Did the Proletariat Ever Exist?

 

When I speak of the death of the proletariat, I do not mean to imply that the working class has ceased to exist.  There's a difference between the international working class (which definitely still exists) and the proletariat.  What's the difference?

As Karl Marx put it, "The proletariat is political, or it is nothing."  Well, then, we have to admit that it is nothing.  The proletariat is nothing.

Was it ever something?  What would it mean for it to be something?  That is to say, what would it mean for the proletariat to be political?

Rather than speaking of the proletariat simply as a class, technically, we should understand the proletariat as a political movement.  

Marx also said that the ruling ideas in every epoch are the ideas of its ruling class.  For the proletariat to exist as a political movement, it would have to be a self-conscious, self-moving movement.  As Guy Debord put it, "The proletariat is the class of consciousness."  Rather than a self-conscious proletarian movement, what we have today are several kinds of bourgeois socialism and petit-bourgeois socialism that have gained some adherents among the working class.  [Note: this is not the same thing as accusing anyone of "false consciousness".  The only people who have "false consciousness" are those who accuse others of false consciousness.]

Did any proletarian movement ever exist?  

When I'm in an optimistic mood, I see a vague outline of a proletarian movement that existed from around 1871 to around 1905 - scarcely more than thirty years.  It began around the time of the Paris Commune, and ended around the time of the Boer War, when the proletariat distracted itself to death.  

We could sum things up by saying that the proletarian movement arose out of nationalism, and came into existence by distinguishing itself from nationalism, only thirty-some years later to collapse back into nationalism.

And the proletarian movement, such as it existed, was never, by any means, a unified movement, but was constantly divided against itself in myriad ways.  (Some of these ways were national.)   The proletarian movement was far more engaged in infighting than it was ever involved in any struggle against the bourgeoisie.  Still, some scuffles did break out: the Haymarket Affair in 1886, the Lattimer Massacre in 1897, the Colorado Labor War of 1903-1904, and so on.

The proletarian movement had several threads within it, one of which was Marxism.  Marxism, as a real political movement, did not get going until the 1880s.  This was due to several factors: for one thing, Karl Marx debilitating sickness and, finally, death in 1883 - that was probably a prerequisite of any substantial Marxist political movement.  More importantly, the Anti-Socialist Laws went into effect.  The first was passed in 1878, and then it was extended, with some modifications, 4 times: in 1880, 1884, 1886, and 1888.  In 1890, Otto von Bismarck attempted to make the Anti-Socialist Laws permanent, but was opposed by the Kaiser, and so the laws lapsed and socialism became legal again, in a political struggle that ended with Bismarck's resignation in shame, after perhaps the most illustrious career of any chancellor before and perhaps, since.  It is fascinating that the movement grew most during this, the "illegal period" - and, in my opinion, it probably grew because it was illegal.  Forbidden fruit.  As Princess Leia said, "The more you tighten your grip, Tarkin, the more star systems will slip through your fingers."  The Law of Eristic Escalation: Imposition of Order = Escalation of Disorder.

During (most of) Marx's lifetime, his ideas were relatively unpopular and unknown.  It is not so much that his ideas were rejected by most people; it's simply that they had never heard of him.  That began to change in the wake of the Franco-Prussian war, which Prussia decisively won in March of 1871.  That month, the French National Guard took control of the City of Paris, and for the better part of two months, a complex, many-sided political and sometimes violent struggle for power occurred which became known as the Paris Commune.  When the French Army, under the command of Adolph Thiers, came in and put down this rebellion, they rounded up thousands of people, who became known as the "communards," and for a long time, it became a hotly debated question in European politics - what to do with the communards?  Simply execute them all?  Indeed, many were killed - a mass slaughter on a tremendous scale.  Europe was horrified but also unresolved - what was Thiers supposed to do with them?  Thus the communards evinced an outpouring of a profound and conflicted emotion - both sympathy and suspicion.  They rose to almost mythic status, as both heroes and villains.

Rumors began circulating that the communards were part of a secret organization called the International, and that it was directed by a mysterious professorial person in London, by the name of Karl Marx, who had issued some "manifesto" or other, some 23 years earlier.  Some plucky reporter for the New York World, writing under the name R. Landor, decided to investigate, and soon published Marx's first interview, on July 18, 1871.  Here he denied that he or the international was responsible for the Paris Commune, which was true - in fact, a delegation of those who were planning the revolt had met with him, and he told them not to do it.  It didn't matter; the interview was largely ignored.  (Another interview, 8 years later, from the Chicago Tribune, was so thoroughly ignored that almost no one even knew it existed until about a century later.)  At that time, the focus was not on this obscure intellectual, but on the revolutionary struggle of people like the communards - that is to say, on the workers themselves, engaged in their political self-transformation - as it should be.

By the time of the interview, Marx was already in the midst of a split that was gradually pulling the International apart.  He had tried to deny this, in an article called "Fictitious Splits in the International" two months earlier, but by the next year, in 1872, things came to a head at the Hague Congress. Marx and Engels convinced the leadership of the International, such as one of my favorite characters, the official president of the International, George Odger, to expel two of their opponents, Mikhail Bakunin and James Guillaume.  Moronically, Marx and Engels took the same moment to declare that the International was moving to the United States and that they themselves were withdrawing from it.  And so the official "International" withered away to nothing.  

It wasn't until the mid-1880s, after Marx's death, during the "illegal period" that the proletarian movement really took off and became a mass movement.  

And it remained one until around 1905, after which it started to dwindle.  By 1914, it died completely.

As I say, this is how I see things when I'm in an optimistic mood. But a lot of the time, I suspect that even to look at this period, from the 1880s to 1905, and to see a proletarian movement in there requires looking through rose-colored glasses - that it's more hype than reality.