The Princesse de Clèves Today

As the beginning of The Communist Manifesto states, pre-capitalist societies, as well as industrial capitalist society in its first phase, were based on a dichotomous and hierarchical organisation: masters and slaves, aristocrats and peasants, exploiters and exploited, capitalists and proletarians. These social groups were opposed to each other in almost every way, even though they shared the same form of religious consciousness and the same worldview. At the base of social reproduction was the theft of the surplus production created by the direct producers; this theft was initially carried out by violence, and violence was also the method of last resort to assure the distribution of social "roles". Normally, however, this theft was justified and disguised by a vast apparatus of "superstructures" — from education to religion — which guaranteed the peaceful submission of those who, in reality, had little interest in accepting such an unfavourable distribution of rights and duties in society and who, at the same time, potentially had the ability to overthrow this state of affairs if they were united enough and resolved to do so. Once this order was put up for debate — essentially, from the onset of the Industrial Revolution and the Enlightenment — revolution (or profound reforms; in any case, a drastic change of course) was the necessary outcome. Opposition to the material mode of production was accompanied by the questioning of all of its justifications, from monarchy to religion, and even, during the most advanced stages of this opposition, of the family, the education system, etc. The dichotomy was then clearly highlighted: a tiny fraction of exploiters ruled all the rest of the population by means of violence and, above all, by cunning — a cunning that would later be called "ideology" or "manipulation". These classes have nothing in common; the exploited are the bearers of all the human values denied by the ruling classes. It is very hard to break the power of the rulers, who have accumulated a considerable quantity of means of coercion and seduction, and often successfully divide the exploited classes, or else intimidate or corrupt segments of them. But there was no doubt that the day would come when, despite all the obstacles, the "lower" classes would overthrow the social order, and replace it with a just and good society such as the earth had never seen. If the members of the ruled classes exhibit in their present life multiple defects and egotistical attitudes with respect to their peers, this is because the upper classes inoculated them with their vices; furthermore, the revolutionary struggle will not fail to eliminate these defects, which are not inherent to the ruled classes.

This portrait, caricatured to only a slight degree here, has served to galvanise all the supporters of social emancipation for two centuries. It was not a false depiction. Although it was always one-sided, it partially corresponded with certain realities. The anarchist movement in Spain of the first decades of the twentieth century, which in 1936 led "a social revolution and the most advanced model of proletarian power ever realised", was probably the movement that came closest to the formation of a counter-society within capitalist society itself and largely opposed to its values (but not as completely as this movement believed itself to be; we need only think of its exaltation of work and industry). Furthermore, its solid roots in clearly pre-capitalist local traditions played an understandably prominent role in this "otherness" with respect to bourgeois society, something that was always cruelly lacking in — for example — the German workers' movement, whose revolutionaries, according to Lenin's well-known observation, would have bought train tickets before storming the station (which, however, did not prevent Lenin from maintaining that the German Post Office was the model for the future communist society that had to be constructed in Russia).

In the last few decades the idea that social emancipation will consist in the victory of one part of capitalist society over another part of that same society has lost its lustre. This idea held sway as long as the ruled part of society was deemed not to be part of that society, but only bore its yoke as that of an alien rule. If, however, this schema can still find partial application today — perhaps — in certain particular cases such as Chiapas, it can by no means be applied to capitalist society in the fully developed form it has assumed since 1945. The distinctive feature of this society is not the fact that it is based on the exploitation of one part of the population by another. This exploitation certainly exists, but it is not specific to capitalism; it also existed before. What is specific to capitalism — and what makes it historically unique — consists rather in the fact that it is a society based on generalised competition, on commodity relations that affect all aspects of life, and on money as the universal mediation. Equalisation before the market and money, which "only" understand quantitative differences, has gradually eclipsed the old classes, but without by any means making this society less conflict-ridden or less unjust than it was before.

This equalisation existed in embryo from the very inception of the industrial revolution because it is consubstantial to capitalism as valorisation of labour value and self-referential increase of money. It became predominant after the Second World War, at least in the West; but only over the course of the last few decades, with the advent of so-called "postmodern" society, has it become self-evident. It was also during these last twenty years that theoretical reflection began to take note of this fundamental change. The "dichotomous" view, of course, has not died; its most common avatar is the concept of "class struggle", the axis of all variants of traditional Marxism and even of certain forms of thought that do not define themselves as Marxist (from Pierre Bourdieu to the main currents of feminism). The anxiety caused by the recent globalisation of capital has given new impetus to concepts — from the social democrats of ATTAC to the neo-workerist advocates of "intellectual capital" — that only question the distribution of capitalist "goods", such as money and the commodity, but never their existence as such.

However, a different kind of analysis of the contradictions of the capitalist system is beginning to emerge. This analysis abandons the centrality of the concept of the "class struggle" (without denying, however, that class struggles exist and often for good reasons), but not...