ON THE APORIAS OF MARXIAN POLITICS

TIENNE BALIBAR

FROM CIVIL WAR TO CLASS STRUGGLE

Before posing the problems of the reconstruction of the concept of politics in Marx, problems that are for the most part without univocal solution, I would like to indicate briefly what brought me to modify the title that I initially proposedwithout radically altering the orientation and contents. The original title was Marx and the Conquest of Democracy. It alluded to a famous passage in the Manifesto, found at the end of chapter II, more precisely at the moment where Marx, after having presented and refuted a certain number of objections against communism raised by the bourgeoisie, starts to lay out the program of revolutionary measures leading from capitalism to a classless society. Parenthetically, we can take this classless society as an implicit definition of communism, in which, as the last sentence of the chapter states, we shall have an association, in which the free development of each is the condition for the free development of all [Manifesto 491]. Marx thus writes: the first step in the revolution by the working class is the constitution of the proletariat into a ruling class, the conquest of democracy [Manifesto 490; trans. modified]. The corresponding German expression, die Erkmpfung der Demokratie, could be glossed by saying that the first step is to come to democracy through combat or struggle; consequently, this means that the measures laid out in what follows have themselves a radically democratic character or that they are meant to give rise for the first time in history to a democracy in the absolute sense of the term. This expression, the conquest of democracy, belongs then among the formulations, less rare in Marx than one might think, that identify the revolutionary anticapitalist process with both a democratization (if need be, with a democratization of democracy itself, under the limited forms it has taken on until now) and with a destruction of the class structure and its juridical, political, and economic conditions. 1 The interpretation of this formula naturally requires that we examine its context, and it is here that the difficult problems arise, problems that are first and foremost semantic (or whose semantic dimension we can no longer neglect). This is certainly the case in the close association, underscored by the text, between the process of the conquest of democracy and the necessary use of revolutionary violence to transform that generator of class antagonism, the regime of property and production:

Originally presented at the international colloquium A 160 aos del Manifiesto Comunista. Relecturas del pensamiento de Marx. Universidad Diego Portales and Universidad ARCIs, santiago, Chile, November 2628, 2008.

diacritics Volume 39.2 (2009) 5973 2012 by the Johns Hopkins University Press

The proletariat will use its political supremacy [politische Herrschaft] to wrest, by degrees, all capital from the bourgeoisie. . . . Of course, in the beginning, this cannot be effected except by means of despotic inroads on the rights of property, and on the conditions of bourgeois production [vermittelst despotischer Eingriffe in das Eigentumsrecht und in die brgerlichen Produktionsverhltnisse]. . . . Political power, properly so called, is merely the organized power of one class for oppressing another [die organisierte Gewalt einer Klasse zur Unterdrckung einer andern]. If the proletariat during its contest with the bourgeoisie is compelled, by the force of circumstances, to organize itself as a class, if, by means of a revolution, it makes itself the ruling class, and, as such, sweeps away by violence the old conditions of production [gewaltsam die alten Produktionsverhltnisse aufhebt] . . . it will destroy classes generally, and will thereby have abolished its own supremacy as a class. [Manifesto 49091; trans. modified] Even if the word has not yet been uttered, we seem to be dealing here with at least a part of what Marx himself and at least some Marxists will call the dictatorship of the proletariat. We should also note here a textual problem that we will return to later: in order to found its conception of a dialectical sublation [Aufhebung] of antagonism that is triggered by the intensification of that very antagonism, a conception that follows the schema of the negation of the negation, the text in the original German depends on the double meaning, philosophical and political, of the word Gewalt (and of the derivative gewaltsam). It is a question simultaneously and successively of public power, in this case that of the state, and of anti-institutional or at least extra-judicial violence that subverts that very power in its instituted form; so that the democracy to be conquered through struggle appears both on the side of the institution and its contrary. But this leads directly to what may form the principal difficulty (or enigma) of the text, which Marxism in its different forms and trends, as we know, never truly managed to solve satisfactorily: the reference in the text to the end of the political state that would culminate the revolutionary process and its social objectives. The typical formulas frame the reference to the negation of the negation that we have emphasized: When, in the course of development, class distinctions have disappeared, and all production has been concentrated in the hands of associated individuals [in den Hnden der assoziierten Individuen], the public power will lose its political character [so verliert die ffentliche Gewalt den politischen Charakter]. In place of the old bourgeois society, with its classes and class antagonisms [Klassengegenstzen], we shall have an association, in which [tritt eine Assoziation, worin] the free development of each is the condition for the free development of all. [Manifesto 49091] This passage intertwines quite paradoxically a reference to a public power [ffentliche Gewalt]thus to an institution if not an authority, that as such is not or is no longer politicalwith a reference to an egalitarian association that holds democracy in some way beyond itself, toward communism, an association that is thus no longer the product of any Gewalt, neither as power nor as violence. Underlying this paradoxical condensation, the text takes up almost literally the opposition between antagonism and association that forms the theoretical core of the 1829 text, Exposition de la doctrine de saint-simon (in parts Marx simply repeats the very words of the original French). This doctrine is one of the principal sources for Marxs text and the question of the end of exploitation. But the Saint-Simonians argumentation, far

