Paul Blackledge
Marx did not write a systematic treatise on intellectuals, and when he did comment on members of the intelligentsia he tended to use the phrase ‘educated people’, or, if in a more scornful mood, ‘literati’ to describe them (Draper 1978: 481; 516). In a sense this is a surprising lacuna in his thought, for Marx and Engels were themselves, as Lenin pointed out, obviously intellectuals cut from the most traditional cloth (Miliband 1977: 36); and in failing to provide a detailed analysis of intellectual radicalism they, in effect, obscured their own position within the socialist movement. Alvin Gouldner has argued that Marx’s reticence when it came to commenting on the role of the intelligentsia in the socialist revolution is symptomatic of a deeper problem with his political theory: beneath its self-image as a model of proletarian socialism, in practice Marxism functions as an ideology of a new class of revolutionary intellectuals whose goal is the rational reconstruction of society in its own image (Gouldner 1985: 25; 48).
There is obviously some power to Gouldner’s arguments; revolutions in China, Cuba and elsewhere in the twentieth-century have been led by intellectuals, and are evidence that the proletariat is not inevitably a revolutionary class in even the most revolutionary of situations. Nevertheless, the force of Gouldner’s critique of Marx’s political theory is undermined by his deployment of a crude caricature of Marx’s theory of revolution, according to which, for instance, Marx’s own class background negates his claim to have articulated a theory of proletarian socialism (Gouldner 1985: 6). Fortunately for Marxists, this will not do as a critique of the origins of historical materialism, for Marx did not construct a crude model of historical development according to which individuals are forever trapped in a specific consciousness determined by their location within the class structure. Moreover, he did not believe that intellectuals had nothing to contribute to the socialist movement. Indeed, the obvious venom with which he criticised intellectual ‘hired prize-fighters’ of the bourgeoisie implied an ethical commitment to the search for truth which, nominally at least, most intellectuals would claim to share (Marx 1873: 97). However, Marx was circumspect about the revolutionary potential of the intelligentsia, and believed that intellectuals should be welcomed into the socialist movement on the condition that they resolutely broke with the elitist culture which afforded them a sense of identity.
Marx arrived at this conclusion through his political and intellectual break with the Young Hegelian circles in Germany in the 1840s. Central to this rupture was his ‘discovery’ of the proletariat as an active agent rather than a passive victim of history. Contrary to popular belief,[2] Marx did not think that the proletariat would automatically and unproblematically realise this potential: he was well aware of the dehumanising and fragmenting consequences that the division of labour had on the working class. Yet, he argued that the proletariat’s location within the division of labour, whilst alienating, simultaneously created the possibility that it might come to perceive the capitalist system in a new light, as a totality which it created and which it could therefore recreate. Conversely, he believed that the intelligentsia’s location within the division of labour mediated against their embrace of this worldview.
Despite this suggestion, Marx was well aware that individual intellectuals could contribute to the workers’ movement in various ways; for instance as ‘ideological innovators’, or in more general roles within the movement which required a degree of educational training; such as editors etc. Further, he argued that intellectuals could act as technical experts in the service of post-revolutionary regimes (Draper 1978: 539-545). Marx also recognised that certain sections of the intelligentsia were themselves experiencing the pressures of proletarianisation such that an a priori rejection of their role in the struggle for socialism would be absurd. Nonetheless, Marx was aware that the layer which Gramsci would later label traditional intellectuals was formed within a specific location in the division of labour which afforded it a very different perspective on the world to that experienced by workers. He thus insisted that intellectuals could make a positive contribution to the workers’ movement only if they came to see the world from the perspective of revolutionary workers.
Human Nature, Alienation and the Division of Labour
At its core Marxism is a democratic theory of working-class self-emancipation: Marx believed that ordinary workers were capable of developing the intellectual skills needed to run a modern complex society. Marx’s political theory thus stands in marked opposition to the assumption, generally accepted since at least the time of Plato, that a natural hierarchy of intelligence exists which underpins social stratification. Nevertheless, Marx recognised that most workers in ‘normal’ conditions tended not to exhibit the talents associated with leadership; in fact they were socialised from birth to be led rather than to lead. Accordingly, socialism is envisaged as a system within which this division between leaders and led, or as Marx would have it, between mental and material labour, is overcome (Ratanssi 1982: 56).
It does not require a vivid imagination to realise that this perspective challenges much that is sacrosanct to most intellectuals, including their self-identity as members of an inherently intellectually superior social layer. This conflict between Marxism and intellectual common sense in turn produces an interesting dynamic. For, as we shall see below, while Marxism predicts that sections of the intelligentsia will be predisposed towards a form of radicalisation in response to the market’s tendency to reduce their status towards that of the proletariat, many intellectuals will simultaneously be repulsed by Marxism’s apparent embrace of the logic of this process. One consequence of this contradiction is that intellectual radicalisation may well evolve as an elitist rejection of working class politics. Moreover, even amongst those intellectuals whose radicalism leads them into the socialist movement, their intellectual background will lend itself to a particularly philanthropic, and elitist, interpretation of their role within the movement.
