Etienne Balibar Reflections on Gewalt

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Historical Materialism 17 (2009) 99–125 brill.nl/hima

Violence

A: al-ʿunf, al-quwwa. – G: Gewalt. – F: vio-lence, pouvoir. – R: nasilie, vlast’. – S: violen-cia, poder. – C:

Te paradox of Marxism’s relationship to vio-lence is that, although Marxism has made adecisive contribution to understanding ‘therole of violence in history’ – more precisely, to

understanding the link between forms ofdomination and exploitation (primarily capi-talism) and the structural modalities of socialviolence, and the necessity of class strugglesand revolutionary processes – and has therebycontributed to defining the conditions andstakes of modern politics, it has nonethelessbeen fundamentally incapable of thinking(and thus confronting) the tragic connectionthat associates politics with violence from theinside, in a unity of opposites that is itselfsupremely ‘violent’. Tis connection has cometo light in different periods in, for example,the work of historians and theorists like Tu-cydides, Machiavelli or Max Weber, in a waythat it has not in Marxism. Tere are severalreasons for this. One is the absolute privilege

that Marxist theory assigns to one form ofdomination (exploitation of labour), withother forms appearing as epiphenomenona;this leads Marxist theory to ignore or underes-timate the specific contribution that theseothers forms make to the economy of violenceand cruelty. A second reason is the anthropo-logical optimism at the heart of the concep-tion of ‘progress’ defined as the development

of the productive forces of humanity, which isthe basic postulate of the Marxist conceptionof the history of social formations. Te lastreason, finally, is the metaphysics of history asthe concrete realisation of the process of ‘nega-tion of the negation’ (or of the alienation and

reconciliation of a generic human essence),

which transmits to Marxism the theologicaland philosophical scheme of the conversion ofviolence into justice.

Te co-existence of these two closely inter-linked aspects – recognition of extreme formsof social violence and their role, on the onehand; failure to recognise the specificallypolitical problem that they pose, on theother – in the thought of Marx and his succes-

sors (albeit with widely varying degrees ofintellectual profundity) has not failed to haveformidable consequences in the history of thesocial movements and revolutionary processesthat have offi cially identified with Marxism,and whose leading or dissident forces havesought tools in Marx ’s work to ‘master’ them.Tis co-existence is more palpable than ever inthe context of the current phase of globalisa-tion of capitalism and the search for alterna-tive policies that its contradictions inspire.Tis built-in limitation of Marxism has notimpeded striking intellectual attempts frombeing made in the course of Marxism’s historyover the past two centuries to take the measureof violence and describe the stakes involved init; quite the contrary.

In the following exposition, we will notattempt to give an exhaustive presentation ofMarxian and Marxist formulations on thequestion of violence, but we will try to analysesome of the foremost texts and episodes thatillustrate the issue we have raised.

Te exposition will be structured in the fol-lowing way: we will proceed by taking as our

starting point a rereading of a text that can beconsidered the exposition of a ‘classical’ Marx-ist doctrine on the question of violence: Engels’sposthumous booklet Die Rolle der Gewalt inder Geschichte (1895) [usually translated intoEnglish as Te Role of Force in History] Despite

Reflections on Gewalt



its unfinished character, this text has a degreeof coherence and theoretical precision that ismuch higher than most of the other texts thatwe will be led to refer to, including in Marx ’s

own work. It can, therefore, be no accidentthat it raises some of the basic problems thatthe Marxist approach poses, and, for this rea-son, has given rise to several discussions andcritiques to which we are still indebted. Tishas not prevented some readers from seeing itas a simplification, or others as an extensionand transformation, of Marx ’s formulations.

After having characterised its orientation,

therefore, we will have to proceed to a dualdisplacement. On the one hand, we will beobliged retroactively to return to the most sig-nificant conceptions of violence that Marx himself had sketched out in various conjunc-tures and contexts, and try to comprehend theinsoluble problems that they contain: formu-lations according to the schema of ‘permanentrevolution’ on the basis of an ‘activist’ philoso-phy of praxis (before and after the 1848 revo-lutions); formulations in the framework orarea of the critique of political economy (inthis connection, we will see that some verysingular implications can be found in the the-ory of ‘commodity fetishism’); and, finally,dilemmas of ‘proletarian politics’ in the con-text of clashes with other tendencies of nine-

teenth-century socialism. On the other hand,inversely, we will have to sketch the trajectoryand make a diagnosis of the doctrinal opposi-tions deployed in post-Engels ‘Marxism’, nec-essarily (given the scale of the material) insummary fashion.

Tese oppositions are, of course, insepara-ble from strategic orientations that played adecisive role in the political history of the last

century. Tey correspond to two major cyclesof social movements and events, temporarilyout of phase but, in the end, superimposed oneach other: the cycle of class struggles andanticapitalist revolutions, and the cycle ofanti-imperialist, anticolonial and then postco-lonial struggles. Although these cycles in theirclassical form have today essentially come toan end, a large share of the questions to which

they gave rise still manifest themselves in thecurrent historical conjuncture, which we can

connect to the fundamental phenomenon of‘globalisation’. Tis is why the ‘heresies’ ofMarxism that are fuelled, among other things,by divergent positions on the nature and

political functions of violence (or, perhaps,even constituted on the basis of a divergenceon this point, as can be seen in exemplaryfashion in the mutual opposition of Bolshe-vism and Social Democracy on the issue ofviolent revolution, proletarian dictatorshipand civil war) are very likely to resurface andfind inheritors in contemporary debates oncrises and alternatives to the ‘world order’ now

taking shape, even if not necessarily in thename or language of Marxism. Tis is, ofcourse, why rereading Marxism’s texts andinterpreting its history is important; other-wise, they would have a purely archaeologicalsignificance.

Equipped with these three sets of refer-ences, we will able, in conclusion, to try tomake explicit the problem that seems to us tounderlie the whole of this history, a problemthat the ‘real catastrophes’ of the twentiethcentury (in which Marxism was simultane-ously the agent and the victim) have broughtto a point of no return: not the problem ofa choice between reform and revolution, asMarxists have tended to believe, but ratherthe problem (decisive for them without their

realising it) of how to ‘civilise the revolution[ Zivilisierung der Revolution]’, which, probably,determines on the other hand the real possi-bility of ‘civilising politics’ and the state itself.In this sense – starting from a question that wepersonally consider is not one specific questionamong others, but rather the constituent ques-tion of politics – our task is to set out a cri-tique of Marxism on both the theoretical and

ethical levels, on which will depend the possi-bility of making use of Marxism in thefuture.

1. Te Role of Force [Gewalt ] in History – Tebooklet known under the title Te Role of Forcein History has a complex and revealing history.It was one of Engels’s attempts to extract anautonomous work from the ‘theoretical’ chap-

ters of his Anti-Dühring (1875), which woulddemonstrate the originality of the materialist

100 É. Balibar / Historical Materialism 17 (2009) 99–125



É. Balibar / Historical Materialism 17 (2009) 99–125 101

conception of history and its dialecticalmethod and at the same time resolve theproblems of doctrine, organisation and strat-egy of the workers movement, which, from

that time, was united under the leadership of‘Marxists’ (at least in Germany and, to allintents and purposes, in other countries whoseparties would later make up the ‘Second Inter-national’). But, unlike his booklet SocialismUtopian and Scientific , Engels never finishedthe work on the historical role of violence[Gewalt ], which he began working on in about1887. Te text published by Bernstein in Die

Neue Zeit in 1895–6, and then corrected bythe Russian editors of Marx ’s and Engels’sworks in 1937, only included a part of Engels’sinitial project. Te initial project, as outlinedin Engels’s notes, was meant to have threeparts: first, a reworking of the chapters of Anti-Dühring entitled Gewalttheorie I, II, III ,devoted directly to refuting the conception ofviolence put forward by Dühring; then areworking of the earlier chapters (Part I,Chapters 9 and 10) entitled Moral und Recht /Ewige Wahrheiten – Gleichheit [Ethics andLaw/Eternal ruths – Equality] (ultimatelyput aside); and, finally, a completely new essay(left incomplete) on the Bismarckian policiesthat had just culminated by unifying Germanyin the form of the Prussian Empire. All this

was to be preceded by a preface, of which wehave only a rough sketch of the argument. Tewhole work would thus have given a completetreatment (for which Dühring furnished thepretext) of the question of ‘politics’ from aMarxist standpoint, both from a theoreticalperspective (relationships between superstruc-tures and the economic structure of society)and a practical perspective (‘applying’ the the-

ory to the issue that immediately determinedthe characteristics of European politics andradically modified, at least apparently, theprospects for socialist revolution: ‘Let us nowapply our theory to contemporary Germanhistory and its use of force [Gewaltpraxis ], itspolicy of blood and iron. We shall clearly seefrom this why the policy of blood and ironwas bound to be successful for a time and why

it was bound to collapse in the end’ ( MECW 26, 453).

Tis reconstruction of the author’s inten-tions leads us immediately to a remark on lan-guage and terminology that is fundamental toour further argument. In German (the lan-

guage in which Marx , Engels and the firstMarxists wrote), the word Gewalt has a moreextensive meaning than its ‘equivalents’ inother European languages: violence or violenza and pouvoir, potere, power (equally suitable to‘translate’ Macht or even Herrschaft , depend-ing on the context). Seen in this way, ‘from theoutside’, the term Gewalt thus contains anintrinsic ambiguity: it refers, at the same time,

to the negation of law or justice and to theirrealisation or the assumption of responsibilityfor them by an institution (generally the state).Tis ambiguity (which is naturally to be foundin other authors) is not necessarily a disadvan-tage. On the contrary, it signals the existenceof a latent dialectic or a ‘unity of opposites’that is a constituent element of politics. In asense, Engels only made this explicit, and thisis what we will have to try here to make thereader understand. o do this, we will have toconserve the indeterminacy that the termGewalt [violence/force] possesses, to all intentsand purposes, in every context (for examplein the idea of ‘revolutionary force/violence’ –revolutionäre Gewalt – or the ‘revolutionaryrole of force/violence in history’ – revolutionäre

Rolle der Gewalt in der Geschichte ), but on theother hand have recourse to a foreign languagein order to indicate a stress put on the ‘destruc-tive side’ of violence (which, after passingthrough Sorel and his Reflections on Violence ,recurs in Germany in Benjamin’s essay ZurKritik der Gewalt ), or in order to indicate astress on the institutional or even ‘constitu-tional’ side of power (which has tended to pre-

vail in the construction of the single-partystates of ‘really existing socialism’ and theinterpretation they made of the notion of ‘dic-tatorship of the proletariat’).

Engels’s intention also draws our attentionto the fundamental importance, in interpret-ing the theses that would constitute the mainreference point for ‘Marxism’ as well as itscritics, of the conjuncture in which they were

formulated and assembled: that is, the Gründer- periode of the German Empire from 1875 to




1895. Tis period, we may note, was also thetime in which Nietzsche, a critic of Dühring from a standpoint diametrically opposed toEngels’s, was attempting to define philosophi-

cally a ‘grand politics’ that could be an alterna-tive to the Bismarckian institution of the Machtstaat (Beyond Good and Evil and TeGenealogy of Morals were published respec-tively in 1886 and 1887). Te period’s endcoincided moreover with the publication ofMax Weber’s first essays in ‘applied politics’,which were attempting precisely to found apost-Bismarckian idea of a ‘national-social’

state (Der Nationalstaat und die Volkswirtschaft-spolitik [Te National State and Economic Pol-icy ], academic inaugural address, 1895; ZurGründung einer national-sozialen Partei [owardsthe Founding of a National Social Party ] (1896))while taking up several of the themes thatDühring had used for his metaphysical cri-tique (such as the ‘diabolical’ character ofpower). Tis is why, just as it is necessarybefore returning to Marx to have some idea ofthe results of Engels’s ‘Marxist’ interpretationof his work, we must begin our reading ofEngels’s booklet with its political ‘conclusions’.