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from being founded in a logic of the negation of the negation, in which the conditions of antagonism are abolished by the intensification of antagonism, on the contrary relies on the idea that the two principles (those of antagonism and association) are throughout history permanently incompatible. For the Saint-Simonians, the two principles evolve in inverse proportion; thus a decrease in antagonism leads to an increase in association (antagonism for them is linked particularly to the interpenetration of civil and military power or domination and brute force, whereas association is linked to peaceable operations of industry and commerce and more generally to the economy). The Manifesto (along with the 1846 Poverty of Philosophy, which immediately preceded and paved the way for the Manifesto) is one of the texts where Marx insists most strongly on the political character of historical evolution or the collective actions that compose it, actions assembled together in the idea of class struggle (of which the Manifesto says, in a central passage in the first chapter, that every class struggle is a political struggle [481]). It is also one of the texts that most strongly affirm the eschatological postulate of an end of politics, but at the expense of profoundly obscuring the notion of power (and consequently, the state). This aporia cannot be resolved by invoking either an ambiguity in the category of politics (which we could establish, following Aristotle, by affirming that politics has various meanings), or a dialectical progression that inverts the meaning and function of the initial category at the culmination of its development. This is because the aporia resides at the heart of each and every notion that describes the nature of the phenomenon of history as Marx envisioned it, a phenomenon characteristically described by him in the present (the eschatological present of the intelligibility of history in light of an end already obliquely given): whether it be communism, democracy, or above all class struggle itself. The animating and directing function of class struggle in history is inseparable from the fact that it cannot be reduced to any of the definitions or institutional forms of politics [la politique] as it has been defined throughout history; and, for the first time, class struggle endows politics with the ability to act on its own conditions and transform them. Class struggle is thus both apolitical or antipolitical and archepolitical or hyperpolitical. Its relation to politics is constitutive but nonetheless incomprehensible. It constitutes both an end and a beginning or a new beginning. The difficulty of this situation imparts both interest and indetermination to what one could call the concept of the political in Marx [der Begriff des Politischen bei Marx], a concept comparable and opposable to others, but this difficulty is made much greater by the following double circumstance: First, clearly this is not only an academic problem of interpretation or philosophical categorization. It is a difficulty that profoundly affects Marxism itself from within, including its ability to act and to organize action on a particular situation. Or more accurately, it did affect Marxism, since Marxism essentially belongs to the pastbut that is not to say that its history and its discursive constitution have nothing to teach us or have no critical utility for us. As I and many others have tried to demonstrate elsewhere, the fact is that Marxism, and already the Marxism of Marxfrom which, as we know, he tried to extricate himself with the witticism: what is certain is that I am not a Marxisthas never managed to find a language that would bring together theory and practice. The absence of this language has prevented Marxism from finding its own place among the antithetical discourses on the relationship between the workers struggles and politics, and thus the state: whether it be the discourse of anarchism or antipolitical confidence in spontaneous revolutionary action [spontanisme anti-politique], as for Bakunin, or institutional politics organized into parties, as for Lasalle. At the cost of increasingly strident internal conflict, this contradiction or tearing asunder has reproduced itself throughout the historical trajectory of Marxism, so much so that the Marxist concept of politics is reduced to the initial idea that it is class struggle that makes history. This concept of

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politics is thus unable to say anything about the characteristics of this struggle without immediately entering into conflict with itself. But this aporia that in many ways weakens Marxism is also in many respects its strength or at least what prevents us from casting it off as a superficial and uselessly paradoxical construction. If the idea of class struggle once again calls for attention or if it refuses to be ignored, either for reasons of ideological conjuncture or social history, or both at the same time as may currently be the case, these conditions are sufficient to raise the naggingly persistent question of what problem, constitutive of politics itself, is hiding in the folds of a discourse that purports to build politics on radically new foundations all the while anticipating the end of politics, and thus in some sense practicing by anticipation that very end. But I believe there is a second pressing reason to return to these formulations or to revive the interminable settling of scores and their attendant meanings and consequences. It is the fact that, in a crucial passage of the Manifesto, to which I will return, Marx establishes a parallel, and even an equation of definitions, between the notion of class struggle and that of civil war. Consequently, the idea of civil war seems to control both the meaning of antagonism in those passages and, through a sort of boomerang effect, the articulation between power and violence, a violence that is conceived as anti-power or power against the power [pouvoir contre le pouvoir]. Even if this is a metaphor (and in that case the very meaning of metaphor would be called into question), the result of the equation is both to displace the paradoxes of the end of politics and to intensify them: this is because civil warin its antique and modern conceptionsis, more than class struggle itself, an impolitical notion par excellence, a notion that brings up the limits of politics or the conditions of impossibility at the heart of the political. Class struggle as a form of civil war, or even civil war in its perfect formthat is, war that not only divides this city or that community against itself in a transitory manner but also divides irreconcilably the state or society as suchthis idea thus takes the form of a double bind. It is at once a condition of possibility and a condition of impossibility. It is a condition of possibility in that without civil war, which is to say without class struggle, there would be no politics in the strong sense of the word, but only the appearance of a political game [jeu] whose only stake [enjeu] would be the substitution of some representatives of the dominant classes for others. And it is a condition of impossibility since the figure of civil war is that of a scission or radical spaltung in which political space, whether forged in communication or conflict, dissolves as such leaving only space for completely exterior terms that are incompatible with each other. Given these conditions, we should not be surprised that the equation of class struggle and civil warthe interpretation of class struggle as a prolonged civil war that is constantly metamorphosing, in its protagonists and its form, beyond its origins and its immediate rootshas developed throughout the long history of Marxism as an entrenched point of heresy, one that constantly forces Marxism to divide itself and subjugates it to the alternatives of renunciation and restoration. That is why in what follows I want to analyze the aporias of the Marxian concept of politics as an end of politics inscribed in its very practice while focusing on the equation of class struggle and civil war. 2 We can begin by outlining a periodization of theoretical moments, which correspond to political moments. The most recent of these do not cancel the most distant, but they obviously impose what I will call successive recurrences that cannot be disregarded. These recurrences affect the very meaning of the words we use and read in Marx. Although the meaning of these words has irreparably drifted, we can still dissociate them analyti-

