12.6 The origin of the concept of class

We have seen above that James Mill, in the early decades of the nineteenth century, worked out a simple but cogent and effective two-class theory of class; the ruling class that ran the state, and the remainder of society, who constituted the ruled. At about the same time, during the Restoration period in France after the fall of Napoleon in 1814, a group of laissez-faire libertarian theorists were working out a far more sophisticated version of the same model, a model that contained a historical and sociological dimension absent in James Mill. This group were the spiritual and physical descendants of the ideologues of the Napoleonic era, and the major link was J.B. Say. Say was the inspirer and elder statesman of this Restoration group, which was led by his son-in-law Charles Comte (François Charles Louis Comte, 1782–1837) and Charles Dunoyer (Barthélemy Charles Pierre Joseph Dunoyer, 1786–1862). An important follower of Comte and Dunoyer was the young Augustin Thierry (1795–1856), soon to become to most notable of French historians. At the beginning of the Restoration and until 1820, Comte and Dunoyer founded and edited Le Censeur followed by Le Censeur Europe'en, periodicals that became the centre for the new laissez-faire movement.

Like Mill, Comte and Dunoyer defined conflicting classes as those who gained control of the state apparatus as against those who were controlled by the state. But they also pointed out that history had been a history of such class (or ‘caste’) struggles. Under oriental despotism, the emperor and his bureaucracy constituted the ruling class; in early Europe, conquering tribes settled down among the conquered to constitute a state with a ruling class; historically, then, another component of such a ruling class is that, at least initially, it was of a different ethnic group from the ruled. In this way, ethnic oppression reinforced political-economic class oppression by the state.

But to Comte and Dunoyer, the new element, the factor that would bring about the inevitable emergence and triumph of a classless (in the sense of ‘casteless’) society, was what they called industrielisme. The emergence of an industrial society required an international free market economy to enable it to work; hence Comte and Dunoyer saw it as inevitable that a free market economy would spread throughout Europe and eventually the world, dissolving the ruling classes, and bringing about a libertarian region and world, a world free of the oppression of the state. Thus the state, in this vision, would wither away, to be dissolved into the market exchange economy, and in the explicit language of Comte and Dunoyer, ‘the government of men would be replaced by the administration of things’.

Thus Comte and Dunoyer saw the world as being split into the productive classes (workers, entrepreneurs, producers of all kinds), crippled and oppressed by the ‘non-productive’ classes, using the state to levy tribute upon the producers. The ‘non-producers’ were, in particular, politicians, government officials, and rentiers living off government bonds, as well as subsidized businessmen or receivers of government privilege. The ‘peak of perfection’, which Comte and Dunoyer saw as eventually arriving, ‘would be reached if all the world worked, and no one governed’.

In their analysis, Comte and Dunoyer went beyond their mentor, J.B. Say, with his blessing, to add the historical, sociological, and political philosophic dimensions to the strictly economic.

The Comte-Dunoyer movement were firm and militant believers in individual liberty and in property rights. Thus Dunoyer's attack on egalitarian-ism: ‘Equality would be the reversal of that fundamental law of humanity and of society’ which provides that the income and the position of each man ‘depends above all on his conduct, and is proportionate to the activity, the intelligence and the morality and the persistence of his efforts’. And on liberty, Dunoyer wrote that for 40 years, ‘I have defended the same principles: liberty in everything, in religion, in philosophy, in literature, industry, in politics. And by liberty I mean the triumph of individuality...’.¹⁷

