The First Episode: Poetry of the Past — the Future, Part II
There is a clock that never strikes.
— Rimbaud, "Childhood"
Distributive justice — in the first volume of Capital, published twenty years after the bombshell of the Communist Manifesto, Marx writes that:
The capitalist maintains his rights as a purchaser when he tries to make the working-day as long as possible, and to make, whenever possible, two working-days out of one. On the other hand, the peculiar nature of the commodity sold implies a limit to its consumption by the purchaser, and the labourer maintains his right as seller when he wishes to reduce the working-day to one of definite normal duration. There is here, therefore, an antinomy, right against right, both equally bearing the seal of the law of exchanges. Between equal rights force decides. Hence is it that in the history of capitalist production, the determination of what is a working-day, presents itself as the result of a struggle, a struggle between collective capital, i.e., the class of capitalists, and collective labour, i.e., the working-class. [1]
After weeks of mounting tension and growing bad blood between the restless, unemployed workers and the paralyzed representatives of the Provisional Government and Constituent Assembly created by the actions of February — for example, how on the 15th of May 1848, a demonstration in support of the hopeless revolution in Poland had suddenly transformed into a column marshalled by the radical republican Armand Barbès and the anarchist-socialist Louis Auguste Blanqui to storm the chambers of the Hôtel de Ville and declare a new revolutionary dictatorship over the heads of the bourgeoisie; of course, the confusion was quickly cleared by the authorities and the attempted coup de tête became nothing more than a disquieting joke, a presentiment of the violent farce that would soon begin — the Paris barricades were lifted up again in June, resurrected by the workers in the high heat of summer. The National Workshops of the Luxembourg Commission, where schoolboy recollections of the utopian systems of Fourier and Saint-Simon were vulgarly applied to the practical task of employing the people of France, were dissolved by decree of the bourgeois republic: collective capital had declared its bankruptcy and claimed the right of liquidation against collective labor’s right to work. In the end, this dispute — right against right, both equally bearing the seal of the law of exchanges — could only be settled by an open measure of force: the poorly organized and largely unarmed workers of Paris were met with the mortars, rifles, and bayonets of the National Guard; the same popular militia that had stormed the Bastille in 1789 for the sake of founding the First Republic now stormed cobblestone barricades to massacre indignant workers in the name of preserving the Second — the first time as tragedy, the second time as farce. Marx would famously register that this phantom of historical repetition was the appearance of a real crisis within the bourgeois revolution, one that would not be solved by returning to the old imago of the democratic republic which had been irreparably shattered by the ineluctable movement of history. As he writes in The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte (1852):
Men make their own history, but they do not make it just as they please; they do not make it under circumstances directly found, given and transmitted from the past. The tradition of all the dead generations weighs like a nightmare on the brain of the living. And just when they seemed engaged in revolutionizing themselves and things, in creating something entirely new, precisely in such epochs of revolutionary crisis they anxiously conjure up the spirits of the past to their service and borrow from them names, battle slogans, and costumes in order to present the new scene of world history in this time-honored disguise.[2]
This is what the German romantic poet Heinrich Heine reported as a correspondent for the Augsburger Zeitung of the political proclivities of the Paris workers:
“Tell me what thou hast sown today, and I will tell thee what thou shalt reap tomorrow.” I thought of this proverb of the pithy Sancho when I today visited certain workrooms on the Faubourg Saint-Marceau, and there discovered what works were read among the workmen who are the most vigorous portion of the lower class. There I found, for instance, several new editions of the speeches of old Robespierre, also Marat’s pamphlets in two-sous form, the “History of the Revolution” by Cabet, the venomous libels of Cormenin, Baboeuf’s Teachings, and Conspiracy of Buonarroti — writings which smell of blood, and heard songs sung which seemed to have been composed in hell, the refrains of which caused the wildest excitement. [3]
