Polytropy

Index to this series

CHAPTER V Action [2]

28 power and the space of appearance

¶ 28.1

The space of appearance comes into being wherever men are together in the manner of speech and action, and therefore pre­dates and precedes all formal constitution of the public realm and the various forms of government, that is, the various forms in which the public realm can be organized. Its peculiarity is that, unlike the spaces which are the work of our hands, it does not sur­vive the actuality of the movement which brought it into being, but disappears not only

• with the dispersal of men—as in the case of great catastrophes when the body politic of a people is de­stroyed—but
• with the disappearance or arrest of the activities themselves.

Wherever people gather together, it is potentially there, but only potentially, not necessarily and not forever. That civilizations can rise and fall, that mighty empires and great cul­tures can decline and pass away without external catastrophes—and more often than not such external “causes” are preceded by a [199] less visible internal decay that invites disaster—is due to this peculiarity of the public realm, which, because it ultimately re­sides on action and speech, never altogether loses its potential character. What first undermines and then kills political com­munities is loss of power and final impotence; and power cannot be stored up and kept in reserve for emergencies, like the instru­ments of violence, but exists only in its actualization. Where power is not actualized, it passes away, and history is full of ex­amples that the greatest material riches cannot compensate for this loss. Power is actualized only

• where word and deed have not parted company,
• where words are not empty and deeds not brutal,
• where
  • words are not used to veil intentions but to disclose reali­ties, and
  • deeds are not used to violate and destroy but to establish relations and create new realities.

¶ 28.2

Power is what keeps the public realm, the potential space of appearance between acting and speaking men, in existence. The word itself, its Greek equivalent dynamis, like the Latin potentia with its various modern dervatives or the German Macht (which derives from mögen and möglich, not from machen), indicates its “potential” character. Power is always, as we would say, a power potential and not an unchangeable, measurable, and reliable entity like force or strength. While strength is the natural quality of an individual seen in isolation, power springs up between men when they act together and vanishes the moment they disperse. Because of this peculiarity, which power shares with all potentialities that can only be actualized but never fully materialized, power is to an astonishing degree independent of material factors, either of numbers or means. A comparatively small but well-organized group of men can rule almost indefinitely over large and populous empires, and it is not infrequent in history that small and poor countries get the better of great and rich nations. (The story of David and Goliath is only metaphorically true; the power of a few can be greater than the power of many, but in a contest be­tween two men not power but strength decides, and cleverness, that is, brain power, contributes materially to the outcome on the same level as muscular force.) Popular revolt against materially strong rulers, on the other hand, may engender an almost irresist­ible power even if it foregoes the use of violence in the face of [200] materially vastly superior forces. To call this “passive resistance” is certainly an ironic idea; it is one of the most active and efficient ways of action ever devised, because it cannot be countered by fighting, where there may be defeat or victory, but only by mass slaughter in which even the victor is defeated, cheated of his prize, since nobody can rule over dead men.

¶ 28.3

The only indispensable material factor in the generation of power is the living together of people. Only where men live so close together that the potentialities of action are always present can power remain with them, and the foundation of cities, which as city-states have remained paradigmatic for all Western political organization, is therefore indeed the most important material pre­requisite for power.

• What keeps people together after the fleeting moment of action has passed (what we today call “organization”) and
• what, at the same time, they keep alive through remaining to­gether

is power. And whoever, for whatever reasons, isolates himself and does not partake in such being together, forfeits power and becomes impotent, no matter how great his strength and how valid his reasons.

