Class Struggles
Having declared in the opening sentence of the
Manifesto that all history is the
history of class struggles, Marx adds
immediately in a footnote "of written
history". For prior to the invention of
writing, societies were nomadic, organized
in tribes, each tribe made of less
than 100 individuals. There was hardly any
division of labor, other than
sexual. The tribe would designate a chief, and
modern ethnology tells us the
chief had very little power. His main function was
to defuse any conflict
among tribesmen, not as a judge, he had no power to
judge, but more by using
his charisma to talk people out of their quarrels. His
authority would be
limited to leading the hunt and, of course, the war. That’s
all. In his
essay, The Origin of Property, Family and the State, Engels
describes social
life in these primitive tribes very much as something like
"anarchy". I would
like to add here that modern anthropology supports
Engels’ analysis.
Primitive societies did not know anything that resembles
political power, let
alone a state. They had no use for it. Pierre Clastres, in
his fascinating
book, Society Against State, notes that the only distinctive
feature between
"primitive" and "modern" societies is not
agriculture, it is not sedentary
life, it is the institution of a state. A
modern society is a society that is
subject to the power of a state. So called
primitive societies were not. In
economic terms, nomadic tribes (which Engels
calls gens) do not accumulate a
lot of goods. The only capital they use is what
people can carry on their
back or on the back of an animal. Not much. Thus,
between tribes, violence is
limited, there is not much to conquer and to loot,
and war is considered more
like a sport, a rough athletic competition. Note that
war was a game played
by all tribesmen. All valid men went to war, when called
for, there were no
professionals. How did the state come about ? With
agriculture began a
process of capital accumulation. In order to farm, one needs
first to clear
the land. Trees have to be uprooted, fields have to be irrigated,
tilled and
planted. Granaries have to be built to store grain for the year,
pending the
next harvest. All this preparation and construction may take many
months, and
it is hard work. So people started to think : "Why should we do
it ? When we
go at war, we take prisoners, let the prisoners do the hard
work". And so,
says Engels, society experienced its first division into
classes, between a
class of masters and a class of slaves, between exploiters
and exploited. Of
course, the society which has accumulated this capital becomes
the envy and
the target of its neighbors. War is no longer a sport, it can pay,
and pay
big, because if you conquer the enemy’s land that has already been
cleared
and irrigated, with a year or more supply in storehouses, it is saving
you
the investment and hard work. So each society had to organize some sort
of
permanent defence against marauders and invaders. Each society took out of
its
surplus enough food to pay for a group of people who would have no
other
function than protection, i.e., a professional army. Now once the
rulers had an
armed force at their disposal, the temptation was there
permanently to use it
against their own people, to consolidate the rulers’
power. Thus, says Engels,
there emerged a new institution, which would
maintain "order" in
society, and of course an order favorable to the dominant
class. This
institution is called "the state". Let me quote directly from
Engels
: "In order to maintain this public power, contributions
from
the state citizens are necessary -- taxes. These were completely unknown
to
gentile society [the so-called "primitives"]. We know more than
enough
about them today ! With advancing civilization, even taxes are not
sufficient ;
the state draws drafts on the future, contracts loans, state
debts. Our old
Europe can tell a tale about these, too." [Engels was
writing this in 1867.
What would he have to say about our modern Europe,
with states plundering a full
50% of all wealth created in society and
running debts equivalent to two years
of GNP !] "In possession of the public
power and the right of
taxation, the officials now present themselves as
organs of society standing
above society... Representatives of a power which
estranges them from society,
they have to be given prestige by means of
special decrees, which invest them
with a peculiar sanctity and
inviolability." "The state is therefore
by no means a power imposed on
society from without... Rather, it is a product
of society at a particular
stage of development..." The first
point I wish to emphasise here
with Marx and Engels is that the state is a human
construct ; it is not
inherent to mankind, as the queen is to an ant colony or a
beehive. Human
societies existed historically without a state, and there is no
reason why we
could not organize ourselves again in the future without a state.
My
second point is that, as Marx and Engels tell us, the state is the
instrument
of oppression used to keep in check the exploited masses. Without
the state,
mass exploitation would not be possible.