The worm in the apple, the way in which libertarian social class analysis got transmuted into a mixture of itself and its opposite, was provided by a garrulous French aristocrat Henri, Comte de Saint-Simon (Claude Henri de Rouvroy, Comte de Saint-Simon 1760–1825). Saint-Simon, a hopelessly muddled thinker, was not aided in his existential confusion by his penchant for picking up ideas orally, at salons, instead of by systematic reading.¹⁸ For a while, during the Censeur period, Saint-Simon, who had picked up the Comte-Dunoyer ideas at salons, was what could best be described as a fellow-traveller of theirs, and pushed their ideas in his own periodical, I'Industrie (1816–18). After that, however, Saint-Simon grew increasingly authoritarian and hostile to laissez-faire liberalism. Having imbibed libertarian class analysis from Comte and Dunoyer, he characteristically got the concepts confused, and introduced the fateful and unacknowledged contradiction: between conflicting classes in the sense of those who govern, or are governed by, the state versus employers vis-à-vis wage earners on the free market. The Marxian jumble was Saint-Simon's dubious contribution to social thought. After Saint-Simon's death in 1825, his disciple Olinde Rodrigues, an engineer and son of a bureaucrat, joined by Enfantin and Bazard, founded the Saint-Simonian journal Le Producteur which, followed by conferences and tracts for the remainder of the 1820s, converted their deceased master's confused social philosophy into a militant proposal for a totalitarian socialist system. This system was to be run by what the Saint-Simonians considered the true class representatives of industrielisme: an alliance of engineers and other technocratic intellectuals with investment bankers, coordinated and led by a banker-dominated central bank.

In short, in contrast to communist socialism, which was at least ostensibly egalitarian, Saint-Simonianism was frankly elitist, to be run by the ‘good’ and allegedly modern classes. Thus the Saint-Simonians, who were the first users of the word ‘socialism’, repudiated capitalists and entrepreneurs, on behalf of their favoured bankers and intellectual classes, representing the worker-producers. It is perhaps not coincidental that, of the two maximum co-leaders of Saint-Simonianism, Enfantin and Bazard, Barthélemy Prosper Enfantin was the son of a banker, was trained as a banker and engineer, and had been a mathematics student of Olinde Rodrigues. Nor is it surprising that Saint-Simonianism appealed hugely to the investment bankers, the Producteur being financed by the prominent banker, Jacques Laffitte. The Saint-Simonian culture reached the peak of its remarkable influence in France from 1830–32, after which the dual popes of this political-religious cult, Enfantin and Saint-Amand Bazard (1791–1832) had a fiery split on the free love question on which every disciple was required to take immediate sides. Unfortunately, the destructive split between the two popes came too late, and the Saint-Simonian socialist movement had already become astoundingly influential throughout Europe. In France, artists and writers became Saint-Simonians, including George Sand, Balzac, Hugo, and Eugène Sue, while in music Berlioz attempted to apply Saint-Simonian principles by composing a Song on the Installation of Railroads, and Franz Liszt played the piano at Saint-Simonian meetings.

In England, the reactionary romantic pantheist Thomas Carlyle took to Saint-Simonian socialism immediately, and became its leading spokesman in England, going so far as to translate and attempting to publish the master's final work, The New Christianity, in which he foreshadowed the development of his movement into the cult of a new religion. Of more lasting importance was the deep influence that Saint-Simonianism had on John Stuart Mill. For it was the Saint-Simonians who were initially and largely responsible for Mill's quasi-conversion from his father's hard-core free market views to semi-socialism. In his Autobiography, Mill explains that he read every Saint-Simonian tract and how it was ‘partly by their writings that [his] eyes were opened to the very limited and temporary value of the old political economy, which assumes private property and inheritance as indefeasible facts and freedom of production and exchange as the dernier mot of social improvement’. Indeed, in a letter to a leading French Saint-Simonian, Gustave d'Eichtal, a friend of Rodrigues, Mill went so far as to concede that some form of Saint-Simonian socialism ‘is likely to be the final and permanent condition of our race’, although he differed with them in believing that it would take a long time for mankind to become capable of achieving that happy state.¹⁹

