Peter Hallward, Politics & Society
I stand by the ‘politics of prescription’ that I outlined
back in 2005, and that Timothy Kaposy has kindly taken the time to consider in
his article above. I think the general emphasis on universalisable and
egalitarian principle, on subjective commitment and resolve, on the logic of
consequence and anticipation, on an engagement with the strategic constraints
of a specific situation, etc., remain pertinent to any conception of
emancipatory politics worthy of the name. If anything, the last few years
(2011-2014) have shown that these themes deserve more systematic attention, and
appreciation, both in the domain of practical politics and in the domains of philosophy
and political theory.
Very soon after writing that article, however, I began to pay
more attention to the limits posed by framing these issues in terms of
‘prescription’ per se. I had argued that prescription offered a more ‘applied’,
more concrete purchase on a situation than that proposed by the more axiomatic
approaches of Badiou and Rancière, for example, but this criticism clearly
applies to prescription as well: unless it is based on a more adequate, more
fleshed out account of the process of prescribing itself, so to speak, and on a
fuller account of the actor or subject that sustains it, then a politics of
prescription also risks being too abstract and too abrupt, and thus unable
properly to address the real difficulties of political practice.
Ever since 2005, then, I’ve been working on how best to
address this problem, on the hypothesis that the clearest, simplest and most
economical solution is to draw on the old notion of political will, and to
conceive it as the basis for a broadly dialectical conception of voluntarism.
To frame processes of domination and liberation in terms of political will
helps to foreground the basic difference between the involuntary and the
voluntary dimensions of social life, and thus helps reduce or transform the one
in favour of the other. In every situation where it applies, such a voluntarist
approach serves to clarify a version of what I take to be the most important
question of political practice: how can a dominated and coerced group or class
of people free themselves from this coercion and acquire the power they need to
determine their own course of action, consciously, deliberately or ‘willingly’,
in the face of the specific obstacles and resistance this course will confront?
If the modern ‘riddle of history’ remains the passage from the domain of
necessity to the reign of freedom, what needs to be done to enable this passage
itself to be freely undertaken?
I gave a first presentation on this problematic at the
University of York in October 2006, and have been devoting most of my available
time to it ever since. [1] I think the most useful thing I can do here is give
a rough sense of how this work has been shaping up so far, and how I’m planning
to proceed with it over the next few years. A workable account of the practice
of political will, I hope, should give the idea of a principled and
prescriptive politics a more compelling grounding in the capacities of the
actors who sustain it, and a more effective grip on the situations that
confront us.
I
The guiding intuition of this project is that the homely and
clichéd phrase, ‘the will of the people’, remains the best way of approaching
the question of democratic politics, and of making distinctions between genuine
and deceptive forms of democracy. In direct opposition to oligarchy, genuine
democracy means the rule of the people — the people as distinct from a
privileged few or ruling elite, the people understood as the many, or as the
great majority of the population. Democracy applies in situations where the
will of the people (however this is formulated or expressed) can over-power the
will or wills of those few who might seek to exploit, oppress, or deceive them.
These two vague terms, people and will, are both notoriously
difficult to pin down. Despite their revolutionary history and implications,
both have been yoked to reactionary and in some cases ultra-reactionary
political projects. Taken on their own, both terms are now widely considered to
be almost indefensible as political categories; the notion of will, in
particular, has been the object of varied but relentless philosophical assault
for much of the past century, going back at least to Heidegger’s critique of
Nietzsche, and recurring in the work of thinkers as varied as Althusser,
Derrida, Agamben, Deleuze, and many others. I’d like to suggest, however, that
the combination of these two terms, in the formulation of a will of the people,
serves to frame if not answer most of the general questions that a theory of
emancipatory politics needs to address.
Compared to other, more conventional ways of formulating the
question of democracy (for instance in terms of state institutions, electoral
mechanisms, market structures, ‘civil society’, ‘liberal values’, etc.), our
cliché has a couple of advantages.
First of all, nobody quite knows what it means. Of all the
basic concepts at issue in modern political theory and philosophy, the notion
of a will of the people is perhaps the most indeterminate. Everyone is familiar
with the words, and their combination, but as things stand today their meaning
is quite literally up for grabs, and in the last couple of years in particular,
it has been invoked in all kinds of ways, and in all kinds of situations.
On the one hand, diplomatic reference to ‘the will of the people’
has long been one of the most formulaic turns of phrase in the modern political
lexicon. In mainstream discussion of current affairs, this usually amounts to
nothing more than a token nod to ‘formal democratic’ mechanisms for ensuring
some sort of minimal choice in the selection of political representatives. So
long as such selection is controlled in ways that restrict any challenge to the
established order of things, apparent respect for the will of the people is an
integral aspect of the status quo, and has been so for a long time. Even so
conservative a constitution as the one described by the French writer Benjamin
Constant in 1815 “recognizes the principle of the sovereignty of the people, in
other words, the supremacy of the general will over every particular will”,[2]
and today there is perhaps no modern political principle more widely shared
than the one that condemns as illegitimate any attempt to govern people against
their will. It’s in this sense that even so aristocratic an oligarch as Winston
Churchill might defer to a representation of the people’s will,[3] and it’s in
this sense that presidents of the United States like to remind the world they
dominate that they “support the democratic aspirations of all people’,
including a few places ‘where the will of the people [has] proved more powerful
than the writ of a dictator.”[4] Even the president whom Cornel West memorably
derided as “a black mascot of Wall Street oligarchs and a black puppet of
corporate plutocrats”[5] does not hesitate to define ‘self-determination’ as
“the chance to make of your life what you will.”[6]
On the other hand, the concentration and assertion of the
people’s will has been central to the whole modern trajectory of revolutionary
practice. From the Jacobin constitution of 1793 France through the ANC’s
Freedom Charter of 1955 to the new Bolivian constitution of 2009 and the Arab
revolutions of 2011, a long and versatile emancipatory tradition has affirmed
the will of the people as the basis of political action and legitimacy. The
ANC’s Charter, for instance, before it denounces apartheid, racism and social
inequality, opens with the assertion that ‘no government can justly claim
authority unless it is based on the will of all the people’, and insists as its
first demand: ‘The People shall govern!’ National liberation movements from
Algeria to Zimbabwe took shape around a similar “will to independence.”’[7] The
2011 uprisings in Tunisia and Egypt, likewise, crystallised around a literal
assertion of the people’s will, expressed in the innumerable variations of the
slogan that has already transformed the Middle East: “the people want to topple
the regime.” [8] Reference to emancipatory political will is also essential to
the political theory and practice of a wide range of revolutionary thinkers,
from Robespierre and Saint-Just through Lenin and Gramsci to Mao and Fanon.
