FREE ESSAY ON CLASS STRUGGLES

CLASS STRUGGLES

The State
Having declared in the opening sentence of the Manifesto that all history is the history
of class struggles, Marx adds immediately in a footnote of written history. 
For prior to the invention of writing, societies were nomadic, organised in tribes, each
tribe made of less than 100 individuals. There was hardly any division of labour, other
than sexual. The tribe would designate a chief, and modern ethnology tells us the chief
had very little power. His main function was to defuse any conflict among tribesmen, not
as a judge, he had no power to judge, but more by using his charisma to talk people out
of their quarrels. His authority would be limited to leading the hunt and, of course, the
war. That's all. In his essay, The Origin of Property, Family and the State, Engels
describes social life in these primitive tribes very much as something like anarchy.
I would like to add here that modern anthropology supports Engels' analysis. Primitive
societies did not know anything that resembles political power, let alone a state. They
had no use for it. Pierre Clastres, in his fascinating book, Society Against State, notes
that the only distinctive feature between primitive and modern societies is not
agriculture, it is not sedentary life, it is the institution of a state. A modern society
is a society that is subject to the power of a state. So called primitive societies were
not.
In economic terms, nomadic tribes (which Engels calls gens) do not accumulate a lot of
goods. The only capital they use is what people can carry on their back or on the back of
an animal. Not much. Thus, between tribes, violence is limited, there is not much to
conquer and to loot, and war is considered more like a sport, a rough athletic
competition. Note that war was a game played by all tribesmen. All valid men went to war,
when called for, there were no professionals.
How did the state come about ? With agriculture began a process of capital accumulation.
In order to farm, one needs first to clear the land. Trees have to be uprooted, fields
have to be irrigated, tilled and planted. Granaries have to be built to store grain for
the year, pending the next harvest. All this preparation and construction may take many
months, and it is hard work. So people started to think : Why should we do it?? When we
go at war, we take prisoners, let the prisoners do the hard work. And so, says Engels,
society experienced its first division into classes, between a class of masters and a
class of slaves, between exploiters and exploited.
Of course, the society which has accumulated this capital becomes the envy and the target
of its neighbours. War is no longer a sport, it can pay, and pay big, because if you
conquer the enemy's land that has already been cleared and irrigated, with a year or more
supply in storehouses, it is saving you the investment and hard work. So each society had
to organise some sort of permanent defence against marauders and invaders. Each society
took out of its surplus enough food to pay for a group of people who would have no other
function than protection, i.e., a professional army.
Now once the rulers had an armed force at their disposal, the temptation was there
permanently to use it against their own people, to consolidate the rulers' power. Thus,
says Engels, there emerged a new institution, which would maintain order in society, and
of course an order favourable to the dominant class. This institution is called the
state.
Let me quote directly from Engels :
In order to maintain this public power, contributions from the state citizens are
necessary -- taxes. These were completely unknown to gentile society [the so-called
primitives]. We know more than enough about them today ! With advancing civilisation,
even taxes are not sufficient ; the state draws drafts on the future, contracts loans,
state debts. Our old Europe can tell a tale about these, too.
[Engels was writing this in 1867. What would he have to say about our modern Europe, with
states plundering a full 50% of all wealth created in society and running debts
equivalent to two years of GNP?!]
In possession of the public power and the right of taxation, the officials now present
themselves as organs of society standing above society... Representatives of a power
which estranges them from society, they have to be given prestige by means of special
decrees, which invest them with a peculiar sanctity and inviolability.
The state is therefore by no means a power imposed on society from without... Rather, it
is a product of society at a particular stage of development...
The first point I wish to emphasise here with Marx and Engels is that the state is a
human construct ; it is not inherent to mankind, as the queen is to an ant colony or a
beehive. Human societies existed historically without a state, and there is no reason why
we could not organise ourselves again in the future without a state.
My second point is that, as Marx and Engels tell us, the state is the instrument of
oppression used to keep in check the exploited masses. Without the state, mass
exploitation would not be possible.