There is no country, however, that took to Saint-Simonianism with more gusto than Germany. In the early 1830s, Saint-Simonianism ‘went like wildfire through the German literary world’.²⁰ Its enthusiastic adepts included the eminent political writer, Friedrich Buchholz and the famous poet Heinrich Heine, while the Young German school of poets became Saint-Simonian adepts. But the most important influence of Saint-Simonianism in Germany was on the Young Hegelians, Young German poets such as T. Mundt and G. Kuehne were Hegelian university lecturers on philosophy. More directly, Saint-Simonianism exercised a formative influence on Marx. In the first place, Marx's home town of Trier had been part of the German Rhineland occupied by France for two decades of the French revolutionary wars. Hence the town had become greatly susceptible to French intellectual influences. As a result, Trier was rife with Saint-Simonian agitation when Marx was a young adolescent; so much so that the archbishop felt obliged to condemn Saint-Simonian doctrines from the pulpit. Ludwig Gall, former secretary to the Trier city council, was a prominent and prolific Saint-Simonian writer. There is little doubt that Marx read Gall's writings.

Another powerful influence on Marx was one of his favourite teachers at the University of Berlin, Eduard Gans, one of Hegel's favourite disciples, who taught criminal law. Gans was both a Hegelian and a Saint-Simonian, and the interpenetration of the two doctrines in Germany deeply shaped the views of the Young Hegelians, of whom Marx became a leader. As Billington notes, ‘The entire phenomenon of left Hegelianism has indeed been described as “nothing more than a Hegelianized Saint-Simonianism or a Saint-Simonianized Hegelianism”.’²¹ Steeped in Saint-Simon as well as Hegel, Marx found the concept of class struggle, as strained through the defective lenses of the Saint-Simonians, ready to hand and suited for incorporation into his own Grand Design. In addition to the class struggle between proletarians and capitalists, Marx also adopted the Saint-Simonian version of industry and its embodiment (among the Saint-Simonians and in Marx, the workers) as inevitably victorious, along with the future goal of history as the withering away of the state and the ‘replacement of the government of men by the administration of things’. There was, of course, a crucial difference between this abortive concept and its original. Among Comte and Dunoyer, the Utopian state was to be a purely free society of individual property-holders and free market exchangers; for Marx it was to be a communal collective ‘self ownership of all goods by ‘man’, with no extant division of labour, specialization, money or exchange.

Marx himself has testified to a particularly powerful Saint-Simonian influence over him, as conveyed by his beloved mentor, surrogate father, and future father-in-law, Baron Ludwig von Westphalen. Towards the end of his life, Marx told his close friend and admirer, the Russian liberal aristocrat Maxim Kovalevsky, that he had imbibed Saint-Simonianism from von Westphalen, who was apparently an ardent admirer of Saint-Simonian doctrine.

We have already seen that in the Communist Manifesto, Marx and Engels slipped into the original libertarian, rather than the Saint-Simonian-Marxian theory of class, confusing the state-privileged with capitalists who hire workers on the market. In a penetrating discussion, Professor Ralph Raico has pointed out that the term ‘bourgeois’ as used on the Continent provided the basis for that confusion. As Raico notes:

When Marx says that the bourgeoisie is the main exploiting and parasitic class in modern society, ‘bourgeoisie’ may be understood in two different ways. In England and the United States, it has tended to suggest the class of capitalists and entrepreneurs who make their living by buying and selling on the (more or less) free market... On the Continent, however, the term ‘bourgeoisie’ has no such necessary connection with the market: it can just as easily mean the class of ‘civil servants’ and rentiers off the public debt as the class of businessmen involved in the process of social production.²²

Raico goes on to state that the systematic exploitation of other classes by bureaucrats and public debt-holders ‘was a commonplace of 19th century social thought’; Tocqueville, for example, denounces the ‘middle class’ rule under the ‘bourgeois monarchy’ of Louis Phillippe (1830–48) as follows: ‘It settled into every office, prodigiously increased the number of offices, and made a habit of living off the public Treasury almost as much as from its own industry.’²³