1.1 Present-day historians (e.g. Winkler, I:178 et sqq.) still attach the greatest impor-tance to the analysis Engels made of the ‘revo-

lution from above’ (an expression adopted ifnot coined by Bismarck himself), the meansby which the dream of German unificationwas ‘fulfilled’ at last. Tis analysis poses sev-eral, closely interlinked problems: the problemof Engels’s limited enthusiasm for Bismarck-ian Realpolitik , the question of the validity ofhis thesis that the bourgeoisie was politicallyincapable of acting on its own, and, finally, the

problem of the causes of the incompletion ofGerman unification.Engels’s enthusiasm was evoked essentially

by the capacity that Bismarck showed inEngels’s eyes to impose a policy on the Ger-man bourgeoisie ‘against its will’ that waseffective in defending its interests (in particu-lar, Bismarck ’s military policy, but also theestablishment of universal suffrage). In this

sense, Bismarck falls once again under theBonapartist model of 1851, though going still

further in the direction of throwing idealistic justifications overboard (such as the ‘right ofpeoples to self-determination’, a principle thatLouis-Napoleon championed). In a quasi-

Schmittian description of the ‘de facto dicta-torship [tatsächliche Diktatur ]’ that allowedBismarck to cut through the contradictionsthat the German bourgeoisie, caught betweenthe various ‘historic roads’ capable of leadingto the national unity to which it aspired, hadgotten bogged down in, Engels closely associ-ates the idea of Realpolitik , which destroyedthe moral and juridical ‘self-deceptions [Selb-

sttäuschungen]’ with which the bourgeoisie’s‘ideological representatives’ were impregnated,with the idea of ‘revolutionary [that is, excep-tional or unconstitutional] means’ in the serv-ice of a ‘revolutionary goal’: the formation of amodern state, which dynastic interests and‘games with statelets [Kleinstaaterei ]’ haddelayed in Germany for a long time. Engels thus takes up a position opposed to liberalthought in two ways: by describing parlia-mentary principles as so much ideologicalmummery expressing historical impotence (atleast in a situation in which the ‘problem’posed by history, the achievement of ‘impos-sible’ German unity, can only be solved bymeans of force); and by treating the Prussianmilitarism that Bismarck incarnated (at least

until the Franco-Prussian War of 1870–1) as aprogressive rather than reactionary force.But Engels’s enthusiasm has its limits. One

might even think that Engels went so far inpraising the ‘Iron Chancellor’ precisely inorder to make the limits of his enthusiasm vis-ible. By showing the bourgeoisie that it neededa master, as Kant would have said, he is pre-paring for the collective actor (the proletariat),

which will prove to be the master’s master, totake the stage, and demonstrating to the bour-geoisie that politically it amounts to nothing.(One is reminded of General de Gaulle’s 1945remark: ‘Between the Communists and us,there is a vacuum.’) He phrases this proposi-tion precisely in terms of force [Gewalt ]: thereare only two ‘forces’ that truly make history,the state and the people (‘In politics there are

only two decisive powers [entscheidende Mächte ]: organised state power [Staatsgewalt ],




the army, and the unorganised, elementalpower of the popular masses’ ( MECW 26,479)); one of them must inevitably pick upwhere the other leaves off. Tis will happen

because national imperialism, once it hasreached its goal, becomes reactionary, incapableof managing the consequences of its ownactions (as seen in Bismarck ’s policy of annex-ations against the will of the populationsconcerned, and in his police methods domes-tically), and because from this point on (unlikein 1848) the working class ‘knows what itwants’. Te working class will thus be able to

turn the same weapons against the state thatthe state uses to control them. Nevertheless,this correction that Engels made to the his-toric function of the ‘great man’ (that his veryrealism will ultimately land him in illusions)does not remove all ambiguity. Tis can beseen clearly by analysing the two other ques-tions we have mentioned.

Is the political incapacity of the bourgeoisiea structural characteristic of this class, or is ita conjunctural phenomenon linked to the‘backwardness’ and ‘blockage’ of historicaldevelopment in Germany? Here, Engels adaptsthe analyses of Bonapartism in Class Strugglesin France and Te Eighteenth Brumaire of LouisBonaparte (‘autonomisation’ of the state appa-ratus and the ‘will’ that embodies it due to the

way in which the forces of the contendingclasses neutralise each other), and runs upagainst the diffi culties that Marx had as well.Engels seems to privilege the thesis of Ger-man exceptionalism, the Sonderweg , but thisthesis is apt to capsize. In fact the history ofthe obstacles to German unity is a capsule ver-sion of the whole of European history fromthe Wars of Religion on. By comparison, it is

really rather the model of the French Revolu-tion, which the Communist Manifesto privi-leges, that comes across as an exception thatwas not susceptible to repetition: it was a sin-gular moment, situated ‘neither too soon nortoo late’ for the bourgeoisie to effectivelymobilise the proletariat, the ‘popular masses[Volksmassen]’, for a violent overthrow of feu-dal domination, and thus ‘take power’.

All at once, the very notion of revolutionbecomes problematic. Is a ‘revolution from

above’ a revolution? Is not the term ‘revolu-tion’ irremediably equivocal, precisely to theextent that it embraces references to severalkinds of force, which cannot all be included in

the same schema of class struggle? We will seepresently that this diffi culty is equally at theheart of the ‘theoretical’ developments bor-rowed from the Anti-Dühring. But, here,already it enables us to understand better whatkind of obstacles ultimately led Engels tointerrupt his work of composition.

Why did this text (like so many of Marx’stexts) remain unfinished? A first hypothesis is

that Engels was not entirely able to ‘believe’his own analysis of the Bismarckian empire,which misses some key aspects. Te allusivereference that his sketch makes to ‘socialreform shit [Sozialreformscheisse ]’ is revealing.Even more than Napoleon III, Bismarck invented a model of the co-optation of classstruggle, an avatar of the ‘national-social’ state. Any judgement of the chances that eitherimperialism or the working class had of emerg-ing victorious from their confrontation (towhich the Anti-Socialist Laws gave dramaticform) depends on the degree of effectivenessattributed to this invention, which Engels,like most Marxists, manifestly underestimated.Similarly, the spontaneist description that heproposes here in order to characterise proletar-

ian politics (‘the unorganised, elemental force[Gewalt ] of the popular masses’) is logicallynecessary to mark the turning point consti-tuted by the working class’s entry onto thehistorical stage as the agent of its own history,but contradictory to the perspectives of build-ing a political party that Engels is in the proc-ess of working out. Like Marx a few years earlier,he finds himself caught between anarchist-

(Bakuninist) and statist- (Lassallean) type for-mulations, without being genuinely able tomaintain a specifically Marxist discourse.

As in earlier theoretical chapters, the ‘direc-tion of history’ supplies the criterion thatdetermines the significance of Gewalt and theconditions in which it can be used: the ques-tion is how violence and power play their rolein the course of world history, either by ‘accel-

erating’ it or by trying to ‘block’ it. But thishistorical direction is itself defined on the




basis of an a priori hierarchy of forms of force. Te fact that the ‘solution’ of the nationalquestion (and, more generally, the formationof modern bourgeois societies in the form of

national states) constitutes a necessary momentin world history is no more than somethingthat is empirically/speculatively postulated. Andthe idea that modern militarism, by introducingthe popular masses [Volksmassen] into theapparatus of state power [Staatsgewalt ], createsan ‘eventual’ contradiction that necessarilyends in its overthrow risks being no more thanan assertion of what was to be demonstrated.

1.2 Yet Engels’s dialectical construction inthe three chapters of his Teory of Force [Gewalt-theorie ] ( MECW 25, 146–70) forms an aston-ishingly coherent whole. We can characteriseit as the ‘turning upside down of the turningupside down’. Te conception of force [Gewalt ]that Dühring had put forward had two fun-damental characteristics. On the one hand, itturned the schema of historical materialism‘upside down’ by postulating that economicstructures, or more precisely relations ofappropriation and exploitation, derive fromthe ‘first-order facts’, the Gewalttaten, that is,the phenomena of subjugation [Knechtung,Unterwerfung ] and domination [Herrschaft,Beherrschung ] imposed by force – a perspective

that put the whole history of social forms andproperty relations under the heading of injus-tice. On the other hand, Dühring’s concep-tion traced everything back to a metaphysicalcategory of force [Gewalt ], defined in anabstract or ahistorical fashion, but, above all,situated short of oppositions between ‘exploita-tion of human beings’ and ‘exploitation ofnature’, ‘politics’ and ‘economics’ (Dühring

speaks of ‘possession by force [Gewalteigen-tum]’). Tis explains the profoundly Rous-seauean tone of his argument, which Engels rightly emphasises. Engels, by contrast, tendsto return to the Hegelian conception of a neg-ativity that ‘overcomes’ or ‘raises up [aufhebt ]’its own destructive power throughout historyin order to bring about the realisation of asubstantial human community.

Engels’s concern is primarily to bring ‘force’down from the heaven of metaphysical ideas

in order to analyse it as a political phenome-non, included in a history of the transforma-tions of politics. In several different passages, apure and simple equivalency between the two

notions seems to be posited: ‘Tat was an actof force [Gewalttat ], hence a political act [ poli-tische at ]’ ( Anti-Dühring , II, 2; MECW 25,147). Te true relation between them is,rather, that one is a subset of the other: politicsincludes force [Gewalt ], but cannot be reducedto it. Or, rather, force is an integral compo-nent of any politics, so that it is illusory toimagine an effective political action that does

not have recourse to it. One might even saythat this element of force always plays a deci-sive role, whatever the social forces or classesat work, and thus in proletarian politics aswell – even if the diffi cult question must thenbe posed as to whether a specifically proletar-ian modality of violent action (distinguishablefrom war, for example) exists. Yet politics can-not be reduced to force, which, in this sense, isnever ‘naked’ or ‘pure’. Not only does it pre-suppose the economic means necessary toexert it, but it includes as well an element of‘conceptions [Vorstellungen]’ (bourgeois liberalideas, or socialism) and ‘institutions [Einrich-tungen]’ (parliamentarianism and universalsuffrage, popular education, the army itself).

Here, we see the multiple significations

mentioned earlier of the term Gewalt, whichEngels takes advantage of to sketch a dialecticinternal to the history of politics. In fact, onthe one hand, force, reduced to organised vio-lence (and to war, in particular, whether for-eign war or civil war), only constitutes part ofthe system of political instruments; on theother hand, it includes all the effects of power and is overdetermined by other terms that also

connote political action. Following a traditionof Saint-Simonian origin, Engels sometimesseems to think that politics has a tendency –taken to its logical conclusion by the socialistmovement – to civilise itself, by decreasing themilitary element and replacing it with aninstitutional element. But his main line ofargument is aimed instead at showing thatclass struggle, of which politics is only the

form taken, tends towards an ultimate, neces-sarily violent, confrontation between the con-




tending forces (bourgeoisie and proletariat),which is also a confrontation between twoantithetical modalities of political violence. Or,more precisely, the argument shows that this

confrontation expresses a necessity immanentin economic development [ökonomische Ent-wicklung ], which tends to transcend the formsof exploitation and subjugation [Herrschafts-und Knechtschaftsverhältnisse , an expressionderived directly from Hegel].

Engels’s line of argument is dictated by histaking up a logical schema that previouslyplayed the central role in the Hegelian dialec-

tic of history: the schema of means (or of‘human’ material ) and historical ends (seeHegel, Reason in History ). Tis schema impliesthat the actors’ (individuals and above all peo-ples or ‘collective individuals’) specific actionsand intentions can be read at two different lev-els: in an immediate, conscious way, theyappear to be contingent, but, in an indirect(and, albeit unconsciously, decisive) way, theyare necessary, at least to the extent that theycontribute to the attainment of the end thatSpirit [Geist ] is working towards in history(that is, its own rationality). But Hegel goesfurther, and, on this point, is in fact already the theoretician of the ‘role of force in his-tory’: he states that the apparent irrationality of human actions, the use they make of

passions, conflict and violence, is in fact the phenomenal, contradictory form in which theobjective power of reason manifests itself. Tisexplains the ‘realism’ of Hegel’s politics, whichis entirely indissociable from his ‘idealism’. InEngels’s work, the teleology of reason becomesthe teleology of the economic development ofhumanity, going by way of the dissolution ofthe ‘primitive’ communities and the successive

forms of private property before reconstitut-ing a higher community, which capitalist‘socialisation’ of the productive forces is creat-ing the conditions for. Tis explains his insist-ence on the fact that political force (and stateforce [Staatsgewalt ] in particular) is effective/actual [wirksam/wirklich] only to the extentthat it is functional from the standpoint of theeconomic development of society (Engels

speaks of the exercise of force’s ‘social function[ gesellschaftliche Amtstätigkeit ]’, Anti-Dühring ,

II, 4; MECW 25, 167) and to the extent thatit follows the direction of economic develop-ment (as was the case with the French Revolu-tion). It also explains his ingenious theory of

the inversion of appearances in the politicalsphere as compared to the underlying eco-nomic logic, which allows him to take accountof a number of things: how political historyand economic history can be ‘out of phase’with each other; how political ideas, forcesand institutions can acquire their owndynamic, autonomous from the fundamentalclass struggle; and even the incapacity of eco-

nomically dominant classes to become politi-cally dominant as well (here, we link up withthe issue of Bonapartism or Bismarckism, thatis, the issue of the defeat of ‘popular revolu-tions’ or ‘revolutions from below’ and theirsupersession by the nineteenth-century ‘revo-lutions from above’). But an inversion of thistype can never be anything but transitory; or,better expressed, it must represent the form ofits transition towards being put rationally onits feet once more, without which the logic ofmeans and ends would be strictly speakingabolished.

