history 7 ‘transformations, and the contrast between actual and rational behaviour cannot but concern him, if only because he must be concerned with the historical effectiveness of the actions and ideas he studies, which—at least up to and including the era of bourgeois sociery—do not normally correspond to the intentions of the individuals and organizations which undertake them or hold them, For instance, itis important to note—as Lubics and Marx did, incidcutally—unt the class consciousness of ‘peasants is normally quite ineffective, except when organized and Jed by non-peasants with non-peasant ideas; and why this is so. Or itis important to note the divergence between the actual, ic, observable class consciousness of proletarians, which is programatically rather ‘modest, and the Kind of wider class consciousness not merely ‘ascribable’ (Gn the Lukécsian sense) to them, but actually embodied in the working, class through the socialist labour movements which this class developed. However, though historians cannot overlook such matters, they are naturally moze concemed professionally with what actually happened (including what might under specified circumstances have happened), than they are with what ought really to happen. I shall therefore leave aside much of Lukécs’s discussion as icrelevant to my purpose, which is the rather modest one othe historian. ‘The first point I wisk to make is one which was also made by both. ‘Marx and Lukécs. While classes in the objective sense can be said to have existed ever since the break-up of a society based essentially on Kinship, class consciousness is a phenomenon of the modern industrial era, This is familiar to historians, who have often traced the transition from the pre-industrial concept of ‘rank’ or ‘estate’ to the modern one of ‘class’, from such terms a8 ‘the populace’ or ‘the labouring poor’ to ‘the proletariat’ or ‘the working class’ (via the intermediate ‘the working classes’), and the, historically slightly earlier, formation of such terms as ‘middle class? or ‘bourgeoisie? out of the old ‘middle rank(s) of society’. In Westera Europe this change occurred roughly in the frst half of the nineteenth century, probably before 1830-40. Why is class consciousness so late to emerge? In my view Lukécs’s argument is persuasive. He points out that economically speaking all precapitalist societies have incomparably less cohesion as a single entity than the capitalist economy. Their various parts are far more independent of one another, their mutual economic dependence fat less. The smaller the role of commodity exchange in an economy, the more parts of society are either economically self-sufficient (like the parts of the rural economy) or have no particular economic function except perhaps parasitic consumption (a5 in classical antiquity), the more distant, indirect, “unreal are the links between what people actually experience as8 B.F. Hobsbawm ‘economy, polity or society, and what actually constitutes the wider economic, political, etc. framework within which they operate. Contrariwise, one might add, the relatively few and numerically small strata whose actual experience coincides with this larger framework may develop something like a class couscioustiess much sooner tran the rest. This is true, for instance, of nobility and gentry, who are few in number, interrelated, and who function in part through their direct relationship to institutions which express or symbolize society a5 @ ‘whole—such as king, the court, parliament, etc. I note in passing that some historians have used this phenomenon as an argument against ‘Marxist interpretations of class and class struggles in history. As will be evident, itis in fact specifically provided for in Marxist analysis. In other words, under capitalism class is an immediate and in some sense a directly experienced historical reality, whereas in pre-capitalist epochs it may merely be an analytical construct which makes sense of a complex of facts otherwise inexplicable. This distinction must not, of course, be confused with the more familiar Marxist proposition that in the course of capitalist development class structure is simplified and polarized until, in extreme cases such as Britain at some periods, one can operate in practice with a simple two-class system of ‘middle class” and ‘working class’. This may also be true, but that is part of another line of thought. Incidentally, it does not imply, and Marx never sug- gested that it implied, a perfect homogeneity of each class. For certain purposes we need not trouble about their internal heterogeneities, as, for instance, when defining certain crucial relations between classes, such as that between employers and workers, For other purposes we ‘cannot leave them out of account. Neither Marx nor Engels neglected ions, etc, within classes in their directly historical writings or their analyses of contemporary politics However, this is by the way. Tf we try to look at the consciousness of social strata in the pre- ‘capitalist epochs, we therefore find a situation of some complexity. At the top we have groups such as the high aristocracy which come close to class consciousness on the modern scale, i.c. on what, using an anachronism, we might call the ‘national’ scale (the scale of the large state), or even in some respects the international scale. However, itis highly likely that even in such cases of ‘class consciousness’ the criterion of self-definition will be primarily non-economic, whereas in modern classes it is primarily economic, It may be impossible to be a noble without holding land and dominating peasants, and abstaining from ‘manual labour, but these characteristics would not be enough to define a noble to the satisfaction of a medieval society. This would require Class consciousness in history 9 also kinship (‘blood’), special legal status and privileges, a special relationship to the king, or various others, At the bottom of the social hierarchy, on the other hand, the criteria of social definition ate either too narrow or too global for class conscious ness. In one sense they may be entirely localized, since the village community, the district, or some other limited area is in fact the only real society and economy that matters, the rest of the world making only remote and occasional incursions into it. So far as men living in such circumstances are concerned, the man from the next valley may not be merely bea foreigner, butan enemy, however similar his social situation, Political programmes and perspectives are by definition locelized. ¥ was once told by «political organizer in Latin America who worked among Indians: “It is no use telling them the tiller has a right to the soil, What they understand is only this: “You have a tight to this piece of land which belonged to your community in your grandfather's day and which has since been stolen from you by the landlords. Now you can claim it back.”” Yet in another sense these criteria may be so general and universal as to exclude any properly social self-classification. Peasants may be so convinced that all the world, except for a marginal few, consists of them, that they may merely define themselves as ‘people’ or (as in Russian language) ‘Christians’, (This leads to un- conscious historical ironies, such as that’ of the revolutionary atheist libertarian leader in Andalusia who told his defeated comrades, ‘Every Christian had better hide in the hills’ or the Red Army sergeant who wwas overheard during che last war addressing his platoon as “True Believers’,) Or else they may simply define themselves as ‘countrymen’ against the cities (campesinos, contadinos, paysans). One might argue that the well-known affinity of peasants for millennial or messianic ‘movements reflects this social reality. The unit of their organized action is either the parish pump or the universe. There is nothing in between. Once again confusion must be avoided. What I have been talking ‘about is the absence of a specific class consciousness. This is not the same as that low degree of class consciousness which Marx and other observers have noted, eg. among the peasantry in the capitalist era. ‘Marx ascribed this, at any rate in the case of nineteenth-century France, to the fact that being a peasant implied being exactly like a great many ‘other peasants, but lacking mutual economic relationships with them. Each peasant houschold is, economically speaking, largely isolated from ‘the others, This may well be true under capitalist conditions, and it may help to distinguish peasants as a class from workers as a class, for ‘concentration in groups of mutual co-oper the basic social reality of proletarian existence. Marx’s argument suggests, in my view correctly and fruitfully, that there are degrees of class cohesion. As ‘Theodore Shanin once put it the peasantry is ‘a class of low classness’, and B10 EJ. Hobsbawm ‘conversely one might say that the industrial proletariat is a class of ‘extremely high ‘classness’. (It is, after all, the only class which has developed genuine political mass movements held together specifically and primarily by class consciousness, e.g. as ‘parties of the working class’—Labour patties, Partis Ouvriers, etc.) However, the point I have noted about pre-capitalist societies is not thie, but a different one. In such societies, it may be suggested, the social consciousness of the ‘lower ranks’ or subaltern classes will be fragmented into local or other segments even when their social reality is one of economic and social co-operation and mutual aid, as is the case in several kinds of village community. There will frequently be not high or low ‘classness’, but, in the sense of consciousness, no ‘classness? at all, beyond the miniature scale. Alternatively, it may be suggested, the unity felt by the subaltern groups will be so global as to go beyond «lass and state, There will not be peasants, but ‘people’ or ‘countrymen’; there will be not workers, but an indiscriminate ‘common people? of ‘abouring poor’, distinguished from the rich merely by poverty, from. the idle (whether rich or poor) by the compulsion to live by the sweat of their brow, and from the powerful by the unspoken or explicit corollary of weakness and helplessness. Between the top and the bottom of the pre-industrial social hier- archies, we find a conglomerate of local, sectional and other groups, each with its multiple horizons, and far too complex for cursory analysis, oF for that matter for more than the rarest common action on the ‘national? scale, Within a locality, such as a city state, these may in fact be profit ably analysed in terms of class and class struggles, as indeed contem- ‘poraries and historians have habitually done from the days of the ancient Greek cities. However, oven here the realities of socio-economic stratification are likely to be overlaid, in the minds of men, by the non~ economic—e.g. the legel—classifications which tend to prevail in such societies. This is obvious where the new reality of a society divided frankly by economics comes into conflict with the old models of a hierarchically stratified society, the reality of socio-economic trans- formation with the ideal of socio-economic fixity. Then we can see the confiicting criteria of social consciousness locked in battle, e.g. the declining corporate or gild consciousness of journeymen craftsmen and the rising class consciousness of proletarians, skilled or otherwise. How far such consciousness of status (Which is, of course, itself economic, in so far as legal or quasi-legal privilege implies economic advantage) persists or can revive under modern capitalism is an interesting subject for enquiry, which I cannot pursue. Lukics has afew suggestive observa- tions on this point, to which I draw your attention. Can we therefore say that class consciousness is absent from pre~ capitalist societies ? Not entirely, for even if we leave aside the history Class consciousness in history 1% of small and locally enclosed communities such as city states, and the special case of ruling classes, we encounter two types of social move- ment which plainly operate on a more than local and less than ecu smenical scale, These are, first, those of the ‘common people” or ‘labour- ing poor? against the ‘tcp people’ (“When Adam delved and Eve span, who was then the gentleman ?) and, second, the phenomenon of peasant wars, sometimes actually reeognized and named as such by contem= poraries. The absence of class consciousness in the modern sense does not imply the absence of classes and class conflict. But it is evident that in the modern économy this changes quite fundamentally. ‘How? Let me begin with a general but very significant observation. ‘The scale of modern class consciousness is wider than in the past, but it is essentially ‘national’ and not global: that is to say it operates within the frameworks of the territorial states which, in spite of the marked development of a single interdependent world economy, have remained to this day the main units of economic development. In this sense our situation is still analogous to that of pre-capitalist societies though on a higher level. The decisive aspects of economic reality may be global, but the palpable, the experienced economic reality, the things which directly and obviously affect the lives and livelihoods of people, are those of Britain, the U.S.A., France, etc. It is not impossible that we may today beentering the era ofa directly global economy. Some numer= ically small strata of the population do indeed alzcady function inter~ nationally, subject to linguistic limitations, as, for instance, scientists and some other types of scademics, 2 fact both expressed and symbolized by their rapid movement between jobs in different parts of the world. However, for most people this is not yet the case, and indeed in impor- tant ways the increasing management of the economy and of social affairs by governments has intensified the national character of social consciousness. To this extent global classes are still the same sort of theoretical constructs as they were in pre-capitalist days, except at rare moments of global revolutionary ferment. The real and effective classes are national, The links of “international solidarity’ between French and British workers, or even between their socialist movements, are far more tenuous than the links which bind British workers to one another. ‘Within these limits, what of the consciousness of the different classes ? T do not want to go through the list of the classes and strata which historians and sociologists might or might not agree to recognize as the major ones, Instead, I wish to drawv your attention to two aspects of the problem. ‘The first is the question of the relation between class consciousness and socio-economic reality. There are ‘class’ slogans and programmes which have very little chance of realization, because they ran dead against the current of history, and others which are more practicable,12. E.J. Hobsbawm because they run with it. Peasant movements and those of the classical petty bourgeoisie of small artisans, shopkeepers, petty entrepreneurs, tc., belong to the first kind. Politically these strata may be extremely formidable, because of their numerical strength or for other reasons, bbut historically they are inevitable victims, even when they ensure the ‘victory of whatever cause they attach themselves to, At most they may Become powerful sectional vested interests of negation, and even these ‘have rather limited strength in countries where the dominant economic or political forces are extremely dynamic, The immense political strength of the North American farmers and small towns has not significantly slowed down the decline of either the farmers as a class, or the economic concentration against which the Populists fought so strenuously. The Nazis, who were borne to power on the mass mobiliza- tion of such strata, and some of whom actually tried to some extent to realize their programme, turned out to be a régime of monopolist and state capitalism, not because they set out to be, but because the pro- gramme of the ‘little man’ was simply a non-starter. If the socialist perspectives of the working-class movement are excluded, then the only alternative in western industrial states is a régime of big business~ cum-big government. ‘The relation between peasant movements and the régimes they have brought to power in the twentieth century is analogous. These revolu~ tions, as Eric Wolf has pointed out, have been victorious primarily because they have mobilized the peasantry, and above all the most traditionally-minded strata of the peasantry.” Yet the actual social ‘outcome of these transformations has been very different from the aspira- tions of the peasants who made them possible, even when they received the land. History has more than confirmed the Marxists against the Natodaiks: post-revolutionary systems have not been constructed on the foundations of the pre-capitalist village communities, but on its ruins. (However, itis only fair to add that they confirmed the Narodniks against some of the Marxists on another point: the most effective rural revolutionaries have been neither the proto-capitalist Aulaks nor the proletarianized village labourers, but the middle ‘More interesting than such cases of what might be called blind-alley class consciousness is the situation of classes whose relation to social reality changes. The case of the bourgeoisie is both instructive and familiar, Around, say, 1860, bourgeois class consciousness, even in an unsophisticated form, did in fact reflect and—at a very superficial level —explain the reality of bourgeois society. In 1960 this was plainly not soany longer, even though our society can still be described as capitalist. We can still read the sort of opinions which every good Liberal pate familias took for granted at the time Lincoln was assassinated, mostly in ‘the leader columns of the Daily Telegraph and the speeches of a few Class consciousness in history 13 back-bench Conservative M.P.s. They are indeed stil taken for granted in good suburban homes. It is patent that today these views have about as much relation to reality as the speeches of William J Bryan about the Bible. Conversely, itis today evident that the pure programme of nineteenth-century economic liberalism, as put forward, say, in the Presidential campaign cf Barry Goldwater in 1964, is as unrealizable 48 the peasant or petty-bourgeois utopias. The difference between them js that the Goldwater ideology did once serve to transform the world economy, but no longer does so, whereas the other ideologies of the ‘fttle men’ never did. In brief, the development of capitalism has left its former carrier, the bourgeoisie, behind. The contradiction between the social nature of production and the private nature of appropriation in this system has always existed; but was (economically speaking) secondary up to a certain point, Unrestricted competitive private ‘enterprise by owner-managed family firms and state abstention was not merely an ideal, or ever a social reality, but ata certain stage the most effective model for the rapid economic growth of industrial economies. ‘Today the contradiction is dramatic and obvious. The capitalism of vast corporations intertwined with vast states remains a system of private appropriation, and its basic problems arise from this fact. ‘However, even in its ordinary business operations it finds the economic liberalism of the nineteenth century quite irrelevant, and the class ‘which carried it, the classical bourgeoisie, unnecessary. ‘The point I wish to make is this. Some forms of class consciousness, and the ideologies based on them, are, as it were, in tune with historical development, and others not. Some, having once been in tune, cease to ‘be. Who today are the rising classes whose consciousness and ideology point to the future? The question is important not only in political terms, but (if we follow Marx) for our understanding of epistemology, at least in the social sciences. I cannot, however, pursue it further here. ‘The second aspect I want to discuss concerns the relation between, class consciousness and organization. Let me begin with some obvious historic differences between bourgeois or ‘middle-class? and working- class consciousness. Bourgeois movements were based on a very powerfull class consciousness. In fact, we can probably still say that the class struggle is normally fought or felt with much greater or more consistent bitterness on the bourgeois side of the front (where the menace of revolution is the domiaant sentiment) than on the proletarian side (where hope, a civilized emotion, is at least as important as hatred). However, they were rarely explicit class movements. The few parties ‘which have called themselves specifically ‘middle-class? parties, or by some similar title, are normally pressure groups for particular and ‘generally modest purposes, stch as keeping down rates and taxes. The bourgeois movements waved liberal, conservative, or other ideological14 B,J. Hobsbawm ‘banners, but claimed to be socially classless or all-embracing even when they were visibly not, Proletarian movements, om the other hand, are ‘based on explicit class consciousness and class cohesion. At the same time bourgeois movements were organized much more loosely and informally, often apparently for limited purposes, and involved much less loyalty and discipline than working-class ones, though in actual fact their political perspectives might be very armbitious. In this respect the contrast between the Anti-Corn Law League, the prototype as it ‘were of bourgeois-class movements, and the Chartists, the prototype of mass-proletarian ones, is instructive. ‘we have noted, the difference is not necessarily in the scope of the political objectives pursued. Both may be equally ambitious in so far as they aimed at the overthrow of one kind of society and its replacement by another. The difference may lie in the nature of the social experience of the classes or strata, their composition, and their social function. This ‘point could be formulated in various ways. The bourgeoisie or ‘upper ‘idle class? was or isan élite group of cadres, not because its members are specially selected for ability or enterprise (as they always felt sure they were), but because it consists essentially of people who are, atleast potentially, in positions of command or influence, however local; of ‘people who can make things happen as individuals, or in small numbers. (This statement does not apply to the petty bourgeoisie or lower middle class as a group.) The characteristic ‘campaign’ of the modern British professional strata—ageinst the location of an airport, the routing of a motorway, or some other piece of administrative steam-rollering—is, effective out of all proportion to the number of persons involved in it for this reason. On the other hand, the working class, like the peasantry, consists almost by definition of people who cannot make things happen. except collectively, though, unlike peasants, their experience of labour ‘demonstrates every day that they must act collectively or not at all. But ‘even their collective action requires structure and leadership to be ‘effective. Without a formal organization for action, except under certain circumstances at the place of work, they are unlikely to be effective; without one which is capable of exercising hegemony (to use Gramsci’s phrase), they will remain a5 subaltern as the common people of the pre-industrial past. The fact that history may, as Marxists argue, have cast them as the grave-diggers of an old and the foundation of anew society (although this requires some rethinking or at least reformulation) does not change this characteristic of their social existence here and now. In other words, bourgeois or middle-class movements can operate as ‘stage armies of the good’; proletarian ones can only operate as real armies with real generals and staffs, ‘The matter may be put another way. Each class has two levels of aspiration, at least until it becomes politically victorious: the immediate, Class consciousness in history 15 day-by-day specific demands, and the more general demand for the kkind of society which suits it. (Once it is victorious this second demand turns into conservatism.) There may, of course, be conflicts between these two levels of aspiration, as when sections of the nineteenth-century bourgeoisie, whose general demand was for government abstention from economic interference, found themselves appealing to government for specific aid and protection. In the caze of a class like the bourgeoisie both these levels of aspirations can be pursued with only relatively loose or ad foc Kinds of organization, though not without a general ideotogy to hold them together, such as economic liberalism. Even the nineteenth-century class parties of liberalism were not mass patties or movements (except in 0 far as they appealed to the lower orders), but coalitions of notables, of influential individuals or small groups.® On the other hand, working-class consciousness at both levels implies formal organization; and organization which is itself the carrier of class ideology, which without it would be little more than a complex of informal habits and practices. The organization (the ‘union, ‘party’ or ‘movement’) thus becomes an extension of the individual worker's personality, which it supplements and completes. When working-class militants or party supporters, faced with some novel political situation, refuse to express their own opinion and send visiting journalists to ‘the ‘union’ (or whatever else the title of the organization may be), it expresses not the abdication of their private judgment before some superior authority's, but the assumption that the ‘union's’ words are their words; they are what they would say if they had the private capacity to say it ‘Nevertheless, the types of consciousness and organization which correspond to each of the two levels are normally distinct, though some- times linked or combined, The lower level is represented by what Lenin called (with his usual sharp and realistic eye for social realities) ‘trade union consciousness’, the higher by ‘Socialist consciousness’ (or possibly, but much more rarely, some other consciousness which envisages the total transformation of society). The former is (as Lenin also observed) the more spontaneously generated, but also the more limited, Without the larter the class consciousness of the working class is incomplete, historically speaking, and its very presence as a class may, as in the USA, be—quite mistakenly-—questioned. Without cither, the workers may, for political purposes, be completely negligible, indeed Snvisible’, like the very substantial mass of ‘Tory working men’ who have always existed in Britain, without affecting, in more than the most fleeting and marginal way, the structure, policy and programme of the Conservative Party, which could not win a single election without them. ‘Once again the distinction between proletariat and peasants must be made, The latter, aso a historically subaltern class, require even the16 E. J, Hobsbazom ‘most elementary class consciousness and organization on the national (ie. the politically effective) scale to be brought to them from outside, whereas the more elementary forms of class consciousness, class action, and organization tend to develop spontaneously within the working class. ‘The development of significant trade union movements is almost universal in societies of industrial capitalism (unless prevented by phyvical coercion). The development of ‘labour’ or ‘socialist’ parties has ‘been so common in such societies that the infrequent cases where they have not developed (as in the USA) are commonly treated as in some sense exceptional, and requiring special explanation. This is not so with autonomous peasant movements and even less with so-called “peasant parties’, whose structures in any case rather different from that of ‘labour parties’. Proletarian movements have a built-in potential for hegemony, which peasant movements lack. ‘Socialist consciousness’ through organization is thus an essential ‘complement of working-class consciousness. But itis neither automatic nor inevitable, and what is more, it is not class consciousness in the obvious sense in which spontaneous ‘trade-unionist” consciousness is, whether in its moderate reformist or in its politically less stable and effective radical, even revolutionary ‘syndicalist’ form, And at this point the problem of class consciousness in history turns into an acute problem of twentieth-century politics, For the necessary mediation of organization implies a difference, and, with greater or smaller pro- ability, a divergence, between ‘class’ and ‘organization’, i.e. on the political level, ‘party’. The further we move from the elementary social units and situations in which class and organization mutually control one another—e.g, in the classic case, the socialist or communist union Jodge in the mining village—and into the vast and complex area where the major decisions about society are taken, the greater the potential divergence. In the extreme case of what left-wing discussion has baptized ‘substitutionism’, the movement replaces the class, the party the movernent, the apparatus of functionaries the party, the (formally elected) leadership the apparatus, and, in well-known historical examples the inspired general secretary or other leader the central committee, ‘The problems which arise out of this, to some extent, inevitable diver- gence affect the entire concept of the nature of socialism, though it may also be argued that, with the increasing irrelevance to contemporary capitalism of the old type of nineteenth-century entrepreneurial bourgeoisie, controlling significant quantities of the means of production a individuals or families, they may also be stising within the present system, They are problems, partly of the apparatus of administration, planning, executive and political decision, etc. which any complex modern society must possess, and especially one of economic and social planning and management under present circumstances (ie, problems Class consciousness in history 17 of “bureaucracy’), and partly of the nature of societies and régimes arising out of the labour and socialist movements. These are not the same, though the loose and emotional usege of such terms as ‘bureau racy’ in left-wing discussion tends to confuse them: they are con- gruent only where a formal bureaucracy is ex offcio a ruling ‘class? in the technical sense, as perhaps among the imperial Chinese scholar- gentry, or today amorg the senior managers of corporate capitalism, ‘whose interest is one of ownership as well as salaried management.!* ‘The crucial problem for socialists is that revolutionary socialist régimes, unlike bourgeois ones, arise not out of a class, but out of the characteristic combination of class and organization. Itis not the work- ing class itself which takes power and exercises hegemony, but the working-class movement or party, and (short of taking an anarchist view) it is difficult to see how it could be otherwise. In this respect the historical development of the USSR has been quite logical, though not necessarily inevitable. The ‘party’ became the effective and formal ruling group, on the assumption that it ‘stood for the working class. The systematic subordination of state to party has reflected this. In due course, equally logically, the party absorbed and assimilated the effective individual cadres of the new society as they emerged—its officers, administrators, executives, scientists, etc.