Ideology
Now, the dominant class amounts to only a fraction of the population, sometimes as low as
10-20%. Surely, 10% cannot exploit 90%. How come therefore this small minority manages to
stay in power??
For controlling the state is not enough. Maintaining an army of professional warriors to
keep in check citizens who very often do not have the right to bear arms is indeed a way
of enforcing your power over society, but it is not a guarantee. An insurrection, a
massive taking to the streets, a general strike, can overthrow any government, even
supported by the military, as history has witnessed so many times. So the ruling class
always used another mean of wielding its power, it is ideology, and understanding how
ideology works may be Marx's greatest contribution to the study of history.
Ideologies are the changing ideas, values, even feelings, through which individuals
experience their society. Ideologies present the dominant ideas, the beliefs and values
of the ruling class, as being the ideas of society as a whole. Thus individuals, because
they are thinking by using the concepts, the words and the references of others, are
prevented from grasping how society actually functions, and they cannot even suspect that
they are exploited. Marxists thinkers, like Gramsci, Lukacs and Althusser, have expanded
greatly on Marx's concept of ideology, and it goes further than Ayn Rand's sanction of
the victim. For Marx, and especially for Gramsci, I would say ideology achieves the
perfect crime. A perfect crime is not when the criminal remains unknown, it is one that
nobody even suspects to be a crime, where death is declared purely accidental, and no one
will look for a criminal. For Marx, the victims have nothing to consent to, they do not
see themselves at all as victims. Quite the reverse. They say the master is good, he
feeds me every day, he does not beat me more often than I deserve to be.
The production of ideology is the intellectuals' job, and up until recently,
intellectuals were part of a clergy. You know the famous definition given by Marx of
religion as being the opium of the people. Religion was perceived as a sort of sedative
of the mind. So even when people might have become conscious of their oppression, there
came the ruling class' second line of defence : Yes, my friend, you are right, God placed
you at the bottom of society, but it is for your own good, you will be all the happier in
a later life; it is God's plan for society that there exists lords and servants, sorry,
old chap, you are one of the servants, but you wouldn't want to rebel against God's will,
would you ?. 
Armed with such powerful tools as the state police and ideology, the dominant class never
gives up its power gracefully. Why would it ? It seems it has the means to rule forever.
Yet, history shows us that changes did take place. Marx identifies two such
transformations in human history, from slavery to feudality, and from feudality to
capitalism.
Revolutions
So what caused these momentous changes ?
The answer is : technical innovations, which forced changes in the production process.
Marx is often interpreted as a technological determinist on the basis of such isolated
quotations as: The windmill gives you society with the feudal lord; the steam-mill gives
you society with the industrial capitalist. It is of course more complicated than that.
But basically, what we can say is that the dominant class' power base is the control over
certain commodities, over certain sources of wealth. But the dominant class cannot
predict, let alone control, the emergence of a new technology. When this technology
emerges, it may be in the hands of a group of people who are not members of the dominant
class. And suddenly these pioneers generate a transformation in the means of production,
in the way society is organised, and therefore in the way society thinks, how it
apprehends itself, because, says Marx, the way we work, the function of production, what
we do, influences who we are. And the growing number of people who are involved in the
new technology see society with new eyes, they start questioning whether the power of the
dominant class is legitimate.
This is exactly what happened throughout history, of course. For instance, new inventions
in the 18th century, including the steam engine, were both a consequence and a cause of
the philosophy of Enlightenment, which exposed the arbitrary of the divine right of
Kings, and hence of all aristocratic privileges, and led to the American and French
revolutions.
It is difficult to dispute the relevance of Marx's and Engels' analysis of history. I
concur with all they say about class struggles and the function of ideology - prior to
the Enlightenment. Quite obviously, the slave is dispossessed, he may not own anything,
he is clearly exploited. The feudal serf is hardly in a better condition. He is tied to
the land, he cannot leave it and is sold with it. 
