The point is that there is nothing inevitable about the liberatory role of production. The rationalization of production may lead to both an enormous increase in material goods and increasing control and subjugation of labor. “The passages by Simone Weil on the condition of the factory worker must be read in order to realize to what degree of moral exhaustion and silent despair the rationalization of labor can lead.” Suggesting both the source of his own indignation and die thrust of his constructive efforts, Camus observes: Work in which one can have an interest, creative work, even though it is badly paid, does not degrade life. Industrial socialism has done nothing essential to alleviate the condition of the workers, because it has not touched on the very principle of production and the organization of labor, which, on the contrary, it has extolled (R.216).
In fact, as Camus notes in a footnote as confirmation of the failure of “industrial socialism,” Lenin, “without any apparent bitterness,” “dared to say . . . that the masses would more easily accept bureaucratic and dictatorial centralism because ‘discipline and organization are assimilated more easily by the proletariat, thanks to the hard school of the factory'” (R, 217). Camus concludes that “the political form of society is no longer in question at
this level, but the beliefs of a technical civilization on which capitalism and socialism are equally dependent. Any ideas that do not advance the solution of this problem hardly touch on the misfortunes of the worker” (R, 216).
The Marxist plan to abolish the degrading opposition of intellectual to manual work has come into conflict with the demands of industrial production, which elsewhere Marx exalted. . . .
Division of labor and private property, he said, are identical expressions. History has demonstrated the contrary. The ideal regime based on collective property could be defined, according to Lenin, as justice plus electricity. In the final analysis it is only electricity, without justice (R, 215).
Was this a scientific mistake? To suggest this is to mistake the very essence of the thinking in question, according to Camus. What we are faced with is not simply an attempt to analyze the conditions of exploitation and to develop strategies to counter them. Rather, we are confronted with a counter mythology. Marxism at this level continues the Hegelian effort to offer a complete analysis of the human condition, and by so doing to envision the definitive resolution of the condition of human finitude and temporality.6 Not only is its analysis presented as scientific and comprehensive, but historical development is seen as providential and necessary. Salvation is assured. We need only pursue the dialectic to its consummation.
Of course, the language of science is continually invoked. Those who are “true believers” in “scientific socialism” were deeply offended by Camus’s analysis. And yet how else account not only for “the cult of production”— which, in any event, Marxism shares with bourgeois thought—but for the mystical faith in a mythologized proletariat? This proletariat, put in place by the dialectic of production, is to carry out the transformation that will usher in the classless society—that definitive resolution of historical injustice. But what qualifies the proletariat to carry out this revolution? And how can we be sure that the revolution, given its motor force by the suffering of the toiling masses, will likewise be directed by them? Out of degradation and extreme poverty, can insight and practical strategy emerge? Who could envisage that those with no experience of ruling would be able to organize themselves into a viable social order, not to say one marked by the subtle balance of freedom and justice? Camus asks:
Where is the guarantee that, in the very bosom of the revolution, estates, classes, and antagonisms will not arise? The guarantee lies in Hegel. The proletariat is . . . the universal in opposition to the particular. … It has nothing, neither property nor morality nor country. Therefore it clings to nothing but the species of which it is henceforth the naked and implacable representative. In affirming itself it affirms everything and everyone. . . . “Only the proletariat, totally excluded from this affirmation of their personality, are capable of realizing the complete affirmation of self” (R, 205).
But this is no longer a discussion of the conditions of working people. Nor is it a program for action. It is myth, pure and simple, however legitimated by the rationalism of Hegel’s historicized Christianity. “Through its suffering and struggles” this “mission of the proletariat … to bring forth supreme dignity from supreme humiliation” reveals it as “Christ in human form redeeming the collective sin of alienation” (R, 205).
Practical revolutionaries have not been misled by this paean to the spontaneity of worker self-liberation. They know that such a revolution must be organized; like all holy missions, it requires a priesthood.
By failing to deal theoretically with the practical problems of strategy and organization, Marxism made certain these problems would be dealt with apart from the mythical framework, and usually in a way that belied the initial call for the self-liberation of working people. “More and more, revolution has found itself delivered into the hands of its bureaucrats and doctrinaires on the one hand, and to enfeebled and bewildered masses on the other” (R, 216). The history of Marxism is the history of the use of the myth to justify the organized opposition of elites and vanguards in the name of the revolution. It is the doctrine of the revolution, with its companion notion of the revolutionary vanguard, which stands dead center in the Marxist tradition, to which the mission of the proletariat is dedicated, and in which is encapsulated the pathology that is prophetic Marxism. Of this, Marx, of course, is only partly responsible. One would have to look elsewhere for the full development of the notion of a revolutionary vanguard, particularly in the messianic nihilism of nineteenth century Russia which leads from Bielinsky and Pisarev, through Bakunin and Nechaiev, to Lenin. Nor ought we to forget its roots in the French revolutionary radicalism of St. Just, Babeuf, and even Sade.
The Revolution
One must see the doctrine of the revolution as the central Marxian myth to which all else is subordinated. This has been the legacy and the source of the evangelical force of Marxism as a world movement. This myth is required by the historicized demand for totality which dynamized the metaphysical structure of Western beliefs. As a response to the failure of Christianity, it is nurtured by Rousseau’s vision of civic faith, the Enlightenment demand for progress in accord with a reasoned nature that assured the virtues of its endeavor, and Hegel’s incorporation of these themes into a historicized vision of liberation. All that was needed was to place this post-Christian drama on the solid material bases offered by the development of science and industry, while linking the development of production with the struggle of classes for liberation. The point of it all was the driving need to give absolute sense and purpose to existence in the face of a world in complete upheaval. How much masses of people would snuggle for a progressive but partial amelioration of their condition may not be clear. But there is nothing like a messianic mission
to galvanize them into action. Especially when they have faith that they are in the right and that their side is sure of its ultimate triumph.
Whatever the historical dynamic, and whatever the source of Marx’s personal vision and determination, it is clear that the critical analysis of exploitation, when joined with faith in the power of the productive forces and the prophetic mission of the proletariat find their perfect rational union in the doctrine of the revolution. Here the historical struggle of oppressed and oppressing classes is dialectically consummated with the radical inversion that will put an end to the struggle of classes, ushering in an ideal society without class antagonisms and thus without exploitation and injustice.
And what is the promise of the revolution? “The final disappearance of political economy . . . signifies the end of all suffering. Economics, in fact, coincides with pain and suffering in history, which disappear with the disappearance of history. We arrive at last in the Garden of Eden” (R, 223). It is only as the definitive end to human suffering that the revolution can offer itself as the sole foundation of values in a world that has been denied transcendent justification. From this perspective, moral questions become matters of tactics and of efficacy. From the perspective of the Absolute what can the concerns of individuals matter? “If it is certain that the kingdom will come, what does time matter? Suffering is never provisional for the man who does not believe in the future. But one hundred years of suffering are fleeting in the eyes of the man who prophesies, for the one hundred and first year, the definitive city” (R, 207). Thus: Utopia replaces God by the future. Then it proceeds to identify the future with ethics; the only values are those which serve this particular future. For that reason Utopias have almost always been coercive and authoritarian. . . . The golden age, postponed until the end of history and coincident. . . with an apocalypse, therefore justifies everything (R, 207-8).