—so that at a certain point of Soviet history success in almost any socially significant career implied the invitation to join it. (This did not imply that these ‘functional’ recruits acquired an equal possibility to form policy with the old mem- bers for whom politics was a career, but then there was an analogous difference in the bourgeoisie between those recognized as belonging to ‘the ruling class and those within this body who belonged to the governing soup.) The fact that the original social basis of the party, the small industrial proletariat of Tsarist Russia, was dispersed or destroyed during the Revolution and Civil Wer, obviously facilitated this evolu- tion of the Communist Party. The fact that, after a generation of the new régime, the individual cadres of the new society were largely recruited from men and women of worker or peasant origins, who had made their career entirely in and through it, and only in a rapidly diminishing proportion from the members or children of former bourgeois and artistocratic families, whom the régime naturally tried to exclude, speeded the process up further, Nevertheless, it may be suggested that a process of this kind was implicit in the ‘proletarian revolution’, unless systematic counter-measures were taken.) ‘The moment when ‘proletarian revolution’ is successful is therefore the critical one. It is at this moment, when the formerly reasonable assumption of a virtual identity between class and organization opens the way to the subordination of the former to the latter, that ‘sub- stitutionism? becomes dangerous. So long as the organization continues18 B,J. Hobsbawm to maintain its automatic general identity with the class, and denies the possibility of more than the most temporary and superficial diver- ences, the way to extreme abuses, up to and including Stalinism, lics wide open. Indeed, some degree of abuse is hardly to be avoided, for the organization is likely to assume that its views and actions represent the real views (or in Lukécsian terms, the ‘ascribed’ consciousness) of the clase, and where the actual views of the class diverge from it these divergences are due to ignorance, lack of understanding, hostile infl~ tration, etc. and must be ignored if not suppressed. The stronger the concentration of party-cum-state power, the greater the temptation to ignore or suppress; and conversely, the weaker this concentration, the greater the temptation to strengthen it. Hence problems of political democracy, of pluralist structures, freedom of expression, etc., become more important than before, a statement which does not imply that the solution of such problems must or should be those of bourgeois liberalism. To take an obvious example. If under socialist systems trade unions lose their old fonctions and strikes are outlawed, then, whatever the general justification and the possible overall gains for the workers, these have lost an essential means for influencing the condition of their lives, and unless they acquire some other means for the purpose theirs is a net loss, The classical bourgeoisie could defend the equivalent of its ‘tado-union-conscious? interests in various more or less informal ways, where they conflicted with the wider interests of the class as interpreted by governments. The ‘working class, even in socialist systems, can do so only through organiza- tion, i.e. only through 2 political system of multiple orgenizations or through a single movement which makes itself sensitive to the views of its rank and file, ic. through effective internal democracy. But is this exclusively a problem of proletarian revolutions and socialist systems ? As we have already noted in passing, similar problems are arising out of the changing structure of the modern capitalist economy itself. Increasingly the constitutional, legal, political and other devices by means of which people were traditionally supposed to ensure some influence over the shaping of their lives and their society—if only negative influence—are becoming ineffective. This is not so merely in the sense in which they have always been ineffective for the “labouring poor’ in any but a trivial manner, but in the sense thet they are increas- ingly irrelevant to the actual machinery of technocratic and bureau- cratized decision. ‘Politics’ are reduced to public relations and manipu- lations. Decisions as vital as war and peace not merely by-pass the official organs for them, but may be taken—by a handful of central ‘bankers, by a president or prime minister with one or two backroom advisers, by an even less identifiable interlocking of technicians and ‘executives—in ways which are not even formally open to political (Class consciousness in history 19 control, The classical machinery of nineteenth-century ‘teal’ politics increasingly revolves in a void: the leading articles of the ‘heavy’ newspapers are read by back-bench MPs whose opinions are negligible or by ministers who are dispensable; and their respective speeches are only a litte less insignificant than their private démarches with those who actually take decisions, assuming they can be identified. Even the members of ‘the Establishment’ (or ruling class) may as individuals be little more influential than the shareholders in whose interests capitalist firms are still (in legal taeory) conducted, Increasingly the real members of the ruling class today are not so much real persons as organizations; not the Krupps or Rockefellers, but General Motors and IB.M., not to mention the organization of government and the public sector, with ‘whom they readily interchange executives.!? ‘The political dimensions of class consciousness and especially the relation between members of the class and organizations are therefore rapidly changing. The problems of the relations of the proletariat with working-class states, or even the large-scale organizations of their ‘movement under capitalism, are only a special case within a more general situation, which the imperatives of technology and large-scale public or ‘corporate management have transformed. This observation should not be used merely to score debating points. Nothing is more futile and infuriating than pots calling kettles black’and assuming that in so doing they have solved the problem of blackness. Classes continue and have consciousness. It is the practical expression of this consciousness which is today in question, given the changes in its historic contest. But at this point the historian may fall silent, not without relief, His professional concern is not the preent or future, though he ought to throw some light on it, but the past. What is likely to happen, and what we can or ‘ought to do about it, cannot be discussed here, Notes X Geschichte und Klasrenbewusstsein, Betlin, 1923, p. 62. All my references are to this original edition, 2 Loe. city p. 62. 3 Loc. cts p. 67. 4 The relevant passage from Highteenth Brumaire, VUl, is famous, but will not be harmed by yet another quotati “The small peasants form a vast mass, the meihbers of which live in similar conditions, but without entering into manifold relations with one another. Their mode of production isolates them from. fone another, instead of bringing them into mutual intercourse. ‘Their fcld of production, the small holding, admits of no division of labour ir. its cultivation, no application of science and,20 EJ. Hobsbazom therefore, no multiplicity of development, no diversity of talents, xno wealth of social relationships. Each individual peasant farnily is almost self-sufficient; it itself directly produces the major part of its consumption and thus acquires its means of life more through exchange with nature than in intercourse with society. The small holding, the peasant and his family; alongside them another small holding, another peasant and another family, A few score of these make up a village, and a few score villages make up a Department. In this way the greet mass of the French nation is formed by simple addition of homologous magnitudes, much as potetoes in a sack form a sackful of potatoes, Insofar as millions of families live under economic conditions of existence that divide their mode of life, their interests and their culture from those of other classes, and put them in hostile contrast to the latter, they form a class. Insofar as there is merely a local interconnection among these small peasants, and the identity of their interests begets no unity, n0 national union and no political organisation, they do not form lass,” 5 ‘The Peasantry as 2 pol Bp. 5-27. 6 Bug, los. cites. 70. 7 ‘On Peasant Rebellions? (New Society, 4.9.1965). 8 Once again, this does not apply to parties of the lower middle class, which tended and tend to be mass movements, though, reflecting the socio-economic isolation of the members of these strata, mass movements of 2 particular kind. Mare’s prophetic insight into the reletion of the French peasants with Napoleon III is relevant here: “They cannot represent themselves, they must be represented. Their representative must at the same time appear as their master, as an authority over them.” 9 The most striking instances of such identification are normally found in the comparatively eatly stages of labour organization, before labour movements have become part of the official political system of operations, and at times or in places where the movement consists of a single organization which represents, i. literally ‘stands for’, the class. 0 A ruling group may or may not be bureaucratized, though in European history it has rarely been so; it may operate with or through a bureaucratized administrative system, as in twentieth century Britain, or an unbureaucratized one, as in eighteenth- century Britain. The same, allowing for the different social status— ruling parties are not classes—may be true in socialist societies. ‘The CP.S.U. is bureaucratic, and operates through a very bureaucratized state and economic administration. The Macist ‘cultural revolution’ has, if I understand it correctly, attempted to destroy the bureaucratization of the Chinese C.P., but itis a fairly safe bet that the country continues to be administered by means of ical factor’ (Sociol, Rev., XIV, x, 1966), (Class consciousness in history 21 a bureaucratic system. It is not even impossible to discover examples of a bureaucratized ruling group with a non-bureaucratic, i.e. without an effective, administrative system, as perhaps in some ecclesiastical states of the past. rx Tam not discussing the possible developments which might lead large numbers of the individual cadres, in particular historical circumstances, to prefer not to join the formal organization of ‘top people’, ie, the party. 12 Ata lower level, it also seems that the differences between formally liberal-democratic and other political systems may be diminishing sharply. Neither President de Gaulle, whose constitution guaranteed him against excessive electoral or parliamentary interference, nor President Johnson, who was not so safeguarded, were significantly affected by the pressures recognized in liberal systems. Both were vulnerable oaly to quite different pressures, operating outside such systems.Three Barnave: a case of bourgeois class consciousness Ralph Miliband ‘Class consciousness is not a simple concept—or so at least [find and it ‘may therefore be useful to examine one particular instance of it, and of its application in a specific historical context. The case is that of ‘Bamave, who played a leading role in the early phases of the French Revolution, and who in any case deserves, if only for his Introduction {la Révolution Frangaise, to be better known than he is.* ‘Before speaking of Bamnave, however, I should like to make a few ‘general remarks about class consciousness, and to suggest that it may be understood at a number of distinct and ascending levels; and that, at each level, it is more commonly found among members of a privileged class than among members of a subordinate one. Firstly and most obviously, class consciousness may be taken to denote a fairly accurate perception of class membership on the part of a particular individual, This is the basic, elementary meaning of class consciousness: e factory worker who thinks of himself as belonging, say, to the middle class, or who does not think of himself as belonging to any particular class, is clearly not class conscious. Even this elementary type of class consciousness may often be lacking in members of subordinate classes. But it is seldom lacking among members of privileged ones. Secondly, class conscionsness may denote a certain perception of the immediate interests of the class of which one is conscious of being a jemaber. The two perceptions may be but are not necessarily linked: is quite possible for members of the working class to be aware of their ‘class membership, even to be sharply aware of it, without being aware ‘of what are the immediate interests of the class to which they belong. This, again, is much less likely to be true of members of privileged classes. Even where these two levels of class consciousness exist, they may | ] Barnave: bourgeois class consciousness 23 not lead to a third level of such consciousness, which involves a till to advance the interests ofthe class, Thus, itis possible for an individual 1 have a clear perception of his class, and of its interests, but to lack the will, for whatever reason, to do anything in order to advance these interests. One such reason, not seldom encountered among members of the working class, is a desire to escape from that class: a worker who, rough conscious of belonging to the working class, and of its interests, is primarily concerned to ‘rise? above it, is not in this sense class con- scious. This also applies to members of privileged classes: at all times, some of them, though class conscious in the two first meanings, have chosen to ally themselves with subordinate classes. Such people are familiar figures in all working-class movements, often in positions of leadership. They are diclassé to a greater or lesser extent (for they may ‘carry into working-class movements modes of thought and behaviour associated with their clas or origin). Fourthly, and most difficult of al, lass consciousness may be under stood to mean, not only a consciousness of class membership and of its interests, and not only the will to advance these interests, buta particular perception of what their advancement requires, not simply in immediate ‘but in mote general, global terms, Within the Marxist tradition, class consciousness has generally been, defined, in relation to the working class, in terms of a specific commit- ‘ment to the evolutionary abolition of the capitalist system: @ worker ‘who is not thus committed is not, in this sense, class conscious. How far this is a legitimate definition of class consciousness is not ‘here my concera, though the question is of great interest, with many ‘complex ramifications. What I should like to note, however, is that in this Marxian sense clats consciousness has not been a particularly common phenomenon, More often than not, class consciousness has appeared in the form, so to speak, of false consciousness. It is this, of course, which largely accounts for the non-occurrence, so far, of the ‘kind of socialist revolution which Marx envisaged; and it is also this which led Lenin to insist on the paramount importance of the party as the mediating agency between the workers’ movement and the achievement of true class consciousness. ‘The question of true versus false class consciousness presents itself lifferently in relation to privileged classes. In the Marxian perspective, the worker is falsely conscious when he fails to perceive that his interests require the abolition of capitalism; but its abolition is not only the condition of the liberation of his class, but of society as @ whole, False consciousness, in this sease, is also the failure to realize the universal ‘task which the proletariat is called upon to perform, Bourgeois false consciousness is precisely the opposite, in that it entails the belief that ‘the bourgeoisie’s own interests and aspirations are synonymous with the24 Ralph Miliband best interests of all classes. The worker is falsely conscious when be fils to realize the universal nature of his role, the bourgeois because he fails to_realize the partiality of his class. The former state of false consciousness is remediable, since, far fom being necessary to the ‘worker, it is an impediment to him. Bourgeois false consciousness, on the other hand, serves a crucial class purpose, since it legitimates bourgeois rule in the eyes of the bourgeois, and thus makes it easier for him to press that legitimation upon others, The bourgeois needs this kind of false consciousness, in order to vel from himself, and hopefully from others, the true nature of bourgeois rule. ‘For each new class which puts itself in the place of one ruling before it’, Marx writes in ‘The German Ideology, “is compelled merely in order to carry through its aim, to represent its interest as the common interest of all the mem~ bers of society, that is, expressed in an ideal form: it has to give its ideas the form of universality, and represent them as the only rational, universally valid ones.? However, Marx also notes, there may be certain circumstances in which ‘its interest really is more connected ‘with the common interest of all other non-ruling classes, because under the pressure of hitherto existing conditions its interest has not yet been able to develop as the particular interest of a particular clas’® In both cases, Marx has especially in mind the challenge of the French Third Estate to the ancien régime. But, notwithstanding the qualification, the only class which, for Marx, really does represent ‘the common interest of all is the proletariat. Be that as it may, Barnave, as I hope to show, affords a remarkably clear example of bourgeois class consciousness. Indeed, there is no one in the French Revolution who exemplifies it better, and who more consistently expresses that consciousness in his political practice. Barnave was born in 176r in Grenoble, the son ofa leading lawyer in the town and of a mother who, though born in the petty provincial nobility, hhad become a resolute member of the haue bourgecisie of Grenoble to ‘which her husband belonged. Both parents were Protestants, but their child, for purely practical reasons, had to be baptized as 2 Catholic. A ‘good case has, however, been made out for the view that before his death Barnave ‘was no longer a Christian, or a deist but an atheist* In choosing a profession, he followed in his father’s footsteps, joined the Bar in 1782, and practised in Grenoble. He later recalled that he was a zealous reader of political works. In 1783 he delivered an address before the Parlement of Grenoble on ‘The Necessity of the Division of Powers in the Body Politic, and the choice of subject indicates, as does | Barnave: bourgeois class consciousness 25 his later work, that Montesquieu’s Esprit des Lois had a considerable influence upon him. On a different plane, Bamave expresses with ‘extraordinary clarity the political frustrations of the young, able and thrusting bourgeois in the last years of the ancien régime, There was then, he wrote, only room for great minds, not for great men, by which ‘he obviously means great public figures and men of action. The man who ‘was born with ‘a great sou!’ could only develop in aclimatc ofcatiwusiasm and activity. But as soon as one such had enough reason to look around hhim, he discovered a desert. There was no relationship between great ideas and the actual purposes which he found about him. All roads are ‘closed and his spitit is stifled. The path of public service is narrow, difficult, discouraging and full of every demeaning and repulsive ‘obstacle all that is open to him is a petty and confining career. All that is left to him is writing, but this is acold, sterile, problematicalternative.® OF course, one must beware of investing such sentiments with an ‘exaggerated significance based upon retrospective reading. What they ‘express is a diffuse frustration rather than a powerful reforming pur- pose; and an availability for action, should opportunity offer itself, rather than a definite commitment to it. The opportunity came as a result of the manifold failures of the régime, manifested in its financial difficulties, which forced it to try to raise money by convoking, at the end of 1786, an assembly of notables, mainly composed of aristocrats. ‘This inaugurated the ‘aristocratic revolution’ which broke the way for the bourgeois Third Estate and provided the impulse which Barnave and many like him needed. Barnave later expressed well the sense of impending opportunities which he then felt: ‘Ideas [he wrote] which had engaged me when they were still only the object of fruitless curiosity, absorbed me totally when public events began to suggest that there was some hope for them. From the convocation of the notables onwards, my only concern was with public affairs. The thought of seeing my country ‘emancipated, and the caste to which I belonged raised from the humiliating state to which a misguided government had more than ‘ever seemed to condemn it [note the automatic juxtaposition ‘between national and class emancipation] exalted all the faculties of my soul, and filled me with zeal and enthusiasm. I devoted my existence to the cause of liberty, and gave all my time to labours which made it possible for me to serve it? Jn other words, the will for great changes emerged when circumstances disclosed at least the possibility of their achievement. In the two years preceding the meeting of the Estates General at Versailles in May 1789, Bamave was, in the Dauphiné, one of the leading figures in the political agitation which gripped France, and e26 Ralph Miliband which was felt with exceptional acuteness in his province. When the ‘government tried in 1788 to crush the Parlement’s resistance to it, and to compel the Parlement of Grenoble to endorse its edicts, Barnave, in his own words, ‘did not hesistate to be the first to step into the breach’? with a fierce pamphlet, Esprit des Edits, which became sufficiently notorious to be condemned to suppression as incendiary and unpatriati.® ‘The pamphlet, written in an inflated and declamatory style which. Barnave soon abandoned, insistently stressed that the only remedy for ‘France's ills was the convocation of the Estates General. It noted that insurrection was the resource common to all oppressed peoples’, but that it was ako ‘the last and the worst’ of resources.’ Even so, he did not hhesistate to appeal to ‘owners of offices, owners of land, traders, capitalists’ to unite and rally to ‘the party of the magistrature’; and to call upon all citizens to refuse their help in the execution of the govern- ‘ment’s new laws.!® On the other hand, the pamphlet is also notable for a conviction which endured throughout Barnave’s politica life, and which, ‘was eventually to send him to the guillotine—namely, the conviction that the King was, or at least could be turned into, the ally of the Third Estate in the task of reform, and that the responsibility for misguided policies was not his, but that of his advisers. In this, of course, Barnave ‘was only echoing a common sentiment: hatred of the King, let alone republicanism, dates from a later period. The Third Estate certainly hoped that it could achieve its purposes with the King, against the privileged orders and their ministerial supporters. By coincidence, Barnave’s pamphlet was published on the same day as occurred an outbreak of popular violence in Grenoble in defence of the Parlement—the Day of the Tiles, as it came to be known. Barnave himself had nothing to do with this episode, but he wrote an address to the King about it, which also foreshadows some of his later positions. ‘Theaddress deplored the violence which had occurred, but explained that “the least enlightened class of your subjects forgot, in their despair, the endless resources that we have in your justice’. This said, he went on to affirm the rights of the King’s subjects, and to urge him to call the Estates General. As was to happen later on similar but far more important occasions, Barnave clearly marks the gulf which separates hhim and his fellow bourgeois from ‘the least enlightened class’ of the King’s subjects; but he also finds their actions useful as a lever upon a ‘monatch thought capable of leading the movement for reform. ‘The King finally had to yield and the Estates General were convoked. ‘The Dauphiné had played 2 notable part in this outcome, and so, ‘within the strict limits of the province, bad Barnave. ‘While everywhere csc, he later recalled, ‘the aristocracy was still alone in its insurrection against the throne, the Dauphiné was already claiming the tights of the Barnave: bourgeois clas consciousness 27 Third Estate’, and by putting forward the great question of the com- position of the Estates General ‘it was laying the first foundations of a democratic revolution’."* Barnave’s own reward was his election to the Estates General as the youngest member of the Dauphiné deputation. ‘Rather than follow him now into the French Revolution, I should like to turn to his Introduction @ la Révolution Frangaive. To do so does violence to chronology, since he wrote these notes (and they are no more than notes) in 1792, after the Constituent Assembly had concluded its labours, and after he, like all his fellow deputies, had been forced out of | the legislative arena by the Assembly’s decree, which he had strongly opposed, against immediate re-cligibility. It is most unlikely that Bar- nave could have written the first, theoretical, and most important part of the Introduction before he hed gone through the experience of revolution, At Jeast none of his previous work suggests that he could. But neither is it at all likely that he could have written the Iniroduction in 1792 if he had not in earlier years already formed at least the basic ideas which inspire it. In this sense, Barnave’s political practice may be seen as the application of his general conception of the Revolution, just as that conception no doubt acquired more mature form as a result of his political practice. m ‘The Introduction @ la Révolution Fransaise is one of the most remarkable documents to come out of the French Revolution. Compared with it, all other attempts by contemporaries to account for its occurrence and to fathom the underlying determination of the events they witnessed seem like naive essays in ideslist history; and this is not east the case for ‘men of far greater stature than Barnave, for instance, Robespierre and Saint-Just, whose view of the Revolution constitutes an enormous misunderstanding of what it was about. It may well be argued that if they had not misunderstood what it was about, if they had not been ‘falsely conscious’, they could not have achieved what they did; but this does not affect the point. Nor is the Introduction sitaply about the French Revolution. It is concerned rather with a much larger historical dynemic of which the Revolution is a part. It's impossible to achieve an accurate appreciation of the great revolution which has just occurred [Barnave begins] by considering it in an isolated manner, by detaching it from the history of the empires which surround us and of the centuries which have preceded us. In order to judge its nature, and to assign it to its28 Ralph Miliband real causes, it is necessary to look further, and to perceive the place ‘we occupy in a larger system: it is by considering the general movement which has, from feudalism to our own days, led European governments successively to change their form, that we shall understand clearly the point at which we have arrived, and the general causes which have fed us to it.* ‘This insistence on the need for a broad historical perspective for the appreciation of the nature of the French Revolution is not what is remarkable about the Introduction. Others spoke ia much the same way of that need, and tried to meet it—for instance, Condorcet, with his Sketch of the Progress of the Human Spirit. What is unique about the Introduction, in relation to other contemporary writings and pronounce- ments about the Revolution, is that the ‘general system’ which Barnave tried to elaborate is firmly grounded in what may properly be called a materialist interpretation of history. No doubt one’s appreciation of the ‘wo:k must up to a point depend oa the view one takes of that interpre~ tation. But here, at any rate, is an outstanding early example of it, “a first sketch’, as Jean Jaurts called it in a formula which does not do full justice either to Marx or to Barnave ‘of Mars’s economic materialism’ 35 Some of the passages of the Introduction which do, indeed, anticipate the Marxist interpretation of history have been appropriately high- lighted by Jaurés and more recently by Fernand Rude, But since the Introduction has not been translated into English, I may be forgiven for quoting liberally from it. The key to Barnave’s sketch of political change lies in the develop- ‘ment and transformation of forms of property. In a first stage of society, man, who lives by hunting, barely knows property: His bow, his arrows, the game he kills, the skins which cover him, are practically his only possessions. The whole land is common to all. At this stage, political institutions, if they do exist in some carly form, cannot have property as their basis democracy is, then nothing but independence and natural equality. The need for a leader in combats creates the first elements of monarchy. The credit attributed to knowledge, which is always the greater, the ‘more ignorant is the maze of men, gives birth to the firet kind of aristocracy, that of elders, priests, diviners, doctors, Druids and sauguries; in short, aristocracy founded on knowledge, which has always preceded that of arms and of land, and which, from the ‘origins of society has always acquired considerable power by virtue ‘of some real services which it renders allied to a great deal of deceit. ‘With the growth of population and the need for a less precarious and Barnave: bourgeois class consciousness 29 more ample subsistence, men tame animals, raise flocks and enter a pastoral stage: Property then begins to influence institutions. The rich and the poor cease to be equal [presumably in political terms} and natural democracy has alreacy disappeared. The need to protect and defend possessions requires that greater strength be given to military and civil authority. Those who dispose of that strength attract wealth by virtue of power, just as by virtue of wealth they increase their power and keep it in their own hands. Thus, there may exist, at this stage of society, arrangements where aristocratic or monarchical power acquires an unlimited extension, as examples from a number of Asiatic regions prove.” As the needs of the population grow still greater, so does man cease to be a nomad and becomes a cultivator, Sactificing the remainder of his independence, he binds himself, so to speak, to the land and submits to the need of regular toil. Then is the land divided between individuals (rarely, and perhaps never [Barnave also notes} has it happened that the frst distribution of land has been made more or less equally);!* property no longer includes only the flocks which graze on the land, but the land itself, Nothing is in common: soon, the fields, the forests, even the rivers become property; and the right to property, acquiring ever greater scope, infiuences ever more powerfully the distribution of power. {tis at this point that Bamave introduces for the first time the factor which, for him, makes possible an altogether different and bencficial advance of society, namely, what he calls the ‘progress of the arts’, by which he means the grogress of commerce and industry, as well a8 the advance of knowlecge. It is a ‘definite principle’ that whea there is no economic activity other than agriculture, the larger estates will progressively absorb the smaller ones. It is when there is commerce and industry that the work of the poor can, litle by little, attract to itself a portion of the lands of the rich.” On this view, aristocratic Jand-ownership leads to the further concentration of wealth; industry and commerce, on the contrary, lead to its ‘democratic’ dispersion, In the earlier pericd, Barnave also suggests, the peasant, poor, scattered in the countryside, is not only bowed down by his needs, but also by the nature of his labour, which separates him from his fellows and isolates him. It is only the coming together of men in cities which gives to the weak the means of resisting by the force of numbers the influence of the strong; and it is ‘the progress of the arts? which ‘maintains and increases this concentration in cities.30 Ralph Miliband Barnave paints a striking picture of the mental subjection of the poor at the pre-commercial and pre-industrial stage: In this stage of society [he writes] the poor are also ground down by their ignorance. They have lost that natural sagacity, that boldness of imagination, which are characteristic of the man roaming in the forest, those customs and maxims of wisdom which are the fruit of the contemplative life of pastoral peoples. They hhave not yet acquired the knowledge and the boldaess of thought which wealth and the progress of the arts introduce into all classes of society. Usually alone, absorbed by constant and monotonous work, they provide an example of the last degree of degradation into which human nature may fall, Thus it is that some people easily acquire over the multitude the three-fold domination of wealth, power and knowledge, and that they concentrate in their hands the government of the state, the administration of justice, ‘the military command and the priesthood.* Landed property, Barnave also argues, has its origin in conquest and ‘occupation, which only favour a small number: Industrial wealth, on the contrary, is produced by the laborious portion of the people. Its origin is in labour, It is through it that the rich become dependent on the labour of the poor, and that the industrious poor are able, little by litle, to draw to themselves some parcels of the property of the rich, and finally to obtain some portions of the rich man’s lands, It is through industry that they acquire, with a greater degree of wealth, the education and the tide which one associates with it, And it is also through it that the people are assembled in those great workshops which we call cities, and that they manage, by their assembly, to oppose an effective resistance to the oppression of great landowners. Industrial property and capital are therefore the principle of democracy, as landed property is the principle of aristocracy. Barnave further suggests that where the only form of property is Janded property, ‘the social bond and, so to speak, the cohesion between the different parts [of society] can only be very weak’? Here too he draws a strong contrast with the conditions produced by industry and ‘capital ina passage which recalls (of course, minus Bernave's apologetic intent) the well-known tribute which Marx and Engels paid in The Communist Manifesto to the bourgeoisie, Because of these new conditions, hevwrites, objects of exchange multiply, great wealth is easily transported, all distances grow smaller, a constant circulation occurs between all parts of the country; and as capital accumulates, so can the State, through taxation, acquire the means of paying for its administration Barnave: bourgeois class consciousness 31 and for an army which belongs, not to each section which provides it, but to the whole of socety: A numerous class of citizens is formed which applies itself to ‘commerce and mancfacture. Since that class has a great need of ‘peace and protection, it will provide the government, by granting it taxation, with the means of obtaining sufficient power. Thus, just as landed property is, in all large states, the basis of aristocracy and federalism [i.e. weak central government], 80 is capital the principle of democrecy and of unity. Barnave is in fact describing (and applauding) the rise of the bourgeoisie in terms of the development of ‘the useful arts, trades, commerce in all its branches, and that part of the sciences which are immediately concerned with their simplification and their improve- ment’, je, technical change. Once such forms of activity were able to make their way through ‘feudal anarchy’, their advance became rapid and universal, ‘and oe must consider them as the principal agent which, in the space of four or five centuries, has modified all govern- ments and changed the face of Europe’.