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cally and thus, from our present moment, establish an order and a perspective. From this point of view, I think there are three remarkable facts, which come within both the history of discourse formations and the history of the political and social world, passing progressively from modernity to post-modernity. The first of these facts is that Marx could not maintain the formulation of the Manifesto, in its provocative radicality, even though he never ceased using its revolutionary perspective as his point of reference or coming back to the very words he used there to establish a communist perspective that joined class struggle and proletariat revolution. However, Marx never purely and simply abandoned this equation of class struggle and proletariat revolution. On the contrary, it wasat least at firstreformulated in radically different terms and with a radically different historical referent, and, as a result, its meaning was practically inverted from the point of view of the identification of politics and its concept. It must be noted then that not only did Marx not develop one concept of the political, just as he did not develop one critique of political economy or one philosophical problem of ideology or praxis, but also that he did not develop one single concept of class struggle. Rather he opened a polyvalent and polymorphous set of problems, whose foundation was to question the permanent substitution of its own forms and the uncertainty of its historical effects. I am here referring to a central development in Book I of Capital (on the workers struggles for a normal workday, and thus for social legislation) in which the very words of the Manifesto are turned against their initial use. We should first ask ourselves if Marx himself tried to overcome the internal discrepancy of his own thought. We will see that the responseladen with consequencesis negative and for a factual reason: the historical events led him, in dramatic circumstances, to invalidate each of the two schemas of class struggle put forth in the Manifesto and in Capital. This of course did not stop the Marxists from continuing to draw from one or the other of the two schemas depending on orientation and circumstances. The problem that then presented itself to Marx and that initially received only a rather incomplete response was rather to know how to introduce class struggle into situations of civil war (here civil war is understood as confrontations within the same country, the typical example being the Paris Commune). The second remarkable moment involves the instances in which the political is elaborated in terms of war or the continuation of war. We can generally call these instances post-Leninist because their presupposition is to be found in the way Lenin came to define the moments and alternatives of the revolutionary period in terms of strategy. I am thinking here not only of the moment power is seized, but also and above all of the following: the moments of revolutionary civil war and the new political economy where the fronts in the class struggle are in a sense overturned since it is a question of recreating a certain form of capitalism within socialism in order to arrive at communism. Of course these instances are not only found in Marxism (however we understand its scope). It is even more interesting to explore the effects of the reversibility of politics and war independently of the position philosophers take in relation to Marxism, at the very moment that they inherit its fundamental questions. I think that this moment extends to Foucault, whose famous statements on the necessity of inverting Clausewitzs formula and of making politics a continuation of war by other means [15] have in turn completely redefined the intellectual frames we use to investigate the concept of class struggle. But this moment that I am calling on the whole post-Leninist also includes earlier authors, in particular Antonio Gramsci and Carl Schmitt, who I believe form a symmetrical pair in their reception and in their transformation of Leninism. What is at stake in the confrontation of these diverse recurrences is the very meaning, in the field of politics, of the category of antagonism and of the thesis that holds that there is no politics without antagonism, indeed no politics but as development of antagonism, conflict,

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or power struggle. It is highly interesting, for us at least, that this thesis could only be formulated differently by a reference to Marxism, that is, by reviving the implications of the idea of the civil war of classes (and if needed, a critique and an internal limitation). Finally, there is a third moment, that of our present condition, in which the Marxist equation is subjected to another type of recurrence. Here I am thinking of contemporary discourses that try to think through the modalities and stakes of politics by analyzing our present situation as a global civil war (of which we can say, like Marx, that it is now hidden, now open [Manifesto 474], except that it is more of a juxtaposition of different configurations in geographical or social space than a temporal succession as it was in the Manifesto). This theme is notoriously central to an elaboration such as that of Hardt and Negri, who make the antithesis between global civil war (itself made up of multiple wars, visible or invisible) and the multitude (with its resistances and its modes of communication) the defining character of the new revolutionary politics that they are offering under the name of biopolitics. But the theme is also present in other authors, before and after the developments of terrorism and counterterrorism that are more or less coextensive with the questioning of Occidental (and, in particular, American) hegemony in the world. But to describe the distribution of violence and its relation to borders, states, and ideologies would require many different schemas. What they all have in common, however, is precisely that they all revive, broaden, and reformulate the question that Marx posed after the Commune: to know how to bring back class struggle (and thereby politics) into civil war, which does not constitute it, but, quite to the contrary, destroys, diverts, or leads it astray. This question is without a doubt very closely linked to that of knowing in what way capitalism is not only a system or a productive order but a destructive and auto-destructive system (of men, nature, culture, and communities of citizens). This then comes back to the apocalyptic questions raised by Marx in the Manifesto about the dissolution of the proletariats conditions of existence and, more generally, of society: a dissolution which would culminate in the reign of that agent of unlimited accumulation, the bourgeoisie. We thus return to the question of what the trace of Marxism allows us to conceptualize about the impolitical face of the political, or what I have called elsewhere Marxs other scene.1 3 In what follows, I will concentrate on the first of these three moments, that is on the way that Marx in the Manifesto expresses the thesis of equivalency between class struggle and civil war, and which he later rectified, particularly in Capital. This topic seems to me particularly appropriate in the context of a colloquium for the 160th anniversary of the 1847 pamphlet that permanently brought together the notions of communism and proletariat revolution.2 We must begin by citing in their entirety two decisive statements that appear in Chapter I of the Communist Manifesto. First, the famous opening sentences: The history of all hitherto existing society is the history of class struggles. Freeman and slave, patrician and plebeian, lord and serf, guild-master and journeyman, in a word, oppressor and oppressed, stood in constant opposition to one
see Politics and the Other Scene. Written in 1847, the Communist Manifesto was published more or less clandestinely in February 1848 before being reprinted and translated into various languages after 1870, the date which marks its dissemination in and influence on the socialist movement as part of the making of Marxism.
1 2

