The Undivided Past (17 page)

This in turn
meant they failed to understand that most societies comprised a complex hierarchy of ranks, levels, and gradations, which melded and merged imperceptibly one into another across the boundaries of what Marx and Engels believed were these three impermeable and antagonistic class identities. As the complex residential patterns of cities, towns, and villages made plain, people were rarely cut off from each other in homogeneous, hermetically sealed suburbs or settlements, which meant there were many internal divisions within their three ostensibly uniform and united classes that Marx and Engels ignored: between aristocrats and landed gentry, between bankers and businessmen, between industrialists competing for the same market, and between the many different layers of skilled and unskilled labor. Nor could the
aristocracy,
bourgeoisie, and proletariat be directly elided into partisan political activists or organizations, and there would never be one single historical example of “all” the bourgeoisie or “all” the proletariat embracing revolutionary doctrines. Finally, Marx and Engels were mistaken in asserting that their three classes, based on specific relationships to the means of production, were more important than individual identities more usually expressed in patterns of consumption. For most people, work has only ever been part of their life (especially when it is seasonal, casual, or intermittent), and has never been the sole determinant of how they see themselves, or themselves in relation to others.
²⁸

The reality of these more complex and varied patterns of economic development also meant the existence of other anomalous classes and groups whose existence Marx and Engels were grudgingly compelled to recognize, yet whose relations to the means of production did not fit into their simple tripartite scheme. There were the agrarian
peasantry, rural laborers and farm workers, who were compelled to endure what Marx and Engels dismissed as “the idiocy of rural life”: they were neither
urbanized nor industrialized proletarians, yet they formed the largest single occupational group in the mid-nineteenth century, not just in Europe, but around the world, and they would continue to do so well into the twentieth century.
²⁹
There were the petty bourgeoisie,
who were urbanized but not industrialized, and who were neither wholly proletarian (though some worked with their hands) nor fully bourgeois (though others, on a small scale, did own
means of production), and whose numbers greatly expanded during the closing decades of the nineteenth century. And at the very bottom of society was the “lumpenproletariat,” who had given up on finding employment altogether, and whom Marx and Engels wrote off as “that passively rotting mass.”
³⁰
None of these classes, they concluded, had any serious revolutionary potential, but this would not matter, since Marx and Engels predicted they would all disappear as industrial
capitalism inexorably advanced. It was a view of the future that would prove completely mistaken.
³¹

The efforts of Marx and Engels to endow their three chosen classes with collective identities and clear trajectories as the drivers of past, present, and future change owed more to their powerful but reductive imaginations and to their engaged and impassioned rhetoric than to the refractory and complex nature of
historical reality; and for the same reasons, their understanding of the recent past was equally flawed. They interpreted the
French Revolution of 1789 as a major historical discontinuity, by arguing that a rising and increasingly unified middle class had overthrown a declining and enfeebled nobility, and had “abolished
feudal property in favour of bourgeois property.”
³²
Yet in reality there was no such stark division between the middle and upper classes, and there was no such burgeoning capitalist class, eager to pioneer industrial progress, while those few who were formally described as bourgeois were “a legally defined social category which granted the non-noble elites of many towns privileges similar to the
aristocracy.” In 1789 and across the ensuing decade, none of the major players in the Revolution and its aftermath claimed to be bourgeois or to be acting on behalf of a social grouping to which that name was applied. As late as the 1830s, industry had made little progress, and
France remained a predominantly agrarian nation, governed by—and in—the interests of a largely traditional elite of landed notables. Only during a brief period, from the 1820s to the 1840s, did a body of literature emerge, produced by
liberal politicians and writers such as
Thierry and
Guizot, implausibly casting the French bourgeoisie as the anti-aristocratic heroes of
1789.
³³
Yet it was this flawed and polemical interpretation, written with immediate political objectives in mind, that Marx and Engels mistakenly accepted and exaggerated and wrote into their own work.
³⁴

In the same way, their hopeful predictions that 1848 might witness a continent-wide proletarian
revolution, in the aftermath of the German bourgeois revolution, were based on Engels’s serious misreading of the situation in Manchester, which Marx had uncritically accepted. Following his initial sojourn in the city, Engels had taken away an exaggerated picture of proletarian and bourgeois
class solidarity and of the conflict between them. Beyond doubt, Manchester was the largest industrial metropolis devoted to the manufacture of cotton, and it had grown with unprecedented rapidity since the 1800s. But the
economic and occupational structures were more varied than Engels appreciated, for there were also many retail, service, construction, and distribution businesses.
³⁵
Moreover, the social cleavages were less marked than he claimed, and they would lessen still further when the economic downturns of the 1840s were past and the workers became (contrary to his hopes and expectations) better off. Relations between employers and their men were also more nuanced and less distant, thanks to common
religion, shared political loyalties, and the local celebration of civic milestones or
great
national events.
³⁶
The two separate, sundered collective aggregations Engels claimed to discern in Manchester were in reality neither wholly homogeneous nor invariably antagonistic, for as was also the case with the assumed solidarities and antagonisms of religions and nations, there were many connections and conversations across these allegedly all-encompassing identities and impermeable boundaries of class.

