individuals; they can only take shape and exert their effects in a virtually infinite network of interactions between human beings. The ‘resolution’ of the contradiction cannot consist in a return to narrower forms of human activity and life, but only in a collective mastery of the ‘totality of the productive forces’.
The proletariat, universal class
This can be put another way: the proletariat constitutes the universal class of history, an idea which is nowhere given more articulate and complete expression in Marx’s work than in this text. The imminence of revolutionary transformation and of communism is, in fact, based on this perfect coincidence in the same present time of the universalization of exchange and – ranged against a bourgeois class which has raised particular interest as such to universality – a ‘class’ which has, by contrast, no particular interest to defend. Deprived of all status and all property, and therefore of any ‘particular quality’ (Eigenschaft), the proletarian potentially possesses them all. Practically no longer existing at all through himself, he exists potentially through all other human beings. Let us note here that the German for ‘propertyless’ is eigentumslos. In spite of the sarcastic remarks Marx directed at Stirner, it is impossible here not to hear the same play on words as the latter had used – and abused. But it is turned round in the opposite direction now – against ‘private property’:
Only the proletarians of the present day, who are completely shut off from all self-activity, are in a position to achieve a complete and no longer restricted self-activity, which consists in the appropriation of a totality of productive forces and in the thus postulated development of a totality of capacities.19
Negative universality is converted into positive universality, deprivation into appropriation, loss of individuality into the ‘many-sided’ development of individuals, each of whom is a unique manifold of human relations.
Such a reappropriation can only occur for each person if it simultaneously occurs for all. ‘Modern universal intercourse can be controlled by individuals, therefore, only when controlled by all.’20 This explains why the revolution is not just communist in its outcome, but also in its form. Will it be said that it must inevitably represent a decrease of freedom for individuals? On the contrary, it is the true liberation. For bourgeois/civil society destroys freedom at the very moment it proclaims it as its principle; whereas in communism, which is the revolutionary overthrow of that society, freedom becomes effective liberty because it responds to an intrinsic need for which that same society has created the conditions. ‘In place of the old bourgeois society, with its classes and class antagonisms, we shall have an association, in which the free development of each is the condition for the free development of all.’21
The thesis of the proletariat as ‘universal class’ thus condenses the arguments which allow Marx to present the condition of the worker, or rather the condition of the wage-labourer, as the final stage in the whole process of the division of labour – the ‘decomposition’ of civil society.22 It also allows Marx to read off from the present the imminence of the communist revolution. The ‘party’ of the same name, for which, with Engels, he went on to draft the Manifesto, will not be a ‘separate’ party; it will not have ‘interests separate and apart from those of the proletariat as a whole’;23 it will not establish ‘sectarian principles’, but it will quite simply be this real movement come to maturity, become manifest for itself and for society as a whole.
The unity of practice
At the same time, a theory is also outlined here which – though it vigorously rejects the label of philosophy – nonetheless represents a new departure in philosophy. Marx has exited from the exit from philosophy. But he has not simply come back inside … We can demonstrate this by raising here a very old issue in dialectical thought. As I have said above, though the notion of praxis or revolutionary practice declared with unrivalled clarity that the aim of ‘changing the world’ had put paid to all essentialist philosophy, it was still, paradoxically, liable to present itself as another name for the human essence. This tension increased with the notion of production, as now analysed by Marx. Not only because there is a whole empirical history of production (which will oblige the philosopher to become an economist, historian, technologist, ethnologist etc.), but, above all, because Marx removed one of philosophy’s most ancient taboos: the radical distinction between praxis and poiêsis.
Since the Greeks (who made it the privilege of ‘citizens’, i.e. of the masters), praxis had been that ‘free’ action in which man realizes and transforms only himself, seeking to attain his own perfection. As for poiêsis (from the verb poiein: to make), which the Greeks considered fundamentally servile, this was ‘necessary’ action, subject to all the constraints of the relationship with nature, with material conditions. The perfection it sought was not that of man, but of things, of products for use.
Here, then, is the basis of Marx’s materialism in The German Ideology (which is, effectively, a new materialism): not a mere inversion of the hierarchy – a ‘theoretical workerism’, if I can put it thus (as has been the charge of Hannah Arendt and others24), i.e. a primacy accorded to poiêsis over praxis by virtue of its direct relationship with matter – but the identification of the two, the revolutionary thesis that praxis constantly passes over into poiêsis and vice versa. There is never any effective freedom which is not also a material transformation, which is not registered historically in exteriority. But nor is there any work which is not a transformation of self, as though human beings could change their conditions of existence while maintaining an invariant ‘essence’.
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