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another, carried on an uninterrupted, now hidden, how open fight [Kampf], a fight that each time ended, either in a revolutionary re-constitution of society at large, or in the common ruin of the contending classes [den gemeinsamen Untergang der kmpfenden Klassen]. . . . The modern bourgeois society that has sprouted from the ruins of feudal society has not done away with class antagonisms. It has but established new classes, new conditions of oppression, new forms of struggle in place of the old ones. [47374] The same theme is further developed at the end of the chapter, just before the statements on the conquest of democracy and the end of politics that I quoted earlier: In depicting the most general phases of the development of the proletariat, we traced the more or less veiled civil war [Brgerkrieg], raging within existing society, up to the point where that war breaks out into open revolution, and where the violent overthrow of the bourgeoisie lays the foundation for the sway of the proletariat. [48283] In order to firmly grasp these passages, we must first contextualize them by inscribing them at the cross-section of several semantic series, each with its own genealogy, that run throughout the Manifesto.3 In The Poverty of Philosophy, which predates the Manifesto by a few months, Marx also writes (in French) about civil war while discussing class struggle. He cites an eloquent turn of phrase by George Sand who is herself echoing the patriotic slogans of the French Revolution: Combat or death, bloody struggle or nothingness. It is thus that the question is inexorably put [211]. Such would be the law of political revolutions that serve as the means to social evolution until the last class-based society is abolished. The terminology of civil war was a paradigm at the time. We find it particularly in Balzacs novel, Les paysans, written in 1844 and published posthumously in 1852, as well as in Blanqui and his followers who associated it with the notion of revolutionary dictatorship. It gave rise to the famous lines in Disraelis novel, sybil or the Two Nations, which describes the England of the Industrial Revolution as a nation cut into two hostile nations separated by the conditions of life and feelings. This novel is still quoted today in the context of race relations or the separations created by the color line in former slave-holding societies. It is perhaps from Disraeli, as well as from Carlyle and Chartism, that Engels inherited this terminology used in The Condition of the Working Class in England in 1844. All of these formulations are strongly infused with Greek and Roman notions of stasis, tumultum or bellum civile, which in the case of Rome develop in conjunction with the theme of the state of exception or temporary dictatorship, and in the case of Greece with the theme of the ruin of cities. From Foucaults genealogical work in his 197677 course Society Must be Defended, we have also learned to situate them as descendants of a thematic war of races, which French and English writers of the Classical age used to explain the origin of the monarchical institutions that were founded after an initial conquest. The Manifesto both displaces and generalizes this theme turning it into a schema to explain the totality of history. With the statement more or less veiled civil war, it takes into account the alternating phases of apparent institutional stability and revolution or critique. Eventually, the theme is radicalized into terms of struggle to the death, or struggle for survival, by invoking recollections of the French Revolution (fraternity or death) and by transposing the Hegelian model of the clash of master and slave.
3

The two terms set in opposition for the saint-simonians, antagonism and opposition, refer to Kant and Rousseau respectively.

