1

TELLING THE TRUTH ABOUT CLASS

G.M. TAMÁS

O ne of the central questions of social theory has been the relationship

between class and knowledge, and this has also been a crucial question
in the history of socialism. Differences between people – acting and knowing
subjects – may influence our view of the possibility of valid cognition. If
there are irreconcilable discrepancies between people’s positions, going
perhaps as far as incommensurability, then unified and rational knowledge
resulting from a reasoned dialogue among persons is patently impossible.The
Humean notion of ‘passions’, the Nietzschean notions of ‘resentment’ and
‘genealogy’, allude to the possible influence of such an incommensurability
upon our ability to discover truth.
Class may be regarded as a problem either in epistemology or in the
philosophy of history, but I think that this separation is unwarranted, since
if we separate epistemology and philosophy of history (which is parallel to
other such separations characteristic of bourgeois society itself) we cannot
possibly avoid the rigidly-posed conundrum known as relativism. In speak-
ing about class (and truth, and class and truth) we are the heirs of two socialist
intellectual traditions, profoundly at variance with one another, although
often intertwined politically and emotionally. I hope to show that, up to a
point, such fusion and confusion is inevitable.
All versions of socialist endeavour can and should be classified into two
principal kinds, one inaugurated by Rousseau, the other by Marx. The two
have opposite visions of the social subject in need of liberation, and these
visions have determined everything from rarefied epistemological posi-
tions concerning language and consciousness to social and political attitudes
concerning wealth, culture, equality, sexuality and much else. It must be said
at the outset that many, perhaps most socialists who have sincerely believed
they were Marxists, have in fact been Rousseauists. Freud has eloquently
described resistances to psychoanalysis; intuitive resistance to Marxism is no
less widespread, even among socialists. It is emotionally and intellectually
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difficult to be a Marxist since it goes against the grain of moral indignation

which is, of course, the main reason people become socialists.
One of the greatest historians of the Left, E.P. Thompson, has synthe-
sized what can be best said of class in the tradition of Rousseauian socialism
which believes itself to be Marxian.1 The Making of the English Working Class
is universally – and rightly – recognized to be a masterpiece. Its beauty,
moral force and conceptual elegance originate in a few strikingly unusual
articles of faith: (1) that the working class is a worthy cultural competitor
of the ruling class; (2) that the Lebenswelt of the working class is socially and
morally superior to that of its exploiters; (3) that regardless of the outcome
of the class struggle, the autonomy and separateness of the working class is an
intrinsic social value; (4) that the class itself is constituted by the autopoiesis of
its rebellious political culture, including its re-interpretation of various tradi-
tions, as well as by technology, wage labour, commodity production and the
rest. Whereas Karl Marx and Marxism aim at the abolition of the proletariat,
Thompson aims at the apotheosis and triumphant survival of the proletariat.
Thompson’s Rousseauian brand of Marxism triggered a sustained critique
by Perry Anderson, one that is now half-forgotten but still extremely impor-
tant. Although his terms are quite different from mine, Anderson sought to
show that Thompson’s conviction that he was a Marxist was erroneous.2
Thompson had participated in a number of movements and intellectual
adventures inspired by Marxism, and his fidelity to radical socialism – under
twentieth-century circumstances – meant loyalty to Marxism’s revolution-
ary legacy. But Thompson had to ignore the Faustian-demonic encomium
of capitalism inherent in Marx, and so he had to oppose ‘critical theory’,
and then theory tout court.3 Anderson later described this decomposition of
‘Western Marxism’ – away from class to ‘the people’ – in conceptual terms,4
a diagnosis that has been proved right by events since.

ROUSSEAU VERSUS MARX

The main difference between Rousseau and Marx is that Rousseau seeks to
replace (stratified, hierarchical, dominated) society with the people (a purely
egalitarian and culturally self-sustaining, closed community), while Marx
does not want to ‘replace’ society by annihilating ‘rule’ and the ruling class as
such, but believes that capitalism (one specific kind of society) might end in
a way in which one of its fundamental classes, the proletariat, would abolish
itself and thereby abolish capitalism itself. It is implied (it is sous-entendu) that
the moral motive for such a self-abolition is the intolerable, abject condition
of the proletariat. Far from its excellence – extolled by the Rousseauians – it
is, on the contrary, its wretchedness, its total alienation, that makes it see that
it has ‘nothing to lose but its chains’, and that it has ‘a world to win’. In the
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Marxist view it is not the people’s excellence, superiority or merit that makes
socialism – the movement to supersede, to transcend capitalism – worthwhile
but, on the contrary, its being robbed of its very humanity. Moreover, there
is no ‘people’, there are only classes. Like the bourgeoisie itself, the working
class is the result of the destruction of a previous social order. Marx does not
believe in the self-creation or the self-invention of the working class, parallel
to or alongside capitalism, through the edification of an independent set of
social values, habits and techniques of resistance.
Thus there is an angelic view of the exploited (that of Rousseau, Karl
Polányi, E.P. Thompson) and there is a demonic, Marxian view. For Marx, the
road to the end of capitalism (and beyond) leads through the completion of
capitalism, a system of economic and intellectual growth, imagination, waste,
anarchy, destruction, destitution. It is an apocalypse in the original Greek sense
of the word, a ‘falling away of the veils’ which reveals all the social mecha-
nisms in their stark nakedness; capitalism helps us to know because it is unable
to sustain illusions, especially naturalistic and religious illusions. It liberated
subjects from their traditional rootedness (which was presented to them by
the ancient regime as ‘natural’) to hurl them onto the labour market where
their productive-creative essence reveals itself to be disposable, replaceable,
dependent on demand – in other words, wholly alien to self-perception or
‘inner worth’. In capitalism, what human beings are, is contingent or stochas-
tic; there is no way in which they are as such, in themselves. Their identity is
limited by the permanent re-evaluation of the market and by the transient
historicity of everything, determined by – among other contingent factors
– random developments in science and technology. What makes the whole
thing demonic indeed is that in contradistinction to the external character, the
incomprehensibility, of ‘fate’, ‘the stars’, participants in the capitalist economy
are not born to that condition, they are placed in their respective positions by
a series of choices and compulsions that are obviously man-made.To be born
noble and ignoble is nobody’s fault, has no moral dimensions; but alienation
appears self-inflicted.
Marx is the poet of that Faustian demonism: only capitalism reveals the
social, and the final unmasking; the final apocalypse, the final revelation can be
reached by wading through the murk of estrangement which, seen histori-
cally, is unique in its energy, in its diabolical force.5 Marx does not ‘oppose’
capitalism ideologically; but Rousseau does. For Marx, it is history; for Rous-
seau, it is evil.
It was Karl Polányi who best described the foundations of Rousseauian
socialism, of which he himself was an archetypal representative.6 Accord-
ing to Polányi, the great discovery of Rousseau was the discovery of ‘the
people’. This is not as trivial as it may seem. The common assumption of
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all philosophy – in contradiction to Christianity – is that raw, untutored

humanity is worthless. Ancient Greek philosophy, to which all subsequent
lovers of wisdom were supposed to have supplied nought but footnotes, held
that virtue was knowledge. But knowledge (science, philosophy, even litterae
humaniores) is a social institution, possible only in certain situations of high
complexity, sometimes called ‘civilization’, which would allow the growth
and betterment of that knowledge. Thus, augmenting science presupposes
a necessary or at least plausible perfectibility of civilization and the general
salutary character of social institutions useful or indispensable for the advance
of cognition.
Rousseau reversed the philosophical trend of more than two millennia
when he said that arts, letters, sciences, ‘culture’ and ‘civilization’ did not
contribute to the moral progress of humankind – on the contrary. The basic
intuitions of persons living in circumstances which would not be conducive
to the advance of knowledge and the ever-growing refinement of arts, mores
and manners were, he thought, superior to whatever complex, unequal and
sophisticated societies could boast of. Superior in what sense?
These intuitions were deemed to be superior because the development
of civilization required an ever-growing separation between humans – high
culture, according to Nietzsche, presupposes slavery that can sustain a leisured
aristocracy dedicated to war and play and beauty – to the extent that all
‘virtues’ are necessarily confined to a few. Even in societies where essential
communication still takes place among people personally acquainted with
each other (affection and sympathy are possible only among such persons)
the main ‘civilizational’ transactions are dispatched by abstract mediation
such as script. In order to maintain a modicum of fairness and uniformity
in society, it is necessary to codify law and religion. People will believe and
revere the same prescriptions (‘values’) by reading or being read to (by offi-
cials), instead of coming to agree as a result of shared experience and feeling.
Script and code (uniform law, scriptural religion, formal education, high art)
will change from tools of mediation in society, aiding contact and co-opera-
tion, into a social goal, a motivational source of future action – in other
words: authority. But this is an authority based on the familiar transformation
of a tool into an end or a goal. It is a ‘fetish’.
Rousseau thought that we would have remained both more virtuous
and much happier were we bereft or at least rid of mediation. He knew it
was too late, and his recipes for a solution are famously desperate; they take
essentially the shape of a purge, ‘cleansing’, épuration. All Rousseauian socialist
solutions (for this reason extremely popular in peasant societies, that is, in
societies with a still strong cultural recollection of peasant experience and
ideals) aim at simplification. Simplification towards a more natural (or, with
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luck, a completely natural) way of life. It is, after all, Karl Polányi’s famous
thesis that market societies are not natural, that they are the exception rather
than the rule in history.7 On the one hand, he resists the idea that capitalism
is a natural order, whose emergence was only prevented in the past by scien-
tific and technological backwardness and blind superstition; and he resists the
idea that competitiveness and acquisitiveness are ‘instincts’ characteristic of all
societies, only repressed in the past by chivalric and religious ‘false conscious-
ness’ (and here he is of one mind with Marxists in ‘historicizing’ competition
and the market.) On the other hand, Polányi regards non-market societies
as ‘natural’ for being in the historical majority. He believed that we should
orient our social action towards a re-establishment of what modern capital-
ism has falsified.
The other great Rousseauian socialist Marcel Mauss has shown that most
acts of exchange in the history of humankind were motivated not by a desire
for gain, but for ostentatious display and the satisfaction of pride.8 Yet another
Rousseauian socialist, Georges Bataille, one of the few truly prophetic
geniuses, has generalized Mauss’s point in drawing attention to society’s need
for unproductive losses, waste and destruction, which contradicts any notion
of utility.9 Sacrifice, he reminds us, etymologically means ‘the production of
the sacred’. The sacred is the result of unnecessary bloodshed. Non-genital
and non-reproductive sexuality has long been considered ‘a waste’. All these
elements have been classified under the rubric of ‘the irrational’, since only
equitable exchange conforms to the official idea of rationality which cannot,
ever, account for a surplus which appears as ‘savage’ or ‘illusory’. But then,
bourgeois society, in the guise of ‘representative government’, has always
equated ‘the people’ with the ‘irrational’.The apposite clichés (savage ‘crowds’,
‘masses’) have been inherited from the late Roman republic.
Rousseau’s innovation was the unheard-of provocation of declaring the
people – the servants of passion – morally and culturally superior to reasoned
and cultured discourse and its Träger, the civilized elite of Court and Univer-
sity, and even the counter-elite of belles-lettres, experimental science, and the
Enlightenment pamphleteering and journalistic culture to which Rousseau
himself, of course, belonged. Against that discourse, again in terms of Roman
republican controversies, Rousseau championed the martial, athletic, bucolic
and folk-art virtues of nature-bound, egalitarian communities.
In the famous Second and Third Maxims of Book IV of his treatise on
education, Rousseau says: ‘One pities in others only those ills from which one does
not feel oneself exempt’. And: ‘The pity one has for another’s misfortune is measured
not by the quantity of that misfortune but by the sentiment which one attributes to
those who suffer it’.10 These maxims are the kernel of a manifesto for soli-
darity. Pray consider: Rousseau does not presuppose anything else but bare
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humanity in any individual.This presupposition is purely personal, subjective,