Marx’s response to the elitist tendencies exhibited even by socialist intellectuals was twofold. Theoretically, he challenged the notion that the historical division between mental and material labour was an essential character of all human societies, whilst politically he guarded against the malign consequences of the actions of well-meaning intellectuals within the labour movement. To make sense of these theoretical and political strands of Marx’s analysis of intellectuals it is useful to locate them within his broader analysis of the division of labour.
At the centre of Marx’s anthropology is the concept of social production, understood as conscious and purposeful activity (Braverman 1974: 46). According to this model, humans socially produce with the conscious aim of transforming the world to meet their changing needs. However, whilst production in pre-class societies was a unified process of conception and execution, Marx believed that the emergence of a social division between mental and material labour paved the way for the rise of class societies within which this purposeful process came to be increasingly fragmented, as one class rose to direct production in its own interests, while a second actually did the work of producing (Marx and Engels 1845: 51; Engels 1877: 341).[3] Beyond this basic process, Marx argued that once class societies had been established, the separation between conception and execution within the production process developed to its highest form under capitalism (Braverman 1974: 114).
In The German Ideology the concept of the division between mental and material labour was primarily deployed as a synonym for the division between social classes – whereas mental labourers directed the production process, material labourers did the concrete work of producing. However, Marx was well aware that the division between mental and material labour was much more complex than this simple diptych would suggest. Thus, in addition to this primary denotation, Marx pointed out that there existed a secondary division between those sections of the ruling class who were directly involved in the production process and those intellectuals who functioned to ideologically justify this process: traditional intellectuals, according to this model, operated at the level of society’s ideological superstructure (Marx and Engels 1845: 65; Lukacs 1972, 13; Lowy 1979: 15). Moreover, this division of labour within the ruling class was not negligible, but could ‘develop into a certain opposition and hostility between the two parts’ (Marx and Engels 1845: 65).
Nevertheless, while Marx and Engels were aware of the importance of this division, they insisted that so long as it remained a division within the ruling class it was a secondary social cleavage, such that in periods of crisis ‘when the class itself is endangered’, the great bulk of the individuals on the two sides of the division would unify against common enemies (Marx and Engels 1845: 65). So, whatever the verbal radicalism of traditional intellectuals, Marx and Engels were careful to insist that workers should beware of the radical intelligentsia’s backsliding tendencies. In this sense, the location of the bulk of traditional intellectuals within the ruling class, although at some distance removed from the production process, meant that in the final analysis they would rather accommodate with the old order than fight for its revolutionary overthrow. Bourgeois intellectuals, according to this model, like the rest of the bourgeoisie, while just as alienated from the product of their labour as are proletarians, feel at home in this alienation: only the proletariat, Marx and Engels argued, experience their alienation as an imperative to revolt against the system (Marx & Engels 1844: 36).
Unfortunately, while proletarians were therefore impelled to revolt against the capitalist division of labour, the division of labour itself tended to make them unfit for rule (Marx and Engels 1845: 51-57; 95). [4] Indeed, Engels pointed out that ‘in the division of labour, man is also divided. All other physical and mental faculties are sacrificed to the development of one single activity. This stunting of man grows in the same measure as the division of labour, which attains its highest development in manufacture’ (Engels 1877: 355; cf Draper 1978: 483; Braverman 1974: 73). So, while Engels insisted that the development of society’s productive forces created the conditions whereby the division of labour might be ‘swept away’, and Marx argued that increases in the productivity of labour associated with the growth of capitalism ensured that ‘the technical reason for the lifelong attachment of the worker to a partial function is swept away’, Marx also added that, simultaneously, ‘the barriers placed in the way of the domination of capital by this same regulating principle now also fall’ (Engels 1877: 342; Marx 1867: 491). Marx therefore argued that while the increases in the productivity of labour associated with the deepening of the division of labour under capitalism had created the objective potential for socialism, he also saw that the existence of the division of labour acted as a fundamental barrier to the realisation of this potential. In this sense he re-engaged with a problem that had troubled Adam Smith.
In The Wealth of Nations, Smith had famously argued that the tendency towards the division of labour was a basic facet of human nature: the division of labour ‘is the necessary, though very slow and gradual consequence of a certain propensity in human nature which has in view no such extensive utility; the propensity to truck, barter, and exchange one thing for another’. Moreover, the division of labour gave rise to great increases in the productivity of labour, whose consequence it is to increase ‘that universal opulence which extends to the lowest ranks of the people’. However, Smith recognised that in addition to this positive consequence of the division of labour, there existed a negative corollary: those who worked on the most menial tasks became intellectually debased by the deskilled nature of their work. Indeed, Smith argued that philosophers and manual workers differed less in natural abilities than did a spaniel from a sheep dog, and that it was the division of labour experienced from childhood that gave rise to the differential educational capacities of the two groups in later life (Smith 1776: 117; 115; 120). Furthermore, Smith went so far as to suggest that ‘the man whose whole life is spent performing a few simple operations … has no occasion to exert his understanding … He generally becomes as stupid and ignorant as it is possible for a human creature to become’ (Smith quoted in Marx 1867: 483).
