Elaborating on the nature and necessity of a Socialist Republicanism is vital for our present movement. On this topic, Sam Thomas’s article “The Machiavellian State, Fascism and the Tribune of the Proletariat” both provides interesting insights and grounds for a further debate, that I feel should be given importance in the midst of our Communist organizations. Fundamentally, this can only be clarified by asking the question of the revolutionary past and its role in our present movement, what we inherit from past revolutionary classes and what makes ours the final struggle. In doing so, we must study the Republic as a demand through a lens of historical materialism, clarifying precisely how classes negate their republicanism as they become reactionary (something that we must vitally grasp to understand why the bourgeoisie has tolerated feudal remnants, monarchies, and wildly undemocratic political structures ever since the 19th century, especially where its power allowed it to dismiss anti-feudal alliances with the peasantry and the proto-proletariat, like in England and Germany), and understand the place of universalism and particularity in past and present class struggles. My goal in this letter is to do so by bringing to the question of Republicanism a revolutionary conception of time and the past, as present in Walter Benjamin’s “Theses on the Concept of History ”.1
As a demand, non-domination is inherently universalist. By seeing freedom as the capacity for all humans to understand and control the laws by which they live, any struggle for non-domination views itself as a struggle for class abolition, for an universalist state of things.
In centering non-domination as the defining demand of Republicanism, Machiavelli fundamentally links it with the struggle of the oppressed. For him, the defense of the Republic by the plebeians came exactly from oppression, from “being oppressed, or suspicion of having been oppressed.”2
As Historical Materialists, this notion of the struggle for non-domination arising from the “plebeians”, the dominated classes, allows us to “brush history against the grain”3 as Walter Benjamin theorized, understanding this fight for a Republic as an underground historical demand of the oppressed. Conversely, this allows us to acknowledge how a class’s turn towards a reactionary role is paralleled by an increasing anti-republicanism. This, along with the understanding of how the few bourgeois revolutions (with the Jacobin Republic being the primary example of this) were propelled towards radicalism by the peasantry and proto-proletariat,4 illuminates on the nature of bourgeois “republicanism” as devoid of the contents of the republican demand, ever since the historically reactionary era of Capital, tolerating and even upholding feudal political remnants, monarchies, and the persistence and integration of the aristocracy. Alongside this revolutionary conception of past struggles, Benjamin brought a certain conception of time to Marxism that I feel is vital to understand history. Instead of a merely formalistic conception of time, a rigid separation between past, present and future, he, influenced by a heretical interpretation of Jewish and Christian Theology, put forward an idea of Kairos, full historical time, where the past contains a certain quality of the present. This is even more present in revolutionary moments of history, where the oppressed seek to halt and destroy the present state of things. These historical moments encapsulate a certain totality, by their radical demands of universalism, charged with the present and the future.
Armed with these revolutionary understandings of both time and republicanism, we can conceive of the demand for a Republic as a battle-cry of oppressed classes, from the plebeians in Rome to the German rebelling peasants to the Sans-Culottes in the Jacobin Republic in their struggle for non-domination and universalism, wishing to halt the historical march of the oppressors and, in doing so, embodying an explosive historical totality. In the face of this, what is the duty we have to the past, and past oppressed classes, and how does inheriting this demand make our movement more revolutionary?
With this concept in mind, we have to understand these revolutionary moments, and the central demand of the oppressed in all its iterations, as explosive in embodying a full historical time, imbued with the present and future. To this powderkeg of revolutionary potential, Historical Materialism shall be a match, paving the way for a “leap in the open air of history, the dialectical leap Marx understood as revolution.”5 This translates into the need to study how the Republican demand changes in demand and moves through history, as different modes of production topple previously existing ones. Essentially, we need to study the more specific contents of the struggle for non-domination dialectically, through its contradictions and negations, to truly unearth the past’s revolutionary potential.
