As Berdyaev notes, there are two sides to Marx’s thought: On the one hand, it is understood as a scientific theory, with a necessary historical development (historical materialism) and in that sense it is an empirical and normative-free theory. The proletariat will free itself out of pure historical necessity. But Berdyaev reminds us that Marx is also an heir of German idealism; and in that sense, Marxist theory “is also a teaching of deliverance, of the messianic vocation of the proletariat, of the ideal society to come, in which humankind no longer depends on economy, of the power and victory of man over the irrational powers of nature and society” (Berdyaev, 81); this emancipatory gesture is what makes Marxism humanistic. And it is here where Marx’s anthropology lies as well: “the active subject that will free humankind of slavery and that will create a better life is the proletariat” (ibid.). The notion of the active subject is exactly that which Marx inherits from the Idealists. But the reason why it is exactly the proletariat that is given this messianic power is due to a new linkage between productivity and human value.

The novelty in Marx is that with him-

“-man is represented as producing himself through his labor, as defined by the labor-identity. Man’s productive-material-labor was now represented as the single source of economic and of metaphysical human value. Whilst Man-as-Labor was historically equal, a new power/prestige order based on incremental levels of skill — trained skilled ‘labor’ was represented as increments of unskilled labor — displaced the earlier variant of degrees of ownership of capital/Natural Reason. Since Man’s identity as labor was guaranteed by the cognitive charter of the ‘scientific truth’ in Marxism Leninism, the trained intelligentsia, able to decipher this ‘truth’ through their ‘correct consciousness’ were legitimated as the Vanguard-brain to the brawn of the working classes” (Wynter, 37).

In other words, this new anthropology is marked by a profound ambivalence: On the one hand, the capacity for productive labour would, as an essential component of the active subject, be distributed on egalitarian grounds. On the other hand, especially due to the inherently industrial character of the Marxist variant of communism, it also led to a quantitative differentiation of skill, which was also, in a certain way, normative. The skilled worker could operate more complex machinery, and therefore would take a more important role. This differentiation not only becomes central in light of the structure of the communism to come, but also in light of the revolution that realises it. The leading force of the revolution, is, within the Marxist framework, class-consciousness, which is not a given, but has to be induced — and here, the intelligentsia takes its vanguard position, for it is them, with an even higher cognitive skill, that can ‘read the signs’, analyse the economic dynamics, and uncover the sources and mechanisms of the workers’ exploitation.

It is for that reason that self-awareness — once again we’ll recognise Hegel’s and Fichte’s influence — plays a central political role in Marxism. It is theory that induces self-consciousness and ‘awakens’ the masses who are blind to their own exploitation; it is only through becoming self-aware that the masses gain political consciousness. In this leading role of theory, we can see an important aspect of Marxist thought: he does not believe in the people. Only the proletarian can bring the revolution “because the nature of the proletarian work process supposedly refines out of their systems such archaic feelings and beliefs as egotism, nationalism and theism, while rationalizing their thinking processes and habits, making them truly modern human beings” (Armah, 43). It is for that reason that Marx sees the possibility of communism only in a highly industrialised society. At the same time, Marx’s philosophy becomes Eurocentric. But-

“-The supposition that the European industrial workers’ involvement with the machine process would rationalize their thinking processes, turning them into suitable harbringers of socialist rationality, is an error springing from a misreading of the machine process, a misreading of the psychology of European industrial workers and a misreading of the connection between machine and workers” (ibid., 47).

In short, it is only the process of industrialisation, and therefore of a technological and ‘civilising’ process, that will create the people that will be able to bring forth the communist revolution. And as it was Britain that was at the forefront of this development, Marx not only predicted the revolution to first happen there, but also implicitly assumed that whichever nation wanted to follow suit, had to imitate the historical trajectory of this very country.

The flip-side to the appraisal of the proletariat was that “Marx and Engels were convinced that peasants were stupid” (ibid., 43) — “The root of the problem is that peasants as a class, and peasant-based civilizations in their generality, have worldviews distinctly different from those of industrially-based civilizations” (ibid., 44). We can also remember that in the Manifesto, they called the lumpenproletariat “the social scum, that passively rotting mass thrown off by the lowest layers of the old society” (Marx/Engels, 20).

In other words: Productive labour is industrial labour, so the humans that produce value are the industrialised and ‘civilised’ people that have been brought to maturity through their technological work and to self-awareness through the vanguard intelligentsia (so even the ‘civilised’ proletarian first needs to be ‘awoken’ and ‘freed’ by the intellectual avant-garde). The analysis of the relations of production was therefore the most important aspect to help bring forth the revolution. Such an active role of theory, which completely blacks out the deterministic aspects of Marxism, was further reinforced by Lenin, for whom the revolution is brought forth by the vanguard party, which also decides when the people are ‘ripe’ for the revolution.

On a side note: The two critics of Marxism that I have cited here, Sylvia Wynter and Ayi Kwei Armah, have formulated their critiques only two years apart, in 1982 and 1984 respectively. Yet, they’re coming from different discourses, namely feminism and postcolonialism. That the spectre of Marx still had to be exorcised from their discourses, should once again remind us that the history of thought is neither a linear nor a dialectic affair.