Thus stated there are a number of obvious problems with Smith’s defence of the division of labour. First, his universalisation of the propensity to truck, barter and exchange, acts to obscure the novelty of the capitalist mode of production (Brenner 1989: 272). Second, given that by his own admission the division of labour tends to reduce the bulk of humanity to a greater or lesser state of idiocy, it is not at all obvious why we should follow him in accepting that this division is in the universal interest. Smith recognised this latter problem and, as Marx pointed out, attempted to mediate against the negative consequences of the division of labour by proselytising a universal system of education through which the tendency to narrow proletarian intellectual horizons would be mediated. However, Marx realised that the arguments of Smith’s bourgeois critics, who suggested that by educating workers the state would act to undermine the division of labour itself, could not adequately be countered without overcoming the division of labour itself; for educated people would be repelled by the mind numbing work carried out in the new factories of his day (Marx 1867: 484).
As an antidote to the stupefying consequences of the division of labour, Marx seemed to agree with Hegel that an educated person is one that ‘can do what other do’ (Hegel quoted in Marx 1867: 485). But one can only do what others do if there is no division of labour, and if there is no division of labour then, according to Smith, humanity will revert back to a primitive state. This may be a desirable condition, but it is scarcely a practicable one, and it is certainly not Marx’s mature vision of the socialist future.[5] How then did Marx square his critique of the division of labour with the view that socialism required a relatively high level of economic development? The answer to this question lies, primarily, in the differentiation he made between two distinct aspects – the social and the manufacturing[6] – of the division of labour; and secondarily, in his analysis of the dynamic process through which capital accumulation tended to overcome the practical need for a division between mental and manual labour.
In relation to the first of these suggestions, Marx, in his mature work, insisted that while social or occupational divisions within the production process are a universal feature of human history, the most dehumanising element of the modern division of labour – the manufacturing or technical division of labour – is a product of modern capitalist production. Thus Marx differentiated between the social division of people into various specialist occupations, and the technical division of individual jobs, and thereby the people who worked them, into increasingly simple component parts.
In the Economic Manuscripts of 1861-1863, Marx argued that Smith ‘constantly confuses these very different senses of the division of labour, which admittedly complement each other, but are also in certain respects mutually opposed’ (Marx 1861-63: 266). It was as a consequence of this confusion that Smith ‘did not grasp the division of labour as something peculiar to the capitalist mode of production’. So, as he argued in Theories of Surplus Value, whereas occupational specialisation was a relatively universal feature of human history, the subdivision of jobs into their relatively unskilled component parts, whilst built upon this earlier division, was a peculiar product of capitalist manufacture (Marx 1861: 268). Moreover, where Smith equated the manufacturing division of labour with both the social division of labour and the tendency towards increased productivity, Marx argued that the development of the manufacturing division of labour is better understood as that process through which the subsumption of labour to capital moved from its formal to its real phase. So, Marx insisted, the manufacturing division of labour was not instituted primarily as a means of increasing labour productivity, but was rather used as a means of enforcing a capitalist discipline on the labour force by deskilling the labour process (Braverman 1974: 119; Thompson 1989: 75). Indeed, whereas the social division of labour facilitated increases in the productivity of labour by occupational specialisation, the technical division involves the subdivision of jobs such that individual workers perform increasingly simple tasks for which they require only a minimum of training (Ratanssi 1982: 150). For where capitalism had emerged, in part at least, out of pre-capitalist modes of production by enforcing the discipline of the market upon existing labour processes – the formal subsumption of labour to capital; with the development of factory production the nature of the labour process was itself transformed such that labour was deskilled and becomes really ‘subsumed under capital’ (Marx 1861-63: 271; 279; cf Marx 1867: 1019-1024). In this new situation, Marx argued, ‘the division of labour within the workshop implies the undisputed authority of the capitalist over men’ (Marx 1867: 477).
So for Marx the social and the manufacturing divisions of labour could be differentiated thus: the former allowed increases in labour productivity, while the latter was primarily designed to increase capital’s control over the labour process. Marx suggested that whilst the former process was an inevitable precondition of economic and social advance, the tendency immanent in it towards ‘crippling of the body and mind’ by occupational specialisation was taken to an extreme in the factory for reasons that had little to do with increasing the ‘universal opulence’. Rather, the manufacturing system emerged to ensure capital’s control over the labour process and was an ‘entirely specific creation of the capitalist mode of production’ (Marx 1867: 484; 480).
If the technical or manufacturing division of labour therefore tended to dehumanise manual workers by robbing them of the chance of partaking in meaningful productive activity, its malign consequences also reached up to the division between mental and manual labour. Indeed, Braverman insisted that in the twentieth century the bulk of the once privileged clerical labour undertaken in most offices had, as a consequence of capital’s quest to control the labour process by increasing the polarisation between those who conceive and those execute the labour process, become just as ‘manual’ as the material labour carried out on the factory floor (Braverman 1974: 316).
