Nicoline van Harskamp - DeLVe | Institute for Duration, Location and ...

a better world possible. Marx saw the struggle for the shortening working day as one
corridor, potentially opening into future struggles: “the limitation of the working-day is
a preliminary condition without which all further attempts at improvement and emancipation
must prove abortive”. 27 Paradoxically, as we now know, the greatest expansion of
British industry occurred after the deal for the normalization of the working day.
Similarly, at different times, Lenin, Kautski, Luxemburg, Trotsky (!) and Gramsci grappled
with the problem of fighting for compromised gains here and now on the one hand while
also fighting for a better world on the other. At various points they stood for tactical
struggles for immediate gains, advocating trade unions, whose function was to win a
better deal for workers in an exploitative system; but none of them thought that trade
unions were all that was possible, and none of them were satisfied with simply winning a
better deal in this exploitative system.
Tensions between evolutionary and revolutionary Marxism were articulated differently
in relation to different historical moments: throughout his World War I polemics against
the social patriots, Lenin emphasized the difference between various periods and trends:
“[U]nlike yesterday, the struggle for socialist power is on the order of the day in Europe.
The socialist working class is on the scene as a contender for power itself. This means:
There may still be ‘lesser’ and ‘greater’ evils (there always will be) but we do not have to
choose between these evils, for we represent the alternative to both of them, an alternative
which is historically ripe. Moreover, under conditions of imperialism, only this
revolutionary alternative offers any really progressive way out, offers any possibility of
an outcome which is no evil at all. Both war camps offer only reactionary consequences,
to a ‘lesser’ or ‘greater’ degree.” 28
The debate articulated by Marxists in different periods was about how political transformation
should be brought about: in an evolutionary fashion – a step by step approach
along a trajectory of improvement (a kind of Darwinian evolution by which the reign of
the proletarians is a historical necessity) – or rather in a revolutionary manner, with a
fast and decisive break with the past. In other words, Marxists in various periods asked
whether change arrive through the reduction of pain – do things become gradually
better until they become good, with the danger that with the reduction of pain society
should become content and complicit? (In which case pain should be seen as a selfdisciplining
device). At one of the ends of the spectrum in which the lesser evil argument
occupies the middle are the utopian absolutists who believe that every possible gain at
present is insignificant in light of the essentially compromised state of the world. Part of
the structure of this argument is found the principle of the politique du pire – the politics
of making things worse in order to hasten political change—or the theory of Dolorism,
which sees pain as a spiritual experience that allows people to see reality more clearly.
The danger was of course that things simply get worse and worse. In fact Marxists used
these approaches alternately, in a tactical manner, in different periods and situations.
The lesser evil argument was articulated in another way by Herbert Marcuse in the context
of discussions regarding the Marxist attitude to the danger of fascism:
Compared with a neo-fascist society, defined in terms of a ‘suspension’ of civil rights and
GDJE SE SVE TEK TREBA DOGODITI / WHERE EVERYTHING IS YET TO HAPPEN