Proudhon had no such progressive agent of change, in his petty-bourgeois, moralistic model. For Marx that agent is the working-class. Without it, Proudhon has no way out, no way forward, and so is simply forced to make an ideological leap, to pick up some category that can perform this function for him. The same is seen, today, with the petty-bourgeois, moral socialists. Some of them who cling to the subterfuge that they are still Marxists, pay lip-service to the idea that they see the working-class as the agent of change, but all of their actions and programme says otherwise.
One camp aligns with “democratic imperialism” as that agent of change, even claiming that imperialism and the capitalist state defends workers interests! The other camp aligns itself with various reactionary “anti-imperialist” and “anti-capitalist” movements, and even states. The only role both camps assign to the working-class is as foot soldiers to be periodically called out to act as a means of applying pressure to, or on behalf of, other social agents.
As Lenin described, in relation to the Narodniks, the social agent the petty-bourgeois socialist usually sees as the agent of change is the capitalist state, although they are always forced to try to present this state as some kind of neutral vessel, rather than what it actually is. The Narodniks drew up all sorts of social schema that they appealed to the Russian state to implement, so as to enable Russia to develop along its own unique, non-capitalist path of development.
The same is true today of the Third Worldists, who make similar appeals to develop less developed economies along some unique, non-capitalist line of development, but its also true of those like Paul Mason who has drawn up a fantasy world in which NATO imperialism is to be simply taken over, and utilised to meet the needs of the working-class, and foster progressive change across the globe!
But, as Lenin pointed out, the Russian state in the 1870's, was already a capitalist state, and pursued policies in the interests of capitalist development. When petty-bourgeois socialists, today, in response to a crisis for this or that business or industry, call for it to be nationalised by the capitalist state, it is just an example of this same appeal to the capitalist state to act as their chosen agent of change, and on the basis of a fantasy that it will act not as a capitalist state, but as some kind of neutral, non-class state! They call on the workers to mobilise not as an act of self-government, to take over the capital, but only to pressurise the state to nationalise it.
A classic example was Upper Clyde Shipbuilders, where the workers, threatened with closure, took over the business, staging a sit-in. But, the whole focus of the struggle, led by the Stalinist Jimmy Reid, was to force the state to nationalise the firm, at which point the workers handed it over to that capitalist state, which, then, proceeded to their more effective exploitation, rationalisation of the capital, in preparation for its subsequent privatisation, which has been the series of events of all nationalisations.
And, the same is true internationally. One section of petty-bourgeois, moral socialists (and not just socialists, but also of petty-bourgeois liberals/libertarians) sees “imperialism” not as historically progressive, but as something to be opposed, focussing on its “bad” side, in terms of “super-exploitation”, and so on. Like Sismondi, and the Narodniks, therefore, they want to hold back, or reverse such capitalist development, especially that brought about by “imperialist” capital, i.e. large multinational corporations. Hence, they were to be found opposing the development of the EU, and arguing for Brexit, on the basis that the EU is a club of large-scale imperialist capital. The corollary of that position, was, then, the idea that the way forward lay in the hands of a series of smaller, imperialist nation state clubs, now in competition with each other!
On the other hand, there is their mirror image in the form of the petty-bourgeois moral socialists of the type of the AWL, or of social-democracy. They see imperialism as progressive, and so are also sanguine when that imperialism also engages in wars and annexations to deal with its opponents, such as in Serbia, Iraq, Afghanistan, Libya, Syria and so on, and even for the AWL's mentors Burnham and Shachtman, in Vietnam. Some elements of this trend, the Euston Manifesto Group, for example, in relation to Iraq, and Paul Mason, in relation to Ukraine, have made the same, inevitable, transition that Burnham and Shachtman did into becoming open advocates of the role of NATO in engaging in such wars.
An example of that was a comment to Andrew Coates blog, some time ago, from someone who claimed to have been a member of the SWP in their teens. The SWP are a product of that same “third camp of the petty-bourgeoisie”, as Trotsky called the Shachtmanites that the AWL now adheres to. They are, however, mirror images of each other, starting from opposing Kantian moral imperatives. The commentor, now, having illustrated this by having switched to the same categorical imperative as the AWL, put forward the claim that NATO is the most progressive, anti-imperialist force on the planet!
Completely missing from the view of all these petty-bourgeois socialists is any independent agency of the working-class. They all end up, therefore, as proponents of idealist and utopian schemas, whereby NATO is supposed to act progressively, or this or that “anti-imperialist” state is supposed to be acting progressively, or be a staging post for some future development, which leads to alliances with some grotesquely anti-working class forces, as seen with the alliances with Zelensky, or Putin, Hamas, Hezbollah, Khomeini, the Viet Cong, PIRA, Algerian FLN and so on.
The trajectory of them all, as Marx, Lenin and Trotsky noted, is into the camp of reaction.
Proudhon,
“takes the first category that comes handy and attributes to it arbitrarily the quality of supplying a remedy for the drawbacks of the category to be purified. Thus, if we are to believe M. Proudhon, taxes remedy the drawbacks of monopoly; the balance of trade, the drawbacks of taxes; landed property, the drawbacks of credit.
By taking the economic categories thus successively, one by one, and making one the antidote to the other, M. Proudhon manages to make with this mixture of contradictions and antidotes to contradictions, two volumes of contradictions, which he rightly entitles: Le Système des contradictions économiques.” (p 105)
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