But this is far from all. Professor Raico shows that, in analysing specific historical events, particularly in contemporary French history, Marx and Engels kept slipping into the state-bound two-class, libertarian-type analysis. Thus, consider Marx's Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte (1852), analysing the events leading up to Bonaparte's coup of 2 December 1851, which Marx himself portrayed as a ‘demonstration how the class struggle in France created circumstances and relationships that made it possible for a grotesque mediocrity to play a hero's part’. In the Eighteenth Brumaire, Marx writes indignantly of:

This executive power, with its enormous bureaucracy and military organization, with its ingenious state machinery, embracing wide strata, with a host of officials numbering half a million, this appalling parasitic body, which enmeshes the body of French society like a net and chokes all its pores, sprang up in the days of the absolute monarchy... Every common interest was straightway severed from society, counterpoised to it as a higher general interest, snatched from the activity of society's members themselves and made an object of government activity, from a bridge, a schoolhouse and the communal property of a village community to the railways, the national wealth and the national university of France... AH revolutions perfected this machine instead of smashing it. The parties that contended in turn regarded the possession of this huge state edifice as the principal spoils of the victor... [Ujnder the second Bonaparte... the state seems to have made itself completely independent. As against civil society, the state machine has consolidated its position...²⁴

Not only is Marx using here a two-class state-bound analysis of class conflict, but he foreshadows the libertarian development of the idea of the state as an anti-social instrument, as in Herbert Spencer and in Franz Oppenheimer, and even Albert Jay Nock's advanced twentieth century libertarian analysis of ‘state power’ as being an interest inherently opposed to, and exploitative of, ‘social power’.

Fine. But where in all of this are the capitalists and their use of the state as their ‘executive committee’ to redouble their exploitation of the proletariat? Where, in fact, are capitalists and proletariat at all! As Raico points out, there is a delicious irony here. For sophisticated libertarian analysts speak not only of state power, but also of various groups in history – Asiatic bureaucratic despotism, feudal landlords, Communist Parties, or whatever – who have managed to gain control of the state and use its coercive apparatus of exploitative rule over the rest of society. Thus, as Raico notes, the Marxian analysis ‘here completely ignores the massive use of state-power by segments of the capitalist class, and limits itself to the exploitative activities of those directly in control of the state apparatus’. Why Marx and Engels ‘should care to whitewash the capitalists in this way’, Raico concludes ironically, ‘I cannot say’.²⁵

Marx repeated a similar analysis 20 years later in his The Civil War in France (1871) on the rise and fall of the Paris Commune. That Commune, he wrote, aimed at restoring ‘to the social body all the forces hitherto absorbed by the State parasite feeding upon, and clogging the free movement of society’. In particular, the Commune was able to succeed, at least for a while, ‘by destroying the two greatest sources of [government] expenditure – the standing army and State functionarism’.

Finally, Engels in his 1891 preface to the Civil War in France, applied this same libertarian, and very un-Marxian, analysis to the existing political situation in the United States:

Nowhere do ‘politicians’ form a more separate and powerful section [class?] of the nation than precisely in North America. There, each of the two major parties which alternately succeed each other in power is itself in turn controlled by people who make a business of politics... It is in America that we see best how there takes place this process of the state power making itself independent in relation to society... we find two great gangs of political speculators, who alternately take possession of the state power and exploit it by the most corrupt means and for the most corrupt ends – the nation is powerless against these two great cartels of politicians who are ostensibly its servants, but in reality dominate and plunder it.²⁶

Professor Raico concludes his analysis as follows:

It seems, therefore, that there are two theories of the state (as well as, correspondingly, two theories of exploitation) within Marxism: there is the customarily discussed and very familiar one [and the one which Marx himself proclaimed], of the state as the instrument of the ruling class (and the concomitant theory which locates exploitation within the production process); and there is the theory of the state which pits it against ‘society’ and ‘nation’ (two surprising and significant terms to find in this context...). Moreover, it would seem suggestive that it is this second theory that predominates in those writings of Marx which, because of their nuanced and sophisticated treatment of concrete and immediate political reality, many commentators have found to be the best expositions of the Marxian historical analysis.²⁷