Merchants, Intellectuals and Politicians by Édouard Berth (1907)

* Source: Retrieved on 21/6/2022 from gallica.bnf.fr and translated by d'Arma 

* First published: Berth, É., 1907. Marchands, Intellectuels et Politiciens. Le Mouvement socialiste, 188, pp.1-12.

The abstract negations of the State by democracy, individualist anarchism and orthodox Marxism, far from diminishing its power, have only strengthened it: such was the conclusion of our article: Individualist Anarchism. orthodox marxism and revolutionary syndicalism (1). And we added that with revolutionary syndicalism, a movement was inaugurated capable of finally reabsorbing in the social body "this parasitic State, which feeds on the substance of society and paralyzes its free movement (2)").

But it is important to analyze very closely the notion of this modern state, the organs of which revolutionary syndicalism must dismantle. What does the creation of modern states signify historically? We have said that statism and anarchism are complementary to each other, that the state necessarily forms the only real social bond, where the isolation of producers hinders the development of popular collective force. ; but this is only an entirely negative determination of the State, necessary, 

but not sufficient, to exhaust the notion of it. We must find a more positive determination for it and find out which classes took the creative initiative. Now, there is no doubt about that: the class which, historically, created the modern State, is the bourgeoisie, the bourgeoisie with its two fundamental groups, the merchants and the intellectuals. 

And, immediately, we thus see emerging the three characteristics of the State which, taken together, is: 1º a mystical being, a myth of the popular consciousness not yet "come to an understanding" as Marx says; 2 a board of directors of capitalist interests, of bourgeois materialism found its adequate expression; and 3' an Idea, a concept, of which the intellectuals of the bourgeoisie have made the theory: popular mysticism, bourgeois materialism, political idealism the State is the product of these three factors. We will examine it in turn under these three aspects. But we'll start with the last two. as being directly complementary to each other.

                                              I

Here is how Marx, in the “Jewish Question (3)”. characterizes the political revolution: 

> The political revolution is the revolution of bourgeois society. What character had the old society had? it can be defined in one word: feudalism. This old society immediately took on a political character; the elements of civil life, for example property, the family, work, in the forms of lordship, caste, corporation, had become so many elements of political life. These elements thus formed determined the relations of the individual with the political collectivity, they determined his political relations. This feudal organization of national life was far from raising property and labor to the level of social elements; rather, it separated them from the community. political, by constituting them as particular societies in society... it had the consequence of necessarily identifying political unity with the conscience, the will, the activity of a prince, and the public thing became the private thing of a king and his ministers.

> The political revolution, which overthrew royalty, which raised the affairs of State to the height of national affairs, and made the political State the thing of all, thereby constituted the true State, it necessarily destroyed all the privileged orders, the corporations and guilds, which were so many expressions of the people's divorce from itself.

« The political revolution thus effaced the political character of Civil society; she broke it down into its component parts:

on one hand, the individuals, on the other, the material and intellectual elements of which the life and the private situation of these individuals is made. It freed from its chains the political life hitherto dispersed, lost, disoriented in the multiple impasses of feudal society; it pulled it out of this dispersion, it freed it from the confusion of civil society and. making it coincide with the general life of the nation, constituted it in an ideal independence vis-a-vis the particular elements of bourgeois life. The practical activity and the private situation of each citizen henceforth had only a purely individual value; it was no longer on their basis that the general relations of the individual with political society were established; public affairs, as such, became the universal attribute of every individual, the public service, its universal function. But political idealism brought to its perfection was, at the same time, bourgeois materialism at its peak. The political yoke was broken. and at the same time all the bonds which had hitherto compressed the selfish spirit of civil society; political emancipation was, at the same time, the emancipation of bourgeois society from the shackles of politics; civil society lost even its semblance of universality. Feudal society was reduced to its ultimate element, which is man. but selfish man. This man, a member of bourgeois society, is the basis, the condition of the political state; this selfish man is recognized in the Rights of Man... The man, a member of bourgeois society, is regarded as man properly speaking, the real man: the politician is only the artificial man, the abstract man, an allegorical character; the real man is the selfish individual; the citizen has only an abstract existence... Political emancipation is the reduction of man, on the one hand to the member of civil society, to the selfish and independent individual, and, the other, to the political citizen, a moral and allegorical figure. It follows that true human emancipation will only take place when individual and real man, absorbing the abstract citizen into himself, has become a social being in his daily life, in his work, in his individual affairs, when the man, finally, recognizing and organizing his own forces as social forces, will no longer separate social force from him in the form of political force. »