1.3 It would nonetheless be mistaken tobelieve that Engels could be content to ‘trans-late’ a Hegelian schema from the language of

mind [Geist ] to the language of economicdevelopment. Te specificity of the problemsthat interpreting the relations between forceand class structures (in Marx ’s sense) posesobliges him to invent an original line of argu-ment. But, here, the logic of means and endstends to bifurcate into profoundly differentinterpretations, each of which gives rise tospecific problems. Te first interpretation,

which emphasises the immediate dependence ofall organised violence on its material resources, and therefore on the economic means of pro-duction of these resources (technology, level ofindustrial development, the state’s financialcapacities), essentially concerns wars of con-quest. It leads, in particular, to sketching outa history of forms of military tactics as a func-tion of revolutions in armament technology.

Te second interpretation, by contrast, empha-sises the social forms of the masses’ incorporation




into the structures of institutional violence , andconcerns the incidence of class struggle withinthe force of the state itself. One could (andthis is, probably, what Engels seeks to do)

consider the two interpretations as comple-mentary; but it seems more fruitful to us tocounterpose them, not only because of theirlater divergent histories, but also because ofthe completely different signification that theyconfer on the notion of ‘economic determina-tion in the last instance’. Te first interpreta-tion leads to a technological version of theprimacy of economics over politics, which

reduces the autonomy of politics further, butit has the advantage of introducing a crucialdiscussion on the historical parallels betweenthe development of means of production andthe development of means of destruction (weap-ons), or even a dialectic of productive forces anddestructive forces in the history of humanity(which Engels resolves in an ‘optimistic’ wayby upholding the primacy in the last analysisof the productive forces). Te second interpre-tation is more decisive to determining whetherthe notion of ‘revolution’ can be applied in thesame way to all processes of transition to a newmode of production.

It must be acknowledged that Engels swingsback and forth here in an astonishing waybetween two extremes: after having main-

tained (in Teory of Force [Gewalttheorie ], I)that the process of the bourgeoisie’s economicelimination of feudalism is being repeated inidentical fashion in the proletariat’s economicelimination of the bourgeoisie, he then turns(in Teory of Force [Gewalttheorie ], II) to ana-lysing the history of the successive forms ofthe people’s incorporation into modern armies(from the American and French Revolutions

up until Prussian militarism) as an unprece-dented process of mass political education,which contains in embryo the transformationof the force of the state into ‘the force of thepopular masses’ and the revolutionary wither-ing away of the repressive state machine (‘assoon as the mass of the people . . . will have awill [einen Willen hat] . . . the machine refusesto work and militarism collapses by the dialec-

tics of its own evolution’, Anti-Dühring , II, 3; MECW 25, 158). In order for the revolution-

ary transformation of the capitalist mode ofproduction to be possible, class struggle mustthus not be enclosed in the infrastructure, butmust rather penetrate into the very heart of

the functioning of the state and subvert it.Engels does not dare to prophecy this out-come in a categorical way, however. In the lastlines of the same chapter, rather, he presentsthe collapse of militarism and revolution asthe two terms of an alternative.

What the economic/political dynamic thatEngels invents retains from Hegel, at theend of the day, is only (but this may be the

essential thing, in terms of his ‘conception ofthe world [Weltauffassung ]’) the idea of an his-torical process that can be understood as a‘conversion [Konversion]’ of force into ration-ality (which, in Hegel’s work, means the insti-tutional rationality of the state, while, forEngels, it means the rationality of economicevolution leading to socialism), in such a waythat force is not only not ‘external’ to theeffective process of rationality’s emergence,but that it is precisely, in fact, its ‘extreme’forms that do justice to the power of therational, and to the way in which the actionsof individuals (or of masses, which, in Engels’swork, take the place of individuals) are incor-porated into the objective development proc-ess. What is manifested here is a sort of force

beyond force, which coincides with the neces-sity of its own transcendence. (Te expressionis virtually present in Engels’s text, particu-larly when he wants to show how the imma-nent process of history puts limits to the verypolitical forms it has made use of: ‘it [thebourgeoisie] did not in any way will this resultof its own actions and activities – on the con-trary, this result established itself with irresist-

ible force [unwiderstehlicher Gewalt ], againstthe will and contrary to the intentions of thebourgeoisie’ ( Anti-Dühring, II, 2; MECW 25,153).) Engels is here, admittedly, far removedfrom a metaphysics of violence as an unavoid-able or indestructible ‘radical evil’, whichEngels thinks he detects in Dühring; but it isnot clear that he is far removed from a metaphysical concept of violence, as a principle of

interpretation of historical/political processesthat brings about the transmutation of irra-




tionality into rationality, or the ‘inversion ofappearances’ – that, in this way, makes the‘forcing’ of rationality possible within reality,at the risk of failing to recognise the most

unyielding ‘excesses’ (even in the long term).Tis must, thus, be the starting point, on

the one hand for a re-examination of theextent to which Marx ’s analyses can be incor-porated without anomalies or contradictionsinto this dialectical theorisation (which madeits popularisation and organised politicalusage possible), and, on the other hand, for anexamination of the way in which the encoun-

ter with real history progressively determinedthe displacement and bursting apart of doctri-naire ‘Marxism’, with all its orthodoxies andheresies, over the course of a century, withoutfor all that making the initial question purelyand simply disappear.

2. Marx: historical moments and structures ofextreme violence – Engels’s systematisationconstantly evokes several of Marx ’s formula-tions (in particular from the Communist Man-ifesto, which the two friends had written incollaboration with each other). But it depends,above all, on two citations from Capital ,which, for this reason, have acquired a partic-ular significance, independent of their con-text. Te first comes from Chapter 24 of

Volume I ( MECW 35, 582–3) and does notcontain any explicit reference to force, butrather to the ‘internal dialectic’ of the transfor-mation of private property based on exchangeof equivalents into private property foundedon the unpaid appropriation of labour. Teother citation comes from Chapter 31 of Vol-ume I, devoted to the ‘so-called primitiveaccumulation’ ( MECW 35, 739); here, Engels

displaces Marx ’s description of the organisedstate violence required for the primitive accu-mulation of capital into a thesis on the ‘revo-lutionary role of force’, which Dühring, andthose in general who adopt a moral positionon violence, fail to recognise. Te passageincludes the famous messianic metaphor(which Engels transposes to the feminine gen-der) of the ‘midwife [Geburtshelferin]’, which

later provided a point of departure notably forHannah Arendt ’s critical reading in Between

Past and Future : ‘Force is the midwife of everyold society pregnant with a new one. It is itselfan economic power [Die Gewalt ist der Geburt-shelfer jeder alten Gesellschaft, die mit einer

neuen schwanger geht. Sie selbst ist eine ökono-mische Potenz ]’.

In both cases, we are thus faced with a para-dox. Engels has ‘reduced’ a twofold distance:the distance that separates the (provisional)Marxian hypothesis of the origin of privateproperty in individual labour from an histori-cal analysis of its real conditions; and thedistance that separates the ‘historical excep-

tion’ constituted by primitive accumulationfrom the other exception constituted by revo-lutionary force ‘from below’ (which Marx ,later in Capital , refers to as ‘expropriation ofthe expropriators’, Capital I, 32; MECW 35,750). Engels can thus construct a typical ‘line’of development that coincides with the verymovement of the conversion of force in thehistory of class struggle. But, to discuss therelevance of this line of argument, we must tryto take stock of the complexity of the inter-locking perspectives on Gewalt in Marx ’swork, which certainly cannot all be tracedback to a single argument.

For our part, we think that we can distin-guish at least three different perspectives, inrelation to ‘problems’ posed in different ways.

But we also think we are able each time to dis-cern a very strong tension in Marx ’s thoughtbetween two approaches to comprehendingthe status and effects of extreme violence. Oneapproach attempts, if not to ‘naturalise’ extremeviolence, then at least to incorporate it into achain of causes and effects and treat it as aprocess or a dialectical moment of a processof social transformation of which the contend-

ing classes are the agents, precisely so as tomake intelligible the conditions of ‘real poli-tics [wirkliche Politik ]’ (as opposed to moralis-ing or idealised politics). Te other approachuncovers in some extreme or excessive formsof violence, which are both structural andconjunctural, both spontaneous and organised,what one might call ‘the reality within politics[das Reale in der Politik ]’, that is, the unpre-

dictable or incalculable element that confers atragic dimension on politics, a dimension that




politics feeds on even as it risks annihilatingpolitics. (Tis is indicated in the formula thatRosa Luxemburg attributed to Engels in her1916 Junius Pamphlet : ‘Capitalist society faces

a dilemma, either an advance to socialism or areversion to barbarism’, Junius Pamphlet , 269;GW 4, 62).

Tese two modes of thought are like twosides of the same coin, parts of the sameattempt to give ‘meaning’ to the imbricationof force and social practice. Perhaps the twoapproaches cannot be reconciled, but neither(at least in Marx ’s work) can there be any

watertight separation between them. Tisprobably has in the last analysis to do with theambivalence of the very model of ‘class strug-gle’ as the essential characteristic and ‘motor’of the transformation of human societies. Tismodel is indissociable (as Foucault 2003 hasrecently reminded us) from the generalisationof the social relationships characteristic of themodel of war and its ‘utmost use of force[äußersten Anwendung der Gewalt ]’ (Clause-witz 102), and meant to translate even themost savage destruction, processes of extermi-nation and enslavement – which ensure, in thewords of a French publicist cited by Marx ,that ‘capital comes dripping from head tofoot, from every pore, with blood and dirt’(Capital , I, 31; MECW 35, 748) – into the

rational logic of conflicts of interest. Tisinvolves us in the diffi culties of interpretationthat Marx ’s formula (in French) in his polemicagainst Proudhon, and generally against the‘progressive’ conception of history – ‘It isthe bad side [le mauvais côté ] that produces themovement which makes history, by providinga struggle [en constituant la lutte ]’ (Poverty ofPhilosophy, MECW 6, 174) – has always raised.

We can read this formula as a dialectical thesisreaffi rming (following Hegel) that the histori-cal process always ends up converting suffer-ing into culture (by carrying out ‘a negation ofthe negation’). But it can also be read as anindication of the fact that there is no guaran-tee that history really does ‘move forward’,except perhaps towards horror.

