In the epilogue to my 2006 book Planet of Slums, I asked: To what extent does the informal proletariat, the most rapidly growing global class, possess that most potent of Marxist talismans, “historical agency”? Although I was not aware of it at the time, Eric Hobsbawm had asked exactly the same question in an interview given in 1995. (He is quoted at the beginning of the next chapter.) Neoliberal globalization over the last generation has recharged the meaning of the “wretched of the earth.” Hobsbawm’s “gray area of the informal economy” has expanded by almost 1 billion people since his interview, and we should probably subsume the “informal proletariat” within a broader category that includes all of those who eke out survival by day labor, “micro-entrepreneurship,” and subsistence crime; who toil unprotected by laws, unions, or job contracts; who work outside of socialized complexes such as factories, hospitals, schools, ports, and the like; or simply wander lost in the desert of structural unemployment. There are three crucial questions: (1) What are the possibilities for class consciousness in these informal or peripheral sectors of economies? (2) How can movements, say, of slum-dwellers, the technologically deskilled, or the unemployed find power resources—equivalent, for example, to the ability of formal workers to shut down large units of production—that might allow them to struggle successfully for social transformation? and (3) What kinds of united action are possible between traditional working-class organization and the diverse humanity of the “gray area”? However, in thinking about a sequel to Planet of Slums, based on comparative histories and case studies of contemporary activism in the informal economy, I realized that I first needed to clarify how “agency” was construed in the era of classical socialism—that is to say, from Marx’s lifetime down to the isolation of the young Soviet state after 1921.
Although everyone agrees that proletarian agency is at the very core of revolutionary doctrine, one searches in vain for any expanded definition, much less canonical treatment. For this reason, Chapter 1 adopts an indirect strategy: a parallel reading of Marx’s Collected Works and dozens of studies of European and U.S. Labor history in the nineteenth and early twentieth century. The goal has been to find accounts of how class capacities and consciousness arose on the principal terrains of social conflict; in the socialized factory and the battles within it for dignity and wages; through sometimes invisible struggles over the labor process; out of the battles of working-class families against landlordism and the high cost of living; from crusades for universal suffrage and against war; in campaigns of solidarity with workers and political prisoners in other countries; and in movements to build alternative socialist and anarchist cultures in the very heart of industrial capitalism. The result, presented as a series of theses, is something like a historical sociology of how the Western working classes acquired consciousness and power. A persistent theme that emerges from these case studies is that class capacity on larger scales arises conjuncturally, as activists reconciled both in practice and in theory different partial demands and interests. In other words, it was precisely at the confluence of struggles (wages and suffrage; neighborhood and factory; industrial and agricultural, and so on)—and sometimes intra-class antagonisms (skilled versus semi-skilled)—that the creative work of organizing became most important and radically transformative. Historical agency, in other words, derived from the capacity to unite and strategically synthesize the entire universe of proletarian grievances and aspirations as presented in specific conjunctures and crises. And, it is necessary to add, to respond successfully to the innovations of employers’ offensives and counter-revolutions.
Years ago, Robin Blackburn made the surprising claim that the “real originality of Marx and Engels was in the field of politics, not in economics or philosophy.” I would amend this to say “both in politics and economics.”9 Chapter 2, “Marx’s Lost Theory,” influenced by Erica Benner’s work on the politics of nationalism in Marx, argues that Marx’s requiem for the failed revolution in France (The Eighteenth Brumaire and Class Struggles in France) stands second only to Capital as an intellectual achievement; moreover, it is one grounded completely in the urgency of revolutionary activism. Marx, so to speak, opens up the engine compartment of contemporary events to reveal what Antonio Labriola would later call the “inner social gearing” of economic interests, as well as the autonomous role of the executive state, in a situation where no class was able to form a political majority or lead the way out of the national crisis. The French essays, heralds of a materialist theory of politics, explore a middle landscape, usually unrecognized by Marx interpreters, where “secondary class struggles” over taxes, credit, and money are typically the immediate organizers of the political field. They are also the relays whereby global economic forces often influence political conflict and differential class capacities. (The theory of hegemony, in other words, starts here, with the underlying-interest structure of politics, which is doubly determined by the relations of production, at least in the long run, and the artful activity of leaders, organizers, and brokers.) In any future revolution, Marx argued, the workers’ movement must be adept at addressing all forms of exploitation (such as over-taxation of the peasantry and the credit squeeze on small business) and, in the event of a foreign intervention—which he saw almost as a precondition for proletarian hegemony—to lead resistance in the name of the nation. These essays, finally, signaled a radical innovation: the retrospective “balance-sheet” method of strategic critique at which Lenin and Trotsky would become so masterful.
Chapter 3 focuses on Marx’s critic, Kropotkin, who in his scientific persona instigated a great international debate on climate change. The prince, of course, was the most congenial and charming of late-Victorian anarchists, at least as encountered in the parlors of London’s middle-class radicals and savants, usually hand in hand with his stunningly beautiful daughter Sophia. But the Okhrana, which kept him perpetually under surveillance, regarded this turncoat noble and former explorer as one of the world’s most dangerous revolutionists. His intellectual interests, like those of Marx and Engels, were omnivorous; but whereas Marx admired scientists from afar, Kropotkin was one: an outstanding physical geographer whose explorations of Manchuria and the Amur watershed rank in importance and daring with those of contemporaries such as John Wesley Powell and Ferdinand Hayden in the American West. Although he wrote frequently for Nature in later years, and his book Mutual Aid brilliantly anticipated the “symbiotic turn” in modern biology, his major scientific work on glacial geology and the recession of the ice sheets (the first installment finished in a dungeon) has never been translated, and has only recently been republished in Russian.
From his fieldwork in Siberia and Scandinavia he made a number of deductions about climate change that were popularized decades later in a 1904 article in the Geographical Journal. The significance of this article, and the chief topic of Chapter 3, is that Kropotkin was the first scientist to identify natural climate change as a major driver of human history. This might not seem terribly original, but in fact it was. In contrast to the current reign of denialism in the White House, educated opinion in the nineteenth century widely embraced the idea that human activity, especially deforestation and industrial pollution, was changing the climate in ways that might threaten agriculture, or even human survival. What was missing until Kropotkin was any observationally grounded case for important cyclical or secular trends in natural climate processes, and evidence that they had shaped history in consequential ways. In his Geographical Journal piece he argued that the ending of the Ice Age was a still ongoing process, and that the resulting effects of progressive desiccation were visible across Eurasia and had produced a series of catastrophic events, including the episodic onslaughts of Asian nomads upon Europe.
Unfortunately, his research became immediately annexed to the debate about a “dying civilization” on Mars, as revealed by the elaborate system of “canals” supposedly observed on the Red Planet. Perceval Lowell, the most zealous proponent of these canals, wrote a book claiming that Mars merely rehearsed the future of the Earth, citing Kropotkin and others on the progressive aridification of Eurasia. But Kropotkin’s real Frankenstein monster, shocked to life by the Geographical Journal debate, was the American geographer and former missionary Ellsworth Huntington, a tireless self-promoter, who reinterpreted linear desiccation as a natural cycle, the famous “Pulse of Asia.” Huntington’s belief in climatic determination,