But when Marx goes on to say that workers under the capitalist regime are dispossessed as
the serfs were, I have a problem following his reasoning. Marx believes that the new
dominant class after the Industrial Revolution is the one made up by the owners of
capital, it is the bourgeoisie. But this deduction is wrong, plain wrong. There is a
logical fallacy here. 
Freedom
The logical fallacy is to posit that if two events occur simultaneously, one must be the
consequence of the other. This logic reminds me of one of Husserl's favourite anecdote :
There is this guy who drinks whisky and soda, and he gets drunk, then he takes gin and
soda, and he gets drunk, then he takes vodka and soda, and he gets drunk, and he
concludes that he gets drunk on soda. I don't want to denigrate Marx's vast intelligence,
but he is telling us that slave masters had political power, they exploited their slaves
and they got rich. Feudal lords had political power, they exploited their serfs and they
got rich. Capitalists are rich, therefore they must exploit their workers, right ? Hang
on. Capitalists have no political power. This surely must make a difference. Unlike
feudal lords and slave masters, capitalists cannot coerce anybody to work for them, to
consume their products, nor to finance their endeavours. Marx feigns to ignore that with
the emergence of the industrial revolution came another revolution, which redistributed
power within society. It was the classical liberal revolution in the 18th century and it
changed radically the political and legal environment. People were free to work where
they wanted, for whomever they wanted. 
Marx pooh-poohs the achievement of that revolution and what he refers to as formal
freedom. You know the argument, that Marx will belabour in The Capital : We say the
worker agrees to work for the capitalist because no policemen are dragging him from his
home to the factory, but this means only that he is compelled by social conditions. In
his treatise, 'The Poverty of Philosophy', Marx writes Indeed the individual considers as
his own freedom the movement no longer curbed or fettered by a common tie or by man, the
movement of his alienated life elements, like property, industry, religion... And Marx
adds : In reality, this is the perfection of his slavery and his inhumanity. This is
rather poor philosophy on Marx's part. Freedom is the movement no longer curbed by other
men, freedom is freedom of property, of industry, of religion.. There is none other. Take
it away and you get Stalinism.
The wealth of kings, slave masters, feudal lords and all their lackeys, was acquired
through the exertion of violence, by way of military conquest, tax, confiscation,
enslavement.. But not necessarily the capitalists' wealth. The capitalist makes money,
indeed, and for a few of them, that money may be numbered in billions, but he is not an
exploiter. The ownership of the means of production by itself does not make anyone an
exploiter. This is where Marx got it wrong. Making money in a trade between consenting
parties is not exploiting anyone, how could it be?? 
Work
Marx was a believer in property rights. It is because his work is the worker's property
that Marx may conclude the worker is dispossessed of his remuneration. But Marx's crude
materialism blinds his vision and prevents him from seeing that it is not work that is
remunerated, what is remunerated is work that is of service to someone, and to someone
who values this work enough to pay for it. Work by itself is destructive. The Bible
already taught us that work is a malediction. Paradoxically, the record of Marxist states
proves my point. Armies of workers toiled literally like slaves during dozens of years,
not creating any wealth, actually destroying it. They extracted perfectly good copper
mineral and crude oil, and turned it into unusable electric wires and plastics. Many
economists calculated that if all the people in the Soviet Union had stopped working and
had been content to sell their vast commodity resources without attempting to transform
them, they would have been far better off. Work has no value by itself. The value is in
the service you render to somebody. It so happens that in most instances you cannot be of
service to somebody without performing a certain amount of work, but Marx confuses the
end and the means. If someone could bring me clients whilst sleeping, I would pay that
someone to sleep.
So it is not work that the capitalist pays, it is the service the worker is rendering.
There are people who for whatever reason are able to render a great service to a great
number of buyers, and they make bundles of money, and there are others who have not found
a way to prove their usefulness, resulting in differences of revenues, sometimes very
substantial ones. But the capitalist pays all services exactly the fair price, or the
worker, in a politically free society, would immediately check the classified ads to see
whether another employer offers a higher price for the same service, and if that other
employer cannot be found, then it is evidence that the salary paid is exactly the fair
and present value of the service rendered.