Ideology Now,
the dominant class amounts to only a fraction of the
population, sometimes as
low as 10-20%. Surely, 10% cannot exploit 90%. How
come therefore this small
minority manages to stay in power ? For controlling
the state is not
enough. Maintaining an army of professional warriors to keep
in check citizens
who very often do not have the right to bear arms is indeed
a way of enforcing
your power over society, but it is not a guarantee. An
insurrection, a massive
taking to the streets, a general strike, can
overthrow any government, even
supported by the military, as history has
witnessed so many times. So the ruling
class always used another mean of
wielding its power, it is ideology, and
understanding how ideology works may
be Marx's greatest contribution to the
study of history. Ideologies are the
changing ideas, values, even feelings,
through which individuals experience
their society. Ideologies present the
dominant ideas, the beliefs and values
of the ruling class, as being the ideas
of society as a whole. Thus
individuals, because they are thinking by using the
concepts, the words and
the references of others, are prevented from grasping
how society actually
functions, and they cannot even suspect that they are
exploited. Marxists
thinkers, like Gramsci, Lukacs and Althusser, have expanded
greatly on Marx's
concept of ideology, and it goes further than Ayn Rand's
sanction of the
victim. For Marx, and especially for Gramsci, I would say
ideology achieves
the perfect crime. A perfect crime is not when the criminal
remains unknown,
it is one that nobody even suspects to be a crime, where death
is declared
purely accidental, and no one will look for a criminal. For Marx,
the victims
have nothing to consent to, they do not see themselves at all as
victims.
Quite the reverse. They say "the master is good, he feeds me every
day, he
does not beat me more often than I deserve to be." The production
of ideology
is the intellectuals’ job, and up until recently, intellectuals
were part of
a clergy. You know the famous definition given by Marx of religion
as being
the "opium of the people." Religion was perceived as a sort
of sedative of
the mind. So even when people might have become conscious of
their
oppression, there came the ruling class’ second line of defense :
"Yes, my
friend, you are right, God placed you at the bottom of society,
but it is for
your own good, you will be all the happier in a later life";
"it is God’s
plan for society that there exists lords and servants,
sorry, old chap, you
are one of the servants, but you wouldn’t want to rebel
against God’s will,
would you ?". Armed with such powerful tools as the
state police and
ideology, the dominant class never gives up its power
gracefully. Why would
it ? It seems it has the means to rule forever. Yet,
history shows us that
changes did take place. Marx identifies two such
transformations in human
history, from slavery to feudality, and from feudality
to
capitalism. Revolutions So what caused
these
momentous changes ? The answer is : technical innovations, which forced
changes
in the production process. Marx is often interpreted as a
technological
determinist on the basis of such isolated quotations as: "The
windmill
gives you society with the feudal lord; the steam-mill gives you
society with
the industrial capitalist." It is of course more complicated
than that. But
basically, what we can say is that the dominant class’ power
base is the
control over certain commodities, over certain sources of wealth.
But the
dominant class cannot predict, let alone control, the emergence of a
new
technology. When this technology emerges, it may be in the hands of a
group of
people who are not members of the dominant class. And suddenly these
pioneers
generate a transformation in the means of production, in the way
society is organized,
and therefore in the way society thinks, how it
apprehends itself, because, says
Marx, the way we work, the function of
production, what we do, influences who we
are. And the growing number of
people who are involved in the new technology see
society with new eyes, they
start questioning whether the power of the dominant
class is legitimate. This
is exactly what happened throughout history, of
course. For instance, new
inventions in the 18th century, including the steam
engine, were both a
consequence and a cause of the philosophy of Enlightenment,
which exposed the
arbitrary of the "divine right of Kings", and hence
of all aristocratic
privileges, and led to the American and French revolutions.
It is
difficult to dispute the relevance of Marx’s and Engels’ analysis of
history.
I concur with all they say about class struggles and the function of
ideology
- prior to the Enlightenment. Quite obviously, the slave is
dispossessed, he
may not own anything, he is clearly exploited. The feudal serf
is hardly in a
better condition. He is tied to the land, he cannot leave it and
is sold with
it. But when Marx goes on to say that workers under the capitalist
regime are
dispossessed as the serfs were, I have a problem following his
reasoning.