¶ 28.4

If power were more than this potentiality in being together, if it could be possessed like strength or applied like force instead of being dependent upon the unreliable and only temporary agree­ment of many wills and intentions, omnipotence would be a con­crete human possibility. For power, like action, is boundless; it has no physical limitation in human nature, in the bodily existence of man, like strength. Its only limitation is the existence of other people, but this limitation is not accidental, because human power corresponds to the condition of plurality to begin with. For the same reason, power can be divided without decreasing it, and the interplay of powers with their checks and balances is even liable to generate more power, so long, at least, as the interplay is alive and has not resulted in a stalemate. Strength, on the contrary, is indivisible, and while it, too, is checked and balanced by the pres­ence of others, the interplay of plurality in this case spells a defi­nite limitation on the strength of the individual, which is kept in bounds and may be overpowered by the power potential of the many. An identification of the strength necessary for the produc­tion of things with the power necessary for action is conceivable [201] only as the divine attribute of one god. Omnipotence therefore is never an attribute of gods in polytheism, no matter how superior the strength of the gods may be to the forces of men. Conversely, aspiration toward omnipotence always implies—apart from its utopian hubris—the destruction of plurality.

¶ 28.5

Under the conditions of human life, the only alternative to power is not strength—which is helpless against power—but force, which indeed one man alone can exert against his fellow men and of which one or a few can possess a monopoly by acquir­ing the means of violence. But while violence can destroy power, it can never become a substitute for it. From this results the by no means infrequent political combination of force and powerless­ness, an attay of impotent forces that spend themselves, often spectacularly and vehemently but in utter futility, leaving behind neither monuments nor stories, hardly enough memory to enter into history at all. In historical experience and traditional theory, this combination, even if it is not recognized as such, is known as tyranny, and the time-honored fear of this form of government is not exclusively inspired by its cruelty, which—as the long series of benevolent tyrants and enlightened despots attests—is not among its inevitable features, but by the impotence and futility to which it condemns the rulers as well as the ruled.

¶ 28.6

More important is a discovery made, as far as I know, only by Montesquieu, the last political thinker to concern himself serious­ly with the problem of forms of government. Montesquieu realized that the outstanding characteristic of tyranny was that it rested on isolation—on the isolation of the tyrant from his subjects and the isolation of the subjects from each other through mutual fear and suspicion—and hence that tyranny was not one form of gov­ernment among others but contradicted the essential human con­dition of plurality, the acting and speaking together, which is the condition of all forms of political organization. Tyranny prevents the development of power, not only in a particular segment of the public realm but in its entirety; it generates, in other words, im­potence as naturally as other bodies politic generate power. This, in Montesquieu’s interpretation, makes it necessary to assign it a special position in the theory of political bodies: it alone is unable to develop enough power to remain at all in the space of appear- [202] ance, the public realm; on the contrary, it develops the germs of its own destruction the moment it comes into existence.³⁰

¶ 28.7

Violence, curiously enough, can destroy power more easily than it can destroy strength, and while a tyranny is always char­acterized by the impotence of its subjects, who have lost their human capacity to act and speak together, it is not necessarily characterized by weakness and sterility; on the contrary, the crafts and arts may flourish under these conditions if the ruler is “benevolent” enough to leave his subjects alone in their isolation. Strength, on the other hand, nature’s gift to the individual which cannot be shared with others, can cope with violence more success­fully than with power—either heroically, by consenting to fight and die, or stoically, by accepting suffering and challenging all affliction through self-sufficiency and withdrawal from the world; in either case, the integrity of the individual and his strength re­main intact. Strength can actually be ruined only by power and is therefore always in danger from the combined force of the many. Power corrupts indeed when the weak band together in order to ruin the strong, but not before. The will to power, as the modern age from Hobbes to Nietzsche understood it in glorification or denunciation, far from being a characteristic of the strong, is, like envy and greed, among the vices of the weak, and possibly even their most dangerous one.

¶ 28.8

• If tyranny can be described as the always abortive attempt to substitute violence for power,
• ochlocracy, or mob rule, which is its exact counterpart, can be characterized by the much more promising attempt to substitute power for strength.