So if capitalists pay fair wages, and if workers are not exploited by their employer, who
are the exploiters?? Who makes up the dominant class today ? This question will become
clear if we bear in mind there are two ways to move goods in society, by the use of
violence, which is the political way, by trade and gifts, which is the economic way.
Capitalism is the use of trade and gifts, not the use of politics, to distribute goods in
society. All other regimes resort to violence. Marx and Engels emphasise the point
themselves. Feudalism and slavery are based on state coercitive powers. The results of
their work are simply confiscated from the workers, and if they do not like it and try to
escape, policemen and soldiers will drag them back to where they belong, so they may
continue to be exploited. Now, is there not a class today, who uses the powers of police
and the army to confiscate the results of our labour ? Is there not a class today, who
resorts to political constraint to acquire its means of living ? 
Those who resort to violence today to get their revenues, as the feudal lords did three
hundred years ago, are, of course, all state employees. They do not make money in
exchange for a service people find useful enough to pay for. State employees simply
collect the means they need through the use of violence, coercion, racket, taxes (all
these words being synonymous here). They form the new ruling class. We are the oppressed.
So it is obvious, my friends, that the class struggle is not over. We are still face to
face with our exploiters, class against class, 
The mystery is why this exploitation by the ruling class of state employees and their
lackeys is not obvious to everyone. How come does it last, how come the vast majority of
the population does not become conscious of the oppression it is subjected to??
For it is true that most people in Europe do not perceive taxation as robbery and
government-imposed regulations and controls as coercion. You meet people nowadays who
would take out a gun and shoot a youth who is stealing a cassette player from their car,
and these same people allow the taxman to walk away with 50% of what they earn, every
month, year after year, during their entire lifetime. Furthermore, when you assess how
much you are robbed by the taxman, it is not just what you pay today that you should take
into account, but the compounded value of all what you have paid since the VAT you
incurred on your first ever purchase and the income tax on your first salary, plus the
opportunity cost of all the projects and desires you could not fulfil with that money
because it was taken away from you. Try to figure out what these numbers add up to for
yourself, you'll be staggered.
The Ruling Class
Now the first answer to the question of why we allow ourselves to be exploited seems to
be that the dominant class does not appear to be the wealthiest in society, and the fact
is it is not. So how come they exploit us, if they don't make more money than the richest
amongst us??
Some people in the new ruling class may not be rich, it is true, but neither were many
slave owners or feudal lords. Many lived no better, even were much poorer, than
commoners, who were active in trade and other businesses. It is not the amount of wealth
that makes you a member of the ruling class, but the way this wealth, however modest, is
acquired. It is not how much you earn, but how you earn it, that qualifies exploitation.
Do you make your money by political means or economical means?? Is it earned or is it
extorted??
Madonna makes 1,000 times more money than a secretary in the European Union Brussels
bureaucracy, but no one is forced to buy Madonna records or attend her concerts. Every
single penny, therefore, that Madonna gets is given to her, often enthusiastically, by
her fans. Every single penny the EU secretary gets in salary is extorted from taxpayers.

I grant you that some people who acquire their revenues through coercion may still render
a useful service. I am sure one finds learned professors in state universities and
dedicated practitioners in state hospitals. The feudal lord too offered the services of
justice, police and defence to his serfs, the official church provided education and
social services.. The question is : there is no way to know how much these services
offered by state employees are really worth : are they rendered in an optimal fashion??
Do they correspond to the true needs of the people?? Because you are not free to pay for
them (and often the provision of these services is a monopoly protected by law), no one
can tell how useful the service really is, how much of this service would be needed and
at what price. More importantly, the end never justifies the means. As Albert Camus used
to say : A political assassination is not a political act, it is an assassination;
likewise we may say : Robbing the rich to assist the poor is not assistance, it is
robbery.
You can test by yourself how useful a profession is by the way you would like those
engaged in it to practice it. You want an airline pilot, a hairdresser, a lawyer, a cook,
a prostitute..., to be hard working, dedicated, and creative in their job, but now think
of customs officials. If you have to pay them at all, pay them for doing nothing, you
would get better value than paying them for interfering with your affairs. This is how
useful these exploiters are to society.
