Marx and the Middle Classes Pt.2
II
Within the framework of capitalist society, the lower middle-class is immortal. Not only do small traders and small producers, worshippers of the principle of private property and credit, inevitably ensure the existence of parasites on the social organism, as being causes of the dissipation and waste of social labour; but also from out of their midst there appear the bearers of a special philosophy, directed for the purpose of restraining the proletarian revolution.
“The lower middle-class,” in Marx’s words, “has no special class interests. Its liberation does not entail a break with the system of private property. Being unfitted for an independent part in the class struggle, it considers every decisive class struggle a blow at the community. The conditions of his own personal freedom, which do not entail a departure from the system of private property, are, in the eyes of the member of the lower middle-class, those under which the whole of society can be saved.”
And this is the very reason why the lower middle-class masses are the most dangerous enemies of the dictatorship of the proletariat. They represent a very strong section of society. Their special interests are absolutely incompatible with the economic disturbances which are the inevitable accompaniment of transitional periods.
The disturbance of credit cuts the ground from under their feet. They begin shouting for order, for the strengthening of credit, in such a way that every concession to them leads in effect to a complete restoration of the old order.
The bearers of middle-class philosophy, who took up their stand as critics of capitalism in the working-class movement at the time when that movement was still in the stage merely of a critical attitude towards capitalism, and who brought in with them a peculiarly lower middle-class outlook, feel disillusioned when the era of decisive battle arrives. Their supremacy in the realm of ideas can continue no longer; while it is beyond their powers to free themselves from the lower middle-class-world-concept.
This is what Marx says in his “Eighteenth Brumaire,” in which he gives a masterly analysis of this lower middle-class outlook, on the subject of these “representatives” of the Labour movement — or, to speak more correctly, of these leeches which have attached themselves to it:
“By their upbringing and individual position, the former can be as far apart from the latter as heaven and earth. What makes them the spokesmen of the lower middle class is the fact that their thoughts do not leave the path in which the latter’s whole life moves, and that therefore they come, by a theoretical road, to the same problems and solutions as the lower middle class reaches in actual life. Such, in general, is the relation between the political and literary representatives of a class and the class itself.”
Marx was merciless in dealing with this kind of poisoners of proletarian class-consciousness. The whole Labour movement ought to be the same. With the weapons of ridicule and hatred he fought against the “heroes” of the French social democracy of the time — the political movement which represented an unlawful union between the lower middle class and the proletariat.
He wished to separate the Labour movement from all lower middle class elements, because the lower middle class attitude — attachment to the idea of private property, more or less open striving to uphold credit, terror of every fundamental social disturbance — is in practice the greatest internal enemy of the proletariat and the proletarian revolution.
III
A proletarian dictatorship that betrays a readiness to make concessions to the lower middle class is threatened with destruction.
A working class struggling against the bourgeoisie “from below” escapes this peril more easily than a victorious proletariat. A proletariat fighting “from above,” possessing State power, and grappling with the problems of organisation of production, is in a much more difficult position than a proletariat which has not yet attained victory. The working class itself is not yet free from all lower middle class habits of mind, while the mass of middle class parasites which lived on the back of the old order is now, equally ready to live on the back of the proletarian State.
The crushing of counter-revolution in Russia shows that, here too, the time has come when, as Marx says in “The Civil War in France,” all sections of the bourgeoisie except the great capitalists — “shopkeepers, tradesmen, merchants” recognise that the proletariat is the only class capable of initiative in the sphere of social reconstruction. This means, however, that the same section of the lower middle class which “offered up the workers as a sacrifice to their creditors” will once again attempt to come to an agreement with its creditors.
While the lower middle class exists, it is not capable of renouncing itself, even if it does submit to the proletariat. Though incapable of independent resistance, it will nevertheless try by roundabout ways to distort the meaning and the aims of the Revolution.
If it once manages, under whatsoever disguise, to reappear in the arena of the workers’ struggle, it will use all its energies to the end that it may remain the proprietor of its little shop, and the client of capitalism. It demands first of all “the re-establishment of credit” — but this cry is, for the lower middle class, only “a disguised form of the cry for the re-establishment of private property.”
The Revolution, when celebrating the centenary of Marx’s birth, will not forget the sentence he passed on the lower middle class.
Bela Kun, from Pravda May 4, 1918