2.1 Significance of Marx’s revolutionary ‘cata-strophism’ . – Te schema that associates the

final collapse of capitalism with the emer-gence – for the first time in history – of a pos-sibility of collective liberation, whose agent isthe revolutionary proletariat, is a model of

interpretation of the ‘historical tendency’ thatcan be found in Marx ’s work. He applies itboth (as in 1848 in the Communist Manifesto)to the imminence of the present and (as in theconcluding chapter of Capital , [Volume I], onthe ‘expropriation of the expropriators’) to theindefinite future implied by the contradictionbetween capitalist property and the socialisa-tion of the productive forces, which nonethe-

less never disappeared from his thought.Nevertheless, it was in the conjuncture of therevolutions of 1848, with the radicalisationthat it brought about in the Marxian critiqueof politics (leading to the ‘first’ concept ofthe dictatorship of the proletariat), whichmade its consequences most perceptible. Inthe wake of an intensification of his concept ofsocial revolution, which accentuated its anti-nomic characteristics, Marx closely associatesthe idea of a final crisis that would mean the‘dissolution’ of bourgeois society with theidea of an ‘alternative’ between the extremeforms of counterrevolutionary violence andthe extreme forms of consciousness of themasses, who are determined to ‘take humanemancipation to its logical conclusion’. He is

then able (even if the term no longer appearsexplicitly in his terminology) to give a theo-retical content and historical referent to theunity of opposites that, in the 1845 Teses onFeuerbach, the philosophical notion of ‘praxis’designated: a consciousness that arises imme-diately from contradictory social relations andthat, without going through the mediation of‘ideological’ representations, metamorphoses

into collective action capable of changing theworld.Marx ’s thought is henceforth dominated

on the political level by an ultra-Jacobin con-ception that, without explicitly addressing thequestion of error, turns the proletariat intothe ‘people of the people’, capable of rescuingthe demand for liberty, equality and com-munity from its imprisonment in bourgeois

limits, and reasserting the full timeliness ofthe perspective for action that Robespierre




expressed in the watchword, ‘No revolutionwithout revolution’ (speech of 5 November1792; cf. Labica , 56) – the revolution cannotstop halfway. And, on the economic level,

Marx ’s thought is dominated by a pessimisticinterpretation of Ricardo’s theory, accordingto which the antagonism between capitalist‘profit’ and workers’ ‘wages’ leads to the abso-lute immiseration of the mass of the popula-tion, that is, to wages’ falling below subsistencelevel. After having described the proletariat’sliving conditions (in Te Holy Family and TeGerman Ideology ) as a ‘self-dissolution’ of bour-

geois civil society [bürgerliche Gesellschaft ],he arrives in the Communist Manifesto at theconclusion of his analysis of the ‘simplificationof class struggle’ and polarisation of society.He concludes that capitalism, unlike earliermodes of production, includes a nihilistdimension: the logic of the bourgeoisie’s modeof exploitation leads it to destroy the livingconditions and reproduction of the very peo-ple who enable it to live, and thus destroyits own conditions of existence. Tis catastro-phe, whose imminence is shown by industrialcrises, was suffi cient as a basis for the necessityof a proletarian revolution that could onlytake the form of a ‘violent overthrow of thebourgeoisie’.

But the bloody (and disappointing) experi-

ence of the failure of the 1848 revolutions ledMarx (in Class Struggles in France (1850) andTe Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte (1852)) to give proletarian revolution an evenmore dramatic form. What determines thegeneral crisis of the capitalist mode of produc-tion is not the proletarian revolution directly,as ‘the conquest of democracy’ by the new rul-ing class, but rather a going to extremes in

which revolution and counterrevolution (‘dic-tatorship of the proletariat’ and ‘dictatorshipof the bourgeoisie’) constantly reinforce eachother until the moment of their decisive con-frontation. Tis confrontation will be between,on the one hand, the autonomised, swollen‘state machinery [Staatsmaschinerie ]’, which‘concentrates organised violence’ and whichthe proletariat must manage to ‘break’, and a

process of ‘permanent revolution [Revolutionin Permanenz ]’, which expresses the proletari-

at’s capacity to extend direct democracy to thewhole of society.

Te messianic dimension of this way of rep-resenting the revolutionary moment and the

‘praxis’ that must lead to its achievement isobvious. It will reappear periodically in thehistory of Marxism, particularly each timethat the conjuncture lends itself to being seenas a final clash on which the very future of theworld and civilisation depends (as in RosaLuxemburg’s work in 1914–16 when shedescribed the choice between war and revolu-tion), and even in the work of post-Marxists

(for example in the form of an alternative, inone kind of contemporary ‘political ecology’,between destruction of the planetary environ-ment and destruction of capitalism). It explainsthe antinomic character that the idea of revo-lutionary force takes on here, simultaneouslyconcentrating the destructive powers of theold world and introducing an absolute, crea-tive positivity. But its modality cannot beunderstood well without also linking it toMarx ’s pronouncements about the uncertainty of the combat’s outcome, beginning with theenigmatic phrase in the Communist Manifesto about the possibility of ‘the common ruin ofthe contending classes’ ( MECW 6, 482) andcontinuing with Marx ’s recognition after1852 of capitalism’s capacity for further devel-

opment, which will reproduce the same antag-onisms on an indefinitely enlarged scale.

2.2 Te violence of economics, the economicsof violence . – Te theme of force [Gewalt ], ifwe look carefully, is so persistent in Capital (particularly in Volume I), that this wholework could be read as a treatise on the struc-tural violence that capitalism inflicts (and as

a treatise on the excess of violence inherent inthe history of capitalism), described in itssubjective and objective dimensions, of whichthe critique of political economy providesthe red thread. Tis has, first of all, to dowith the fact that the exploitation of the work-ers – the source of accumulable surplus-value[ Mehrwert ] – seems indissociable in capitalismfrom its tendency to over-exploitation, which is

not content to extract a surplus from labour-power over and above the value necessary to




its own reproduction by taking advantage ofthe increased productivity that makes theindustrial revolution possible, but rather con-stantly stakes (and endangers) the very conser-

vation of this labour-power, insofar as it isembodied in living individuals. At the end ofChapter 15 (‘Machinery and Modern Indus-try’), Marx describes the production processas a ‘process of destruction’, and concludes,‘Capitalist production, therefore, developstechnology, and the combining together ofvarious processes into a social whole, only bysapping the original sources of all wealth-the

soil and the labourer’ ( MECW 35, 507–8).But, because of its own resistance and a ‘mod-ernisation’ of society leading to systematicannihilation of precapitalist ways of life andculture, this destruction of living productiveforces necessarily takes extremely violent forms(concerning on the one hand processes thatwe would today call ethnic cleansing or geno-cide, and on the other a dismemberment of thehuman body or of the individual psychic/physical ‘composite’).

In Marx ’s eyes, there is no exploitationunder capitalism without over-exploitation.Tis is the lesson of the various comparativearguments devoted to the various ‘methods’ ofproducing surplus-value, which all have to dowith pushing back the limits of overwork,

without which capital would fall victim to itsown tendency to a falling rate of profit. Let usnote the importance of the fact that Marx went in search of this observation, not in thework of economists, but at least indirectly (bythe medium of the Factory Reports in the serv-ice of English labour) among the workersthemselves (Michel Henry , in particular,rightly stresses this point). On the side of ‘pro-

duction of absolute surplus-value’, we see, forexample, an indefinite extension of the work-ing day, women’s work and above all childlabour, which leads to various forms of mod-ern slavery and frenetic speculation by capitalon the costs of workers’ food, housing andhealth. On the side of ‘production of relativesurplus-value’, we see an intensification of thetempo of work and an accelerated exhaustion

of the ‘human instruments’; a division oflabour counterposing manual and intellectual

ability; repressive factory discipline; and‘repulsion and attraction of workpeople’ inthe industrial revolution, that is, use of forcedunemployment as a constraining ‘regulator’ of

the value of labour-power. In all these cases,Marx is bent on showing that the differentforms of over-exploitation depend on a gen-eral condition of violence [Gewaltverhältnis ],inherent in capitalism, which he calls collec-tive ‘enslavement [Hörigkeit ]’ of the workingclass by the capitalist class ( MECW 35, 609),which leaves the legally ‘free’ workers nothingbut the chance to sell themselves on the condi-

tions laid down by capital. But Marx wants toshow as well that each of them includes a spe-cific form of violence, corresponding to anentire phenomenology of suffering (to thepoint of ‘torture’: MECW 35, 426).

His analysis of over-exploitation results in adialectic of resistance, of conflict, of interac-tion between violence and institution. It issurprising that Engels, although, as we haveseen, he cited two essential moments of thisdialectic, simplified its complexity to theextent he did. Tis may relate to the fact that,in the last analysis, it does not result in a one-way historical ‘direction’, but, rather, in a mul-tiplicity of possible paths of development,which Marx himself, and, in any event, hissuccessors, found it an enormous chore to

choose between.Some of the arguments in Capital [Volume 1](supplemented here and there between thefirst edition in 1867 and the second edition in1872 thanks to the repeal of the English lawsagainst workers’ combinations) describe theclass struggle between capital and the workingclass, in the first stages of organising itself,over working conditions (and later wage levels

etc.). Te state intervenes in this struggle(though in an imperfect way, and partially tothe benefit of the bourgeoisie, whose long-term interests it defends at the expense of itsimmediate profits) as the agent of ‘that firstconscious and methodical reaction of societyagainst the spontaneously developed form ofthe process of production’ ( MECW 35, 483).Describing this history as one of a ‘protracted

civil war, more or less dissembled, between thecapitalist class and the working-class’ ( MECW




35, 303), Marx ’s analysis culminates here in aproposition in which the multiple meaningsof the word Gewalt are fully evident: ‘Betweenequal rights force [Gewalt ] decides’ ( MECW

35, 243). Te sentence is all the more remark-able inasmuch as it echoes, with slight varia-tions, the sentence that Marx used in 1849to describe the conflict between the FrankfurtNational Assembly and the Prussian monar-chy: ‘only power [Gewalt ] can decide betweentwo powers [Gewalten]’ ( MECW 8, 324). Vio-lence lies at the root of power , which, inversely,is exercised in order to control it. In the revo-

lution, violence [Gewalt ] had ‘decided’ betweenthe ‘powers [Gewalten]’; in the social strugglestate power [Gewalt ] (legislative Staatsgewalt )will ‘decide’ between two forms of violence[Gewalten].

Tese forms of force can all be situated onone side of the process of normalisation ofcapitalism’s conditions of functioning (andincorporation of class struggle into the politi-cal institutions of bourgeois society). Tey donot in any way abolish the violence of exploi-tation, but they restrain its ‘excesses’ and post-pone (perhaps indefinitely) the outbreak of aconfrontation between the proletariat and thestate itself (which, we can imagine, is rendereduseless by the growth of the organised politicalpower of the proletariat, if only the bourgeoi-

sie does not ‘put up a fight’).Te dynamic is completely different in thepassages devoted to ‘the so-called primitiveaccumulation’, which, by contrast, concernthe relationship between force and capitalismas it was established in the ‘transition period’, prior to any possibility of ‘pacifying’ the socialconflict. In opposition to the liberal myth ofthe origins of capital in individual merchant

property, Marx describes in these passages, aswe have seen, a ‘process of forcible expropria-tion of the people’ ( MECW 35, 711), neces-sary to the process of transferring the mass ofworkers from one form of ‘servitude [Knech-tung ]’ ( MECW 35, 706) to another. Te best-known moment in this transition is thepractice of ‘enclosures’ in sixteenth- and sev-enteenth-century England. But, in fact, capi-

tal employed all legal, pseudo-legal and illegalmeans (massacres, expulsions, more or less

induced famines as in Ireland, colonisation,‘bloody legislation’ organising the expulsionor imprisonment of vagrants, etc.) coordi-nated by ‘the power of the state [Staatsgewalt ]’

( MECW 35, 726) in order ultimately to get itshands on the means of production and ‘free’ aproletariat without any resources of its own.Here, Gewalt in its multiple meanings does notserve to repress extreme violence through thefunctioning of state institutions, but, on thecontrary, to multiply and intensify violencethrough the cruel use of state institutions.

Although they thus develop in opposite

directions, the different ways in which capital-ism is linked with the historical phenomenonof ‘class warfare’ reflect equally the same fun-damental anthropological reality (which Marx had attempted to elucidate in speculative fash-ion in the chapter of Capital on the ‘fetishismof commodities’): the objectification of humanlabour-power as a ‘commodity’. Tis objectifi-cation, which the ‘normal’ process of capitalistproduction presupposes, even though the freeworker’s ‘personal’ juridical status masks it, isultimately impossible ; this is why it must beconstantly forced , in face of workers’ individ-ual and collective resistance, by means of amore or less transitory complex of terroristinstitutions and practices. Tese practicesinsert destruction into the sphere of produc-

tion itself, in a sense far removed from whatpolitical economy later called ‘creative destruc-tion’, seeing it as the mainspring of industrialinnovation (Schumpeter).