Propertyless workers, the newly birthed, screaming children of the Industrial Revolution, were arrested by the superstitions and broken dreams of a previous generation of vanquished heroes; they looked back towards the Great Revolution of 1789 and the covenant it had made for the Universal Republic and thought that by repeating the old gestures of the bourgeois revolution, its victory might still be salvaged. What the workers failed to recognize, however, was that the Third Estate which had followed the revolutionary aspirations of the bourgeoisie to victory in 1789 had in the meantime begun to show signs of an irreparable schism — this was the meaning and the occasion for Marx and Engel’s Communist Manifesto. There they describe how the revolutionary process by which the Third Estate had conquered the feudal world and deposed the ancien régime — by harnessing the hitherto unrealized creative potential of human labor, capturing its power through the division of labor and the application of industrial techniques — became self-contradictory with the unforeseen emergence of an urban working-class who had no other recourse after the dissolution of rural life than to make use of their newfound poverty and sell the only property at their disposal: the time and power of their labor, their very energy and exhaustion. The bourgeois-democratic ideal of universal equality is the principle of free exchange and the basis of wage-labor in bourgeois society; the permanence of unemployment in capitalism is the negation of bourgeois right. Thus in the monstrous cities that first flowered with bourgeois society, members of the nascent working-class were compelled to confront one another as equal values of power and compete amongst themselves for an amount of work that the technical advance of industry, which would never have been possible without the existence of wage-labor, nevertheless made less and less necessary. The National Workshops were dissolved in June because capitalism could find no use for them — for the same reason the workers were massacred. “It is the race of those who possess no commodity but their labor power.” [4]
Race of Abel, sleep and eat;
God smiles on you complacently.
Race of Cain, in mud and filth
You crawl and die in misery.
Abel’s race, your sacrifice
Smells sweet to all the Seraphim!
Race of Cain, your punishment,
Will it be ever at an end?
…
Race of Abel, see your shame:
The plough is conquered by the pike!
Cain, your modern progeny
Have just begun to do your work;
Race of Abel, carrion,
Manure to feed the steaming sod!
Race of Cain, assault the skies
And drag him earthward — bring down God! [5]
And the universal reality of the commodity-form of labor — the fact that everyone has to work in order to live and only lives in order to work — means that everything bears “the seal of the law of exchanges.” Even the poet atop his garret, absorbed in the mysteries of reverie, will realize nonetheless that he must find a buyer in order for his lyrics to survive.
Already by 1830, as Arnold Hauser notes in his seminal Social History of Art, the condition of the artist had come to be characterized by the problem of a new mass public, the anonymous audience of middle-class masses to which the artist’s work was addressed after the fall of the old system of patronage with the collapse of the feudal order. [6] No longer able to rely on commissions from the Church or aristocracy, artists found themselves abandoned to a marketplace where one never knew what would sell or for how much. Speculation in art, like speculation in business, became the new principle of aesthetic production. Gone were the great murals and choirs of the past, works of moral and religious instruction, and in came the flood of easel painting and chamber music, a type of work whose size and reproducibility lent itself more readily to the new demands of commercial distribution. In the world of narrative arts, for instance, the massive growth of the daily paper created new publishing conditions that would fundamentally shape the form of modern literature. The innovation of advertising, a reflex of the new consumer culture that had emerged in the city, allowed newspaper publishers to subsidize the subscription costs of their readers in a competition for market share and ad revenue. It was this drive to conquer greater portions of the public that offered an opening for ambitious writers whose work the newspapers commissioned in order to offer artistic products that would distinguish themselves in the market. The episodic structure of the modern novel, as well as the naturalism with which it tries to capture the grotesque features and dynamic rhythm of social life, develop from the commodity-form of exchange that begins to mediate between the artist and his audience with the irreversible unfolding of the industrial revolution. Even the formalist doctrine of l’art pour l’art that gained traction with the work of the Symbolists already assumed the isolation of the artist that had been accomplished by the division of labor and already tended to naturalize