The Jet-Set Peasantry: where no passenger is not drunk

The rabble is a fundamental problem for Hegel argues Frank Ruda. Sacha Kahir reviews Ruda’s Rabble, piecing together and pushing onwards the fragmented parts of civil society’s cyclonic contradiction

 

Come, poor things, let us sing […]

After darkness comes light,

After evil comes the good,

Our guide and leader, Abundance,

Comes to lead us1

 

Karl Marx, referring to etymological research by the Brothers Grimm on the German language’s links to ancient Nordic Folklore, exclaimed:

 

What would old Hegel say in the next world if he heard that the general [Allgemaine] in German and Norse means but the common land [Gemeinland], and the particular [Sundre, Besondere] nothing but the separate property divided off from the common land?2

 

The dead labour congealed within the commodity intersects a history of expropriation, enclosure, and colonisation that is at the same time our history. Sugar once grown by slaves in plantations, on land cleared through genocide, fuelled factory workers who flocked to the cities to escape destitution. The money generated built huge museums now staffed by interns on workfare schemes.

 

As the Israeli filmmaker Amos Gitai – whose documentary Pineapple (1983) unearths the complex social relations behind a tin of pineapples – observes:

 

One day, when I opened my refrigerator, I looked closely at a can of pineapple. It had been ‘made in the Philippines’, ‘packaged in Honolulu’, ‘distributed in San Francisco’ and the label ‘printed in Japan’. This was a concrete illustration of the multinational economy.3

 

Speaking Congelations

 

The history of expropriation is also congealed in the way we speak – within the semiotic structures we use to bracket (enclose) our world. However, residues and traces of the crime scene remain. The opening line of the first English translation of Marx and Engel’s Communist Manifesto originally read:

 

A frightful hobgoblin stalks throughout Europe. We are haunted by a ghost, the ghost of Communism.

 

It’s translator, Helen Macfarlane, a Scots Chartist and arguably one of the first Marxist Hegelians, is the subject of a recent article by David Black and Ben Watson, which explores the linguistic turns and traces in the relation of Marx to Hegel, within the wider world of the emerging proletariat.4 These traces of a general dispossession were, through fairy lore and detourned parables, spat out as polemics uttered by quaking politicos in Victorian taverns. A growing number of works are attempting to reread the Marx / Hegel relationship in the present period, in which strange new state forms and contradictions are appearing. This period includes, for example, both the Occupy movement and ISIS in the same sequence of events.

 

A notable contribution to this body of work is Frank Ruda’s Hegel’s Rabble: An Investigation into Hegel’s Philosophy of Right.5 The book continues and develops a Marxist of tradition of revealing the Un-Hegelian nature of many of Hegel’s conclusions, while retaining a certain fidelity to the continuity between both thinkers. It is Hegel’s Philosophy of Right that has chiefly been the focus these attacks. Initiated by Marx himself, and continuing with Hegelian Marxists like Theodor Adorno through to Ruda, whose interest in that work stems from the Hegelian Dialectic appearing to become ‘frightened of itself’ (p.59), when faced with the rabble, necessitating dialectical moves beyond Hegel’s own. Ruda proposes that we need to rewrite Marx’s early work, which had already made these moves, in an era where terminal contradictions roam the globe. Ruda sees in Hegel’s notion of ‘the rabble’ the seeds of Marx’s conception of the proletariat. A stratum of society necessarily produced by the workings of society but excluded from it. A part whose inclusion is an impossibility – a contradiction too cyclonic – to leave the whole unchanged. This impossibility of its proper inclusion leads to an indignation against society as a whole and fuels the sentiment behind revolution.6

 

The German idealists believed, as the heirs of Luther and Kant, that they could create through thought a shockwave equal to that of the French Revolution. It was proposed that

 

Kant had […] surpassed Robespierre in intellectual terrorism: whereas the guillotine managed to kill off only a pathetic, fat king who had lost his head anyway, the axe of reason had slain deism itself throughout Germany […] the French Revolution (acting) as the allegory of an ‘other’ – more comprehensive – revolution in the mind.7

 

Hegel and many of his idealist contemporaries, however, were both attracted to and repulsed by the excesses of the spirit of their age that had ushered in revolutions in politics, technology, and organisation. ‘German Idealism’, however, became a ‘German Misery’ trapped within the pulpits, academic halls, and other institutions of polite society.