In opposition to this conceptualisation of recent social developments, Nicos Poulantzas argued that ‘the mental/manual labour division characterises the new petty bourgeoisie as a whole, which in contrast to the working class is located on the ‘side’, or in the ‘camp’, of mental labour, either directly or indirectly’ (Poulantzas1978: 251-2). According to this model, all those, including intellectuals, who are involved in ‘unproductive’ activity are best characterised as members of a new petty bourgeoisie. In contrast, Wood and Wright have argued that this claim relies upon an unpersuasive suggestion that mental and manual divisions within the labour force constitute a class division rather than a simple division within the working class, and thus implies an absurdly narrow definition of the working class (Wright 1978: 53; Wood 1986: 39). Similarly, Callinicos has argued that ‘unproductive’ labour is best understood as a necessary constituent part of what Marx called the ‘collective worker’ (Callinicos 1987: 19). Nevertheless, even if we accept Callinicos’ broad conceptualisation of the proletariat, and agree that the intelligentsia has experienced a remarkable expansion in size and proletarianisation since Marx’s day, divisions between intellectuals and workers remain.
Nigel Harris has suggested that in the twentieth century, even more than in the nineteenth, the term intelligentsia ‘cuts across class analysis’, while Erik Olin Wright has persuasively argued that within modern capitalist relations of production, intellectuals should best be understood not as part of the working class, despite their need to sell their labour power, nor as a wholly distinct social class – either bourgeois or petty bourgeois. Rather, intellectuals exist as part of a social stratum that occupies a ‘contradictory class location between the working class and the petty bourgeoisie at the economic level, but between the working class and the bourgeoisie at the ideological level’ (Harris 1991: 98; Wright 1979: 204). So, despite selling their labour power modern intellectual producers, economically, experience a degree of autonomy at work that is closer to that felt by the petty bourgeoisie than it is to that of most workers, whilst, ideologically, they are expected to articulate and disseminate bourgeois ideology.
The key point here is that the intelligentsia is not a class but a stratum, and that different intellectuals operate at very different points on the economic and ideological continua between the proletariat and the petty bourgeoisie. Thus, the tendencies towards economic proletarianisation and ideological autonomy are experienced very differently across the intelligentsia. Nevertheless, as Marx and Engels argued, even in the nineteenth century the malign effects of the spread of the market tended to debase all forms of social activity, such that the process of capital accumulation tends to break down the division between intellectuals and the mass of workers by the proletarianisation of the former: ‘The bourgeoisie has stripped of its halo every occupation hitherto honoured and looked up to with reverent awe. It has converted the physician, the lawyer, the priest, the poet, the man of science, into its paid wage labourers’ (Marx 1848: 70). And while this process would tend to produce a radical response amongst all the groups thus affected, because intellectuals are not a homogeneous group, their response to these pressures would be complex and mediated.
Revolution
The logic of Marx’s discussion of the division of labour appears to suggest that the condition of the proletariat is both too fragmented and too intellectually narrow for it to act as a realistic agency of its own emancipation. Nevertheless, as Braverman pointed out, while the aim of the technical division of labour is to reduce workers to the position of cogs in a machine, the intelligence of those performing even the most menial tasks is never completely suppressed (Braverman 1974: 325). Similarly, Marshall Berman has pointed out that Capital contains the voices of many workers who, when interviewed by factory inspectors, while showing no signs of revolutionary militancy exhibited a ‘stoical endurance’ and ‘austere intelligence’ in the face of the overbearing pressures of manual labour in nineteenth-century England (Berman 1999: 83). Indeed, it was Marx’s contention, based upon his experience in socialist workers’ circles in the mid-1840s, that it was the intelligence and the humanity of these workers, which could not be expunged from the machine, that acted as the mainspring of the struggle for freedom, and that through their struggle for freedom workers could break the sociological binds that alienated them from each other and the rest of society. In fact, Marx distinguished himself from other socialists of his day through the link he drew between socialism and the democratic struggle from below (Draper 1977: 59). In throwing himself into the radical campaign for democracy in Germany in the 1840s, he found that the working class acted as the most resolute arm of the democratic movement, and in so doing added a social depth to the demands of the movement. Indeed, his experience of workers’ struggles in Germany and France acted as a catalyst which pushed him to the conclusion that Hegel’s critique of proletarianisation was one-sided: where Hegel had argued that this process merely created a fragmented rabble (Taylor 1975: 407 & 436), Marx suggested that workers could move, through their engagement in combined struggles for a better life, from being an atomised and dehumanised group, towards becoming a potential collective agency of universal social and political emancipation. So, Marx differentiated himself from the utopian socialists in conceptualising workers not merely as victims of the system but also as agents of its possible overthrow: ‘they see in poverty nothing but poverty, without seeing in it the revolutionary, subversive side’ (Marx 1847: 120-1).