Insofar as what is at stake is the empowerment of people to determine their own
destiny and their own political programme, Tony Benn is right to insist that
democracy remains the most revolutionary programme of all, “the most
revolutionary thing in the world”[9].
This uncertainty in the status of our phrase gives it a
unique strategic purchase. Unlike concepts that are more directly associated
with orthodox Marxist or Communist traditions, reference to the will of the
people evokes a revolutionary practice that also retains a thoroughly
‘mainstream’ significance.
A second and more important advantage stems from the peculiar
and problematic conjunction of the two terms in question, ‘people’ and ‘will’.
If we leave the partial exception of ancient Athens to one side, the connection
of these two notions was scarcely thinkable before the world was ‘turned upside
down’ by the Levellers, Diggers and other egalitarian mobilisations during the
English revolution of the 1640s, and among the privileged classes it has
remained the primary source of political anxiety ever since. Although important
initial contributions were made by early modern thinkers like Machiavelli and
Hobbes, I think that it’s only with Rousseau that the notion of a collective or
‘general’ will began to receive adequate theoretical definition. It is only
with Rousseau’s Jacobin admirers, furthermore, during the French and Haitian
revolutions, that such a notion came to orient political practice, and it is
only after Marx that such practice gained the sort of historical determination
required to give it far-reaching strategic purchase on a situation. If we can
clarify what is meant by these elusive terms ‘people’ and ‘will’, and what
their combination requires and implies, then we may also clarify what is
required to move from merely formal to actual democracy.
My hypothesis is that their conjunction is enough all by
itself to provide a normative basis for democratic practice, and thus for the
political project of changing a world ruled by and for the few into a world
ruled by and for the many. Precisely on account of their generic and
transhistorical quality, these terms offer a useful basis for getting a grip on
a wide range of situations. Compared with emancipatory perspectives that filter
the category of the people through pre-existing categories of identity,
occupation or history, or with conceptions of volition filtered through (or
displaced by) notions of instinct, intellect, appetite, affect, or
communication, the terms will and people are as wide-ranging and versatile as
the notions of empowerment and liberation themselves.
It’s equally important to stress, however, that they also
prescribe a certain specificity. The category of ‘the people’, as is well
known, is always bound up with the tension between abstract inclusion (the
people simply as everyone, or as the whole population, the ‘realm’ or nation as
a more or less harmonious totality) and concrete exclusion (whereby the
category of the people excludes those ‘enemies’ who exploit, oppress or
dominate them); it is only through its articulation with concrete political
practice that its orientation is decided, in one direction or the other. The practice
of political will likewise mediates the norm of free self-determination and the
necessity to engage with the constraints that inhibit popular participation in
such determination, the obstacles or tendencies that might divide, isolate or
deceive those who seek to formulate and impose their will.
Will and people: rejecting the merely formal i.e. oligarchic
conceptions of democracy that disguise the established balance of class power,
a genuinely or literally democratic politics can be described as the effort to
think and practice one term through the other. A will of the people must of
course involve association and collective action, and shall depend on a
capacity to invent and preserve forms of inclusive assembly (e.g. through
demonstrations, meetings, unions, parties, networks, websites…). If an action
is prescribed by popular will, on the other hand, then what’s at stake is a
free or voluntary course of action, decided on the basis of informed and
reasoned deliberation. Since there’ no agreement on the meaning of the term
will (or even on its very existence), its usage calls for some further
clarification.
By ‘will’ I mean, first of all, the actual exercise of
willing a particular purpose or end. For precisely this reason I will prefer
the generic term actor over the term ‘subject’, since it avoids or recasts some
of the well-known ambiguities of latter (as both agent and substrate, active
and passive, free and ‘subjected’, etc.) in favour of a direct derivation from
the verb to act, a verb whose own ambiguity is productive and illuminating. To
will is a practical rather than theoretical matter, and as a matter of practice
it involves direct participation, action and effort on the part of its subject
or actor, undertaken as deliberate and purposeful (rather than conceived as an
‘authentic’ expression of an essence or identity). There is an essential
difference between active involvement in an act of willing, and its
representation, measurement or interpretation by external observers.
There is likewise an essential difference between voluntary
and involuntary kinds of action. Unlike an involuntary action or movement, for
instance a movement determined by a reflex or instinct, or one that has become
routine by force of repetition or habit, and unlike action that is coerced or
compelled, a voluntary or willed action is more or less freely chosen, intended
and sustained, on the basis of more or less well-informed rational
deliberation. (As opposed to a metaphysical understanding of the will as
endowed with a kind of absolute or quasi-divine freedom, the freedom at issue
is indeed always a matter of ‘more of less’, since freedom is also to be
understood here as a practice, as a process of freeing or emancipating – a
practice through which actors liberate themselves, more or less, from the
various constraints they confront, and thereby acquire a degree of autonomy).
The kinds of purpose at issue in an act of will are also more
or less distinct from those involved with mere impulses of whim or wish.
