choice (either accepting or rejecting all abstractions en bloc), one has a criterion by which it is possible to discriminate between those abstractions which represent real knowledge and those which merely have a function of misrecognition or mystification; and, even better, to discriminate between circumstances in which the use of abstractions is mystificatory and those in which it is not. The nihilism inherent in Stirner’s position is thus averted at a fundamental level, without the need for a radical critique of the dominant ideas being contested. Indeed, that need is clearly recognized.
The revolutionary overturning of history
The German Ideology takes the form, then, of an account of the genesis, both logical and historical, of social forms, the guiding thread of which is the development of the division of labour. Each new stage in the division of labour characterizes a certain mode of production and exchange – hence a periodization which is, inevitably, very reminiscent of the Hegelian philosophy of history. Rather than a mere narrative of the stages of universal history, what we have here in fact (as in Hegel) are the typical moments of the process by which history became universalized, became the history of humanity. However, the content of the exposition is as far removed as can be from the Hegelian objective spirit. For that universalization does not consist in the formation of a Rechtstaat rationally extending its powers over the whole of society and ‘totalizing’ the activities of that society. On the contrary, such a juridico-statist universality seemed to Marx the ideological inversion par excellence of social relations. The point is, rather, that history has become the interaction, the interdependence of all the individuals and all the groups belonging to humanity.
Marx’s erudition, already great, was mobilized to demonstrate that the counterpart to the division of labour was the development of forms of ownership (from communal or State ownership to private ownership formally open to all). Each mode of production implies a historical form of appropriation and ownership, which is merely another way of looking at the question. Consequently, it is precisely the division of labour which governs the constitution and dissolution of the larger and larger, less and less ‘natural’ social groups, from primitive communities to classes, by way of the various guilds, orders or estates (Stände) … Each of these groups, ‘dominant’ or ‘dominated’, must be understood, all in all, as a two-sided, contradictory reality: both as a form of relative universalization and as a form of limitation or particularization of human relations. Their series is therefore merely the great process of negation of particularity and particularism, but a negation through the experience and complete realization of their forms.
The starting-point of this development was the productive activity of human beings contending with nature: what Marx calls the real premiss (wirkliche Voraussetzung), which he stresses at length, against the illusions of a philosophy ‘devoid of premises’.18 As for its end point, that is ‘bourgeois/civil’ society (bürgerliche Gesellschaft), which is founded on the different forms of ‘intercourse’ (Verkehr: which might also be translated as communication) between competing private owners. Or rather, the end point is the contradiction such a society harbours within it. For individuality, considered as an absolute, amounts in practice for the masses to an absolute precariousness or ‘contingency’ of the conditions of existence, just as ownership (of oneself, of objects) amounts to a generalized dispossession.
One of the great theses of The German Ideology, taken directly from the liberal tradition but turned against it, is that ‘bourgeois’ society is irreversibly established once class differences prevail over all others and in practice sweep them away. The State itself, no matter how overgrown it may seem, is now merely a function of those differences. It is at this point that the contradiction between particularism and universality, cultivation and brutishness, openness and exclusion is at its most acute, and that between wealth and poverty, the universal circulation of goods and the restriction of access to them, the apparently unlimited productivity of labour and the worker’s confinement in a narrow specialism becomes explosive. Each individual, wretched as he or she may be, has become potentially a representative of humankind, and the function of each group is defined on a world scale. History is then on the point of emerging from its own ‘prehistory’.
The whole argument of The German Ideology tends in fact to demonstrate that this situation is as such intolerable but that, by the development of its own logic, it contains the premisses of a revolutionary overturning (Umwälzung) which would amount, quite simply, to the substitution of communism for bourgeois/civil society. The transition to communism is therefore imminent once the forms and contradictions of bourgeois/civil society are completely developed. In fact, the society in which exchange has become universal is also a society in which ‘universal development of [the] productive forces’ has occurred. Throughout the whole of history, the social ‘productive forces’, expressing themselves in all fields, from technology to science and art, are only ever the forces of many individuals. But they are henceforth inoperative as the forces of isolated 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;