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I think that the meaning of Marxs formula, which he inherited from these different lines of signification but whose reconstruction is entirely his own, may be explained first by the progressive construction, throughout the Manifesto, of a great equivalency that makes of class struggle the point where the concepts of history and politics intersect. History as change crystallizes into political action, and politics is essentially an action whose collective subjects are classes. We must then assume that the course of history strives toward a simplification of antagonisms, a simplification that tends to separate society into opposing camps and that will culminate in capitalism. But we also have to take into account a complex strategic game in which the two camps come together and dissolve as they make and break alliances. It is precisely this game that is in question in the remarkable matter of the proletariat being enlisted into a reserve or rescue army in the bourgeoisies battle against feudalism. This recruitment brings about the political education of the proletariats while the Industrial Revolution radicalizes their exploited conditions and leads them to turn their training (or their consciousness) against their new masters. Politics is thus thought of as a game between contraries: advance and retreat of antagonism, fusion and separation of adversaries. Its vicissitudes are explained by the evolution of social conditions, and its general tendency is prescribed by the development of productive forces. But politics is also inscribed in another paradigm that marks the opposition between Marxs discourse and that of the liberal tradition or utopian socialism. Commenting on the generalization of competition between capitalists, between capitalists and their workers, and between workers themselves as vendors of their own labor, the Manifesto states that the bourgeoisie finds itself in a state of perpetual war [481; trans. modified]. Here it is an analogy between competition and a war of all against all, a state of nature as Hobbes defines it, but whose result has nothing to do with the establishment of sovereignty. Competition perpetually runs counter to the possibility of thinking industrialization as a process of pacification and of organization of a society whose contradictions are doomed to resurface in the long term and threaten its existence. But, having served to atomize the class of salaried workers, competition also pushes them to unite and to organize against the bourgeoisie in anticipation of a continuous struggle for existence. This struggle, Marx informs us (like so many historical battles), knows both successes and setbacks in terms of defending workers standards of living, but for the workers it becomes an end in itself, that is, a means to prepare another battle, the decisive battle for the transformation of the very social relations of exploitation. This is already a central theme in The Poverty of Philosophy, which advances the idea that the proletariats invent a politics against politics, a politics that is neither the apoliticism of the social movement advocated by anarchist traditions and syndicalists following Proudhon or Bakunin, nor bourgeois politics, inscribed in the representative institutions of government that came out of the bourgeois revolution. There are thus really two heterogeneous politics, one of which is the reverse side of the other or is defined by negating the characteristics of the other in such a way that each appears as a non-politics or an anti-politics in relation to the other.4 But all of that is possible only on the condition that we inscribe the vicissitudes of class struggle into a grand narrative that comprises an eschatological and even messianic perspective. Here we must rigorously work the text and not simply read a secularization of a religious narrative because Marx reformulates the idea of the becoming-subject of the class (what The Poverty of Philosophy calls, following a Hegelian terminology, the passage from the class in itself to the class for itself) according to a precise phenomenology of
4

Let us recall the theme that makes of modern state power a committee for managing the common affairs of the whole bourgeoisie [Manifesto 475].

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the conditions of communication between individual workers. This phenomenology will be advanced further in the last chapter by a historical depiction of ideological conflicts through which class conflict becomes conscious of antagonism, as put in the Preface to A Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy, and gives way to the formation of a party, in the sense developed in the Manifesto.5 But, for that to happen, the very evolution of historical conditions must lead to a situation of all or nothing, of life or death for society, in which the proletariat has only the choice between extinction or total revolution. Consequently, the moment when class members coalesce into the same subjective unity, a collective me [moi collectif] as Rousseau says of the people, is also the moment when the disappearance of classes and the end of history as we know it become imminent. I think it essential to introduce this eschatological perspective in relation to the quotation given earlier: the mutual destruction of combatant classes [474; trans. modified] which in many respects is the forgotten line of the Manifesto. It is here we find the thesis of The Poverty of Philosophy: history advances by its bad side.6 If we compare this enigmatic thesis with the way that, at the end of the chapter, Marx describes the threat of death that, through pauperization and economic crises, weighs on the proletariats physical existence (thus reinforcing the idea that the bourgeoisie is the first dominant class of history that at a certain point in its development proves incapable of feeding those who feed it), we understand that Marxs schema in the end is the following: the fact that the course of class struggle is comparable to civil war, in which no reconciliation is possible, immediately puts history on the edge of an abyss where society could annihilate itself. This perspective materializes with capitalism, which for that very reason represents in every sense of the word the last form of exploitation. But this is also the moment when, for the first time, there exists a collective subject whose political action, radically incongruous with the notion of private property, prepares, in forms necessarily antinomic to a democratic despotism, the abolition of domination in the form of an economic system of exploitation, a political system, or a system of power separate from society. Having reached an extreme, where the very survival of the social being is at stake, violence turns against its own conditions of possibility. At least we can imagine it doing so. And it is in order to give form [donner corps] to this salutary imagination that Marx and Engels write at this moment in the text in the present tensethe timeless present of an interruption of time, which has a performative value as much as a descriptive or predictive oneinscribing the solution in the very formulation of the problem. 4 In opposition to this conception of the politicization of class struggle through the schema of civil war, not only agonistic or antagonistic, but properly apocalyptic, I would like immediately to propose another, strangely formulated in almost identical terms, but tending to a completely different representation of this process. We find this schema in Book I of Capital, particularly in the developments in Chapter Ten, on the struggle for a normal workday.7 It is here that we find the following two remarkable formulas:
That is, in the sense of a conscious party as opposed to an organization party or apparatus, as I have argued elsewhere. 6 It is the bad side that produces the movement which makes history, by providing a struggle [Poverty 174]. 7 Given more time, we would have to consider these developments along with the often equivalent struggle against womens labor and child labor, against the intensification of work due to mechanization, and the struggle for general and technical education (all of which are addressed later in the section on large-scale industry).
5