I must confess that, among exploiters, I nourish a special aversion for customs
officials, and if I may make a pause here, I would like to tell you a story. It is about
this tourist who is visiting a foreign city. He notices a shop, like that of an antique
dealer, and a very odd small statue of a cat in the window. The tourist walks in and asks
for a price. The statue is only $100, says the antique dealer, but the story that goes
with the statue is $1,000. I don't need the story, the tourist shrugs, I want to bring a
souvenir home, and this statue will do just fine. I'll sell it to you, but believe me,
warns the antique dealer, you'll soon come back for the story. The tourist leaves the
shop, with the statue in his pocket. As he is returning to his hotel, he notices a cat is
following him. This is unusual. He looks back again, and now four cats are on his tails,
and soon twenty cats. The tourist realises he cannot walk into the hotel with a herd of
cats behind him, so, as he was crossing a bridge, he throws the statue into the river.
Immediately, the whole army of cats jump from the bridge into the water and drown.
Flabbergasted by what happened, the tourist pauses for a long moment ; then he takes a
sudden decision and traces his steps back to the shop. The antique dealer wears an
indulgent smile : I see you are already coming back for the story. No, replies the
tourist, I would like to buy a statue of a customs official.
With the transformation of society, the face of oppression changes to reflect different
circumstances. This is why we don't readily recognise exploitation for what it is. For
instance, in most European countries, government bureaucrats are employed for life. It is
the rule in France. When a talented young Frenchman is recruited by a state agency, the
whole French society finds itself saddled with a legal obligation of 7 to 10 million
dollars towards this new employee. This is how much it will cost society on average to
fund this person's useless activity from the first pay-check through retirement and until
she dies. This 7 to 10 million dollars is the capital the exploited class is forced to
guarantee by law each member of the state exploiters' class. And in France, there are
more than 5 millions of them, some 20% of the active population.
Drowning By Numbers...
This figure of about 20% of the active population, by the way, is at the high end of the
proportion of feudal lords and the official clergy to the total population during
medieval times. 
There seems to be a natural law that prevents the ruling class from growing above that
number of 20%. Ecology offers us many examples of such a fixed ratio between exploiters
and exploited, between the number of predators and their preys. Wolves, for instance,
feed on caribous. When the wolves population increases, they kill off too many caribous ;
they start to go hungry, the weakest starve to death, and their total population settles
back to where it was. 
This analogy tells us there is no difference in nature between socialism and
social-democracy. The difference is only in degree. In the USSR, in Cuba and elsewhere,
the predators exterminated their preys, at least those who did not manage to flee the
country, so the predators ended up starving. Social-democratic states were clever enough
not to scare off all the caribous and keep enough of them alive, so that the ruling class
could prosper.
The environment however is changing before our eyes. Social-democratic economies are not
growing as steadily as they did, and joining the predators' class is seen as the short
and safe way to make a living. Families want their daughters to land a job at a Ministry,
farmers demand subsidies, industrialists beg for tariff protections, the elderly want
higher pensions...
Every dominant class throughout history faced this demand from outsiders to participate
in the loot. At first, the exploiters found ways to restrict entry. For instance,
participation in the class of feudal lords came by birth only. But sooner or later, the
dominant class had to give in to allies' and dependants' pressure. Athens had to
integrate its meteques, its resident aliens ; too many colonials became Roman citizens
(think of the Apostle Paul) ; in France, under Louis XV, as state coffers were emptying,
the King was simply auctioning off access to the noble ranks...