Power indeed can ruin all strength and we know that where the main public realm is society, there is always the danger that, through a per­verted form of “acting together”—by pull and pressure and the tricks of cliques—those are brought to the fore who know nothing and can do nothing. The vehement yearning for violence, so char- [203] acteristic of some of the best modern creative artists, thinkers, scholars, and craftsmen, is a natural reaction of those whom society has tried to cheat of their strength.³¹

¶ 28.9

Power preserves the public realm and the space of appearance, and as such it is also the lifeblood of the human artifice, which, unless it is the scene of action and speech, of the web of human affairs and relationships and the stories engendered by them, lacks its ultimate raison d’être.

• Without being talked about by men and without housing them, the world would not be a human artifice but a heap of unrelated things to which each isolated individual was at liberty to add one more object;
• without the human artifice to house them, human affairs would be as floating, as futile and vain, as the wanderings of nomad tribes.

The melancholy wisdom of Ecclesiastes—“Vanity of vanities; all is vanity. … There is no new thing under the sun, … there is no remembrance of former things; neither shall there be any remembrance of things that are to come with those that shall come after”—does not necessarily arise from specifically religious experience; but it is certainly un­avoidable wherever and whenever trust in the world as a place fit for human appearance, for action and speech, is gone.

• Without action to bring into the play of the world the new beginning of which each man is capable by virtue of being born, “there is no new thing under the sun”;
• without speech to materialize and memorialize, however tentatively, the “new things” that appear and shine forth, “there is no remembrance”;
• without the enduring permanence of a human artifact, there cannot “be any remem­brance of things that are to come with those that shall come after.” And
• without power, the space of appearance brought forth through action and speech in public will fade away as rapidly as the living deed and the living word.

¶ 28.10

Perhaps

• nothing in our history has been so short-lived as trust in power,
• nothing more lasting than the Platonic and Christian distrust of the splendor attending its space of appearance,
• nothing [204] —finally in the modern age—more common than the conviction that “power corrupts.”

The words of Pericles, as Thucydides reports them, are perhaps unique in their supreme confidence that men can enact and save their greatness at the same time and, as it were, by one and the same gesture, and that the performance as such will be enough to generate dynamis and not need the trans­forming reification of homo faber to keep it in reality.³² Pericles’ speech, though it certainly corresponded to and articulated the innermost convictions of the people of Athens, has always been read with the sad wisdom of hindsight by men who knew that his words were spoken at the beginning of the end. Yet short-lived as this faith in dynamis (and consequently in politics) may have been—and it had already come to an end when the first political phi­losophies were formulated—its bare existence has sufficed

• to ele­vate action to the highest rank in the hierarchy of the vita activa and
• to single out speech as the decisive distinction between human and animal life,

both of which bestowed upon politics a dignity which even today has not altogether disappeared.

¶ 28.11

What is outstandingly clear in Pericles’ formulations—and, in­cidentally, no less transparent in Homer’s poems—is that the innermost meaning of the acted deed and the spoken word is inde­pendent of victory and defeat and must remain untouched by any eventual outcome, by their consequences for better or worse. Unlike human behavior—which the Greeks, like all civilized people, judged according to “moral standards,” taking into ac­count motives and intentions on the one hand and aims and conse­quences on the other—action can be judged only by the criterion of greatness because it is in its nature to break through the com­monly accepted and reach into the extraordinary, where whatever is true in common and everyday life no longer applies because everything that exists is unique and sui generis.³³ Thucydides, or [205] Pericles, knew full well that he had broken with the normal stand­ards for everyday behavior when he found the glory of Athens in having left behind “everywhere everlasting remembrance [mnē­meia aidia] of their good and their evil deeds.” The art of politics teaches men how to bring forth what is great and radiant—ta megala kai lampra, in the words of Democritus; as long as the polis is there to inspire men to dare the extraordinary, all things are safe; if it perishes, everything is lost.³⁴ Motives and aims, no matter how pure or how grandiose, are never unique; like psycho­logical qualities, they are typical, characteristic of different types of persons. Greatness, therefore, or the specific meaning of each deed, can lie only in the performance itself and neither in its motivation nor its achievement.

