The Essence of Revolutionary Practice

I have been puzzled by the term 'revolution' since the 1970s when I started reading Marx's work. In the past few years my puzzlement has focused more precisely on the 'revolutionary practice' that appears in Marx's third thesis on Feuerbach:

The materialist doctrine that men are products of circumstances and upbringing, and that, therefore, changed men are products of changed circumstances and changed upbringing, 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. -- Karl Marx, Theses on Feuerbach

I was on the brink of dismissing it as a rhetorical flourish that 'solves' a philosophical problem poetically. Then it occurred to me. Revolutionary practice was a euphemism for action guided by faith, something that obviously couldn't be uttered in a commentary on Feuerbach's critique of religion. What Marx meant by revolution was simply the name that had been given to major political upheavals that had led to the termination of the ancien regimes: the French Revolution, the Glorious Revolution, the American Revolution. In his Introduction to A Contribution to the Critique of Hegel’s Philosophy of Right, Marx lamented that Germany had suffered from all the subsequent counter-revolutions without ever benefiting from a revolution of its own. It was in this Introduction, that Marx proposed the idea of a proletarian revolution as well as the famous aphorism about religion being the opium of the people.

To this non-specialist reader, several of Marx's criticisms of Feuerbach in the Theses seem exaggerated or unsupported by an objective reading of Feuerbach. In all fairness, this was not something Marx intended to publish and he may have simply been putting down provocative markers for later attention and revision. The Grundrisse is chock full of disclaimers that one or the other observation "does not belong here." Marx also had a habit of scolding his sources for "not seeing" something that he realized after reading the source.

In The Essence of Christianity, Feuerbach discussed the contradiction of faith and love, with love revealing the "hidden essence of religion" while faith is its conscious form. Love expresses "the identity of the divine being with the human" while the form of religion, faith, revolves around the distinction between the human and the divine, the believer and the unbeliever. 

In his analysis of (partial) political revolutions, in his Introduction to the Critique of Hegel’s Philosophy of Right, Marx highlighted the need for a common enemy to unite the other classes:

For the revolution of a nation, and the emancipation of a particular class of civil society to coincide, for one estate to be acknowledged as the estate of the whole society, all the defects of society must conversely be concentrated in another class, a particular estate must be the estate of the general stumbling-block, the incorporation of the general limitation, a particular social sphere must be recognized as the notorious crime of the whole of society, so that liberation from that sphere appears as general self-liberation.

But in 1840s Germany, no particular class "has the constituency, the penetration, the courage, or the ruthlessness that could mark it out as the negative representative of society." It is this absence of a "negative representative class" that provides the opening for the proletariat as the revolutionary subject.

...a class with radical chains, a class of civil society which is not a class of civil society, an estate which is the dissolution of all estates, a sphere which has a universal character by its universal suffering and claims no particular right because no particular wrong, but wrong generally, is perpetuated against it; which can invoke no historical, but only human, title; which does not stand in any one-sided antithesis to the consequences but in all-round antithesis to the premises of German statehood; a sphere, finally, which cannot emancipate itself without emancipating itself from all other spheres of society and thereby emancipating all other spheres of society, which, in a word, is the complete loss of man and hence can win itself only through the complete re-winning of man.

This distinction between "a class of civil society which is not a class of civil society" and all other spheres of society is an inversion of the distinction between the divine being and the human but fundamentally, it is a distinction. There is even an echo of the Sermon on the Mount in it. "Blessed are the meek, for they will inherit the earth." Blessed is the proletariat, for it will free all society.

To borrow Feuerbach's distinction, while faith is the conscious form of Marx's revolutionary practice, its essence is love. The full context of Marx's description of religion as opium reveals a deeper sympathy with the impulse toward religion:

Religious suffering is, at one and the same time, the expression of real suffering and a protest against real suffering. Religion is the sigh of the oppressed creature, the heart of a heartless world, and the soul of soulless conditions.

Marx was concerned with eradicating the real suffering religion expressed and thus nominated the proletariat "which has a universal character by its universal suffering" as the agent for ending that suffering. There is an undoubted symmetry to that argument but no obvious procedural logic. One might speculate that Marx's subsequent decades-long study of political economy was in search of such a logic. What that investigation discovered, however, was not a logic of revolutionary practice but of capital accumulation, whose "absolute general law" was the expansion of a disposable industrial reserve army:

The greater the social wealth, the functioning capital, the extent and energy of its growth, and, therefore, also the absolute mass of the proletariat and the productiveness of its labour, the greater is the industrial reserve army. The same causes which develop the expansive power of capital, develop also the labour power at its disposal.

But if religion is "the sigh of the oppressed creature, the heart of a heartless world," why should a mere quantitative increase in the "mass of a consolidated surplus population, whose misery is in inverse ratio to the amount of torture it has to undergo in the form of labour" turn that mass away from the opium of religion -- supplemented by synthetic opiates, whether chemical, mechanical, or digital -- toward the elixir of revolutionary practice? 