But what can be the outcome of this unsta-ble combination? Te Marxist tradition afterMarx is profoundly divided on this point, inrelation to divergent ‘tactics’ within the work-ers’ movement. What we will examine here in

conclusion are the extensions of Marx ’s analy-sis that highlight the unshakeability of the phe-nomenon of extreme violence as a structuraldetermination of capitalism, thus making itnecessary to pose the question of revolution,not only in terms of seizure of power andtransformation of the mode of production,but also in terms of ‘civilisation’. Tis can bedone in different ways.

Te path that Rosa Luxemburg illustrated (inher 1913 work Te Accumulation of Capital ,




in particular Chapters 26–9 on colonisation)consists in showing, starting from Marx ’s defi-nitions and the contemporary history of impe-rialism, that violent ‘primitive accumulation’

does not constitute a transitory phenomenoncharacteristic of the ‘prehistory’ of moderncapitalism. On the contrary, capitalism needspermanently (for the most part outside the‘central’ region where industrialisation tookplace) to form markets and reserve labour sup-plies for itself by means of exterminationistviolence. Te question of the ‘law of popula-tion’, which Marx linked to the cycles of accu-

mulation and to the economic necessity of an‘industrial reserve army’, lies at the heart ofthis problematic. Tere can be no capitalismwithout excess population, and no excess pop-ulation without violence, whose targets areabove all non-European peoples. Capitalismis, in this sense, always still ‘archaic’, or, rather,it presents the entirely modern violence that itimposes on the whole world, which is forcedlittle by little to enter its space of reproduc-tion, as an archaism.

In an astonishing text (Results of the DirectProduction Process [Resultate des unmittelbarenProduktionsprozesses. VI. Kapital des Kapitals ]),published in 1933 in Moscow and again in1969, Marx had himself sketched out anotherpath, which left deep traces in the discussions

in the years 1960–70, particularly among rep-resentatives of Italian ‘workerist’ Marxism(Quaderni Rossi , ronti, Negri), on the for-mation of the ‘mass worker’ in advanced capi-talist society. Te hypothesis here is that thereis an ultimate stage in the subjection of labour-power to the commodity-form, correspondingto a complete commodification of workers’consumption and a conditioning of their

training with a view towards their immediateincorporation into mechanised production,what Marx refers to as ‘real subsumption [realeSubsumtion]’ of labour-power under capital.Marx may have considered this deeply nihilisthypothesis incompatible with revolutionaryperspectives for a progressive radicalisation ofclass struggle in the course of capitalist devel-opment; this was perhaps the reason that he

ultimately failed to include this chapter (reallya section) in the published version of Capital.

Te hypothesis does not necessarily lead, let usnote, to extenuating violence as a form of ‘vol-untary servitude’; or, rather, this is only itsutopian, bourgeois form. More likely, it cor-

responded (and corresponds) to a situation ofendemic, anarchic or anomic violence (a‘molecular’ civil war, Enzensberger wouldsay), which capitalism tries to control byincorporating a multiplicity of apparatuses ofcontrol and ‘risk management’ (in RobertCastels’s phrase) into its social-policy toolkit.

2.3 Te aporia of ‘proletarian revolutionary

politics’ . – Rereading the analyses in Volume Iof Capital on the question of the violenceinherent in the development of capitalism as a‘mode of production’ and in the evolutionarytendencies that take shape within it enablesus to view in another light the question ofwhy Capital was left unfinished, as well asthe ambiguities of revolutionary ‘strategy’ thatMarx continually ran up against during thelife of the First International and after itsdissolution, before and after the bloody epi-sode of the Paris Commune (a new ‘solo’ and‘swan song’ of the European working class,to use Marx’s expression in Te EighteenthBrumaire – MECW 11, 193). Tey both origi-nate in the last analysis in the aporia of theconstitution of the working class as a political

subject, or of the relationship between the‘subjectification’ of the proletariat and thecapitalist ‘socialisation’ of the productiveforces. But this relationship itself is profoundlytroubled by the phenomenon of extreme vio-lence, which can be considered, depending oncircumstances, either as a residual irrationalitywhich the ‘normal course’ of historical evolu-tion must ultimately put an end to; or, as the

element of dialectical negativity that precipi-tates the overthrow of domination by meansof revolution (‘accelerating’ the course of his-tory); or, finally, as the added factor that risksblocking the ‘resolution’ of social contradic-tions or even perverting their modalities fromwithin. (Te invention of the category of ‘sub-proletariat’ or Lumpenproletariat , reduced byimpoverishment to a domain where poverty

coexists with criminality, is a striking symp-tom in this respect. We know that Marx never




completely gave up the idea that Louis Napo-leon owed the success of his coup d’état to amobilisation of the Lumpenproletariat , andthat Louis Napoleon himself was its political

representative). In any event, the notion of asimple division of violence [Gewalt ] betweenthe terrain of politics and the terrain of econom-ics (or of ‘society’, structured by economic rela-tionships) cannot be sustained. Violence [Gewalt ]circulates , in a way that is fundamentally uncon-trollable, between politics and economics.

Perhaps the reason why Capital remainedunfinished, after the publication of Volume I

in 1867 and its various later editions, is (bear-ing all historical and biographical circum-stances in mind, incidentally) that the processof violent ‘consumption’ of labour-power,whose causes, forms and social effects itdescribes, does not make it possible to choosein a conclusive way between several possibleoutcomes. Marx may have preferred to let‘real’ history settle the issue, and left theexploited masses the task of inventing a ‘strat-egy’ in which one option would prevail overthe others.

Probably in the chapter entitled ‘Historicalendency of Capitalist Accumulation’, theapparent ‘conclusion’ of the work [Volume I],Marx himself chooses a dialectical route inorder to make the ‘leap’ from science to poli-

tics. He repeats the catchphrases of 1848,according to which the proletariat is ‘the onlyrevolutionary class’, that is, the subject of his-tory as the history of human emancipation,while basing them now, not on a catastrophistschema, but, rather, on a theory of the ineluc-table tendency to the socialisation of produc-tion and the constitution of a ‘collectivelabourer’. Tis process is supposed to unfold

with the necessity of a ‘natural process’, inwhich the violence at its end, though inevita-ble, can no longer be compared with the vio-lence at its origin. Tese are the formulationsthat orthodoxy has clung to.

But the course of the book had opened upother possibilities, which it would still be pos-sible to take up without abandoning ‘Marxist’reference points. Tere is the possibility of a

process of reforms , imposed on society by thestate under the pressure of increasingly power-

ful and better organised working-class strug-gles, which would force capital to ‘civilise’its methods of exploitation or innovate con-stantly in order to overcome the resistance of

‘variable capital’. Tere is the possibility ofexporting over-exploitation to the ‘periphery’of the capitalist mode of production, in a waythat perpetuates the effects of ‘primitive accu-mulation’. (Rosa Luxemburg worked this ideaout in great detail, while always imaginingthat the process would ultimately run upagainst its limits, ‘because the earth is round’ –whereas one can also imagine intensive dimen-

sions, in the form of ‘colonisation of thelife-world’ [Lebenswelt ] (in Habermas’s words)or development of the bio-economy, in whichhuman life itself would become a raw materialconsumed by industry.) Finally, there is thepossibility, suggested in the ‘UnpublishedChapter’ and taken up by certain theorists ofcontemporary ‘mass culture’, of a ‘society ofcontrol’ (as Deleuze calls it) accompaniedby a coercive normalisation of individual pro-ducers, consumers and reproducers: a normal-isation of which physical as well as psychicviolence would be both the means and thepermanent material. In these various hypoth-eses, the proletariat would no longer figure asthe predestined subject of history, and theforce that it experiences or exerts would not

bring history to a ‘natural‘ end. Te subjectifi-cation of the working class, that is, its trans-formation into a revolutionary proletariat,would then be a continually receding horizon,an unlikely counter-tendency, or even a mirac-ulous exception to the course of history.

Mentioning these competing, explicit orlatent ‘outcomes’ in Marx ’s analyses enables usto understand, better than Marx himself and

his contemporaries, the reason for the aporiaethat mar his attempts to define an autono-mous ‘proletarian politics’, with its strategy, itsinstitutions, its ‘worldview’ and its own dis-course on the transition from class to classlesssociety, as they were deployed after 1870.Marx is caught between the anarchist (Bakun-inist) thesis, which demands above all the‘destruction of (state or party) authority’, and

the statist, nationalist (Lassallean) thesis,which sees organising society as ‘legitimate




functions’ of the state (see Te Civil War inFrance , MECW 22, 332). He never succeedsin overcoming this symmetry, despite the newdefinition of the dictatorship of the proletariat

drawn from the model of the Paris Communeor Engels’s remarkable efforts to theorise thepolitical function of the ‘masses’ insofar asthey cannot be reduced to the abstraction ofclasses.

All these diffi culties crystallise around thequestion of the formation of a ‘class politicalparty’, seen as neither an element nor a mirrorimage of the bourgeois state apparatus. Tey

come down to the fact that it is just as diffi cultto conceive of revolution as a ‘revolution fromabove’ as it is to conceive of it as a ‘revolutionfrom below’; that is, as a proletarian ‘appro-priation’ of a pre-existing force developed bythe ruling classes, or a ‘metamorphosis’ of thehistorical figures of force, or a ‘return of therepressed’: a popular, spontaneous force spe-cific to the masses themselves. Force [Gewalt ]is undoubtedly not ‘available [verfügbar ]’ tothe proletariat. Always exceeding the prole-tariat’s ability to control it, whether as violence or as power , far from forming the direct prov-ince of its political subjectification, it ‘decon-structs’ (as Derrida would say) the proletariat’sclaims to subjecthood.

3. Marxism and post-Marxism between ‘Gewalt’and civility . – By speculating on the crux ofrevolutionary subjectification, socialisationand force, we have anticipated the lessons thatcan be drawn from a describing the develop-ment of Marxism starting from the work of itsfounders. Tese lessons now bring us tosketching out a critique of Marxism in whichthe aporia of its relationship to the significance

and use of force will be the guiding thread. Itwould of course be desirable for a critique ofthis kind to be presented as a self-criticism, inwhich Marxism would find the means tounderstand its own setbacks and overcome itshistorical limits, so as to reopen the perspec-tives of a revolutionary ‘transformation of theworld’. Unfortunately, we know that nothingof the kind is about to happen, fundamentally

because of the incapacity that Marxism hasmanifested to analyse the real catastrophes of

the twentieth-century history (quite differentfrom the ‘final catastrophe’ of capitalism thatMarx prophesied), in which it was both agentand victim: fascism and Nazism, ‘really exist-

ing socialism’ and its exterminationist aberra-tions, the mutation of anti-imperialist strugglesinto ideological/military dictatorships, thecombination of ethnic or religious racism withabsolute impoverishment and devastation ofthe earth’s environment, etc. Tis means that acritique of Marxism is at the same time an‘exit’ from its problematic or a relativisation ofits point of view. But this in no way means

that all the analyses it has put forward or thequestions that it has raised are lacking in con-temporary significance.

It is appropriate, first of all, to describe thedispersion that occurred during the twentiethcentury in the field of Marxist discourses andshow its linkage with the problem of force andthe ‘choices’ that it impelled. Our thesis is thatthis problem constitutes precisely the redthread of the split dynamic that is typical ofhistorical Marxism, making it impossible toattribute a simple ‘position’ to it in politicalaffairs (even though the successive orthodoxiesof the Second and Tird Internationals triedto give credence to the opposite standpoint).But the splits themselves evidently cannot beexplained only on the basis of theoretical

choices. Tey must be traced back in an intrin-sic way to practical conjunctures, which appearto us in hindsight as falling under two majorcycles of political struggles whose dynamics Marx-ism attempted to grasp, two cycles that havebeen superimposed on each other withoutpurely and simply intermingling. Te first isthe cycle of anticapitalist class struggles whoseprotagonist has been the working class with its

historical organisations (parties, trade unions,associations); the second is the cycle of anti-imperialist struggles whose protagonists havebeen movements for national independenceand/or movements resisting the unequalexchange that is blamed for underdevelop-ment. In both cases, the discourses that weneed to take account of have not always beenunanimously recognised as ‘Marxist’, or, in

some cases (Sorel, Fanon), have not evenidentified completely with Marxism. But this




is a secondary issue; it expresses, in fact, theimpossibility of unifying the Marxist prob-lematic and thus of marking any hard-and-fastboundaries for it. What matters to us is these

discourses’ historical/theoretical relationshipwith the problems that Marx and Engels raised.