Marx believes that the new dominant class after the Industrial
Revolution
is the one made up by the owners of capital, it is the bourgeoisie.
But
this deduction is wrong, plain wrong. There is a logical fallacy here. Freedom
The logical fallacy is to posit that if two events occur simultaneously,
one
must be the consequence of the other. This logic reminds me of one
of
Husserl’s favorite anecdote : There is this guy who drinks whisky and
soda,
and he gets drunk, then he takes gin and soda, and he gets drunk, then
he takes
vodka and soda, and he gets drunk, and he concludes that he gets
drunk on soda.
I don’t want to denigrate Marx’s vast intelligence, but he
is telling us
that slave masters had political power, they exploited their
slaves and they got
rich. Feudal lords had political power, they exploited
their serfs and they got
rich. Capitalists are rich, therefore they must
exploit their workers, right?
Hang on. Capitalists have no political
power. This surely must make a
difference. Unlike feudal lords and slave
masters, capitalists cannot coerce
anybody to work for them, to consume their
products, nor to finance their endeavors.
Marx feigns to ignore that with
the emergence of the industrial revolution came
another revolution, which
redistributed power within society. It was the
classical liberal revolution
in the 18th century and it changed radically the
political and legal
environment. People were free to work where they wanted, for
whomever they
wanted. Marx pooh-poohs the achievement of that revolution and
what he refers
to as "formal freedom." You know the argument, that
Marx will belabor in
The Capital : We say the worker "agrees" to work
for the capitalist because
no policemen are dragging him from his home to the
factory, but this means
only that "he is compelled by social
conditions". In his treatise, 'The
Poverty of Philosophy', Marx writes
"Indeed the individual considers as his
own freedom the movement no longer
curbed or fettered by a common tie or by
man, the movement of his alienated life
elements, like property, industry,
religion..." And Marx adds : "In
reality, this is the perfection of his
slavery and his inhumanity." This is
rather poor philosophy on Marx’s part.
Freedom is "the movement no longer
curbed" by other men, freedom is freedom
of property, of industry, of
religion.. There is none other. Take it away and
you get Stalinism. The wealth
of kings, slave masters, feudal lords and all
their lackeys, was acquired
through the exertion of violence, by way of
military conquest, tax,
confiscation, enslavement.. But not necessarily the
capitalists’ wealth. The
capitalist makes money, indeed, and for a few of
them, that money may be
numbered in billions, but he is not an exploiter. The
ownership of the means of
production by itself does not make anyone an
exploiter. This is where Marx got
it wrong. Making money in a trade between
consenting parties is not exploiting
anyone, how could it be ?
Work Marx was a believer in property
rights. It is because his work is the
worker’s property that Marx may conclude
the worker is dispossessed of his
remuneration. But Marx’s crude materialism
blinds his vision and prevents him
from seeing that it is not work that is
remunerated, what is remunerated is
work that is of service to someone, and to
someone who values this work
enough to pay for it. Work by itself is
destructive. The Bible already taught
us that work is a malediction.
Paradoxically, the record of Marxist
states proves my point. Armies of workers
toiled literally like slaves during
dozens of years, not creating any wealth,
actually destroying it. They
extracted perfectly good copper mineral and crude
oil, and turned it into
unusable electric wires and plastics. Many economists
calculated that if all
the people in the Soviet Union had stopped working and
had been content to
sell their vast commodity resources without attempting to
transform them,
they would have been far better off. Work has no value by
itself. The value
is in the service you render to somebody. It so happens that
in most
instances you cannot be of service to somebody without performing a
certain
amount of work, but Marx confuses the end and the means. If someone
could
bring me clients whilst sleeping, I would pay that someone to sleep. So it
is
not work that the capitalist pays, it is the service the worker is
rendering.
There are people who for whatever reason are able to render a
great service to a
great number of buyers, and they make bundles of money,
and there are others who
have not found a way to prove their usefulness,
resulting in differences of
revenues, sometimes very substantial ones. But
the capitalist pays all services
exactly the fair price, or the worker, in a
politically free society, would
immediately check the classified ads to see
whether another employer offers a
higher price for the same service, and if
that other employer cannot be found,
then it is evidence that the salary paid
is exactly the fair and present value
of the service rendered. So if
capitalists pay fair wages, and if workers are
not exploited by their
employer, who are the exploiters ? Who makes up the
dominant class today ?