* For Barnave, the economic evolution which he describes was 0 strong, so inteversible that it was bound, in the long run, to produce what he calls, in terms which here remind one of de Tocqueville, 2 “democratic revolution’. In this sense Barnave is undoubtedly an ‘economic determinist’, though not by any means a crude one. “The will of man’, he does say, “does not make the laws: it can do nothing, or almost nothing, about the forms of government.” It is the ‘nature of things’, the social stage at which the people bas arrived, the land it inhabits, its wealth, its needs, its habits, which distribute power.** In the same train of thought, he has a passage which itis surely not fanciful to see as an amazing if ‘very primitive anticipation of those famous lines in Marx’s Preface to A Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy, in which Mare describes the relation of ‘base’ to ‘superstructure’. Barnave’s language is here awkward and strained, because he is obviously struggfing to bring out a difficult thought, Zor which he is seeking an appropriate metaphor: ‘One may, from a certain point of view [he writes], consider population, wealth, customs, knowledge as the elements and the substance which form the social body [i.e. the base}, and see in the laws and the government the tissue which contains and envelops them [ie. the superstructure). In all situations, iti necessary that the one should be in proportion to the other in strength end scope. Ifthe tissue expands in the degree that the substance grows in volume, the progress of the social body will32, Ralph Miliband cccur without violent commotion. But if, instead of being an elastic force, it opposes itself rigidly {il oppose une rigidité cassante], there will come a moment when proportionality will ead and where the substance mast be destroyed, or where it must break its envelope and expand [il faudra que humeur soit consumée, ot qu'elle brise son envelope et stextravase].”* Compare Marx: Ata cettain stage of this development, the material productive forces of society come in conflict with the existing relations of production, or—what is but a legal expression for the same thing—with the property relations within which they have been ‘at work hitherto, From forms of development of the productive forces these relations turn into their fetters. Then begins an epoch of social revolution (K. Marx and F. Engels, Selected Works, Moscow, 1950, I, p. 329). Its in the light ofthis general schema that Bamnave sees not only the French Revolution, but also such events as the Crusades and the Reformation. It was not the humiliation to which were subjected the pilgrims at the hands of the Turks, or the preaching of Peter the Hermit, or the scandal of indulgences and the anger of Luther which were the real causes of these great explosions: for when general circumstances have prepared them, some incident or other always occurs to bring them about. It was when ‘the narrow and rigid bounds’ of the feudal régime could no longer contain the mass of population, of industry and activity which the progress of civilization had produced in Europe that the Crusades occurred; and it was when the progress of industry and ‘capital had loosened the bonds of superstition that a Church, oppressive to king and people alike, became vulnerable to Luther’s preaching, and lost a part of Europe. “In the long run’, Barnave writes, ‘political institutions adopt, if one ‘may thus put it, the character of the area [le génie de la localité}.’° Yet, hhe also suggests, and this is where his ‘economic determinism’ is qualified, political institutions can greatly affect the speed of the movement and the forms in which it expresses itself: ‘the will of man’ is not nearly as powerless as he earlier suggests. Thus, he notes, the aristocracy, before the epoch when commerce existed, was ‘by the nature of things’ in possession of power: it made the laws, it ‘created the belief’ and ‘directed the habits’ of the people. It was, of course, careful so to ‘combine? these beliefs and habits as to maintain its power. And where an aristocracy has as much skill as it has zeal in devising ‘means to do it, it may counteract for a very long time, by the strength ofits institutions, ‘the influence of natural causes’. Barnave: bourgeois class consciousness 33 ‘The fact remains, however, that, as soon as ‘the arts? and commerce manage t0 penetrate among the people and to create a new means of wealth for the benefit of the ‘Iaborious class’, a revolution {by which he means here a fundamental transformation} is being prepared in the political order [il se prépare une révolution dans les lois politiques]; a new distribution of wealth produces a new distribution of power. Just as the possession of land raised the aristocracy, so does industrial property raise the power of the people. The people acguires its freedom, it multiplies, it begins to influence public affairs? Even so, the triumph of the ‘democratic revolution” is nat always and absolutely assured. For there are countries where resources are so proportioned that the people may have acquired enough of them to provide the monarchy with enough means to bring down the aristocracy, and yet never enough to te able itself to fight the monarch, With the ‘democratic force and the aristocratic force thus balancing each other equally, the royal power, raising itself above both, paralyses one with the other, and manages to subjugate them. .. . The destiny of these states is to arrive by a slow progression of feudal anarchy, to the most absolute military regime. Here again, and without making too much of it, it is interesting to ‘compare this view of the circumstances in which political power ‘manages to emancipate itself from contending social forces with ‘Marx's view that Bonapartism in France was ‘the only form of govern- ‘ment possible at the time when the bourgeoisie had already lost, and the working class had not yet acquired, the faculty of ruling the nation” (K. Marx, The Civil War in France, in Selected Works, op. cit I, PD. 469-70); and, even more specifically apposite, Engels’s statement ‘that bby way of exception, however, periods occur in which the warring classes balance each other so nearly that the state power, as ostensible mediator, acquites, for the moment, a certain degree of independence of both. Such was the absolute monarchy of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, which held the balance between the nobility and the class of burghers . .. (F. Engels, ‘The Origin of the Family, Private Property and the State, ibid., Il, p. 290). ‘Moreover, even where, as in France, a ‘democratic revolution’ as inevitable, a monarchy possessed of greater skill might have avoided ‘the explosion of popular power’ if it had associated the Third Estate34° Ralph Miliband with the government, and opened all careers to it—instead of which the reverse was done, and the government set itself against ‘the natural ‘march of things’, with the result that it provoked a revolution of which, the monarchy itself became the victim.** In his comments on the Introduction, Jaurés suggests that Barave is so completely absorbed in the struggle between the aristocracy and the ‘bourgeoisie that he does not for a moment ask himself whether the possession of capital is not a new privilege which makes possible the oppression of labour; and also that he has no awareness of the coming, struggle between the bourgeoisie and the proletariat. This, though ‘generally true, also seems to me to require some qualification. For one thing, Barnave does allude in the Introduction to the possibility that ‘a new aristocracy, a sort of bourgeois and mercantile aristocracy, smight arise by means of this new kind of wealth’ and become master of the government. But he does admittedly consider this hypothesis, to be applicable only to ‘small states’, and hastens to reject it for large ones, where, he argues, 2 numerous class of well-to-do citizens has the strongest interest in the maintenance of internal peace and in the existence of a strong executive power capable of imposing ‘general laws’, ie. laws that would be to the general interest.” In other words, a “bourgeois aristocracy’, which would control the government for its ‘own purposes, is impossible in such a country as France. The argument is exceedingly superficial, and one secs here the otherwise lucid and percipient bourgeois philosopher of history falter and refuse to allow his thought to advance into dangerous paths—paths, incidentally, which others in the radical and democratic movement did not hesitate t0 tread. Barnave needs to assume that the revolution for which he speaks is capable of achieving what he calls an ‘intimate cohesion’ between all parts of the nation.’ Here, above all, is where true and false bourgeois consciousness uneasily coexist. ‘On the other hand, when Bamave does, in the second part of the Iniroduction, come to look back upon the actual course of the Revolu- tion, he shows himself well aware of the division, not indeed between “capitalist? and ‘proletarian’ (the terms, for the most part, do not properly fit the social struggles of the French Revolution), but between the bourgeois Third Estate and ‘the poo’. Indeed, it is not too much to say that, in his political practice, he is obsessed by that awareness. But here, too, the very sharpness of his bourgeois consciousness requires him to blur his vision: and he will, in the course of the Revolution, achieve the necessary degree of opaqueness with the belief that it is not the division itself which is of consequence, since rich and poor do have 2 common interest in stability; what is dangerous is the ‘corruption’ of the poor by ambitious demagogues. When he speaks of Barnave: bourgeois class consciousness 35 the Reformation, he sees Luther's preaching as ‘a spark which fell on a mount of combustible matter’.®® But when he speaks of the bourgeois revolution, he cannot afford to apply to it his own historical perspectives and his world therefore comes to be filled with evil men, intent, for their ‘own purposes, upon misleading ignorant multitudes which would otherwie be content to accept the beneficent rue of their bourgedis ‘As I noted when I began, Barnave's political career seems to me to provide an illuminating example of the application, so to speak, of one particular sort of class consciousness to political practice, and it is to that practice, or at least to its most salient features, that T now tum. wv Barnave’s political careet describes a trajectory which is closely deter- mined by the course of the Revolution from 1789 to 1792. In 1789, when the Third Estate had to force its claims to national leadership upon the King and the régime, he was one of the most resolute members cof the ‘patriotic’ party in the Constituent Assembly. But once the Thitd Estate had established its political predominance, and had asserted its power to reshape France in the image it desired, he soon ‘became one of the main advocates of caution, compromise and con- solidation. This earned him, in the eyes of the democratic and popular ‘movement, a high place in the crowded gallery of revolutionary turn coats. The change in his position was in fact more apparent than real, and the charge was based upon a misunderstanding of what he had ‘wanted throughout, It is the circumstances rather than Barnave which, changed, and which dictated his shift of position. For what itis worth, his political career is marked by a very high degree of consistency: indeed, he died of it. Even in the first weeks after the meeting of the Estates General, Barnave had managed to attract some attention as a spokesman of the ‘Third Estate. But it was a few unpremeditated words uttered in the National Assembly after the fall of the Bastille which shot him into public prominence. Sitting in Versailles under the imminent threat of military repression, the Assembly had received the news of the popular insurrection in Paris on 14 July with a marked lack of enthusiasm; and the enthusiasm which the deputies did show the next day, when the King let it be xknown that the military reinforcements would be removed from Paris ‘and Versailles, was not least due to their hope that this would make it possible to prevent further ‘anarchy’ and to restore order, In fact, their dearest wish, after the fall of the Bastille and the King’s apparent36 Ralph Miliband capitulation, was to bring all disorders to an end and to ensure the fall ‘resumption of control in Paris by the bourgeois militia. On 22 July two bitterly hated men, the financier Foulon and his son-in-law, Berthier, the Intendant of Paris, were put to death in gruesome circumstances by a crowd assembled at the Hétel de Ville. It was the next day, after the National Assembly had listened to loquent laments upon their fate, and to diverse proposals for the restoration of order, that Barnave uttered the words which earned him an entirely undeserved reputation for ‘extremism’ : ‘Was then the blood ‘which has just been spilled so pure? he exclaimed, Recalling in the Introduction the speech in which these words occurred, Barnave said that they could not be justified, and that he hhad in the stress of the moment gone further than he should. There is, something significant about the fact that this usually cool young ‘bourgeois, who made a paramount virtue of self-control, should have lost it at that point, for it marks well the struggle in the hearts of many bourgeois deputies between the fear of popular disorder and the hope that it might serve their purposes. Thus, Barnave also recalled that while his speech deplored the killings, he insisted that they did not warrant a renunciation of the Revolution: all revolutions produced such misfortunes, and the Assembly might perhaps rejoice in the fact that this one had caused so little bloodshed. Moreover, he said, if they desired to prevent the bloody calamities which seemed to threaten the ‘whole kingdom, what was required was not lamentations and pro- clamations, but that property owners should be armed against ‘brigands” as rapidly as possible, and that the municipalities should be given much greater power.‘ Barnave had no more love then than later for popular ‘anarchy’. But neither did he want then to see ‘anarchy’ used as a pretext for halting @ revolution which had only begun, and this was ‘what a number of prominent members of the Third Estate in the Assembly, including the most distinguished member of the Dauphiné deputation, Mounier, were already coming to consider necessary. Barnave did want ‘anarchy’ contained and subdued, but by the re- inforcement of bourgeois power. In a letter written to a correspondent in Grenoble on 15 July, he urged that numerous addresses be sent to the National Assembly and that bourgeois militias should be brought to a state of readiness. ‘No good citizen should refuse this kind of enlistment. The rich are those with the greatest interest in public well-being. The greater part of the Parisian militia is solidly bourgeois, [bonne bourgeoise], and this makes it as reliable for public order as it is redoubtable to tyranny.” At the beginning of August, he also writ to a friend in Grenoble that ‘the disturbances in Paris and in some other cities of the kingdom have furnished people who are weak, ot of bad faith, with an occasion to raise an outcry about anarchy and Barnave: bourgeois class consciousness 37 licence, and to make the Assembly forget that it is from force alone that the achievement of the Constitution which it has to establish can ‘be expected’, But he also adds in the same letter: I should not be extremely sorry if the Assembly were to be moderated by circumstances in this important work, because I am almost sure that if ft had stilt been in its first enthusiasm, it ‘would have gone too far. But deliberate moderation, moderation, ‘from foresight is one thing, and moderation owing to weariness ‘or to haste is another.!® ‘Though he did not sey so, the force of which Barnave spoke could. only be supplied by the National Assembly's distrusted allies among. the common people. In fat, it soon became clear that only by a ‘second. access of revolution’, as the radical journalists called it, could the decrees of the Assembly be imposed upon the King. By the beginning. of October, Barnave belived that the nation must ‘forcefully express its will “9 The pressure was duly supplied by the Parisians’ march on. Versailles on 5 October and their invasion of the Palace on the 6th. ‘Once again, the King, who had steadily resisted the Assembly’s will in the previous months, was forced to capitulate. Barnave later spoke of this popular intervention as ‘terrible events’. But it may well be doubted that he was unduly disturbed by them at the time, since they achieved for the Assembly and for the bourgeois revolution what the ‘Third Estate was by itself unable to secure. However, having been saved, one of the Assembly’s first acts after it had followed the King to Patis was to place martial law on the statute book, and thus 10 signify its firm intention of curbing further agitation. In his history of the French Revolution, Jaur’s described 1799 8 its ‘most ‘orgonic’ year, in the sense that in that yeat, all the fundamental institutions of the new society were created and a decisive impulse was given to the Revolution’. The point is of absolutely crucial importance in explaining Barnave's apparent change of position: it is precisely ‘because he thought that the vast reforms of this period had firmly laid the political foundation of bourgeois hegemony that his not very latent ‘conservatism now came to the fore, and tuned him into one of the main architects of consolidation. AAs early as the spring of 1790, the ‘colonial question” had already demonstrated how limited by bourgeois interests was his conception of the Revolution. ‘Hardly anyone seriously sought to place the question of slavery on. the agenda of the Revolution. But the question which did urgently arise was whether the universalistic principles upon which the Third38 Ralph Miliband Estate rested its legitimacy also applied to the free coloured men in the ‘colonies, and notably in San Domingo, the brightest and most valuable jewel in the French colonial crown. If they did, the question of slavery itself might soon come into question, But in any case to assert the political rights of the free coloured men meant waging a bitter struggle with colons utterly determined to maintain their exclusive rule, and involved the risk of colonial secession, For Barnave there was no room for doubt: the only problem was to ensure that France retain her colonies and her colonial trade. As Jaurés says, for him ‘anything that could impede the power of the bourgeoisie and of capitalism was contrary to the Revolution . .. his general conception of society and of politics did not allow him any other posture in the colonial question’. After his enforced retirement, Barnave devoted some pages to the colonies, and stated it as a fundamental principle of policy that France needed her colonies, not only to ensure its wealth and prosperity, but its freedom as well; the condition of freedom was an increase in wealth and prosperity, in the achievement of which the colonies and colonial trade must play a vital role. In particular, France needed protection against foreign competition, and the retention of her exclusive trading. relations with the colonies. Whatever might be said for free trade in theory (and it was, Bamnave agreed, a great principle in theory), it ‘would, in present circumstances, undoubtedly bring about French rin? ‘Armed with these convictions, Barnave tumed himsetf into the chief advocate in the Constituent Assembly of a colonial poticy based upon, any concession to the colons which would keep them within the French fold, From March 1790, when he first spoke on the question as the rapporteur of the Colonial Committee, until the very end of the Assembly in September 179r, he argued for that policy with stubborn determina- tion, ‘Long before then, Barnave, in common with his political friends, had come to believe that not only must the Revolution not be exported to the colonies, but that it must be brought to a close in France itself. ‘As the work of reform which had been made possible by the popular ‘movements of 1789 proceeded through 1790, so was the Constitution- alist faction of which he was a leading member increasingly and almost obsessively preoccupied with the dangers of popular agitation and ‘social disorganization’, of course fomented by men whom Barnave ‘was soon to denounce as self-seeking demagogues. They argued that the Revolution had been betrayed and urged the need for a ‘second revolution’. It was precisely the fear of such a revolution which caused men like Barnave to strive for a rapid settlement, be it at the cost of concessions to the enemies of the Revolution, In May x79 Barnave's close fiend, Duport, sounded the alarm in terms which Barnave Barnave: bourgeois class consciousness 39 himself was to echo, in more dramatic circumstances, a few weeks later. His theme was a simple one, namely, that the Revolution was over, and that to continue it exposed the country to civil war and despotism. Now that liberty hed been won, the most important of all tasks was the achievement of stability.** Here was the authentic voice of one section at least of bourgeois France, Bringing the Revolution to a close meant, above all, the establish- ment of a strong executive power, though those who worked to achieve it did not then, it may be worth noting, think of it in Caesarist terms— it was still too early for the Third Estate to develop a strong penchant in that direction, What they wanted was a powerful monarchy, but one that would be advised and largely controlled by the new conservatives. In fact, this is what Bamave had always wanted: the unfolding of the Revolution merely confirmed his belief that a constitutional and limited monarchy was, as he later wrote in the Introduction, ‘the ‘happiest, the most beautiful of all forms of government.#? That belicf wwas based on an entirely unsentimental view of what such a monarchy would achieve, namely, a stability based upon the containment both of aristocracy and of ‘popular anarchy’; in other words, here, for him, wwas the linchpin of the new bourgeois order. This concept was dealt a terrible blow by the King’s fight from Paris on 21 June 1791. However, his arrést at Varennes provided a ‘chance of retrieving the situation, and of halting the spread of dangerous ideas to which his flight gave vast encouragement. With the King gone, the whole new constitutional structure was in jeopardy, and the road lay open to further and perilous innovations. With his arrest, the problem became a different one altogether, that is, how to maintain Louis XVI on the throne as if nothing had happened. ‘The solution to that problem, in the elaboration of which Barnave took a major part, was threefold: firstly, to resort to what may fairly bbe called the first great lie in the history of mass politics, namely, the insistence that the King had not fied, but had been ‘spirited away’ Cealevé’) by evil counsellors; secondly, to claim that the inviolability Which was guaranteed to him by constitutional provision shielded him from trial; and, thirdly, to repress the radicals who now clamoured for his removal. ‘Barnave was one of the three deputies sent out by the National Assembly to bring back the King to Paris. Once the King was back in Paris, it was also Bamave and his ftiends who took it upon themselves, to advise him as to the terms of his reply to the commission of inquiry set up by the Assembly. And it was Barave who, during the delibera- tions on the King’s fate in the Assembly, delivered on 15 July the speech which made plain what the whole debate was really about. ‘The monarchy, he argued, was essential to France. The ‘absurd40. Ralph Miliband Republic’ which some people supported would lead to disorder and anarchy, until the nation, unable to resist the blandishments of ‘great generals, great orators, great philosophers’, would opt for tyranay in order to rid itself of its troubles. But the zeal question, the question which concerned the national interest, was this: ‘Are we going to conclude the Revolution, or are we going to start it again?” Great hharm was being done by the perpetuation of a revolutionary movement which had destroyed all that needed to be destroyed, which had ted ‘them to the point where it was necessary to stop, and which needed a coming together of all parts of the French nation. From all that had ‘been achieved, there resulted a ‘great truth’: this was that the Revolu- tion could not move one pace forward without danger. If it continued, “the first step it could well take in the pursuit of liberty was the abolition of the monarchy; and the next, in pursuit of equality, was an attack on property’, For what other aristocracy, he asked, still remained to be destroyed but that of property? (Thus Barnave acknowledges here, in the heat of political battle, the existence of an ‘atistocracy of property” which he denies, for countries like France, in the Introduction.) Those ‘who wanted to make revolutions did not make them with ‘metaphysical maxims’: they needed the support of the multitudes, and they would not get it without giving the multitudes real, palpable benefits. Every- body knew that the night of 4 August (je. the night of 4 August 1789, when the Constituent Assembly had ‘abolished? the feadal régime) had drawn more support for the Revolution than all the constitutional decrees. But what night of 4 August, he asked, remained to be accom- plished, unless it were laws against possessions ? And even if such laws were not passed, who would guarantee that it would not happen all the same, because of the weakness of the government, because they had not concluded the Revolution and repressed the movement which perpetuated it? With the explicit appeal for the repression of the radical movernent went 2 no less explicit appeal to the aristocracy for an acceptance of what had been achieved. Everybody must realize that it was in the common interest for the Revolution to stop. Those who had lost must understand that it was impossible to push it back, and that the only ‘question now was how to consolidate it. ‘The National Assembly, increasingly worried by a radical agitation which had been gathering strength in the months preceding the King’s flight, but which had been given 2 tremendous impulse as a result of it, exonerated him, in the knowledge that this might lead to a direct confrontation which was now part of the strategy of Barnave’s faction, ‘On the night of 15 July the Jacobin Club split and all but a few of its parliamentary members left it to form a new club, the Feuillants, ‘which marked the institutionalization of a conservative party which had Barnave: bourgeois class consciousness 41 ‘existed as an informal group for some considerable time, On 17 July the split in the revolutionary ranks was given a further and far more dramatic expression with the shooting by the National Guard into a vast crowd of demonstrators assembled on the Champ de Mars to protest against the Assembly's decision. This Massacre of the Champ de Mars, which received the approval of the Assembly, marks the first of the many bloody encoanters between bourgeois power and popalar movements which have punctuated French history, and it also made explicit the division between two conceptions of what the Revolution ‘was about—the one a conception of it as a restricted operation designed to enthrone the bourgeoisie on the ruins of the old régime; the other a conception of it as a far more democratic and ‘popular’ enterprise, ‘which was never intended to go beyond the bounds of bourgeois property relations, yet which went well beyond what Bamave and his friends thought to be congruent with the ‘national interest’. ‘As I noted before, however, Barnave refused to consider the danger of social subversion in terms of a direct confrontation between the men of property and the propectyless. He explained his own appreciation ‘of what he saw as the real danger in another major speech in the National Assembly, in defence of a further increase in the conditions required for the enjoyment of membership of electoral assemblies, In that speech, Barnave stressed the distinction between democratic and representative government, and argued that to be a member of inter- mediate electoral assemblies was not a right, but a function, the qualifications for whose performance it was for ‘society’ to determine. ‘The qualifications required were, firstly, knowledge, and it was un- deniable that the command of some means (‘une certaine fortune’) was the best guarantee of its possession; secondly, an interest in the proceedings, and it was obvious that this would be greater among those ‘who had mote private interests to defend; and, thirdly, an independence ‘of means, which would place the elector above attack and corruption, ‘These advantages, he went on, were not to be sought among the very rich (la classe supérieure des riches”), whose private interests were so ‘great as to separate them from the public interest; nor among those ‘whose complete lack of fortune prevented them from acquiring know- ledge, and who were susceptible to corruption. It was in the class of those with middle fortunes (‘Ia classe mitoyenne des fortunes’) that the necessary qualifications would be found. It might already be Guizot speaking. In any case, Barnave rejects the notion that the division in society runs between the rich and the poor. For as soon as the government was settled and the Constitution assured, there was only the same interest for those who lived ftom property and those who lived from “honest labour’. The real division was between those who wanted a D42 Ralph Miliband stable government and those who only wanted revolution and change, because they grew upon agitation like flies upon filth. A few weeks later he was suggesting that, while all civilized states needed liberty ‘and tranquillity, for the common run of men (‘le commun des hommes") ‘tranquillity was more necessary than liberty. No doubt the people was sovereign. But its representatives could alone act for it, since its interest ‘was almost always linked to political truths of which it could have no clear and deep knowledge. ‘The reactionary programme for which Barnave spoke was supported by the bulk of the Constituent Assembly. It did, after the Massacre of the Champ de Mars, revise the Constitution in more conservative and restrictive directions; and it also applied itself with considerable energy to the repression of the radical and democratic movement. v In addition to his public activities, Bamnave, 2s a member of the ‘triumvirate’ which he formed with Adrien Duport and Alexandre de ‘Lameth, was also engaged in other activities of another and most secret Kind, as counsellor, or rather as would-be-counsellor, to the King by way of correspondence with the Queen, This correspondence, which hhad begun in July 1791, was in line with Barnave’s hope of turning the monarchy into the ally of the bourgeoisie, and of thus achieving a final settlement, on the basis of a strong and stable executive power. In the Introduction, Barnave later suggested that had such a settlement ‘occurred, there would have been a general acceptance of the Revolution those chosen to govern would have been men with both means and talents and the conduct of affairs would have passed ftom the most turbulent to the wisest and most enlightened part of the nation, from that part which overthrew governments to that which had an interest in the status quo’ the revolution would have been really concluded and representative government would have assumed its true character, according to which the class of citizens with fortune and knowledge must govern the state, though not without the obligation to defend the interests and to respect the dignity of ‘the most numerous class’ At frst sight, this hope of consolidating the Revolution with the help of Louis XVI and of Marie-Antoinette, and of turning them into bourgeois monarchs, must seem grotesquely misguided, to say the least. Indeed, the correspondence itself offers conclusive proof of how far Bamave and his friends misread the Queen’s intentions: for while ‘Maric-Antoinette was assuring them of her sincerity and willingness to be guided by them, she was also, with ruthless duplicity, denouncing her correspondents, in other letters, as ‘earagés’ whom she was only Barmave: bourgeois class consciousness 43, Jhumouring in order to gain time; and she was also appealing to her brother, the Emperor of Austria, to intervene so as to crush the Revolution and restore the French monarchy to its previous position of power. ‘However, what makes Bamnave’s endeavours perhaps less grotesque, given the over-riding purpose he had in mind, is precisely the fact that ‘Marie-Antoinete’s only alternative to becoming a bourgeois