 

Spectre vs Hob

 

Marx and Engel’s wrote in their attack on German idealism ‘spectres, bonds, the higher being, concept […] are merely the idealistic conception of the isolated individual’, with history appearing as ‘a series of persons […] the thinkers, the philosophers, (these) ideologists are understood as the manufacturers of history […] thus the whole body of material elements has been removed.’8

 

Macfarlane‘s translation, therefore, might be truer to Marx’s thinking than the spectre that haunts the later versions. ‘Hob’ was a name for a country labourer. ‘Goblin’ a mischievous sprite. ‘Thus communism manifested itself in the manifesto in the discourse of the agrarian commons.’9

 

The hobgoblin, however, is also a Hegelian figure since it contains the thing that was sublated as still alive within it. Hegel’s world is populated by the undead. Nothing is lost in the all-devouring spiral of the Hegelian dialectic. Nothing that is except for the rabble.

 

Frank Ruda uses Slavoj Žižek’s ‘Organ Without a Body’ as the rabble’s central metonymy. This is not the smooth space of Deleuze’s ‘Body Without Organs’, but a horrendous conflation of twitching undead body parts. ‘Atomisation, alienation, unbinding, disintegration. These are the characteristics of the rabble.’ (p.37)10 The Hegelian dialectic is often represented as a trinity ending in synthesis when it could equally be represented as a turning inside out, or the abolition of inside and outside.

 

Dead Habits

 

Hegel’s ‘rabble’ lacking habit falls like a putrefying limb or organ from the social body of civil society and the state. Habit for Hegel is what transforms ‘bodily organisation, sensations, and needs’, creating a second nature, negating the first order of nature as ‘immediate sensation […] as indifferent’, and in ‘hardening us against external sensations.’ It founds the manner in which we shape and interact with our environment. Habit is a dexterity formed by ‘deadening the intensity of the activity’ (p.76). As Ruda says, ‘Hegel’s notion of habit always fulfils the same function: the forming of new and more universal nature.’ The natural organisation of the world is formed by habit, for Hegel, this is second nature. But just how deadening our daily habits were becoming was already recognised as a problem by Hegel and others.

 

What has become second nature is an existence as sets of organs excited by different sensations who cannot act as a body but move under the propulsion of sheer mass. It is this zombie-like movement impelled by the density of a ‘bad infinity’ of growth without form, which threatens to ‘unbind’ Hegel’s system, and the state form itself, as we shall see below.

 

Image: Francisco Goya, Disasters of War, plate 30, Harris 150, Delteil 149, 1808-1814

 

Hegel’s ‘isolated individual’ (as Marx would say) in and for himself exists within a kind of commons made up of others like him. Hegel holds that ‘the endless multiplication of needs of others is a lasting resource for everyone’, where, ‘no one can take a bite of bread without thereby providing bread for others (as one) cannot accomplish the full extent of his ends without reference to others’.11 Hegel traces the problem of poverty to the ever changing needs of others (the problem of overproduction and changing desires), ‘as one must earn ones livelihood from producing for these ever changing needs.’12

 

Hegel’s state is not balanced by wealth but by a balance of production and consumption – making poverty a problem of coordination for the state, in what Hegel terms a ‘system of needs’. However, Hegel ultimately has no proper solution for poverty as such, recognizing that ‘When civil society is in a state of unimpeded activity […] expanding internally in population and industry. The amassing of wealth is intensified’. This leads to an exclusion that entails for the poor an ‘inability to enjoy the broader freedoms and […] benefits of civil society (so that) poverty immediately takes the form of a wrong done to one class [Klasse] by another.’13 As wealth intensifies, so equally poverty intensifies in relation to that wealth. As Hegel writes, ‘When the standard of living of the mass of people falls below […] one necessary for a member of (that) society […] the result is the creation of the rabble […] this facilitates the concentration of disproportionate wealth in a few hands.’14 Hegel also acknowledges that a ‘system of needs’ in ‘advanced societies’ does not exist in a ‘state of nature’ but against a backdrop of luxury that blurs the distinction between the ‘natural and refined’, where, ‘dependence and want increase ad-infinitum’15

 

Luxury Rabble

 