Whereas much of the scholarly work done on the problem of free will might
better be described as reflection on ‘free whim’, the notion of political will
that interests me, and that has its roots in Rousseau and in Machiavelli,
instead associates will and ‘virtue’ with power and the capacity to act. Unlike
mere whim or wish, or the simple expression of an opinion or preference, to
will a purpose is itself to embark on the course of action that may realise it,
in spite of the obstacles and vagaries of fortune it must confront. No doubt
the difference here is more a matter of dialectical transition than of
categorial distinction: a certain quantity of wish, so to speak, may well cross
the qualitative threshold that separates it from will. But once this threshold
is crossed, in ways that will vary with the situation and the obstacles
involved, then the old truisms remain true: where there’s a will there’s a way,
so long as those who will the end will the means.
Examples of the sort of egalitarian political will I have in
mind are easy to list: along with the Bolivarian projects of Latin America and
the recent mobilisations in north Africa (along with, on what remains for the
time being a more modest scale, the anti-neoliberal demonstrations across
Europe and much of the world), they could include the political determination
of South Africa’s United Democratic Front, Haiti’s Lavalas and Palestine’s
Intifada to confront forms of inequality and injustice based on race, culture,
privilege and class. For me the most instructive examples remain the great
revolutions that took place in France and Haiti, and then in Russia, China and
Cuba, along with the anti-colonial liberation movements that drew much of their
inspiration from these revolutions.
In each case, a threshold is crossed when the actors in these
sequences apply a version of Danton’s principle, later cited by Engels, Lenin
and many others: “de l’audace, de l’audace, encore de l’audace!” [10] In each
case, a decisive element in the struggle is the respective actors’ capacity and
willingness to act – the capacity of those who control the economic levers of
power and the repressive machinery of the state, on the one hand, versus the
people’s collective capacity to act deliberately and forcefully in pursuit of
common goals. When a struggle reaches a decisive point, those waging it must
decide between fright or fight. Anyone involved in a popular struggle knows
that if we are to continue to fight, and to fight to win, then we need to
maintain solidarity and unity, to resist fragmentation and dispersal, to invent
forms of discipline and organisation, and to encourage means of leadership that
are both responsive and decisive. A popular mobilisation prevails when its
sense of purpose is strong and its principles are clear, and when it is
prepared to take the steps needed to apply them. As Frederick Douglas realised
early in a long cycle of anti-imperialist struggle, “power concedes nothing
without a demand” [11] – but by the same token, as the Vietnamese general Vo
Nguyen Giáp argued later in that same cycle, when a popular demand is clear,
conscious and well-organised, when it is made with “unshakeable conviction”,
then it commands “invincible strength” and can “overcome all difficulties and
hardships to defeat an enemy who at first was several times stronger.”[12]
Along the way, uncounted numbers of people struggling against all sorts of
powerful enemies have repeated the slogan that prevails whenever it is put into
practice with the determination it requires: “the people, united, will never be
defeated!”. Popular determination, in the past, has put an end to slavery,
colonialism, child labour and apartheid; only similar determination can, in the
future, put an end to capitalist exploitation, imperialist oppression, nuclear
proliferation and environmental catastrophe.
II
I’m currently trying to tackle this cluster of ideas and
historical sequences from two angles, one broadly synthetic, the other more
genealogical. The synthetic project is intended to be a somewhat systematic
study of the notion and practice of the will of the people as such, with
sections devoted to accounts of the people on the one hand and of the will on
the other, along with the most fruitful attempts to think them together, for
instance via the effort made by Marx and Blanqui, followed by Luxemburg, Lenin
and their contemporaries, to think the notion of a resolute, determined and
autonomous proletariat, as the ‘leading edge’ of a mobilisation in pursuit of
the political and economic emancipation of the people as a whole. This project
also includes some discussion of several of the essential practices that figure
as conditions for the organised exercise of such a political will: practices of
association, combination and assembly (for instance in the Jacobin clubs,or
municipal sections of the French Revolution, in trade unions, workers’ councils
and political parties, in the ti legliz and base ecclesial communities of
liberation theology, etc); practices of education, information, deliberation
and debate, that allow for the formulation and assertion of collective
priorities, goals and decisions; practices that enable these decisions to be
imposed and these goals to be realised, in the face of whatever opposition they
might encounter from more privileged members of the situation; practices that
encourage the cultivation of a collective spirit, discipline and courage
(practices that Rousseau, followed by e.g. Mao and Che, described in terms of
political ‘virtue’), to counter the inevitable tendencies that encourage the pursuit
of private, factional or divisive interests; practices that enable a popular
political will to persevere as united (but not uniform), determined (but not
dogmatic), self-critical (but not cynical), steadfast (but not rigid), and so
on.
Several broad suppositions underlie this approach to
emancipatory politics. One is that the conscious and deliberate intentions of
the actors are an important (though certainly not the exclusive) factor in the
determination of political struggle. This factor has been systematically
downplayed if not dismissed by many of the most innovative figures in
continental philosophy, ever since the turn against Sartre and existentialism
in the early 1960s — and in many ways, ever since the turn away from the voluntarist
conceptions of moral and political philosophy defended, in various ways, by
Rousseau, Kant and Hegel, but then rejected by figures as varied and divergent
as Schopenhauer, Nietzsche, Wittgenstein, Stalin, the later Heidegger,
Foucault, Deleuze, Derrida, Agamben, and many others. Any analysis of imperial
and neo-colonial policies, for instance, or of neo-liberal policies, or of the
policies that in recent years have targeted the labour movement, immigrant
workers, anti-imperialist ‘insurgents’, etc., that doesn’t pay attention to the
perfectly explicit, perfectly deliberate intentions of the actors involved, has
no chance of grasping the class and power dynamics involved – and the same
goes, of course, for the emancipatory movements resisting these policies.