psychological – available through introspection. It is based, as is well known,
on fear: fear of suffering, which we can understand in others as well. There is
no external or ‘objective’ measure for suffering, nor is there any need for it; it
is sufficient for us to have a feeling for the perils lurking around us in order
to have a feeling for the probable predicament of others. We pity others to
the extent of our understanding and sympathy for a situation we can imagine
ourselves to have been in, and to the extent of our picturing their feelings
at such a juncture. On this small foundation stone – a pebble, really – is the
edifice of a solidary community built.
To wish to put an end to imaginable and avoidable suffering is enough
for the construction of social justice, since fear and imagination are natural
givens in the human animal, but there is another hidden idea here, an idea
even more revolutionary. This we could call the rejection of any and all
theodicy. The church explains suffering by sin. How could a benevolent and
omnipotent God cause suffering and death? Only as a retribution for some-
thing inherent in all humans but at the same time willed by all humans: the
original sin of disobedience. (Reductionist theories of human nature play the
same role in modern agnostic societies.) If we do not think that original sin
is indeed inherent in human nature, suffering is unnecessary; and vice versa,
if suffering is felt and understood in others, if then it can be counterbalanced
by the succour of those who may not be good but who have an instinctive
distaste for the ominous threat of visible misfortune in their environment
– well, then the plausibility of original sin seems remote.
Moreover, if suffering is avoidable, there is nothing to prevent us from
assuming that the alleviation of human suffering is a duty. We are bound by
duty only in cases that appear feasible. But if suffering is not natural, in the
sense that it is not a necessary consequence of our natures, then it must be
social and historical, subject to change – and why should we not hasten that
change? If, say, inequality is caused by natural selection, revolutions are mean-
ingless; if it is not, making revolutions is meritorious.
Rousseauian socialism is anti-theodicy; it opposes the tragic and conserv-
ative view of original sin or natural fatum with the splendid philosophical
fiction of free-born men and women who are everywhere in chains. If the
free-born are reduced to a servile condition, the culprit cannot but be society,
the wrong kind of society. If human nature does not need to be moulded to
be receptive to freedom since we are free by definition, it is social organiza-
tion that wants changing.
Human nature being tantamount to liberty, our true nature is the source
of the liberty that is falsified and denied to us; hence the assumption that
those enslaved are morally superior to the slavers. Rousseau’s theory suggests
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that there is a separate culture and a separate morality inherent in the people;
a culture and a morality that attracts the sympathy and the solidarity of all
persons of good faith.
This brings us back to E.P.Thompson’s Rousseauian socialism. He formu-
lated the matter with classical simplicity when he described 18th century
radicalism’s

… profound distrust of the ‘reasons’ of the genteel and comfortable,

and of ecclesiastical and academic institutions, not so much because
they produced false knowledges but because they offered specious
apologetics (‘serpent reasonings’) for a rotten social order based, in
the last resort, on violence and material self-interest …. And to this
we must add a …cultural or intellectual definition of ‘class’. Every-
thing in the age of ‘reason’ and ‘elegance’ served to emphasise the
sharp distinctions between a polite and a demotic culture. Dress,
style, gesture, proprieties of speech, grammar and even punctua-
tion were resonant with the signs of class; the polite culture was an
elaborated code of social inclusion and exclusion. Classical learning
and an accomplishment in the law stood as difficult gates-of-entry
into this culture …. These accomplishments both legitimated and
masked the actualities of brute property and power, interest and
patronage. A grammatical or mythological solecism marked the
intruder down as an outsider.11

Thompson is quite right: since Parmenides, ‘reason’ has always or nearly

always been a symbolic mark of ideological mastery, opposed to ‘the people’
as the repository of unreason.12 But the trouble with Rousseauian socialism
is not that it unmasks the high-falutin pretensions of ruling-class doctrine,
but that in doing so it treats the ‘demotic’ as ‘natural’. Whatever seems to be
beyond the ken of demotic culture (and in our case, working-class culture
but in Rousseau’s case, peasant folklore), Rousseauian socialism holds to be
unnecessary or artificial. This would be true only if the proletariat were pris-
tinely self-created and not the complicated product of capitalist society.
The main idea of Rousseauian socialism is, obviously, equality. Equality
is a many-sided notion, but within this tradition it means the renunciation
of the superfluous, from luxury to the cultivation of the self, from agonistic
competition (resulting in excellence) to the enjoyment of high art divorced
from the needs of the community. The Greek word for equality, homonoia,
also means etymologically ‘being of one mind’. The Rousseauian commu-
nity is frugal, musical and martial. It is hostile to individuation and text.13
It is also hostile to opinion. Opinion is an aspect of sociability in bourgeois
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society, while being the traditional enemy of philosophy, the counterpart

of the quest for truth. The empty variety of individual opinions is reduc-
ible to a mind bent to the service of powerful interests, an expression of the
self which is neither a result of an unbiased, dispassionate contemplation of
reality (nature) nor an authentic outward sign of inner feeling. The competi-
tion of diverse opinions is not even a competition of egos for their own sake,
merely a competition for quick adaptation to the demands of power with the
aim of advancement: an adaptation without a true belief in the excellence
of the opinion assumed.14 Bourgeois sociability is false, the people – restored
to its natural status – is (or was) authentic. ‘True feeling’ as the criterion of
adequate elementary morality is reminiscent of the Calvinistic idea of ‘justi-
fying faith’ in Rousseau’s Geneva.15
Equality, thus, is opposed not only to hierarchy, but to variety or diversity
as well. The expression ‘chattering classes’ was invented much later by Don
Juan Donoso Cortés, but Rousseau was certainly opposed to Öffentlichkeit
qua ‘talking shop’. Opinion as instrument is a travesty of any honourable
intellectual endeavour. The same would go, I am afraid, for any ‘freedom of
expression’ conducive to a frivolous parataxis of competing egotisms. Rous-
seauian socialism is moralistic, not historicist. Lukács said that nature becomes
landscape when one looks at it as it were from outside, when one is separated
from it. For Rousseau and the Rousseauians, ‘the people’ is nature not land-
scape; it is not considered from afar. Solidarity, pity, sympathy have ordained
closeness. Propinquity enjoins a modesty of political aims. The emancipation
of the people does not mean the abolition of the people (as in Marx the
emancipation of the proletariat means – decisively – the self-abolition of
the proletariat). It means the abolition of aristocracy and clergy; basically, it is
not the abolition of ‘class’ but the abolition of ‘caste’ or ‘estate’, whereby the
Third Estate – the commoners – become The Nation.

THE ACTUALLY-EXISTING
WORKING CLASS (AND BOURGEOISIE)
Why (and how) could modern socialists mistake the abolition of caste for the
abolition of class? There are several reasons.
One is the oldest conundrum of the workers’ movement, to wit, the
fact that wherever successful proletarian movements or revolutions have
taken place, they triumphed not against capitalism, but against quasi-feudal
remnants of the old regime that, naturally, went against their self-understand-
ing and their self-image. All the endlessly complicated debates about class
consciousness are influenced by this primordial fact. This is also why Arno
Mayer’s theory concerning ‘the persistence of the old regime’ is so crucial to
Marxist debates.16
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Class struggle, as prosecuted by the workers’ movement, instead of extol-

ling the paradoxical, demonic ‘virtues’ of capitalism, was forced not only to
attack it, but also to defend itself. It defended itself by insisting on the excel-
lence of the ‘Grand Old Cause’, the moral superiority of those who fought
for working-class autonomy, supposing they were an exception to the general
rule of bourgeois society. This resulted in an enduring achievement which
lasted about a century, from the 1870s to the 1970s: the creation of a counter-
power of working-class trade unions and parties, with their own savings
banks, health and pension funds, newspapers, extramural popular academies,
workingmen’s clubs, libraries, choirs, brass bands, engagé intellectuals, songs,
novels, philosophical treatises, learned journals, pamphlets, well-entrenched
local governments, temperance societies – all with their own mores, manners
and style. A Hungarian sociological survey from 1906 shows that a working-
class housing estate in Transylvania has one portrait of Marx and one of
Lassalle per flat, workers are teetotal in a heavily drinking society, and open
atheists and anticlericalists in a polity dominated by the church militant;
church weddings are frowned upon, there are attempts at a healthy diet, non-
competitive sports (not shared with outsiders) are encouraged (in Central
Europe there were special socialist workers’ athletic championships and mass
musical choir contests until 1945); non-socialist charities are rejected, parties
are held only in daylight to avoid immorality, and at least the men are trying
– in a country of barefoot illiterates one generation away from the village
primeval – to read social science and serious history. Admirable as this is, it
must have been, for all intents and purposes, a sect.
This counter-power developed its own political superstructure and ideol-
ogy, from ‘reformist’ social democracy to revolutionary anarcho-syndicalism,
a whole separate world where the bourgeoisie’s writ did not run.17 The amal-
gamation of Rousseauian and Marxian socialism resulted from the special
interests of this established counter-power or adversary power: the workers’
movement was often Rousseauist in regard to itself and Marxist in regard to
the bourgeois enemy.
What did this mean in terms of its struggle? In the nineteenth century
there had to be struggles against throne and altar, for universal suffrage, for
the right to organize and to strike; then national unity was re-forged in the
Great War as if the class struggle could be switched off at will; after that
war the proletariat liberated the miserable Eastern peasantry that had been
kept in a servile condition (this was the most massive historical achieve-
ment of the communist regimes18); later it had to create Popular Fronts and
Résistance alliances against the fascist peril – there was always something that
prevented proletarian politics (in Marx’s sense), apart from heroic episodes by
revolutionary minorities.
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The reasons for this in post-1914 socialism seem self-evident: the need for
self-legitimation of the workers’ movement in view of its defeat but persist-
ing power, and its repeated contribution to bourgeois revolutions liquidating
the semi-feudal remnants of the old regime. A dispensation oriented to tran-
scending capitalism remained – and still remains – utopian, while the ‘secular’
triumph of social democracy in the West and the transformation of the old
regime into a tyrannical state capitalism under Bolshevik rule in the East
offered a vindication for the movement, justified mainly by a puritanical and
egalitarian system closer to Calvin’s and Rousseau’s Geneva than to Marx’s
classical Walpurgis night.19 ‘Welfarism’ was not limited to the West: the Soviet
bloc’s idea of legitimacy was also a steady growth of income, leisure and
accessible social and health services. ‘Planning’ was a common idea of Mao’s
Red China and de Gaulle’s bourgeois and patriotarde and pompiériste France.
Jacobinism was common to both.The staatstragende community, the addressee
of welfare statism and egalitarianism, had to be defined somehow: it was the
people, offered equal dignity by ‘citizenship’.
To help us understand this properly, it is useful to return to what Thomp-
son was complaining about in his debate with Perry Anderson and Tom
Nairn. In a celebrated series of essays,20 they tried to demonstrate that the
weaknesses of the British workers’ movement were caused by a peculiar-
ity of British capitalism: it was the economic preponderance of efficient
and market-friendly farming on the great estates and the disproportionate
political influence of the landed aristocracy, both richer and more powerful
than the incipient bourgeoisie – if there is such a thing (culturally) at all in
England – that limited the breadth of vision, the vigour and the scope of any
proletarian socialism in the British Isles. This was also, according to Ander-
son, the reason for England’s subsequent decline in all the respects that are
crucial to the criteria of European ‘modernity’, including an astonishingly
large number of blind spots in British ‘high culture’, especially in the so-
called social and human sciences.21
The great emotional force of ‘class’ as a special English socio-cultural
problem – defined in the common usage as an intricate system of almost
tribal markers such as diction, dress, speech habits, even posture, forms (and
ritualistic denials) of courtesy, diet and the like – has its roots in this. These
caste-like, sometimes quasi-ethnic differences of ‘class’ gave a special cachet to
the class struggle in England, denying the possibility of a bourgeois-Jacobin
ideology of ‘community’ or ‘national unity’. Conservatives on the Continent
would vehemently deny the mere existence of the class struggle, but High
Tory ranters and satirists like, say, Peregrine Worsthorne or Auberon Waugh
(indeed, both Waughs, père et fils), would declare their enjoyment in doing
down the widow and the orphan, and were constantly waging a gallant
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fight against the vulgarian with his ‘job’, ‘holiday’, ‘telly’ and ‘pop “music”’.
In England, the class enemy was highly visible, but he or she was never or
almost never ‘the bourgeois’, but ‘the toff ’, ‘the terrific swell’ opposed to
those who were common as muck. Even today the supposedly yuppified,
classless ‘estuary English’ has a ‘posh’ version.
All this has pre-modern accents. It seems obvious that for the creation
of ‘a people’ the annihilation of the upper classes would be necessary, as in
eighteenth-century France, where only the Third Estate became the nation
and where class relations had been ethnicized (the aristocracy: Nordic; the
people: Celtic, Gallic; cf. Norman blood in England, Varangians in Russia,
etc.). Class identity of this kind is definitely pre-socialist. Socialist movements
had used it in the past, creating enormous difficulties for themselves later.
Its use succeeded only where they could combine the specific demands of
the usually small and culturally (and sometimes ethnically) ‘different’ prole-
tariat, with the general (or ‘bourgeois’) democratic enthusiasms of the usually
peasant, provincial majority led by the middle classes and journalistic opinion:
for republic instead of monarchy, universal suffrage, anti-clericalism (or laïcité),
agrarian reform (i.e., redistribution of land), reduction of birth privileges, a
citizen army, ethnic minority rights, votes for women, and the like.
This was a fundamental dilemma of Austro-Hungarian and Russian social
democracy and, later, of East and South Asian communism (in India and
Nepal, to this very day). During the belle époque, socialism in the East was faced
with either the prospect of victory at the helm of a bourgeois democratic
revolution against an aristocratic old regime with elements of modernizing
militarism (die Soldateska), or certain defeat and annihilation while preserv-
ing the purity of the ‘Western’ proletarian idea. When Gramsci called the
October revolution in Russia a ‘revolution against Das Kapital’, he was appo-
site and to the point in this sense (not that Lenin and Trotsky knew exactly
what they were doing). But even earlier, it was clear that universal suffrage,
socio-cultural egalitarianism, democratic parliamentarism and a more secular
and tolerant, less militaristic society would be realized east of the Rhine,
south of the Alps and west of the Pyrénées, only by the socialist movement,
not by the feeble liberal bourgeoisie, in predominantly farming societies.
On the whole, socialists decided to assume the leadership of non-social-
ist, democratic revolutions. The result was nationalism, both in the debacle
of August 1914 and in the unavoidable transformation of Leninism into
Stalinism. The truth is that modern capitalist societies as we know them
today would have been entirely impossible without movements whose ‘false
consciousness’ was precisely socialism. Socialism as a political movement was
a tool of capitalist modernization not only in the East, but also in Central and
Western Europe; the bourgeoisie itself did, historically speaking, very little
12