Before the proletariat, no other class could truly have an understanding of historical totality, of its place alongside the oppressed classes of the past, no other class could render the past legible for revolutionary praxis. However, the material conditions that allow the proletariat to recognize this necessity bring with them a consciousness that class abolition can only be realized through class dictatorship, that the universal can only be realized through the particular.
This results from the specific nature of wage labor as an economic relation not established through law, that determines the struggle of the proletariat as a political and economic fight aiming for conscious class dictatorship. As Rosa Luxemburg noted:
“All previous societies were based on an antagonism between an oppressing class and an oppressed class’. But in the preceding phases of modern society this antagonism was expressed in distinctly determined juridical relations and could, especially because of that, accord, to a certain extent, a place to new relations within the framework of the old.”6
In essence, the proletariat is the class that, while imbued with demands for universalism, is freed by its conditions to recognize how this can be attained. Its rule is republican in the sense that, as a process of class abolition, it is a real dictatorship of humankind’s interests. In Communism, as the free association of producers, we find a sublated form of the republic, a shedding of its content of non-domination from its state form. From this, it follows that, embodying the struggle for this state of affairs, the dictatorship of the proletariat is a process of contradiction, where “a being is at each moment itself and yet something else”7, realizing the content of the republican demand by wielding it in order to abolish its form. To do so is to redeem and realize the struggles of the past, to finally resolve the final struggle for a Res Publica passed down by the oppressed of the past, while not falling into any illusions regarding the need for class particularity as was present in these other classes.
On the question of the Tribune of the Proletariat, and how such a measure could be a great battle won in the class struggle, I have only some remarks to add. While we can force specific measures on the bourgeois state to pave the way for the Dictatorship of the Proletariat, we have to recognize that such a thing can only be possible when the class struggle has been intensified and politicized. It is not the Tribune of the Proletariat that causes class struggle to grow and advance, it’s the growth and advance of the class struggle that can allow for a Tribune of the Proletariat. We cannot dismiss that such a measure could advance the class struggle, but we have to understand that in this reciprocal relationship the intensification of the class struggle is the primary and first factor. This also can be applied to Socialist presence in the bourgeois parlament. Too many parties see this relation backwards, not realizing the work that must be done to intensify and politicize the struggle of the working class before bourgeois parlament can be used in a revolutionary manner.
Fundamentally, for the struggle to implement a Tribune of the Proletariat to succeed, it’s vital that we first implement its embryonic forms into practice, in the small ways that we can. Building occupations, tribunes, and councils to organize our class and to win. On a smaller scale, victories in the struggle is necessary for us to be able to impose a Tribune of the Proletariat on the bourgeois state, as it requires a political, conscious and organized proletariat and a constant sharpening of its tactics by practice.
In essence, one of the most relevant questions of our current movement is how to create a reciprocal relation between theory and praxis, avoiding both from becoming ossified and arbitrary. In doing so, the nature of our relation to the past, to the history of the oppressed, and the nature of our demands is essential. I hope bringing forward Machiavelli’s theory of republicanism, among many others, can revitalize our understanding of what we’re fighting for, and spark debate and study over how these demands modify themselves historically. The proletariat is at a site of struggle that is both continuity and rupture with the past: our goal should be to infuse the past with a real sense of the future and present revolution, in order to both break from and realize this past, in ways that will be determined by the struggles of today.
Ari
- Specifically, most of my analysis was inspired by Michael Löwy’s book, “Fire Alarm, Reading Walter Benjamin’s ‘On the Concept of History’”
- Machiavelli, Discourses, I.IV.9, p. 72.
- Walter Benjamin, On The Concept of History, Thesis VII
- On the class composition of the Jacobin and Montagnard movement, Albert Soboul offers a great class analysis of how many of the French Republic’s radical measures were spurred on by the Sans-Culottes, who could be defined as proto-proletarians.
- Benjamin, Thesis XIV
- Rosa Luxemburg, Reform or Revolution?, Chapter VIII, Page 64, Foreign Languages Press
- Friedrich Engels, Anti-Dühring, Chapter XII – Dialectics. Quantity and Quality, Page 112, Progress Publishers, 1987