¶ 28.12

It is this insistence on the living deed and the spoken word as the greatest achievements of which human beings are capable that was conceptualized in Aristotle’s notion of energeia (“actuality”), with which he designated all activities that do not pursue an end (are ateleis) and leave no work behind (no par’ autas erga), but exhaust their full meaning in the performance itself.³⁵ It is from the experience of this full actuality that the paradoxical “end in itself” derives its original meaning; for in these instances of action and speech³⁶ the end (telos) is not pursued but lies in the activity itself which therefore becomes an entelecheia, and the work is not what follows and extinguishes the process but is imbedded in it; the performance is the work, is energeia.³⁷ Aristotle, in his political philosophy, is still well aware of what is at stake in politics, name­ly, no less than the ergon tou anthropou³⁸ (the “work of man” qua [206] man), and if he defined this “work” as “to live well” (eu zēn), he clearly meant that “work” here is no work product but exists only in sheer actuality. This specifically human achievement lies alto­gether outside the category of means and ends; the “work of man” is no end because the means to achieve it—the virtues, or aretai—are not qualities which may or may not be actualized, but are themselves “actualities.” In other words, the means to achieve the end would already be the end; and this “end,” conversely, cannot be considered a means in some other respect, because there is nothing higher to attain than this actuality itself.

¶ 28.13

It is like a feeble echo of the prephilosophical Greek experience of action and speech as sheer actuality to read time and again in political philosophy since Democritus and Plato that politics is a technē, belongs among the arts, and can be likened to such activities as healing or navigation, where, as in the performance of the dancer or play-actor, the “product” is identical with the perform­ing act itself. But we may gauge what has happened to action and speech, which are only in actuality, and therefore the highest ac­tivities in the political realm, when we hear what modern society, with the peculiar and uncompromising consistency that charac­terized it in its early stages, had to say about them. For this all-important degradation of action and speech is implied when Adam Smith classifies all occupations which rest essentially on perform­ance—such as the military profession, “churchmen, lawyers, physicians and opera-singers”—together with “menial services,” the lowest and most unproductive “labour.”³⁹ It was precisely these occupations—healing, flute-playing, play-acting—which furnished ancient thinking with examples for the highest and greatest activities of man.

29 Homo Faber and the space of appearance

¶ 29.1

The root of the ancient estimation of politics is the conviction that man qua man, each individual in his unique distinctness, appears and confirms himself in speech and action, and that these activi- [207] ties, despite their material futility, possess an enduring quality of their own because they create their own remembrance.⁴⁰ The public realm, the space within the world which men need in order to appear at all, is therefore more specifically “the work of man” than is the work of his hands or the labor of his body.

¶ 29.2

The conviction that the greatest that man can achieve is his own appearance and actualization is by no means a matter of course. Against it stands

• the conviction of homo faber that a man’s products may be more—and not only more lasting—than he is himself, as well as
• the animal laborans’ firm belief that life is the highest of all goods.

Both, therefore, are, strictly speaking, unpolitical, and will incline to denounce action and speech as idleness, idle busybody­ness and idle talk, and generally will judge public activities in terms of their usefulness to supposedly higher ends—

• to make the world more useful and more beautiful in the case of homo faber,
• to make life easier and longer in the case of the animal laborans.

This, however, is not to say that they are free to dispense with a public realm altogether, for without a space of appearance and without trusting in action and speech as a mode of being together, neither the reality of one’s self, of one’s own identity, nor the reality of the surrounding world can be established beyond doubt. The human sense of reality demands that men actualize the sheer pas­sive givenness of their being, not in order to change it but in order to make articulate and call into full existence what otherwise they would have to suffer passively anyhow.⁴¹ This actualization re­sides and comes to pass in those activities that exist only in sheer actuality.