Hegel’s solutions for dealing with poverty characterises the way states continue to deal with the issue. These solutions reproduce the state itself, in the form of a policing in the broadest sense of the word, which operates at the level of mediation where its subjects have an investment in the forms of policing. The state mediates provision through welfare, hospitals, education and a general infrastructure. The manning of this policing is still carried out by Hegel’s ‘Universal Class’ that consists of civil servants, teachers, scholars, lawyers, doctors, clerics and other bureaucrats. To this list we might add social workers, therapists and various managers who form part of long line of soft cops. This policing, Hegel admits, can only contain the worst excesses of the rabble, rather than abolishing the conditions that create it. Therefore the more expansive and industrious society becomes the more intense the forms of rabble that appear as an inertia constantly expanding in magnitude and intensity. (p.97-99) This leads to the possibility of a world populated by ‘the most horrible rabble that even fantasy cannot imagine’. (p.99) A world populated by what Ruda terms, in relation to Hegel’s conception of the rabble, the luxury and pauper rabble. A world where islands of wealth exist gated from a mass of poverty.

 

The luxury rabble exists in privation due to it refusing to be part of the corporation. Its attitude to rights, obligations and duties it considers a matter of choice, and it refuses to hand these over to the state or corporation. The freedom to choose marks a significant difference from the pauper rabble. Though, it is important to underline here, it is not poverty alone that makes the rabble, according to Hegel, it is an attitude or being ‘without attitude’, to use Ruda’s terminology, namely demanding subsistence without work and ‘rights without rights’. (p.61) The rabble demands rights while existing outside the realm of right that is connected, in the Hegelian State, to work, and in this sense the two types of rabble mirror each other.

 

The pauper rabble exists by living day to day in a manner that relies on contingency (chance) making them gamblers by default. However, the wealthy gamble on the market, and in the present climate of financial speculation it is easy to see the relevance of Ruda’s close reading of Hegel’s fears about the destructive power of unfettered wealth that unbinds social cohesion.

 

The luxury rabble sees itself as a sovereign power over ‘a sort of economical state of nature’. (p.38) As the luxury rabble increasingly funds the policing of poverty through charity this becomes ‘naturalized’, while the State becomes merely a form of policing that enforces this position, preventing class conflict. As Alain Badiou (who’s influence can felt in many of Ruda’s arguments) declares: ‘The state is not founded on the social bond, which it would express, but rather upon un-binding, which it prohibits.’16

 

Real Life Training

 

 

The state operates in a form that Paulo Virno links to the Katechon: the power to keep at bay the coming of the Anti-Christ – continually postponing the end – a form of disaster management.17 For example, ‘Real Life Training’ in Germany sees the long-term unemployed being forced to pretend to work, stacking shelves with inflatable produce in fake supermarkets.18 ^‘The classical forms of capitalism survive, but as empty forms, as pure conduits serving to maintain apparatus.’19

 

An empire of suspended animation keeping the myth of Lazarus on ice: who with the right training, can rise up from the dead to stack shelves in our local supermarkets and charity shops. Like the un-dead who comically mimic the motions of the living in zombie films, in an endless shambling repetition, workfare schemes increasingly want participants to look like they’re working.

 

They’re training to be us…

They used to be us…

They’re learning to be us again…They’re pretending to be alive…

Isn’t that what we’re doing?20

 

Hegel’s generation saw that work was becoming more repetitive and reductive under the influence of industrialisation. Ruda writes that Hegel

 

developed a theory of the corporation, that provides an organizational model and a conception of a political instrument for the working class in the moment of its formation […] distancing itself from the ossified structures of mediaeval guild-system (enabling) them to influence economic factors […] with his conception of the corporation a sphere of civil society could organize itself in a manner by which it could counter the instability of the economic dynamic by which it is otherwise determined.21

 

A few years after Hegel formulated the role of the corporation in civil society the first trade union conference in Britain was staged and Chartism was born, a movement demanding universal suffrage, of which The Communist Manifesto’s first translator, Helen Macfarlane, was a central figure.

