For 150 years, we have seen a huge literature that dramatizes the brutalization of the bourgeoisie, a class in which those who are most comfortable with brutality are most likely to succeed. But the same social forces are pressing on the members of that immense group that Marx calls the “modern working class.” This class has been afflicted with a case of mistaken identity. Many readers have always thought that “working class” meant only factory workers, or industrial workers, or manual workers, or blue-collar workers, or impoverished workers. These readers then note the changing nature of the workforce over the past half-century or so—increasingly white collar, educated, working in human services, in or near the middle class—and they infer the Death of the Subject and conclude that all hopes for the working class are doomed. Marx did not think the working class was shrinking: In all industrial countries it already was, or was in the process of becoming, “the immense majority”; its swelling numbers would enable it to “win the battle of democracy.” The basis for his political arithmetic was a concept that was both simple and highly inclusive:
The modern working class, developed … a class of labourers, who live only so long as they find work, and who find work only so long as their labour increases capital. These labourers, who must sell themselves piecemeal, are a commodity, like every other article of commerce, and are consequently exposed to all the vicissitudes of competition, to all the fluctuations of the market.
The crucial factor is not working in a factory, or working with your hands, or being poor. All these things can change with fluctuating supply and demand and technology and politics. The crucial reality is the need to sell your labor to capital in order to live, the need to carve up your personality for sale—to look at yourself in the mirror and think, “What have I got that I can sell?”—and an unending dread and anxiety that even if you’re OK today, you won’t find anyone who wants to buy what you have or what you are tomorrow, that the changing market will declare you (as it has already declared so many) worthless, that you will find yourself physically as well as metaphysically homeless and out in the cold. Arthur Miller’s Death of a Salesman, a twentieth-century masterpiece, brings to life the consuming dread that may be the condition of most members of the working class in modern times. The whole existentialist tradition dramatizes this situation with great depth and beauty, yet its visions tend to be weirdly disembodied. Its visionaries could learn from the Manifesto, which gives modern anguish an address.
A great many people are in the working class but don’t know it. Many are the people who fill up the huge office buildings that choke all our downtowns. They wear elegant suits and return to nice houses, because there is a great demand for their labor right now, and they are doing well. They may identify happily with the owners, and have no idea how contingent and fleeting their benefits are. They may not discover who they really are, and where they belong, until they are laid off or fired—or deskilled, outsourced, downsized. (It is fascinating how many of these crushing words are quite new.) And other workers, lacking diplomas, not dressed so nicely, working in cubicles, not offices, may not get the fact that many of the people who boss them around are really in their class. But this is what organizing and organizers are for.
One group whose working-class identity was crucial for Marx was the group to which he himself belonged: intellectuals.
The bourgeoisie has stripped of its halo every occupation hitherto honoured and looked up to in reverent awe. It has transconverted the physician, the lawyer, the priest, the poet, the man of science, into its paid wage labourers.
Marx is not saying that in bourgeois society these activities lose their human meaning or value. If anything, they are more meaningful and valuable than ever before. But the only way people can get the freedom to make discoveries, or save lives, or poetically light up the world, is by working for capital—for drug companies, movie studios, boards of education, politicians, HMOs, etc., etc.—and using their creative skills to help capital accumulate more capital. This means that intellectuals are subject not only to the stresses that afflict all modern workers, but to a dread zone all their own. The more they care about their work and want it to mean something, the more they will find themselves in conflict with the keepers of the spreadsheets; the more they walk the line, the more they are likely to fall. This chronic pressure may give them a special insight into the need for workers to unite. But will united workers treat intellectual and artistic freedom with any more respect than capital treats it? It’s an open question; sometime in the twenty-first century, the workers will get power somewhere, and then we’ll start to see.
Marx sees the modern working class as an immense worldwide community waiting to happen. Such large possibilities give the story of organizing a permanent gravity and grandeur. The process of creating unions is not just an item in interest-group politics, but also a vital part of what Lessing called “the education of the human race.” And it is not just educational but existential: the process of people individually and collectively discovering who they are. As they learn who they are, they will come to see that they need one another in order to be themselves. They will see, because workers are smart: Bourgeois society has forced them to be, in order to survive its constant upheavals. Marx knows they will get it by and by. (Alongside his fury as an agitator, the Manifesto’s author also projects a brooding, reflective, long patience.) Solidarity is not sacrifice of yourself but the self’s fulfillment. Learning to give yourself to other workers, who may look and sound very different from you but are like you in depth, gives a man or woman a place in the world and delivers the self from dread.
This is a vital part of the moral vision that underlies the Manifesto. But there is another moral dimension, asserted in a different key but humanly just as urgent. At one of the book’s many climactic moments, Marx says that the Revolution will end classes and class struggles, and this will make it possible to enjoy “an association, in which the free development of each is the condition for the free development of all.” Here Marx imagines communism as a way to make people happy. The first aspect of this happiness is “development”—that is, an experience that doesn’t simply repeat itself but that goes through some sort of change and growth. This model of happiness is modern and is informed by the incessantly developing bourgeois economy. But bourgeois society, although it enables people to develop, forces them to develop in accord with market demands: What can sell gets developed; what can’t sell gets repressed, or never comes to life at all. Against the market model of forced and twisted development, Marx fights for “free development,” development that the self can control.
In a time when crass cruelty calls itself liberalism (we’re kicking you and your kids off welfare for your own good), it is important to see how much ground Marx shares with the best liberal of all, his contemporary John Stuart Mill. Like Marx, Mill came to see the self’s “free development” as a fundamental human value; like Marx, he believed that modernization made it possible for everybody. But as he grew older, he became convinced that the capitalist form of modernization—featuring cut-throat competition, class domination, social conformity and cruelty—blocked its best potentialities. He proclaimed himself a socialist in his old age.
Ironically, the ground that socialism and liberalism share might be a big problem for both of them. What if Mr. Kurtz isn’t dead after all? In other words, what if authentically “free development” brings out horrific depths in human nature? Dostoyevsky, Nietzsche, and Freud all forced us to face the horrors and warned us of their permanence. In response, both Marx and Mill might say that until we have overcome social domination and degradation, there is simply no way to tell whether the horrors are inherent in human nature or whether we could create benign conditions under which they would wither away. The process of getting to that point—a point where Raskolnikovs won’t rot on Avenue