by way of creating, or even fighting for, modern capitalist society.22 Let us

recall that the allegedly bourgeois revolutions of the nineteenth century were
invariably led by the landed gentry; these revolutions had been completed
in Central and Eastern Europe in 1918-19 by the socialist workers’ move-
ment – this latter case being one of the most important and most neglected
aspects of the vexed problem of the origins of fascism and national socialism,
directed both against the bourgeoisie and the proletariat. This may sound
strange to Western ears, but is thoroughly comprehensible for a German, an
Italian, an Austrian or a Hungarian of a certain age and/or Bildung.23
The bourgeoisie wrought gigantic changes in the texture of the world
– economic, social, technological, scientific, artistic and ideological – but
almost nowhere did it play a leading political role.24 Bourgeois power (even
social and cultural hegemony) proved impossible in the absence of a modern
(in practice, a Lassallean-Marxist) socialist movement. This seems to be the
unspoken, never openly stated conclusion of the debate between Anderson,
Nairn and their adversaries. The decline of England, the unchanging person-
nel of British politics and public administration and the other elements of
decadence so poignantly and pugnaciously described by Anderson and Nairn
must be – at least partially – caused by the lack of a modernizing revolution
led by the proletariat. It is, I believe, rather significant that the most ‘contem-
porary’ ideological campaign in favour of a modern capitalism in Britain
was conceived not by mainstream liberal or social democratic (‘labourite’)
tendencies, but by a côterie of former communists (the ‘New Times’ crowd
around Marxism Today, a once-Communist monthly).When English Marxists
like Anderson and Nairn were discussing the lack of a revolutionary bour-
geoisie in Britain, they must have been painfully aware of the even more
glaring lack of a revolutionary workers’ movement, which seems to have been
the only effective weapon against any kind of aristocratic rule, wherever such
a rule existed and persisted. But they were more or less hobbled by their
desire for an authentic proletarian revolution which has never occurred in its
anti-capitalist purity anywhere – yet.
This perhaps explains why the origin of capitalism, especially English capi-
talism, is such an important political question or Kampffrage. The ‘Brenner
Debate’ was and remains decisive in this respect. But it is in the work of
Ellen Meiksins Wood that all the threads come together, and the theoretical
and political consequences are most clearly stated.25 Answering Anderson’s
harsh questions about ‘the “absent centre” of English social thought’, Wood
insisted: ‘The individualism and ahistoricism of English social thought, its
fragmentation, have more to do, then, with the advance of capitalism than
with its inhibition’.26 She characterizes the parallel and contrast with conti-
nental Europe thus:
 13

While in France Bodin was describing the state as a unity of ‘fami-

lies, colleges or corporate bodies’, Sir Thomas Smith defined the
commonwealth as a ‘multitude’ of free individuals.While the French
state continued to serve as a lucrative resource for the propertied
classes, the English were increasingly preoccupied with individual
appropriation by purely ‘economic’ means.… The replacement of
corporate entities by individuals as the constituent units of society,
the separation of the state and civil society, the autonomization of
the ‘economy’ – all these factors associated with the evolution of
English capitalism conduced to the atomization of the social world
into discrete and separate theoretical spheres. And with it came a
detachment of the social sciences from history, as social relations
and processes came to be conceived as natural, answering to the
universal laws of the economy ….27

This seems to be the very opposite of Perry Anderson’s view. But it is,
at the same time, another Marxian correction of E.P. Thompson’s Rous-
seauism. The emphasis in Wood’s work on the separateness or autonomy of
the ‘economy’ and ‘the economic’ points, rather promisingly, I think, towards
a much-needed Marxian political science. This autonomy of the economy
may account for peculiarities in English political culture that would, accord-
ing to Perry Anderson, explain the lack of a radical socialism in Britain,
the substitution of ‘class culture’ for ‘class’ and the notorious (and idealized)
absence of great, salvific social theorems in the national culture. But the
sudden modernization of Britain under Thatcher and Blair yields surpris-
ing results, as Anderson himself recognizes in another of his breathtaking
surveys:

By the [nineteen-]eighties, the net effect of these changes was a

marked disjuncture between high culture and politics in Britain.
In most European cultures, such a pattern has historically been
quite frequent. In many, indeed, the normal stance of intellectu-
als has tended to be oppositional, swinging against the pendulum
of regimes rather than with it. In England, this has not been so.
Here, the larger portion of the intelligentsia has generally sung in
harmony, if not unison, with the established power of the day, from
the time of Coleridge’s first scoring of its part after the Napoleonic
wars. The present position is an anomaly in this record ….28

Nevertheless, the problem remains: part of the Left will see ‘class’ in cultural
and political terms, and this is indeed an effective aid to sustaining an opposi-
14

tional stance against ‘a rotten regime’ in the name and on behalf of a people
judged capable of achieving for itself a cultural and moral autonomy vouch-
safed by a working-class politics.29 The case of England is crucial for several
reasons: it is traditionally ‘the distant mirror’ of capitalism.30 It cannot possibly
be denied that the shift to culture in class theory was and is caused by the fate
of socialism (i.e., of the workers’ movement): to succeed only in the sense of
making capitalism more modern, democratic, secular and (perhaps) egalitar-
ian via cross-class alliances forces the workers’ movement to abandon the
specific proletarian calling envisaged by Marx. Western and Northern social
democrats, Eastern and Southern communists alike have replaced emancipa-
tion with equality, Marx with Rousseau. Marxian socialism has never been
attempted politically, especially not by Marxists.31 Egalitarianism and statism
(in democratic and tyrannical versions) were the hallmarks of the main offi-
cial versions of socialism, everywhere.
These are also the key elements of the contemporary popular image of
socialism, and the key elements of the colourful pop ideology of the ‘new
social movements’ as well, aiming at righting injustice by enlarging and radi-
calizing the idea of equality and trying to impose this idea on the bourgeois
states and international financial organizations they despise (they themselves
do not wish to take power; theirs is an étatisme by proxy). The ‘statism by
proxy’ of the new social movements (we won’t vote for you, we won’t smash
your power through revolution, but we want you to draft bills and pass acts
of parliament and UN and EU resolutions that we deem useful and edify-
ing), in spite of their many beauties and quite a few successes, is still statism,
experimenting with a radical idea of equality of all living beings, hesitating
between straight reformism and utopian self-sufficiency and exodus.
The retreat to egalitarianism, statism and ‘culture’ thus appears to be a
quasi-permanent feature of socialist movements. In almost every case, this
can only be explained by the fact that they must engage with an adversary,
bourgeois society, which is replete with historical imperfections derived from
the caste societies out of which they emerged.

FROM CASTE TO CLASS TO PEOPLE

That the retreat from Marx to Rousseau is a also tendency among Marxists,
as in the most important case of E.P. Thompson, is of particular importance.
Technically, this is sometimes a reaction against an alleged rigid determinism
in Marxian class theory (an allegation effectively refuted by G.A. Cohen32),
but more frequently (again, also in E.P. Thompson’s case) it happens owing
to a fatal misunderstanding concerning the conflation of ‘class’ and ‘caste’
(Stände, états, or, in Hungarian, rendek). Caste society, the remnants of which
are still with us, even today, is based on a view of human nature radically
 15

different from the Enlightenment view, so ingrained in modern thinking as

to be almost invisible and implicit, scarcely in need of being articulated.
For most of history, humanity was not thought to have been co-extensive
with humankind. Women, slaves, foreigners, children were almost invariably
excluded everywhere, but so were people who had to work for a living
(banausoi), people who had become retainers in a chieftain’s retinue, persons
exercising trades that were ideologically considered repellant or religiously
taboo, people with physical deficiencies, whole nations subjugated in war,
persons belonging to another religion or denomination, persons without
property, enemies of the state, members of ‘inferior’ races, and so on. These
and many others were not supposed to share with the rest the prerogatives of
full-fledged human beings. There was resistance to this state of affairs among
some Stoics, Cynics and Epicureans, the early Christians and some medieval
heretics, some Buddhists and other assorted riff-raff. But on the whole the
title of ‘man’ (let alone of ‘citizen’, which is still limited by nation-states33)
was a prerogative circumscribed by criteria of excellence, hence the absence
of an idea of equal and universal rights and obligations.
Caste or ‘estate’ is a whole life, with dimensions capitalism has since nulli-
fied. Let me quote a few words from the greatest authority on the caste
system:

… the lot of the Shudras is to serve, and … the Vaishyas are the
grazers of cattle and the farmers, the ‘purveyors’ of sacrifice … who
have been given dominion over the animals, whereas the Brah-
mans-Kshatryas have been given dominion over ‘all creatures’.…
[T]he Kshatrya may order a sacrifice as may the Vaishya, but only
the Brahman may perform it. The king is thus deprived of any
sacerdotal function …. The Brahman naturally has privileges ….
He is inviolable (the murder of a Brahman is, with the murder of a
cow, the cardinal sin), and a number of punishments do not apply
to him: he cannot be beaten, put in irons, fined, or expelled ….34

The contrast with modern capitalist society could not be more obvious:
each caste (or estate) is a complete way of life, embodying a cosmologi-
cal principle. Caste is a differential system of privileges, endowments and
‘gifts’ which represent a model of the social world, based on a philosophical
doctrine concerning human functions and a scale of values, embodied by
various closed groups whose commerce with one another is a function of
their respective rungs on the ladder of human values, religiously determined.
All this is strengthened by a well-entrenched system of prejudices. The
English word villain, French villain, has its origin in the late Latin villanus,
16

villager, peasant. ‘Ignoble’ originally means a person devoid of noble rank.