This question will become clear if we bear in mind there
are two ways to move
goods in society, by the use of violence, which is the
political way, by
trade and gifts, which is the economic way. Capitalism is the
use of trade
and gifts, not the use of politics, to distribute goods in society.
All
other regimes resort to violence. Marx and Engels emphasize the
point
themselves. Feudalism and slavery are based on state coactive powers.
The
results of their work are simply confiscated from the workers, and if
they do
not like it and try to escape, policemen and soldiers will drag them
back to
where they belong, so they may continue to be exploited. Now, is
there not a
class today, who uses the powers of police and the army to
confiscate the
results of our labor ? Is there not a class today, who resorts
to political
constraint to acquire its means of living ? Those who resort to
violence today
to get their revenues, as the feudal lords did three hundred
years ago, are, of
course, all state employees. They do not make money in
exchange for a service
people find useful enough to pay for. State employees
simply collect the means
they need through the use of violence, coercion,
racket, taxes (all these words
being synonymous here). They form the new
ruling class. We are the oppressed. So
it is obvious, my friends, that the
class struggle is not over. We are still
face to face with our exploiters,
class against class, The mystery is why this
exploitation by the ruling class
of state employees and their lackeys is not
obvious to everyone. How come
does it last, how come the vast majority of the
population does not become
conscious of the oppression it is subjected to?
For it is true that most
people in Europe do not perceive taxation as robbery
and government-imposed
regulations and controls as coercion. You meet people
nowadays who would take
out a gun and shoot a youth who is stealing a cassette
player from their car,
and these same people allow the taxman to walk away with
50% of what they
earn, every month, year after year, during their entire
lifetime.
Furthermore, when you assess how much you are robbed by the taxman, it
is not
just what you pay today that you should take into account, but the
compounded
value of all what you have paid since the VAT you incurred on your
first ever
purchase and the income tax on your first salary, plus the
opportunity cost
of all the projects and desires you could not fulfill with that
money because
it was taken away from you. Try to figure out what these numbers
add up to
for yourself, you’ll be staggered. The Ruling Class Now
the first
answer to the question of why we allow ourselves to be exploited seems
to be
that the dominant class does not appear to be the wealthiest in society,
and
the fact is it is not. So how come they exploit us, if they don’t make
more
money than the richest amongst us ? Some people in the new ruling
class may
not be rich, it is true, but neither were many slave owners or feudal
lords.
Many lived no better, even were much poorer, than commoners, who were
active
in trade and other businesses. It is not the amount of wealth that makes
you
a member of the ruling class, but the way this wealth, however modest,
is
acquired. It is not how much you earn, but how you earn it, that
qualifies
exploitation. Do you make your money by political means or
economical means?
Is it earned or is it extorted ? Madonna makes 1,000
times more money than
a secretary in the European Union Brussels bureaucracy,
but no one is forced to
buy Madonna records or attend her concerts. Every
single penny, therefore, that
Madonna gets is given to her, often
enthusiastically, by her fans. Every single
penny the EU secretary gets in
salary is extorted from taxpayers. I grant you
that some people who acquire
their revenues through coercion may still render a
useful service. I am sure
one finds learned professors in state universities and
dedicated
practitioners in state hospitals. The feudal lord too offered the
services of
justice, police and defense to his serfs, the official church
provided
education and social services.. The question is : there is no way to
know how
much these services offered by state employees are really worth : are
they
rendered in an optimal fashion ? Do they correspond to the true needs
of the
people ? Because you are not free to pay for them (and often the
provision of
these services is a monopoly protected by law), no one can tell how
useful
the service really is, how much of this service would be needed and at
what
price. More importantly, the end never justifies the means. As Albert
Camus
used to say : "A political assassination is not a political act, it is
an
assassination"; likewise we may say : "Robbing the rich to assist
the
poor is not assistance, it is robbery". You can test by yourself how
useful
a profession is by the way you would like those engaged in it to
practice it.