 

Image: Francisco Goya, Disasters, pl. 26, Harris 146, Delteil 145). Original etching, 1808-1814

 

At the same time an element of corporatism also develops which is proto-fascist in nature, acting as a replacement for the sovereign body that finds cohesion in identifying a foreign element or organ it must amputate. Mussolini famously stated that fascism should more properly be known as corporatism. The Hegelian state is a strange beast when viewed at a distance. Hegel’s conception of the state, he claims, exists in the ‘is’ rather than the ‘ought’, proclaiming that: ‘What is rational is actual and what is actual is rational’, this tautology makes reason the material kernel around which his dialectic operates. It is a workers’ state that is a constitutional monarchy, which needs to engage in war with other states to prevent it becoming like an oceanic stagnant pond, where no real life exists. The annihilation of the superfluous rabble in warfare is a hidden solution in The Philosophy of Right that Ruda doesn’t really seem to explore. This stagnation, in a Marxist sense, of course, leads to class war, but for Hegel it must be deflected outward. The organic alliance of the working class with other estates (classes), within the framework of the national state is classic corporatism, whether manifested in left wing social democratic or right wing fascistic forms.

 

Abolition Postponed

 

New forms of corporatism have emerged. Take for example Greggs the bakers, who run a reality TV series called Greggs: More Than Meats the Pie, featuring different bakeries for each episode. The staff from a Greggs in Newcastle were recently accused of vandalising a pop-up coffee shop that had opened up nearby. This is class war but as farce, a class attacking a particular instances of itself rather than the oppressive social relation per se, and shows the problem that corporatism has on many levels. As Gáspár Miklós Tamás neatly summarises:

 

The proletariat had, historically, two contradictory objectives: one, to preserve itself as an estate with its own institutions (trade unions, working-class parties, a socialist press, instruments of self-help, etc.), and another one, to defeat its antagonist and to abolish itself as a class. We can now see that the abolition of the working class as an ‘estate (while) class as an economic reality exists, and it is as fundamental as ever.²²

 

A politics of the second (Marxist) tendency, has rarely occurred, instead a tendency that ossifies the role of the worker has predominated in Socialism, whether in the British Labour Party or the Communist Parties of Russia and China. Some, like Paulo Virno, have argued that capitalism at a certain juncture was more successful in abolishing the proletariat than socialist regimes, and this why workers overthrew the eastern block regimes.

 

We are presently witnessing a movement of people across the globe, a planet-wide dispossession – cruelly accelerating the conditions of early capitalism. The mass of vagabonds created by the loss of common land, compounded by advances in agricultural technology, and the repurposing of land for grazing livestock – spelt out the end of the feudal order for Marx and Engel’s. So, what does the ever-increasing population in the West today that is unemployed, under-employed and dispossessed of wage labour spell out to us? The tendency to dispossess workers of the wages owed them is of course as much a part of the absolute law of capitalist accumulation as is the ‘reserve army’ of the unemployed.23

 

As the powers of social production develop so too does a tendency to make what was once a luxury an everyday necessity. Marx exploring the subsumption of luxury, painted a picture of a world similar to our own - where we drive to work as an unpaid intern, our mobile phone and laptop at the ready – he wrote:

 

What previously appeared as a luxury is now necessary […] for the most naturally necessary and down to earth industry […] this pulling away of the natural ground from the foundation of every industry, and this transfer of its conditions of production outside itself, into a general context – hence transformation of what was previously superfluous into what is necessary […] is the tendency of capital.24

 

The tendency to transfer conditions of production outside of production itself translates into types of dispossession that include flat screen televisions and smart phones, not as alienation in themselves, but as a pure semblance or false appearance of luxury that masks a social relation of exploitation and exclusion. Ruda’s rabble is already ‘the negation of negation’, sublated as unemployed workers. Ruda has similar preoccupations to other on-going attempts to revive or rethink the communist project, but with barely any reference to either commodities or capitalism. Swerving in another direction from Lukácsian reification, Ruda’s is a poverty of ‘subjective operation’ or ‘disposition’ in Hegelian terms.25

 

Indigence Indignant

 

Ruda focuses on Hegel’s consideration of ‘indignation’, which is not just an ‘affective description of the attitude of the rabble’ but also has a ‘sense of outrage, rebellion or insurrection.’ (p.59) Hegel sees this as a crime against the state, but Hegel’s state is one its subjects must recognise themselves within, and reciprocally be recognised by. The fact, therefore, that Hegel acknowledges that civil society, as we know it, continuously produces poverty means that civil society, ‘the world of appearance of the ethical is in its totality is nothing but a gigantic concatenation of injustices, which incessantly produces the impossibility to universally validate.’26

 