The Hungarian paraszt, ‘peasant’ originates in the Slav stem prost, ‘simpleton’,
etc., all signs that contempt and deference did not need excuses. Medieval
ditties made fun of hunchbacks, beggars, cripples, fat people and, simply, the
poor. Explanations for the ill-fate of some were, apart from social theodicy,
racial and warlike. The upper castes were (in the whole Indo-European area)
supposed to be fair, the servants, the aborigines, the slaves, the foreigners,
swarthy.35
The tripartite scheme of social hierarchy (oratores, bellatores, laboratores) does
indeed identify social groups with human functions, but in ascribing func-
tion to person and group and vice versa, if these persons and groups remain
within their prescribed or pre-ordained confines, it absolves them from
responsibility: responsibility is conceivable only in transgression, not by the fact of
differential human condition, such as membership in a social class. Choice (and
the ‘quality’ of the individual) does not enter it at all, and therefore misery
does not need the intricate theodicy which is the bad luck of Christendom.
The target of egalitarian rebellion was always this ascription and adjudica-
tion, i.e., doubt concerning just deserts, and ambiguity of the idea of ‘God’s
children’ and the radical distinctions regarding dignity (and the sheer scope of
human life) inherent in caste society.The complaint that kings and barons are
not chivalrous and gallant, that monks and nuns are not sagacious and chaste,
is perennial. For the rebels, the world is turned upside down, merit trampled
underfoot, while crime is rewarded with honours and plenty. Virtue, unlike
moral goodness or intelligence, adheres to caste, not to persons or to human-
ity as such. What is virtue for one caste, is not for another. Pride is good in
one, humility in another. Achilles, the greatest warrior, is incomprehensible
apart from his semi-divine, princely heroism which coexists with extreme
prickliness and sensitivity and a morbid preoccupation with slights and with
the insufficient deference shown to him by equals whom he was bound to
consider inferiors – a universal type encountered in ancient epics. Heroism
is very much a matter of bodily integrity and beauty, athleticism, elegance,
sexual glamour and a pronounced distaste for being ‘dissed’. Heroism is play
and display; all this is allowed under the disquieting but glorious threat of
death on the battlefield, the untimely deaths of rich young men.36
In sharp contrast with caste, class is an abstraction (I do not mean only
a scientific idealization, but a lived abstraction as well) in a society where
freedom of contract exists. In such a society subordination, hierarchy, domi-
nation, rank, dignity, etc., are not only random, totally unconnected to the
quality of the individual, but also seen as such. Fate is no longer, as in Greek
tragedy or Corneille (and as late as Kleist), an accident of birth, but an acci-
 17

dent of the social division of labour and other similar historical kinds of
serendipity.
If it is true, and I think it is, that Marx’s theory does not purport to be a
theory of human nature as such, but a theory of capitalism, then the immor-
tal words of The Communist Manifesto, according to which ‘[t]he history of
all hitherto existing society is the history of class struggles’, must be false.
Class is unique to capitalist society. Class is, first of all, a structural feature
of the system; belonging to a class is a condition legally and, quite often,
socially, open to anybody. This openness of class as a contingent social posi-
tion is what makes capitalism great and gives it the aura of Mephistophelian
liberation through ever ‘more extensive and more destructive crises’, as the
Manifesto also puts it. In order to achieve this gigantic ‘creative destruction’
(an expression of Schumpeter’s inspired by Bakunin) there was a need to
unleash the forces of individual freedom – a freedom, that is, from a legally
and coercively enforced classification of human beings into groups of birth
and status.
Addressing class as such is, intuitively, very difficult.

Within the production process, the separation of labour from its

objective moments of existence – instruments and material – is
suspended. The existence of capital and of wage labour rests on this sepa-
ration. Capital does not pay for the suspension of this separation which
proceeds in the real production process – for otherwise work could not
go on at all.… But as use value, labour belongs to the capitalist; it
belongs to the worker merely as exchange value. Its living quality
of preserving objectified labour time by using it as the objective
condition of living labour in the production process is none of the
worker’s business. This appropriation, by means of which living labour
makes instrument and material in the production process into the body
of its soul and thereby resurrects them from the dead, does indeed
stand in antithesis to the fact that labour itself is objectless, is a
reality only in the immediate vitality of the worker – and that
the instrument and material, in capital, exist as being-for-them-
selves.… But to the extent that labour steps into this relation [with
its moments of material being], this relation exists not for itself, but
for capital; labour itself has become a moment of capital’.37

The distinction between castes could not be farther away from this
portrait of the worker who may be alienated and exploited, but certainly is
no stranger to capital; on the contrary, he is one of its ‘moments’, one of its
structural features. This is clearly not something anybody could abolish by
18

decree or by law. If the worker is a feature of capital, the worker can change
capitalism into something else only if he or she changes himself or herself, in
an extra-moral sense.
Looked at from the ulterior vantage-point of the revolutionary, we may
rather confidently say that the abolition of caste leads to equality; but the aboli-
tion of class leads to socialism. Yet as we have seen, the retreat from socialism
to egalitarianism, from Marx to Rousseau, the retreat from critical theory to
ahistorical moral critique, from Hegel and Marx to Kant, has been the rule,
rather than the exception, in the history of the Left. It is therefore in need
of some explanation.
First, one has to take into account the psychological needs of opposition
to any system one was brought up in. All social systems – through mytholo-
gies, patriotic chronicles, traditions and the like – pretend and, indeed, must
pretend that they are natural, and that their failings are due to inherent
clashes within human nature, and that unhappiness all too obviously caused
by impersonal factors is somehow retribution, either visited upon people
because of their imperfections, or because of some fatal breakdown in the
system itself caused by ingratitude, impiety or the inscrutable decree of a
higher force of some kind. Blaming the system will always appear as an easy
pretext for failing to blame oneself, dissatisfaction being always regarded as a
weakness of the unsuccessful, of the insufficiently noble or the insufficiently
insightful – in short, of the Thersites of this world. People have to be on a
solid moral footing if they are to dare to say ‘no’. Thus, it seems necessary to
establish that there is an innate excellence residing in those who have been
held by the ruling order to be inferior, and that the inversion of the estab-
lished moral order or moral hierarchy happens to be both the superior truth
and a satisfactory motivation for its reversal. The oldest rhetorical tricks can
be employed here:

Blessed be ye poor: for yours is the kingdom of God. Blessed are

ye that hunger now: for ye shall be filled. Blessed are ye that weep
now: for ye shall laugh. Blessed are ye, when men shall hate you,
and when they shall separate you from their company, and shall
reproach you, and cast out your name as evil, for the Son of man’s
sake…. But woe unto you that are rich! For ye have received your
consolation. Woe unto you that are full! For ye shall hunger. Woe
unto you that laugh now! For ye shall mourn and weep. Woe unto
you, when all men shall speak well of you! For so did their fathers
to the false prophets. But I say unto you which hear, Love your
enemies, do good to them, which hate you, Bless them that curse
you, and pray for them which despitefully use you.38
 19

The moral order is reversed, but even the threat of that reversal is turned
upside down, for those who would suddenly find themselves at the bottom
of the moral heap will be forgiven and saved. This sums up nearly all revo-
lutionary manifestoes we can think of. The scary flip of the moral coin is
made unthreatening – even the frightening curse, ‘ye shall mourn and weep’
is made good – by the invocation of universality: ‘love your enemies’. But the
right to forgive will be conferred upon those who did not have the power to
forgive, and thus to condemn, before. Power is being taken away and given
anew, this is why the Son of Man is also called the Lord.
A second reason why the retreat from socialism to egalitarianism has
been the rule is the need for a trans-social or meta-social foundation for the
possibility of a change which might reduce or even obliterate injustice and
domination. This is (intuitively) the suppleness, the plasticity, the flexibility,
the malleability of human nature and the randomness of intellectual, aesthetic
or physical endowment, distributed capriciously among all ranks, races, creeds
and provinces. In other words: a belief in the possibility of equality without
upsetting too much the shape of society which – even if equality of income,
opportunity, status and access to political power were achieved – would still
contain elements of domination, either by government (tempered by law)
or by various social hierarchies of command and control in the workplace,
education and family, as well as a continuing social division of labour.
But domination married to equality would not contradict the possibil-
ity of equality only if the perpetual re-creation of inequalities is constantly
upset by new forces ‘from below’ which constantly re-establish equality.39
Redistribution (the only way to perpetually impose and re-impose equality
if the other customary aspects of society remain essentially the same) can be
implemented only by an extremely strong state able to defeat the resistance
of those from whom something shall be taken away. But the strength of the
state is apt to reinforce domination concentrated in the hands of the few,
which will, then, further reinforce domination, naturally unfavourable to an
equality of condition or of social positions and so on without end. All this is
likely, though, only if the malleability of human nature is allowed free rein
by the dominant or ‘hegemonic’ culture; hence the permanent Kulturkampf
concerning the pre-social or ‘natural’ equality of persons before redistribution,
from ‘blue blood’ to natural selection to the Bell curve.40
Third, egalitarianism was (and up to a point, still is) an expression of a
dynamic of individuals uprooted from ‘caste’. As well as fighting against the
market system, socialists found themselves still fighting against the remnants
of a feudal order, i.e., for a system where surplus value would be extracted on
the market (from people legally free and assenting to obligations arising from
contract), not through coercion and social-cum-religious conditioning. Put
20

more simply, they had to execute successful bourgeois and proletarian revolu-
tions at the same time. Hence the endless wrangling of nineteenth-century
social democrats about the problem of the peasantry, when they sometimes
had to advocate the creation of competitive small farm businesses in order
to win the rural allies they needed to enable them to smash the landed aris-
tocracy and gentry, the political ruling stratum of most countries until quite
recently.41 Central European socialists (especially in Germany and Austria-
Hungary) worried a great deal about their capitalism not being created by an
autochthonous bourgeoisie, but in fact this was much more generally true.42
The problem of Kautsky and Lenin (and Luxemburg and Szabó and Dobro-
geanu-Gherea and Mariátegui) may actually be a universal problem.
Fourth, et nunc venio ad fortissimum, there is a deep moral and psycho-
logical difficulty with Marxism, intertwined with the historical problematic.
Marxism, after all, proposes the abolition of the proletariat, not its apotheosis.
Because of reification and alienation, it holds with Simone Weil that la condi-
tion ouvrière, being a worker, is the worst condition a human being can find
herself or himself in. (And Simone Weil is quite right in believing that perfect
solidarity with the working class means the assumption of, and acquiescence
in, servitude and squalor. But this is, of course, the opposite of the sense of
solidarity in the tradition of non-Marxian socialism.) The meaning of Rous-
seauian socialism is the re-establishment of the purity of the people through
the forcible destitution of the upper castes and the exclusion of extraneous
economic elements such as commerce; the people is held to be capable of
discovering its virtue, which has been obliterated or corrupted by oppression
and inequality, servitude and deference. This presupposes an Essence of Man
to be found through philosophical means, an essence whose vacuity histori-
cal materialism was created to demonstrate.The ‘enlargement’ of Marxism in
the normative sense (with, usually, some kind of Kantian moral philosophy)
nearly always means a retreat towards equality and Rousseau.43
On the other hand, this ever-recurring retreat makes good psychological
sense. It is well-nigh impossible to wage a battle to the death (which revolu-
tion, however slow and gradual, necessarily is) if there is no sense that it is
fought on behalf of people who deserve sacrifice, whose cause is morally
superior because they are superior to the foe. The anti-luxury ideas of Rous-
seau and his countless ideological forebears declare ‘the great and the good’
to be superfluous. This notion may be plausible (although still unpleasant)
in the case of caste society, but in the case of class society, Marx is adamant
that

… in my presentation, capital profit is not ‘merely a deduction or

“robbery” on the labourer’. On the contrary, I present the capital-
 21

ist as the necessary functionary of capitalist production and show

very extensively that he does not only ‘deduct’ or ‘rob’, but forces
the production of surplus value, therefore the deducting only helps to
produce; furthermore, I show in detail that even if in the exchange
of commodities only equivalents were exchanged, the capitalist – as
soon as he pays the labourer the real value of his labour-power
– would secure with full rights, i.e. the rights corresponding to that
mode of production, surplus value.44

This is not consonant with the millenary voice of rebellion. That voice,
on the contrary, tells us that ‘we was robbed’, the thrifty by the thriftless.That
honest toil was not paid in full, owing to the superior coercive power of the
mighty. That ascribing a necessary ‘productive’ role to the ruling classes is
pernicious ‘ideological’ mendacity. All value is created by the workers – this
is Lassalle’s view, and not Marx’s.45 All official and triumphant ‘socialist’ art
from Soviet social realism to Latin American muralists glorifies proletarian
might, sinews, purity, work and victorious confrontation with the puny and
unclean enemy – unlike the few works of art truly inspired by a Marxian
vision, from George Grosz and Gyula Derkovits to the more extreme avant-
garde. These latter creations are almost invariably dark and pessimistic. Their
problem was succinctly summarized by Georg Lukács thus: ‘[T]he objective
reality of social existence is in its immediacy “the same” for both proletariat
and bourgeoisie’.46
The working class is not situated outside capitalism. It embodies capital-
ism as much as the bourgeoisie does. In a way perhaps even more: reification
touches it in a radical manner. Nevertheless, Lukács emphasizes the inex-
tricable interrelatedness of ‘rationalization’ and irrationality brought about
by capitalist crises.47 The redemption of ‘social evil’ is possible only if ‘evil’
is separated from the redeeming feature; but this is not feasible. Since it is
not only classes, i.e., human groups, that are divided from one another, but
whole social spheres and, especially and crucially, ‘the economy’, which is
separated from the other realms of social life by capitalism: the economy
is quasi-liberated from the yoke of bloodline (birth) and the ancient fusion
of politics, religion and custom.48 But the separation of the economy from
the rest, owing to the specifically capitalist method of extracting surpluses
on the market, as it were ‘peacefully’, instead of through direct coercion, as
before, creates a commonality between the fundamental classes in capitalism
where the mere conquest of power by the lower classes may not overcome
the separation and therefore will fail to establish a classless society – as has
indeed happened.
22