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However, the principle [of a workday limited by law to ten hours a day] had triumphed with its victory in those great branches of industry which form the most characteristic creation of the modern mode of production. . . . The masters from whom the legal limitation and regulation had been wrung step by step after a civil war of half a century, themselves referred ostentatiously to the contrast with the branches of exploitation still free.. . . It will be easily understood that after the factory magnates had resigned themselves and become reconciled to the inevitable, the power of resistance of capital gradually weakened, whilst at the same time the power of attack of the working class grew with the number of its allies in the classes of society not immediately interested in the question. [300] And then further on: The history of the regulation of the working day in certain branches of production, and the struggle still going on in others in regard to this regulation, prove conclusively that the isolated labourer, the labourer as free vendor of his labour-power, when capitalist production has once attained a certain stage, succumbs without any power of resistance. The creation of a normal working day is, therefore, the product of a protracted civil war, more or less dissembled, between the capitalist class and the working class. As the contest takes place in the arena of modern industry, it first breaks out in the home of that industry England. [303] We suspect that the author of Capital did not choose these formulations by chance. In order to understand precisely their import, we must, as before, place them within a precise descriptive and analytic context. In the end, the context concerns the axiomatic system of the extraction of surplus value (or survaleur) in its different forms, and consequently of (individual or social) capitals perpetual conversion of surplus labor into an exchange value that can be accumulated. But more immediately, and this also corresponds to the moment when the analysis becomes concrete, shifting from historical structure to political circumstances, the discourse consists of an arrangement of factors of class struggle: an evaluation of the degree of antagonism and extreme violence involved in the struggle as well as a diagnostic of the signs indicating the ongoing reversal of power relations and consequently of the present state of affairs. Finally, it contains a characterization of the result obtained by the class struggle as prolonged civil war, where Marx insists on the notions of social control and relative autonomization of political power. Concerning the factors of class struggle, we see that Marx has moved on to a much more complex configuration, one that formally inverts the notion of simplification of antagonisms, or more precisely reinscribes a social, even political, complexity into the binary structure of confrontation between the fundamental classes. Reading the complete description of which I have given only the concluding lines allows us to characterize the complexity as an addition, or an overdetermination, of several processes taking place simultaneously. One of these is the tendency in the capitalist mode of production not only toward exploitation of the work force but toward an over-exploitation, in the form of a seemingly limitless extension and intensification of work, a trend that the capitalist class fanatically supports in the name of the principles of liberalism. From this structural tendency comes antagonism, which Marx immediately establishes as conditioned by an extremely violent power struggle that is found both in the pressure exerted on the workers, thus calling into question the integrity of their corporal and intellectual faculties (as well as the continuity of generations), and on the side of property owners who resist,

