There is no revolutionary subject

A Critique of the Essentialist Grounding of Revolutionary Subjectivity

“With the lever of enthusiasm we can change the world. All the knowledge of science, all the refinements of theory, all the calculations of mathematical economics will never create even the smallest fraction of that irresistible force which emerges from enthusiastic hearts and exalted spirits.” (Louis-Auguste Blanqui)

If there is one political orientation that has remained hegemonic within the sphere of the (communist) left from the late 19th century up to the present day, it is workerism. From Bakunin to Mao, and from Kautsky to Negri, a variety of theoretical approaches and tactical practices within the movement have led to the predominance of the identification of the communist and emancipatory project with the “realization of the interests” of the working class.

Workerism, as we understand and criticize it, constitutes the dominant theory concerning the question of the revolutionary subject; that is, the question surrounding the characteristics of the political subjectivity oriented toward revolution, understood as radical emancipation from the system of capitalist domination. Despite the divergences between the various approaches, by examining workerism in general we arrived at the following condensation of positions broadly accepted by the currents of communism that adopt it:

• Communism and universal emancipation constitute the realization of the interests of the working class.

• The working class structurally embodies, by virtue of its position within production, the abolition of the capitalist system.

• The working class constitutes the bearer of revolutionary change.

Below, we will analyze and critique the political implications of the above positions. It is important, however, to emphasize our distance from other contemporary anti-workerist currents. Such perspectives, unable to transcend the theoretical framework of searching for structurally revolutionary subjects, merely redirect their attention toward social groups beyond the working class, which they then burden with the execution of the revolutionary project in question. Such groups are usually the peasantry, the lumpenproletariat, the “precariat,” students and youth, the proletariat of the Global South or colonized subjects, queer subjects, and so on. As we will show, we believe that each of these perspectives reproduces the same methodological error: assigning to a social group the task of carrying out a project that requires consciously political subjects. More specifically, regarding workerism and workerist logic, we formulate the following theses:

We do not search for a revolutionary subject. We reject every theory that “reads off” the revolutionary character of social groups from their structural position within a system of domination.

The working class, as the class of “doubly free” commodity owners, does not embody, as such, the abolition of capitalism; on the contrary, it is an organic element of it. Let us examine the issue more systematically. The structural interests of the working class are determined by the rationality inherent in commodity exchange: the worker seeks to increase the price of the commodity “labour-power,” that is, their wage. This pursuit is entirely rational within the limits of capitalist society; indeed, it constitutes the necessary form through which the working class defends its structural interests. However, precisely because this pursuit operates within the logic of commodity exchange, it cannot lead to the transcendence of the logic of capital itself. Communism and the political struggle for emancipation do not arise from the aforementioned rationality. As Heinrich notes:

“From this perspective, class struggles are not an indication of a weakness of capital, nor of an impending revolution, but rather the normal form through which the conflict between bourgeoisie and proletariat unfolds.”

The conclusion drawn from this is not indifference toward purely trade-union demands (wage increases, reduction of working hours, etc.), but rather the necessity of conducting political struggle and forming a political orientation aimed at overthrowing the very logic of capital itself. From this standpoint, we reject the view according to which revolution can emerge as the result of the mere escalation, generalization, or coordination of spontaneous social struggles. Economic and social resistances, even in their most confrontational forms, do not automatically produce revolutionary consciousness, nor do they linearly transform into political confrontation with the state. The transition from defensive economic struggle to revolutionary politics is not a matter of the quantitative accumulation of social explosions, nor of their technical coordination by some party, but of a qualitative political rupture with the entirety of capitalist social organization. Wherever such political formation was absent or remained immature, even the most massive, “popular,” or class-based forms of resistance proved incapable of surpassing the level of immediate negation and condensing into a total political confrontation with bourgeois power and its state form.

Despite his own workerist deviations, we agree with Louis Althusser’s thesis that history has no subject. This formulation, which has been misunderstood in many ways, does not deny the existence of acting subjects within history; it denies the existence of a predetermined subject, a subject that would serve as the “bearer” or “guarantor” of a preordained historical trajectory. There do, of course, exist political subjects within history that confront it as a stake. Consequently, we hold that no theory of political subjectivity can exist in isolation from a theory of political organization and political consciousness. This position has significant consequences for the way we understand the relation between organization/party and class. Contrary to the workerist conception, which views organization as the simple “representative” of an already revolutionary (potentially) class, we argue that organization is the site of the constitution of revolutionary subjectivity itself. These subjects, however, do not preexist their political constitution; on the contrary, they are constituted through the process of political struggle itself. This consciousness, in turn, is not derived from the “point of view” of the working class or any other social group, but from practical-critical activity and the anticipatory conception of the communist perspective.

