obstacle to the further development of the productive forces? Or the obverse of the same question: When can we speak of an accordance between productive forces and relation[s] of production in the capitalist mode of production? Strict analysis leads to only one possible answer: never.41
A strict interpretation of psychoanalysis thus would turn a historical obstacle into an inherent one that can never be overcome. In all the hitherto existing history of humankind, then, there would be no agreement except in disagreement, no harmony except in conflict, and no encounter except in a missed encounter.
In fact, a similar conclusion had already been reached in For Marx by Althusser, for whom “the great law of unevenness suffers no exceptions,” for the simple reason that it appears to be a universal law of the development of any social formation whatsoever:
This unevenness suffers no exceptions because it is not itself an exception: not a derivative law, produced by peculiar conditions (imperialism, for example) or intervening in the interference between the developments of distinct social formations (the unevenness of economic development, for example, between “advanced” and “backward” countries, between colonizers and colonized, etc.). Quite the contrary, it is a primitive law, with priority over these peculiar cases and able to account for them precisely in so far as it does not derive from their existence.42
This primitive or originary fact of unevenness would help explain why the discoveries of Marx and Freud, even more so than with Columbus’s, have been compared with the upheavals caused by the Copernican revolution. Just as Marxism shows that “the human subject, the economic, political or philosophical ego, is not the ‘center’ of history,” so does strict analysis show that “the human subject is decentered, constituted by a structure that, too, has a ‘center’ solely in the imaginary misprision of the ‘ego,’ that is, in the ideological formations in which it ‘recognizes’ itself.”43 And yet, when the decentering effects of unevenness are thus posited as insuperable facts, as primitive laws, or as quasi-ontological conditions of being as such, do we not also lose out on the potential for change that would seem to be the outcome of uneven development for Marx and Martí? Does this potential for radical change, including a change in the mechanism of the whole existing social structure itself, necessarily depend on the positing of an ideal of natural harmony and organicity to be established or restored—with everything that such a restorative ideal entails, for example, in terms of the exorcism of violence, including domestic violence, which then always threatens to come back with a vengeance, as in Martí? Alternatively, does the potential for change depend on a humanist appeal to subjective freedom, allegedly disavowed in the structuralist account of uneven development? Is the humanism of the young Marx then necessarily the only answer to an Althusserian-inspired interpretation of Marxism? These are some of the fundamental theoretical questions—regarding the limits of nature and structure, determinism and freedom, humanism and anti-humanism—that will continue to be raised in art and literature in the form of melodramatic oppositions, as witnessed in the novel to which I turn in the next chapter.
2
MARXISM AND MELODRAMA
The Double Intrigue
What the bourgeoisie and proletariat, middle class and lumpenproletariat look for throughout the length and breadth of the culture industry, and find without knowing it, or without needing to know it, is a systematic understanding of society unified and transfigured by melodrama.
Carlos Monsiváis, Mexican Postcards
Any discussion of Los errores (The Errors), the sixth and last novel by José Revueltas (if we except El apando, a short narrative whose generic nature remains unstable but which in any case hardly qualifies as a novel), published in 1964, must take as its point of departure the structural tension between its two storylines: that of the social outcasts and lumpen, with its prostitutes, pimps, small criminals, and circus artists; and that of the Communist Party, with its militant workers, its cadres, and its ideologues, as well as its typical class enemies, such as the usurer or the fascist police.1 In itself, the contrast between these two sides of the story already carries great potential for melodrama, and in fact the entire novel breathes the feuilleton-like atmosphere of the genre, mixing elements of farce, the comedy of errors, the morality tale, and the popular theater. But we should avoid any premature judgment as to the exact value of these melodramatic elements within the context of Revueltas’s literary work or political thought, since they fulfill various functions all at once.
On one hand, there can be no doubt that the sheer persistence of the criminal underworld—the inframundo or bajo mundo—left to its own devices far removed from the high-sounding debates among leaders and intellectuals of the Party, serves the effect of brutally unmasking the latter’s hypocrisy, not to say its utter historical inexistence in Mexico, as Revueltas had discussed it two years earlier in his Ensayo sobre un proletariado sin cabeza (Essay on a Headless Proletariat). In this sense, we might say that, for the Mexican author, there will not exist a genuine communist party unless it finally includes those members of the underworld whom orthodox Marxism had always excluded under the denigrating term of “lumpenproletariat.”2 In spite of their enormous curiosity for the genre of melodrama, especially the work of Eugène Sue, about whom they write several eloquent pages in The Holy Family, Marx and Engels only rarely show a comparable appreciation for the group of marginals that typically are the genre’s protagonists. “Marx and Engels do not spare their invectives with respect to the latter,” Ernesto Laclau comments, referring to the lumpenproletariat, in his recent book On Populist Reason, before he recalls how Marx speaks in this regard of “the scum of society,” whereas Engels uses even stronger language: “This rabble is absolutely brazen . . . Every leader of the workers who uses these scoundrels as guards or relies on them for support proves himself by this action alone a traitor to the movement.”3 And yet, with the help of Peter Stallybrass, Laclau goes on to demonstrate how, even in Marx’s perspective, the lumpenproletariat appears after all as a key reference for the articulation—this time contingent and hegemonic, not deterministic, in nature—of any and all emancipatory politics. This perspective is further confirmed in Revueltas’s Los errores.
Precisely insofar as it lacks any stable social inscription, the lumpen constitutes something like an ideal term of heterogeneity from which to articulate a political identity without essentialisms. This is how Frantz Fanon understood it, long after Marx, in a fragment from The Wretched of the Earth in which he would appear to offer an anticipation of the whole gallery of characters that populate the pages of Los errores:
The lumpenproletariat, once it is constituted, brings all its forces to endanger the “security” of the town, and is the sign of the irrevocable decay, the gangrene ever present at the heart of colonial domination. So the pimps, the hooligans, the unemployed, and the petty criminals . . . throw themselves into the struggle like stout working men. These classless idlers will by militant and decisive action discover the path that leads to nationhood . . . The prostitutes too, and the maids who are paid two pounds a month . . . all who turn in circles between suicide and madness, will recover their balance, once more go forward and march proudly in the great procession of the awakened nation.4
In Los errores, of course, we are a far cry from such an awakening of the lumpenproletariat to the solution of its troubles. The worlds of misery and of communist militancy do not really meet in this novel, except in crime and the repression of crime. Even so, it would seem as if this entire underworld, by its sheer physical presence, were loudly proclaiming the void of a duty, like the task of an ethical or moral revision of really existing communist politics. The party, the narrator seems to tell us through all the classless characters gathered in his text, should also include the latter as the true motor of history, far from the preachings about history as the “objective” history of the class struggle, according to the hefty manuals from the Soviet Academy.
The gesture of converting the lumpen, by way of the genre conventions of melodrama, into an integral