Engels also confused the broader implications of developments in Manchester with the process of industrialization that was already taking place in Britain, and was now starting to happen elsewhere in Europe. To begin with, he failed to appreciate that Manchester was unusual among large British industrial cities, for in many of them, such as Birmingham, the units of production were small workshops rather than factories, which
meant relations between men and their masters were correspondingly closer. In
addition, Engels did not realize that industrial cities (and industrial production) were not typical of mid-nineteenth-century
Britain. Scarcely 10 percent of the nation’s working population was factory-employed, and since Britain boasted the most advanced economy in the world, this meant the percentage was even lower across the continent. Despite the hopes of Marx and Engels to the contrary, neither the whole of Britain nor the whole of Europe was in the process of becoming like Manchester, and it was a serious mistake to inflate the unique history of this small part of the British working class into a universal template of global proletarian development. Yet it was only on the basis of such an unrealistic view that they could ever have entertained the implausible hope that in 1848 vast numbers of industrial workers across the whole of the continent would emerge from their factories to stage a unified proletarian
revolution against the bourgeoisie, and thereby usher in the socialist utopia.
³⁷

The arguments that Marx and Engels advanced for the primacy of class identities over those of religion or nation, and for the unique importance of class conflict in driving the historical process, were thus highly tendentious. As the (formerly Marxist) historian
Gareth Stedman Jones has written, “much of what was first put forward in the
Manifesto
and later accepted as a commonsense understanding of the making of the modern world belongs more to the realm of mythology than fact.”
³⁸
By the end of 1848, the year when it was predicted with quasi-millenarian anticipation that everything would change in Europe as a bourgeois revolution in Germany would be followed by its proletarian successor, the traditional forces of authority successfully reasserted themselves across the continent, and Marx grudgingly admitted that it had been premature to claim in the
Manifesto
that the “
formation of the proletariat into a class, [the] overthrow of the bourgeois supremacy, [and the] conquest of
political power by the proletariat” had been imminent.
³⁹
Pace
The Communist Manifesto
, even bourgeois revolution was not inevitable, and nor did the proletariat of 1848, such as it was, evince much enthusiasm for giving history a helping hand in the direction of the ultimate classless society.

Marx and Engels were not only mistaken in their predictions of an imminent revolutionary future, initially bourgeois and subsequently proletarian; they were also suspiciously light on detail when they described the nature, the working, and the institutions of the postbourgeois world—and of the postbourgeois identities—that the triumphant revolutionary proletariat was expected eventually to bring into being.
⁴⁰
They offered no considered guidance as to how
private property would be abolished, how the state would wither away, or how class would disappear—their vague imaginations carrying them no further than an unspecified “association” in which “the free development of each is the condition for the free development of all.”
⁴¹
But this was naïve verbiage, for if all
capital, property, and productive resources were initially centralized in the hands of the state, then they would have to be administered and allocated by those in authority (in which case both the state and a ruling class, far from withering away, would still exist), or they would have to be given over to the workers (in which case private property, albeit redistributed among new owners, would continue in being).
⁴²
Either way, there would still be
economic (and
political) inequality, and according to the criteria devised and deployed by Marx and Engels, this would
mean that the class differences and class identities they believed they had discerned would survive and endure rather than vanish and disappear.

Given its manifold limitations, blind spots, exceptions, and outright errors, it is not surprising that the view of class-based identity and conflict developed by Marx and Engels during the late 1840s made little immediate impact.
The Condition of the Working Class
originally appeared in German, but was not translated into English until 1885 (in the United States) and 1892 (in the United Kingdom).
The German Ideology
was never completed, and only appeared in print in 1932. A limited edition of
The Communist Manifesto
was initially published in German in 1847, but plans to translate it into English, French, Italian, Flemish, and Danish
were postponed indefinitely.
⁴³
After the failed
revolutions of 1848, the
Communist League, which had commissioned the
Manifesto
, was disbanded, and although Marx later tried to make the First International (which he helped found in London in 1864) into a vehicle of global working-class solidarity, it was for most of its existence little more than a “paper organization,” riven by doctrinal disputes, and disbanded in 1876.
⁴⁴
By then new socialist parties were coming into being, but they were more concerned to further the participation of organized
labor within the existing political system than to bring about a continent-wide proletarian revolution. On Marx’s death in 1883, Engels claimed that “just as
Darwin discovered the law of development of organic nature, so Marx discovered the law of development of human history”; but he had done no such thing, and few besides Engels believed he had. In an era of growing (albeit still limited)
national consciousness and solidarities, class as an alternative form of collective identity possessed very limited appeal, while the idea that it was the most important aggregation of all had gained little traction.
⁴⁵

During the twenty years after Marx’s death, Europe
urbanized rapidly, industry and factory employment proliferated, the Second International was founded in 1889, socialist parties spread across the continent, and
The Communist Manifesto
belatedly achieved a global readership in translation (Engels died in 1895, his deeds as Marx’s friend and funder, collaborator and champion soon forgotten). But of what new relevance were the teachings and predictions of the
Manifesto
under the changed conditions of the fin de siècle? The philosopher
Karl Kautsky, who would be referred to by some as the pope of Marxism, insisted that Marx’s doctrines of class identity, social polarization, and proletarian revolution retained their value and urgency. But the German politician
Eduard Bernstein argued that such “orthodoxy” needed significant “revising,” since relations between the bourgeoisie and workers had significantly improved since 1848, which meant the prospects for a proletarian revolution were dwindling, and that “evolutionary”
socialism was the more likely path forward.
⁴⁶
Contemporary social developments would largely vindicate Bernstein’s revisionist view: the new, factory-based proletariat was still a minority of the working class, while the growth of reformist trade unions, which
preferred to get a better deal for their members than overthrow the capitalist system, cast doubt on the likelihood of a workers’
revolution anywhere or anytime soon. Moreover, Europe’s
socialist parties were nationally rather than internationally constituted, and for all their claims to have espoused the revolutionary doctrines of Marxism, they accommodated themselves to “bourgeois” parliamentary politics and the significance they attached to the
Manifesto
was “mainly emblematic.”
⁴⁷