The present ruling class is even more vulnerable. It finds it impossible to restrain the
number of predators, as new entries are conferred not by birth, but by an exam. This
method of selecting predators on the basis of expertise was what the Enlightenment
considered its highest achievement : La carriere ouverte aux talents.. Not the scions of
ancient families, but the ablest citizens, whatever their social origin, would rule the
country. Of course, these new rulers, as they became in charge of public education, would
make sure the curriculum would favour their own kin. You seldom see an ambassador's son
working on a factory line, and they are not many factory worker's sons who make it to an
ambassadorship. It is a defining characteristic of a ruling class that it perpetuates
itself through generations. The problem for the present ruling class, however, as Marx
anticipated, is again technological innovation. As the economy evolves from the Machine
Age to the Information Age, it requires better qualified people, not illiterate factory
line workers. Information Age workers are people who have the capacity to pass all the
barriers for admission into the ruling class. So the number of predators is swelling. It
is the ruling class' internal contradiction.
Democracy
Of course, this is not the only problem the exploiting class is facing. Its other worry
is that the ideology which comforts its legitimacy, the Enlightenment philosophy, also
supports the political regime known as democracy.
Democracy's perversity is that it turns all of us into accomplices of the violence
exerted against society. We accept this violence inasmuch as we hope to become the
oppressors ourselves. In a feudal society, it is clear who the oppressors are, and who
are the victims, because you are born into one camp or into the other, as I was
mentioning earlier. You are born a slave or a serf, and all your life, you remain an
innocent victim of your oppressors.
Democratic society blurs this line between villains and victims. It gives everyone an
easy chance to take part in oppression. Every time we cast our vote, we are signifying
that we wish to take control over part of the population, that we want to impose upon
these men and women our ideas and values and we want to extort from them the financial
means to achieve our own goals. Democracy is the system that perverts every individual's
soul and turns every man and woman into a racketeer.
With the conjunction of democratic racketeering and an inflating ruling class, the burden
on the exploited masses is getting unbearable. Exploitation is naked and brutish. Even
ideology soon will not be able to explain away why we are ransomed. 
The Big Lie
Yet the ruling class' ideology has done a good job so far, when you think of it. It made
us believe that without the state, roads would not be built, the poor would agonise in
the streets, hospitals would not be funded, and no one would write theatre plays any
more... On radio and television channels, in the newspapers, at schools and in
universities, at churches, everywhere, we are told that democracy is the only viable
regime ; that social justice is the common good ; that it is morally acceptable to coerce
any individual if it is for the good of the collective ; that the end justifies the means
; that there are experts up there in government, who are taking care of our well-being,
who know better than we do what is good for us, if only we would let them... 
Conservative ideologues maintain that class struggle does not exist any longer, we are
all middle-class now... Leftist ideologues still believe in this idea that we are
exploited, but exploitation, they say, comes from the rich, from multinationals, from
Wall Street financiers and Swiss bankers... No one ever mentions that the exploiters are
the state bureaucracy and its lackeys, the military-industrial complex, subsidised
farmers and industrialists..., living off funds extorted from the productive masses.
Such blindness is amazing. On my left, you have a class of people with guns. They run the
army, the police, justice, they control the media through broadcasting licenses, they
exert censorship. All the means at their disposal come from taxation, your revenues and
savings extorted literally at gun point. On my right, you have multinationals and small
entrepreneurs, productive workers and creators... They bring you the food you consume,
they build your houses, they connect you to telephone networks and television channels,
they supply you with clothes, they manufacture your automobiles and your computers ; they
are so afraid that you would stop buying their goods, which you can do at any time, that
they spend zillions advertising them on glossy paper and video clips.
Now, who are the exploiters ? The people with guns, right, the people who don't offer you
anything you wish to have, or they would have no need to confiscate your money in order
to produce it, the extortionists?? Wrong. The exploiters are the capitalists. Isn't a
feat of genius on the ideologues' part that they have us believe the exploiters are the
producers, the creators, the providers, of the goods you enjoy to buy ? 
The bigger a lie, the more faithfully it is believed. In a Fran?ois Truffaut film, there
is this schoolboy who arrives late in class. He knows the teacher won't believe any story
about trains running late, bus accidents, and the usual excuses. So he makes a sad face
and declares : My mother just died. The whole school assembles immediately and offers
sympathy ; no one suspects this tragic death could be a lie. Political lies have to be so
gross as to be believed.