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obstruct, and manipulate every attempt at legislation in what Marx likens to a slave drivers rebellion.8 This brings us to an essential thesis that we can interpret, anticipating Althusser, as a primacy of class struggle over the very existence of classes, and thus over their unity. The vicissitudes of civil war are described less as stages of confrontation between given collectivities than as inverse movements where what is at stake is the formation of these collectivities; the formation thus constitutes an essentially political phenomenon or a sociological phenomenon based in politics. The advancement of labor legislation corresponds to the unification of the working class, and the retreat of labor legislation to the division of the working class. It is the same relation, although inverted, for the bourgeois class. Neither of these two classes thus exists in itself, and their underlying formation has precisely as its condition and its correlate the dissolution of the opposing class. This is not to say that the notion of subjectivity or political subjectification does not apply at all here, quite the contrary. But, we see both that it no longer has an ontological basis that can be located in material conditions and that its essence lies in opposing processes that are themselves dependent on circumstance. It is the same, implicitly, for the notion of a party as an expression of that subjectivity. Consequently, it becomes impossible to describe class struggle as a form of duel or spectacular confrontation, and the notion of civil war takes on a rather peculiar meaning. It indicates less the irreconcilable character of the class struggle than its irreducible character. It also indicates the way that class struggle displaces divisions within society the more it becomes entrenched within that society. Civil war not only has a logic but also a history. However, within this history, factors other than class as pure or absolute subjects necessarily intervene. First, the state, which intervenes as a relatively autonomous apparatus situated at the intersection, possibly the balancing point, between various entities: between the interests of antagonistic classes, between the collected interests of classes, and between the individuals that compose them.9 Then there is the intervention of the factory inspectors, who both denounce the forms of over-exploitation along with their moral, social, or biological consequences and prepare legislation. They are in many respects the heroic protagonists of the narrative proposed by Marx in Capital, just as the liberal or vulgar economists are the contemptible antagonists. In a very interesting description, Marx situates them halfway between serving the function of the technicians of exploitation and that of spokesmen for the workers suffering, thus at a strategic point, or point of heresy, in the political struggle.10 This leads us to introduce a supplementary factor: what we can call civil society, or public opinion, made up in part by supplementary social groups that add to the principal class relations and play a fundamental role in explaining the reversal in the power struggle. We can now come to a characterization of the result that Marx ascribes to this form of class struggle. It can be understood in two complementary ways, in its historical function and in its political mechanism. Concerning the historical function, Marx speaks of the emergence of forms of social control over exploitation, or the reduction of its extreme violence, insisting on the transition from governments of exception to a form of normality, or of normalization (inscribed in the very name of normal workday). Foucault will obviously keep these analyses in mind as well as the similar analyses of factory discipline
Let us not forget that the text is contemporaneous with the American Civil War, on which Marx, in the name of the International, had taken a determined stance. 9 This is the case not only for bourgeois capitalists but also for workers because they must be protected collectively against their own individual tendencies to sacrifice their lives to acquire the means of existence in competitive and over-exploitative conditions. 10 It would be essential to compare this description with the analyses of Gramscis organic intellectual or of Foucaults intellectual specialist.
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and resistance to the intensification of labor due to mechanization. Further on in Capital, in addressing the limitations on child labor and the implementation of obligatory primary education, Marx speaks about the first conscious and methodical reaction [Capital 483] to trends that threaten the lives of individuals; he thereby inscribes unexpectedly an organicist or holistic dimension into the set of questions. But that does not mean that the content of social control is determined by natural laws. It is on the contrary entirely dependent on a political mechanism that is more than ever thought of in terms of a power struggle, even if its effects must take the institutional form of law. We can introduce here another remarkable formula by Marx, one that also displays this fascinating characteristic of being a form that he returns to repeatedly, traveling between texts and contexts, and changing meaning as it takes full advantage of its semantic possibilities. It is the statement: between two equal rights force decides [zwischen gleichen Rechten entscheidet die Gewalt] [Capital 242]. Let us not forget that the word Gewalt in German brings together two meanings that French and Spanish distinguish from each other: power and violence. That is, the word potentially contains the possibility of making explicit the dialectic between these two terms. Marx had already used this formula in his analysis of the 1848 revolutions in order to found the idea that in revolutionary situations, when the struggle becomes radical and escalates to extremes as in the alternatives of a dictatorship of the bourgeoisie or a dictatorship of the proletariat, the law of politics is the state of exception (what Marx will call in 1851 permanent revolution), in which the institutional form of power disappears under the struggle for power or naked violence incarnated in the confrontation between the repressive army and the insurrection of the masses. Here we have, under the same terms, almost the opposite idea with the exception that the insistence on the conversion of violence into an institution does not lead to legalism. It is the struggle for power and not juridical or moral principles that is decisive, thus the expression civil war. But this struggle for power takes place within an institutional framework that it transforms as needed. In the end, we could characterize what is here described as a movement of democratization, since it is a movement that insists on the recognition of certain fundamental rights for the exploited masses. Alternatively, we could characterize it as the emergence of a conflictual democracy since for those excluded from society or politics it is a matter of entering or including themselves [sinscrire] in the power play by using the instruments of law. But this configuration is less a matter of formal constitution than a matter of what Negri, following Costantino Mortati, calls a material constitution, which crystallizes a balance of social forces rather than a normative logic. In truth, this idea has a rather long history, it comes particularly from Montesquieu and his famous thesis that only power checks power, which could take either an institutional or a violent form. Another classic reference must however be addressed here if we are to better our understanding of the concept of politics as class struggle that is at stake in Marxs description: the reference to Machiavellis Discourses on Livy. In the famous developments of Book One, starting in Chapter 4, Machiavelli compares the conflict in Italian cities between the nobles (that is, the urban property owners) and the plebs (artisans or even wage-laborers) to the forms of social conflict in ancient Rome [16]. He raises the question of knowing on what conditions antagonism could give rise not to the auto-destruction of the city but to the consolidation of its institutions and the increase of its strength (particularly its exterior strength). We know that he places particular emphasis on the dissymmetry of interests or humors of each camp, according to which the little people do not strive to build an oppressive force but only to limit that force or not to be oppressed by those bigger; that is, they strive to clear a space for liberty. This leads him to reformulate in an original way the classic notion of mixed government not as a constitutional regime combining different principles of legitimacy, but as a state, or a state of political

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things [tat de choses politiques]. This state relies on a certain balance of power and thus remains contingent even as it endures because it always depends on perpetuating this balance of powers. The importance of the paradoxical institution of the Plebeian Tribune in his eyes comes precisely from the fact that it crystallizes the balance of power in an institutional form even though it is an exception within the hierarchy of power, a contradictory form that represents the point of view from below within the pinnacles of power. Wouldnt it be possible to interpret the meaning of Marxs analyses in these terms and suggest that, with his analysis of labor legislation and especially of the process that brought it into existence, he built in a Machiavellian manner something like a theory of mixed government within the framework of capitalism and a theory of a material constitution that the class struggle comes to confer on this government? Against this proposition we could of course offer a variety of objections. The first is that in the classical representation of civil war (whose model is the war of religions), civil war leads essentially to the emergence or the reinforcement of state sovereignty. This perspective would not in the least be incompatible with the idea that class struggle in the end leadsin certain places and in certain circumstances, if not in the absoluteto an incorporation of the workers resistance into state regulation of social conflicts. This process can be relatively autonomous, but, in the end, it functions in the service of capitalist domination and establishes, rather, the normal operating conditions for it, but at the cost of renouncing certain forms of over-exploitation. But that is not the lesson that Marx is offering: in order to speak of integration or incorporation, the social conflict would have to function as a process of neutralization of antagonism, and thus neutralization of politics, as Schmitt will later say. Correctly or incorrectly, Marx wants to show exactly the opposite: the progress of regulation, as far as it must be perpetually imposed and as long as it remains precarious, always to be redone or won back (just as we must always win back democracy), serves to perpetuate class struggle. It is here, moreover, that Marx is close to Machiavelli, because Machiavelli did not set out to describe the condition of sovereignty in the classical sense of the term (that of Bodin and Hobbes). He described less a state rising above struggles than a power that modified the forms of struggle or displaced their point of implementation. It seems to me that this is also what we are dealing with in Marx, and that, once again, imparts a remarkable function to the analogy between class struggle and civil war. Class struggle becomes an instance of the civilization of war and, hence, of the civilization of a society founded on irreconcilable antagonism. It is as if class struggle were suspended between several possible orientations, tending either toward self-destruction or toward social control. 5 To conclude, we still have to ask ourselves what can be done in practice with these theoretical orientations that, with the same terminology, point to vastly different conceptions of politics and thus reveal, as I have said, the radical ambiguity within Marxism of the notion of politics. First and foremost, we must address the question of what the result was for Marx himself. Apparently, Marx conceived of a solution to this dilemma. It is implicit at the end of Book I of Capital where he takes up the formulations from the Manifesto about the revolutionary outcome of class struggle and its translation in terms of the expropriators . . . expropriated [Capital 748] which is itself a return to formulas belonging to the messianic register of biblical tradition. This solution is based particularly on the idea that the forms of civil war evoked in the analysis of labor legislation (forms that, let it