The formation of "a disposable industrial reserve army, which belongs to capital just as absolutely as if the latter had bred it at its own cost" was an analysis that Marx had developed in his 1857-58 notebooks in his engagement with the 1821 pamphlet, The Source and Remedy of the National Difficulties. He later summarized that encounter in Theories of Surplus Value, "This scarcely known pamphlet... contains an important advance on Ricardo," Marx wrote:

It bluntly describes surplus-value—or “profit”, as Ricardo calls it (often also “surplus produce”), or “interest”, as the author of the pamphlet terms it—as “surplus labour”, the labour which the worker performs gratis, the labour he performs over and above the quantity of labour by which the value of his labour-power is replaced, i.e., by which he produces an equivalent for his wages.

Toward the end of his discussion of the pamphlet, Marx commented, "Our pamphleteer overlooks two things":

As a result of the introduction of machinery, a mass of workers is constantly being thrown out of employment, a section of the population is thus made redundant; the surplus product therefore finds fresh labour for which it can be exchanged without any increase in population and without any need to extend the absolute working-time.

The above comment is simply an alternative phrasing of Marx's description in Capital of the "absolute general law of capital accumulation." Its final point about the non-necessity of extending working hours may have been in rebuttal to the pamphlet's question:

How is it that notwithstanding the unbounded extent of our capital, the progressive improvement and wonderful perfection of our machinery, our canals, roads, and of all other things that can, either facilitate labour, or increase its produce; our labourer, instead of having his labours abridged, toils infinitely more, more hours, more laboriously...?

What Marx overlooked in his comment about the lack of need to extend working time was that employers extended hours whether or not they needed to. Average weekly hours in the U.K. continued to increase through the 1820s and only began a gradual decline after 1830. By 1864, when Marx was writing the draft for TSV, average weekly hours had declined by a little less than four and a half hours or 6.6%.

In the Grundrisse, Marx's discussion of the inversion of necessary and superfluous labour time recapitulated Feuerbach's discussion of the inversion of the relationship between humanity and its divine projection, "In production resting on capital, the existence of necessary labour time is conditional on the creation of superfluous labour time." In notebook VI, this inversion become vertiginous:

Labour capacity can perform its necessary labour only if its surplus labour has value for capital, if it can be realized by capital. Thus, if this realizability is blocked by one or another barrier, then (1) labour capacity itself appears outside the conditions of the reproduction of its existence; it exists without the conditions of its existence, and is therefore a mere encumbrance; needs without the means to satisfy them; (2) necessary labour appears as superfluous, because the superfluous is not necessary. It is necessary only to the extent that it is the condition for the realization of capital. 

Where is revolutionary practice when we need it? How does self-change arise from these changing circumstances? In notebook VII of the Grundrisse, Marx declared that the compulsion of capital "to reduce labour time to a minimum, while it posits labour time, on the other side, as sole measure and source of wealth" creates "the material conditions to blow this foundation sky-high." "The more this contradiction develops," he argued, the clearer it becomes that "the mass of workers must themselves appropriate their own surplus labour." In his Inaugural Address to the First International, Marx hailed the Ten-Hours' Bill as a victory of the political economy of the working class over the political economy of the middle class. In chapter 10 of volume one of Capital, he affirmed that the limitation of the working day was a necessary condition for "improvement and emancipation." And in chapter 48 of volume three, proclaimed the reduction of the working day as a basic prerequisite for achieving the "realm of freedom." 

One begins to discern a pattern here. But that pattern is both confirmed and confused by a very famous passage from Marx's 1859 Preface to A Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy:

It is not the consciousness of men that determines their existence, but their social existence that determines their consciousness. At a certain stage of development, the material productive forces of society come into conflict with the existing relations of production or – this merely expresses the same thing in legal terms – with the property relations within the framework of which they have operated hitherto. From forms of development of the productive forces these relations turn into their fetters. Then begins an era of social revolution. The changes in the economic foundation lead sooner or later to the transformation of the whole immense superstructure.

The first line reiterates the description of the materialist doctrine from thesis #3: "that men are products of circumstances and upbringing, and that, therefore, changed men are products of changed circumstances and changed upbringing." But it omits what that doctrine forgets: "that it is men who change circumstances and that the educator must himself be educated." Instead it pivots to the conflict between the productive forces of society and the existing relations of production in which the latter becomes a restraint on the continued development of the former. In Feuerbachian terms, think of the productive forces as humanity and the relations of production as God. 

"Then begins an era of social revolution." Marx no longer talked about human activity or self-change but about changes in the economic foundation and political superstructure. "The coincidence of the changing of circumstances and of human activity or self-change" is either taken for granted or overlooked as inessential. One need no longer worry about the contradictory nature of revolutionary practice as love versus revolutionary practice as faith.

There is an automatism to the self-changing presumed to spring from the fetters placed on the productive forces in the Preface that is inconsistent with the Promethean world-changing ethos of the Theses. Prometheus despised the gods and his chains and torment were an eternal punishment for his defiance. For the proletariat, their fetters are presumed to be a signal for their self-emancipation from torment. The first time as tragedy; the second as comedy? But Marx was not writing for the stage. He wanted to change the world. The detour from revolutionary practice to revolutionary era was a dead end. Walter Benjamin commented on it in one of his last drafts:

...classless society is not to be conceived as the endpoint of historical development.

From this erroneous conception Marx's epigones have derived (among other things) the notion of the "revolutionary situation," which, as we know, has always refused to arrive.

The error was not the Social Democrats', as Benjamin thought, but Marx's.