You want an airline pilot, a hairdresser, a lawyer, a cook,
a prostitute..., to
be hard working, dedicated, and creative in their job,
but now think of customs
officials. If you have to pay them at all, pay them
for doing nothing, you would
get better value than paying them for
interfering with your affairs. This is how
useful these exploiters are to
society. I must confess that, among exploiters, I
nourish a special aversion
for customs officials, and if I may make a pause
here, I would like to tell
you a story. It is about this tourist who is visiting
a foreign city. He
notices a shop, like that of an antique dealer, and a very
odd small statue
of a cat in the window. The tourist walks in and asks for a
price. "The
statue is only $100, says the antique dealer, but the story
that goes with
the statue is $1,000". "I don’t need the story, the
tourist shrugs, I want to
bring a souvenir home, and this statue will do just
fine." "I’ll sell it to
you, but believe me, warns the antique
dealer, you’ll soon come back for the
story". The tourist leaves the
shop, with the statue in his pocket. As he is
returning to his hotel, he notices
a cat is following him. This is unusual.
He looks back again, and now four cats
are on his tails, and soon twenty
cats. The tourist realizes he cannot walk into
the hotel with a herd of cats
behind him, so, as he was crossing a bridge, he
throws the statue into the
river. Immediately, the whole army of cats jump from
the bridge into the
water and drown. Flabbergasted by what happened, the tourist
pauses for a
long moment ; then he takes a sudden decision and traces his steps
back to
the shop. The antique dealer wears an indulgent smile : "I see you
are
already coming back for the story." "No, replies the tourist, I
would like to
buy a statue of a customs official." With the transformation
of society, the
face of oppression changes to reflect different circumstances.
This is
why we don’t readily recognize exploitation for what it is. For
instance, in
most European countries, government bureaucrats are employed for
life. It is
the rule in France. When a talented young Frenchman is recruited by
a state
agency, the whole French society finds itself saddled with a legal
obligation
of 7 to 10 million dollars towards this new employee. This is how
much it
will cost society on average to fund this person’s useless activity
from the
first pay-check through retirement and until she dies. This 7 to 10
million
dollars is the capital the exploited class is forced to guarantee by law
each
member of the state exploiters’ class. And in France, there are more
than
5 millions of them, some 20% of the active population.
"Drowning By
Numbers..." This figure of about 20% of the active
population, by the way,
is at the high end of the proportion of feudal lords
and the official clergy to
the total population during medieval times. There
seems to be a natural law that
prevents the ruling class from growing above
that number of 20%. Ecology offers
us many examples of such a fixed ratio
between exploiters and exploited, between
the number of predators and their
preys. Wolves, for instance, feed on caribous.
When the wolves population
increases, they kill off too many caribous ; they
start to go hungry, the
weakest starve to death, and their total population
settles back to where it
was. This analogy tells us there is no difference in
nature between socialism
and social-democracy. The difference is only in degree.
In the USSR, in
Cuba and elsewhere, the predators exterminated their preys, at
least those
who did not manage to flee the country, so the predators ended up
starving.
Social-democratic states were clever enough not to scare off all
the
"caribous" and keep enough of them alive, so that the ruling
class
could prosper. The environment however is changing before our
eyes.
Social-democratic economies are not growing as steadily as they
did, and joining
the predators’ class is seen as the short and safe way to
make a living.