the critical distance that had been provided by the system of exchange (e.g. even the yearly Salon exhibitions of contemporary French painting and sculpture were mass cultural phenomena covered in all the major newspapers of the time and reviewed by famous writers and critics in popular pamphlets that were widely read and circulated.) The modern origins of the autonomy of art can be traced to the moment that art steps forth as a commodity to be exchanged like any other, only then is it “changed into something transcendent. It not only stands with its feet on the ground, but, in relation to all other commodities, it stands on its head, and evolves out of its wooden brain grotesque ideas, far more wonderful than ‘table-turning’ ever was.” [7] As Baudelaire would come to recognize, the language of commodities is the language of correspondances — of the “sympathetic resonance” of the equality of the principle of exchange — and that the strange, spontaneous language of commodities is the lyricism of modern poetry:
Nature is a temple, where the living
Columns sometimes breathe confusing speech;
Man walks within these groves of symbols, each
Of which regards him as a kindred thing. [8]
Tell me what thou hast sown today, and I will tell thee what thou shalt reap tomorrow. Marx explains that the workers were doomed to be defeated in 1848 because they had failed to recognize how the meaning of the past had changed with conditions and how the old revolutionary tradition had become an obstacle to be surmounted. As he writes in The Eighteenth Brumaire:
The social revolution of the nineteenth century cannot draw its poetry from the past but only from the future. It cannot begin with itself before it has stripped off all superstition in regard to the past. Earlier former revolutions required world-historical recollections in order to drug themselves concerning their own content. In order to arrive at its content, the revolution of the nineteenth century must let the dead bury their dead. There the phrase went beyond the content; here the content goes beyond the phrase. [9]
A similar sort of recognition must have dawned on Gustave Courbet when, during an international congress on modern art in 1861, he defined the position of realism:
The basis of realism is the negation of the ideal, a negation towards which my studies have led me for fifteen years and which no artist has dared to affirm categorically until now…. Romantic art, like that of the classical school, was art for art’s sake… the Burial at Ornans was in reality the burial of romanticism, and it preserved only what had been a discovery of the human mind, and which therefore had a right to exist. [10]
A funeral procession in the country; really the scene of any city street; bored and restless glances thrown across the mourning throng; of simple-minded workers, insolent children, nervous women, pompous priests, sycophant bourgeois; in the grand dimensions of history painting; the rhythm of workers at the factory line; goods that must be brought to market; the rampant spread of syphilis and gossip; a black train that interminably cuts through the landscape; the open grave that all are destined to share; the seal of the law of exchanges — distributive justice.
Twenty years after the revolution of 1848, wondering what there had been to learn from the experience, Baudelaire reflects on a visit from his Demon:
Well this is what the voice whispered to me: “A man is the equal of another only if he can prove it, and to be worthy of liberty a man must fight for it.”
Immediately I leaped upon the beggar. With a blow of my fist I closed one of his eyes which in an instant grew as big as a ball. I broke one of my finger nails breaking two of his teeth and since, having been born delicate and never having learned to box, I knew I could not knock out the old man quickly, I seized him by the collar with one hand and with the other took him by the throat and began pounding his head against the wall. I must admit that I had first taken the precaution of looking around me and I felt sure that in this deserted suburb no policeman would disturb me for some time.
Then, having by a vigorous kick in the back, strong enough to break his shoulder blades, felled the sexegenarian, I picked up a large branch that happened to be lying on the ground, and beat him with the obstinate energy of a cook tenderizing a beefsteak.
Suddenly — O miracle! O bliss of the philosopher when he sees the truth of his theory verified! — I saw that antique carcass turn over, jump up with a force I should never have expected in a machine so singularly out of order; and with a look of hate that seemed to me a very good omen, the decrepit vagabond hurled himself at me and proceeded to give me two black eyes, to knock out four of my teeth and, with the same branch I had used, to beat me to a pulp. Thus it was that my energetic treatment had restored his pride and given him new life.