3.1 Te anticapitalist cycle and institutional‘Gewalt’ . – Te anticapitalist cycle (which hasfor the most part unfolded in Europe, at leastas far as its major innovations go, though ofcourse it has extended over the entire world)began in the trade-union movement and the

socialist parties of the Second International. Itpivoted around the Great War of 1914–18,the Russian Revolution and the confrontationwith fascism between the two World Wars. Itconcluded, after a long period of immobilisa-tion in the structures of the ‘Cold War’, in themass revolts of 1968 and subsequent years,when a certain resurgence of the councilist tra-dition combined with the growth of revolu-tionary movements and revolts against otherforms of ‘power’ or ‘domination’ besides capi-tal (family, school, ‘disciplinary’ institutions inFoucault ’s sense and ‘ideological state appara-tuses’ in Althusser’s sense).

Te habit has taken hold since the debatesinside German Social Democracy and the1917–20 split of classifying the different posi-

tions present during the first period in linewith the simple formula reform or revolution,with the advocates of a gradual, ‘peaceful’ evo-lution from capitalism to socialism (the Eng-lish Fabian Society, Bernstein, Jaurès) on oneside and the advocates of an immediate over-throw of capitalism by means of revolutionaryviolence (Lenin, Rosa Luxemburg, Panne-koek etc.) on the other, with the defenders of

Marxist ‘orthodoxy’ (like Kautsky ) trying fortheir part to uphold an intermediate position.From the theoretical point of view that we areputting forward here, it is more interesting toorganise the debate directly around the mostoriginal positions, in the works of Sorel,Bernstein, Lenin and Gramsci.

Combining Proudhon’s legacy with Marx ’s,Sorel attempted to theorise the tactic of the

‘general strike’ that French revolutionary syn-dicalism had adopted after leaving behind its

anarchist phase, in which notably the ideaof ‘propaganda of the deed’ or anticapitalistcriminality had been widespread. Te redthread of his celebrated 1908 work Reflections

on Violence is the distinction between two anti-thetical ‘social powers’, bourgeois institutional force and spontaneous proletarian violence. Inlight of this distinction, he rereads Marx ’stexts that Social Democracy had made canon-ical, and sifts through the tactics of the con-temporary workers’ movement, denouncingin particular the coexistence of revolutionaryphraseology and parliamentarist practice in

the parties of the Second International. Forhim, proletarian violence is an extrapolationof the rebellions inherent in the condition ofexploited producers, which leads to the mobi-lising ‘myth’ of the general strike and fore-shadows socialism as an association of freemen. On a political as well as ethical level,it can be distinguished from the perspective ofa civil war between classes organised intoopposed ‘camps’, and repudiates the model oferror or permanent revolution inheritedfrom the Jacobin tradition.

Although Sorel (probably under Nietzsche’sinfluence) exalts the model of the ‘useless’(anti-utilitarian), heroic warrior, he makesantimilitarism the touchstone of proletarianmorality. But what complicates his position

(and at least partly explains how both a revo-lutionary tradition and Mussolini’s fascistscould make use of his work) is precisely thiscategory of ‘myth’, whose philosophical foun-dations he borrows from Bergson’s theories ofintuition and life force [élan vital ], and whichhe counterposes to both the abstract ‘utopias’of the socialist movement and the ‘magic’ ofthe state. Referring to both an ideal totality of

social struggles and an affective capacity formass mobilisation, his ‘myth’ seems destinedin practice to a perpetual fuite en avant . Tis isprobably why Sorel soon felt obliged to dividethe notion of ‘general strike’ into two forms,one authentically proletarian, the other per-verted by its political co-optation (a stratagemthat is also to be found in Benjamin’s work)– though this would not prevent him from

throwing his lot in with the most mutuallyantagonistic parties himself.




Bernstein, whose 1899 book Te Precondi-tions of Socialism set off the ‘revisionist’ con-troversy, was also an acerbic critic of SocialDemocracy’s institutional ‘double language’.

Contrary to a tenacious legend, he was not atall an ‘opportunist’ in the French sense, anexclusive champion of the parliamentary roadand of political alliances with ‘bourgeois’ par-ties. In 1905, he joined Rosa Luxemburg indefending the ‘mass strike’. But he sought todraw a demarcation line within the revolu-tionary tradition (including in Marx ’s andEngels’s work) between two radically dissimi-

lar traditions: an archaic tradition, an expres-sion of the survival of utopia within Marxismitself, which tried ‘dialectically’ to combinethe image of a capitalist collapse [ Zusammen-bruch] with the terrorist tactic of the seizure ofpower (transmitted by way of Blanqui, theprobable inventor of the expression ‘dictator-ship of the proletariat’); and a genuinely mod-ern tradition, which tried to link socialisationof the economy to democratisation of societyby generalising associative and federativeforms of self-management [Selbstverwaltung ].(‘Democracy is both means and end. It is aweapon in the struggle for socialism, and it isthe form in which socialism will be realised’,Preconditions of Socialism, 142; Voraussetzun- gen, 154). Tis explains his famous formula

declaring that ‘what is usually termed the finalgoal of socialism is nothing to me, the move-ment is everything’ (Preconditions of Socialism,190), closely linked to a critique of the ‘accel-erating’, ‘creative’ function that part of theMarxist tradition attributes to force.

Earlier, Marxists had, from timeto time, assigned force [Gewalt ] a

purely negative role in contemporarysociety, but nowadays an exaggera-tion in the opposite direction is inevidence; force is given what amountsto a creative omnipotence, and anemphasis on political action [ätigkeit ]seems virtually the quintessence of‘scientific socialism’ – or even ‘scien-tific communism’, to use the expres-

sion as ‘improved’ by a new fashion,not exactly with any advantage to

its logic. (Preconditions of Socialism, 203; Voraussetzungen, 212–13).

Tis also explains his rehabilitation of law , or

more accurately of citizenship (whose Germanname, Bürgertum, refers to the history ofcivil and political liberties; this is why Bern-stein criticises the tendency to substitute theexpression ‘civil society’ – ‘bourgeois society[bürgerliche Gesellschaft ]’ – for the expression‘capitalist society [kapitalistische Gesellschaft ]’.)He thought that citizenship was increasinglyindissociable from forms of economic democ-

racy , not in the form of an egalitarian organi-sation of work – utopian in his eyes – but,rather, in the form of trade-union representa-tion in the management of firms and thegrowth of consumer co-operatives (in otherwords, a regulation of the ‘free market’). Itexplains, finally, Bernstein’s emphasis on thenecessity of educating the working class , whichit must set itself to in order to become capableof taking on ‘responsibility [Verantwortli-chkeit ]’ for society as a whole.

Tis brings us to Lenin’s position. Troughthe two Russian Revolutions of 1905 and 1917and then the Civil War, Lenin never stoppedtrying to grasp the relationship between anti-capitalist social transformation and the politi-cal transformation of the autocratic régime.

His approach has often been reproached with‘voluntarism’. But its force is not due only tohis conception of a party of ‘professional revo-lutionaries’ (which as early as What Is to BeDone? in 1902 goes together with the idea ofthe proletariat’s mission of joining togetherthe emancipatory aspirations of all classes ofsociety), nor to his elaboration (on the basis ofthe whole international debate of the years

1910–14: Hobson, Hilferding, Luxemburg,Bukharin, etc.) of a theory of imperialismthat leads to seeing the revolutionary conjunc-ture as a boomerang effect of capitalism’s glo-bal contradictions and the violent forms thatits expansion inevitably assumes. It is duemore profoundly to his original treatment ofthe relationship between force and the tempo-rality of politics, which can be illustrated both

with his conception of ‘transforming theimperialist war into a revolutionary civil war’




in 1914–17 and with his reformulation of the‘dictatorship of the proletariat’ at the time of‘war communism’ and the NEP. His famous1917 pamphlet State and Revolution, in which

he rereads all of Marx ’s and Engels’s texts onthe transition from capitalism to communismin order to justify insurrection and define thegoal of the seizure of power as the destructionof the state machine, is located in time rightbetween the two. It has a clearly more scholas-tic character than other works like his 1915Collapse of the Second International , his 1917 April Teses or his 1920 ‘Left-Wing’ Commu-

nism: An Infantile Disorder.Te slogan of transforming the imperialist

war into a revolution was not Lenin’s purelyindividual idea. On the contrary, after the fail-ure of the European socialist movement’sattempts to prevent the World War, the ideawas shared by the different left-wing factionsresisting the politics of patriotic unity in theirvarious countries, which defined their com-mon platform at the conferences in Zimmer-wald (1915) and Kienthal (1916). But, whilemost left-wing leaders and theorists saw theslogan as an injunction, accompanied by a feel-ing of living through an apocalyptic momentof ‘choice’ between salvation and damnation –either revolution will reverse the course ofevents, or the war will reduce civilisation to

ruins – Lenin reasoned in the opposite direc-tion. He treated the war as an overdeterminedhistorical process whose nature would necessar-ily be gradually modified, and which at the‘opportune moment’ would make room foran intervention combining the ‘objective’ con-ditions with the ‘subjective’ conditions forrevolution.

Lenin provided a philosophical foundation

for this standpoint by rereading conjointly theworks of Hegel (mainly his Logic ) and Clause-witz (On War ), as can be seen in the Philo-sophical Notebooks that he wrote during thesame period (provided one does not expurgatethem, as their Soviet publishers did). His read-ing led him to surprising applications ofClausewitz’s dictum that ‘war is the continua-tion of politics by other means’. Te extreme

violence of the process of mutual extermina-tion of peoples set in motion by their respec-

tive governments is presented in Lenin’sanalysis under the heading of the subjectivefactor, which must gradually induce the massesto turn against their governments and bring

about a resurgence of class politics at theexpense of patriotism in the soldiers’ state ofmind. At the same time, Lenin subjects thehistorical incidence of the national question toanalyses that lead to the idea that every revolu-tionary process is an ‘uneven’ combination ofheterogeneous factors, whose conflict engen-ders a specific duration and determines conjunctures of concentration and dispersion of

contradictions, of strengthening and weaken-ing of state power. By this route, Lenin intro-duces a new idea into Marxism: neither the‘conversion’ of force into historical rationality,nor its use (or rejection) as a revolutionary‘means’, but rather a genuine politics of violence aiming at its transformation.

A related issue can be found at the heart ofLenin’s theoretical conceptions after the Octo-ber Revolution. He worked them out in themidst of incessant (national and international)polemics in the fraught conditions of exercis-ing power, waiting for and observing thedefeat of the world revolution, and clashesamong revolutionary currents. In reality, theydo not contain any final synthesis (Stalin would take on the task of synthesis, in his own

way). As we have argued elsewhere, (‘Dictat-ure du prolétariat’, in Dictionnaire critique dumarxisme ), Lenin in fact invented a third con-cept of the dictatorship of the proletariat (fol-lowing Marx ’s concept of 1848–52 andMarx ’s and Engels’s of 1872–5). Te necessityof insurrection is part of Lenin’s concept,naturally, but he relates it very specifically tothe changing conditions of the revolutionary

process, which cannot be the subject of a ‘deci-sion’. (Even in State and Revolution, where hewrites, ‘Te necessity of systematically imbu-ing the masses with this and precisely this viewof violent revolution lies at the root of theentire theory of Marx and Engels’ (LCW 25,405), Lenin finds a way to remind his readersthat the forms of the seizure of power dependon circumstances.) On the other hand, the

necessity of insurrection is only a prelude to adialectic specific to the ‘transition period’,




which requires a clear distinction between thequestion of power and the question of the stateapparatus . Here again, the issue is how todefine a political practice in conditions of vio-

lence, which, in a sense, turn political practiceagainst itself (just as the state must be turnedagainst its traditional function so as to becomea state that is no longer a state in the propersense of the word). Te distinction betweenpower and apparatus comes from Marx , but,from now on, it serves to help comprehend theuneven development of the revolutionary proc-ess: for the proletariat, exercising power

(through the intermediary of its representa-tives) does not in any way mean controlling thestate apparatus, and still less controlling theeffects of using an administrative and politicalmachine that the ruling classes ‘built’ in orderto block the masses’ access to political practice.