queen as foreign intervention against Frances and of that there was no real hope ‘at the time. It may well be that war between revolutionary France and ‘old Europe was in the long run inevitable, But it was not inscribed in the history of the Revolution in the spring of 1792. Its occurrence at that time was the responsibility of a disparate and mutually antagonistic conjunction of forces within France—counter-revolutionaries and ‘conservatives who hoped that defeat, which they believed all but certain, would destroy the Revolution; bourgeois revolutionaries who ‘saw war as a means of strengthening the Revolution economically by foreign conquest and socially by diverting popular energies into what they thought were safe channels; ideologues who saw it as a war of liberation. against despotic régimes. It was the Girondins who led a remarkable propaganda campaign for war which had, by the time war ‘eccurred, almost obliterated all opposition to it, By far the most prominent of its opponzats was Robespiérre, because he feared that war would place the Revolution in dire jeopardy. It is incidentally one of the greatest ironies of the Revolution that the Girondins were never more successful than in the advocacy of a policy which doomed them ‘to extinction, since they willed the war but did not will the concessions ‘to democratic demands which its successful prosecution imperatively required; and that Robespierre, whom war was to bring to the pinnacle of power, was also its most determined opponent. ‘The ‘triumvirate’ of which Bacnave was a member was also opposed ‘to the war for reasons of its own, the most important one of which ‘was, as Bamave put it later, that it made ‘a second revolution? much more likely. In a memoir addressed to the Emperor of Austria at the beginning of January 1792, he and Duport explained that Louis XVI's ‘only sensible course was to accept the constitutional settlement which hhad now been achieved and to seek the support and confidence of that ‘classe mitoyenne? which formed the core of the nation and assured its ‘wealth and its powers and they also warned the Emperor that war (fo which he was not in any case disposed) was a grave threat to him ‘00, since it was bound to spread the ‘revolutionary principle’ beyond the frontiers of France and arouse feelings ageinst aristocrats and ‘kings."" For them the Revolution was no more for export to the rest of Europe than it was to the colonies. (On the other hand, the faction to which Barnave belonged was, in44, Ralph Miliband practice, far too committed to a policy of conciliation with the Court and the other enemies of the Revolution to be able to pursue a consistent course. They did not want war with Austria, but so great was their concern to reinforce the royal power, and to provide the King with an adequate army for the purpose, that they wavered between the assertion that France was threatened and that it was not, Bamave himself had left Paris and retired to Grenoble ia January 1792. The reasons for his departure from the political scene are not clear, In a last letter to the Queen, he had said that his journey was intended ‘to increase the means whereby he could serve the public interest’ #* but there is no evidence that he bestirred himself unduly in the following months. It has also been suggested thet he retired because he had become discouraged with the course of events, the more so since he was no longer in complete agreement with his closest friends and allies** A letter which he wrote to 2 woman ftiend in Paris soon after his return to Grenoble certainly suggests weariness ‘with public affairs. No sooner had he left the centre of movement, noise and corruption, he told her, that he had again found his soul “Itis very interesting to begin a revolution, but very burdensome to be compelled to bring it to an end’. He was, he said, prepared to go back into the fray, but at this moment of rest he was able to reflect and to say that this was not where happiness lay. Of all his former acquain- tances, he also noted, all but five or six were ‘aristocrats’ ie, counter= revolutionaries; most had emigrated; and of those who had begun the Revolution in Grenoble, he found himself the only one who had not become its enemy. Yet ‘the people and the countryside are excellent’ and entirely behind the Revolution: ‘here, the distinction between agé” patriots and moderate ones is of little account, for all are of ‘good faith, and the division between the aristocrats and the patriots erases all others’? What this would seem to suggest—and the point is necessarily tentative—is that Barnave, who had in the previous months been so steeped in intrigues and manoeuvres that bordered on, if they did not amount to, counter-revolutionary politics, now pulled back somewhat, He was caught in a choice which his whole cast of thought and this political career rendered impossible—between counter-revolution on the ‘one hand and a revolutionary movement which he detested on the other. It is not surprising that he should have made a third choice, namely retirement. Nevertheless, he had not altogether given up hope that it might yet be possible to establish the kind of régime he wanted; and even the war, be came to think, might yet be turned to advantage for the purpose, In a letter to Duport at the beginning of April, when it appeared that war would not be long delayed (it was declared on 20 Barnave: bourgeois class consciousness 45 April), Bamave set out what he saw as the two alternatives it posed, and both hinged on the King’s attitude. Once war hed broken out, he said, an attempt would be made to modify the Constitution in favour of the King and the aristocrats. If the King himself supported such policies, the result would ultimately be disastrous, for it would bring about the ‘ferment of a new revolution’, A great many bold and deter- mined mea would begin a war whose certain consequences would be the most horrible ravages history had ever witnessed, and whose ultimate result would probably be the expropriation of the nobles and the overthrow of the King. The monarchy itself might, after a long period of anarchy, be re-established, but Louis XVI would have been swept away and the evils produced by the unstable circumstances which would follow this revolution could be appreciated neither in their intensity nor in their duration.** ‘This prophetic view was accompanied by a very different appreciation ‘of how these horrors could be avoided. The alternative, Barnave argued, was for the King clearly to indicate his will always to remain united with the nation: great cefeats might still be sustained, but the nation ‘would rally round him, and both the monarchy and the government would ultimately be strengthened.** Salvation, in other words, lay in Louis XVI wholeheartedly leading France in a patriotic war, at the ‘end of which he would emerge as the ‘strong king of a bourgeois régime. Here was blindness indeed, born of the refusal to see that if the King stayed on the throne, with all that this represented, the war would be lost and the Revolution would be crushed, which was not what Barnave wanted: but, since he did not want a ‘second revolution” either, the dilemma was altogether insuperable. This was also the dilemma which the Girondins were soon to confiont, and it is interesting that Barnave, a little later, should have ‘been urging his friends to show somewhat less enmity towards them. ‘After all, he told them, somebody had to govern the country, and the faction to which ke had belonged (‘your side’, as he now called it) ‘would be much embarrassed if it was asked to do it, What was needed was to guide the energies of the Girondins in useful directions, to help them govern, and to cose the door to all ‘spirit of faction’. If the Girondins were destroyed, he warned, the Legislative Assembly would be like a vessel without sails.® These promptings show an acute sensitivity to the fact that the Girondins would sooa, faute de mieux, come to constitute a valuable bulwark of bourgeois conservatism, ‘But the ‘second revolution’ which Barnave had feared did comes and when the Tuileries were stormed on 10 August 1792 evidence of his relations with the Court was discovered. He was arrested, tried, and condemned to deata; and he died on the guillotine in November 1793, By then the Jacobins were in control of affairs, and the bourgeois46 Ralph Miliband Revolution was being saved by men like Robespierre and Saint-Just and, a5 I have suggested catlier, they were able to save it precisely because their own vision of the nature and meaning of the Revolution ‘was so much wider than Barave’s. In a sense, he was the victim of his ‘own class consciousness: for that very class consciousness, which gave him so lucid a view of the causes of the Revolution, also fatally narrowed his field of political action. In thie perspective, extreme bourgeois class consciousness appears to impose severe limits upon successful political practices and it may be that the point is not only applicable to bourgeois class consciousness. Notes 1 There is a two-volume biography of Bamave ia English, E. D, Bredby’s The Life of Bamave, which was published in rors (Oxford University Press), and which is well documented but very superficial. ‘There is also a Freach ‘popular’ biography by J. J. Chevallier, Barnave ou les Deux Faces de la Revolution, Payot, Paris, 1936, Bamave’s writings and some of his major spesches were published in an imperfect four-volume edition by Bérenger de la Drome (Ocuores de Barnace) in 1843. Part of the Introduction la Revalution Francaise was republished in an annotated edition by Fernand Rude in 1960 (Armand Colin, Paris). His correspondence with Marie- Antoinette was published by Alma Sédechjelm in 1934, Marie~ Anioinerte et Barnave—Correspondance Secréte—Juillet 1791-Fanvier 1792, Armand Colin, Paris. For an early and excellent appraisal of ‘Bamave, see Jean Jaurts, Histoire Socaliste de la Revolution Frangaise, ‘A. Mathiez,ed., Vel. I, La Constituante, Paris, 1927, Vol. I, L’Oeuore de la Constisuante, Paris, 1927, Vol. U1, La Légisiative, Paris, 1922. See also the important study of the ‘patty’ of which Barnave was @ member by G. Michon, Essai sur Histoire du Parti Feullant, Adrien Duport, Payot, Paris, 1924. For a brief but percipient appreciation in English of Barnave’s Introduction, see also H. J. Laski, The Rise of European Liberalism, Allen & Unwin, London, 1936, pp. 230-6. 2K, Marx and F. Engels, The German Ideology, London, 1965, pp. 61-2. 3 Ibidy p. 62, 4 F. Veunale, ‘Le Testanent Philosophique de Bamave in amales Historiques de la Révolution Frangaise, Vol. XXXVI (1965), P- 216. 5 Ocwores, op. city IIL, p. 70. 6 Introduction a Ia Révolution Frangzise, in Ocuares, op. cit I, p. 96 (henceforth refersed to as Introduction). 7 Wid p. 97. 8 Bradby, op. cits 1, p. 48. 9 Oowores, op. cit, IV, p. 389. 10 [bid p. art. Barnave: bourgeois class consciousness 47 11 Bradby, op. cit., I, p. 49. 12 Bid p49. 13 Invroducton, 3, p. 97- 14 Bid, pp. 1 15 Jaurés, op. cit I, p, 120, 16 Introduetion, T, B.5- 17 Ibid, p. 6. 18 oid BT, 19 Ibid., pp. 6-1. 20 [bid p. 9. 3x Ibid, pp. 9-10. 22 Ibid., p. 31. 23 [bids p. 32. 24 Ibidey D. 32. 25 Bid p. 30. 26 Thid, p. 30. 27 Ibid, p. 3. 28 Ibid., p. 3. 29 Ibid. pp. 37-8. 30 Ibid, pp. 36. 31 Ibid, p. 13. 32 Mid, pp. 13-14 33 Ibid., pp. 58-9. 34 Ibid., p. 84. : 35 Jaures, op. cit.. I, pp. 127-8. 36 Introduction, p14. 37 Ibid, p. 14. 538 Tbid, p. 5. 39 Ibid, p. 40. 40 Ibid., pp, 168-9, Two years later, at a moment of great crisis provoked by the King’s flight from Paris, Barnave also urged the Assembly to provide firm leadership aguinat disorders, and asked his coleagues ‘to recall that, on 14 July, ‘the first impulse was given by a thoughtless class which was easily led, and that disorders ensued. Next day, thinking men, men of property; citizens really attached to this country, armed themselves, disorders ceased, genuinely civic actions followed, and France was saved (Jaurés, op. cit, Il, 376). 4x Chevalier, op. dit . 75. 42 Bradby, op. city p. 129. 43 Michon, op ots ps 44 Introduction, p. 116. 45 Taures, op. oft, Ul, p. 196. 46 Ibid., 11, p. 214. 47 Oeuvres, op. cit., II, pp. 198 ff. 4 Michon, op. cit pp. 208-12. 49 Introduction, p. 6. $0 Ocwores, op. cit T, pp. 242-66. 5t Bid. pp. 269-70.48 Ralph Miliband 52 Ibid. p. 27% 53 Ibid, pp. 283-4. 54 Introduction, p. 205. 55 Ibid. p. 213. 56 Sddethjelm, op. cit, p. 238. 57 Michon, op. city p. 363. 58 Sédethjelm, op. cit, p. 230. $9 Michon, op. city p. 364. 60 Ibid. p. 514. 61 Tbid.y pp. 490-1. 62 Ibid., pp. 498-2. 63 Tbid., p. 497. Four Class structure and social consciousness Tom Bottomore In the opening pages of History and Class Consciousness Lukéics formulates a distinctive view of Marxism: ‘[Marxist theory] . . . is essentially nothing more than the intellectual expression of the revo~ Iutionary process itself” This fundamental idea is restated in a variety of forms throughout the book. For example, Lukics characterizes historical materialism as ‘the self-consciousness of capitalist society’, and else- ‘where he argues, in the course of an analysis of the theory of knowledge in bourgeois philosophy, that the problems which atise fiom the separation of subject and object can only be resolved when @ historical ‘being appears which is at the same time both subject and object; which expresses in thought (as subject) its own historical practice (as object). ‘This subject-object is, of course, the proletariat in capitalist society. ‘Lukics’s version of Marxism plunges ws at once into difficulties. ‘Marxist theory, it is aimed, is the expression in thought of the revolutionary process; but it is Marxist theory itself which tells us that there is a revolutionary process, and defines its characteristics. Or, to state the problem in ancther way: Marxism is in part @ theory of class ‘ideologies, yet at the same time it is (or may be represented as being) itself a class ideology; and its validity or worth as an ideology is held to depend in some way upon its truth as a theory. Lukics himself recognizes, and discusses briefly, the difficulty which arises from the fact that historical materialism has to be applied to itself; his solution is to claim that Marxism is true in the context of a particular social form of production, namely modem capitalism, and thus to accept a qualified relativism.? But he does not deal fully with that aspect of the ‘question which is most important in his own work, namely, that if ‘Maraism is conceived essentially as class consciousness this presupposes the result at which Marxism as theory arrives—that classes, class ‘conflict and class consciousness exist as primary histarical forces. This presupposition underlies Lukics’s book and gives a particular quality °50 Tom Bottomore to the discussion, which is throughout ideological—that is to say, ‘concerned with how Marxism should be conceived in order to be an effective instrument of the revolutionary proletariat—rather than theoretical or empirical. I is not my purpose in this essay to consider the general features of Lukécs’s interpretation of Marxism, but simply to examine his analyeis of clase coneciousnecs.* Since, however, it is in History and Glass Consciousness above all that Lukics expounds his method, and since this method is connected in a peculiarly close fashion with the idea of class consciousness, it will not be possible to avoid some general reflections upon his conception of the proper Marxist method, or what he terms ‘orthodox Marxism’. In the essay on ‘Class Consciousness? Lukécs traces the historical development of the working class in capitalist society, and notes especially the general differences between the:phenomenon of class as, it appears in this specific form of society and the similar phenomena in earlier forms of society. Following indications which were given by Marx, mainly in The Poverty of Philosophy, but also in a section of The German Ideology, where it is suggested that class itself, in one sense, is a creation of the bourgeoisie, Lukics emphasizes two important features: first, that class manifests itself in capitalist society as a national, rather than a local, bond; and, secondly, that the two major classes of capitalist society—bourgeoisie and proletariat—are ‘pure’ classes, in- asmuch a8 their economic character and interests emerge plainly and are no longer obscured by other kinds of relationships. Lukécs, again following Marx, sees these circumstances as being exceptionally favourable for the development of working-class consciousness, but it is noteworthy that he does not advance beyond what Marx had already sketched, either in considering the history of working-class movements since Marx's time or in examining, in the light of that history, some of the obstacles to the growth of working-classconsciousness in capitalist society, and some of the difficulties in interpretingits character and course. One example of these problems, which Lukics does not explore, is to be found in the contrast between the respective social situations of the bourgeoisie and the proletariat. Marx evidently took as his model of the development of classes and class consciousness the rse ofthe bourgeoisie in feudal society yet there are important differences between that process and the subsequent development of the working class. The bourgeoisie was a third class in feudal society, not the directly exploited class, and it was directly associated with a new mode of production based upon a new technology. The situation of the proletariat is more similar to that of the feudal peasantry, and, like the peasantry, the industrial working class is not very clearly connected with a new, more progressive form of production, It is more obviously subjected to, and Class structure and social consciousness 51 determined by, an established system of production, Marx once expressed the difference between feudalism and capitalism in an aphorism: ‘The hand mill gives you a society with the feudal lord, the steam mill a society with the industrial capitalist” The problem I have raised can be put in equally simple form by asking: What kind of mill would give rise to a classless or socialist society ? In order to deal with thie question it is necesoary either to investigate, both structurally and historically, the role of the working class in the development of whatever new technology itis that will engender a new society; or else to present ‘the iste in quite a different way by arguing that the working class has a freedom denied to any previous class, such that it is able to engage in an autonomous, conscious struggle for a new type of society without being the bearer of new technological forces. A second example of these problems bears more immediately upon the subject of class consciousness, While it may be true that the con- Gitions of capitalist society permit the more rapid development of classes on a national scale,’ and also bring economic interests more clearly into prominence, other elements within these same conditions may impede the formation of new classes, and obscure the character of ‘economic relationships. Thus, geographical and social mobility, the ‘growing complexity of the division of labour, the expansion of the middle classes, all affect the possibility that the working class will develop as a political community with a distinct consciousness of its place in society and its long-term aims. Equally, the nature of capitalist production may obscure the fact of exploitation, even though it estab- lishes economic interests as paramount. Neither the slave nor the serf can be in any doubt that he works in whole or in part for the benefit of another man; but the wage-earner cannot perceive in such a direct way thata part of his labour is appropriated by others. Marx’s object, indeed, in Capital, was to pierce the veil of commodity production and exchange in order to show the real social relationships which made possible the production of surplus value, But this theoretical model, which delineates the relations between classes in the process of production, is quite distinct from the actual historical development of social consciousness in particular classes; even though it does itself influence social con- sciousness, It is essential, therefore, to study the real development and. ‘torelate the results ofthis study to the original economic analysis in order to discover whether the modal is adequate. Lukécs fails to do this, and instead substitutes a theoretical or speculative history for real history. ‘There is a third set of problems—connected on one side with the different social positions of the bourgeoisie and the proletariat, and on the other side with the question of the formation of class consciousness which concerns the relation between thought and action. The thinkers who helped to form the consciousness of the bourgeoisie, and52 Tom Bottomore expressed the bourgeois outlook in social doctrines and world views, ‘were themselves bourgeois; in this case, therefore, we do not need to suppose that thercis a large gap between a form of social activity and the representation of that activity in thought. But in the case of the prole~ tariat its consciousness is partly formed and expressed—for example, in ‘Marxism itself—by thinkers who are not proletarians but bourgeois; and a genuine problem presents itself about the relation between the practical life of the working class and the interpretation of that life in socialist doctrines. One of the principal themes in History and Class Consciousness is the consideration of this problem. Lukécs writes, in the essay on ortho- dox Marxism, that ‘Historical materialism grows out of the “immediate, natural” standpoint of the proletariat. .. . But it does not follow from this that this knowledge or this methodological attitude is the inherent or natural possession of the proletariat as a class (let alone of proletarian individuals)’; and then goes on, in the essay on class consciousness, to make a distinction between ‘psychological class consciousness’, ie. the immediate consciousness which workers have of their situation in > society (which Lukécs also describes as ‘false consciousness’), and a ‘possible consciousness’ or ‘imputed consciousness’. The argument is set out in the following passage: ‘This twofold diaectical determination of ‘false consciousness? constitutes an analysis far removed from the naive description of ‘what men in fact thought, felt and wanted at any moment in history and from any given point in the class structure. T do not wish to deny the great importance of this, but it remains after all merely the material of genuine historical analysis. The relation ‘with concrete totality and the dialectical determinants arising from it transcend pure description and yield the category of objective possibility. By relating consciousness to the whole of society it becomes possible to infer the thoughts and feelings which men ‘would have in a particular situation if they were able to assess both it and the interests arising from it in their impact on immediate action and on the whole structure of society. That is to say, it ‘would be possible to infer the thoughts and feelings appropriate to their objective situation . . . Now class consciousness consists in fact of the appropriate and rational reactions imputed [cugerechnet] in a particular typical place in the process of production. In some respects this line of thought corresponds with Mars’s ideas on the development of working-class consciousness, from the stage of sporadic and isolated actions to maintain wage-levels to the stage of political organization and political struggle on a national scale. But (Class structure and social consciousness $3 important differences appear if we consider the relation which is ‘posited between the earlier and later stages, and the manner in which the ‘transition from one to the other is conceived. Lukics, in fact, does not see the question so much in terms of a historical development of con- sciousness as in terms of a more or less absolute distinction between ‘psychological consciousness? and ‘imputed? rational consciousness. ‘The former is the actual consciousness of the working class, which, LLukics describes as the material of historical studies,” not as a pheno- ‘menon which has important social effects, or which provides some kind of test of social doctrines themselves. The ‘imputed? rational conscious ness of the working class, on the other hand, is for Lukécs Marxism itself; that isto say, a social theory already worked out and established, which is brought to the proletariat from outside. Lukées repeats this notion still more plainly in the 1967 preface, where he associates his distinction between ‘psychological’ and ‘imputed? or ‘possible’ con- sciousness with the distinction which Lenin made between ‘trade union consciousnes’, which is all that the working class can attain by itself, and ‘socialist’ consciousness? which is provided by revolutionary intellectuals. In practice, the meeting place of the working class, with its undeveloped conscioasness, and the intellectuals is the party but the meeting is one-sided, for the party embodies above all a correct theory of the world, and it is therefore dominated by the ideologists. ‘Lukécs expresses this view when he refers to ‘the correct class con- sciousness of the proletaciat and its organizational form, the communist Tt should be evident that these conceptions diverge widely from the idea of class consciousness which Marx adumbrated in various writings. Marx states quite plainly that the working class will, through its own efforts and experiences, attain a fully developed consciousness of its ‘lass situation and aims, Indeed, he considered that this process had already advanced some way, in the form of the various socialist move- ‘ments, before he undertook his own studies. In The Poverty of Philosophy hhe observed that: Economic conditions iad in the first place transformed the mass of the people into workers. The domination of capital created ‘the common situation and common interests of this class. Thus this mass is already a class in relation to capital, but not yet a class for itself. In the struggle, of which we have only indicated a few phases, this mass unites and forms itself into a class for itself. The interests which it defends become class interests. Again, in one of his latest writings—the introductory note to his Enguéte Ouoriére of 1880—Marx insisted that only the workers can describe ‘with full knowledge the evils which they endure’, and ‘only34 Tom Bottomore they, not any providential saviours, can energetically administer the remedies for the social ills from which they suffer’. According to Marx, then, the working class was able to become a class for itself, and to assume responsibility for its own destiny. What part would be played in this process by intellectuals, by political parties and movements, Marx did not examine, but it seems clear that these would in any case be subordinate to the general development of the working class. At the other extreme, Lukécs subordinates the working class to the ‘rational consciousness” expounded by party ideologists, and thus provides an {intellectual justification for the unrestrained dictatorship of the party which has characterized all the Soviet-type societies since 1917. The results at which Lukics arrives derive only in part from his conception of Marzist method. The most important influence in determining his approach and conclusions is the initial definition of ‘Marxism as class consciousness, rather than as a theory which stands in a complex relationship with the social outlook of the class with which it is mainly concerned. So far as method is concerned, Lukécs is more inclined to depart from than to follow his own prescriptions. In his essay on orthodox Marxism he emphasizes two methodological notions: the fluidity of concepis (which he treats very briefly along the lines of Engels’s discussion in Anti-Dihring), and the idea of totality, by which hhe means ‘the integration of the facts of social life (as elements in a historical development) into a totality’, in which they reciprocally influence each other. It may be questioned whether these ideas are 50 distinctive of Marxism,® but for the present purpose it is more important to notice that Lukics observes his own methodological rules very imperfectly. For example, his account of the differences between classes in capitalist society and classes in other forms of society leads, in his own words, toward a ‘typology of class consciousness’ (obviously influenced by the ideal-types of Max Weber); that is to say, towards a relatively fixed categorization of types of class and class consciousness considered in themselves. The working class, and working class con- sciousness, are not treated at all as elements in 2 total historical process, and Lukics, unlike Marx, does not relate them to the continuing development of human Iabour and of the forms in which itis organized. ‘Similarly, in spite of the insistence upon the fluidity of concepts. the actual tendency of Lukles’s writing is to reify them, and to turn such concepts as class, class consciousness, and even Marxism itself into fixed and absolute entities. This propensity is strikingly illustrated by Lukics’s initial discussion of Marxist method, in which he makes the following claim: Let us assume for the sake of argument that recent research had disproved once and for all every one of Mars’s individual theses. (Class structure and social consciousness 35 Even if this were to be proved, every serious ‘orthodox? Marxist would still be able to eccept all such modern findings without reservation and hence all of Marx’s theses én toto—without having +0 renounce his orthodoxy for a single moment. Orthodox Marxism, therefore, does not imply the uncritical acceptance of the results of Marx’s investigations. It is not a “belief” in this or that thesis, nor the exegesis of a ‘sacred’ book. On die comtrary, ‘orthodoxy refers exclusively to method. ‘find this passage difficult to understand, in a number of ways, and itis surprising that Lukics should repeat it, with great approval, in his new preface of 1967. Does it mean, for instance, that someone who rejected Marx’s theory of class and class conflict would still, nevertheless, bea Marxist? Or would this question be met by arguing that the idea of class forms part of Marx’s method, and that only the details of class relations in particular situations belong to the category of theses which Lukics would allow to be rejected? More generally, what is the sense ‘of saying that Marxist orthodoxy consists in accepting Mars’s method if atthe same time it should be the case that this method produces nothing but false theses ? The significance of these questions, and others which might be derived from them, is that they reveal the fiuidity of the notions of ‘method’ and ‘theory’, and the’ difficulty of separating the methodological and theoretical elements in any complex body of social thought. But Lukics, far from recognizing this fluidity, establishes (without specifying) an absolute distinction between theory (theses) and ‘method which seems to be untenable, whether one is a Marxist or not. ‘There is another aspect from which to consider Lulkics’s book, which brings out, and at the same time helps to explain, its predominantly ‘ideological character. To a much greater extent than is the case with ‘other expositions of Marxism, Lukics’s book is setigebunden; that is to say, deeply impregnated with the ideas and concerns of a particular historical time and place, It may be said, of course, that all social thought bears the marks of the age in which it was produced, but still there are differences: some systems of thought (and some works of art) havea more or less universal character and appeal, Marx’s own thought ‘unquestionably shows the impact of early industrial capitalism and of the French Revolution, but itis evidently not bounded by the conditions of Mars’s times besides an interpretation of the contemporary world, it provides universal concepts and theories which are far from having lost their value and significance today, With Lukics’s book, however, one is inclined to say that it does Primarily express, through a particular conception of Marxism and of the proletariat, the character of a very specific period. These essays were written at a time when revolutionary movements were occurring56 Tom Bottomore throughout much of Europe. The Russian Revolution had been success- fol, and it was followed by revolutionary struggles in Germany and Austria, and by a short-lived revolutionary régime in Hungary, in which Lukécs himself took a leading part. His book provides, through the ‘medium of an interpretation of Marxism, an idealized portrait of the revolutionary movement and the Communist Party; in contrast with a stitical view of the same phenomena, such as was given, for example, by ‘Rosa Luxemburg, In the light of the fact that there were no serious revolutionary struggles in some of the most advanced capitalist coun= ‘es, that elsewhere the revolutions failed, and that where they succeeded (then and later) they produced, not a socialist society, but dictatorship, it is reasonable to see a greater validity in the more critical forms of ‘Marzisttheory, and to regard Lukics’s work as expressing a very limited, transient mood and orientation, In many passages of his 1967 Preface ‘Lukécs himself formulates a judgment of this kind on the ideas ex- pounded in History and Class Gonsciousness. He obsexves, for instance, that his theory expressed a typical attitude to the basic problems of its time, and belongs to 2 period when the possibility of revolution in Enrope was still real; and in a still more critical vein that the idea of revolutionary practice set out in the book is closer to the left-wing messianic utopianism of the time than it is to Marx’s own doctrine.