Indignation operates as a kind of anxiety that, in the Lacanian sense, is directed towards an object that is not an object, what we often refer to as generalized anxiety. ‘[T]he object of anxiety is not an object in the world, but rather appears in the very relation to the world.’27 Ruda claims that Hegel, also, saw indignation as not directed at an object as such, but directed ‘against the general manner in which the world is set up and erected. More precisely: indignation for Hegel is always indignation against a world in which there is indignation.’28

 

For both Giorgio Agamben’s ‘bare life’ and Ruda’s ‘rabble’ there has been a kind of abandonment, and at the same time, a domestication of human life. We are unable to be political animals and have become what Ruda would describe as a commercialised animal under a form of animal humanism that is devoid of thinking and especially so with regards to the ability to create new ideas at the level of our species life.

 

Sociological analysis of the class composition of the planetary proletariat would entail encompassing a vast array of differences in the manner of an extensional set or ‘menge’ (indiscernible mass). Hegel feared the ‘menge’, which in German can also mean accumulation, assemblage, multitude, and mathematical ‘set’, as it blurs individual features within a faceless aggregate in which no universal class or executive can administer the infinite unbinding rabble, at least that is, within any recognised notion of freedom.

 

Angelic Mis-Rule

 

In Hegel’s universe, as in William Blake’s, individual consciousness flows through forces of a biblical magnitude that are played out in everyday life. But unlike Blake’s cosmology – etched out within a kind of pagan antinomian commotion – the sprawling edifice Hegel built is as stripped down and as formally abstracted as the places of worship of the Free Presbyterian Church of Scotland (the Wee Wee Frees who split from the Wee Frees).29 Hegel’s remarks, ‘Man, finite when regarded for himself, is yet at the same time […] a fountain of infinity in himself. He is the object of his own existence – has in himself an infinite value, an external destiny’, resonates within a similar wavelength to Blake’s grain of sand.30 However, Hegel couches this within a system ruled by ‘myself to the universal as this immediate unity […] it is my real self, it is I who rule. It is lord, public force, and ruler – in these three aspects it is [directed] toward me.’31 This is a self-rule of the will as the subsumed monarch, a disappeared monarch reborn throughout the system. ‘Caesar the person replaced by Caesar the title’ – as Žižek is fond of saying. The idea of an absolute monarch died out around the same time, and under the same conditions, as the death of God. This death according to both Blake and Hegel has made us potentially angelic.

 

Image: The Musicians of Bremen as featured on the cover of a pamphlet by Jacques Camatte and Gian Collu

 

Ruda, citing Hegel, describes the coming humanism of communism as a government of ‘non-human beings […] a democracy of angels.’ (p.178) A Marxist angelo-humanism that is an ‘affirmation of a different, transformed humanism […] a humanism of impossibility – and not a humanism of the already invested and inscribed possibility of the human being.’ (pp.178-179)

 

In universal production it is mankind itself (the ground of the possible) that is produced. It follows, therefore, that the curtailing of a bad infinity of ever increasing poverty, then, is one of a different kind of organisation, as Ruda writes, ‘the rupture with civil society and the state […] needs to lead into the process of a reorganisation of the existing circumstances in accordance with the universality of mankind.’ (p.173)

 

New forms of communist organisation must attempt to dialectically subsume the bare life of a proletariat / rabble generalised on a global scale – ‘as the complete loss of man’ – within the creation of a sensuous ‘species being’. The creation of this sensuous species being becomes the role of universal production under communism. Ruda highlights this, writing,

 

for Marx, to truly think human species-life signifies to think a collective universal production that itself generates life (as) the permanent creation of one’s own universality. (p.177)

 

But first we must unbind the state form, which equals religion: whose very meaning, ‘re-ligio’, is to bind back. Our world is unbinding but to save it from a pure death drive, Ruda claims we need an ‘idea’ – ‘an idealism without idealism’ – that he names as communism. This communism that ends the ‘animal silence’ of our present humanism is necessary if we want escape the end of history under the influence of the ‘most horrible rabble that even fantasy cannot imagine.’32

 

 

 

Sacha Kahir <cthulhu_studies AT yahoo.co.uk>has been engaged in a human strike since leaving school in the late ‘80s. He occasionally scabs off to do some work, which can be seen here http://www.sachakahir.co.uk/

 

 

 

Footnotes