From this point on, the alternative of ‘bour-geois dictatorship’ or ‘proletarian dictatorship’takes on another meaning. It implies that thebourgeois ‘dictatorship’ can be reproducedinside the revolutionary process, not just start-ing from the resistance of the revolution’sadversaries, but starting as well from its ownpolitical institutions. Tis requires a specificsort of (class) struggle, until the time when theconditions for the ‘withering away of the state’foretold by the theoreticians of socialism are

finally in place. In relation to the issue of vio-lence , however, this idea proves to be particu-larly ambiguous, as historical experiences of‘socialist revolutions’ on the Leninist modelhave repeatedly illustrated. It evokes the ideaof an intensification of class struggle during theperiod of the dictatorship of the proletariat,which Lenin frequently described as a ‘relent-less life-and-death struggle between two

classes, two worlds, two historical epochs’ (‘APublicist’s Notes’, 1920; LCW 30; 355), aswell as a prolonged undertaking in which theproletariat does its apprenticeship in directdemocracy and economic management (symbol-ised by the initiative of ‘communist subbot-niks’: see ‘A Great Beginning’, 1919; LCW 29,409–34). In principle, the party has the taskof resolving this tension or carrying out the

synthesis between the contradictory ‘tasks’ ofthe communist revolution, but Lenin’s works

are silent about how this is supposed to beaccomplished. History has shown that tendsto happen instead is that the contradictionsreproduce themselves within the party itself,

and that no ideological purity can immunise itagainst its own internal violence.

In the following period, Gramsci’s thought,in which we today see a desperate effort toovercome the effects of Stalinised Bolshevismon the Communist movement and thus hoistit to the level necessary to confront fascism,can be considered an attempt at a synthesis ofelements from these three traditions. Starting

from the inspiring and tragic experience of therevolution of the urin factory councils andfrom a voluntarist philosophy influenced bySorel, this Communist leader, prisoner andmartyr, whom the Comintern had abandonedto his fate, had undertaken to rethink all theelements of the Marxist and Leninist prob-lematic while returning to a concept of poli-tics of a Machiavellian type. In this way, hesought to take up ideally both a standpoint from above (defending the necessity of a revo-lutionary party that would function like a‘modern prince’, as both a collective intellec-tual and strategist) and a standpoint frombelow (defending the necessity of an ‘intellec-tual and moral reform’ that would enable themasses to become the agents of their own his-

tory and leave behind the ‘subaltern’ condi-tion to which capitalism confines them byraising themselves to a ‘hegemonic’ position).Here, we only keep hold of the following ideafrom his conception of revolution as a ‘war ofmovement’ that prepares within capitalismitself the conditions for proletarian power: inthe last analysis, not only is there never a ‘pure’revolution, but also any revolution that is

active as a ‘praxis’ of transformation of socialrelations is an alternative that the ruled inventin face of a ‘passive revolution’, that is, a strat-egy of the rulers to perpetuate their domina-tion by adapting to new historical conditions.(Te classic example is the postrevolutionaryconstruction of a French nation; and the ques-tion posed at the time Gramsci was writingwas whether US ‘Fordism’, with its project of

‘rationalisation of the nation’s demographiccomposition’, should be interpreted in the




same way.) On this account, although Gram-sci does not ignore violence [Gewalt ], he is lessa theorist of violence than of ‘forces [Kräfte ]’and ‘relationships of forces [Kräfteverhält-

nisse ]’, which cultural processes are as muchpart of as violence [Gewalt ] is, and whichalways necessitate analysing state structures ina relationship of reciprocal determinationwith the organisation of civil society.

Tese theoretical paths mapped out duringthe first half of the twentieth century in a timeof war and revolution essentially remained thereference points of an enlarged Marxism,

resisting a dogmatic ice age, until the upheavalof 1968. At that point, a new ‘great debate’began about the forms and functions of revo-lutionary violence (including terrorist forms,in the case of the Italian Red Brigades andGerman Red Army Fraction). Te most inter-esting debate theoretically was probably thedivergence that opened up within Italian‘workerism [operaismo]’, which had pro-foundly renewed analysis of the politicaldimension of conflicts in the modern factoryand of the labour force’s refusal to submit to‘capitalist planning’ (or the ‘socialised workers’refusal to let themselves be reduced to thestatus of ‘mass workers’). Tis problematicrelaunched the discussion of the relationshipamong forms of power (above all the ‘state-

form’, understood on a model derived fromthe Marxian analysis of the ‘commodity-form’)and processes of political subjectification. Butwhile Mario ronti, under the influence ofhis reading of Carl Schmitt , defended thenotion of ‘the autonomy of the political’,observing that any form of organisation ofcapitalist labour presupposes state action, andasked how political antagonism is established

when the state is no longer a state of theclassical liberal type but rather a state of theKeynesian ‘interventionist’ type or the Christian-Democratic ‘consensual’ type, Antonio Negri,by contrast, started from the thesis of a struc-tural crisis of the ‘planner-state’. Negri saw theautonomy of the state as a fictional mediationof social conflicts that conceals the generalisa-tion of repressive practices. Under the rubric

‘workers’ autonomy’, he theorised a permanentinsurrection of the collective worker against the

dictates of capital, which he argued aimed atrecomposing labour while at the same timedestroying any ‘institutional mediation’.

It would be even more interesting to com-

pare these theorisations systematically withthe conception of ‘power’ that Michel Foucault began to develop at the same time, in particu-lar in Discipline and Punish (1975). Marx ’sanalyses in Capital concerning capitalist vio-lence, inasmuch as it aims to transform theworker’s body into a production tool, areincorporated in Foucault ’s work in the moregeneral framework of ‘disciplinary’ mecha-

nisms of domination in modern societies,and – taking the work of Frankfurt-schoolresearchers like Rusche and Kirchheimer in adifferent direction – of a theory of the ‘strate-gic’ function that the use of revolts and illegal-ity has in the functioning of the state. In thisway, the anthropological foundations of theMarxist theorisation of class struggles and eco-nomic and political force are, in a certainsense, put in question. Marxist historians suchas Hobsbawm had taken the risk of question-ing the boundary between political violence(‘revolt’) and criminal violence (‘delinquency’)only in dealing with precapitalist societies, butnot in dealing with ‘developed’ forms of classstruggles – such was the power of the tabooinherited from the debates with anarchism.

4. Te anti-imperialist cycle and the ‘reallyexisting catastrophes’. – In a text written in1959, ‘Te Meaning of Working through thePast [Was bedeutet: Aufarbeitung der Vergan- genheit ]’, Adorno posed the problem of the‘survival’ of National Socialism in Germany asa psychic structure rooted in the objectivity ofa certain economic order and in the defence

mechanisms that the fear of historic catastro-phes elicits.

One wants to break free of the past:rightly, because nothing at all canlive in its shadow, and because therewill be no end to the terror as longas guilt and violence are repaid withguilt and violence; wrongly, because

the past that one would like to evadeis still very much alive. National




Socialism lives on, and even todaywe still do not know whether it ismerely the ghost of what was somonstrous that it lingers on after its

own death, or whether it has notdied at all, whether the willingnessto commit the unspeakable survivesin people as well as in the conditionsthat enclose them. (89–90.)

Te text goes on to combine two types ofapproach to this structure of ‘terror’, which iscapable of perpetuating itself beyond the con-

ditions in which it emerged and of being anobstacle to any democratisation of politics.Te text is, on the one hand, a critique ofsocial alienation, inspired by the Marxianproblematic of ‘commodity fetishism’, extendedsince Lukács’s work to the entire process ofreification (or desubjectification) of society:‘Using the language of philosophy, one indeedcould say that the people’s alienation fromdemocracy reflects the self-alienation of soci-ety’ (93). On the other hand, it is a recourse toFreudian ego psychology (as in Group Psychol-ogy and the Analysis of the Ego and Civilisationand Its Discontents ) that had already been setin motion in 1950 in Studies in the Authoritar-ian Personality : ‘Authoritarian personalities arehowever altogether misunderstood when they

are construed from the vantage point of a par-ticular political-economic ideology; the well-known oscillations of millions of voters before1933 between the National Socialist andCommunist parties is no accident from thesocial-psychological perspective either. [. . .] Authoritarian personalities identify themselveswith real-existing power per se , prior to anyparticular contents’ (94). Tese two explana-

tory factors are subsequently joined togetherin a single matrix of subjection to the force ofcircumstances (or, to borrow La Boétie’s cele-brated expression, ‘voluntary servitude’):

Te economic order, and to a greatextent also the economic organiza-tion modelled upon it, now asthen renders the majority of people

dependent upon conditions beyondtheir control and thus maintains

them in a state of political imma-turity. If they want to live, then noother avenue remains but to adapt.[. . .] Te necessity of such adapta-

tion, of identification with the given,the status quo, with power as such,creates the potential for totalitaria-nism. (98–9.)

Te same terms are invoked in Te Dialectic ofEnlightenment in an attempt to approximatethe ‘elements of anti-Semitism’: a ‘false socialorder’, in which individual subjectivity as such

is repressed, spontaneously engenders a ‘willto destruction’ or a hatred that becomes insep-arable from the organisation of production,which it defines as ‘natural’. Tis hatred isthen integrated into a compensatory portrayalof the Volksgemeinschaft and projected on his-torically existing groups that incarnate formodern (European) civilisation ‘the other’ inits midst. Tis hatred is thus also very muchself-destructive.

One could, of course, discuss each of theelements of this analysis, and, above all, thenature of their interconnection, the explana-tion of whose mysteries [ Auroren] requires noless than an entire metaphysics. wo thrusts of Adorno’s discourse seem particularly note-worthy. On the one hand, he calls the irrevers-

ible fact that has turned our view of politicsupside-down (including, and perhaps mostparticularly, the phenomena that the Marxisttradition as an expression of the workers’movement had developed) a (both real andsymbolic) ‘catastrophe’. On the other hand,he does not hesitate, as his argument unfolds,to couple the threat associated with the spectreof Nazism with the threat that national-libera-

tion movements may embody, to the extentthat they too base themselves on glorificationof the ‘folk community’:

oday the fascist wish-image unques-tionably blends with the nationa-lism of the so-called underdevelopedcountries, which now, however, areinstead called ‘developing countries’.

Already during the war the slogans about Western plutocracies and pro-




letarian nations expressed sympathywith those who felt shortchanged inthe imperialist competition and alsowanted a place at the table. [. . .]

Nationalism today is both obsoleteand up-to-date. [. . .] But nationalismis up-to-date in so far as the traditio-nal and psychologically supremelyinvested idea of the nation, whichstill expresses the community ofinterests within the internationaleconomy, alone has suffi cient forceto mobilize hundreds of millions of

people for goals they cannotimmediately identity as their own.[. . .] Only in an age in which it wasalready toppling has nationalismbecome completely sadistic anddestructive. (97–8.)

We do not think that these formulations canbe interpreted as expressions of contempt forTird-World liberation struggles. Rather, theytake a critical look at how extremes can meetat a time when, at least in Europe, the discov-ery of anti-imperialist struggles, as well as thepossibility of viewing their global significancein an enlarged Marxist framework (preparedby classical theories of imperialism) had con-tributed for many revolutionaries and ‘left-

wing’ activists to hiding the elements ofantinomy inherent in very idea of a politics ofviolence.

4.1 Te first point that strikes us as impor-tant is that while the intensive theoreticalwork that liberation struggles gave rise tobefore and after the Second World War admit-tedly widened the field of application of reflec-

tions on force considerably, by giving them amore and more central place in politicalthought (with the same justification as thetheory of ‘development’), it did not funda-mentally modify the definition of this cate-gory. One might even think that it returned tothe same dichotomy between the institutionaland spontaneous aspects of force that so manyefforts of post-Engels Marxist theoreticians

(particularly in Lenin’s work and above allGramsci’s) were directed against. In a situa-

tion characterised by massive forms of abso-lute impoverishment and harsh (colonial orsemi-colonial) political domination, arisen ina civilisation suffused with racism towards

non-European humanity, which had for cen-turies not hesitated in the end to resort toextermination, the various currents each triedin their own ways to take note of the factthat violence is not truly a choice but rather aconstraint. Te only possibility availableseemed to be to rearrange it and reinvent itsmodalities. Tere was only one apparentexception in this respect: the politics of ‘non-

violence’ carried out by Gandhi, to which wewill return.