* Perhaps the most disillusioned judgment which he makes upon his ‘work, however, is to be found in his reflection, at the beginning of the preface, upon what he refers to as ‘the prevalent uncertainty of the present time about what 2 man should regard as the essential and durable content of his thought, and as his enduring method’. ‘The enormous gulf that separates us, and Lukics, from the period. 1917-23, when these essays were composed, is brought home most forcefully if we consider the question put in the ttle of the frst essay: “What is Orthodox Marsism ?, For us, today, this question manifestly has, and can have, no intellectual sense. A hundred varieties of Marxism flourish, as the hundred flowers were once supposed to bloom, and ‘who is to say which is orthodox, which heretical Is any serious thinker even interested in such a question? The only meaning which we can now attach to the term ‘orthodox Marsism? is a historical one; it refers 10 a political dogma, promulgated by party leaders and upheld with the aid of the police and the executioner, which became established in the ‘USSR in the 1920s and endured at least until 1956. In this particular historical form it is best described as “official Marxism’. In the concluding part of this essay I propose to examine class con- sciousness from a different point of view, based upon a different idea of Marxism. The starting point for this study is a general method- ological proposition: namely, that Marxism is to be regarded primarily (Class structure and social consciousness $7 as a theory of society, not.as_an ideology. Its function is to explain class consciousness, not to express it fully. This is not to deny tht ‘Marxism (like every other social theory) has an ideological aspects that it develops in particalar historical conditions, expresses preferences and commitments which originate outside any social science, prescribes forms of action directed toward valued ends. But these two aspects— the theoretical and the ideological—are separable in some degree, and should be held separate. The least valuable form of Marxism is that in which they are conflated, 25 in Lukics’s notion of Marxism as nothing more than the developed consciousness of the proletariat; for on one side this makes impossible any testing of the theory (which is assumed to be true, at least for a given historical period), and on the ‘other side it can be shown that there is historically no complete co- incidence between the consciousness of a class and a particular social theory. This point may be illustrated, in the first place, by considering. the development of bourgois class consciousness. This was not fully and exclusively expressed in any single theory, but assumed diverse forms in different times and places; thus, it may be argued that the bourgeois ideology is to be found in the political theory of Hobbes and Locke, in the Utilitarian philosophy, in the Encyclopédie, in classical political economy, or in the Protestant ethic. In fact, there is a cluster of ideas—about property, work, government, human nature, etc.—not entirely harmonious ané not represented in any single theory, which may be taken to constitute the bourgeois outlook; but this outlook has to be constructed as an ideal-type, which can then be compared with actual historical manifestations. ‘The case is similar with the develop- ment of working-class consciousness. Here too a number of related ideas, about labour, exploitation, equality, co-operation, find expression in diverse social theories, which range from Marzism to anarchism; and again it is necessary to construct an ideal-type of the working-class ‘outlook; which may be compared with the actual development of class consciousness in different societies at different times. ‘The point of this construction of an ideal-type and its comparison with the real phenomena of social consciousness is not, as with Lukécs, to assert the existence of a gap between ‘psychological class conscious- ness’ and a ‘correct class consciousness? ({¢. Marxism) which is to be closed by the ideologists, but to describe, and so far as possible to explain, the divergences between the ideal-type and reality; and, if i¢ proves necessary, to reconstruct both the ideal-types and the theory in which they are used in order to arrive at a better understanding of the Phenomena, Marx’s conception of the bourgeoisie as a ruling class, and ‘of the proletariat as a revolutionary class, can be treated in this way. T have discussed elsewhere"? some of the instances in which social conditions diverge from the ideal-type of a ‘ruling class’, and I shall not z58 Tom Bottomore pursue this theme on the present occasion. If we now consider the situation of the working class in capitalist society ftom this point of view we have to distinguish two separate questions; one concerning the diversity within, and the differences between, paiticular societies, the other concerning the historical changes which have occurred with the development of capitalism as a social system. Te is obvious that the forms of working-class organization and consciousness vary widely from one country to another, In France and Italy a considerable part of the working class gives its support to the ‘Communist Party3 that is to say, to a party which is officially Marxist and revolutionary. In Britain, West Germany, and the Scandinavian countries a still larger proportion of the working class supports the mainly reformist Social Democratic or Labour Parties. On the othet hand, in the USA the working class has had no distinctive political organization, on a mass scale, since the First World War, and has produced no widely accepted radical or socialist doctrine. Even in those countries where a majority of the working class supports a distinctively working-class party (notably in Britain, where the association between class membership and political allegiance is particularly strong) there exist, nevertheless, a variety of left-wing parties and sects, all of which receive some working-class support. Furthermore, there is in all countries a substantial part of the working class which gives its support to liberal and conservative parties. Over a fairly long period of time, therefore, the political consciousness of the working class has assumed diverse forms of expression within ‘each country, while the dominant type of expression has come to differ quite radically from one country to another. It is by no means easy to give a satisfactory account of these variations; but it is clear, at least, that—to use the words which Marx employed in discussing a similar problem—‘we shall never succeed in understanding them if we rely ‘upon the passe-partout of a historical-philosophical theory whose chief ‘quality is that of being supza-historical’.™ There:is no basis for the view ‘that the differences in working-class consciousness correspond with stages in the development of capitalism in such a way that a more revolutionary consciousness appears at a more advanced stages for it is in Britain and in the USA, which have been, in different periods, the most developed capitalist countries, that a revolutionary working-class consciousness has most obviously failed to emerge. On the contrary, it may be claimed with great plausibility that @ revolutionary con- sciousness has established itself most strongly in those capitalist ‘countries which were relatively backward and had a low per capita income.* Aside from these general factors there have clearly been particular influences at work in each society, which have helped to create what (Class structure and social consciousness 59 may be called a ‘national style’ in politics. Here I can only mention very briefly some of the possible influences, which would need to be analysed more rigorously in any worthwhile comparative sociology of the manifestation of cless consciousness in political doctrines. There hhas been in France the influence of a long revolutionary tradition; in Germany and in the countries of the former Habsburg Empire the strains resulting from cefeat in the First World War; in Britain the conservative sentiments engendered by a long period of imperial rule, allied with social reform at home; in the USA the obstacles to class formation presented by ethnic and geographical divisions, the legacy of ‘Negro slavery, and the egalitarian ideology. These national traditions ‘and peculiarities, together with the economic factors which I have ‘mentioned, need to be pat in relation to Mars’s model of the formation, of a revolutionary proletariat if we are to be able to assess critically his whole theory of class and class conflict. But a critical assessr:ent of this kind requires also that we should ay attention to the second set of questions which I posed earlier— namely, those questions concerning the development of capitalist society as a whole. For Marx’s theory of class was not a completely self-contained and autonomous body of propositions; it was linked with, and partly dependent ugon, an analysis of the structure of capitalism 5 a total social system, and of the main tendencies in the historical development of that system. A Marxist account of classes at the present time, therefore, involves a study of twentieth-century capitalism along the lines of Marz’s unfinished study of nineteenth-century capitalism, anda similar attempt to determine the main directions of change.!* ‘One of the most significant changes which has occurred between ‘Marx's time and our ovtn, as a consequence of developments in tech- nology and in the whole system of production, is the steady expansion of the middle classes, which has as its correlate the contraction of the ‘working class. This process has gone farthest in the USA, where the numbers engaged in middle-class occupations already exceed those in working-class occupations, but it is taking place more or less rapidly in all the capitalist countries. Marx himself touched upon the possibility ‘of such a development when he wrote of the ‘continual increase in numbers of the middle classes... . [who] rest with all their weight upon. the working-class and at the same time increase the social security and ‘power of the upper-class and still more plainly in several passages of the Grundrisse,# in which he analyses the effects of machinery: ‘Once brought within the capitalist process of production the instrument of labour goes through Various metamorphoses, the last of which is the machine, or rather, the automatic system of machines ... directed by an automaton which is a self-acting6 Tom Bottomore motive force, .. . At this stage the machine works by itself; the worker has only to supervise the machine’s activity and to’enstre that nothing goes wrong with it. . .. The process of production hhas ceased to be a process of labour. . . . The worker appears superfiuous . .. and the process of production a technological application of science. . .. As large scale industry develops the creation of wealth will depend ess and less upon the duration of ‘working time and the quantity of labour used, more and more upon the force of machines. . .. It is man’s productive powers in ‘general, his understanding of nature and his ability ro master it, ‘which now appear as the basis of production and wealth. Tt is true that Marx sets his discussion of these phenomena in a particular context, and that when he refers to the application of science as the new basis of wealth he is speaking mainly of a potentiality in capitalist society which will be fully realized only in some future state of society. But the process which he describes has actually occurred within capitalism; the use of science has become immensely more important than physical work, and this change has transformed the structure of occupations, which in turn has affected the class structure. ‘What consequences this change has had, and will have, for social consciousness is still unclear. It depends on one side upon whether the new middle classes inherit and perpetuate a middle-class ideology; or rather, one should say, which of the possible middle-class ideologies— ranging from certain forms of left-wing radicalism to fascism—are likely to become predominant. At the present time there are contra- dictory movements: a part of the middie class in some countries is preoccupied with threats to its traditional position in society, and with the need to re-establish ‘law and order’ (ie. to repress dissent), while another part, including students and younger members of professional and scientific occupations, appears to be developing a more radical outlook. On the other side, the new social consciousness cannot help but be affected by the decline of the traditional working class; parti- cularly by the decline of such occupations as coal-mining, which gave rise to closely-knit, class-conscious political communities which played a leading part in the socialist movement. But in this case, too, there are contradictory tendencies. It may be that, as is often asserted, the ideologies (and the political practice) of labour and social democratic parties, and even of the communist parties of Western Europe, have become gradually more reformist, to such an extent in some cases that national political consensus between ‘left-wing? and ‘right-wing’ parties may be said to exist. If this isso, itis reasonable to suppose that the changing ideologies reflect in some degree the declining political importance of the working class. But such ideas were more readily (Class structure and social consciousness 61 accepted by sociologists in the 19505 than they are today, for there hhas now emerged an opposite tendency; among some young workers and workers in technologically advanced industries a new radicalism ‘has appeared which finds expression in claims for a larger share in the ‘management of the enterprise, and in the renewed interest in general notions of ‘participation’, industrial democracy’ and ‘workers? control’. ‘The task of a Marxist socivlogy is to investigate these changes in. lass structure, placing them in the total context of changes in the system of production (including, besides those aspects which I have mentioned, such phenomena as the development of giant international corporations), and to examine in detail, along the lines which I have sketched, the consequences which the changes have in the creation of new forms of social consciousness. But in order to deal thoroughly with these questions we must also take account of a second major change in modem capitalism: the achievement, over the past twenty-five years, of sustained economic growth, uninterrupted by major economic ‘rises, which has produced a marked and continuing improvement in the general level of living. The effects of this change upon social conscious ness are twofold. First, it reinforces the tendency, produced by the movement into middle-class occupations, to establish as predominant the image of modemn societies as ‘middle-class societies’, in which other classes appear increasingly marginal ia a political and ideological sense. Secondly, it establishes economic growth itself as a new ideology. Political debate in the capitalist countries has been increasingly con- cerned with such questions as technological progress, modernization and growths and these issues have overshadowed earlier preoccupations with class inequalities. Of course, it may be said that the indefinite continuation of steady economic growth is far from being theoretically demonstrated. Nevertheless, the experiences of twenty-five years, together with theoretical arguments concerning the ability ofa ‘managed? capitalist system to avoid serious economic crises, have persuaded a large part of the population that a condition of sustained economic ‘growth and steadily increasing prosperity is both a reasonable expecta- tion and a pre-eminen: value; while on the other side the Marxist theory of capitalist crisis, which figured so prominently in the political struggles of the 19305, has now been tacitly, or in a few cases explicitly, abandoned. The intellectual uncertainties of the present time, to which Lakiics alludes, are revealed in the disarray which prevails within some established ideologies (notably in Marsism itself), and in the of a confusing variety cf new doctrines, or new styles of thought (for ‘example, in the student movements) which seem to be only loosely connected with social classes, or indeed with any identifiable social group which could be seen as a potentially effective agent of social62 Tom Bottomore change. It has become increasingly difficult to be sure of having understood the influences which form political consciousness, and thus to be able to discern the main direction of events. One thing at least is plain: we have long since passed out of the era in which the real consciousness of social groups, expressed in their beliefS and actions, ‘could be discussed as mere ‘psychological’, ‘false’ consciousness, and be contrasted with the ‘rational consciousness? enshrined in the ideology of a Communist party. Notes x First published in 1923, under the title Geschichte wd Klassenbe- ‘wusstsen, the book contains eight essays, some of which had appeared previously in slighely different versions. Soon after its publication the book was condemned as ‘revisionist’, reformist” and ‘idealist’ by the representatives of official Marxism; notably by Bukharin and Zinoviev at the sth Congress of the Communist International in r924, In the early 19308 Lukes himself publicly disavowed his book, and it was not reprinted until 1968, almost fifty years after the earliest essays in it had first appeared. The new edition contains a preface, dated ‘March 1967, in which Lukies discusses some of the vicissitudes of his work and re-examines in a critical spirit some of the ideas which he expounded in the early 1920s. I shall refer to this critical reassessment later. Notwithstanding the account which Lukes has now provided, and other discussions, itis stil not entirely clear why the book should have been so strongly condemned by the oficial Marxists, particularly in view of the fact that Lukécs expresses the idea of the dominant role of the communist party in a manner which is entirely consonant with Leninism and Stalinism, It would be worthwhile, now that Lukécs’s book is available again, to undertake a comprehensive reconsideration of the intellectual history of Marxism in the decade after the First World War, when many of its ideas were being revised in the context of the Russian Revolution and other revolutionary ‘movements. 2 History and Class Consciousness, Merlin Press, London, 1971, p. 228. 3 The four essays in History and Glass Consciousness which are most relevant to my discussion are: ‘What is Orthodox Marxism? (March 3919), “The Changing Function of Historical Materialism’ (June 1919), ‘Class Consciousness’ (March 1920), and ‘Reification and the Consciousness of the Proletariat’ (1922). 4 This question is evidently linked with problems in Mary’s theory ‘of social revolution, as this isapplied to the particular case of capitalism, In general the theory states that a social system experiences a revolu- ton when new powers of production develop (represented by @ ‘particular class) which can no longer be contained within the existing system; but in the case of capitalism Marx seems to emphasize an Class structure and social consciousness 63 internal breakdown, resulting from the fact tat capitalism is in herently unstable. The working-class revolution will have as its basis, snot the progress of technology, but the strains produced by economic crisis, the accumulation of misery, and the conscious acceptance by the proletariat ofa dectrine or doctrines which formulate a new social ideal. 5 ‘The real fruit of their battles lies, not in the immediate results, but sn the ever-expanding union of the workers, This union is furthered bby the improved means of communication which are created by modern industry, and which place the workers of different localities in contace with one another. Tt was just this contact that was needed 10 centralize the numerous local struggles, all of the same character, into one national struggle between classes. . . . And that unica, to attain which the burghers of the Middle Ages, with their miserable highways, zequired centuries, the modern proletarians, thanks to rail- ‘ways, achieve in a ew years’ (Marx and Engels, The Communist Manifesto). 6 ‘Itis inevitable... that landed property, the root of private property, should be drawa corapletely into the movement of private property and become a commodiys that the rale of the property ownet should appear as the naked rule of private property; of capital dissociated from all political colouring; that the relation between property owner and worker should be limited to the economic relationship of exploiter and exploiteds that all personal relationships between the property owner and his property should cease, and the latter become purely material wealth; that in place of the honourable marriage with the Jand there should be a marriage of interest, and the land as well as ‘man himself sink to the level of an object of speculation’ (Marx, Economic and Philosophical Manuscripts). 7 The sense of this phase is not entirely clear, but it seems to mean ‘hat actual working-class consciousness in particular historical situations is only of interest as material for comparison with what a ‘rational’ consciousness would have been in that situation, 8 In my view, Mar’s thought is distinguished by its content—its theoretical statements—rather than by its method. Lévi-Strauss has commented on one azpect of this in his criticism of Sartre in the final chapter of The Savage Mind: ‘It is possible that the requirement of “otalization” i @ great novelty to some historians, sociologists and Psychologists, Ix has been taken for granted by anthropologists ever since they learned it fou: Malinowski.’ One mightadd that Sociologists hhave used the category of ‘totality’ since the inception of their discipline in the works of Saint-Simon, Comte and others. 19 Its also close to the messianic utopianism which flourishes in some circles at the present time, and this no doubt accounts in some degree for the renewed interest in Lukics’s book. 40 Flites and Society, Ckaptet Tl. 11 Unfortunately, the official Marxists, among them Lulkics, have done precisely what Marx warned against; they have shown a marked64 Tom Bottomore reluctance to engage in detailed historical studies of these phenomena and have relied instead upoa the generalities of a historical-philo- sophical theory. In consequence, they have made a nepligible con- tribution to our understanding of social classes in the twentieth century. 12 This is suggested by S. M. Lipset, Political Man, pp. 61-2, More recently, Alain Touraine, in La société postindustrielle, pp. 26-7, has ‘observed that ‘itis only in such countries as Italy and France, where the society is characterized by uneven industrial development, and by the resistance of archaic sociel and cultural forces, that the working class movement still has a certain revolutionary orientation’. 13 It would also involve, more broadly, a study of the now forms of stratification and political power in the Sovier-type industrial countries ‘but I shall not discuss these questions here. 14 Grundriste der Kritik der politschen Okonomis (Rohentwurf) is the title given to the manuscript written by Marx in 1857-8, which was first published in fall in 1939-41. 15 Op. city pp. $84-93- Five Reflections on History and Class Consciousness Lucien Goldmann In the history of twentieth-century thought, George Lukics occupies a dominant position, With The Soud and the Forms, he was the originator of existentialist philosophy; in the same work and in his Theory of the Novel he developed the first really operative structuralist analyses of cultural creation, and above all, in History and Class Consciousness, he effected a decisive change of direction in philosophy in general and Marxist theory in particular. However, for all the importance of the first two works, I want to concentrate today on Lukics’s Marxist writings, and perticalarly History and Class Consciousness, its significance when it first appeared and its continuing relevance for us today. In order to do this, it is necessary to re-constitute, albeit schematically, the state of Marxist ‘thought in 1923, when the book was first published. Since the death of Marx and Engels, perhaps ever since Engels's last ‘writings, a serious divergence from dialectical thought had been growing apparent, Of course, Marxism was not a monolithic block; there were notable differences between the positions of Lenin, Plekhanov, Bern- stein, Kautsky and Rosa Luxemburg. Even 80, if we leave Rosa Luxem- burg on one side and compare the work of the best-known Marxist theorists before 1923—including even Engels's Anti-Dithring and Dialectics of Nature—with the writings of Marx himself, a quite sig- nificant difference between the two strikes us nowadays, wherens before 1923 it was hardly perceptible, even to the unorthodox. It is partly due t0 Lukécs’s book that this difference has become clearly visible. If Marxist analyses are correct when they teach us that_men’s intellectual life is closely bound up with their economic, social and political life, tis sel evident that this must hold equally for the history of Marxist thought itseif, since it cannot possibly escape the influence of the social reality in which it develops. Dialectical and historical ‘materialism came into being during the period 1845-50, at a time when 6566 Lucien Goldmann Europe was still being shaken by the last waves of the bourgesis revolution, while at the same time the specifically working-class movements were finding their first expression. Shortly afterwards, however, the end of the 1848 Revolution and the seizure of power by Napoleon Uil—‘Napoléon le Petit? as Victor Hugo called him—were to make possible the formation and consolidation of liberal capitalist society, thus encouraging, in the domain of philosophy and theory, the development and success of idealist, neo-Kantian and positivist modes of thought, The formerly revolutionary—or at any rate progressive— bourgeoisie becomes the dominant class, increasingly conservative and more or less sharply threatened by the new forces of opposition, while concurrently the working-class revolutionary movement championed by Marx and Engels begins to be replaced by syndicalism and a social democratic movement which still pay lip service to Marxism, but are in, fact increasingly integrated into the existing order. It is evident that this integration of the socialist movement into the social order of ‘Western capitalism was bound to influence the structure of thought of this movement, even if it continued to proclaim its allegiance to the theoretical and political work of Marx. ‘Thus, between 1890 and 1923, with the exception of Rosa Luxemburg and to a laige extent Trotsky, nearly all the important theorists of ‘Marxism took up a positivist position perallel to that of academic science. This becomes cleat if we consider how little attention was paid in philosophical studies to the relationship between Marx and Hegel, even though this had been explicitly stated by the former. For Kautsky, who was almost universally regarded as the foremost Marxist theorist of the day, Marx’s thought was most neatly akin to that of Darwins for Plekhanov it resembled that of Spinoza, Dietzgen and the mechanistic materialists of the eighteenth century; for Mex Adler, Vorlinder, Bernstein and the Austrian Marxists, it was related to neo-Kantian philosophy; even Lenin, in his Materialism and Empirio-criticism, wrote ‘one of the most mechanistic and anti-dialectical works there is, And ‘this anti-dialectical tradition was to be continued by Stalinism and the Althusserian structuratism of our own time, Between Marx and Lukics, only Antonio Labriola in Italy placed any real importance on the Hegelian tradition, but without elaborating. a truly dialectical Marxism, Remembering all this, itis hardly surprising if the writings which moulded several generations of social democrat and, subsequently communist militants were not those of Marx, but rather, before the advent of Stalinism, the Anti-Dilhring of Engels (later joined by the same author’s Dialectics of Nature) and Lenin’s Materialism and Empivio-criticism. This development in the history of theory corresponded to certain social realities: the stabilization of the social order of liberal capitalism. History and Class Consciousness 67 between 1852 and ror4 (with the slight interruption of the Paris Commune episode, which for all the political and moral importance of its repercussions on revolutionary consciousness was in itself of fairly limited social and historical significance) and later, from roughly 1928 on, the stabilization of the Stalinist régime in the USSR. tis precisely between these two periods of stability, after the Russian crisis of 1905, that the great tremors of world revolution are situated (1917 and 1923-7: Russia, Germany and China) and it seems very probable that the rebirth of dialectical thought is connected with this age of revolutionary upacaval. This rebirth occurred over a faitly small number of years at three different points in Europe; in all three cases, ‘however, it was restricted to the philosophical level and had no impact on the sociological, or, above all, the political and organizational level. ‘The three essentis! moments are: firstly, the discovery of Hegelian philosophy by Lenin in 19r4-15—this is reflected in the text sub- sequently published under the title Philosophical Notebooks; secondly, in 1923, the appearance of Lukics’s History and Class Consciousness and, thirdly, somewhat later, the work of Antonio Gramsci. Characterized in the first place by its assertion of the radical distinc- tion between judgments of fact and judgments of value, between external reality which is subject to ‘objective? laws and human activity which can at most pass moral judgments bn this reality or modify it by ‘means of technical action based on the knowledge and utilization of these objective laws, positivism corresponds to situations where the structures of society are so stable that their existence seems unaffected by the action of the mea who compose them and experience them, It is true that Marx had exposed at length, in Capital, the illusions of the fetishism of commodities, which makes economic and even historical laws appear independent of the will of men and comparable to natural laws. This warning had not, however, been enough to prevent later ‘Marxists from falling victim to the same illusion, in so far as they lived inside a society which was relatively stable and apparently little affected by the transforming action of social classes. In the Bolshevik camp a situation which until r917 was in many ways different nevertheless favoured a related ideology, most clearly expressed in Lenin’s What Is To Be Done ?, The Tsarist state was by no means as stable as Western societies, but until 1905, in the view of the Bolsheviks at least, the proletaria: was not 2 spontaneous and natural force of opposition; the spontaneous tendencies of its consciousness appeared more trade unionist than revolutionary, and it could not therefore take the leading part in the act of historical transformation. This meant that this part had to be played by the party, an organization of pro- fessional revolutionaries, whose action as the collective engineer of the revolution would implant a socialist consciousness in the working class.68 Lucien Goldmann ‘The Bolsheviks thus arrived at an equally positivist and objectivizing conception of society, and this seems to me to explain, together with other factors, why, in spite of the considerable political differences between the revolutionary Bolsheviks and the reformist social demo- crats, a certain number of theoretical works (Hilferding’s FinanzAapital, the works of Kautsky, etc.) were accepted by both sides and integrated into the two different idcologics. ‘The first rift in this situation appears in Russia in 1905, with the setting up of the Petrograd Soviet; this relatively spontaneous revolu- tionary act of the proletariat marks the end of a long period of stability ‘and integrationist tendencies. The political characteristics of this event ‘correspond moreover to the ideological situation: the Bolsheviks, who hhad favoured a revolution led by an organization of professional revolu- tioaaries and had created this organization by splitting with the Men- sheviks, found that their influence on the Petrograd Soviet was relatively slight, whereas Trotsky, who had noorganization of his own, butwho had developed, together with Parvus, the theory of the permanent revolution and the revolutionary proletariat, made a lasting entry into history by ‘becoming the president of this Soviet. Lenin’s first reaction was to change his policies: after being the inflexible champion of the creation of a disciplined organization of professional revolutionaries and deliber- ately breaking with the Mensheviks, he now preached a return to unity and implicitly granted a much greater influence to the proletarian base. But before long the 2905 Revolution seemed like a mere episode and the Bolsheviks, including Lenin, reverted to their previous policies. Te was only in 1915, and particularly in 1917 as the Revolution drew nearer, that Lenin returned to a mote dialectical position, first on a more philosophical level in his Philosophical Notebooks and then, on a political level, in the writing of State and Revolution and the admission of the Trotskyist group to the Bolshevik Party, where many of them