The pressures which resulted in one of the characteristic abandonments of

the Marxian class view are impeccably described in another of Ellen Meik-
sins Wood’s excellent books.49 In a series of sharpish attacks on a number of
post-Marxist semi-converts, she selected authors (whose subsequent careers
she, on the whole, accurately predicted) who tried – in view of the repeated
defeats of socialist movements and the even then perfectly clear cul-de-sac of
communist parties in or out of power – to find, at first, a substitute for the
working class as the vanguard of revolution; but unlike the New Left, not in
the ‘person’ of Third World peasants, inner-city blacks or young intellectuals,
but in a new cross-class coalition of rebellious ‘people’ desirous of a new kind
of democracy. The Retreat from Class shows how the transformed concept of
‘democracy’ (from the ancient Greek understanding of it as the rule of the
free-born poor, to the idea of pluralism and the division of power, accept-
able to the ruling class, so much so that the original democratic idea came
to be seen as ‘anti-democratic’) contributed to the change of the social-
ist telos from an end to exploitation and domination (ergo, classless society)
into a mere hope for cultural ‘hegemony’. A hegemony, that is, of egalitar-
ian forces bent on abolishing discrimination, privilege, social exclusion: but
even within egalitarian discourse these authors (Wood’s ‘new true social-
ists’) stressed recognition rather than redistribution (to use Nancy Fraser’s
subsequent phrase), and pluralism rather than socialism.50 The problem here
is basically the same as during the ‘revisionism’ debate around Eduard Bern-
stein’s book, or the ongoing quarrel on ‘reformism’.51
This weighty heritage inspires Rousseauian socialism. It is the rearguard
battle of ‘the people’ which is and isn’t identical with bourgeois society. This
was certainly what made Marat, Robespierre, Saint-Just, Desmoulins, Hébert
and Gracchus Babeuf so lofty and unforgiving: humiliation, not alienation.
In semi-feudal peasant societies, such as the countries of Eastern and South-
ern Europe in the first half of the twentieth century, it was this, the spirit of
jacquerie combined with an intimation of a sansculotte revolution, which gave
a special vigour and savagery to the idea of ‘class’ and ‘socialism’, since both
were combined with strong remnants of ‘caste’ and ‘equality’. Neither Marat
and Saint-Just, nor the English Levellers and their successors about whom
E.P. Thompson, Raymond Williams, Christopher Hill, Raphael Samuel and
their confederates wrote, dreamed of a kind of egalitarian change that would
be conducive to a society of market, contract and money. But while over-
turning caste changes countless things – hierarchy (status, if you wish), moral
nomenclature, relations of obedience and deference, prescribed biographies,
connubiality and commensality, spatiality and religion – it cannot touch the
economy, which has just come into its own right as an autonomous sphere of
 23

the human condition. Above all, it does not replace hierarchy with equality,
only caste (or estate) with class.
This is what happened to West European social democracy and ‘euro-
communism’52 (and British radicalism from Lloyd George and Keir Hardie
to Attlee, Bevan, Laski and Beveridge), and to East European, Chinese and
Vietnamese ‘communism’: they have unwittingly and unwillingly either
created or reinforced and modernized capitalist society in their countries.
It is not certain that the anti-globalization movements of today, with their
sincere calls for planetary (the word ‘international’ is avoided nowadays, for
some reason) equality will not contribute to yet another rebirth of a more
attractive, slimmed-down, fairer and smarter capitalism, after destroying the
superannuated global financial institutions and the more shameless neo-
conservative governments – even though the anti-globalists, too, obviously
want much, much more.

EPILOGUE
Our argument has established that revolutionary mobilization in the past
was almost invariably aimed at the economic, social, cultural, racial, legal,
religious, racial, sexual and intellectual humiliation inherent in ‘caste’; it was
an egalitarian mobilization against aristocratic orders of variegated kinds. It is
true that ‘democracy’ in practice never meant the effective rule of the lower
orders, albeit their influence has increased from time to time (never for long,
though), but it alleviated a burden we neglect too easily. Equality of dignity,
the principle of civic rights and liberties (even if most often honoured in
the breach), shifted the struggle for emancipation to new levels, both more
profound and more intractable.
Let’s not forget that bourgeois liberty, i.e., modern (liberal) capitalist class
society, was not quite safe until very recently. It should not be forgotten,
either, that this element played an important role in the anti-fascist struggle
(not understood by purely and uncompromisingly proletarian radicals like
Amadeo Bordiga and some, by no means all, left communists).An explanation
is here in order. Fascism and National Socialism are constantly interpreted,
not without justification, as instances of ‘reactionary modernism’, as a sub-
species of twentieth-century revolutionism, etc., initially in order to stress
their not negligible parallels and similarities with ‘communism’, especially
Stalinism, often under the aegis of the (untenable) ‘totalitarianism’ dogma.
However justified and novel these approaches were, they contributed to the
(all too frequent) neglect of the obvious. Southern and Catholic fascism
wanted to introduce the Ständestaat (always translated as ‘corporate state’ but
literally meaning ‘the state of estates’, a sort of new caste society), based on
the theories of Othmar Spann, Salazar and others, all inherited from Count
24

Joseph de Maistre, the Marquis de Bonald and Don Juan Donoso Cortés, with
a mix of the ‘elite’ theories of Vilfredo Pareto and others.There were variants
of the same neo-feudalism in Nazism, too, with racist and sexist elements of
‘arischer Männerbund’ (Aryan male fraternity) and similar pseudo-histori-
cal nonsense, very much in vogue then among fashionable people like Carl
Schmitt and others of his ilk.
What all this verbiage amounted to was a quite serious attempt to re-intro-
duce caste society, that is, human groups with radically different entitlements
and duties (against uniformizing and levelling, ‘mechanistic’ conceptions of
egalitarian liberalism and socialism and bourgeois individualism): the Führ-
erprinzip in all occupations (witness Heidegger’s infamous ‘Rektoratsrede’,
i.e., commencement address); vocational groups dissolving classes (e.g., steel-
workers would have meant, in the future, Krupp and Thyssen as well as the
steel-workers proper); untouchables (Jews and other condemned races), and
so on. The fascists were quite serious in wanting to go back to before 1789,
as they (or at least their predecessors) had been announcing loudly since the
1880s. Since pre-modern and aristocratic memories were still alive in Central
and Southern Europe, the modernist-egalitarian impulse against fascism was
quite strong, and since this impulse was carried by the Left, and since the
murderous attack of fascism and Nazism was directed against them and the
liberal bourgeoisie and intelligentsia, small wonder that Popular Fronts were
born and were quite sincere in their fight against the revival of an oppressive
past, and against an anti-egalitarian and anti-Enlightenment obscurantism.
This fight was pre-socialist in its historical and ideological character, but
unavoidable (and one has to admire the gall of Horkheimer and Adorno in
disregarding this aspect altogether).
So, egalitarian, anti-aristocratic and anti-caste – thus ‘Rousseauian’ –
struggles were fully justified as late as the Second World War. We forget the
backward-looking character of fascism and Nazism at our own peril. Serious
attempts to create a new nobility were launched, beginning with the vitéz
or warrior ‘estate’ in the first, radical phase of Vice-Admiral von Horthy’s
counter-revolution in Hungary and ending in Himmler’s SS mystique; the
vitéz (former First World War soldiers, commissioned and non-commis-
sioned, of impeccably Gentile ancestry) were offered land and a small stipend
and were organized in quite an effective knights’ order from 1920; their
Supreme Captain was the Regent, von Horthy, himself. The vitéz order
was revived in Hungary after 1989, albeit only as a nostalgic association of
the extreme right. But ‘corporatist’ ideology is still alive in contemporary
Hungary; from time to time there are proposals to revive an unelected upper
chamber consisting of delegates of all ‘respectable professions’, all the bishops,
 25

etc. Most recently such a proposal was advanced by a ‘socialist’ prime minis-
ter, a former Communist central committee member.
But since the rather recent global triumph of capitalism, egalitarian mobi-
lizations against caste, although still the dominant form (viz. battles against
poverty, for jobs, against local and global discrimination, for gender and racial
equality, for fairness for the indigenous or ‘first’ peoples, and so on) appear
insufficient because inequality (if still a pertinent term at all) has different
causes from those it had in the past. When in the vast literature of the disil-
lusioned Left we read about the irrelevance of class, the vanishing proletariat,
we can still see the unconscious amalgamation of caste and class. Since the
immanent, intra-capitalist fight for equality led by socialists possessed by
the ‘false consciousness’ of fighting against alienation and exploitation, has
ended; since the historically forced synthesis of these two aspirations has
been dissolved through the final evanescence of the remains of aristocratic
order, deference and birth privilege; since the ‘socialist’ states have reverted to
capitalist type, as a result of the successful conquest of agrarian aristocratism
by ‘communist’ parties;53 it is for the first time that pure capitalism makes an
appearance.
One should be careful here. The historically-forced synthesis of egalitari-
anism and socialism is obviously not over in the ‘developing’ world where
egalitarian movements based on the petty merchants of the bazaar, on the
peasantry and the lower clergy (‘Islamic radicalism’) are attacking the West-
ernized elites and military states with an islamicized Khmer Rouge rhetoric
or, in Latin America, with an ‘indigenous’ millenarism. It is a telling fact that
‘revolutionary openings’ are on offer again on capitalism’s periphery, where
new strategies of the ‘weakest link’ and of ‘combined and uneven develop-
ment’ are reformulated for the benefit of a new generation of ‘vicarious
revolutionary’ dupes.
That said, on a global plane capitalism appears in the stark, unforgiving
light of its final triumph. It is completely, utterly, absolutely itself. It is like
Rome being perfectly realized in Byzantium.We reconstruct Roman society
from the legal documents written later and elsewhere, in which Roman law
was generalized and synthesized by people culturally remote from Latium
but who nevertheless understood, and what is more, lived and experienced
‘Rome’ in its unadulterated Roman ‘haecceity’ as Romaioi. Balzac and
Dickens might not be able to understand the completed ultra-capitalism of
today, but we see that we are the accomplished heirs of their characters.
There has never been an experiment in Marxian socialism. It is an open
question if there can ever be one, if indeed Marx was right in his fundamen-
tal assumptions. The stumbling block was and remains the paradox of class,
that is, of the exploited as a collective revolutionary agent. In the battle for
26

equality before the law, defining the task of the revolutionary agent was quite
easy, as we can see from the Putney Debates (1647) where Rainborough is
arguing against Ireton and Cromwell: since nobody is responsible for their
mothers and fathers, what can birthright then possibly mean? The claim-
ants are outside, the lords within; the former are clamouring to get in, the
latter protesting against people with no property, i.e., with no interest in the
common weal, getting in; but nobody doubts that it is worthwhile to be
inside.54
In modern capitalism, there is no inside, as there is no upwards direction.
There is no route by which you can leave and there is no place that is funda-
mentally unlike yours and there is no one who is not, in some way, yourself.
The primary quality of labour – that which ought to be liberated by socialist
action – is not injustice. It is a general and irremediable divorce of persons’
inner forces, desires and capacities, from the aims at the service of which they
must develop and exercise these forces. The best characterization I know of
this is by Moishe Postone:

Alienated labor … constitutes a social structure of abstract domi-

nation, but such labour should not necessarily be equated with
toil, oppression or exploitation. The labour of a serf, a portion of
which ‘belongs to’ the feudal lord, is, in and of itself, not alienated:
the domination and exploitation of that labour is not intrinsic to
the labour itself. It is precisely for this reason that expropriation
in such a situation was and had to be based upon direct compul-
sion. Non-alienated labour in societies in which a surplus exists
and is expropriated by non-labouring classes [‘castes’ in my sense,
GMT] necessarily is bound to direct social domination. By contrast,
exploitation and domination are integral moments of commodity-
determined labour.55