Political idealism, brought to its perfection, was, at the same time, bourgeois materialism at its apogee: there you have it, clearly denounced by Marx, the two essential characteristics of the modern democratic State, there you have it the two aspects , 

both complementary and contradictory, under which the creation of the state appears: the political idealism of the Intellectuals and the practical materialism of the merchants of the bourgeois class. Intellectuals and merchants, these are indeed the two fundamental groups between which the bourgeoisie is divided and which were the direct authors of the creation of the state, the first to raise the state to the height of an Idea. of a concept, of a metaphysical entity, the latter by making the instrument of their material interests, and, as we say,

 "the council of administration" of their affairs. And that there breaks out between these two groups a perpetual divorce, that they constantly enter into opposition against each other, this in no way contradicts their essential identity. Political democracy has always hated capitalism, intellectuals have always despised merchants, and what we call today social democracy, or the extension of political democracy to the economy, is precisely that an extreme and acute form of this struggle between intellectuals and merchants.

 But it is quite obvious that it is as impossible for political democracy to truly "overcome" capitalism as it is for a shadow to "overcome" the body that projects it; the intellectuals despise the merchants in vain: they If, in fact, we compare these three things, these three manifestations of the intellectual, political and economic activity of man, we discover remarkable analogies between them, analogies which concern just as much their intimate being as their effects and, to put it straight away, the kind of liberation they procure. What is the concept, in the order of intellectual activity? 

The concept is an extract of sensations, a reduction of the sensible multiplicity to the unity of the understanding, and, if we consider its effect, a means for the mind to free itself from the chaos of sensations, under which it would remain buried if he did not find this bias to free himself from it. The concept is therefore a kind of logical framework where sensitive diversity comes order, simplify, abstract; and, as Kant has shown, experience or science is only possible if things agree to be classified within these frameworks constituted by concepts. 

But if the concept is thus a liberation for the mind, we must hasten to add that this is a liberation which affirms, a liberation which risks creating a new servitude, if the mind does not immediately take him to react against the very organ of his emancipation. This is what M. Bergson strives to demonstrate in his courses at the College de France; he applies himself to denouncing the immense danger that conceptualism conceals, if the mind, not trying to transcend the concept to recapture reality, becomes numb in intellectualist torpor,

 far from life in perpetual becoming. He is accused of wanting to destroy science; the rationalists see in him only a mystic, who lays a sacrilegious hand on science, a reactionary hand; but it is because they do not understand the very origin of the philosophical attempt of M. Bergson, who, far from rejecting science and denying that the concept is necessary and does not constitute for the mind a liberation vis-à-vis -a-vis sensible particularism,

 only warns against the excesses of rationalism and demands of thought a new effort, which prevents it from becoming petrified in the very immobility of its first victory. In other words, M. Bergson does not want to bring us back to pure empiricism, or to simple sentimental or literary dilettantism, but he wants us to transcend the concept, and that, supported by science,

Such is the nature of the concept, such are its effects: instrument of liberation and cause of servitude altogether, it demands to be transcended if it wishes to preserve a truly fruitful role in intellectual activity. 

But if we now consider the state, can we not make analogous observations about it? What is, in fact, essentially, the modern state, compared to the feudal particularism of the Old Regime? Did it not constitute an immense simplification, an immense 'abstraction', just like the concept, in relation to perceptible particularism?

Was not the essential effect of the French Revolution to clear the social terrain of all the thickets and barriers that encumbered it with them, internal customs, tolls, feudal privileges of all kinds? It was the unity and uniformity of the Civil Code which replaced the motley feudal customs, a work of unification already sketched out by the royal administration and to which the Revolution and the Empire came to put the finishing touches. . Such was, incontestably, the essential work of the French Revolution, which created the modern State or rather completed its creation - a work of liberation for social life, hitherto "lost, disoriented, as Marx says, 

in the multiple impasses of feudal life” and quite analogous to the liberation that the concept procures for the mind which, without it, would get lost, also disoriented, in the multiple impasses of empirical life. But we can pursue the analogy: the concept, we have said following M. Bergson, is a liberation that risks enslaving, unless it is transcended. It is the same with the State, with the State which, once constituted, wants to govern everything, no longer suffers any independent life alongside it, looks with jealous anxiety on any private association, in a word, 

wants absorb everything into it. State centralization becomes enormous, crushing; social abstraction takes on formidable proportions; there is no longer any collective life other than state life, the Monster that is the State devours everything, groups and individuals, and is transformed into an instrument of growing collective servitude: the need arises to transcend it, too, and this is the goal of revolutionary syndicalism. But the goal of syndicalism isn't to bring us back to a kind of corporate particularism of feudal allure, just as M. Bergson is reproached for wanting to destroy science to bring us back to a kind of impressionism? 