On the one hand we have thus theories ofrevolutionary armed struggle, such as ‘people’swar’ (Mao in China) or ‘guerrilla war’ (Castro and Che Guevara in Latin America). Teirmutual opposition gave rise at the time tointense ideological debates, with differentand clashing conceptions of the link betweenvanguard and masses, the primacy of the polit-ical (meaning ideological) factor and the mili-tary factor, nationalism and internationalism.Tere can be no doubt that these debatesdefined an era in military thought , putting inquestion in particular the distinctions betweenwar and revolution that had been the founda-tion of the classic definitions of politics (as can

also be seen in the reception they got in CarlSchmitt ’s counterrevolutionary essay Te Te-ory of the Partisan). But it is all the more strik-ing to note that, whatever the subtlety of theclass analyses that they give rise to (clearerin Mao’s work than in Guevara ’s or RégisDebray ’s), they are always conceived accord-ing to a strategic model , in which the onlyactors are the appurtenances of ‘forces’ and

‘masses’ shifting in space and over time. Tisis probably why they have an intrinsic needto compensate for their objectivism by refer-ring to complementary ideal states , particularlyeschatological prospects of the coming of the‘new man’ once the process of liberation isaccomplished.

Faced with this objectivism, we have theextreme subjectivism of a discourse like Frantz

Fanon’s (whose amplification by Sartre in theform of a sort of exorcism of extreme colonial




violence ensured its lasting, universal reper-cussions). Here, the subject is no longer forceas organised power or force , but force as an‘absolute praxis’ that itself, immediately, effects

the spiritual liberation of the colonised at thesame time that it turns the accumulated capac-ity for terror against the coloniser:

At the level of individuals, violenceis a cleansing force. It frees thenative from his inferiority complexand from his despair and inaction;it makes him fearless and restores

his self-respect. [. . .] When thepeople have taken violent part inthe national liberation they willallow no one to set themselves up as‘liberators’. [. . .] Yesterday they werecompletely irresponsible; today theymean to understand everything andmake all decisions. Illuminated byviolence, the consciousness of thepeople rebels against any pacification.From now on the demagogues, theopportunists, and the magicianshave a diffi cult task. Te action[ praxis ] which has thrown theminto a hand-to-hand struggle confersupon the masses a voracious taste forthe concrete. (Fanon 94–5.)

Tis great gap has in fact never been bridged.Tis may be what has intellectually disarmedanti-imperialist movements in face of counter-revolutionary strategies – and, in the last anal-ysis, in face of their own authoritarian andtotalitarian lapses as well.

4.2 By comparison, one could say that more

theoretical creativity, if not political effective-ness, has been apparent in the discourses of cri-sis that tried throughout the fascist period inEurope to interpret ‘negatively’ the genesis ofextreme violence and its capacity to wipe outthe space for politics (including by turningrevolutionary identities upside-down), bycombining Marxist analytical categories withNietzschean theses on ‘cruelty’ or Freudian

theses on thanatos (the death drive) and its rolein collective identification (as we have already

seen in Adorno’s work). Te theorists whodeveloped these discourses resolutely refusedto conceive of class struggles within the con-fines of a progressive, productivist anthropo-

logical horizon, as the classical Marxists had. We would say that this was the case with Wil-helm Reich’s attempts in Te Mass Psychologyof Fascism (1933), Georges Bataille in ‘TePsychological Structure of Fascism’ (1933–4),and Walter Benjamin in the whole formed byhis 1921 essay ‘Zur Kritik der Gewalt’(‘owards a Critique of Violence’) and his1940 ‘Teses on the Philosophy of History’ –

with all the differences that distinguish theseworks from each other.

Reich – despite the dubiousness of hissometimes raving naturalist biologism – pointsinsistently at Marxism’s blind point (the ‘irra-tional’ libidinal structure of mass gatheringsand movements that are responsible for ‘mak-ing their own history’) as well as the parallelblind spots of Freudianism, which ought tomake it possible to comprehend the trans-individual material of politics (denial of thestate’s repressive function linked to forms ofthe patriarchal family). Almost a half-centurylater, Deleuze and Guattari would take this astheir starting point in Anti-Oedipus and, aboveall, in A Tousand Plateaus (1980).

Bataille describes the state, not just as an

apparatus of power in the service of specificclass interests, but as an institution that tendsto shelter the ‘homogeneous part’ of societycentred on productive utility from the boo-merang effect of its ‘heterogeneous part’, thatis, from the inassimilable forces which bringtogether the opposed figures of the sacred anddisgust, as well as the forms of individual orcollective violence that serve as the erotic

foundation of sovereignty and more generallyof mastery. He suggests that Mussolini’s andHitler’s fascist formations were not able tomobilise the oppressed masses without bring-ing the heterogeneous element of social lifeback to the foreground, and redirecting itagainst victims banished from society. Bataille also dares to suggest that the proletariat orpeople can only triumph over fascism if they

mobilise the same elements (returning, in acertain way, to the Marxian conception of the




Lumpenproletariat , but, in contrast to the origi-nal conception, in order to value it positively).

Benjamin, finally, in his youthful work(explicitly influenced by Sorel) shows that any

institutional (legal ) force takes the form of amonopoly and consequently of an excess of power , which points as required to its own tar-gets in society by setting the boundaries oflegality and illegality. He then contrasts it withthe extra-legal and therefore revolutionary fig-ure of ‘divine violence’, which refounds theinstitution while destroying it, but which isinherently divisible into state violence and

redemptive violence. Tis formulation is closeto the one that Bataille would arrive at later(the two of them have the reference to ‘sover-eignty’ in common), except insofar as itpresents the ambiguity of extreme violence asan aporia and not as a solution.

Much later, after living through the experi-ence of fascism and encountering Marxism, inthe 1940 ‘Teses on the Philosophy of His-tory’ that put an end to his unfinished work,Benjamin portrays Spartacism as the heir ofthe Blanquist tradition that joins ‘hatred’ ofthe exploiters with the ‘spirit of sacrifice’ (Te-sis 12). But, above all, he draws an absolutedemarcation line between the violence of therulers and the violence of the ruled, the ‘gen-erations of the downtrodden’, whose unlikely

triumph through liberatory violence – compa-rable to the arrival of a messiah – gives mean-ing to the century-old accumulation of rubbleand opens up the possibility of a different kindof history.

All these formulations undeniably have apartly mythical (or mystical) character. Butthey also share the way in which they pointtowards the existence of another scene (to speak

like Freud) in which, in a sense, ‘behindthe back’ of class struggles and relationshipsand forces and even more of ‘class conscious-ness’, a conjunction or metamorphosis of formsof objective violence (structurally implicatedin mechanisms of domination and exploita-tion) into subjective violence (or even ultra-subjective violence, resulting from identificationand fascination with an imaginary, collective

‘omnipotence’) takes place. An idea of this kind,even if expressed in a speculative way, has the

advantage of ruling out as a matter of princi-ple any possibility of thinking of history as a‘conversion’ of violence, let alone any possibil-ity of mastering violence without a boomerang

effect on those who use it, whether they are thepowers of the state or those of the revolution.

4.3 Criticising the illusion of a tactical orhistorical mastery of violence (in oppositionto all the Marxist theoreticians, with the pos-sible exception of some of Rosa Luxemburg’sremarks on the Russian Revolution – seeSchriften zur Teorie , 180 et sqq.), without for

all that believing in the possibility of eliminat-ing it or doing without it, thus does not neces-sarily mean eliminating the question of apolitics of violence. On the contrary, it meansrelaunching a politics of violence on a differ-ent basis. Neither does it mean making historyanew. But it may mean re-opening debatesthat have been evaded or closed too rapidly.o mention only one such debate, whichwe think is fundamental: one of the great‘missed appointments’ in the history of Marx-ism seems to have been an encounter betweenthe Leninist politics of the ‘dictatorship of theproletariat’ and the politics of ‘non-violence’and ‘civil disobedience’ theorised and prac-tised by Gandhi in India – the other greatform of revolutionary practice in the twenti-

eth century (with results that were equallydecisive and, in the long term, equally prob-lematic). For Gandhian non-violence is not(or rather not only) an ethics, but primarily apolitics, with its own conception of the socialconflict between oppressors and oppressedand its own way of gradually turning aroundthe relationship of forces by initiating a‘conversion of means and ends’ (see Bondu-

rant and Chandra (1988), the only greatMarxist-trained author to have ventured inthis direction).

Tis fictional history never took place. Butit could take place in people’s minds in thetwenty-first century, as they face the develop-ment of a global economy of violence and theconcomitant crisis of representation and sov-ereignty. It has the advantage of drawing our

attention, not only to the necessity of civilis-ing the state, but also to the necessity of




civilising the revolution. Te latter is no easierthan the former, but it is a precondition torecovering a Marxist theoretical heritage thathas progressively discovered its multiplicity

at the same time that it has discovered itsfragility.

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Alten Reiches bis zum Untergang der Weimarer

Republik , Munich.

Étienne Balibarranslated by Peter Drucker

Anarchism, anarcho-syndicalism, arbitrariness,Bonapartism, civil war, class struggles, coercion,

Cold War, coup d’état, crime, criminality, des-potic socialism, despotism of capital, destruction,destructive forces, dictatorship of the proletariat,end of history, exterminism, extremism, finalsolution, Fanonism, Fidelism, French Revolu-tion, Gandhianism, general strike, genocide, justwar, Gewaltstaat , Gramscianism, guerrilla, Gue-varism, gulag, Holocaust, injustice, Jacobinism,Leninism, left radicalism, liberation, Machiavel-

lianism, Maoism, machine breaking, markets ofviolence, mass strike, mass worker, militarism,military, military coup, NEP, nihilism, objectiv-ism, oppression, people’s war, pogrom, Pol-

Potism, power, primitive accumulation, putsch,radicalness, rape, resistance, revolt, revolution,right to resistance, semi-state, separation of pow-ers, Sorelianism, struggle, subjectivism, subjuga-tion, torture, total worker, tyranny, unequalexchange, victim, voluntarism, war communism,war and peace, wild capitalism, withering awayof the state, workerism, workers’ education.

Absterben des Staates, Anarchismus, Anarchosyn-dikalismus, Arbeiterbildung, Aufstand, Befreiung,Bonapartismus, Bürgerkrieg, Despotie des Kapi-tals, despotischer Sozialismus, Destruktivkräfte,Diktatur des Proletariats, Ende der Geschichte,Endlösung, Exterminismus, Extremismus, Fan-onismus, Fidelismus, Folter, Französische Revo-lution, Gandhismus, Generalstreik, Genozid,gerechter Krieg, Gesamtarbeiter, Gewalten-teilung, Gewaltmärkte, Gewaltstaat, Gramscis-mus, Guerilla, Guevarismus, GULag, Halbstaat,Holokaust, Jakobinismus, Kalter Krieg, Kampf,Klassenkämpfe, Krieg und Frieden, Kriegskom-munismus, Kriminalität, Leninismus, Link-sradikalismus, Machiavellismus, Macht, Maoismus,Maschinensturm, Massenarbeiter, Massenstreik,Militär, Militarismus, Militärputsch, Neue

Ökonomische Politik, Nihilismus, Objektivis-mus, Operaismus, Opfer, Pogrom, Pol-Potismus,Putsch, Radikalität, Revolution, Sorelismus,Staatsstreich, Staatsterrorismus, Subjektivismus,yrannei, ungleicher ausch, Unrecht, Unter-drückung, Unterwerfung, ursprüngliche Akku-mulation, Verbrechen, Vergewaltigung, Volkskrieg,Voluntarismus, Widerstand, Widerstandsrecht,wilder Kapitalismus, Willkür, Zerstörung, Zwang.

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Etienne Balibar Reflections on Gewalt

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