As far as we are aware, only direct (coercive) social domination was ever
overturned by popular revolt. As the experience of so-called ‘real socialism’
shows only too clearly, a change in legal ownership (of the means of produc-
tion) from that of private citizens or their associations to that of the state or
government means as little (for the workers) as the passage of a company
from ownership by a family into that of a pension fund. The ‘expropriation
of the expropriators’ did not end alienation. The illusion that capitalism was
ever defeated is linked to the non-Marxist idea of an anthropological turn
away from ‘artificial’ society (the anarchy, wastefulness and inefficiency of the
market, self-destructive individualism, greed and assorted social pathologies,
etc.) to true human nature where people will act (not work) creatively after
 27

their hearts’ desire. This is, again, Rousseau, not Marx – or at least not the
mature Marx – the analyst of bourgeois society.56 Marx’s historicism is thor-
ough and radical. He did not describe the human condition when describing
capitalism; indeed, his description is meant as a refutation of any such idea,
and this refutation is pursued throughout his oeuvre. As Postone puts it: ‘The
“essence” grasped by Marx’s analysis is not that of human society but that of
capitalism; it is to be abolished, not realized, in overcoming that society’.57
Neither value nor labour are perennial qualities of human existence, nor
is class. Class, in contradistinction to ‘caste’, is not a framework for a whole
life or a Lebenswelt. This is why the disappearance of the cultural identity of
the old working class does not change the fundamental character of capital-
ism one whit. Class, not being a human group with common interests and
common moral and cultural values such as, say, solidarity and contrariness,
but a structural feature of society, is not an actor. Contra E.P. Thompson, it is
a ‘thing’.58
Class is that feature of capitalist society which divides it along the lines
of people’s respective positions in relation to reification/alienation, i.e., their
degree of autonomy vis-à-vis subordination to commodities and value. The
concomitant differences in wealth, access, etc., could, in principle, be reme-
died by redistribution and mutual ‘recognition’. But greater equality of this
kind (which may appear as a utopia right now, but there are very strong
forces pushing towards that utopia which is well within the realm of possi-
bilities) can achieve better consumption, but not better ‘production’ – that is,
not unalienated labour. Equality, arrived at through redistribution, does not
and cannot preclude domination and hierarchy – a hierarchy moreover that,
unlike in aristocratic systems, does not build upon a cosmology and a meta-
physics that could effect a reconciliation with reality (and what else is reality
than servitude and dependence?).
No doubt the cruelty, craftiness, low cunning and high logistics used in
the expropriation of surpluses goes on as always, but the enemy is less and
less a culturally circumscribed bourgeoisie as described in Benjamin’s Arcades
Project,59 but a capitalism without a proletariat – and without a bourgeoisie –
at least, without a proletariat and a bourgeoisie as we know them historically,
as two distinct cultural, ideological and status groups not only embodying,
but representing ‘socialism’ and ‘capitalism’.60 It is this representation which
happens to be obsolete, and perhaps it was secondary to begin with, in spite
of its mobilizing force which makes the blood flow faster when listening to
the Marseillaise or the Internationale (curiously, both were played at East Euro-
pean demonstrations at the beginning of the twentieth century).
The truth about class is not a proud self-representation through a legiti-
mizing ethic: this belongs to an era of conflict between rebellious universalism
28

(read: egalitarianism) and particularism (read: aristocratism and the esprit de

corps of haughty elites from dukes to abbots). The dominant ideology of the
new, purified capitalism is, naturally, freedom. Freedom, as conservatives have
been pointing out since the late eighteenth century, means the uprooting
of corporate, standesgemäß identities and replacing them with mobility, flex-
ibility, elasticity, ease, a propensity to, and a preference for, change. It is, in
appearance, ‘classless’. But it isn’t. It does not ‘prefer’ the bourgeoisie as a
closed, culturally identifiable, status group (‘estate’); instead it underpins capi-
talism as a system.
Some people mistake the absence of identifiable cultural and status groups
on either side of the class divide for an absence of class rule. But this is false.
The capitalist class rules, but it is anonymous and open, and therefore impos-
sible to hate, to storm, to chase away. So is the proletariat. Legal, political and
cultural equality (equality here only means a random distribution of – very
real – advantages and privileges) has made class conflict into what Capital
makes it out to be. Class conflict is dependent on the extraction of surplus,
and it is not a battle between two camps for superior recognition and a better
position in the scheme of (re)distribution.That battle goes on still, to be sure,
but it is essentially the battle of yesteryear. The bourgeoisie is by now inca-
pable of autonomous self-representation; the representation of its interests
which is taken over more and more by the state. Since the state represents,
and looks after, capitalism, the old-style self-representation of the working
class is moribund, too, but the state is not supplanted – as was the case, at least
symbolically, in the past – by political institutions of counter-power. Thus
revolutionary proletarian movements, although they now barely exist, are
cast into the outer darkness.
The truth about class is, therefore, that the proletariat had, historically,
two contradictory objectives: one, to preserve itself as an estate with its own
institutions (trade unions, working-class parties, a socialist press, instruments
of self-help, etc.), and another one, to defeat its antagonist and to abolish itself
as a class.We can now see that the abolition of the working class as an ‘estate’,
as a ‘guild’, has been effected by capitalism; capitalism has finally transformed
the proletariat (and the bourgeoisie) into a veritable class, putting an end to
their capacity for hegemony. Class hegemony of any kind (still quite viva-
cious and vigorous in Gramsci’s time) was exactly what was annihilated. Class
as an economic reality exists, and it is as fundamental as ever, although it is
culturally and politically almost extinct. This is a triumph of capitalism.61
But this makes the historical work of destroying capitalism less parochial,
it makes it indeed as universal, as abstract and as powerful as capitalism itself.
What political form this may take, we don’t know.62 Nevertheless, it is now
truly the cause of humanity. There is no particular, local, vocational, ‘guild’
 29

bias to this cause, nor is any possible. The truth of class is of its own tran-
scendence. The proletariat of the Manifesto could stand outside because it
could lose nothing but its chains. No one is outside now – although not in
the sense of Antonio Negri: nation-states and classes continue to exist, and
they do determine our lives.63
The question is, could there be a motivation for a class that exists in
deprivation – and is now even deprived of a corporate cultural identity – to
change a situation which is dehumanizing and dangerous, but not humiliat-
ing to the point of moral provocation?
We don’t know.
What is certain is that the last flowers have fallen off the chains. The
working-class culture which inspired so much heroism and self-abnegation
is dead. That culture was modernist in the sense of taking aim at hierarchy
and trying to achieve a secular, egalitarian and rights-based society. This the
working class mistook for socialism. It is not. It is capitalism. Capitalism could
be itself only if and when aided by socialist delusion.64 We are now free of
this delusion. We see the task more clearly.

NOTES

This is an edited and abridged version of a longer manuscript.

1 The Making of the English Working Class, London: Penguin, 1963.

2 A first-rate specimen of the decaying art of polemic, worthy of its target,
is Perry Anderson’s Arguments Within English Marxism, London: NLB/
Verso, 1980. He says in an important passage: ‘Today, too, Thompson is
entirely justified in summoning historical materialism again to take full
and self-critical measure of [William] Morris’s greatness. However, his
ulterior theorization of the reasons why Marxism as a whole long failed
to take up the legacy of Morris cannot be so easily accepted.The former,
he maintains, pertains – or at least pretends – to “knowledge”, the latter
to “desire”. These are “two different operative principles of culture”
which may not be assimilated to each other. Spelling out the distinction,
he writes: “The motions of desire may be legible in the text of necessity,
and may then become subject to rational explanation and criticism. But
such criticism can scarcely touch these motions at their source.” What
is wrong with this account? Essentially that it substitutes an ontological
for a historical explanation of the record of relations between Morris
and Marxism’. (p. 160). Bingo. Rousseauian socialism can be (and is)
empiricist, utopian and moralistic (and, occasionally, passéiste) but never,
ever historicist (in the sense of Historismus, not the Popperian nonsense;
30

cf. Friedrich Meinecke, Die Entstehung des Historismus, I-II, Berlin: R.

Oldenbourg, 1936; see also Meinecke’s Machiavellism [a translation of
his Die Idee der Staatsräson in der neueren Geschichte, 1925], ed. by Werner
Stark, New Brunswick:Transaction, 1998, esp. the chapter on Ranke, pp.
377-391).
3 E.P. Thompson, The Poverty of Theory, London: Merlin, 1978.
4 Perry Anderson, In the Tracks of Historical Materialism, Chicago: The
University of Chicago Press, 1984. The book also contains instructive
political analyses. The term ‘Western Marxism’ originated with Karl
Korsch (q. v.), was made popular first by Maurice Merleau-Ponty in
his epochal Adventures of the Dialectic [1955], Evanston: Northwestern
University Press, 1986, pp. 30-58, and reinvented by Anderson himself
in his famous Considerations on Western Marxism, London: NLB, 1976,
where he notes rather presciently the shift of Marxist theory away from
economics and politics to culture and art, another telling sign of decline
for a revolutionary doctrine: see pp. 49-74.
5 To quote the perhaps most famous words in the modern history of ideas:
‘All fixed, fast-frozen relations, with their train of ancient and venerable
prejudices and opinions, are swept away, all new formed ones become
antiquated before they can ossify. All that is solid melts into air, all that is
holy is profaned, and man is at last compelled to face with sober senses
his real conditions of life, and his relations with his kind’. Karl Marx
and Friedrich Engels, The Communist Manifesto [1847], ed. by Gareth
Stedman Jones, London: Penguin, 2002, pp. 222-3.
6 In an essay written but never published in English, and available only
in Hungarian translation: ‘Jean-Jacques Rousseau’ [1953], in K. Polányi,
Fasizmus, demokrácia, ipari társadalom, Budapest: Gondolat, 1986, pp. 244-
258.
7 Karl Polanyi, The Great Transformation [1944], Boston: Beacon Press,
1957.
8 The Gift, London: Routledge, 1970. Cf. the chapters ‘Don, contrat,
échange’ and ‘Sources, matériaux, textes à l’appui de “l’Essai sur le
don”’, in Marcel Mauss, Oeuvres 3, présentation de Victor Karady, Paris:
Les Éditions de Minuit, 1969, pp. 29-103. Paul Veyne has also demon-
strated how in the ancient Greek city-states, this kind of display became
a system, euergetismos, the system of ‘good works’ whereby the richest
aristocrats had been forced by the community to sacrifice large chunks
of their wealth for public purposes (military, naval, religious and athletic)
in exchange for honours, but under pain of confiscation and exile, in lieu
of taxation. Honour was equated with giving up, not amassing, wealth.
Civisme meant sacrifice. See his Bread and Circuses, London: Penguin
 31

Books, 1990, an abridged version of Le Pain et le cirque, Paris: Les Éditions

du Seuil, 1976.
9 See his The Accursed Share, New York: Zone Books, 1991. Cf. Georges
Bataille, ‘The Notion of Expenditure’, in Bataille, Visions of Excess, ed.
by Allan Stoekl, Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1993, pp.
116-129; for background see his ‘The Moral Meaning of Sociology’, in
Bataille, The Absence of Myth, ed. by Michael Richardson, London:Verso,
1994, pp. 103-112. On war as play, he spoke in a radio interview (on
Nietzsche) with Georges Charbonnier on 14 January 1959, see Bataille,
Une liberté souveraine, ed. by Michel Surya, Paris: Farrago, 2000, p. 130.
10 Emile, or On Education, ed. by Allan Bloom, New York: Basic Books,
1979, pp. 224, 225.
11 E.P. Thompson, Witness Against the Beast: William Blake and the Moral
Law, New York: The New Press, 1993, pp. 109-110. Rousseauian social-
ism was often attracted to counter-cultural intermundia, far away from
official ‘polite’ culture. Bataille, the alleged ‘crazed pornographer’ is a
case in point, see his texts from the 1930s anti-Stalinist left subculture,
L’Apprenti sorcier, ed. by Marina Galletti, Paris: Éditions de la Différence,
1999; cf. Laure: Une rupture, ed. by Anne Roche and Jérôme Peignot,
Paris: Éditions des Cendres, 1999 (letters of Laure, Bataille, Boris Souvar-
ine, Pierre Pascal, Simone Weil). The subversive potential of demotic or
popular culture was shown to great effect by Robert Darnton; see his
The Great Cat Massacre, New York: Vintage, 1985, and particularly The
Literary Underground of the Old Regime, Cambridge: Harvard Univer-
sity Press, 1982. It is small wonder that it was he who pointed out the
parallels between the clandestine literature of pre-revolutionary France
and the underground samizdat literature in Eastern Europe (of which
this writer was a modest practitioner), see R. Darnton, Berlin Journal
1989-1990, New York:W.W. Norton, 1991 It is pretty characteristic that
defeated Marxian socialists would retreat to the ‘antinomian’ stance and
discover the ‘authentic’ proletarian culture, like Jacques Rancière in his
The Nights of Labor, Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1989. It is
significant that Rancière was Louis Althusser’s comrade-in-arms and
ends up as an ally of E.P. Thompson.
12 This does not mean, of course, that Rousseauian socialists are averse to
faux-naïf appeals to reason. See, for instance, P.-J. Proudhon, Les Confes-
sions d’un révolutionnaire, 1849, ed. by Daniel Halévy and Hervé Trinquier,
Paris: Éditions Tops, 1997, p. 141.
13 At the same time, Rousseau would extol the merits of a music rooted in
a parochial community, necessarily based on the cadences of an ethnic
language. As in Rousseau, ‘Lettre à d’Alembert’ [1758], in Jean-Jacques
32

Rousseau, Oeuvres complètes,V, Pléiade edition, Paris: Gallimard, 1995, p.