The revolutionary nature of workers’ struggles was crucial to Marx’s political theory because it was only through such struggles that workers could overcome the intellectually and morally debilitating consequences of the division of labour. Indeed, Marx and Engels argued that a revolution was necessary to overthrow capitalism not simply because the ruling class could not be removed in any other way, but more importantly because it was only through the tumultuous struggles associated with a revolution from below that the proletariat could rid ‘itself of all the muck of ages and become fitted to found society anew’ (Marx & Engels 1845: 95). So, it was only through the act of making a revolution that working people, socialised by their class location to assume subservient social roles, could become masters of their own destiny. In fact, the class analysis of the coming revolution so informed Marx and Engels’ social theory that, rather than use the abstract word socialism to describe their goal, they usually wrote more concretely of the class rule of the proletariat (Draper 1978: 24).
Moreover, Marx’s suggestion that workers could remake themselves through their collective struggle to remake society undermines the arguments of Shlomo Avineri, Alvin Gouldner and Neil Harding to the effect that his political theory involved a model of intellectual generals leading proletarian soldiers. Avineri argued that Marx prefigured intellectual vanguardist interpretations of his political theory when he envisaged ‘a proletarian movement led by intellectuals’ (Avineri 1990: 410).[7] Similarly, Gouldner argued that Marx ‘let the cat out of the bag’ when, in his Introduction to A Contribution to the Critique of Hegel’s Philosophy of Right written in 1843, he argued that within the communist movement, ‘the head of this emancipation is philosophy, its heart the proletariat’ (Marx 1843: 257). However, neither Avineri nor Gouldner mention the third of Marx’s Theses on Feuerbach written a year or so later, in which he argued that
The materialist doctrine that men are products of circumstances and education (erziehung), and that, therefore, changed men are products of changed circumstances and changed education (erziehung), forgets that it is men who change circumstances and that the educator must himself be educated. Hence this doctrine is bound to divide society into two parts, one of which is superior to society. The coincidence of the changing of circumstances and of human activity or self-change can be conceived and rationally understood only as revolutionary practice (Marx 1845: 121).[8]
The obvious implication of this argument is that there are no ready made experts waiting to lead the workers to socialism, and that any intellectual who so conceived his role would in fact be guilty of mistaking his own assumptions and prejudices for the real needs of the revolutionary movement. In fact, Marx was repeatedly scathing of the unwitting class biases that intellectuals brought to the socialist movement. The chief medium through which these prejudices were served to the socialist movement was the very contemplative stance characteristic of most intellectual work. Marx hinted at the malign consequences of this perspective in the ninth of his Theses on Feuerbach: ‘The highest point reached by contemplative materialism, that is, materialism which does not comprehend sensuousness as practical activity, is the contemplation of single individuals and of civil society’ (Marx 1845: 123). Implied in this thesis was the argument that intellectual thought, despite the self-image of intellectuals as supra-class thinkers, was in fact tied the parameters of bourgeois society. Indeed, Marx made this suggestion explicit in The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Napoleon (1851):
Just as little must one imagine that the democratic representatives are indeed all shopkeepers or enthusiastic champions of shopkeepers. According to their education and their individual position they may be as far apart as heaven and earth. What makes them representatives of the petty bourgeoisie is the fact that in their minds they do not get beyond the limits which the latter do not get beyond in life, that they are consequently driven, theoretically, to the same problems and solutions to which material interest and social position drive the latter practically. This is, in general, the relationship between the political and literary representatives of a class and the class they represent (Marx quoted in Draper 1978: 503).
Intellectuals, according to this model, need not originate within the bourgeoisie to reflect bourgeois ideology. In fact, it will not be uncommon to find working-class intellectuals who mouth bourgeois platitudes, and whose influence must therefore be challenged for hegemony within the workers’ movement. Commenting on one such incidence when Marx polemicised against Weitling in the 1840s, Neil Harding has resurrected an old argument that Marxism embodies a form of intellectual ‘arrogance’, inherited by Lenin, which explains Marx’s attack on ‘every native proletarian theorist of socialism’ (Harding 1996: 34). Yet, as Draper had previously shown, it was Weitling, who by the way no proletarian, who advocated the dictatorship of the intelligentsia, and it was because of Marx’s opposition to this manifestation of elitism that he struggled against Weitling’s influence within the German socialist movement (Draper 1978: 654-660).