were to play a role of the first importance. The return to mechanism and Stalinist positivism was to begin round about 1922, but it gathered force principally after Lenin’s death. In Europe, meanwhile, where the Philesophical Notebooks remained unknown (and where Gramsc’s work only became known much later), the appearance of George Lukcs’s book in 1923 was the first expression of the rebirth of dialectical thought. Te was a very influential work, but it also immediately provoked a ‘hostile reaction on the part of the orthodox; as a result of this con- demnation, Lukics prevented it being reissued until 1968 and wrote xno more than the occasional note of two to six pages until shortly before Hitler came to power. We should add too that he frequently declared that his book was incorrect and that he was no longer in agreement with the theses contained in it. History and Class Consciousness 65 In fact, if we attempt to account at the same time for the impact of the work on its first plication and its subsequent infiuence, I think we must distinguish between three different sets of ideas. The frst can be explained in large measure by the date of composition, and everyone today would agree that they did not correspond to reality; the second resulted from the need to integrate the new elements which he was introducing into a system sill largely consisting of elements frout the past; the third, however, are the new theoretical analyses which were to play a vital role in the subsequent development of Marxist thought and the human sciences in general. I shall deal rapidly with the first two of these and spend more time on the third, which seems to me by far the most interesting. Written between 1919 and 1922, in the midst of the revolutionary crisis of European society, after the victory of the Russian Revolution, the temporary victory—and ensuing defeat—of the Hungarian and Finnish revolutions, and the crushing of the Spartakist movement in Germany, these articles reflect the revolutionary hope which saw in these defeats simply a temporary setback in the wider contest of the final and total crisis of world capitalism. Thus Lukécs is convinced that he is writing his book on the eve of the world revolution, the over- throw of capitalism anc the advent of the classless society—one of the central ideas of the work being that, since the economic and social conditions for revolution already existed, its victory depended above all ‘on the consciousness of the proletariat. ‘The verdict of hiscory was different, and the supporters and ‘opponents of Lukics will al now agree about the erroneous and illusory nature of his views on this subject. ‘The second set of ideas concerns the organizational problems of the revolutionary movement and the revolutionary parties. In the first quarter of this century, virtually since the death of Engels in fact, there were two opposite positions, based on different analyses of the nature of capitalist society. The first, represented above all by Rosa Luxemburg and Trotsty, who remained faithful to the hypothesis of the revolutionary proletariat, took as its point of departure the dia- lectical idea of the identity of subject and object and of the spontaneous tendency of the proletariat towards an authentic, non-integrated consciousness, and called for 2 democratic party whose fundamental ‘core must be the proletarian base—even if its revolutionary conscious- ness was less developed than that of the leading cadres. It was this base which should control the party machine, made up of professional revolutionaries who had more experience and a more complete political education, but who were always in danger of becoming bureaucratic, farthering their own interests rather than those of the working class and, in the Western world, gradually becoming integrated into capitalist70 Lucien Goldmann society. The other group of Marxist or neo-Marxist theorists, taking as, their point of departure the historical experience of the preceding decades, observed that the consciousness of the proletatiat did not tend spontencously to challenge cepitaist society, but rather to become integrated with it on the democratic or trade-unionist model. These theorists in their tur were divided into two camps: the first of these, lite revisionists, gave up the very notion of revolution, since there was no social basis for it; the second, represented principally by the Bol- shevik Party, called for the creation of a disciplined party of professional revolutionaries whose task was not to help the proletariat to understand what was already a latent element in its consciousness end its action, but rather to bring a revolutionary consciousness to the proletariat from ‘outside and to maintain a permanent control over it so as to prevent any regression to its spontaneous tendencies. ‘The experience of the years from 1917 to 1923—the defeat of the Spartakists and of the other European revotutions—had shown the mistaken character of the ideas of Rosa Luxcmburg and had increased the prestige of the Bolsheviks, who had remained victorious in Russia (even if, in fact, the respective positions of Trotsky and Lenin had come much closer together during the Revolution). In addition, the years from 1919 to 1923 had again demonstrated the relative stability and resilience of Western capitalism; before long, moreover, the movement of history was to bring about the elimination of Trotsky, as it had already brought about that of Rosa Luxemburg. In his basic positions Lukécs, like many revolutionaries of his day, accepted the idea of the revolutionary proletariat. At most it could ‘perhaps be said that he was more aware than most other theorists that this brought him very close to the positions of Rosa Luxemburg. But this return to the dialectic on the level of philosophy and fundamental sociological analysis could not lead Lukécs, any more than it could lead Lenin in 1926 and later Gramsci—given their perspective on the revolu- tion and the social and political realities confronting them—to call in ‘question the experience of the preceding years, nor above all to work out a radical critique of the structure of the Bolshevik Party (the only party to have organized and led a victorious revolution) and to expose the dangers it held for both democracy and revolution. We can see therefore the dilemma—whether conscious or unconscious—which faced the three theorists who had rediscovered the dialectic. How could the call for a spontaneously revolutionary social force inside existing society (in philosophical terms: the idea of the partial identity of subject and object) be reconciled with the acceptance— which seemed to them completely unquestionable—of the centralized and hierarchically organized Bolshevik Party as the effective organiza tional form par excellence of the revolutionary movement? In reality, History and Class Consciousness 7% the problem was insoluble: there was no practically viable intermediate position between the Lenin of What Is To Be Done? and the position of Rosa Luxemburg. It is understandable that neither Lukécs nor Gramsci nor even Lenin was able to find an answer to a problem which the historical situation rendered insoluble and that all they could do— the first two in theory, the third in practice in the last years of his life— ‘was to propose the impossible programme of an internal democratiza- tion of the Communist parties. On this question too history has made things clearer for us. We should, however, add that the more democratic nature of the Ttalian Commimist Party, and the more vigorous resistance of the Polish intellectuals to restalinization, are perhaps due in part to the tradition of Gramsci and Rosa Luxemburg. However this may be, on this point too the ideas developed by Lukacs in History and Class Consciousness seta to se to be unacceptables but in saying this we should remember that of those who criticize them some, the institutional Marxists, do so because of the proposal to democtatize the party, while others, the heretics, attack rather the illusion that such a democratization is possible. Having said this, T come now to the central core of Lukics’s book, which will guarantee it a permanent place as one of the great events in the history of Marxist thought in particular and European philosophy in general, ‘The first analysis—which contains by implication all the rest and is in itself already a return to dialectical thought—deals immediately with the idea of the collective subject and the idea that the social classes are the only historical subjects and the essential and specific foundations of Marxism. Itis worth adding also that Lukics, having already analysed in two pre-Marxist books a whole series of possible structures of ‘thought based on the individual consciousness, while in these essays he ‘carries the idea of the trans-individual consciousness and particularly of class consciousness as far as it will go, nevertheless concentrates far more on showing its historical status and on criticizing the weakness and fundamental distortions of individualist thought—contemplative status and reification—than on providing an explicit description of the relations between cless consciousness and individual consciousness. Since this problem has been subsequently mised by a number of critical analyses, in particular those of the Frankfurt school, T should like now to consider it briefly. ‘Various currents of the philosophy of the rising bourgeoisie— rationalism, empiricism, Enlightenmentthoughtand subsequentacadem- ic philosophy, positivism, neo-Kantianism, Sartrean existentialism— have always regarded the individual starus of the subject of thought ‘and action as a self-evident truth. At most, those philosophies which admitted the partially or totally active and creative part played by the72 Lucien Goldmann subject in relation toknowledge and the external world (neo-Kantianism, Husserlian phenomenology) have been forced by the impossibility of attributing this status to the empirical consciousness of individuals to fall back on that philosophical and scientific monster, the transcendental Ego. In fact, the hypothesis of the individual status of the subject is incompatible with any ordinary experience of life. We have simply to imagine three removal men moving a piano in onder to see the wil impossibility of understanding what is happening if we suppose that ‘one of them has the status of subject, since this would mean that we assimilate the two others to the piano as objects of the thought and action of the first. I would add that to see things in this way means ‘breaking the link between the consciousness of the individual considered. as subject and the moving of the piano (which is not his individual action), thus giving to his thought a contemplative status with regard to the piano-moving, Clearly the only way of understanding the facts and restoring the link between consciousness and action is to admit that the three removal men make up together the subject of an action ‘which has the piano. as its object and the removal as its result. This apparently banal example is applicable to all the conscious actions of ‘men in their life in society and, implicitly, to the greater part of their ‘consciousness. The hypothesis of the individual subject is a deforming ideology which is itself the product of a collective subject. Atthe same time, itis clear that every action considered as a particular segment of reality has a specific collective subject which is different from the subject of most other actions; this means that every individual in the course of a single day, is a part of a large number of differently ‘composed trans-individual subjects. This instability is not, however, absolute. Certain collective subjects have a more or less lasting status: the workers in the same removal firm often act together, or at least in a limited number of combinations; they make up a trans-individual subject which extends to a greater o lesser number of actions. In a wider sphere there are trans-individual subjects (families, professional groups, social classes) which have a genuinely lasting status in relation to a given historical period. And of these the social classes have a particular importance and a privileged status inasmuch as they are the only trans-individual subject whose consciousness and action are directed to the organization of the sum of interhuman relationships and relationships between men and nature, with 2 view to either Keeping them as they are or transforming them in ‘amore or less radical manners this is to say that they are the subject ‘Par excellence of historical action and, at the level of consciousness, the subject of the creation of conceptual and imaginative worlds, that is, of philosophical end literary works. In relation to the collective subject, what sort of existence and status History and Class Consciousness 73 can the individual's biological and psychological reality possess? ‘Undoubtedly the individual exists in the first place at the level of what Freud called the libido, ic. a whole mass of desires and aspirations which come into conflict with the demands of social life and which are transformed by this confit, either becoming modified or being repressed. and remaining unconscious. The individual, however, exists at another level as well, that of conscious life, in which he appears as @ particular cand specific mixture of collective subjects. Here I think Freud was wrong, to consider the superego—introjected norms—as a coherent and mean= ingful structure, whereas itis really, in my view, a mixture stemming. from the introjection of norms taken from the most diverse structures family, school, profession, class, etc.) In these circumstances, how is the empirical behaviour of an indi- vidual to be studied ? It seems to me that this behaviour is always made up of a mixture of structure with a libidinal significance and structure with a social significance; these are completely different, but dificult to separate except in the extreme cases where one or the other is absolutely predominant, as with the madman or the creative genius. As for the intellectual and social structures themselves, although it may be impossible to disentangle them in the individual case of the average man, they may nevertheless be accessible to the sociological study of the ‘group a8 a whole, since in this case individual differences cancel one another out. It will be seen in what way and to how great an extent a sociological history may attain positive results by establishing the relation between the processes of history at various levels (economic, social, political, cultural) and the historical subjects, ie. the social classes. Since the status of the trans-individual subject is radically different from that of the individual subject, this relating of historical processes to social classes involves at the same time a radical reversal of scientific perspeo- tives and methodology. ‘The frst of these differences consists in the partial identity—Lukics still spoke of total identity—of the subject and the object of thought and action. Thus, to take an example, if we suppose that the writings of ‘Marx express the point of view of the proletariat and are related to its latent consciousness, then Gapital not only allows the proletariat to think about capitalist society as a whole, but also to think about itself as part of this society. And the same will naturally hold for Jansenism considered as the theological expression of the noblesse de robe, for Cartesianism consideted as the philosophy of the French Third Estate and so on. ‘The relation between the individual subject and the world surrounding it was inevitably, at the level of knowledge, static and contemplative; it could only move into the field of action by a leap, a radical break, so ¥74 Lucien Goldmann that action necessarily assumed either a technical or a moral character. ‘The judgments of fact which made up theoretical thought werepresented as having no necessary connection with the judgments of value which informed the hypothetical or categorical imperatives of technical or moral action, The subject-object duality was reflected in the duality ‘between thought and action, between judgments of fact and judgments of value, and in innumerable other dualites: the parts and the whole, the synchronic and the diachronic, the static and the dynamic, the political and the moral, the end and the means, and so forth. As I have stid, the only attempt to surmount this duality by giving the subject a constitutive function was bound, in the individualist philosophies, to bee situated in the abstract and speculative empyrean of the trenscen- dental. ‘We have only, however, to move from the individual subject to the collective subject and we are immediately in the realm of a radical monism which rejects all absolute dichotomies. To return to the first of them, the subject-object duality—which is replaced in dialectical ‘thought by the partial identity of the two—the perspective of the trans- individual subject does away with necessity of filling back on the con- cept of the transcendental in that the empirical trans-individual subjects, human groups, ate the constitutive parts of the whole and have really and empirically created roads, houses, towns, social relation- ships, institutions and norms, mental categories and so on. Similarly, the science-conscience duality loses its radical nature in that the study of the object is at the same time a transforming self-knowledge of the subjects this is, incidentally, the basic meaning of the title History and ‘Class Consciousness, since Luikics hes shown that the two are at least partially identical, ‘Let me say just a few words more about two of the most important dualities which govern positivist thought: the first is that which separates determinism, the dimension of positivist science, and freedom, the dimension which we experience in action, and notably in moral action. Here again the dialectical philosophers reject any sort of dualism, and recognize only the structuring force of history, in that they affirm that the action of men is both externally and internally (i. mentally and peychically) limited by existing social conditions and the resulting ‘mental categories, but also that this limitation allows the members of the various social classes an area of freedom, within which their action modifies the social structures and by this very factincreases or diminishes their freedom. As Marx wrote in his third thesis on Feuerbach: ‘The materialist doctrine concerning the changing of circumstances and education forgets that circumstances are changed by men and. that the educator must himself be educated, This doctrine has History and Class Consciousness 75 therefore to divide society into two parts, one of which is superior to society, ‘The coincidence of the changing of circumstances and of human activity or self-changing can only be grasped and rationally understood as revolutionary practice. In the same way the duality of consciousness and action, which is often encountered at the individual level, where—given the complexity of every personality—it is easy to imagine a very radical contradiction between the beliefs and the actions of an individual, becomes incon= ceivable when it is a question of a social group, whose collective ‘consciousness always bears a functional relation to its actual behaviour. In the field of cultural creation this observation is particularly impor- tant in tbat it would be very diffculy, for example, to establish a necessary ‘connection between the life of Racine and the structure of his work (he could easily have been educated by the Jesuits and thus have ‘written completely different plays), whereas it is much easier to show the necessary connection between his work, Jansenist theology, the ‘mental structures of the seventeenth-century noblesse de robe and the social, political and economic position of this class. J could pursue this subject further, but this would take me outside the limits of this paper. I should simply like to emphasize that even if none of the dichotomies which govern individualist and positivist thinking have any absolute validity, they nevertheless all possess some operational value in research, on condition that the researcher remains aware of their relative and specific nature. What does this mean? It . means that the relationship between subject and object, freedom and determinism, theory and practice, science and conscience, is not per- manent, universal and static, but that it varies with changing historical ‘cixcamstances; that it must always be made explicit and that it con stitutes one of the essential dimensions of what the young Lukcs called the psychic forms, what he was later to call the totality principle and ‘what we today cali the significant structure, ‘One of the essential tenets both of psychoanalysis at the level of the individual subject and of dialectical thought at the social and historical level is precisely the assumption tht all human acts—resulting from the behaviour of an individzal or trans-individual subject whose action is directed to transforming the world surrounding it in such a way as to create an equilibrium more in keeping with its aspirations—possess as such the quality of functional structures or significant structures. Their investigation involves therefore on the one hand an internal analysis siming to understand them by reveating their immanent structure, and consequently the potential significance of the various elements of a siven relationship, and on the other hand an external analysis, aiming76 Lucien Goldmann to explain them by inserting the structure as a functional element in another larger structure. In this sense—in spite of all that separates them—the philosophies of Hegel, Marx, Freud and Lukécs are all varieties of genetic structuralism centred on the idea that all human acts must be regarded as actions—whether individual or collective— whose aim is to establish a more satisfactory equilibrium between the subject and the world surrounding it. This means that we must take seriously the assertion that no human act is absurd, that what may seem meaningless is in reality either an incomplete fact which the researcher hhas mistakenly isolated from the total reality or else a mixture of different meanings related to different subjects; a true understanding that depends either on inserting this fact into a larger whole and into the historical process or else on sorting out the different elements which make up the mixture, or perhaps on both together. T should add that if all behaviour is significant and functional in so far as itis directed towards an equilibrium, that does not, of course, mean that it will be able actually to achieve this equilibrium, since, quite apart ftom the external obstacles which it may encounter, the surrounding world changes as a result of the actions of the various collective subjects and therefore the situation changes, so that what was functional and sig- nificant at a given moment ceases to be functional and gives way to a different functionality. This transformation—which is, of course, a continued process, characterized in the move ftom one set of structures and functions to another by sudden changes—implies a synthesis of continuity and discontinuity which Hegel called the move from quantity to quality. In this light yet another duality which is important and even finds- mental for individualist thought, that between the means and the end— the poles of which are respectively moralism and Machiavellism— disappears and is replaced by a global structure in which ends and means act reciprocally on one another without either of them taking first place on principle. ‘One final important point: in so far as all human action is considered as a process, it can no longer be defined by its actual reality without reference to the potential reality which it seeks to bring into being. The concept of actual consciousness must be supplemented by that of besogenes Bewusstsein, which we have translated as the ‘maximum of ‘possible consciousness’, based on the concept of potential consciousness ‘acting on reality and restricting its field of possible variations. This is the distinction which Marx made between class in itself and class for itself, and without which we shall never understand anything about historical and social life. Lukics's book, which after an eclipse lasting half a century reintro- duced all these dialectical concepts into Marxist thought, and thus History and Class Consciousness 77 re-established its dialectical perspective, has undoubtedly had a great deal of influence. But neither you nor I are pure historians, and it goes without saying that what interests us most of all today is to examine the fruitfulness of these concepts for the positive, scientific understanding of the problems of our time and the societies we live in. This task is all, ‘the more difficult in that—as I have said—there can be no question of ‘our adopting the social and political analyses of Lukics, which are clearly mistaken, and that from a present-day point of view the historical importance of the book lics above all in the philosophical and methodo~ logical field and in its concrete analysis of reification and of certain areas in the history of philosophy. Can we, however, now use the book in order to go further than LLukics himself went or was able to go? Can we, on the basis of dia~ Tectical methods, construct @ social and political analysis of our own times ? I believe that in part at least the answer must be ‘Yes’. Among. ‘the major sections of Marxian analysis which Lukécs preserved and which we must in my view abandon, the most important are the theory of the revolutionary proletariat and the idea of an internal and revolu~ tionary democratization of the Communist parties, which owe their existence precisely to the reformist and integrating tendencies of the ‘working class, The question can be quite simply formulated: in opposi- tion to the moralism of the social-democtat theorists, the non-revolu= tionary reformism of syndicalist politicians and Western socialists and the ‘engineering? attitude of the revolutionary Bolshevik Party up to 1917 oF even 1923, Lulkics raised the dialectical demand for an infernal revolutionary force, which would be a constitutive element in the very object which it aimed to transform, capitalist society, the demand for a social class whose tendency would be spontaneously and naturally revolutionary. Thave already said thet Lukics, Rosa Luxemburg and Trotsky sew this force in the proletariat and that the mistaken nature of this analysis, ‘was probably the reason for their political liquidation by the Bernsteins and the Stalins, the reformists and the institutional Communists whose analyses were, at the time, much closer to reality. But we are still faced with the same dilemma today? Is there no other choice fora socialist except that between the policy of Trotsky and Rosa Luxemburg and that of Stalin and the reformists, at least as far as advanced industrial societies are concerned? I do not believe that this is so. For several years now, three ideas which are closely linked in an overall political analysis have been evolving and occupying an in- creasingly important position in international socialist thought: the ideas of self-management (autogestion), of the salary-carning middle strata (couches moyenes salariées) as a new working class, and of revolu~ tionary-reformism (réformisme-réoolutionnaire).78 Lucien Goldmann It is indeed impossible, for a serious Marxist thinker, to continue to rely exclusively on the concept of capitalist society as Marx elaborated it. What is needed is nota critique of Marx's thoughs, but an attempt to ‘extend it. Even if there are points where the Marsian analyses seem to need modifying, Capital remains the foundation-stone for any serious analysis of liberal capitalist society. But Marx died in 1883, and since hhis death the history of capitalist sociery has continued to bring in important changes, which must naturally be integrated into the analysis. As early as the beginning of the twentieth century and up to the end of the First World War, the principal theorists of the working-class movement, notably Hilferding, Lenin end Rosa Luxemburg, had been obliged to put forward, as the theory of imperialism, an analysis of the cchanges brought about in the traditional structure of liberal capitalism by finance capital, monopolies and trusts. ‘Now it is increasingly clear to most economists and sociologists that since thet time the development of state intervention and the related setting up of mechanisms for regulating the economy have ushered in third phase in the history of capitalism which is usually known as the technocratic society, organized capitalism (capitalisme @organization) ot the consumer society. ‘At this point I think it is necessary to raise an important question of terminology. It seems to me inappropriate to retain the term ‘imperial- ism’ for the second phase in the history of capitalism analysed by Lenin and Rosa Luxemburg and situsted roughly between 1912 and 1945-50. This is not because the term is inadequate, but, on the con~ trary, because the principal characteristics which it refers to and which, made possible the distinction between this phase and the preceding Hberal capitalism, far from being eliminated ot diminished by the move ‘to organized capitalism and the technocratic society, have in fact been farther strengthened, for this last phase is at least as imperialist as the preceding one, if not more so. In these circumstances, since we need thtee separate terms to refer to the specific characteristics of each phase, I should be inclined to suggest that we keep the term ‘imperialist capitalism’ for the whole of the period beginning in the first years of this ceatury, and that within this period we make a distinction between two different phases, crisis capitalism (1912-50) and organized capitalism (since 1950). The first of these terms seems to me to be justified by the disruption caused in. the liberal market economy by the development of monopolies and trusts before the free market was replaced by mechanisms of state intervention and regulation; this disruption gave tise to a series of economic, social and political crises which followed one another ia ‘quicksuccession, barely separated by brief periods of fragile and unstable equilibrium. This historical period is characterized by the First World History and Class Consciousness 79 Wer, the post-war economic and social crisis (up to 1923), the extra~ ordinary economic crises of the years from 1929 to 1933, Hitler’s rise to power and the Second World War. Tf we return now to cur first question, that concerning the existence of transforming forces within contemporary Western capitalist societies which might be capable of contributing to the creation of a socialist society, we must discuss briefly the social transformations which have characterized the move from crisis capitalism to organized capitalism. ‘Seen from the point of view which interests us, the most important of these changes is that while it has considerably reduced the risks of economic crises and has allowed a gradual improvement in the standard of living of nearly every social group which plays a part in production, including the working class, the development of organized capitalism has profoundly altered the social structure of Western societies in two main ways: it has raised the average level of qualification of producers and it has progressively replaced the old middle strata, which were largely made up of independent gentlemen, by a different sort of middle strata, who enjoy an income which is as large or even larger, but ‘who are also specialists dependent on or employed by others. So we see a considerable increase in the number of specialist technicians, known to some as the new sela-y-earning middle steata, by others as the new working class, and a concentration of all decision-making powers in the hands of an ever more restricted group of technocrats who control not only production, but also all the other areas of social life. “Techno «rats? is taken here to mean the ever more restricted groups in whose hands are concentrated the powers to make decisions in aif the areas of ‘economtic, social and political life. There are therefore not only techno- ‘rats of industrial production, but also of orgunization, education, culture, politics, etc.) Now, in so far as furure trends will probably be directed towards an increase in the relative importance of these salary-earning specialists in society as a whole, and towards a lessening—relative if not absolute— in the importance of the unskilled worker, a Marxist analysis of the trends in contemporary society would need to concentrate first of ell on the probable tendencies ofthis class of technicians and of the universities where they are trained, end which will probably occupy an increasingly important place in the life of society. On this question, several impor- tant ideas have been developed the last few years by the theorists of revolutionary reformism: (2) This class of salary-carning specialists whose standard of living will doubtless increase steadily and who will be protected by their training ftom the vulnerability of the old assembly-line workers, will probably be less and less willing to accept the purely instrumental status to which the defenders of the existing order will want to confine80. Lucien Goldmann them. For once the law of diminishing returns will operate, in that the higher the standard of living the less valuc there isin increasing its the very least one can say is that this will provide an increasingly favourable climate for socialist action directed towards a