In the absence of any ‘neutral’ means of deciding the issue,
the sort of voluntarism I’m defending here implies a readiness to treat both
oppressive and emancipatory processes less as reflections of ‘objective
tendencies’ or ‘systemic laws’ than as more or less deliberate strategies
conceived by conscious and specific actors, albeit in circumstances that are
forced upon rather than chosen by them. Against the theoretical reflexes that
have long dominated the human sciences in general and contemporary European
philosophy in particular, this approach involves recognition that no adequate
account of political action can proceed without considering its ‘psychological’
or psycho-political dimension, and without addressing the hopes and motivations
of the actors themselves. It involves a willingness to listen to the reasons
actors give for acting the way they do, before jumping to the conclusion that
these reasons simply mask ‘deeper’ (unconscious, involuntary, ideological…)
forms of determination. It accepts that some kinds of situation are only
intelligible from the perspective of those who are engaged in the process of
its transformation, and that people should be treated as the ‘authors and
actors of their own drama’, rather than as puppets subjected to the play of
forces they cannot understand.[13]
A second and equally self-evident supposition is that the
actors who seek to exploit and dominate target groups or populations usually go
to a good deal of trouble to disguise their intentions, and to control the way
they are represented in what passes for the public means of information and
education. The ideal form of domination, of course, is one that can be
represented, and perhaps even lived, as ‘voluntarily’ accepted by those it
targets, and thus not as a form of domination at all. The genius of capitalism,
as the coercive “command of unpaid labour”[14], is that despite its violent
origins and premises its coercion eventually comes to take on an apparently
free or voluntary form, as mediated by the labour market, in which buyers and
sellers appear to meet on an ‘equal’ footing. The genius of ‘humanitarian’
forms of imperial intervention — for instance as recently perfected by the
‘donor’ countries who have long controlled Haiti’s economy and government — likewise
focuses on the apparent dependence and presumed gratitude of its beneficiaries,
their need to be ‘protected’ from home-grown political projects that might
threaten the status quo.
A third supposition turns on the relation between a will and
its consequences, and qualifies the primacy of willed intention. Even so
austere a political voluntarist as Saint-Just understood, of course, that “the
force of circumstance [la force des choses] may lead us to results that we
never thought of (26 February 1793)”. To insist on the importance of deliberate
intention and conscious purpose is not to pretend that intentions alone might
determine what happens over a course of action. An intention is not the virtual
blueprint for a series of deeds that simply brings it to fruition in actuality.
To will an end or outcome is not to will a fully formed solution in advance of
engaging with the problem; it is rather the readiness to follow through on a
decision and the principles that orient it, the willingness to do what is required
to overcome the obstacles, both predictable and unforeseen, that may emerge
over the course of its imposition. If to will the end is also to will the
means, then participation in a political will is participation in the effort,
which is invariably specific to a particular situation of struggle, to align
means and ends in the way that appears to promise maximum conformity of the
former to the latter. A will cannot dictate its consequences in advance, but
the people who affirm it can be more or less capable of following the partially
contingent sequence of its consequences, and of doing what is necessary to see
them through, without falling prey to dogmatic rigidity on the one hand or
opportunistic compromises on the other.
A further presumption concerns the nature of the actor or
subject of political will. I take the capacity to will to be a universal and
thoroughly ordinary human ability, like the capacity to speak or think, an
ability whose most fundamental conditions of possibility stem from the way that
we evolved as a species. Among other things, this evolution dictates that the
actor who speaks, thinks or wills is an individual (rather than a group) while
at the same time ensuring that willing individuals are always more or less
‘grouped’, in keeping with the commonplace idea that human individuals are
constitutively and irreducibly social. There is then a kind of continuum, one
that crosses multiple thresholds of scale and capacity, between individual and
collective acts of will. “The individual is the element of humanity”, as
Blanqui argues, “like the stitch in a piece of knitting” — without willing and
politically educated individuals nothing is possible, but if the political
fabric they form is too lose or shapeless then when it comes to social or
economic struggles such isolated individuals are reduced to impotence.[15] Only
individuals can will, but as a matter of course only organised groups of
individuals have the capacity to engage in a political will, and thus challenge
the terms of their employment, confront the class of people who exploit them,
or struggle with those who dominate them.
Running through all these assumptions is the correlation of
will and capacity, the capacities to deliberate with others, to formulate an
end, follow its consequences, and so on. The second of the two projects I’m
currently engaged in aims to unpack these assumptions and to explore the link
between will and capacity. There are lots of ways you could try to do this, but
for the time being I’ve decided that the most economical way is to focus on
what I take to be the three most important figures to have contributed to the
modern practice of emancipatory politics – Rousseau, Blanqui and Marx. From out
of the various people I’ve been reading over the last few years, these three
have emerged as the key figures in the genesis or genealogy of the problem I’m
wrestling with, and this is what I’m working on at the moment, as a sort of
methodological preamble to the more broader project.
III
By framing the theoretical roots of political will in terms
of this trio, I mean to emphasise the fact that no single philosopher or
political thinker provides an adequate account of its practice, or deserves to
be taken as a sufficient guide on their own. Rousseau, Blanqui and Marx differ
in many ways, of course, and sometimes spectacularly so. Nevertheless, I hope
to show that they can be productively read as contributions to a common
project, and that taken together they provide the most economical way of laying
the foundations for a general account of political will in this activist and
emancipatory sense. Of course many other thinkers should be added to create a
more complete list (for instance Machiavelli, Kant, Robespierre, Marat, Fichte,
Babeuf…), but I’ve chosen this particular three, beyond their canonical status
and their direct influence on other figures, because together they seem to
offer, with a minimum of direct overlap, the most forceful and suggestive way
of framing the issue.