The early modern revolutionary tradition produced a distinct organizational form. From the Jacobin Club to the Filiki Etaireia and the Blanquists of the Paris Commune, the revolutionary collective was conceived not primarily as a mechanism of representation but as an active force of rupture and intervention. These organizations were conspiratorial and intensely voluntarist. They did not conceive themselves as expressions of already constituted social groups; rather, they sought to politically produce a revolutionary identity through organization and struggle itself. What unified these otherwise different organizations was their structural antagonism toward the state. The revolutionary party “mirrored” the state in negative form. The revolutionary organization functioned as a negative “mirror” of the state apparatus: it developed secrecy, coordination, networks of information, and so on precisely because it stood opposed to a hostile power structure. It positioned itself against the state and sought moments of weakness within it: crises, wars, ruptures of legitimacy, administrative splits, uprisings. These organizations were not merely “political” in the parliamentary sense; they were forms of anti-state power. In this sense, the organization conceived itself as the bearer of a new universality. Its legitimacy did not derive from the representation of an electoral or social base, but from the embodiment of a historical project: freedom, equality, national emancipation, communism, democratic virtue, or proletarian revolution. The revolutionary subject did not preexist as a sociological datum. On the contrary, the organization actively constituted this subject through struggle itself. The Bolshevik party may be regarded as the culmination of this historical tradition.

The decisive transformation came with the rise of the Second International and the stabilization of liberal parliamentary democracies in Europe. There, the party-form underwent an inversion. Instead of positioning itself against the state as an antagonistic force, the mass socialist party gradually became integrated into the political and administrative architecture of the state. Electoral competition, trade-union bureaucracy, parliamentary participation, and the mediation of the welfare state transformed the function of the party. The party ceased to be the creator of a new political subject and became the representative of an already existing sociological category: the worker, the citizen, the poor, the excluded. Its legitimacy now derived from representation rather than historical initiative. In place of insurrectionary antagonism appeared mediation; in place of revolutionary will, management; and in place of universal transformation, the aggregation of particular interests. One could say that the revolutionary party was transformed from a combat organization into a representative mechanism.

Workerism and the ontological conception of political subjectivity have teleological and fatalistic implications. On the one hand, by positing the revolutionary perspective as a property deriving from the structural position of the working class, history appears as the guarantor of emancipatory possibility through the historically determined revolutionary subject, namely the working class. On the other hand, the ontological grounding of the development of political consciousness, that is, the idea that class position entails class consciousness, which will develop sooner or later and is merely mediated and obstructed by a “false consciousness”, leads, in our view, to fatalistic expectations concerning the overthrow of capitalism. The scope of Deleuze’s statement that “no one ever died from contradictions” targets, for us, both theories that envision capitalism automatically collapsing due to its crises and those that posit a historically guaranteed revolutionary subject. In other words, we reject the view that class consciousness is immanent to the worker (or that every worker harbors a “hidden communist” within them), and that bourgeois propaganda functions merely as a “false consciousness” obstructing the worker’s “natural” tendency toward communism. Learning from the conclusions of the Marxist analysis of commodity fetishism and the reification of social relations, we do not believe there exists any privileged “working-class point of view” capable of providing the appropriate consciousness for revolutionary politics. The working class, therefore, possesses no privileged access to the “truth” of capitalism; on the contrary, it is just as trapped within fetishistic forms as the bourgeoisie. The inverted immediacy of economic categories is itself what renders the appeal to a structural point of view insufficient to transcend the level of the purely trade-unionist/syndicalist.

For the above reason, we believe that workerism reduces the role of political organizations to that of a mere “detonator” of movements, to the role of propagandist. The voluntary disengagement of political organizations from assuming responsibilities for revolutionary change, together with the messianic “passing of the ball” to the masses, are, in our opinion, important factors behind the inertia of the movement.

It is a fact that communist organizations do not conceive themselves as agents of political, let alone revolutionary, change. In our view, this is due to the Cartesian dualism of object-subject reproduced by workerist logic and the corresponding self-conception of political organizations. With the obvious example of the opposition between “objective conditions” and the “subjective factor,” which dominates the political subconscious of many communist organizations, the abandonment of the radical significance of Marx’s First Thesis on Feuerbach becomes evident:

“The chief defect of all hitherto existing materialism — that of Feuerbach included — is that the thing, reality, sensuousness, is conceived only in the form of the object or of contemplation, but not as sensuous human activity, practice, not subjectively. […] Hence it does not grasp the significance of ‘revolutionary,’ of ‘practical-critical,’ activity.”

Or the Fifth Thesis on Feuerbach:

“Feuerbach, not satisfied with abstract thinking, appeals to sensuous contemplation; but he does not conceive sensuousness as practical human-sensuous activity.”

For Marx, therefore, the aforementioned dualism is rejected, since there is no “pure subject” confronting an “object out there”; rather, the subject must be understood objectively and the object subjectively. Subject and object are not two separate entities that come into contact; they are two moments of a unified process: human practice. This position has immediate political consequences: if there is no predetermined revolutionary subject, then its constitution becomes the central stake of political struggle. And this constitution can only be the work of a political organization that consciously assumes the task of developing revolutionary consciousness and organizing the struggle for communism (and, as such, is not afraid to “dirty its own hands” in this effort).