transformation of the existing order. Tt must however be emphasized that inasmuch as this action to transform cociety is no longer based in the first instance on the unskilled ‘working class but on technicians and white-collar workers, its character will be fundamentally different. ‘The lack of qualification of the majority of workers in the preceding period made them not only extremely vulnerable, since they could easily be replaced, but also relatively incapable of making a global analysis of society, in that their lack of qualification and the constant repetition of one and the same gesture in their everyday work imposed severe limitations on their intellectual horizon. It is for this reason that ‘great bureaucratic organizations, parties and trade unions, were during this period their only way of defending their interests within capitalist society. By contrast, the qualifications of the technicians and specialists make them indispensable to the production process, hard to replace and much more capable—potentially if not i fact—of an analysis of their position in relation to society as a whole, This means that if they are led to play a social and political role, the question which I discussed earlier of the dislectic of spontaneity and hierarchical, disciplined ‘organization will very probably be reversed in favour of the former. (2) Moreover, all the analyses which led Marx to describe the nature and strategy of socialist transformation by way of the proletarian revolution—and which have turned out to be extremely problematical in the actual evolution of history—eertainly do not apply to socialist action based in the first instance on the specialist technicians as the main motive force for the transformation of society. ‘As is well known, Marx had developed the idea of the increasing misery of the working class, which would inevitably bring it into conflict with existing society. This process, which has not even taken place in the traditional working classes of Western society, can hardly be con- sidered likely for the technicians in the future development of the technocratic society. ‘Similarly, one of Marx’s basic ideas was that the proletariat as such ‘could not possibly increase its economic and social power inside capitalist society and would therefore be the first class in the history of mankind ‘whose fight for freedom would have a universal human character, ming at its own disappearance as a separate group and, above all, giving revolution and seizure of political power precedence over the great economic and social transformations. It hardly needs saying that this whole analysis is inapplicable to the new social strata which I have | 1 History and Class Consciousness 81 been discussing. Theit problem—and it will become increasingly pressing—will be theit lack of influence inside the firm and their reduction to the role of mere instruments. Economically speaking, they will have more and mors to lose and will thus tend to direct their action ot only to keeping what they have, but also to improving on it and to obtaining more and mote power within the process of production and society as a whole. We can thus see the possibility of a transformation ‘on a model very different both from that of a political revolution of the proletariat which precedes the transformation of the economy and from the partial and limited reformism of the Western social democrats ‘whose aim was simply the improvement of existing capitalist society, but which bears a considerable resemblance to the development of the bourgeoisie inside feudal society; in this latter case the seizure of econo~ ‘mic power and a great increase in the social importance of the rising class preceded the seizure of political power, which was, moreover, depending on the country involved, at first revolutionary in nature (England, France), but also, subsequently, evolutionary and reformist (Germany, Italy). This is precisely what is nowadays called the revolu- tionary-teformist analysis, which links the ideas I have been outlining, with the equally important idea of self-management. Ie is no doubt possible to discover a whole series of ancestors for the idea of selfmanagement, from Proudhon to the anarchists of the Spanish Revolution, jast as previously people attempted to find ancestors for revolutionary communism and Marxist thought in primitive communism, Plato’s republic, the communism of the heretical sects of the Middle Ages and so on. This is undoubtedly an interesting subject for the historian of ideas. For the sociologist and the contem= porary political thinker it is cleae, however, that, since the development of the ideas of the Yugoslav socialists, the notion of self-management as a socialist policy has changed radically both in function and in character. Developed in the first place by the Yugoslavs, less to meet the internal needs of their own society, which was still t00 backward to allow any large-scale reduction of central power without doing considerable damage to the investment programme, than to mect the political need for an economic and social structure different from that of the Soviet Union and the People’s Democracies, so as to guarantee ‘Yugoslavia's Independence of these countries, ‘the policy of self- management, which has only been partially and inadequately put into practice in Yugoslavia, has turned out to correspond fairly exactly to the potential tendencies of the strata of specialized technicians in those economically advanced countries which are engaged in their second industrial revolution. Indeed, in so far as the evolution of these societies goes towards increasing the relative importance of the specialist technicians as82 Lucien Goldmann against the unskilled workers in the production process, it seems very likely that the former will tend to press for ever-greater influence in the planning and the taking of important decisions in their firm, which means, at the extreme, the control of the firms by the producers. It should be added that if a programme of this kind is extremely hard to implement in a relatively underdeveloped country with a relatively low standard of living, such as Yugoslavia, since the material needs of the working class are acute and pressing, whereas many of its members have a relatively low intellectual level, having only recently left the land, itis, by contrast, much easier to implement when it is a question of assigning the responsibility for long-term planning and decision- ‘making to specialists whose intellectual level is actually or potentially high and whose standard of living is such that atleast the most pressing, needs of existence are satisfied and no longer present any problems. In the end, self-management is the economic democracy of the pro- ducers, and it seems to me that once the producers have reached a certain level of consciousness and a certain economic level, it will be just as inevitable as the move to political democracy in the advanced industrial countries once the economic, social and intellectual development of the bourgeoisie had taken place, I must add, however, that, apact from. the necessity—which would take us beyond the limits of this paper— to fil out this entirely schematic general outline with concrete analyses of what Althusser calls the factors of ‘over-determination’—that is, in this case, the specific features of the economic, social and political structures and the relationships between the classes in the various advanced industrial countries—there are three problems of a general nature, which I must be content with mentioning briefly, but whose importance cannot be overstressed (@) How will the present rulers and the forces of conservatism resist the prospect of a revolutionary-reformist transformation of society as a whole and the move towards economic democracy and self-manage- ment ? Or, to put it another way, what sort of conflicts will be needed to bring about the humane and efficient development of Western society ? (On this point, the roads forward will certainly be much more diverse than the schema of the proletarian political revolution, Tt is enough to point to the varied ways in which the bourgeoisie took power in the different countries of Western Europe and in the United States (by revolution in England and France, by reform in Germany, by a move- ment for national unification and independence in Italy, by the direct creation of a bourgeois society and the extermination of the previous inhabitants in the United States). Since, however, itis likely that the non-revolutionary road to power of the German and Italian bourgeoisie ‘was only made possible by the previous victories of the English and French revolutions, there is no guarantee, nor even any probability, History and Class Consciousness 83 that the first move to self-management will take place by peacefull means and without more or less severe struggles. This poses the particularly important problem of the forms of organization to be adopted by the socialist movement in order to ensure the victory of self-management over the reactionary forces which will oppose it, It is quite clear that these forms cannot be either those of the great bureaucratic and hierarchical bodies which directed the actions of the workers in the mechanized industry, or those of the movement for liberation and social transformation in the underdeveloped countries. It is within the Western countries that the movement will have to invent and create its own forms of organization, just as in 905 the workers of Petrograd invented the Soviets, which none of the major socialist theorists of the time had foreseen. At the present time, the rediscovery and reactualization of the theorists of an earlier period (Rosa Luxemburg, Trotsky, Lenin) and the reference to the great Teaders of the revolutionary movements in the Third World (Mao, Castro, Guevara) only prove—however much one may admire the ‘genius, the ideas and the achievements of these great leaders—that we still lack solutions appropriate to the needs of the advanced industrial countries, (2) It is clear that the debate on self-management and the revolu- tionary-reformist movement, centred as itis on the problems of Western ‘Europe, cannot be carried on in a vacuum, and that we need to analyse in theory and resolve in practice the problem of the relationship between the socialist movement in these countries and those in the countries of the Third World, which will inevitably take completely differeat forms. I should simply like to stress that this is an extremely complex problem and that most of the atzempts to solve it so far have been mere profes- sions of faith and verbal solutions which avoid facing the real difficulties. (@) Finally, and this is a particularly grave problem and one which the current evolution of the techniques and forces of production obliges us to face, it is possible that the democracy of producers—which socialist thought equated with real economic democracy for society as a whole—could in its turn become the domination of a privileged {group (that of all the producers taken together) over a more and more numerous section of society, which technological change and auto- ‘mation would have eliminated from the process of production. All that we can say on this last point is that in so far as the producers will very probably need the support of the population as a whole in order to achieve structural reforms and a genuine economic democracy with selfmanagement—just as in England and France the bourgeoisie had to rely on the support of the people in its struggle against feudalism and later against the monarchy—it will be one of the most important tasks of socialist theorists and militants to do everything in their power84 Lucien Goldmann to make of this alliance a lasting relationship which goes deeply enough into the consciousness of men to avoid, ot at any rate, attenuate, the emergence of further conflict; in a word, to make sure that in societies ‘which are rich enough to afford i the historical alliance of 1793 does not this time lead to the repression which followed June 1848 and the Paris Commune. ‘We see, then, how relevant the methodological, philovophical and sociological parts of Lukics’s book still are to our attempts to under~ stand the societies we live in and the world of today. This, it seems to me, is the greatest tribute we can pay to a work that will remain—in spite of its undoubted errors, which were probably unavoidable at the time when it was written—one of the great turning-points in the history. of sociological, philosophical and methodological thought in the twen- tieth century. Translated by Peter Prance j Six Contingent and necessary class consciousness Istvan Mészaros 1 Marx’s approach to the problem of class consciousness ‘The following two quotations illustrate, better than anything else, the central dilemma of the Marxist theory of classes and class consciousness. ‘The first comes from The Holy Family: cis not a question of what this ot that proletatian, or even the whole proletariat, at the moment considers as its aim. It is a question of what the proletariat is, and what, in accordance with, this being, i will hitorically be compelled to do, Its aim and historical action is irrevocably and clearly foreshadowed in its own life situation 2s well as in the whole organization of bourgeois society today. There is no need here to show that a large part of the English and French proletariat is already conscious of its historic task and is constantly working to develop that consciousness into complete clarity.» The second quotation, from a work by Gramsci, puts the emphasis ‘on the vital need for developing class consciousness in an organization- ally effective form: It can be excluded that, by themselves, economic crises directly produce fandsmental events; they can only create more favourable ground for the propagition of certain ways of thinking, of posing ‘and solving questions which involve the whole future development of State life. ‘The decisive element in every situation is the force, permanently ‘organized and pre-ordered over a long period, which can be advanced when one judges that the situation is favourable (and it itis favourable only to the extent to which such a force exists and is, full of fighting ardour); therefore the essential task is that of a586 Istodin Mészdiros paying systematic and patient attention to forming and developing ‘this force, rendering it even more homogeneous, compact, conscious of itself? [As we can see, the issue at stake is the relationship between historical necessity and class consciousness. On the face of it there seems to be fa contradiction between Marx and Gramsci: the first speaks of the proletariat being compelled to fulfil its historic task, whereas the second insists that the historical situation itself is favourable only to the extent to which the proletariat has already succeeded in developing an organized force fully conscious of itself. However, for a more adequate under- standing of the meaning of both quotations it is essential to notice that ‘Marx, in his assertion of the historical necessity of class-conscious proletarian action, does not simply refer to ‘economic crises’—the terms of Gramsci’s polemics against ‘vulgar economism’—but to the ‘Being’ of the class: ie. he indicates the line of solution in terms of the complex determinants of a social ontology as contrasted with some economic mechanism, And this makes all the difference. For the ‘being? of any class is the comprehensive synthesis of all factors which are at work in society, whereas the propounders of an ‘economic determinism’ —rightly castigated by Gramsci—single out one factor only, and crudely superimpose it on all the others. | If Mare’s approach to the problem of clases and class consciousness is interpreted on the crude model of ‘economic determinism’, the dilemma mentioned above remains insoluble, Instead of a dialectical assessment of ‘Social being’ we are given a schematic account and @ ‘pseudo-solution: It is apparent that Marx’s theory of social classes, along with other parts of his doctrine, involved a basic ambiguity which has bedevilled his interpreters ever since. For, on the one hand, he felt quite certain that the contradictions engendered by capitalism, ‘would inevitably lead to a class conscious proletariat and hence to 1 proletarian revolution. But on the other hand, he assigned to class consciousness, to political action, and to his scientific theory of history a major role in bringing about this result. In his own eyes this difficulty was resolved because such subjective elements as class consciousness or a scientific theory were themselves a by-product of the contradictions inherent in capitalism. To treat class consciousness as mere subjectivity and ‘by-product’ of ‘capitalist economy is a caricature of Marx. This view arises out of an approach which substitutes 2 one-sided, mechanical model of deter mination for Marx’s complex dialectica? model. Thus, in the end, consciousness is crudely subsumed under economy and its role becomes, Contingent and necessary class consciousness 87 illusory: it cannot actively produce change, since it is itself the mere product (indeed, ‘by-product’) of capitalist economic develop- ment. ‘And here we come to a crucial question: the complexity of Marx’s dialectical methodology. In a mechanical jon there isa clear-cut Tine of demarcation between “determined? and its ‘determinants’, Not so within the framework of a dialectical methodology. In terms of the latter: although the economic foundations of capitalist society constitute the ‘ultimate determinants’ of the social being of its classes, these ‘ultimate determinants? are at the same time also ‘determined deter- minants’, In other words, Marx’s assertions about the ontological significance of economies become meaningful only if we are able to grasp his idea of ‘complex interactions’ in the most varied fields of Jhuman activity. Accordingly, the various institutional and intellectual manifestations of human life are not simply “built upon’ an economic basis, but also actively structure the latter through the immensely intricate and relatively auconomous stracture of their own, ‘Economic determinations? do not exist outside the historically changing compiex of specific medictions, including the most ‘spiritual’ ones.* In Mars’s view ‘the gods in the beginning are not the cause bur the effect of ‘man’s intellectual confusion, Later this relationship becomes reciprocal."> ‘Consequently, once beliefs of this kind—or indeed of any other kind— are held by man, they cetry with them manifold repercussions for the totality of human life, including the ‘economic fact’ of ‘allocating scarce resources” for the construction of cathedrals, for the maintenance of the Church and the clergy, etc. Similarly with consciousness in all its forms and manifestations which have a relatively autonomous structure of their own, determining thus, in the form of reciprocity, the economic structures of society while they are also determined by the latter, ‘Supply and demand’, ‘production and consumption’ are economic categories par excellence. But only on the surface. A closer look reveals that none of them makes any sense whatsoever without the historically changing catezory of ‘human needs’, which cannot conceivably be accounted for in terms of one-sided economic determinations. { One cannot understand Marx's concept of class consciousness ‘without understanding his view of social causation. According to Marx, every human achievement introduces a new element into the ‘complex set of interactions which characterize society at any given time. Consequently, what is the case ‘in the beginning’ cannot possibly remain the case at a later stage of development. The dialectical warning about the nature of economic determinations which prevail ‘only in the last analysis’ is meant to emphasize that while both structurally and genetically the concept of ‘the material conditions of life’ occupies ‘8 paramount position in the Marxian system—i.e. both as regards the88 Istedn Mésedros historical genesis of the more complex forms of human interchange and in that material conditions constitute the structurally necessary pre= condition of buman life in all conceivable forms of society-—it is by no ‘means capable of accounting for the complexities of social development on its own, Indeed, when Marx points to abundance—both material abundance and the fee availability of time at the disposal of men—as the necessary basis of “that development of human energy which is an nd in itself, the true realm of freedom’, he does not suggest that this abundance produces ‘the realm of freedom’, (If he did so he would hhave been guilty of the contradiction of mechanically determining freedom.) On the contrary, by emphasizing the necessary basis and precondition of a truly free human development he indicates those conditions which—if satisfied—enable man to overcome these natural and material determinations which oppose ‘that development of human ‘energy which is an end in itself” ‘This means that the role of consciousness becomes increasingly greater with the development of human productive powers. But precisely because of the relative autonomy of the various forms and manifestations of human consciousness, ‘wocialized man’ (ie. ‘the associated producers who rationally regulate their interchange with nature’ is by no means an automatic result of this development, although he is a necessary being at a certain stage of social interchange. ‘Consciousness can be put at the service of alfenated life, just as it can ‘envisage the supersession of alicnation.* The question whether the former or the Intter forms of consciousness prevail in the society of potential abundance cannot even be tackled, let alone solved, in terms ‘of a mechanical model of social causality which must deny the relative autonomy of social consciousness. (‘Economism’, ‘fatalism’, and “mmobilism’ are the well-known political manifestations of this kind ‘of mechanical approach to the problem of class consciousness.) On the other hand, the failure to understand the dialectic of reciprocal deter :minations can also result in assigning absolute autonomy to consciousness, postulating political structures and forms of organization in sharp contradiction to the objective possibilities of the given socio-historical situation. (‘Subjectivism’, ‘voluntarism’, ‘activism’, etc, are the equally ‘well-known political manifestations of this wndialectical conception.) In the case of mechanical determinism the possibility of a break in the chain of material determinations, in its Marxian sense, is a priori rejected, while in the case of undialectical voluntarism a break is arbitrarily postulated: without taking into account, that is, the conditions necessary for such a break. Marx, by contrast, oa the one hand defines the objective conditions of a break in terms of the reciprocal deter= mination of social being and social consciousness, (To illustrate this point: he insists that the productive forces had to reach a certain Contingent and necessary class consciousness 89 degree of development before it became possible to separate ‘objectifica- tion’ from ‘alienation’: a possibility that cannot become reality without ‘the conscious implementation of the programme of ‘de-alienating’ the various forms and instruments of human ‘seli-objectification’.) On the other hand, Marx stresses the necessity of a break in the chain of ‘economic determinations: a break without which he could not define the crucial characteristic of the proletariat as ‘seif-atolition’, nor its class consciousness as awareness of the historical task of abolishing all class-limirations—the limitations of class-society—in the course of abolishing oneself as a class. ‘Conscious self-abolition’ as a result of ‘economic determinism is « contradiction in terms. Consequently, cither there is no alternative to reproducing the contradictions of class society in all conceivable forms of society, or the chain of socio-economic ‘determinations must be broken, (We shall return shortly to this problem ‘of ‘conscious selfabolition’,) There can be no doubt as to where Marx stands on this issue. Another major difficulty in fully grasping the meaning of Marx’s theory of classes and class consciousness resides in the muti-dimension- ality 0f is concepts. For all his categories are not only structurally interrelated, tout also every one of them is conceived as inherently historical. This dificulty, thus, consists in adequately grasping the historical dynamism of structurally interconniected categories which are constitutive parts of a complex whole. ‘The structural aspect of this problem is well illustrated by Mars’s ‘warnings against isolating the specific categories of any particular field from the complex totality to which they belong: ‘To try to give a definition of property as of an independent relation, a category apart—an abstract and eternal idea—can be nothing but an illusion of meta- physics."? The same goes, of course, for the concepts of ‘classes? and ‘class consciousness’: they acquire their full meaning only as focal points ofa multiplicity of structurally interconnected social phenomena. “Do not say’—warns Manx—‘that social movement excludes political movement. There is never a political movement which is not af the same time social." Consequently, ‘class consciousness’ cannot be understood. simply in terms of the ideological and organizational factors of the Political sphere, however important they may be. Isolating the issue fof class consciousness from the complex problematics to which it objectively belongs can only give rise to voluntarism, subjectivism and adventurism. According to Matx, political devices on their own make xno sense whatsoever; for men must change ‘from top to bottom the conditions of their industrial and political existence, and consequently their whole manner of being’ Strikes, for instance, were enthusiastically greeted by Marx—in sha:p contrast to his categorical condemnation of Luddism—not simply because they contributed to the development 690 Istodn Mészdros of working-class consciousness: he was quite aware of their limitations in that respect. (Limitations which were later appropriately termed by Lenin as ‘trade union consciousness’.) He insisted on their significance for the development of the productive forces in that they compelled the bourgeoisie to introduce labour-saving devices, mobilizing science in the service of higher productivity, and thus substantially hastening the maturation of both the productive potentials and the contradictions of capitalism? The political factor thus acquires its significance in terms of a comprehensive set of reciprocal determinations: in virtue of its effective contribution to a profound structural modification of the totality of social processes—ftom the far-reaching transformation of the means of production to the creation of new ideas, new modes of organization, and new instruments of defensive and offensive action— ‘carrying with it the impossibility of neutralizing or nullifying its total impact, notwithstanding the temporary success of measures devised for taming the trade union movement as 2 political force, In other words: ‘the central significance of strikes resides in that they cannot be structux~ ally integrated into the system of capitalist production in the long run, even if, paradoxically, they are bound to help remedy many a partial defect of capitalism in the short run. This objective dialectic of partial integrability and ultimate disintegration—i.e, both the negative and the positive aspects in their necessary interconnectedness—constitute ‘Mara’s framework of reference, whereas concentrating on the partial and negative aspect alone lands one in a nightmare society of ‘total alienation’, with its ‘fully integrated working class’: a society to which nothing but the fictitious counter-example of a ‘critical Utopia’ can bbe opposed. Marx’s approach always situates the partial movement in its global setting. TThis is why he can perceive already in the embryonic forms of working-class organization the developed forms, just as he ‘can identify the reciprocal interchange of political and economic determinations, in strikes embedded in the capitalist structure of production. Thus, it emerges that trade unionism simply cannot ‘become an exclusively economic form of action, no matter how strongly this side of its nature predominates in a given historical period. (In this light the failure to create, é Ja George Woodcock, a ‘non-political ‘trade tnion movement’—that contradiction in terms—turns out to be a ‘necessary failure.) Indeed, the logic of Marx’s reasoning—in view of ‘the point about the maturation of the productive forces under the impact of strikes, etc.—necessarily means that the more directly the capitalist system of production is involved as a whole in the given confrontation, the greater is the need to bring the political factors into the foreground, in a truly global framework of conflicts and collisions, when the non- integrability of forced concessions becomes particularly acute, And, again, the political factors cannot be separated from the socio-economic ver Contingent and necessary class consciousness 9x ‘ones: fully developed ‘intemationaliom’ and fully developed ‘world mic necessarily imply each other. (We shall return to this problem ‘The historical dynamism of the structurally interrelated particular factors has been already displayed in Marx's cvtical examples quoted above, and therefore need not retain us here much longer. Let it suffice to point at the general methodoiogical validity of Marx's analysis concerning the structural inter-relationship and, at the same time, historical specificity of ‘market? and ‘dinision of labour’, for instance. “The extent of the market, its physiognomy, give to the division of labour at different periods a physiognomy, a character’, writes Marz, ‘emphasizing ‘the need to study the numerous influences which give the division of labour a deiinite character in every epoch.” The same applies, it goes without saying, to ‘classes’ and ‘class consciousness? which must be grasped as integral parts of a dynamic set of socio historical factors. Thus, the modifications of the market, the further ‘extension of the division of labour, the increase in society’s productive powers, the concentraticn of capital, the far-reaching changes in the social pattern of consumption, the development of scientific knowledge, communication, transport, educational technology, efc.