On both historical and conceptual grounds, Rousseau clearly
figures as the first, most fundamental figure of this modern tradition, insofar
as he posits as a primary and irreducible point of departure that “the
principle of every action is in the will of a free being’, such that ‘it is not
the word freedom which means nothing; it is the word necessity.”[16]A person’s
freedom, Rousseau concludes, “doesn’t consist in doing merely what he wills or
wants, but rather in never doing what he does not want to do” [17] It is the
constitutive alignment of willing and doing, which has to be worked out through
practice and experiment, that establishes the ground for a collective and
egalitarian notion of freedom. Rousseau then sketches a normative account of
political community and social justice on the basis of this principle, a sketch
that Robespierre and Marat, along with a host of other Jacobins and
sans-culottes, would soon strive to put into revolutionary practice.[18]
Against the many variations of the argument that downplays the significance of
the French revolution, and that tries either to limit its implications or
confine them to an outdated historical moment, I side with those who affirm it
as the inauguration of a revolutionary period that remains open to this day,
and in particular as the initiation of what might be called a
‘Jacobin-Bolshevik’ project whose significance, however battered and maligned
over recent decades, is far from exhausted.
If Robespierre emerged as the dominant political figure of
the Jacobin phase of the French Revolution it’s because he understood most
clearly why, to accomplish its goals, “we need a single will, ONE will [une
volonté UNE]‘, the will of the people in general – and since the main
resistance to such a general will ‘comes from the bourgeois’ so then Robespierre
recognised that ‘to defeat the bourgeois we must rally the people.”[19] After
Robespierre, Saint-Just summarised the whole Jacobin political project when he
rejected “purely speculative” or “intellectual” conceptions of justice, as if
“laws were the expression of taste rather than of the general will”. The only
legitimate basis for autonomous self-determination, from this perspective, is
instead “the material will of the people, its simultaneous will; its goal is to
consecrate the active and not the passive interest of the greatest number of
people.”[20] In the wake of Thermidorian reaction, Babeuf quickly realised that
the “first and crucial step” towards a more equal distribution of resources and
opportunities was “the achievement of a truly effective democracy through which
the people’s will could be expressed”[21].
After Babeuf and Buonarrati, Blanqui again adopts the ends
and means of this neo-Jacobin project, and his lifelong effort ‘to continue the
revolution’ is first and foremost a confrontation with the specific obstacles
that now prevent conversion of la volonté du peuple into a sovereign political
reality. Considered as a revolutionary activist, Marx shares rather more with
Blanqui than most recent critics acknowledge. Though Marx is, of course, more
concerned with the socio-economic dimensions of this conversion,if we read him
as a political theorist then Lucio Colletti isn’t far off the mark when he
suggests that Marx adds little or “nothing to Rousseau, except for the analysis
(which is of course rather important) of the “economic basis” for the withering
away of the state.”[22]
We might say that Rousseau imagines an autonomous community
governed by a general will, Blanqui considers the steps that need to be taken
in order to actualise it, and Marx the historical and economic tendencies that
may enable or discourage the taking of these steps. In terms of what they
contribute to a general theory of revolutionary emancipation, then, these three
contributions are best understood in a way that inverts their chronological
order: it is Marx who reconstructs the roots and causes of a popular
revolution, Blanqui who considers what is needed to trigger and sustain one,
and Rousseau who ponders its consequences and continuation.
Or else, to risk a still more abstract formulation: Rousseau
considers aspects of our capacity to act, the constitution of a collective
actor and the determination of a common purpose (the who and the why of
action), Marx considers the conditions and tendencies that enable or discourage
emancipatory political action (its where and when), and Blanqui the taking of
action itself (what it involves and how it might prevail).
Although much recent work on Rousseau remains preoccupied by
his allegedly authoritarian inclinations (and the consequent problems this
poses for trying to read him as compatible with approaches he heartily detests:
parliamentary democracy and free-market liberalism), I hope that few readers
will dispute his foundational place in this wider project. Blanqui too, although
marginalised for more than a century, as much by a certain Marxist tradition as
by more ‘moderate’ forms of republicanism, is a relatively obvious choice.
Although certainly not as thorough, original or influential a thinker as
Rousseau or Marx, and despite the clear limits and ambiguity of some of his
positions, Blanqui deserves to be rescued from neglect because he poses with
unrivalled force the essential question of revolutionary politics — the
question of taking and retaining the political power that alone can change a
society structured in dominance and oppression. Although they may not have
known it (or been willing to admit it), the next generation of revolutionary
activists, the generation of Luxemburg, Lenin, Trotsky, and Gramsci, followed Blanqui
almost as much as they did Marx.[23]
The association of Marx with any kind of voluntarism may be
more controversial. As his every reader knows, Marx is certainly critical of
the sort of ‘merely’ political will he associates, in different places, with
Robespierre, Hegel, or Bauer, and with some of Blanqui’s own supporters in
exile. There are also aspects of Marx’s own work that in my opinion go too far
in the opposite, anti-voluntarist, direction, and that help to justify some of
the recurring attempts to dismiss him as guilty of a reductive socio-historical
determinism. One-sided emphasis on the ways that “social being determines
consciousness’, if not corrected by consideration of political practice and
organisation, sometimes encourages Marx to downplay questions of proletarian
agency and purpose in favour of an analysis of ‘what the proletariat is, and
what, in accordance with this being, it will historically be compelled to
do.”[24] Marx rarely worries that proletarian actors might think and act in
ways that could conflict with the underlying tendencies shaping their
proletarian being and ‘forcing’ them into revolutionary conflict with those who
exploit them.[25] A similar confidence will enable him to assume, with
remarkable brevity and nonchalance, that “capitalist production begets its own
negation with the inexorability of a natural process”[26] There is no denying
the problematic consequences of this side of his legacy.