Now, syndicalism no more wants to destroy the State in the negative and reactionary sense that one imagines, than M. Bergson wants to destroy Science; but what he wants is, while remaining on the terrain of the modern State, to find social life disfigured and stifled under statist exaggerations, as M. Bergson wants.

Complete analogy, therefore, between the concept and the State, and if, finally, we consider the economic category of exchange, shall we not find the same essential characteristics in it? What, indeed. than the commodity economy, compared to the so-called natural economy? Is it not in the same relationship as the concept vis-à-vis sensible particularism and as the modern state vis-à-vis feudal particularism? With the natural economy, each producer is confined within his family horizon, producing, not for a market, but for his own consumption; it is particularism in the field of production.

 But as soon as exchange develops, as soon as a market, first regional, then national, then international, is constituted, where producers, emerging from their isolation, come to exchange their products, and for which they produce, everything changes: to the particularistic, concrete. as Marx shows at the beginning of his Capital,  an enormous accumulation of commodities, and the merchants, that is to say the innumerable varieties of what have been called intermediaries, dominate the producers: they are the merchants, owners of gold, who promoted capitalism, founded manufactures and gave the impetus to this formidable development of the productive forces which humanity has witnessed since the sixteenth century. Exchange, too, 

therefore begins by constituting a liberation: it pulls the producers out of the particularist torment of the natural economy and gives impetus to the productive forces; but this liberation, too, is an enslaving liberation, and if there is a conceptualist fetishism and a statist fetishism, there is also what Marx called the commodity fetishism. Exchange, as the concept and as the State, must be transcended; production must free itself from the tyranny of exchange, just as spiritual life must free itself from the tyranny of the concept and social life from the tyranny of the state, without this triple liberation signifying in what whether it is a return to sensitive, feudal or economic particularism. there is a conceptualist fetishism and a etaist fetishism, there is also what Marx called the fetishism of commodities. Exchange, as the concept and as the State, must be transcended; production must free itself from the tyranny of exchange, just as spiritual life must free itself from the tyranny of the concept and social life from the tyranny of the state, without this triple liberation signifying in what whether it is a return to sensitive, feudal or economic particularism. 

there is a conceptualist fetishism and a etaist fetishism, there is also what Marx called the fetishism of commodities. Exchange, as the concept and as the State, must be transcended; production must free itself from the tyranny of exchange, just as spiritual life must free itself from the tyranny of the concept and social life from the tyranny of the state, without this triple liberation signifying in what whether it is a return to feudal or economic particularism.

But consider more closely the nature of the exchange. There is a chapter in Capital which has always seemed very bizarre and very difficult to understand: it is the famous chapter on “The Fetishism of Commodities and the Secret thereof”*. Here, in fact, is the strange passage that can be read there: “The religious world is but the reflex of the real world. And for a society based upon the production of commodities, in which the producers in general enter into social relations with one another by treating their products as commodities and values, whereby they reduce their individual private labour to the standard of homogeneous human labour – for such a society, Christianity with its cultus of abstract man, more especially in its bourgeois developments, Protestantism, Deism, &c., is the most fitting form of religion.” What does that mean? We see Marx here making an interesting connection between exchange and Christian ideology: Christianity, he tells us, with its cult of the abstract man, and especially Christianity of the bourgeois type, such as Protestantism, deism, is, for a merchant society, the most suitable religious complement. One must never forget when one reads Marx. that his observations focused above all on English society. Now, England is, incontestably, the trading country par excellence, a sort of great modern Carthage, the classic land of free trade"

 and of Manchester's theories, by virtue of which the world is conceived under the commercial aspect, like a vast market, “in contact with which everything dissolves and where men are no more than carriers of goods (4)”; and, at the same time, it can be said that it is the country which has remained most attached to Christianity, and where Christianity has taken its most particularly bourgeois form, Protestantism: the English bourgeois is equally preoccupied with the interests of his conscience and his fund; the "business man" and the Protestant Tartuffe can live in the same skin. And English Christianity is above all moral, practical, one might almost say pedagogical Christianity; no mystical anxiety; no theological depth; nothing but a Methodism directed entirely towards moral practice. Besides, don't is this not the character of all English intellectual life? Nietzsche has rightly pointed out the “philosophical mediocrity” of the English: 

all English philosophical production is, incontestably, marked by the corner of the flattest and most spicy empiricism. The English moralists, in particular, have never risen above the meanest utilitarian morality except to conceive of a morality of sympathy which is, after all, only a simple derivative of it; because let us listen to these deep reflections of Nietzsche (Aurore $174, p.192): “Moral mode of a commercial society.- Behind this principle of the current moral mode: 

