CHAPTER TWO CLASS AND ECONOMIC INTERACTION: HISTORICAL MATERIALISM AS A THEORY OF LIBERAL MODERNITY Why Class Essentialism? It is a commonplace that for Marx a social group should be considered “revolutionary” depending upon its relation to modern industry. Given this assumption, only two classes are revolutionary in modern times: the bour- geoisie and the proletariat. The bourgeoisie, “as the bearer of large-scale industry,” is conceived of as a revolutionary class, relative to the feudal lords and the lower middle class, particularly artisans and peasants, who desire to maintain all social positions that are the creation of obsolete modes of production. On the other hand, the proletariat, as the essential product of modern industry, is revolutionary relative to the bourgeoisie, since only this class will strive to strip away from production the fetters imposed by the bourgeois relations of production. Such a “class-essentialist” conception of modern politics finds its most explicit expression in the fol- lowing passage from the Manifesto of the Communist Party: Of all the classes that stand face to face with the bourgeoisie today, the proletariat is a really revolutionary class. The other classes decay and finally disappear in the face of Modern Industry; the proletariat is its special and essential product. The lower middle class, the small manufacturer, the shop- keeper, the artisan, the peasant, all these fight against the bourgeoisie, to save from extinction their existence as factions of the middle class. They are therefore not revolutionary, but conservative. Nay, more, they are reaction- ary, for they try to roll back the wheel of history.1 The question then has to be posed: what accounts for such obsession with “large-scale industry” in Marx’s system of thought? How do we explain the fact that a project informed by critical and apologetic drives should take the relation to industrial forces, which are devoid of any normative or ethical intent, as the ultimate criterion for assessing the revolutionary or reactionary character of a social formation? 1 Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, Manifesto of the Communist Party, in Collected Works, vol. 6 (New York: International Publishers, 1976), p. 494. 56 chapter two The standard response to this question is that there coexist in Marx’s project two conflicting tendencies that, though in opposing directions, are ambiguously entwined in the same idea of historical materialism. Thus Stanley Pierson observes that Marx’s notion of the working class as agents of a socialist revolution highlights tensions between the base/superstruc- ture paradigm of Marxism and its utopian dimensions.2 Like other Left- Hegelians, Marx attempted to translate Hegelianism into a program for radical political changes. It was this apologetic drive that motivated him to provide a powerful new rationale for workers who were struggling to assert their interests in the new industrial system. But Marx based these critical and utopian drives “on his claim that he had discovered, in his historical materialism, an ultimate grounding for human development.”3 From this perspective, many of the ambiguities in Marx’s notion of the historic role of the working class stemmed from this paradoxical synthe- sis. It is noteworthy that such a point of view is widely shared by many commentators on Marx, whether Marxist or non-Marxist. For instance, based on a similar presumption about the gap between Marx’s historical materialism and his critical propensity, Lynn Hunt argues against Marx’s class essentialism for its failure to acknowledge how the political language as rhetoric about collective needs and identity “shapes the perceptions of interests and hence is a way of reconstituting the social and political world.”4 The same presumptions underlie the prevailing tendency in neo- Marxist conceptualizations of class structure “to substitute domination for exploitation.”5 These presumptions also buttress the post-structuralist 2 Stanley Pierson, Marxist Intellectuals and the Working Class Mentality in Germany, 1887–1912 (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1993), p. 6. 3 Pierson, Marxist Intellectuals and the Working Class Mentality in Germany, 1887–1912, p. 6. 4 Lynn Hunt, Political Culture and Class in the French Revolution (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1984), p. 24. Gareth Stedman Jones has developed a similar critique of the limits of historical materialism. Including under the term “language” what others would call “culture,” “ideology,” or “discourse,” Jones argues, “Language disrupts any simple notion of the determination of consciousness by social being because it is itself part of social being. We cannot therefore decode political language to reach a primal and material expression of interest since it is the discursive structure of political language which conceives and defines interest in the first place” (Languages of Class [Cambridge: Cambridge Univer- sity Press, 1983], pp. 21–22; emphasis added). 5 See Eric Olin Wright, “Race, Class, and Income Inequality,” in Anthony Giddens and David Held (eds.), Classes, Power, and Conflict: Classical and Contemporary Debates (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1985), pp. 520–544; Ralph Miliband, “Class Analysis,” in Anthony Giddens and Jonathan Turner (eds.), Social Theory Today (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1987), pp. 324–346..