Nevertheless, along with others who have argued that Marx is
more concerned with political possibility than with historical necessity, I
hope to show that his most fundamental concerns can be traced back to precisely
that central relation of freedom and necessity which Hegel and Kant inherited
from Rousseau. The young Marx insists on the distinctive way that, unlike other
animals, “man makes his life activity itself an object of his will and
consciousness”[27], and in a crucial chapter of Capital the older Marx insists
in comparable terms on man’s ‘sovereign power’ and capacity to ‘change his own
nature’, his ability consciously and deliberately to determine his own ends,
and to sustain the disciplined, “purposeful will” required to realise them[28].
The young Marx likewise insists on “the self-determination of the people”[29],
and emphasises the unique virtues of democracy as the political form of a fully
“human existence”, in which “the law exists for the sake of man” rather than
vice versa,”[30] and is formulated as “the conscious expression of the will of
the people, and therefore originates with it and is created by it”[31]; the
older Marx will embrace the Paris Commune of 1871 (inspired and organised in
large part by Blanqui’s supporters) as an exemplary instance of precisely this
sort of democracy in action. Understood from this perspective, political
decisions are in no sense limited to passively registering changes that occur
at the level of the material ‘base’ of social life. Among other things, the
Commune illustrates our capacity to invent a political lever that can wedge its
way “underneath” this very base, “a lever for uprooting the economical
foundation upon which rests the existence of classes, and therefore of class
rule.”[32] The base itself, moreover, is both shaped by the irreducibly
political inflection of class relations, and sustained by the irreducibly ‘human’
and thus purposeful and inventive character of the forces of production. At
least during periods of revolutionary opportunity, as in 1871, or 1848-50, what
is primary is not some sort of inexorable historical determinism so much as the
taking of vigorous and lucid action, carried out by an independent, resolute
and fully conscious political actor, on the model of another (temporarily)
fruitful collaboration between supporters of both Marx and Blanqui: the
Communist League.[33]
Early and late, Marx understands communism as “the true
appropriation of the human essence through and for man’, and “the true
resolution of the conflict [...] between freedom and necessity.”[34] What is at
stake in the revolutionary transition from capitalism to communism is the
“development of all human powers as such,”[35] together with “the control and
conscious mastery of these powers, which, born of the action of men on one
another, have till now overawed and governed men as powers completely alien to
them.”[36]Once we understand the way we shape our social relations, Engels will
add, “it depends only upon ourselves to subject them more and more to our own
will, and, by means of them, to reach our own ends [...]. Man’s own social
organization, hitherto confronting him as a necessity imposed by Nature and
history, now becomes the result of his own free action”, and confirms “the
ascent of man from the kingdom of necessity to the kingdom of freedom.”[37]
With far more depth and precision than Rousseau or Blanqui,
Marx also exposes how capitalist forms of coercion take on an apparently
‘voluntary’ form, and shows, once it has completed the brutal work of its
‘originary accumulation’, how capital’s ‘command of unpaid labour’ binds it not
with the flagrant chains of slavery but with the ‘invisible threads’ and
‘silent compulsion’ of dependence and precarity.[38] Marx helps us to
understand how modern forms of coercion move beyond mere strategies of overt
exclusion and direct domination, to encompass more subtle manipulations of our
will itself. In doing so he frames what remains the central problem for a
contemporary account of political will: how might we challenge forms of
servitude and oppression that are represented, in the prevailing neoliberal
order of things, as the very form of freedom? If the most salient historical
developments of the last thirty or so years have involved, in almost every part
of the world, the massive transfer of power and resources from the relatively
poor to the relatively rich, perhaps the most far-reaching aspect of these
developments is the way their advocates have managed to induce large numbers of
people to accept and even to embrace them as necessary and unavoidable. Until
we renew our capacity for political will, we will have no convincing answer to
the dreary refrain: ‘there is no alternative.’
IV
Considered in terms of the contribution they make to an
understanding of the practice of political will, if we read them in isolation
then each of these three thinkers appears one-sided and incomplete. Rousseau
affirms the freedom and power of a popular or general will, but (anticipating
Kant) relies too much on the abstract determination of ‘pure’ will as such, and
downplays the historical and economic context in which it takes shape and
operates. Marx emphasises ‘developmental’ factors (following Hegel), to the
occasional detriment of political action and intention. Rousseau tends to
presume too much of pure volition and intention, and Marx can rely too much on
the course of historical development. Blanqui stakes everything on the
immediate pursuit of justice and equality, but without doing enough to consider
either its relations to the people and popular organisation on the one hand or
its historico-material determinants on the other. What is needed today is less
the renewal of Marxism per se, and still less of Blanquism or Rousseauism (or
of Leninism, Maoism, or any other proper-name-ism), so much as the construction
of a more robust and assertive political voluntarism in general, i.e. an
account of the emancipation from necessity that is fully prepared to foreground
its partial but decisive dependence on a whole series of
political-psychological factors, including purpose, intention, consciousness,
deliberation and volition. If it is to prevail and endure, the movement from
necessity to freedom must itself be freely undertaken.
Taken in isolation, Rousseau, Blanqui and Marx all have clear
limitations, but taken together, I think it’s not much of an exaggeration to
say that they anticipate most of the concepts and concerns of a whole series of
subsequent voluntarist political thinkers, including for instance Lenin,
Trotsky, Serge, Gramsci, Mao, Sartre, Che, Fanon, Giáp, Dussel, Bensaïd,
Badiou… For all the obvious differences in context and priority, there is a
striking degree of internal consistency along this voluntarist line of
political thought (so long as we don’t try to trace it back to a single
foundational thinker). There are few significant political concepts developed
by Lenin or Mao, for instance, that weren’t anticipated by either Marx,
Rousseau or Blanqui, and both of them are better understood through the lens of
this triple and thoroughly integrated influence than simply as orthodox
Marxists. Although it would be a sterile and reductive exercise to try to read
them as mere variations in a paradigm, of course, I think it would be easy to
show how Fanon and Che renew certain motifs in Rousseau, or Bensaïd and Badiou
some motifs in Blanqui, and so on, in each case conditioned by particularities of
context and priority. Overall, the underlying continuity is more significant,
with these and other comparable figures, than their (otherwise noteworthy)
innovations and peculiarities.
