ABSTRACT
When Marx writes of the proletariat in The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte, he presents less a neat dialectical trajectory of an authentic historical subject than a process of complication, interrogation, and iteration. ‘Proletarian revolutions’, he writes, ‘such as those of the nineteenth century, constantly engage in self-criticism, and in repeated interruptions of their own course. They return to what has apparently already been accomplished in order to begin the task again.’ To mark that this return is not a repetition of the same, but an always situated process which seeks to draw in the new, he tells us that the proletarian social revolution ‘can only create its poetry from the future’ (Marx 1973b: 150, 149). This chapter takes up something of Marx’s injunction and returns to the question of the proletariat. It returns not to reproduce that way of thinking Donzelot (1979: 73) describes as a compulsory reverence for a certain set of revered political figures, but from a contemporary concern to elucidate the function and place of ‘difference’ in Marx’s proletarian standpoint. It seeks to show that at the core of Marx’s formulation of the proletariat – and despite the work of orthodox Marxism and those who would draw too neat a historical break between modernist and postmodernist political thought – lies a politics which at once highlights the problems of identity and compels a minor practice of invention and becoming. This is an important move if Marx is to maintain contemporary pertinence not just as an analyst of the dynamics of capital – as the bad-conscience-fuelled praise of 1990s business journals would have it (cf. Wheen 1999: 5) – but also as a thinker of its overcoming.