“moral actions are actions of sympathy for others I see the social instinct of fear dominating, which thus takes on an intellectual disguise; this instinct posits as a superior principle, the most important and the most immediate, that life must be rid of the dangerous character it once had, and that everyone must help in this with all their might. This is why only actions that aim at general security and the feeling of security of society can receive the good attribute! Security, “order” as the bourgeois philistine says, is, in fact, the fundamental need of a market society: the morality of the bourgeoisie is only the expression of its police instincts."

Syndicalist violence greatly disturbs the little combinations of our parliamentary bourgeois socialists who dream only of social peace, arbitration and conciliation: and they wonder why the workers prefer direct action” to parliamentary diplomacy. Parliamentary socialism has become eminently a party of order; it even serves as a lightning rod for the bourgeois order, thus betraying its bourgeois essence. But, precisely, is not parliamentarianism a thing of English import? And England, is it not the classic land of parliamentarism, as it is of merchant capitalism?

We can compare a Parliament to a market: the parties are only entrepreneurs who exchange a certain stock of votes for certain advantages; and what comes out of these combinations of merchants is what is called the General Will, the Law, divinity of the modern mercantile world, before which our socialists ask the workers to bow down very low, although it means above all: respect for the established order! But isn't the essential character of parliamentary democracy in this cult of the abstract man? for Marx, characterizes Christianity? Moreover, Marx himself declared very clearly in the Jewish Question that democracy, in his eyes, was of Christian essence: the political citizen is only an abstract, moral, allegorical personage; and the equality before the law is, like equality before God, an abstract equality. 

It may be said that English democracy is in no way remarkable for "this cult of the abstract man" which, on the contrary, so strongly characterizes French democracy; that the Englishman only knows the facts and hardly theorizes, unlike the Frenchman, whose mania for generalizing everything is matched only by his disdain for small facts”. And, doubtless this is true; but one should not believe that there is a real opposition between "English empiricism and "French abstraction. However paradoxical this formula may seem, one can say that there is nothing more 'abstract than 'facts' and that empiricism is itself only 'abstraction in the first degree'. The abstract and universal character of the Declaration of the Rights of the French Revolution is often emphasized; this declaration of rights is no less the general and theoretical, but exact, expression of the lists of claims of the States. 

The difference between the English genius and the French genius is that the former does not feel the need to logi cise and to clarify like the sond: he stops at the first degree of empirical abstraction; the French genius pushes further: it is satisfied only when it has found the logical formula, the general law, the clear and distinct idea dear to Descartes; and where the English genius. superimposes the new on the old, the revolution on the tradition, without ever clearing the social terrain of all the dross of the past, the French genius never is glad that when he has pierced through all the thicket of ancient facts a wide and spacious glade. But there is, in short, only a difference of degree, I repeat, in the abstract: and one can subscribe to this judgment of Nietzsche: 

"What one calls, he says (5), the "modern ideas", or "the ideas of the eighteenth century" or even "the French ideas", everything against which the German spirit rose up with deep disgust, all of this is unquestionably of English origin. . The French were only the imitators and actors of these ideas, as they were their best soldiers and, unfortunately, also the first and most complete victims. We can therefore write,

 extending Marx's formula, that the whole of English ideology is an ideology of exchange. And this appears even more clearly if we consider the United States, this former English colony. Here we find somehow in a pure state what, in England, remains involved in other currents, because if we want to understand England, we must never forget either how much medieval ideas there are still alive: feudal particularism remained in some way underlying what might be called bourgeois and merchant universalism; the English working-class movement is still entirely permeated with purely corporative ideas; and the most popular English socialists, I am thinking of William Morris for example, more or less dream of a return to “Merry England”. In England, therefore, there is a superposition and entanglement of two ideologies. medieval ideology and commodity ideology; but in the United States we find it in its pure state and as it were in full relief.