Unfortunately, it is not unusual to find such inversions of the truth when dealing with academic discussions of Marx. However, Marx’s attitude to intellectuals was much more critical than Harding’s remarks would have us believe. Thus, Marx argued that the contemplative stance typical of intellectual production left the intelligentsia both ill prepared to see beyond the confines of bourgeois society, and also undermined the scientific pretensions of their work. Moreover, he suggested that intellectuals tended to substitute abstractions for careful studies of the balance of class forces in society and the real needs of the mass movement that flowed from this knowledge (Draper 1978: 503). Further, this scientific failing had direct political consequences. For instance, in his discussion of the role of intellectuals in the French revolutionary struggles of 1848, Marx mocked the gap between the care with which the ‘experts’ wrote constitutional treatise, and their lack of concern with the needs of real movement on the ground. As August Nimtz points out, while the liberal intelligentsia penned magnificent constitutions, they were ‘unwilling to take the political step that would have been necessary to guarantee the constitution itself’. Conversely, in their contemporary writings Marx and Engels argued that it was the mobilization of the masses, not the writing of fine constitutions, that was the priority of the day (Nimtz 2000: 114).
To move from writing constitutions to leading mass movements, traditional intellectuals had to unlearn many of the skills which provided them with a sense of self-worth in the first place. Engels praised the young Kautsky as an atypical intellectual precisely because he struggled to break from the hair-splitting pedantry imbued in him by his university education (Draper 1978: 531). Conversely, Marx was savage in his critique of Adolph Wagner in part because when Wagner wrote of universal ‘man’ in his treatise on political economy he actually gave an unwitting concrete form to this abstract idea. And, like all those who imagine that they stand above such matters, the concrete form of human nature assumed by Wagner was filled with his own narrow prejudices. Thus, the professor imagined the universal characteristics of human nature to be the very singular characteristics of the academic: ‘Everything that the professor is unable to do himself, he makes “man” do; but this man is himself nothing more than the professorial man who claims to have understood the world once he has arranged it under abstract heading’ (Marx 1879-80: 193). So, behind the grand façade of Wagners’ theorizing lay a set of ill thought through and indefensible assumptions about human nature which were uncritically drawn from Wagners’ own narrow experiences as a bourgeois intellectual.
Generally, Marx found that the intellectual slovenliness expressed in Wagners’ work was common amongst intellectuals. Indeed, when the Berlin academic Eugen Dühring produced a crude interpretation of human history, Marx and Engels felt compelled to counter his arguments – Engels was delegated to write Anti- Dühring – not because of the strengths of these arguments, but because the naivety of his approach appealed to a layer of intellectuals who had joined the German Social Democratic Party. Nimtz comments that Dühring’s attraction to this layer of intellectuals could be found in the way that he, unlike Marx and Engels, was willing to make ‘ready-made answers’ to complex questions (Nimtz 2000: 255).
Beyond their tendency to lazy thinking, many intellectuals who were drawn to the nineteenth-century German socialist movement proved to be bad teachers within the movement. Engels complained that the bulk of the German party’s intellectuals translated their elitism into a form of ‘schoolmarmish supercilious snobbery’ which did nothing for their relations with ordinary workers (Draper 1978: 523). So, the elitism of intellectuals proved to be a significant barrier to their involvement in a proletarian movement. In this sense, socialist intellectuals tended to betray their cultural background. For their elitism was, in effect, a variant of the disdain shown by traditional intellectuals to manual workers throughout the history of class society (cf Kiernan 1969: 58).
Nevertheless, Marx believed that intellectuals could experience radicalising influences which might lead them to serve the workers’ movement by breaking with the intelligentsia’s typical elitism. Marx and Engels, as we have noted, outlined a material basis for the emergence of a form of intellectual radicalism in the Communist Manifesto, where they argued that the very dynamism of capitalism tended to break down those traditional hierarchies which had previously guaranteed the status of intellectuals. One consequence of this marketisation of the world was that intellectual labour, in addition to material labour, increasingly came to be directed towards production for the market. Further, as some intellectuals became winners in the marketplace, others lost and experienced the gravitational attraction of the process of proletarianisation. Moreover, Marx and Engels insisted that it was not simply intellectuals but ‘entire sections of the ruling class are, by the advance of industry, precipitated into the proletariat, or are at least threatened in their conditions of existence’. Whilst the prospect of this process might terrify average members of the bourgeoisie and petty bourgeoisie, intellectual or not, it did open the possibility, as Marx and Engels continued, that this layer might ‘supply the proletariat with fresh elements of enlightenment and progress’ (Marx and Engels 1848: 77). So, the proletarianisation of intellectuals might begin, de facto, to overcome the separation between mental and manual labour.
Beyond this process, Marx also believed that in the democratic struggles against the feudal and absolutist regimes, bourgeois revolutionaries would be compelled to appeal to the proletariat for support against the old order. However, in so doing they would begin to engage the proletariat in a discourse of rights and justice which workers could subsequently hold up against bourgeois society: ‘In all these battles, it sees itself compelled to appeal to the proletariat, to ask for help, and thus, to drag it into the political arena. The bourgeoisie itself, therefore, supplies the proletariat with its own elements of political and general education, in other words, it furnishes the proletariat with weapons for fighting the bourgeoisie’ (Marx and Engels 1848: 76). So, the very radicalism through which the bourgeoisie was compelled to fight for its liberty against feudal society would introduce the mass of producers into political society from which they had previously been so securely excluded.