I then, by many signs, finally made him understand that I considered the argument settled, and getting up I said to him with all the satisfaction of the Porch sophists: “Sir, you are my equal! I beg you to do me the honor of sharing my purse. And remember, if you are really philanthropic, when any of your colleagues asks you for alms you must apply the theory which I have just had the painful experience of trying out on you.”
He swore that he had understood my theory, and that he would follow my advice. [11]
One wonders if Baudelaire’s Demon was not the same as the spectre of communism that also visited Marx:
Bourgeois revolutions, like those of the eighteenth century, storm more swiftly from success to success; their dramatic effects outdo each other; men and things seem set in sparkling brilliants; ecstasy is the everyday spirit: but they are short lived; soon they have attained their zenith, and a long depression lays hold of society before it learns soberly to assimilate the results of its storm and stress period. Proletarian revolutions, on the other hand, like those of the nineteenth century, criticize themselves constantly, interrupt themselves continually in their own course, come back to the apparently accomplished in order to begin it afresh, deride with unmerciful thoroughness the inadequacies, weaknesses, and paltriness of their first attempts, seem to throw down their adversary only in order that he may draw new strength from the earth and rise again more gigantic before them, recoil ever and anon from the indefinite prodigiousness of their own aims, until the situation has been created which makes all turning back impossible and the conditions themselves cry out:
Hic Rhodus, hic salta!
Hier ist die Rose, hier tanze!
[Here is Rhodes, leap here!
Here is the rose, dance here!] [12]
Giovanni Battista Piranesi, The Giant Wheel,from Imaginary Prisons, 1750. From: Wikipedia.
Jacques-Louis David, The Death of Marat, 1793. From: Wikipedia.
Gustave Courbet, The Stone Breakers, 1849. From: Wikipedia.
Honoré Daumier, The Print Collector, 1860. From: Petit Palais.
Gustave Courbet, The Meeting or “Bonjour, Monsieur Courbet,”1854. From: Wikipedia.
Gustave Courbet, A Burial at Ornans, 1849-50. Oil on canvas, 10 x 22’. Musée d'Orsay. From: Wiki.
Gustave Courbet, The Desperate Man, 1843-45. From: Wikipedia.
Edgar Degas, Fin d’Arabesque,1877. From: Wikipedia.
[1] Karl Marx, “The Working Day,” in Capital (1867), vol. 1, (Moscow: Progress Publishers, 1965). From: marxists.org.
[2] Marx, The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte (1852), (Moscow: Progress Publishers, 1937). From: marxists.org.
[3] Heinrich Heine, “Lutetia” (1854), in The Works of Heinrich Heine, vol. 8, (London: William Heinemann, 1893), 51-9. From: archive.org.
[4] Walter Benjamin, “The Paris of the Second Empire in Baudelaire” (1938), in The Writer of Modern Life, (Cambridge: Harvard, 2006), 55-6.
[5] Charles Baudelaire, “Abel and Cain,” in The Flowers of Evil (1857), trans. James McGowan, (Oxford, 1993), 267-69.
[6] Arnold Hauser, “The Generation of 1830,” in The Social History of Art (1951), vol. 2, (New York: Alfred Knopf, 1952), 714-68.
[7] Marx, “The Fetishism of Commodities and the Secret Thereof” in Capital, vol. 1. From: marxists.org.
[8] Baudelaire, “Correspondences,” in The Flowers of Evil, 19.
[9] Marx, The Eighteenth Brumaire.
[10] Gustave Courbet, “Profession de Foi,” appendix to Paul B. Crapo, “Disjuncture on the Left: Proudhon, Courbet and the Antwerp Congress of 1861” in Art History 14, no. 1 (March 1991), 84-5. My translation.
[11] Baudelaire, “Beat Up the Poor,” in Paris Spleen (1869), trans. Louise Varèse, (New York: New Directions, 1947), 101-3.
[12] Marx, The Eighteenth Brumaire.