Gramsci is perhaps the most suggestive and fertile instance
of this triple legacy, if we can call it that. Gramsci seeks, in terms that
seem to draw as much on Rousseau and Blanqui as on Marx or Lenin, “to put the
‘will’, which in the last analysis equals practical or political activity, at
the base of philosophy.”[39] Reality itself is best understood as “a product of
the application of human will to the society of things”, so “if one excludes
all voluntarist elements [...] one mutilates reality itself. Only the man who
wills something strongly can identify the elements which are necessary to the
realisation of his will.”[40] In a more specifically Marxist sense, Gramsci
explains, ‘will means consciousness of ends, which in turn implies having an
exact notion of one’s own power, and the means to express it in action.’ Participation
in such a will implies a capacity to determine and pursue our “specific ends,
without deviations or hesitations. It means cutting a straight and direct path
through to the ultimate end, without detours into the green meadows of happy
brotherhood”[41] and the false community of the “realm”.
No less than Rousseau, Gramsci knows that “before it can be
physical, movement must always be intellectual” and that “every action is the
result of various wills, with a varying degree of intensity and awareness and
of homogeneity with the entire complex of the collective will.”[42] As they
combine through forms of assembly and association to “forge a social,
collective will”, Gramsci anticipates that people will eventually gain the
ability to “control economic facts with their will, until this collective will
becomes the driving force of the economy, the force which shapes reality
itself, so that objective reality becomes a living, breathing force, like a
current of molten lava, which can be channelled wherever and however the will
directs.”[43]
No less than Blanqui, Gramsci puts his “faith [in] man, and
man’s will and his capacity for action,”[44] and defines man as ”concrete will,
that is, the effective application of the abstract will or vital impulse to the
concrete means which realise such a will.”[45] Gramsci understands partisan
political struggle as “a conscious struggle for a precise, determinate end: it
is a lucid act of the will, a discipline already forged within the mind and the
will”, one that allows “workers in the Party [to] become an industrial vanguard
within the workers’ State, just as they are a revolutionary vanguard in the
period of struggle for the introduction of proletarian power.”[46]
No less than Marx, finally, Gramsci knows that if “society
does not pose itself problems for whose solution the material preconditions do
not already exist”, acceptance of this proposition “immediately raises the
problem of the formation of a collective will”:
“In order to analyse critically what this proposition means,
it is necessary to study precisely how permanent collective wills are formed,
and how such wills set themselves concrete short-term and long-term ends—i.e. a
line of collective action. It is a question of more or less long processes of
development, and rarely of sudden, “synthetic” explosions. [...] It requires an
extremely minute, molecular process of exhaustive analysis in every detail, the
documentation for which is made up of an endless quantity of books, pamphlets,
review and newspaper articles, conversations and oral debates repeated
countless times, and which in their gigantic aggregation represent this long
labour which gives birth to a collective will with a certain degree of
homogeneity — with the degree necessary and sufficient to achieve an action
which is coordinated and simultaneous in the time and the geographical space in
which the historical event takes place.”[47].
There is no better way to begin the renewal of such study and
analysis, I think, than by recalling its point of departure in the political
philosophy of Jean-Jacques Rousseau. That will be my priority for the coming
months, to be followed by brief studies of Blanqui and Marx. And after this, I
hope, I should be in a better position to work out a more synthetic account of
political will in general, and to head off some of the objections that might be
levelled at a politics of prescription.
Notes
[1] The most substantial interim outline I’ve published so
far remains ‘The Will of the People: Notes Towards a Dialectical Voluntarism’,
Radical Philosophy 155 (May 2009), 17-29.
[2] Benjamin Constant, Principes de politique, in Écrits
politiques (Paris: Gallimard ‘Folio’, 1997), 310.
[3] Cf. Martin Gilbert, The Will of the People: Churchill and
Parliamentary Democracy (2006).
[4] Barack Obama, ‘State of the Union Address’, 25 January
2011, http://www.whitehouse.gov/the-press-office/2011/01/25/remarks-president-state-union-address,
accessed 2 February 2014.
[5] Chris Hedges, ‘The Obama Deception: Why Cornel West Went
Ballistic’, Truthdig 16 May 2011,
http://www.truthdig.com/report/print/the_obama_deception_why_cornel_west_went_ballistic_20110516,
accessed 2 February 2014.
[6] Barack Obama, speech from 19 May 2011,
http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2011/may/19/barack-obama-speech-middle-east,
accessed 2 February 2014
[7] Cf. Peter Hallward, ‘Fanon and Political Will’, Cosmos
and History: The Journal of Natural and Social Philosophy 7:1 (2011): 104-127.
[8] Cf. John Rees and Joseph Daher, The People Demand: A
Short History of the Arab Revolutions (London: Counterfire, 2011); Elliott
Colla, ‘The People Want’ (May 2012), http://www.merip.org/mer/mer263/people-want#.T8lP6zCBWnY.facebook;
Gilbert Achcar, The People Want: A Radical Exploration of the Arab Uprising
(London: Saqi Books, 2013).
[9] Tony Benn, interviewed in Michael Moore, Sicko (2007).
[10] Antoine Saint-Just offered a more distilled variant: ‘We
must dare! [Osez!] – this motto compresses the whole political logic of our
revolution’ (Antoine Saint-Just, speech to the National Convention, 26 February
1794). And again: ‘Those who undertake revolutions resemble those who are the
first to navigate in unknown waters, guided by their audacity’ (Report to the
National Convention, 13 March 1794).