We are dealing here with a purely commercial society, where the commercial idea dominates everything. Christianity has an even more "practical" allure there, if possible, than in England; it is pure moral rationalism, with no mystical or theological concerns, and it suffices to evoke Channing to immediately have an exact idea of ​​what religious "creation" can be in the United States. Catholicism itself took on a very particular character there, “Americanism”. In parliamentary life, we find, even more accentuated and freer, I mean less mixed up with foreign elements, the features of English parliamentarism: the same omnipotence, in turn, of two great parties, which we could call political cartels, 

which in turn monopolize the vote market; the same mercantile allure of political life, which there is reduced to haggling and results in appalling corruption. And that democracy be "Christian" is what appears in America as clearly as possible-if one reads President Roosevelt's speeches instead--and that this Christianity is of the bourgeois type, that is what is no less striking. So we see the close connection that ties these three things together: Christianity, parliamentary democracy and exchange. There are, we said, between the concept, the State and the exchange remarkable analogies: but what is the concept, or, if one verifies. rationalist metaphysics, if not the secular form of Christianity? 

Isn't it remarkable, for example, that our freethinkers are in complete agreement with our liberal Protestants? And parliamentary democracy. is it not the divine right - or the magic power of the State - passed from the king to the parties, responsible for translating the so-called sovereignty of the people? The law, which emanates from our modern parliaments, is surrounded by

Now, revolutionary syndicalism has gone into revolt against this legalitarianism: it affirms that the emancipation of workers cannot be the achievement of the Law; it proposes direct action in opposition to parliamentarianism. And by that very fact he has all the parties against him, from the social Catholics to the parliamentary socialists. What to say? We will have, in a word, the key to the problem: revolutionary syndicalism is a philosophy of producers, and we have just seen that the bourgeois-Christian, democratic, socialist ideology is a commodity ideology, an ideology of exchange. . We thus end up with a clear opposition between exchange and production and it is this opposition that we need to explore further.

When the producers put the products of their labor in presence and in relation as values, writes Marx (6), it is not that they see in them a simple envelope under which is hidden an identical human labor: on the contrary, by deeming their different products equal in exchange, they establish by the fact that their different labors are equal. They do it without knowing it.

 The value has therefore not written on the forehead what it is. Rather, it makes every product of labor a hieroglyph. It is only with time that man seeks to decipher the meaning of the hieroglyph, to penetrate the secrets of the social work to which he contributes, and the transformation of useful objects into values ​​is a product of society, as well as language.

I call attention to these last words: "just as well as language." Marx brings together here the exchange of language, as being two eminently social creations: and this bringing together will not surprise us. since we ourselves have already brought the exchange closer to the concept: now, between the concept and language, the analogies are obvious; one could almost say that they are two identical things. I am pleased to quote here the following observations, so profound, of M. Bergson:

 “... The intuition of a homogeneous space is already a path to social life." 

Like us, the animal probably does not represent to itself, in addition to its sensations, an external world quite distinct from it, which is the common property of all conscious beings. The tendency by virtue of which we clearly imagine this exteriority of things and this homogeneity of their milieu is the same which leads us to live in common and to speak. But in proportion as the conditions of social life are realized more completely, in proportion as the current which carries our states of consciousness from inside to outside becomes more accentuated: little by little these states are transformed into objects or things; they are detached not only from each other, but also from us.

 We no longer see them except in the homogeneous medium where we have frozen their image and through the word that lends them its banal coloring (7). Isn't that remarkable? The process of socialization of states of consciousness, as M. Bergson describes it to us. not' is it not absolutely the same as the process of socialization of the products of labor in exchange, as Marx draws it? There is a solidification of states of consciousness into objects or things in homogeneous space and language, just as there is a solidification of the products of labor into exchange values ​​in the commodity world: and, 

under words, men end up by no longer recognizing their own states of consciousness, which have become abstract, having lost their individuality and their organic character. as under the values ​​of exchange, "under this envelope of things", to use the very expressions of Marx, the producers no longer recognize the living qualitative diversity of their work. And as we have the fetish-word, we have the fetish-commodity. Merchants and gossips can go together: there is no shortage,

(To be continued.)                                ÉDOUARD BERTH.  

                                 AUTHOR'S NOTES

(1) See Le Mouvement socialiste, May 1905. 

(2) Marx. The Paris Commune, p. 42.

(3) See Études socialistes, fasc. 1, p. 50-51. (Jacques, editor.)

(4) See Sorel, Introduction to Modern Economy, p. 23.

(5) Beyond Good and Evil, p. 279.

(6) Capital, 1, p. 29, col. 2.

(7) Essai sur les données immédiates de la conscience, p. 104.

                             TRANSLATORS NOTES

* The specific chapter Berth is referring to can be found here