Families want their daughters to land a job at a Ministry,
farmers demand
subsidies, industrialists beg for tariff protections, the
elderly want higher
pensions... Every dominant class throughout history faced
this demand from
outsiders to participate in the loot. At first, the
exploiters found ways to
restrict entry. For instance, participation in the
class of feudal lords came by
birth only. But sooner or later, the dominant
class had to give in to allies’
and dependants’ pressure. Athens had to
integrate its meteques, its resident
aliens ; too many colonials became Roman
citizens (think of the Apostle Paul) ;
in France, under Louis XV, as state
coffers were emptying, the King was simply
auctioning off access to the noble
ranks... The present ruling class is even
more vulnerable. It finds it
impossible to restrain the number of predators, as
new entries are conferred
not by birth, but by an exam. This method of selecting
predators on the basis
of expertise was what the Enlightenment considered its
highest achievement :
"La carrière ouverte aux talents.." Not the
scions of ancient families, but
the ablest citizens, whatever their social
origin, would rule the country. Of
course, these new rulers, as they became in
charge of public education, would
make sure the curriculum would favour their
own kin. You seldom see an
ambassador’s son working on a factory line, and
they are not many factory
worker’s sons who make it to an ambassadorship. It
is a defining
characteristic of a ruling class that it perpetuates itself
through
generations. The problem for the present ruling class, however, as
Marx
anticipated, is again technological innovation. As the economy evolves
from the
Machine Age to the Information Age, it requires better qualified
people, not
illiterate factory line workers. Information Age workers are
people who have the
capacity to pass all the barriers for admission into the
ruling class. So the
number of predators is swelling. It is the ruling class’
"internal
contradiction." Democracy Of course, this is not the
only problem
the exploiting class is facing. Its other worry is that the
ideology which
comforts its legitimacy, the Enlightenment philosophy, also
supports the
political regime known as democracy. Democracy’s perversity is
that it turns
all of us into accomplices of the violence exerted against
society. We accept
this violence inasmuch as we hope to become the oppressors
ourselves. In a
feudal society, it is clear who the oppressors are, and who
are the victims,
because you are born into one camp or into the other, as I
was mentioning
earlier. You are born a slave or a serf, and all your life,
you remain an
innocent victim of your oppressors. Democratic society blurs
this line between
villains and victims. It gives everyone an easy chance to
take part in
oppression. Every time we cast our vote, we are signifying that
we wish to take
control over part of the population, that we want to impose
upon these men and
women our ideas and values and we want to extort from them
the financial means
to achieve our own goals. Democracy is the system that
perverts every
individual’s soul and turns every man and woman into a
racketeer. With the
conjunction of democratic racketeering and an inflating
ruling class, the burden
on the exploited masses is getting unbearable.
Exploitation is naked and
brutish. Even ideology soon will not be able to
explain away why we are
ransomed. The Big Lie Yet the ruling
class’ ideology has done a good
job so far, when you think of it. It made us
believe that without the state,
roads would not be built, the poor would
agonise in the streets, hospitals would
not be funded, and no one would write
theatre plays any more... On radio and
television channels, in the
newspapers, at schools and in universities, at
churches, everywhere, we are
told that democracy is the only viable regime ;
that "social justice" is the
common good ; that it is morally
acceptable to coerce any individual if it is
for the good of the collective ;
that the end justifies the means ; that
there are experts up there in
government, who are taking care of our
well-being, who know better than we do
what is good for us, if only we would
let them... Conservative ideologues
maintain that class struggle does not
exist any longer, we are all middle-class
now... Leftist ideologues still
believe in this idea that we are exploited, but
exploitation, they say, comes
from the rich, from multinationals, from Wall
Street financiers and Swiss
bankers... No one ever mentions that the exploiters
are the state bureaucracy
and its lackeys, the military-industrial complex,
subsidised farmers and
industrialists..., living off funds extorted from the
productive masses. Such
blindness is amazing. On my left, you have a class of
people with guns. They
run the army, the police, justice, they control the media
through
broadcasting licenses, they exert censorship. All the means at their
disposal
come from taxation, your revenues and savings extorted literally at
gun
point. On my right, you have multinationals and small entrepreneurs,
productive
workers and creators... They bring you the food you consume, they
build your
houses, they connect you to telephone networks and television
channels, they
supply you with clothes, they manufacture your automobiles and
your computers ;
they are so afraid that you would stop buying their goods,
which you can do at
any time, that they spend zillions advertising them on
glossy paper and video
clips. Now, who are the exploiters ? The people with
guns, right, the people who
don’t offer you anything you wish to have, or
they would have no need to
confiscate your money in order to produce it, the
extortionists ? Wrong.
The exploiters are the capitalists. Isn’t a feat
of genius on the
ideologues’ part that they have us believe the exploiters
are the producers,
the creators, the providers, of the goods you enjoy to buy
? The bigger a lie,
the more faithfully it is believed. In a François
Truffaut film, there is this
schoolboy who arrives late in class. He knows
the teacher won’t believe any
story about trains running late, bus accidents,
and the usual excuses. So he
makes a sad face and declares : "My mother just
died". The whole
school assembles immediately and offers sympathy ; no one
suspects this tragic
death could be a lie. Political lies have to be so gross
as to be believed.