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be noted, are inscribed in a purely national framework),11 are connected to a certain moment and place in the history of the Industrial Revolution. As such, they are destined to be surpassed by an international extension of exploitation where we find the polarization described in the Manifesto, and where class civil war will inevitably take on the form of a fight to the death. In another possibility perceived by Marx in the unpublished chapter of Capital and left out either for logical or political reasons,12 the inevitable fight to the death can be averted if these ulterior developments of accumulation translate into an even more radical neutralization of the possibilities of struggle and collective resistance, an extension of capitalist control beyond working conditions and the reproduction of the work force to the forms of consciousness or individual and collective subjectivity. It would be nave to deny that the history of capitalist society has lent greater credibility to this hypothesis, which is another form of historical nihilism, even though this again begs the question of the limits of economic conditions or of particular conditions within which this hypothesis can appear irresistible. In reality Marx did not have a serious opportunity to face this dilemma because contemporary history plunged him into dramatic situations where the two models proposed by the Manifesto and by Capital proved invalid; this situation took the form of actual civil wars. The problem then is not so much to radicalize class struggle by conceiving of it as a civil war than to know how to introduce a class factor, or a class point of view, into a militarized social conflict. Given these conditionsand whatever the intrinsic importance of the formulas about the exemplary value of the democratic structures of the Commune as a government of the working class that immediately set out to deconstruct the apparatus of the autonomized stateshould we be surprised that Marx never quite managed to extricate himself, in the final period, from the traditional dilemmas of politics, the same dilemmas in which the strategy of the organized workers movement tended to imprison itself and politics? But we can also suggest the following double hypothesissubject to modifications or enrichments that a new series of readings or recurrences would raise. On the one hand, Marx essentially used the combination of the themes of class struggle and civil war to introduce incessantly an impolitical dimension into his concept of politics (I was about to say his virtual concept), a dimension that is the opposite or other scene of politics: not only a collection of processes that take place outside of the institutional scene, but processes that border on extreme violence in an attempt to unleash it or control it, indeed to civilize it. On the other hand, although this set of problems or heterogeneous discursive sequences are in part homonyms, their effect is essentially to situate class struggle in a third or supplementary position in relation to the dilemmas of classical politics, whether it be that of war or peace, order or disorder, or institution or insurrection. This not only means that class struggle is essentially heterogeneous, but that inevitably it appears in history all of a sudden in a form we did not expect. It is precisely for this reason that it can function as a criterion for the materiality of politics, exceeding in principle its formal representations. Translated by Cory Browning

As a consequence, in certain ways they anticipate what we will call the national-social state. This unpublished chapter can be found in English translation as an appendix to the Penguin edition of Capital vol. 1: Results of the Immediate Process of Production 9431084.
11 12

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WORKS CITED Balibar, tienne. Politics and the Other scene. Trans. Christine Jones, James Swenson, and Chris Turner. New York: Verso, 2012. Print. Foucault, Michel. society Must Be Defended: Lectures at the Collge de France, 19751976. Trans. David Macey. New York: Picador, 2003. Print. Machiavelli, Niccol. Discourses on Livy. Trans. Harvey C. Mansfield and Nathan Tarcov. Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1996. Print. Marx, Karl. The Poverty of Philosophy. Collected Works. Vol. 6. New York: International, 1976. 105234. Marx and Engels Internet Archive. Web. 22 Nov. 2011. Marx, Karl, and Friedrich Engels. Capital. Vol. 1. Collected Works. New York: International, 1996. Vol. 35. Marx and Engels Internet Archive. Web. 22 Nov. 2011. ______. Capital, Vol. 1: A Critique of Political Economy. Ed. Ernest Mandel. Trans. Ben Fowkes. New York: Penguin, 1976. Print. ______. Manifesto of the Communist Party. The Marx-Engels Reader. 2nd ed. Ed. Robert C. Tucker. New York: Norton, 1978. 469500. Print. Negri, Antonio. Toward a Critique of the Material Constitution. Trans. Arianna Bove and Timothy S. Murray. Books for Burning: Between Civil War and Democracy in 1970s Italy. By Negri. Ed. Timothy S. Murray. London: Verso, 2005. 180230. Print.

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