The Idea of Classes as Real Entities

for the last century, but especially in the last fifty years, the world seems to have been invaded, harassed, haunted, terrified, by a nightmare of furies, something like a medieval troop of hellequins or harlequins, or a ride of devils, called the ‘social classes’. The author who chiefly inspired them was Karl Marx, on whom the final conclusion of accurate criticism must be that, while he was a Jeremiah of revolution and a driving force of social movements, he lacked any great philosophic or scientific talent, which is the talent for truth. He put into circulation a series of queer conceptions, both in philosophy and economics, ranging from historical materialism with its ‘ideologies’ in the former, to the theory of surplus value in the latter. No doubt the word ‘classes’ was in use before his day, though only in an empirical context, and no doubt it was used both as a battle cry and a term of abuse, with accompanying hopes and illusions. As the villeins were satirised in the Middle Ages, so in modern times were first the aristocracy and then the bourgeoisie. But Marx petrified the ‘classes’ into clear-cut logical and even metaphysical categories of ‘dialetic’. If this fallacy, of which he is the author and the patron, has any value, if it is to have any influence on the history of thought, it will be by way of reaction in having stimulated a revival and renaissance in the true theory of human history and of pure economic science. Everyone knows what became of feudal aristocracy, bourgeoisie, proletariat, capitalism, in the hands of Marx, to mention only his main conceptions. We all know how these conceptions have to be corrected 80and melted down so that his myths may give place to the realities which he had distorted by bitter prejudice and question-begging definitions. To this revision and recasting I myself devoted an essay ¹ in which I examined the various historical uses of the word ‘bourgeois’, sometimes as a term of contempt for ‘middle-class’ minds and spirits, sometimes with the serious political and moral import of a middle-class mediating between two extremes, and lastly with the ideal suggestion of the educated and civilised classes. Only through the fiction of a mythical metaphysic has it come about that the class-names, naturally given to the component parts of society, have given rise to a belief in the reality of classes, distinguishable as sheep and goats, base and noble, healthy and diseased; and so to these ‘classes’ are applied the verdicts usually passed in social and moral conflicts only on the behaviour of individuals in various temporary situations. I have drawn attention to the uses of the word ‘bourgeois’, which I have treated elsewhere, but it is also worth pausing to notice that the words ‘peasant’, ‘worker’ and ‘proletariat’ in general have also been used in abusive senses similar to that ascribed to bourgeois. I will not give a list of the types and characters presented by sociologists and by realistic or ‘veristic’ novelists like Balzac and Zola. The latter ended by rousing the indignation and retaliation of marxist writers, for example those of the ‘Neue Zeit’, who accused him of libelling the proletariat and of being a lackey of the bourgeoisie. No charge could have been more unjust, since the author’s good faith and his aim of scientific impartiality were unquestionable. If in L’Assommoir and La Terre he had painted the vices of the workers and the grinding avarice of the peasants, in Le Ventre de Paris he had done no less for the greasy bourgeoisie, and in L’ Argent for the business world; while in Germinal he had tried to portray the moral motives of the workers’ struggles, and in his later novels revealed himself still more as an undisguised humanitarian idealist. It is also worth recalling the verdicts of Maxim Gorky, the Bolshevik revolutionary, who in his later years painted in grim colours the peasant class which, by the Russian revolution, obtained the victory over its masters and landlords. He set in relief their anarchical, unsocial, unco-operative and 81refractory character: their preoccupation with the purely animal egoism of eating as much and working as little as possible; their deep-seated hatred for the city-workers and the civilisation they represent; their lack of any knowledge or traditions of their own past; their minds crammed with superstitions but empty of ideas; the refined and cold-blooded cruelties of which in the revolution they were guilty, even in spite of their political and intellectual leaders; their total indifference to religion. In fact; Gorky saw no future for them except as a sort of drudges in their own business, that is to say in their own interests. For Gorky, the picture of the honest peasant, with a natural sense of truth and justice and humanity, was invented in the writings of ‘the friends of the people’, which at last aroused protests from authors like Tchekov and Bunin (Lenin et le Paysan Russe, French translation, Paris, 1924, passim). Verdicts of this kind do not depend on the real character of the human beings to whom they refer but on the simple fact that they are descriptions of ‘classes’. All judgments of classes tend to be severe, because in classifications the human reality is mechanically and arbitrarily parcelled into samples, each absolutely determined by a single motive, which of course can only be the desire to defend its own class way of life, to pursue and increase its own prosperity without regard to any other consideration or loyalty. The same result follows from descriptions of all classes within the bourgeoisie, as it is called, as well as of the aristocracy—workers, soldiers, priests and the rest. Truth, justice, kindness, generosity, piety, charm, are to be found in all classes, nec cubant in ulla; their foundation lies deeper, not in classification but in humanity. These are what make human history and the traditions of the race with its glory and its strength; not abstract distinctions which, in the last resort, find the determining historical factor in that intractable brute obstacle which always materially conditions spiritual activity, and constantly subdues it to the stuff it works in. That is the logical fallacy of the class theory of human history and life. For the true, rich reality, it substitutes a monstrous history without historical evidence, where all the actors are personifications each obsessed by its own goods and gains and shut off from all its fellows and from communion with its kind. A very different spectacle unrolls itself 82before the unclouded eyes of the historian. He sees humanity unwearied in self-realisation and in development; ever increasing and restoring what is called civilisation by its intellectual. activity, its religious enthusiasm, its poetic inspirations, its deeds of sacrifice and heroism, its laborious discoveries in technical science. He sees that the authors and supporters of these activities are not classes but individuals, who, it may very well be said, emerge from all classes, and not least from those reputed the humblest and most downtrodden. We have no need to be reminded of the peasant boys, to mention no others, who have become philosophers, poets, painters, musicians, inventors, generals and statesmen eminent in the highest offices of the social life. Modern historians after an interlude of dull, monotonous and stupidly materialist class-theory, have instinctively returned to the natural and traditional path, no doubt greatly enriched and fortified in the consciousness that it is the right one. The future is certain, for it depends on the critical spirit, the intelligence and good feeling of humanity, which reveres its noble and industrious past. Antonio Labriola, in one of our Socratic arguments, at the time when historical materialism was the rage, once opened his mind to me: ‘Marx’, he said, ‘has practically proved that for thousands of years human life has been a life of wretches, only worthy of pity, governed in all their actions and in all their quarrels, in all their illusory beliefs and virtues, by nothing but avarice and hunger. A truly human history, without the antitheses of classes has still to begin’. To such blindness could historical materialism and the theory of class-warfare bring even men of distinguished intellect.