¶ 29.3

The only character of the world by which to gauge its reality is its being common to us all, and common sense occupies such a high rank in the hierarchy of political qualities because it is the one sense that fits into reality as a whole our five strictly individual senses and the strictly particular data they perceive. It is by virtue [208] of common sense that the other sense perceptions are known to disclose reality and are not merely felt as irritations of our nerves or resistance sensations of our bodies. A noticeable decrease in common sense in any given community and a noticeable increase in superstition and gullibility are therefore almost infallible signs of alienation from the world.

¶ 29.4

This alienation—the atrophy of the space of appearance and the withering of common sense—is, of course, carried to a much greater extreme in the case of a laboring society than in the case of a society of producers. In his isolation, not only undisturbed by others but also not seen and heard and confirmed by them, homo faber is together not only with the product he makes but also with the world of things to which he will add his own products; in this, albeit indirect, way, he is still together with others who made the world and who also are fabricators of things. We have already mentioned the exchange market on which the craftsmen meet their peers and which represents to them a common public realm in so far as each of them has contributed something to it. Yet while the public realm as exchange market corresponds most adequately to the activity of fabrication, exchange itself already belongs in the field of action and is by no means a mere prolongation of production; it is even less a mere function of automatic processes, as the buying of food and other means of consumption is necessarily incidental to laboring. Marx’s contention that economic laws are like natural laws, that they are not made by man to regulate the free acts of exchange but are functions of the productive conditions of society as a whole, is correct only in a laboring society, where all activi­ties are leveled down to the human body’s metabolism with nature and where no exchange exists but only consumption.

¶ 29.5

However, the people who meet on the exchange market are primarily not persons but producers of products, and what they show there is never themselves, not even their skills and qualities as in the “conspicuous production” of the Middle Ages, but their products. The impulse that drives the fabricator to the public market place is the desire for products, not for people, and the power that holds this market together and in existence is not the potentiality which springs up between people when they come together in action and speech, but a combined “power of ex- [209] change” (Adam Smith) which each of the participants acquired in isolation. It is this lack of relatedness to others and this primary concern with exchangeable commodities which Marx denounced as the dehumanization and self-alienation of commercial society, which indeed excludes men qua men and demands, in striking reversal of the ancient relationship between private and public, that men show themselves only in the privacy of their families or the intimacy of their friends.

¶ 29.6

The frustration of the human person inherent in a community of producers and even more in commercial society is perhaps best illustrated by the phenomenon of genius, in which, from the Ren­aissance to the end of the nineteenth century, the modern age saw its highest ideal. (Creative genius as the quintessential expression of human greatness was quite unknown to antiquity or the Middle Ages.) It is only with the beginning of our century that great artists in surprising unanimity have protested against being called “geniuses” and have insisted on craftmanship, competence, and the close relationships between art and handicraft. This protest, to be sure, is partly no more than a reaction against the vulgariza­tion and commercialization of the notion of genius; but it is also due to the more recent rise of a laboring society, for which pro­ductivity or creativity is no ideal and which lacks all experiences from which the very notion of greatness can spring. What is im­portant in our context is that the work of genius, as distinguished from the product of the craftsman, appears to have absorbed those elements of distinctness and uniqueness which find their immedi­ate expression only in action and speech. The modern age’s obses­sion with the unique signature of each artist, its unprecedented sensitivity to style, shows a preoccupation with those features by which the artist transcends his skill and workmanship in a way similar to the way each person’s uniqueness transcends the sum total of his qualities. Because of this transcendence, which indeed distinguishes the great work of art from all other products of hu­man hands, the phenomenon of the creative genius seemed like the highest legitimation for the conviction of homo faber that a man’s products may be more and essentially greater than himself.

¶ 29.7

However, the great reverence the modern age so willingly paid to genius, so frequently bordering on idolatry, could hardly change [210] the elementary fact that the essence of who somebody is cannot be reified by himself. When it appears “objectively”—in the style of an art work or in ordinary handwriting—it manifests the iden­tity of a person and therefore serves to identify authorship, but it remains mute itself and escapes us if we try to interpret it as the mirror of a living person. In other words, the idolization of genius harbors the same degradation of the human person as the other tenets prevalent in commercial society.