[11] “If there is no struggle, there is no progress. Those
who profess to favor freedom, and yet deprecate agitation, are men who want
crops without plowing up the ground. [...] Power concedes nothing without a
demand. It never did and it never will. Find out just what any people will
submit to, and you have found out the exact amount of injustice and wrong which
will be imposed upon them; and these will continue till they are resisted with
either words or blows, or with both. The limits of tyrants are prescribed by
the endurance of those whom they oppress” (Frederick Douglass, “The
Significance of Emancipation in the West Indies” [3 August 1857], The Frederick
Douglass Papers, ed. John W. Blassingame [New Haven: Yale University Press,
1985] 3: 204.
[12] Vo Nguyen Giáp, ‘The South Vietnamese People Will Win’
(January 1966), in The Military Art of People’s War (NY: Monthly Review Press,
1970), 204.
[13] Karl Marx, The Poverty of Philosophy [1847], Collected
Works (London: Lawrence & Wishart, 1975-2000) 6:170.
[14] Marx, Capital vol. 1, trans. Ben Fowkes (London:
Penguin, 1976), 672.
[15] Louis-Auguste Blanqui, Manuscripts, Bibliothèque
Nationale collection NAF9591(2), f. 520 (19 October 1866).
[16] Rousseau, Emile, in his Oeuvres complètes (Paris:
Gallimard, ‘Pléiade’, 1969) 4: 576.
[17] Rousseau, Reveries of the Solitary Walker, in his
Oeuvres complètes 1:1059.
[18] ‘We have turned into imposing realities’, Robespierre
proudly declared in 1794, ‘the laws of eternal justice that used to be
contemptuously called the dreams of well-meaning people. Morality was once
limited to the books of philosophers; we have put it into the government of
nations’ (Maximilien Robespierre, Oeuvres complètes [Paris: PUF, 1910-1967]
10:229).
[19] Robespierre, notes written in early June 1793, in J.
Marx. Thompson, Robespierre (Blackwell, Oxford, 1935) 2:33-34.
[20] R.B. Rose, Gracchus Babeuf: The First Revolutionary
Communist (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1978), 104; cf. Ian Birchall,
The Spectre of Babeuf (Houndmills: Palgrave, 1997).
[22] Saint-Just, Oeuvres complètes (Paris: Gallimard ‘Folio’,
2004), 547.
[22] Lucio Colletti, ‘Rousseau as Critic of “Civil Society”‘,
From Rousseau to Lenin (London: NLB, 1972), 185; cf. Eugene Kamenka, Ethical
Foundations of Marxism (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1962), 37-47.
[23] It’s for precisely this reason that critics keen to
drive a wedge between a ‘democratic’ Marx and the ‘authoritarian’ Lenin
regularly ground their interpretation in a critique of Blanqui. See for
instance Hal Draper, The Dictatorship of the Proletariat from Marx to Lenin
(NY: Monthly Review Press, 1987), 13, 25-6; Richard Hunt, The Political Ideas
of Marx and Engels (University of Pittsburgh Press, Pittsburgh, 1974) 1: 13-16,
191, 289.
[24] Marx and Friedrich Engels, The Holy Family, in Collected
Works 4:37.
[25] Marx and Engels, The German Ideology, in Collected Works
5:52. There are echoes of this emphasis on compulsion and forcing even in so
allegedly ‘voluntarist’ a reading of Marx as Lukacs’ History and Class
Consciousness (Cambridge MA: MIT Press, 1972); see for instance pages 41-42.
[26] Marx, Capital vol. 1, 929
[27] Marx, “Economic and Philosophical Manuscripts” [1844],
Early Writings, 329.
[28] Marx, Capital vol. 1, 283-4.
[29] Marx,“Critique of Hegel’s Doctrine of the State” [1843],
Early Writings, 89.
[30] Marx, “Critique of Hegel’s Doctrine of the State”
[1843], Early Writings, 88.
[31] Marx, “The Divorce Bill” [1842], Collected Works 1:309.
[32] Marx, “Class Struggles in France” [1871], Collected
Works 22:334.
[33] See in particular Marx et al., ‘Address of the Central
Committee to the Communist League’ [March 1850], Collected Works 10:277-87.
[34] Marx, Economic and Philosophical Manuscripts [1844],
Early Writings, 348; cf. Marx, Capital vol. 3, 959.
[35] Marx, Grundrisse, 488.
[36] Marx and Engels, The German Ideology [1846], Collected
Works 5: 51-2.
[37] Engels, Anti-Dühring [1877], Collected Works 25: 266,
270.
[38] Marx, Capital vol. 1, 719, 899.
[39] Antonio Gramsci, ‘Study of Philosophy’, Selections from
the Prison Notebooks, ed. and trans. Quintin Hoare and Geoffrey Nowell Smith
(London: Lawrence and Wishart, London, 1971) 345; cf. Gramsci, ‘The Modern
Prince’, Selections, 125-133, 171-2.
[40] Gramsci, “The Modern Prince”, Selections, 171. Compared
with the apparent solidity of actually-existing reality, ‘what “ought to be” is
therefore concrete; indeed it is the only realistic and historicist
interpretation of reality, it alone is history in the making and philosophy in
the making, it alone is politics’ (ibid., 172).
[41] Gramsci, “Our Marx”, Pre-Prison Writings (Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press, 1994), 57.
[42] Gramsci, “Class Intransigence and Italian History”,
Pre-Prison Writings, 69; Gramsci, Selections, 364.
[43] Gramsci, “The Revolution Against Capital”, Pre-Prison
Writings, 40.
[44] Gramsci, “Socialism and Co-operation”, Pre-Prison
Writings, 14.
[45] “Men create their own personality, 1. by giving a
specific and concrete (“rational”) direction to their own vital impulse or
will; 2. by identifying the means which will make this will concrete and
specific and not arbitrary; 3. by contributing to modify the ensemble of the
concrete conditions for realising this will to the extent of one’s own limits
and capacities and in the most fruitful form” (Gramsci, Selections, 360).
[46] Gramsci, ‘The Communist Groups’, Pre-Prison Writings,
176.