However, as Engels pointed out in his study of the sixteenth-century peasant wars in Germany, once the genie of lower class radicalism had been let out of the bag by bourgeois radicals, these radicals were want to divide between a minority – such as those led by Thomas Munzer in Engels’ narrative – who were prepared to take the struggle to communist conclusion, and a majority – such as those led by Martin Luther – who did everything in their power to suppress the popular movement from below (Engels 1850: 62-8). So while intellectual radicalism might open the door to proletarian radicalism, only those intellectuals such as Munzer who ‘resolutely broke’ with their class background could become true leaders of the popular struggles from below (Engels 1850, 70).
If Engels gave a concrete example of intellectual radicalism in his The Peasant War in Germany (1850), he and Marx had begun to theorise such a model in the Communist Manifesto. In this pamphlet they argued that individual members of the ruling class could, under pressure of economic and political crises, break with their social situation, and become class traitors by joining forces with the proletariat:
Finally, in times when the class struggle nears the decisive hour, the progress of dissolution going on within the ruling class, in fact within the whole range of old society, assumes such a violent, glaring character, that a small section of the ruling class cuts itself adrift, and joins the revolutionary class, the class that holds the future in its hands. Just as, therefore, at an earlier period, a section of the nobility went over to the bourgeoisie, so now a portion of the bourgeoisie goes over to the proletariat, and in particular, a portion of the bourgeois ideologists, who have raised themselves to the level of comprehending theoretically the historical movement as a whole (Marx and Engels 1848, 77).
However, if Marx insisted that the act of perceiving the world in such a way could not be attained through abstract contemplation, then neither could it be achieved merely by looking at the world from the perspective of the working class; for the division of labour ensured that when workers were not engaged in class struggles their viewpoint was fragmented. Rather, it was only from the perspective of workers in the highest level of struggle that a truly scientific socialism could be articulated.
In The Poverty of Philosophy, Marx had predicated this perspective on the proletariat’s position in the division of labour:
What characterizes the division of labour in the automatic workshop is that labour has there completely lost its specialized character. But the moment every special development stops, the need for universality, the tendency towards an integral development of the individual begins to be felt. The automatic workshop wipes out specialists and craft-idiocy (Marx 1847: 138).
Commenting on these lines, and some similar in Marx’s A Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy (Marx 1859: 210; Marx 1857: 104), Gerry Cohen has argued that, beside the tendency to deskill and impose capitalist control of the production process, Marx saw in the division of labour ‘a liberating aspect’ which facilitated in the proletariat, precisely because they had been reduced to general labourers, an ability to perceive the totality of the productive system in a way that had been precluded by the narrow parochialism associated with their craft specialist ancestors (Cohen 1988: 195).
Nevertheless, as István Mészáros has forcefully argued, the division of labour also led not only to the fragmentation of the working class, but also to the fragmentation of workers’ struggles. Indeed, he insists that ‘under normal circumstances, internally divided and fragmented labour is at the mercy not only of the ruling class and its state, but also of the objective requirements of the prevailing social division of labour’ (Mészáros 1995: 930). Nonetheless, Mészáros’ claim that the political consequences of this problem has been ‘greatly underestimated’ by Marxists, need not be accepted (Mészáros 1995: 924). For it was precisely as an answer to these problems that Marx engaged in the project of building a vanguard party.
This project did not, contra Gouldner, Harding and Avineri, involve Marx smuggling the concept of an intellectual elite into his formally democratic theory, but neither, contra Holloway did Marx dismiss the concept of leadership (Holloway 2002: 128). Rather it is evidence that Marx was aware of the powerful tendencies mediating against the development of a socialist class consciousness within the proletariat, which if they were to be overcome had to be met by organised socialist activity. The party, in this conception, aimed both at overcoming the division between mental and manual workers within its own ranks, and at overcoming the tendencies towards the fragmentation of the workers’ movement more broadly (Lowy 2003: 134; 146). It is in this sense that the famous lines from the Communist Manifesto are best understood:
The Communists are distinguished from the other working-class parties by this only: 1. In the national struggles of the proletarians of the different countries, they point out and bring to the front the common interests of the entire proletariat, independently of all nationality. 2. In the various stages of development which the struggle of the working class against the bourgeoisie has to pass through, they always and everywhere represent the interests of the movement as a whole (Marx and Engels 1848, 79).
The socialist party, thus conceived, acts essentially within the tension created by the division of labour: for, on the one hand, the division of labour creates the possibility that the proletariat might perceive the system as a totality which can be consciously reshaped; while, on the other hand, the division of labour also acts to fragment workers and reinforce the power of the bourgeoisie. These contradictory but equally economic aspects of the proletariat’s existence mediate against the view that Marx held to a crude economic model of proletarian radicalisation. Moreover, they help explain Marx’s political practice both in the 1840s and in the period of the First International. In both of these periods Marx was concerned, centrally, with the need to foster the struggles of the working class as a class, whilst simultaneously challenging those forces, for instance anti-Irish racism in England, which grew out of and acted to reinforce and extend divisions within the proletariat (Collins & Abramsky 1965: 39; 45; Harris 1990: 44-45; Gilbert 1981).