¶ 29.8

It is an indispensable element of human pride to believe that who somebody is transcends in greatness and importance any­thing he can do and produce. “Let physicians and confectioners and the servants of the great houses be judged by what they have done, and even by what they have meant to do; the great people themselves are judged by what they are.”⁴² Only the vulgar will condescend to derive their pride from what they have done; they will, by this condescension, become the “slaves and prisoners” of their own faculties and will find out, should anything more be left in them than sheer stupid vanity, that to be one’s own slave and prisoner is no less bitter and perhaps even more shameful than to be the servant of somebody else. It is not the glory but the pre­dicament of the creative genius that in his case the superiority of man to his work seems indeed inverted, so that he, the living creator, finds himself in competition with his creations which he outlives, although they may survive him eventually. The saving grace of all really great gifts is that the persons who bear their burden remain superior to what they have done, at least as long as the source of creativity is alive; for this source springs indeed from who they are and remains outside the actual work process as well as independent of what they may achieve. That the pre­dicament of genius is nevertheless a real one becomes quite ap­parent in the case of the literati, where the inverted order between man and his product is in fact consummated; what is so outrageous in their case, and incidentally incites popular hatred even more than spurious intellectual superiority, is that even their worst product is likely to be better than they are themselves. It is the hallmark of the “intellectual” that he remains quite undisturbed [211] by “the terrible humiliation” under which the true artist or writer labors, which is “to feel that he becomes the son of his work,” in which he is condemned to see himself “as in a mirror, limited, such and such.”⁴³

30 the labor movement

¶ 30.1

The activity of work, for which isolation from others is a neces­sary prerequisite, although it may not be able to establish an autonomous public realm in which men qua men can appear, still is connected with this space of appearances in many ways; at the very least, it remains related to the tangible world of things it produced. Workmanship, therefore, may be an unpolitical way of life, but it certainly is not an antipolitical one. Yet this precisely is the case of laboring, an activity in which man is neither to­gether with the world nor with other people, but alone with his body, facing the naked necessity to keep himself alive.⁴⁴ To be sure, he too lives in the presence of and together with others, but this togetherness has none of the distinctive marks of true plurali­ty. It does not consist in the purposeful combination of different skills and callings as in the case of workmanship (let alone in the relationships between unique persons), but exists in the multipli­cation of specimens which are fundamentally all alike because they are what they are as mere living organisms. [212]

¶ 30.2

It is indeed in the nature of laboring to bring men together in the form of a labor gang where any number of individuals “labor together as though they were one,”⁴⁵ and in this sense togetherness may permeate laboring even more intimately than any other activity.⁴⁶ But this “collective nature of labor,”⁴⁷ far from estab­lishing a recognizable, identifiable reality for each member of the labor gang, requires on the contrary the actual loss of all aware­ness of individuality and identity; and it is for this reason that all those “values” which derive from laboring, beyond its obvious function in the life process, are entirely “social” and essentially not different from the additional pleasure derived from eating and drinking in company. The sociability arising out of those activi­ties which spring from the human body’s metabolism with nature rest [sic] not on equality but on sameness, and from this viewpoint it is perfectly true that “by nature a philosopher is not in genius and disposition half so different from a street porter as a mastiff is from a greyhound.” This remark of Adam Smith, which Marx quoted with great delight,⁴⁸ indeed fits a consumers’ society much [213] better than the gathering of people on the exchange market, which brings to light the skills and qualities of the producers and thus always provides some basis for distinction.