15.
14 ‘… the Savage lives in himself; sociable man, always outside himself, is
capable of living only in the opinion of others and, so to speak, derives the
sentiment of his own existence solely from their judgment’. Jean-Jacques
Rousseau, The First and Second Discourses, ed. by Victor Gourevitch, New
York: Harper Torchbooks, 1990, pp. 198-9.
15 For a neo-Weberian analysis of puritan elements in Rousseau’s views
on inwardness and moral economy, see Alessandro Ferrara, Modernity and
Authenticity: A Study of the Social and Ethical Thought of Jean-Jacques Rous-
seau, Albany: State University of New York Press, 1993, pp. 111-151.
16 Arno Mayer, The Persistence of the Old Regime, New York: Oantheon,
1981.
17 See the classical statement about the oligarchical tendency in (mainly
socialist) political organizations: Robert Michels, Political Parties [1915],
London: Macmillan, 1968, cf. Carl E. Schorske, German Social Democracy
1905-1917, New York: Harper Torchbooks, 1972, esp. pp. 88-145.
18 See G.M. Tamás, ‘Un capitalisme pur et simple’, La Nouvelle Alternative,
60-61, March-June 2004, pp. 13-40.
19 ‘Meta’-capitalist transcendence had to stay utopian in order to be able
to fall back on moral rather than historical criticism.This amounted to a
transition from Hegel to Kant, which, as Lukács well demonstrated, is a
certain sign of defeat. The philosophical manifesto of the 1918 German
revolution shows this clearly in its theologizing metaphysical rhapsody:
see Ernst Bloch, The Spirit of Utopia, Stanford: Stanford University Press,
2000, pp. 237-8.
20 See Thompson’s famous essay ‘The Peculiarities of the English’, Socialist
Register 1965, written against Anderson’s ‘Origins of the Present Crisis’,
New Left Review, I/23, January/February 1964, and Tom Nairn’s ‘The
English Working Class’, New Left Review, I/24, March/April 1964.
21 See the series of superb and gloomy reports in Perry Anderson, English
Questions, London: Verso, 1992, pp. 48-104, 121-192, 193-301. This
réquisitoire of English decadence and philistinism has many parallels in
Matthew Arnold, Culture and Anarchy [1869], ed. by Samuel Lipman,
New Haven:Yale University Press, 1994.
22 This, perhaps necessary, tactic of the socialist movements was criti-
cized very early on. See the important essay of the greatest Hungarian
Marxist before Lukács, Ervin Szabó (an anarcho-syndicalist), ‘Politique
et syndicats’, Le Mouvement Socialiste, 1909, t. 1, pp. 57-67; cf. Ervin
Szabó, Socialism and Social Science, ed. by J.M. Bak and G. Litván, London:
Routledge, 1982. The clearest statement of the problem as regards
 33

Bolshevism is to be found in Herman Gorter, Open Letter to Comrade

Lenin [1920], London: Wildcat, n.d. [1989], cf. Herman Gorter, ‘Die
Ursachen des Nationalismus im Proletariat’ [1915] and ‘Offener Brief
an den Genossen Lenin’ [1920], in A. Pannekoek and H. Gorter, Organi-
sation und Taktik der proletarischen Revolution, ed. by Hans Manfred Bock,
Frankfurt/Main:Verlag Neue Kritik, 1969, pp. 73-87, 168-227.
23 Ervin Szabó attributes the 1848 revolution in Hungary to a class conflict
between landed gentry and landed aristocracy; see his ‘Aus den Parteien
und Klassenkämpfen in der ungarischen Revolution von 1848’, Archiv
für die Geschichte des Sozialismus und der Arbeiterbewegung, 1919, pp. 258-
307 (fragment from a larger work in Hungarian, this latter considered a
classic).
24 See Perry Anderson, ‘The Notion of Bourgeois Revolution’ in English
Questions, pp. 105-118. The whole concept of ‘bourgeois revolution’
seems to disintegrate as a result of late twentieth-century Marxist
research.
25 She was even able to appropriate the dividends of the most blatantly
conservative work of historiography which, during the Thatcher decade,
declared the bankruptcy of the plebeian school in history initiated by
the CPGB Historians’ Group in the 1950s: see J.C.D. Clark, English
Society 1688-1832, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1988. Clark
proves himself to be the scourge especially of E.P. Thompson, in ‘a tract
for the times’ quite enjoyable in its acidity and its fashionably anti-snob-
bish return to those supremely unfashionable writers, Sir Lewis Namier
and Sir Herbert Butterfield; see esp. pp. 141-161, 258-276.
26 Ellen Meiksins Wood, The Pristine Culture of Capitalism, London: Verso,
1991, pp. 91-2.
27 Ibid.
28 ‘A Culture in Contraflow’, in Anderson, English Questions, p. 300. See
also his essays in A Zone of Engagement, London:Verso, 1992.
29 This is a problematic best illuminated in a few wonderful books by T.J.
Clark such as Image of the People: Gustave Courbet and the 1848 Revolution
[1973], London: Thames and Hudson, 1999. See his masterpiece, Fare-
well to an Idea: Fragments from a History of Modernism, New Haven: Yale
University Press, 1999, the best summation in existence of the intricate
and profound identity of modernism and political radicalism (my favour-
ites are the chapters on Pissarro and on ‘Freud’s Cézanne’, pp. 55-167);
summations though, disturbingly, are of the past, are they not?
30 There is a book, sadly overlooked, in spite of its many merits, which
analyses the political aspect of Marx’s picture of England: David MacGre-
gor, Hegel, Marx, and the English State, Toronto: University of Toronto
34

Press, 1996, especially strong on contracts and the Factory Acts; cf. David
MacGregor, The Communist Ideal in Hegel and Marx, Toronto: University
of Toronto Press, 1990.
31 The only exceptions are the failed revolts of Left Communists, Council
Communists, anarchists and anarcho-syndicalists. It is only they who
ever tried to elaborate a Marxian political project. See [Philippe Bour-
rinet], The Dutch and German Communist Left, London: ICC, 2001 and
the numerous and voluminous works of Hans Manfred Bock. There is a
recent re-edition of Anton Pannekoek’s Workers’ Councils [1948], ed. by
Robert Barsky, Oakland: AK Press, 2003.
32 ‘A compressed statement of [Thompson’s] argument: Production rela-
tions do not mechanically determine class consciousness (p), therefore:
Class may not be defined purely in terms of production relations (q). P is
true, but q does not follow from it. We are at liberty to define class, with
more or less … precision, by reference to production relations, without
inferring, as Thompson says we are the bound to do, that the culture
and consciousness of a class may be readily deduced from its objective
position within production relations. The opponent Thompson envis-
ages commits the same fallacy as his critic. He too supposes that if p is
true, then q is true.That is why he bases a denial of p on a denial of q, and
erects a mechanical Marxism which ignores the open drama of historical
process. The difficulty is not the opponent’s premiss, whose innocence
Thompson fails to disprove, but the hasty reasoning with which he
follows it. Thompson’s motive is to insist on p, with which we have
no quarrel. But he mistakenly supposes that one who accepts a struc-
tural definition of class, and so rejects q, is thereby committed against p.
There is no good reason to think that’. G.A. Cohen, Karl Marx’s Theory of
History: A Defence [1978], expanded edition, Oxford: Oxford University
Press, 2001, pp. 74-5. The antiquated, ‘period’ feel of Cohen’s analytical
style, quite extraneous to the book’s main argument, not to speak of its
historical and philosophical sensibility, does not detract from its value,
notwithstanding its untenable theory of ‘theory’ and such. Moreover,
what G.A. Cohen has to add on class is even more important: ‘“The
separation of the free worker from his means of production” – the
phrase encapsulates the structured characterization of the proletarian …:
his “freedom” is his ownership of his labour power, his “separation” is his
non-ownership of his means of production. The text thus recommends
individuation of social forms (and thereby “economic epochs of the
structure of society”) in production relational terms … [T]he produc-
tion relation binding immediate producers will be broadly invariant
across a single social formation: there will be no unordered mélange of
 35

slaves, serfs, and proletarians … [We] say that there are as many types of
economic structure as there are kinds of relation of immediate produc-
ers to productive forces. From the Marxian viewpoint, social forms are
distinguished and unified by their types of economic structure, as indi-
viduated by the production relations dominant within them’ (pp. 78-9).
It is an open question though, whether this is valid also for non-capitalist
societies, where the separation of the economy from the rest of society
and la chose commune has not happened.
33 See my ‘On Post-Fascism’, Boston Review, Summer 2000, pp. 42-6,
reprinted in A. Sajó, ed., Out and Into Authoritarian Law, Amsterdam:
Kluwer International Law, 2002, pp. 203-219. Cf. G.M. Tamás, ‘Resto-
ration Romanticism’, Public Affairs Quarterly, 7/4, October 1993, pp.
379-401.
34 Louis Dumont, Homo hierarchicus [1966], complete revised English
edition, Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1980, p. 66.
35 Cf. Georges Dumézil, La Courtisane et les seigneurs colorés, Paris: Galli-
mard, 1983, pp. 17-36.
36 A splendid book on this theme: Georges Dumézil, Heur et malheur du
guerrier, Paris: Flammarion, 1992, influenced, alas, by the waffle on ‘der
arische Männerbund’ and ‘die kultische Geheimbünde der Germanen’
(Stig Wikander, 1938 and Otto Höfler, 1935, respectively), but no matter:
I recommend the superb chapters on the Tarquinii, Indra the sinner, and
the comparison of the Horatii and the �ptya.
37 Karl Marx, Grundrisse [1857-1858], London: Penguin, 1993, p. 364.
38 Luke 6, 20-2, 24-8.
39 I tried to demonstrate, long ago, that this is an illusion: G.M. Tamás,
L’Oeil et la main, Geneva: Éditions Noir, 1985 (original Hungarian
samizdat edition: 1983).
40 A compendium of anti-egalitarian prejudices, very much a predecessor
of neo-conservative views of our own day, but funnier, is Max Nordau’s
Degeneration [a translation of Entartung, 1892], with an introduction by
George L. Mosse, Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1993, with
amusing rants against Ibsen, Tolstoy, Baudelaire, Wagner, Nietzsche,
Huysmans and others. It was enormously popular when it appeared
precisely because it pointed to the impotence of egalitarianism, espe-
cially of Christian and Jacobin origin, against bourgeois society.
41 It is quite astonishing to see the power of the old landed interest until
the Second World War in the westernmost state of Europe; see David
Cannadine, The Decline and Fall of the British Aristocracy, New Haven:
Yale University Press, 1990, with highly instructive appendices.The data
first collected by W.D. Rubinstein are inventively and entertainingly
36

