collective projects of social transformation were married to systematic efforts to understand the processes of past and present, to produce a premeditated future. The Russian Revolution is in this respect the inaugural incarnation of a new kind of history, founded on an unprecedented form of agency. Notoriously, the results of the great cycle of upheavals it initiated have to date been far from those expected at their outset. But the alteration of the potential of historical action, in the course of the 20th century, remains irreversible.
Now the effect of Thompson’s appeals to agency in his critique of Althusser is to permit a slide from sense one through sense two to sense three. Their rhetorical impact relies on the persuasive everyday evidence that people go about their lives making all sorts of choices, enacting values and pursuing ends, some of them realized, others not, others realized in ways not wanted. This kind of agency (choice of husband or lover, in Thompson’s witty parable of the woman worker)17 is then elided with the limited collective project, which is less frequent (the strike in her workshop), and that can then be tacitly equated with the form of agency indicated by Morris’s dictum, which clearly refers to overall social transformations (its context is the Peasants’ Revolt), which are very rare indeed as willed processes in history. The reductive phrase ‘ever-baffled, ever—resurgent human agents’ provides the timeless linkage. The conceptual error involved is to amalgamate those actions which are indeed conscious volitions at a personal or local level, but whose social incidence is profoundly involuntary (relation of marriage-age, say, to population growth), with those actions which are conscious volitions at the level of their own social incidence, under the single rubric of ‘agency’. The paradoxical result of Thompson’s critique of Althusser is thus actually to reproduce the fundamental failing of the latter, by a polemical inversion. For the two antagonistic formulae of a ‘natural-human process without a subject’ and ‘ever-baffled, ever-resurgent agents of an unmastered practice’ are both claims of an essentially apodictic and speculative character—eternal axioms that in no way help us to trace the actual, variable roles of different types of deliberate venture, personal or collective, in history. A historical, as opposed to an axiomatic, approach to the problem would seek to trace the curve of such enterprises, which has risen sharply—in terms of mass of participation and scale of objective—in the last two centuries, from previously low levels. Even so, however, it is important to recall that there are huge areas of existence which remain largely outside any form of concerted agency at all. Demographic patterns, to take the previous example, have traditionally fallen outside the domain of any conscious social choice. If they are now beginning for the first time to be the object of attempts at deliberate intervention, initial experiments in population control still remain largely ineffective, as in India or China (as well as authoritarian), while inducements to population growth, as in the DDR or France, have so far yielded little results. Another zone of primordial human practice that remains even more unwilled is, of course, language: although even here the 20th century has seen partial exceptions, such as the revival of Hebrew in Israel. The area of self-determination, to use a more precise term than ‘agency’, has been widening in the past 150 years. But it is still very much less than its opposite. The whole purpose of historical materialism, after all, has precisely been to give men and women the means with which to exercise a real popular self-determination for the first time in history. This is, exactly, the objective of a socialist revolution, whose aim is to inaugurate the transition from what Marx called the realm of necessity to the realm of freedom.
The lack of any echo of this basic theme of Marxism in Thompson’s essay on Althusser is very surprising. All the more so, perhaps, because it does find a place in the lengthy text addressed to Kolakowski, written earlier and now published in the same volume. There, Thompson singles out ‘the human potential to act as rational and moral agents’ as ‘a concept coincident with that of the passage from the kingdom of necessity to that of freedom’.18 Under communism, ‘things are thrown from the saddle and cease to ride mankind. Men struggle free from their own machinery and subdue it to human needs and definitions. Man ceases to live in a defensive posture, warding off the assault of “circumstances”, his furthest triumph in social engineering a system of checks and balances and countervailing powers against his own evil will. He commences to live from his own resources of creative possibility, liberated from the determinism of “process” within class-divided societies’.19 From this account, however, Thompson draws an unexpected conclusion. ‘Should this kingdom of freedom be attained, the argument entails no guarantee whatsoever that men will choose wisely nor be good.’20 This contingency soon assumes a very tangible and immediate form. For ‘it might be possible, hideously inapposite as the metaphor appears, that the “socialist” countries have already shuffled across Marx’s frontier into the “kingdom of freedom”. That is, whereas in previous history social being appeared, in the last analysis, to determine social consciousness, because the logic of process supervened over human intentions; in socialist societies there may be no such determining logic of process, and social consciousness may determine social being.’21 Thompson then goes on to speculate as follows: ‘Methods of historical analysis to which one had become habituated would cease to have the same validity in investigating socialist evolution. On the one hand, it opens up the perspective of a long protraction of tyranny. So long as any ruling group, perhaps fortuitously established in power at the moment of revolution, can reproduce itself and control or manufacture social consciousness there will be no inherent logic of process within the system which, as social being, will work powerfully enough to bring its overthrow.’22 But at the same time, ‘over and above any challenge emerging from “social being”, the ruling group has most to fear from the challenge of rational “social consciousness”. It is exactly rationality and an open, evaluative moral process which “ought” to be the logic of socialist process, expressed in democratic forms of self-management and in democratic institutions’.23 The flight of this whole argument, hypothetically advanced as it is, must take aback anyone familiar with the theory of historical materialism or the reality of the USSR and associated countries. For the realm of necessity is founded, for Marx, on scarcity: the leap into freedom evoked in Capital only becomes possible with the advent of generalized abundance. While the ruling stratum in the USSR, far from enjoying a paramount mastery over the laws of historical development in the Soviet Union, has notoriously stumbled through a long series of unpredicted social crises and uncontrolled economic processes, from sudden grain shortages to wild epidemics of terror to creeping paralyses of productivity—all of them blind motions of a society dark to all its members.
How could Thompson have arrived at such a perverse construction? The answer lies in a twofold error. Firstly, he has implicitly identified historical agency with the expression of will or aspiration. Indeed, throughout The Poverty of Theory, the terms in which he conceives it tend to be existential in range—‘choice’, ‘value’, ‘decision’. What is missing from them is any due complementary emphasis on the cognitive dimensions of agency. The sovereign practice of the associated producers envisaged by Marx as the attainment of communism was not only a product of will, but equally and indivisibly of knowledge. For any materialist study of the variable forms of social agency in history, this component of it is central. ‘Mastery’ of society in the mere sense of an instrumental political voluntarism has nothing new about it: it has been the ambition and activity of princes since the dawn of the division of labour. The very existence of the State, as a centralized apparatus of coercion and administration, guarantees the presence of this kind of power in every class society. From the earliest times, and in the most diverse social formations, it produced its own manuals—the Mirror of Kings, compilations of tactical adages and prescriptions for successful exercise of rule which can be found from ancient Egypt to mediaeval Tibet, and which flourished above all in the Islamic world. Modern political thought in the West owes its origins to these brittle guide-books of domination: what else is the form of Machiavelli’s Prince? The limitations of this secular literature are those of its historical understanding: unable to grasp, often even to glimpse, the social mechanisms underlying political stability or change, it was confined to myopic maxims for regal conduct, sententious or cynical as the culture prompted. The conservative type of agency it codified survives to this day, but with an increasingly significant