¶ 30.3

The sameness prevailing in a society resting on labor and con­sumption and expressed in its conformity is intimately connected with the somatic experience of laboring together, where the bio­logical rhythm of labor unites the group of laborers to the point that each may feel that he is no longer an individual but actually one with all others. To be sure, this eases labor’s toil and trouble in much the same way as marching together eases the effort of walking for each soldier. It is therefore quite true that for the animal laborans “labor’s sense and value depend entirely upon the social conditions,” that is, upon the extent to which the labor and consumption process is permitted to function smoothly and easily, independent of “professional attitudes properly speaking”;⁴⁹ the trouble is only that the best “social conditions” are those under which it is possible to lose one’s identity. This unitedness of many into one is basically antipolitical; it is the very opposite of the togetherness prevailing in political or commercial communities, which—to take the Aristotelian example—consist not of an asso­ciation (koinōnia) between two physicians, but between a physi- [214] cian and a farmer, “and in general between people who are differ­ent and unequal.”⁵⁰

¶ 30.4

The equality attending the public realm is necessarily an equali­ty of unequals who stand in need of being “equalized” in certain respects and for specific purposes. As such, the equalizing factor arises not from human “nature” but from outside, just as money—to continue the Aristotelian example—is needed as an outside fac­tor to equate the unequal activities of physician and farmer. Politi­cal equality, therefore, is the very opposite

• of our equality before death, which as the common fate of all men arises out of the human condition, or
• of equality before God, at least in its Christian interpretation, where we are confronted with an equality of sin­fulness inherent in human nature.

In these instances, no equalizer is needed because sameness prevails anyhow; by the same token, however, the actual experience of this sameness, the experience of life and death, occurs not only in isolation but in utter loneliness, where no true communication, let alone association and commu­nity, is possible. From the viewpoint of the world and the public realm, life and death and everything attesting to sameness are non-worldly, antipolitical, truly transcendent experiences.

¶ 30.5

The incapacity of the animal laborans for distinction and hence for action and speech seems to be confirmed by the striking ab­sence of serious slave rebellions in ancient and modern times.⁵¹ No less striking, however, is the sudden and frequently extraor­dinarily productive role which the labor movements have played in modern politics. From the revolutions of 1848 to the Hungarian revolution of 1956, the European working class, by virtue of being the only organized and hence the leading section of the people, has written one of the most glorious and probably the most prom­ising chapter of recent history. However, although the line be­tween political and economic demands, between political organi­zations and trade unions, was blurred enough, the two should not [215] be confused. The trade unions, defending and fighting for the interests of the working class, are responsible for its eventual incorporation into modern society, especially for an extraordinary increase in economic security, social prestige, and political power. The trade unions were never revolutionary in the sense that they desired a transformation of society together with a transformation of the political institutions in which this society was represented, and the political parties of the working class have been interest parties most of the time, in no way different from the parties which represented other social classes. A distinction appeared only in those rare and yet decisive moments when during the process of a revolution it suddenly turned out that these people, if not led by official party programs and ideologies, had their own ideas about the possibilities of democratic government under modern condi­tions. In other words, the dividing line between the two is not a matter of extreme social and economic demands but solely of the proposition of a new form of government.

¶ 30.6

What is so easily overlooked by the modern historian who faces the rise of totalitarian systems, especially when he deals with developments in the Soviet Union, is that

• just as the modern masses and their leaders succeeded, at least temporarily, in bring­ing forth in totalitarianism an authentic, albeit all-destructive, new form of government,
• thus the people’s revolutions, for more than a hundred years now, have come forth, albeit never successfully, with another new form of government: the system of people’s councils to take the place of the Continental party system, which, one is tempted to say, was discredited even before it came into existence.⁵²

The historical destinies of the two trends in the work- [216] ing class, the trade-union movement and the people’s political as­pirations, could not be more at variance:

• the trade unions, that is, the working class in so far as it is but one of the classes of modern society, have gone from victory to victory, while at the same time
• the political labor movement has been defeated each time it dared to put forth its own demands, as distinguished from party pro­grams and economic reforms.

If the tragedy of the Hungarian revolution achieved nothing more than that it showed the world that, all defeats and all appearances notwithstanding, this political élan has not yet died, its sacrifices were not in vain.