—all these factors have a vital beating on the development of classes and class consciousness, just as the later are bound to affect the former in one form or another. ‘Consequently, an adequate understanding of Mars’s theory of classes and class consciousness requires the examination of his conception as a whole under one of its major aspects: an analysis whose focal point is the concept of ‘social conflict and its complex determinants’, assessed in accordance with the dialectic of reciprocal determinations, 2 Class position and class interest Here we have to quote at a greater length a passage from The Holy Family which sums up the majot points of Marx’s view of classes and class consciousness: Proletariat and wealth are opposites. As such they form a cingle whole. They are both begotten by the world of private property. ‘The question is what particular place each occupies within the antithesis, It is not sufficient to declare them two sides of a single whole, Private property as private property, as wealth, is compelled to maintain itself, and thereby its opposite, the proletariat, inexistence, That is the positive side of the contradiction, self-satisied private property. The proletariat, on the other hand, is compelled as proletariat to abolish itscif and thereby its opposite,92 Istedn Mésedros the condition for its existence, that which makes it the proletariat, i.e, private property. That is the negative side of the contradiction, its restlessness within its very self, dissolved and self-dissolving private property. . . . Within this antithesis the private property- ‘owner is therefore the conservative side, the proletarian, the destructive, side. From the former arises the action of preserving the antithesis, from the latter, that of annihilating it, In any case, in its economic movement private property drives towards its own dissolution, but only through a development ‘which does not depend on it, of which itis unconscious and which takes place against its will, through the very nature of things, only inasmuch as it produces the proletariat as proletariat, misery conscious of its spivitual and physical misery, dehumanization conscious of its dehumanization and therefore self-abolishing. The proletariat executes the sentence that private property pronounced on itself by begetting the proletariat, just as it executes the sentence thet wage-lebour pronounced on itself by begetting wealth for others and misery for itself. When the proletariat is victorious, it by no means becomes the absolute side of society, for it is victorious only by abolishing itself and its opposite. Then the proletariat disappears as well as the opposite which determines it, private property. Widen soclist wrters acre his hii role othe proletariat, itis not, as Critical Criticism would have one think, because they consider proletarians as gods. Rather the contrary. Since the abstraction of all humanity, even of the semblance of humanity, is practically complete in the fully-formed proletariat; since the conditions of life of the proletariat sum up all the conditions of life of society today in their most inhuman and ecute form; since ‘man has lost himself in the proletariat, yet at the same time has not only gained theoretical consciousness of that loss, but through the no longer removable, no longer disguisable, absolutely imperative need—the practical expression of necessity—is driven directly to revolt against that inhumanity; it follows that the proletariat can and must free itself. But it cannot free itself without abolishing the conditions of its own life, Tt cannot abolish the ~ conditions of its own life without abolishing ¢11 the inhuman ‘conditions of life of society today which are summed up in its own. situation, Before embarking on a more detailed analysis, let us make a few brief comments on this important passage. ‘The first point to emphasize is the Marxian formulation of the problem of classes as an ‘antithesis? (or structural antagonism) a Contingent and necessary class consciousness 93 ‘constituting —with its positive and negative sides—a single whole, whose clements cannot be absolutized (since they stand or fall together), nor indeed brought to a rest or ‘reconciliation’. (The far-reaching implica- tions ofthis idea will have to be discussed more in detail.) ‘The second point that needs stressing is the distinction between the ‘two sides of this antagonism in terms of class consciousness which does not simply depend on subjective insight, but on objective factors: ‘on one side, the ‘uncowcious* character of capital determined by a specific form of social development which compels it, ‘against its will, 1 produce its opposite; on the other, the necessity, through its mani- festation in the form of practical need, which gives rise to selfcon- sciousness. (The relationship between ‘class interest” and ‘false con- sciousness’ must be understood as a complex interplay of these factors.) Also, it is important to notice Mars’s emphasis on the ‘spiritual’ side of the misery of the subordinate class, for it is customary to misrepresent the Marxian view of ‘incremsing misery’ as merely a material consideration. The fact is, however, that in Marx’s thought, from the early writings to Capital, the material and intellectual spiritual aspects are always linked together, and the worker’s condition is described as growing worse irrespective of the matetial improvements (Cbe his payment high or low") precisely because of the inseparability of the two aspects. Equally important is Mars’s insistence that the ‘sef-abolition’ of the proletariat—defined as abolishing, at the same time, the conditions of debumanization—cannot be achieved without the conscious action of the class that ‘can and must free itself”. Indeed, the programme of ‘self-abolition’ would be a contradiction in terms if things were left to the unconscious force of some mythical ‘historical necessity’. (It is by xno means accidental tha: further on we can read in The Holy Family: ‘History does nothing . . . “history” is not, as it were, a person apart, using man as a means to achieve its own aims; history is nothing but the activity of man pursuing his aims.) The ‘absolutely imperative need’ mentioned by Marx has nothing’ to do with the Kantian ‘categorical imperative’, for it is ‘the practical expression of necessity’. But equally the latter has nothing to do with history personified or turned into some kind of a mechanistic ‘economic ‘determinism’, for it cannot possibly prevail without the fuoman mediation of ‘absolutely imperative need’: the real human basis of an adequate self-consciousness, ie, neither abstractly speculative nor crudely deter~ amined by unmediated empiria, In Mars’s view it is not enough to say that there can be no ‘selfabolition’ without the maturation of its objective conditions. Ore must also add: the objective conditions themselves cannot reach their full maturity without the development of sef-consciousness as coxsciousness of the need for de-alienation. Thus,94 Istvdn Mésedros the ‘subjective’ factor acquires an over-riding importance as the necessary ‘precondition of success at that highly advanced stage of human develop- ment when the isue at stake is the ‘telf-abolishing? abolition of the ‘conditions of dehumanization. (We can see, again, the significance of dialectical approach without which one must end up with irreconcilable ‘antinomies’ and ‘dichotomies’.) Finally, we have to draw attention to the often-ignored fact that Lukics’s ‘famous distinction between ‘ascribed’ or ‘imputed’ class consciousness and ‘psychological’ consciousness has its origin in the ‘Marxian idea which opposes true or necessary class consciousness—one ‘ascribed to the proletariat” in virtue of its being ‘conscious of its historic task’ (as Marx writes a few lines further on, in the passage quoted at the beginning of this paper)—to the contingency of ‘what this or that proletarian, or even the whole proletariat, at the moment considers as its aim’, (Even terminologically, the similasity is striking; Marx uses the term “suschreiben’, and Lukes its closest synonym, ‘zurechnen’: ‘which both mean ‘to ascribe’, ‘attribute’ or ‘impute’.) Thus, Lukics’s distinction between ‘ascribed? and ‘psychological? class consciousness is a reformulation of one of the basic tenets of the Marxian system. Indeed, as we shall see, it is quite impossible to make sense of Marx’s theory of classes and class consciousness without this vital distinction, For any attempt to reduce Marx’s theory to its ‘sociologically sound’— ‘or ‘scientifc’—elements, at the expense of its ‘ideological concepts’ (or ‘merely philosophical ideas’, ‘logical constructs’, etc.), tums the ‘Marxian global vision into a haphazard assembly of disconnected fragments, in the spirit of flat empiricism and positivism. The separation of ‘Marx the sociologist’ from ‘Marx the revolutionary” (or ‘Marx the ideologue’, etc.) can only contribute to a sterile stalemate in both theory and practice, whether the intention behind itis a conservative or an ‘activist’ one. This has been well known ever since Sorel—who ‘opposed ‘social science’ to the function of ‘shaping consciousness”! though, of course, few of those who follow this line of reasoning today would wish to be associated with such a predecessor. All the same, breaking the dialectical unity of the Marxian set of concepts incvitably leads to this kind of polarization, which carries with it the unenviable choice between the ‘scientific objectivity’ of flat empiricism—the Pedestrian assembly of the fragments of phenomenal immediacy, glorified as ‘sound scientific principles’—and the inflated mythology of ‘politcal activism as a category apart’, which is supposed to be respon- sible, on its own, for ‘shaping consciousness’. (It goes without saying ‘that we can find a great variety of artificial polarization in the particular theories which share the methodology ofa rigid, undialectical separation of the ‘theoretical concepts’ from the ‘practical’ ones, divorcing ‘value- free theory’, ‘pure philosophy’, ‘scientific knowledge’, and ‘empirical | Contingent and necessary class consciousness 95 theory’ from ‘ideology’ ‘description’ from ‘evaluation’; ‘analysis’ from ‘synthesis’; ‘social facts’ ‘rom ‘ideal types’; ‘rationality’ from ‘emotivism’ ‘naturalism’ from ‘prescriptivism’; ‘facts’ from ‘values’; ‘necessity’ from ‘freedom’; ‘is’ from ‘ought’, etc." Such theories, invariably, falfil themselves in formulating unrealized—and, because of this etedalegy of rigid polarization, @ priori unrealizable— programmes for of Class consciousness, according to Marx, is inseparable from the recog nition—in the form of “rue? or ‘false consciousness? —of class interest ‘based on the objective social position of the different classes in the established structure of society. This is why, in Marx’s words: ‘The English Established Church, e.g., will more readily pardon an attack on 38 out of its 39 articles than on x/39th of its income. Nowadays atheism itself is culpa levis, as compared with criticism of existing property-relations.”"8 Tt is this consciousness of one’s class interest which explains the vehemence of Keynes's telling attack on Marxism: How can Taccept a doctrine which sets up as its bible, above and beyond criticism, an obsolete economic textbook which I know to be not only scientifically erroneous but without interest or application ‘for the modern world? How can I adopt a creed which, preferring ‘the mud to the fish, exalts the boorish proletariat above the bourgeois and the intelligentsia who, with whatever faults, are ‘the quality in life and surely carry the seeds of all human advance- ment? Even if we need a religion, how can we find it in the turbid rubbish of the Red bookshops ? Tt is hard for an educated, decent, intelligent son of Western Europe to find his ideals here, unless he has frst suffered some strange and horrid process of conversion which has changed all his values.” ‘When it comes to the class struggle as such, my local and personal patriotism, like those of everyone else, except certain unpleasant zealous ones, are attached to my own surroundings. I can be influenced by what seems to me to be justice and good senses but the class war zl find me on the side ofthe educated hourgenisia’ ‘This is clear and straight talking, overtly representing the class interests ‘of a bourgeoisie confident of the stability of its power-position in the ‘established order of society.*™ ‘The situation of those who are forced to notice, on the much more torn European mainland, the disappearance of the old stability, is quite different. Given the limitations of their social position, they interpret the undeniable social dynamism of their epoch as 2 movernent96 Istedin Mésedros that does not question the rule of capital. Thus, they postulate ‘social mobility’ as a ‘convergence? of the classes, and consequently as the elimination of class conflict in a ‘modern industrial society’ smoothly managed by the ‘unattached intelligentsia’ ‘Max Scheler called our contemporary period the ‘epoch of equalisation’ (Zeitalter des Ausgleichs), which, if applied to our problems, means that ours is a world in which social groupings, which had hitherto lived more or less isolated from one another, each making itself and its own world of thought absolute, are now, in one form or another, merging into one another. ‘Nearly half a century has gone by since the formulation of theories of this kind. Having, thus, persuaded themselves of the non-partisan character of their theories—in an epoch when, as a matter of fact, the distance between the ‘haves’ and the ‘have-nots’ continued to increase, and the only ‘mergers’ we could witness, on a global scale, were the results of take-over bids, producing giant monopolies, ‘oligopolies’, ‘duopolies’, ‘conglomerates’ and ‘super-conglomerates’—representatives of the allegedly ‘unattached intelligentsia? continued to write about ‘equalization’, ‘the institutionalization of conflict’, ‘convergence’, and the like. Within the confines of ‘rigorously objective and impartial— ‘value-free’—social science such ‘emotive terms? as ‘bourgeoisie’ and ‘proletariat? were ruled out of order, just as talking about ‘capitalism’ ‘was considered ‘obsolete’ and ‘ideologically biased’. The proper ‘neutral’ terms were: ‘higher and lower income groups’—eliminating, semantically, the problem of classes—and capitalism was ‘superseded? by ‘modern industrial society’, ‘industrial civilization’ and ‘post- ‘capitalist socity’. (In the last few years even such terms were coined as ‘post-industrial cociety’—whatever they might mean.) In this world of semantic convergence—in which the prevaling climate of wishful thinking induced some leading representatives of this ‘value-free social and political science’ to announce, with boundless optimism, nothing less than ‘the end of ideology’—the one and only legitimate use for these allegedly ‘nineteenth century concepts’ consisted in tuming out an endless number of books and ‘scientific research projects’ on the embourgeoisement of the proletariat. ‘There is no space hete for a detailed analysis of these theories. We have to concentrate, therefore, on assessing only a few of their major tenets and methodological characteristics. One of their striking features is the inflation of phenomena of necessarily limited significance into universal laws like ‘equalization’, ‘convergence’, ‘institutionalization of conflict, ‘embourgeoisement’, etc. The smallest sign of marginal (limited, partial, isolated) equalization is eagerly greeted as fundamental or structural equalization. Ta such a Contingent and necessary class consiousness 97 ‘generalized form these ‘laws’ amount to nothing more than an empty postulate, and, for that matter, 2 self-contradictory one, By projecting—as ‘an objective social trend—the so-called ‘equalization’ and ‘convergence? of the classes within capitalism, they postulate the ‘supersession’ of the actual structural subordination of labour to capital (a necessary feature of all conceivable forms of capitalism) without any need for the introduc- tion of radical structural changes in the existing social relations of production, (The delicite renaming of capitalism as ‘modern industrial society”, etc, is one of the devices for hiding this contradiction. Another, theoretically far more important, one is the systematic confusion of all structural aspects of social phenomena with their functional aspects,2¢ as we shall see at the end of this section.) Having thus succeeded in squaring the circle—not by means of a ‘logical construct” but through an illogical one—all that remains is to collect ‘empirical evidence’ in support of the a priori thesis of ‘conver gence’. And the more fragmentary and unrepresentative the data collected in a self-confrmatory fashion are, the better they succeed in concealing the @ prior! character and logical contradictoriness of this Kind of ‘value-free, scientific procedure’, The methodology of flat ‘empiricism serves a dual purpose. On the one hand it hides the fact that all the available comprehensive sets of empirical data point to increasing polarization, growing inequality, and the concentration of the means of production in fewer and fewer hands, on a global scale—iee. that they demonstrate the exact opposite of the claimed equalization, convergence, and structural integration of the classes. Onn the other hand, by stipulat- ing the ‘scientific’ virtues of concentrating merely on the fragmentary details of phenomenal immediacy, it sets itself up—not by means of convincing arguments, but by simply rejecting, with self-complacent circularity, the methodology of ‘generalizations’ attributed to the Sideological’ adversary—as the one and only ‘non-ideologica? procedure. ‘Thus, not only does it succeed in dispensing with the need of rendering explicit its—selfcontradictory—assumptions, as indeed with the need to provide any justification for its adopted methodology; it also brings the additional bonus that this a prioristic, self-contradictory, counter ‘empirical, and blatantly ideological approach can be presented as the paradigm of presuppositionless, empirically founded, rigorous, scientific ‘methodology—as non-partisan objectivity itself ‘Thus, if Marx shows that capital and Tabour constitute a structural antagonism which necessarily excludes the possibility of a structural integration of the proletariat, this can be conveniently dismissed as an “a priori logical construct’, The fact is, though, that—in accordance with the programme Marx had consciously set himself already in his youth—his results have been won as a result of an ‘empirical analysis ‘based on a conscienticus ctitical study of political economy’. The98 Istodn Mészctros above-mentioned structural antagonism between capital and labour, far from being a mere logical construct, is necessarily inherent in the ‘empirical reality of a mode of production which cannot function without the ever-enlarging reproduction of exchange value: ‘The law of capitalist accumulation, metamorphosed by economists into a pretended law of Nature, in reality merely states that the very nature of accumulation excludes every diminution in the degree of exploitation of labour, and every rise in the price of labour, which could seriously imperil the continual reproduction, on an ever-enlarging scale, of the capitalistic relation. Tt cannot bbe otherwise in a mode of production in which the labourer exists to satisfy the needs of self-expansion of existing values, instead of, on the contrary, material wealth existing to satisfy the needs of development on the part of the labourer.** ‘This means that any increase in the price of labour must be relative to the general rate of accumulation (the result of increasing productivity, the concentration of capital coupled with some degree of rationalization, tc.) and subordinated to the latter consequently, the structural relations of society remain fundamentally the same. (In other words, ‘social mobility’ is bound to remain marginal so long as the conditions of the structural subordination of labour to cepital prevail.) Only particular individuals, not classes, can be integrated into an established structure of society which is constituted by the classes themselves. Given the structural antagonism between capital and labour, any talk about the ‘integration’ or ‘embourgeoisment’ of the proletariat in a society whose productive relations remain essentially the same is a contradiction ia terms, no matter what kind of political intent may lie behind it. ‘The core of Marx’s theory of classes and class consciousness is precisely this concept of the necessary structural subordination of labour to capital in commodity society. And no amount of increase in wages—for ‘wages are wages are wages—-could change that, (Not that there is any danger of significant increases. For even the latest Incomes Data Services survey states unmistakably that ‘Poorly paid workers in Britain are getting poorer’ ") The class interest of the proletariat is defined in terms of changing this structural subordination. In Gramsci’s words, it consists in ‘the transformation of the subordinate into the ruling ‘group’. What is, thus, really at stake is not the issue of how to obtain. ‘a better wage for the slave’ (Marx), nor indeed that of a change in the tone of voice—carefully filtered by ‘human engineering’—which ‘transmits the dictates of commodity production to the workers, but radical restructuring of the established order of society. ‘Understandably, there are qualitative differences betweea the Contingent and necessary class consciousness 99 interests of the dominant group and those of the subordinate group. The ‘mast obvious of them is that the dominant group is interested in change only to the extent to which reforms and concessions can be integrated or institutionalized, whereas changes of this kind are opposed to the interests of the subordinate group in as much as they prolong its sub- ordination. (A countervailing force is, of course, the impact of these reforms and concessions on the development of the productive powers of society, significantly contributing to the maturation of social contra dictions, as has been already mentioned in the previous section.) Another fundamental difference is that the individual self-interest of the particular members of the ruling group is directly related to the general objective of retaining the structurally dominant and privileged position the group as a whole enjoys in society. The ‘transcendence of individual self-interest’ in the direction of the collective interest of the class is, therefore, a mere fiction, since such a ‘transcendence’ in reality ‘amounts to nothing but an effective safeguarding of crude seifinterest. Consequently, ‘the pursuit of self-interest’ must be turned by bourgeois thinkers into a ‘National Law’—the alleged law of ‘Human Nature’— valid for this ‘phenomenal world of ours’, and the idea of its transcen- dence must assume the form of a fictitious ‘ought’, ideally but not effectively opposed to ‘s’, and confined to the equally fictitious ‘noume- ‘a? realm of metaphysical transcendentalism.”* All this is quite different with the subordinate group. Here the ‘short-term’ interests of particular individuals, and even of the class 2s a whole at a given time, can stand in radical opposition to the ‘long-term’ interest of structural change. (his is why Marx can and must point to the fundamental difference between contingent or ‘psychological’ and necessary class consciousness.) Thus ‘the pursuit of individual self- interest’—leading to the integration of particular individuals in the established order of society—as well as the collective forms of reformist action in so far as they are straightforward extensions of this pursuit of pparticularistic self-interest, are opposed and transcended not in the form of an a priori impotent ‘noumenal ought’, but by the actuality of social development which in the long run necessarily condemns to failure such attempts ata structural integration of the subordinate class —2 contradiction in terms—on any significant scale. This does not ‘mean, of course, that the problem itself should be ignored, but that it must be kept in its proper perspective. To say that ‘insofar as individuals seek their social betterment through individual rather than group action, to that extent class consciousness is weakened by status aspirations" is a gross oversimplification. ‘Group action’ in itself is by ‘no means a guarantee of an adequate class consciousness, It all depends on the actual nature of the objectives involved, ie. on whether the achievements of group action can be successfully integrated or not.100 Istedn Mésedros Group action devoid of strategically significant objectives can only strengthen ‘group consciousness’—or ‘trade union consciousness hooked on to the partial interests of a limited group of workers. In this it is qualitatively different from a group action like the recently- announced Italian general strike arising out of and further contributing toa crisis of authority which is infact the crisis of hegemony, ot crisis of the State in all spheres’. Besides, the individuals ‘betterment of his position’ need not necessarily carry with it the weakening of class consciousness. Whether it does or not will depend to a large extent on the degree of class consciousness of the individual in question: a relationship implicitly denied by this mechanical-determinist view which first arbitrarily postulates a dichotomy between ‘brute facts’ and “values? (Glass focuses on the divisions which result from the brute facts of econoinic organization. Status relates to the more subtle distinctions which stem from the valves that men set on each other’s actvities.”), and then concludes, with triumphant circularity, that aspirations at a “betterment of one’s position’—by definition (but only by this definition) involving a different set of values—necessarily weaken class conscious ness, (Again we can witness the metamorphosis of arbitrary apriorism into a claim to empirical validity.) ‘The proletariat as merely the ‘sum total’ of its individual members (a Sartre’s terminology: the class as a ‘serial collective’™) at any given time is a sociological contingency, with specific aims and more or less limited powers and instruments for their realization. The same prole- tariat, though, is at the same time —in virtue of its necessarily subor- dinate class position with respect to the bourgeoisie—also a constitutive part of the irreconcilable structural antagonism of capitalist society. ‘The distance between these two aspects of the ‘being of the proletariat’, as reflected in the prevailing form of class consciousness, can be greater or lesser in different historical situations, and no linear progress in reducing the gap is implied by Marx’s formulations of the problem of class consciousness. We shall discuss some of the related problems in the next section, Here we have to emphasize three points of major importance: (G) That Marx was fully aware of the contradiction between the sociological contingency of the class (stratified and divided by sectional interests, etc. at a given moment, and its being as constitutive of the structural antagonism of capitalism, He called it the contradiction between the being and existence of labour (ie. the contradiction inherent in labour existing as wage-labour): a contradiction whose solution is a necessary prerequisite— in its dialectical sense—to successful restructuring of society. The over-riding factor in the resolution of this contradiction is, in Marx’s view, the development of a class conscious ness adequate to the social being of labour. Contingent and necessary class consciousness 10% (@ Marz’s concept of the proletariat as opposed to the bourgeoisie is not an ideal type’, but a category of being: the Being ofthe sociologically specific groups of proletarians who exist in a necessary structural subordination to capital at all stages of capitaliststic development, whether the individuals concerned are conscious of it or not. Proletarian class consciousness is, therefore, the worker's conscieusnass of his social being as embedded in the necessary structural antagonism of capitalist society in contrast to the contingency of group consciousness eohich perceives only amore or less limited part ofthe global confrontation. To assign to the concept of the proletariat merely the status of an ‘ideal type’ inevitably carries with it the conception of class consciousness and political action as an arbitrary ‘ought’, from Sorel’s myth-conscious voluntatism to some contemporary advocates of a ‘critical utopianism’. (Even some parts of Lukics’s History and Class Consciousness are marred by the influence of Sore!’s volaatarism and Max Weber's ‘typology’.) ) The recognition of the contradiction between the “being” and ‘existence’ of the proletariat carties with it the task of “bridging the gap? ‘between group consciousness and class consciousness, or, more exactly, the task of transcending the limits of group consciousness of the given groups of workers in the direction of a global consciousness of their ial being. According to Marx, this task isa realistic one only because it is in agreement with an objective trend of historical development. This fact, though, does not change its nature from being a fash into a mechan= ical historical inevitability. The development of class consciousness is a dialectical process: it is a ‘historical inevitability’ precisely in so far as the task is fulfilled through the necessary intermediary of a self-con~ scious human agency. This, inevitably, requires some kind of organiza ‘ion—whether the constitution of parties, or of some other forms of collective intermediary—structured in accordance with the specific socio-historical conditions that prevail in a particular epoch, with an overall strategic aim of dynamic interventions in the course of social development. (The latter alone are capable of leaving a lasting mark—in ‘contrast to the ephemeral success of political agitation apart—on the consciousness of the proletariat as a whole, since they involve objective ‘modifications in his social being.) In other words, the ‘spontaneous’ and ‘direct’ development of proletarian class consciousness—whether under theimpact of economic cises or asa result of individual self-llumination is a utopian dream. However much (in view of some negative past experiences) one might wish the contrary, the question of political organization cannot be by-passed. The real issue is, therefore, the creation of organizational forms and institutional intermediaries which are adequate to the global strategic objectives, considering () the socio historical limitations that objectively circumseribe the possibilities of action in every epoch, and (8) the necessary limits and distorting effects102 Istodn Mésedros of the institutional form itself. For an undue amount of ‘negative feedback’ from (a) and (6)—which is unavoidable to some extent—can ot only nullify hard-won achievements, but also turn the originally dynamic institution into a powerful break and a major obstacle to all farther advance. The paradoxical clement in the dialectic of institutions is that structuring themselves in accordance with the necessary limita tions mentioned in (a) constitutes both their positive features and their negative characteristics of petrfication and self-perpetuation. The institution’s ability to meet the challenge ofa specific historical situation —its raison d’étre—requires structural firmness and stability; its impact, though, on socio-historical development produces not only advance, ‘but, at the same time, also an element of institutional obsolescence. (This point underlines the superficiality and evasiveness ofall talk about ‘personality cult? as an explanatory hypothesis.) The institution is dynamic only so long as it struggles with its task, and acquires @ more or less extensive layer of inertia the very moment it gains the upper hand, Thus, the victory of a specific institutional form over the historical limitations which were at its roots is at the same time also the well- deserved defeat of this form: a defeat which is, nevertheless, often transformed into a Pyrthic triumph of the obsolete, but powerfully ossified, institution—at the expense of the social body that originally brought it into being. Correctives against this kind of development can and must be incorporated either into the structure of a particular institution, conceived on its own (a strictly limited possiblity), or into the institutional setup as a whole whore parts reciprocally interact with one another, or indeed both into the particular institutions and into the total institutional structure of society. Development will largely depend on the effectiveness of the given set of correctives in minimizing the negative institutional feedbeck mentioned above. It goes without saying, the concept of irreconcilable structural antagon- {sm does not imply anything like a ‘homogeneous class consciousness’, nor indeed ‘occupational uniformity’ and the like. Also, given the dynamic interchange of a multiplicity of factors in socio-historical development, it would be utterly foolish to postulate a static hierarchy of the strategic position of particular social groups. Groups which occupied a strategically more important position at a certain stage of development of the productive forces may very well find their erstwhile power significantly curtailed as a result of changes in patterns of pro duction and consumption, and vice versa, What is inconceivable, though, is a permanent nullification of the effects of the withdrawal of labour, whichever groups” labour falls into the category of strategically more important labour. Categories like ‘working class occupations’ must be treated dynamically, otherwise the dangers of mistaking technological Contingent and necessary class consciousness 103 advances for ‘the integration of the working class’ become acute, Similarly, it would be fallacious to suppose that traditionally ‘trouble- free? groups will remain docile, notwithstanding significant shifts towards an increasing strategic importance of withdrawing their labour, which was negligible in the past. (Such phenomena as teachers” strikes were unheard-of in the not so distant pasts they are likely to gain in Importance in the future.) The same goes for the efforts to turn into a general Taw the relative integrating impact of technological change associated with more leasant working conditions in some factories: a projection which ignores the crucial fact that such an impact is largely dependent on the exceptional status of the marginal groups in question. ‘We could go on, almost indefinitely, with these examples. The signifi- cant thing about their /agic is that they want to have it both mays: a shift in power from a prevaleatly manual occupational structure to one that is increasingly intellectual, coupfed with the docilty of powerless intellec~ tual occupations; the assertion of universal conformity to a pattern of behaviour rooted in the ethos of exceptional status, etc, Their method~ ology is equally telling: it consists in an arbitrary projection of some ‘wishfully selected aspecis of the established order of society a8 permanent features of all future society, at the same time ficttiously postulating a transformation of all the contrasting characteristics of—divided, polarized, confict- and crisis-ridden—society into the pre-selected (and often even misdescribed) partial phenomena, elevated to the status of a universal ‘mode?, in conformity to the (no doubt velvet gloved) ‘iron law of convergence’. In Mare’s view no degree of capitalistically embedded technological development can eliminate the necessary structural subordination of labour to capital, no matter what particalar kinds of modification are ‘made in the occupational pattern of society. It is no use to expect the voluntary acceptance of the soulless routine of commodity production ‘on the ground that itis ‘a discipline inherent in the working process itself”, which therefore applies ‘to superiors and subordinates slike’. For the issue at stake is not teclmology itself, but its mode of application, i.e. commodity productioa that imposes the discipline of soulless routine on ‘superiors and subordinates alike’, in so far as it does. And to the extent to which it does, if it does, there is an identity of interest berween these ‘superiors and sutordinates’ in changing the prevailing system of production: a point which shows that the ‘superiors’ in question are not ‘the ruling class to which abour is structurally subordinated and opposed. ‘Thus, again, we are given 2 semantic solution, produced by the mystify- ing confusion of functional—technical, instramental—subordination with social-sructural subordination. (The same kind of reasoning characterizes the confusion of the social-structural division of labour with its functional-instrumental-technological division: a mystifying