In this situation, intellectual elitism, however well meant, served only to reinforce the subservient position of workers. Thus, in 1890, Engels fumed at those intellectuals who believed that their ‘academic education’ provided them ‘with an officer’s commission and a claim to a corresponding post in the party’. Indeed, he insisted that all party members ‘must serve in the ranks’, and that the intellectuals ‘have far more to learn from the workers, all in all, than the latter have to learn from them’ (Nimtz 2000; 268; Draper 1978: 515). Moreover, in as far as intellectuals perceived their role in philanthropic terms, and correspondingly conceived the workers as mere victims of the system, then they tended towards political reformism: they would fight as an elite for the workers, rather than with the workers for their liberation. Indeed, this tendency towards reformism was reinforced when intellectuals took seats in the Reichstag as the German Social Democratic Party began to experience some parliamentary success in the nineteenth century (Nimtz 2000: 267; Draper 1978: 517; cf Hobsbawm 1973: 259; Barker 1987: 194; 263).
Conclusion
Marshall Berman has expanded on Marx’s discussion of the radicalising tendencies experienced by intellectuals under capitalism. He points out that because intellectuals pour their souls into their work they feel the fluctuations of the market ‘in a far deeper way’ than do most workers who merely give their time but not their heart to their employer. However, because capitalism is such a revolutionary system, it can frustrate the radicalism of even the most disaffected intellectuals by generating markets for their radical ideas. Moreover, even when intellectuals attempt to turn their back on capitalism, as they have done for instance by attempting to sanctifying themselves as an avant-garde, they remain doomed to be incorporated within the capitalist system. Indeed, Berman argues that this is just as true of the Leninist vanguards as it is of the projects for ‘pure science’ of ‘art for arts sake’. Thus, Berman argues, we confront a system that it is hard to imagine anyone transcending (Berman 1983: 115-20).
Fortunately, Berman’s ‘pessimism of the intellect’ need not be contagious. As we have seen, Marx’s conception of a vanguard party, and Lenin’s too once we move away from the crude caricatures (cf Cliff 1975-9; Harding 1977-81; Le Blanc 1993; Liebman 1975), operates at the fault-line generated by the division of labour between revolutionary movements of the proletariat against alienation, and fragmented struggles of individual groups of workers within the system. Marx believed that these moments of the struggle both within and against capital were neither mutually exclusive nor did they automatically flow into each other. Rather, he realised that the tension which existed between the two elements of the struggle called for a revolutionary party to act as the organised political voice of the more advanced sections of the workers’ movement. In this framework, intellectuals could contribute to the socialist movement only if they broke with their inherited elitist frame of reference, and looked at society from the standpoint of the most advanced sections of the working class. If, however, intellectuals attempted to smuggle elitist attitudes into the workers party, then, as Marx and Engels wrote in a circular letter sent to a number of leading members of the German Social Democratic Party on 17th-18th September 1879, the party should not be afraid to break with them: ‘if these gentlemen form themselves into a Social-Democratic Petty-Bourgeois Party they have a perfect right to do so; one could then negotiate with them, form a bloc according to circumstances, etc. But in a workers’ party they are an adulterating element’. So, while Marx was keen to realise the positive contribution that intellectuals could make to the workers’ movement, he was also aware that intellectuals had a tendency to distort the movement in their own image. It was on account of this tendency that Marx’s attitude to those intellectuals who sought to join workers’ parties was, as Hal Draper has argued, one of ‘mistrust tempered by hope, or apprehension sweetened by expectation’ (Draper 1978: 511).
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[1] Thanks to David Bates, Kristyn Gorton, Paul Reynolds and Peter Thomas for their comments on this essay in draft, and to Dom Lowe for an inspirational conversation.
[2] See for instance Carol Johnson’s argument that ‘Marx tends to depict proletarian revolutionary consciousness as something that develops automatically and inevitably as the proletariat and the contradictions of capitalism develop’ (Johnson 1980: 73; 93).
[3] For a discussion of Marx’s developing understanding of the division of labour in general and his increasingly sophisticated articulation of its relationship to the emergence of social classes see Ratanssi 1982; 79.
[4] It was through the concept of the division of labour that Marx gave a materialist depth to his concept of alienation (Beamish 1992: 8).
[5] I am aware that Marx’s views on the division of labour and the parameters of its possible suppression developed from a utopianism that is evident in his earlier work towards a more realistic analysis in his mature work. Unfortunately, considerations of space preclude a discussion of this intellectual evolution (cf Ratanssi 1982; Beamish 1992).
[6] Later commentators have tended to rename the manufacturing division of labour, the technical division of labour.
[7] For a comprehensive rebuttal of Avineri’s arguments see Draper 1978; 636-643.
[8] The word erziehung is usually translated as upbringing in this sentence; thanks to Peter Thomas for pointing out that the more common translation as education is also better in this context.