¶ 30.7

This apparently flagrant discrepancy between

• historical fact—the political productivity of the working class—and
• the phenomenal data obtained from an analysis of the laboring activity

is likely to disappear upon closer inspection of the labor movement’s develop­ment and substance. The chief difference between slave labor and modern, free labor is

• not that the laborer possesses personal free­dom—freedom of movement, economic activity, and personal in­violability—
• but that he is admitted to the political realm and fully emancipated as a citizen.

The turning point in the history of labor came with the abolition of property qualifications for the right to vote. Up to this time the status of free labor had been very similar to the status of the constantly increasing emancipated slave popula­tion in antiquity; these men were free, being assimilated to the status of resident aliens, but not citizens.

• In contrast to ancient slave emancipations, where as a rule the slave ceased to be a laborer when he ceased to be a slave, and where, therefore, slavery re­mained the social condition of laboring no matter how many slaves were emancipated,
• the modern emancipation of labor was intended to elevate the laboring activity itself, and this was achieved long before the laborer as a person was granted personal and civil rights.

¶ 30.8

However, one of the important side effects of the actual emanci- [217] pation of laborers was that a whole new segment of the population was more or less suddenly admitted to the public realm, that is, appeared in public,⁵³ and this

• without at the same time being ad­mitted to society,
• without playing any leading role in the all-impor­tant economic activities of this society, and
• without, therefore, being absorbed by the social realm and, as it were, spirited away from the public.

The decisive role of mere appearance, of distin­guishing oneself and being conspicuous in the realm of human affairs is perhaps nowhere better illustrated than in the fact that laborers, when they entered the scene of history, felt it necessary to adopt a costume of their own, the sans-culotte, from which, dur­ing the French Revolution, they even derived their name.⁵⁴ By this costume they won a distinction of their own, and the distinction was directed against all others.

¶ 30.9

The very pathos of the labor movement in its early stages—and it is still in its early stages in all countries where capitalism has not reached its full development, in Eastern Europe, for example, but also in Italy or Spain and even in France—stemmed from its fight against society as a whole. The enormous power potential these movements acquired in a relatively short time and often under very [218] adverse circumstances sprang from the fact that despite all the talk and theory they were the only group on the political scene which not only defended its economic interests but fought a full-fledged political battle. In other words, when the labor movement ap­peared on the public scene, it was the only organization in which men acted and spoke qua men—and not qua members of society.

¶ 30.10

For this political and revolutionary role of the labor movement, which in all probability is nearing its end, it is decisive

• that the economic activity of its members was incidental and
• that its force of attraction was never restricted to the ranks of the working class.

If for a time it almost looked as if the movement would succeed in founding, at least within its own ranks, a new public space with new political standards, the spring of these attempts was not la­bor—neither the laboring activity itself nor the always utopian re­bellion against life’s necessity—but those injustices and hypocrisies which have disappeared with the transformation of a class society into a mass society and with the substitution of a guaranteed an­nual wage for daily or weekly pay.

¶ 30.11

The workers today are no longer outside of society; they are its members, and they are jobholders like everybody else. The politi­cal significance of the labor movement is now the same as that of any other pressure group; the time is past when, as for nearly a hundred years, it could represent the people as a whole—if we understand by le peuple the actual political body, distinguished as such from the population as well as from society.⁵⁵ (In the Hun­garian revolution the workers were in no way distinguished from the rest of the people; what from 1848 to 1918 had been almost a monopoly of the working class—the notion of a parliamentary sys­tem based on councils instead of parties—had now become the unan­imous demand of the whole people.) The labor movement, equivocal in its content and aims from the beginning, lost this representation and hence its political role at once

• wherever the working class be­came an integral part of society, a social and economic power of its own as in the most developed economies of the Western world, or [219]
• where it “succeeded” in transforming the whole population into a labor society as in Russia and as may happen elsewhere even under non-totalitarian conditions.

Under circumstances where even the exchange market is being abolished, the withering of the public realm, so conspicuous throughout the modern age, may well find its consummation.