Augustine, we saw, feared the “just now,” the modo (da me castitatem et continentiam, sed noli modo, #16); Marx, as a “modern” philosopher, turns to it. The single property of the modo which provokes these opposite reactions is its position between the past and the future. For those who think the future will be like the past, the modo poses no special problem; but Augustine and Marx are too honest for such lazy platitudes. Augustine likes his playboy past, and fears a virtuous future; Marx deplores the past, which is nothing but a long history of class struggle, and sees the present moment, the modo, as the possibility of a different future.
At the moment in 1848 when Marx (along with Engels, to be sure) writes The Communist Manifesto, capitalism has cut through the kaleidoscopic disguises of feudal class oppression: instead of a motley of multiple authorities, religious and secular, and varying obligations to each, we now (modo) have just two groups in naked confrontation: factory workers and factory owners, proletarians and capitalists—or, in ancient words which still apply, matter and form.
Just those two, except for two groups of mind-workers. Non-owners who work with their minds—intellectuals—fall outside, yet victim to, the governing binary of owners and workers. Outside because they are neither proletarians (whose labor is primarily manual) nor owners; victims of it because they must align themselves with one of its two main groups. Either they become apologists for capitalism (in the tradition of the political economists of Marx’s day), or they set their allegiance to the workers and become—Communists.
So where does the Communist stand in Marx’s modo? At the center—for it is the Communist who will push the abject past into a better future. But a center is many things, and to get a grip on them we must turn to Hegel’s treatment of das Zentrum in his Logic. His dialectic is too complex to be followed out in detail here, but centers are basically classified by the kinds of agency they exhibit.
Any place where things come together can be called a “center;” on the simplest level, a center is merely a locus, such as a crossroads, and exercises no agency. Even this kind of passive center is fraught, however; for its lack of agency means an absence of exclusion, so one never knows what is going to show up. In certain versions of African-American lore, you may come across the devil himself at a crossroads.
But centers can also exercise various types of agency. The sun, through its gravitational pull, keeps the planets moving around it and serves as the center of the resulting celestial system, making it a “solar” system. Here the center exercises what we may call a “balancing” function among diverse forces (the various inertias of the planets), and so holds together that of which it is the center.
Finally, the center may also gain the power to exclude certain forces, rather than balancing all of them, as if the sun could somehow throw Neptune out of the solar system. At that point, it draws a boundary: its balancing of different forces becomes ousiodic disposition. The plenary center is an ousiodic form, which draws boundaries, controls whatever is within them, and manages interactions with the world outside.
Hegel presents these three kinds of centrality as stages of a dialectical process: to be a “center” is to be engaged in a development from mere locus to ousiodic form. A center which is going to maintain itself as a center must deal with forces converging on it which are too strong for it, and it must do this either by balancing such a force against the available countervailing forces, as the sun balances gravitational attraction against planetary inertia, or—when no countervailing force is present—by excluding a disruptive force altogether, as do ousiodic forms.
It is clear from the Manifesto that Marx took Communists to be central in the first, least active way. The Communist is the one who, not being a worker himself, is able to acquaint himself with the general characteristics of the class struggle at a particular moment in time (modo), which means knowing about the many isolated struggles that are going on just now in various factories across Europe and the world, informing each about the others. The Communist for Marx is thus a kind of teacher, like the Pullman porters who informed African-Americans in each town their train passed through about what was going on “down the line.” In this way they stitched together what eventually became one of the very few successful revolutions in human history.
Marx’s Communists inevitably had to do a certain amount of balancing, for an honest discussion of what was going on in some other town might well include the news, which in fact was a judgment, that that struggle was on the brink of success, while one’s local struggle was still unripe and should, instead of moving forward, hold off and support the others.
The balancing eventually required eliminating certain forces altogether, as unworthy of inclusion or as too dangerous for it. At first this exclusion was from the revolutionary center itself, as when the Communists excluded the social democrats (weak, unworthy) and, later, the Mensheviks (dangerous to the Revolution). Once the Bolsheviks were in control of the Russian state apparatus, exclusionary tendencies continued and were directed against the whole country: a national counter-system of prisons, gulags, and mental institutions became necessary conditions for the state, and—thus dependent on its internal enemies—it eventually, for many reasons, collapsed.
Marx, who was not good at predictions (he should have stayed with Hegel’s take on dialectics and restricted it to the past) failed to see that the Communists could not remain what he took them to be—teachers of the workers—and would have to assume, to great evil, a “leading role” in society. The Revolution could no more remain emancipatory than markets can stay free.