interpreted. The book bolsters some of the Anderson-Nairn claims,

albeit belatedly. The peasant question was raised by Karl Kautsky; the
debate raged in Germany, Austria-Hungary and Russia; there was also
an interesting contribution from Rumania, by Constantin Dobrogeanu-
Gherea on ‘the new serfdom’; later, the criticism of Lenin, Trotsky and
the October Revolution from the Left was frequently based on the need
of the ‘socialist revolution’ to distribute land to the peasants, creating
thereby petty entrepreneurial capitalism in agriculture, that had to be
‘liquidated’ subsequently by the centralizing re-distributive state in a
violent self-repression of the revolution or, according to the Stalinists,
the liquidation of phase I of revolution by phase II (‘collectivization’
through massacre and famine).
42 Cf. Perry Anderson, ‘The Notion of Bourgeois Revolution’. The histor-
ical points are discussed in Ellen Meiksins Wood’s illuminating book,
The Origin of Capitalism: A Longer View, London:Verso, 2002, esp. pp. 95-
146. Apart from its striking originality, it contains an excellent survey of
recent controversies, around Perry Anderson’s Passage from Antiquity to
Feudalism [1974], London: Verso, 1992 and Lineage of the Absolutist State
[1974], London: Verso, 1979, and the Brenner Debate (see The Brenner
Debate: Agrarian Class Structure and Economic Development in Pre-Indus-
trial Europe [1976], ed. by T.H. Aston and C.H.E. Philpin, Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press, 1988). There is a sharp attack on Ellen
Meiksins Wood and Robert Brenner by Ricardo Duchesne in ‘On the
Origins of Capitalism’, Rethinking Marxism, 14(3), Fall 2002, pp. 129-137,
which for lack of specialist expertise I cannot appraise, but as an outsider,
I am not wholly convinced. Central and East (including Russian) expe-
rience seems to me to bear out Meiksins Wood’s contentions, as far as I
can judge.
43 This is what Andrew Levine fails to see in his interesting book, A Future
for Marxism? Althusser, the Analytical Turn and the Revival of Socialist Theory,
London: Pluto, 2003. It is quite ironical that the two authors who in the
nineteen-seventies tried to recreate a pristine left theory, Louis Althus-
ser and G.A. Cohen, should be Mr Levine’s heroes in a book which
accepts egalitarianism (in John Roemer and others) and ‘normative’
political philosophy (in the later G.A. Cohen) as an egress for wayward
Marxism without any further ado. Andrew Levine’s contention that
G.A. Cohen and others have brought Marxism into the ‘mainstream’ is
rather extraordinary. Imagine a system of beliefs that has influenced the
lives of hundreds of millions of people on four continents, taught around
nocturnal camp-fires in dozens of civil wars and hundreds of trade union
institutions, debated by dozens of revolutionary or reforming govern-
 37

ments, brought into the ‘mainstream’ of a tiny and transient chapter in

the history of thought, analytically styled political philosophy. Academic
myopia often beggars belief. Whatever analytical remains from analyti-
cal Marxism is rather the ‘period piece’ feel, a combination of Oxford
flippancy and Cambridge philistinism, besides a commendable striving
for clarity. Being ‘no-nonsense’ and ‘tough-minded’ and ‘anti-bullshit’ is
more a question of style than anything else. Just as nobody takes seriously
Spinoza’s Euclidean pretensions or Hobbes’s aspirations to be ‘scientific’,
and just as this does not prevent us from appreciating their work, the
‘analytical’ style of a certain Marxian writing, however secondary, does
not preclude its insights from being illuminating or useful. But it is
strange, passing strange that an eccentric manner should be considered
‘mainstream’ while the grand tradition of post-Renaissance European
social philosophy – of which Marxism is, of course, a part – should be
seen as marginal. Andrew Levine also speaks about the ‘insularity’ of
French academic philosophy, which reminds one of the famous English
headline, ‘Fog over Channel, Continent cut off ’. Marxists used to be
internationalist revolutionaries, didn’t they?
44 ‘Notes on Adolph Wagner’ [1879-80], in Marx, Later Political Writings,
ed. by Terrell Carver, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002, p.
232.
45 In the draft programme of German social democracy you could find the
sentence: ‘Labour is the source of all wealth and all culture’. To which,
Marx responds: ‘Labour is not the source of all wealth. Nature is just as
much the source of use-values (and what else is material wealth?) as
labour, which is itself only the expression of a natural power, human
labour power. This line can be found in any children’s primer and is
correct in so far as the implication is that labour requires certain means
and materials. However a socialist programme cannot allow a bourgeois
phrase like this to conceal the very circumstances that give it some sense’.
‘Critique of the Gotha Programme’, in Marx, Later Political Writings, pp.
208-9.
46 ‘Reification and the Consciousness of the Proletariat’, in Lukács, History
and Class Consciousness: Studies in Marxist Dialectics [1923], Cambridge:
The MIT Press, 2000, p. 150.
47 ‘The transformation of the commodity relation into a thing of “ghostly
objectivity” cannot… content itself with the reduction of all objects for
the gratification of human needs to commodities. It stamps its imprint
upon the whole consciousness of man; his qualities and abilities are no
longer an organic part of his personality, they are things which he can
“own” or “dispose of ” like the various objects of the external world.
38

And there is no natural form in which human relations can be cast, no

way in which man can bring his physical and psychic “qualities” into
play without their being subjected increasingly to this reifying process
…. This rationalization of the world appears to be complete, it seems
to penetrate the very depths of man’s physical and psychic nature. It is
limited, however, by its own formalism …. On closer examination the
structure of a crisis is seen to be no more than a heightening of the degree
and intensity of the daily life of bourgeois society. In its unthinking,
mundane reality that life seems firmly held together by “natural laws”;
yet it can experience a sudden dislocation because the bonds uniting
its various elements and partial systems are a chance affair even at their
most normal. So that the pretence that society is regulated by “eternal,
iron” laws which branch off into the different special laws applying to
particular areas is finally revealed for what it is: a pretence. The true
structure of society appears rather in the independent, rationalized and
formal partial laws whose links with each other are of necessity purely
formal (i.e. their formal interdependence can be formally systematized),
while as far as concrete realities are concerned they can only estab-
lish fortuitous connections’ (Ibid., p. 101). It appears that contingency
is the outcome of extreme rationalization (described by Max Weber) of
society’s technological, administrative, legal, logistical, military, etc. sub-
systems in a framework of outlandish randomness. No truly rational
control is conceivable over such a collection of disparate ‘facts’.
48 I spoke about this problem à propos Fichte (the Rousseauian and Kantian
revolutionary genius) in ‘Fichte’s “Die Bestimmung des Gelehrten”: A
Sketch’, Collegium Budapest Workshop Series 12, Budapest: Institute of
Advanced Study, 1997, passim, and in ‘From Subjectivity to Privacy and
Back Again’, Social Research, 69(1), Spring 2002, pp. 201-221.
49 The Retreat from Class [1986], London:Verso, 1998.
50 ‘In order to place ourselves firmly within the field of articulation, we
must begin by renouncing the conception of “society” as founding
totality of its partial processes. We must, therefore, consider the open-
ness of the social as the constitutive ground or “negative essence” of
the existing, and the diverse “social orders” as precarious and ultimately
failed attempts to domesticate the field of differences’. So write Chantal
Mouffe and Ernesto Laclau in their Hegemony and Socialist Strategy
[1985], London: Verso, 2001, pp. 95-6. Wood’s response is rather cruel:
‘After much theoretical huffing and puffing, has not the mountain
laboured and brought forth – pluralism? The alternative – which always
lurks menacingly in the background – is a doctrine according to which
some external agency, somehow uniquely and autonomously capable
 39

of generating a hegemonic discourse out of its own inner resources,

will impose it from above, giving the indeterminate mass a collective
identity and creating a “people” or “nation” where none existed before.
The sinister possibilities inherent in such a view are obvious’. The Retreat
from Class, p. 63. (Two remarks here: I think more highly of Mouffe’s and
Laclau’s talents than Meiksins Wood does; and I think the ‘sinister possi-
bilities’ are already quite obvious in Gramsci’s Machiavellianism. The
end result, though, is indeed pluralism and egalitarianism of ‘recognition’
of the contemporary NGO variety.)
51 An extremely interesting anthology of texts from the Socialist Register,
centred around a few seminal articles by Ralph Miliband, discusses the
case of Britain while considering the general problem of whether the
construction of a cross-class alliance led by labour could ever achieve
socialism: David Coates, ed., Paving the Third Way: The Critique of Parlia-
mentary Socialism, London: Merlin, 2003, with contributions by Ralph
Miliband, John Saville, Leo Panitch, Colin Leys, Hilary Wainwright and
David Coates.
52 See Ernest Mandel’s prescient From Stalinism to Eurocommunism, London:
NLB, 1978.The PCI’s overall political role was not all that different from
that of Labour or the SPD or SPÖ.
53 See G.M. Tamás, ‘Un capitalisme pur et simple’. There is an earlier, non-
socialist essay by the same author, with some realization of this problem,
cf. G.M.Tamás,‘Socialism, Capitalism and Modernity’, in Larry Diamond
and Marc F. Plattner, eds., Capitalism, Socialism and Democracy Revisited,
Baltimore:The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1993, pp. 54-68; see also
my ‘Victory Defeated’, in Larry Diamond and Marc F. Plattner, eds.,
Democracy After Communism, Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University
Press, 2002, pp. 126-131.
54 David Wootton, ed., Divine Right and Democracy: An Anthology of Political
Writing in Stuart England, Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1986, pp. 285-316.
Gerrard Winstanley said, ‘This is your inward principle, O ye present
powers of England. You do not study how to advance universal love. If
you did, it would appear in action’. (Ibid., p. 321). This is the authentic
voice of revolution.
55 Moishe Postone, Time, Labor and Social Domination: A Reinterpretation of
Marx’s Critical Theory [1993], Cambridge: Cambridge University Press,
2003, p. 160.
56 The philosophical doctrine of a reconstructed people – reconstructed
through the abolition of commerce and the market proper – is Fichte’s
in Der geschloßne Handelsstaat [1800], ed. by Fritz Medicus and Hans
Hirsch, Philosophische Bibliothek #316, Hamburg: Felix Meiner Verlag,
40

1979, esp. pp. 89-126; cf. Johann Gottlieb Fichte, Grundlage des Natur-
rechts [1796], ed. by Manfred Zahn, Phil. Bibl. #256, Hamburg: Felix
Meiner, 1991, pp. 156-184; Johann Gottlieb Fichte, Die Staatslehre, oder
über das Verhältniss des Urstaates zum Vernunftreiche… [1813, posthumous],
in I.H. Fichte, ed., Fichtes Werke IV, Berlin: Walter de Gruyter & Co.,
1971, pp. 497 ad fin.
57 Postone, Time, Labor and Social Domination, pp. 62-3.
58 See Thompson’s famous preface to The Making (p. 11): ‘…class is a rela-
tionship, and not a thing…’.
59 Walter Benjamin, The Arcades Project, Cambridge: Harvard University
Press, 2002. It is quite instructive to compare the grand portraitists
of the late bourgeoisie, Henry James, Thomas Mann, Marcel Proust,
André Gide, Roger Martin du Gard, Robert Musil, Italo Svevo, Alberto
Moravia, Tibor Déry – with Walter Benjamin. The last generations of
the old bourgeoisie are distinguished by a certain weakness and tender-
ness towards small things; it is the first non-labouring class that has
no discernible social or political function. Politics is still made by the
grands seigneurs or the new professionals (lawyers and apparatchiki), glory,
elegance and courtliness are still preserves of the nobility together with
sports, duels, military prowess and sexual licence. Arts are the only terrain
where neither professionalism nor ‘caste’ plays an important role. Inward-
ness (Innerlichkeit), plush comfort, solitude, consumption of culture (from
newspapers to operas) are the world of the flâneur which he escapes by
flâner. It is only Mann and Déry among those listed above who could
be said to have been conscious of an apocalyptic dimension to all this
(think of the function of toothache in The Buddenbrooks). These authors
all believed that it should be proletarian socialism, however barbaric it
may turn out to be, which takes the place of the ailing, self-indulgent,
morbidly eroticized microcosm of cultivated bourgeoisie with its Mahler
and Debussy and Klimt and Schiele. They never thought of corporate
management, tabloid television and pop music.
60 About this the best Marxian (or any kind of) analysis is by Robert Kurz
in his largely untranslated books and his periodicals (Krisis, its lighter
Austrian counterpart, Streifzüge, and now Exit). He is the thinker closest
to Moishe Postone I know of. I believe he is the most original thinker
on the German, and perhaps European, Left nowadays. He deserves to
be more generally known.
61 The intellectual history of the highly interesting and important discus-
sions (chiefly among Marxists) on class as a problem of political
philosophy is summarized (and an original solution thereof is attempted)
on a very high theoretical level by Stephen A. Resnick and Richard
 41

D. Wolff, Knowledge and Class: A Marxian Critique of Political Economy,

Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1987. It is a thousand pities
that I cannot argue with it here.
62 A starting point in envisaging the future function of the class-in-itself
would surely be the imposing work of Erik Olin Wright, the greatest
authority on class today.There are continuing sociological investigations
about this: see the innovative work of Stanley Aronowitz and Michael
Zweig. None of the above makes their kind of valuable work superflu-
ous, quite the contrary.
63 On the debate concerning the new imperialism, see G.M. Tamás, ‘Isten
hozta, Mr. Bush’, Élet és Irodalom (Supplement), 22 April 2005.
64 ‘Revolutionary theory is now the sworn enemy of revolutionary ideol-
ogy – and it knows it’. Guy Debord, The Society of the Spectacle [1967],
§124, New York: Zone Books, 1995, p. 90.