“The riots commenced,” as Frederick Engels wrote, “at Peterswalden, in the District of Reichenbach, the center of the manufacturing part of Silesia.”
It happened on June 4, 1844, when weavers and peasants spontaneously revolted against the merchants who exploited them until the last drop of their desolate lives. The short text of Engels, Further Particularities of the Silesian Riots, published in The Northern Star is to the point: it describes, in two pages, everything that we should know about the structure and dynamics of riots.
The evil man, the symbol of the exploiting class (“Mr Zwanziger”); the collective spirit (“the weavers singing a song”); the spontaneous collective violence (“the doors were forced, the windows smashed, the crowd entered the house”); violence against representation (“they destroyed all books, bills of exchange and other documents, and threw the cash they found, amounting to upward of 1000 pounds, upon the street”); violence against commodities – violence as a political declaration (“the bales of cotton and bags, as well as the manufactured yarn and goods, were as far as possible, destroyed or made useless ”); the state repressive forces defending private property (“while they were engaged in this, a detachment of about 160 foot soldiers arrived … the Riot Act was read”); people reacting to the state: enlarging the social circles of spontaneous revolt (“the people replied by throwing stones at the military); brutal repression (“the word to fire was given, and twelve of the rioters were killed and many wounded); self-defense (“the enraged crowd rushed on against the soldiers, dragging commanding officer from his horse and severely beating him”); counter-attack (“while the destruction of property continued”); class war (“at least two battalions of infantry, a company of rifles, some cavalry and artillery appeared”); suppression (“and dispersed the rioters”); bourgeoisie totalitarianism (“further attempts at similar proceedings were stifled by the military, keeping the town and surrounding places occupied”).
Not only the description, but also the explanation (the theory) given for the actions is strikingly contemporary: the people rioted because they were on the edge of existence (“in a family where father, mother, and children worked, all of them at the loom, amounted to a sum which would buy no more than six shillings would in England … besides, they were all in debt”). But the riotous outbreak was not ‘proletarian shopping,’ as reactionary press today describes the lootings; it was the total negation of capitalist conditions, and an attack against non-human conditions (“during all these disturbances not one single robbery has been committed; they did not convert it to their own use.”).1
The simple arithmetic of comparing the six shillings earned by the entire family with the 1.000 pounds discarded on the streets sufficiently demonstrates the correlation between the subjective power of the people's revolt, and the rational wealth of capitalist exploitation. Frederick Engels' text succeeds in showing that the energies and structures involved in the riots are asymmetric.
The Silesian Weavers riots are at the core of the history of communism. The riots are seen as a prelude to the 1848 Revolutions. The son of a peasant from Silesia, named Wilhelm Wolf, wrote an account of the riots based on interviews with eyewitnesses, which became the source book for understanding the political nature of this event. Wolf was a co-founder of the League of Communists in 1848, and died as a devoted fighter for the proletarian struggle. He was also a close associate of Marx and Engels. Marx dedicated the first volume of Capital to Wolf.
The Silesian Weavers riots also forced artists to test their forms and expressions.2
A year after the event, Engels attempted to provide a sociological explanation for the weavers’ riots. Interestingly, he did this by analyzing a painting.
“Let me on this occasion mention a painting by one of the best German painters, Hübner, which has made a more effectual Socialist agitation than a hundred pamphlets might have done. It represents some Silesian weavers bringing linen cloth to the manufacturer, and contrasts very strikingly cold-hearted wealth on one side, and despairing poverty on the other. The well-fed manufacturer is represented with face as red and unfeeling as brass, rejecting a piece of cloth which belongs to a woman; the woman, seeing no chance of selling the cloth, is sinking down and fainting, surrounded by her two little children; and hardly kept up by an old man; a clerk is looking over a piece, the owners of which are with painful anxiety waiting for the result; a young man shows to his despondent mother the scanty wages he has received for his labour; an old man, a girl, and a boy, are sitting on a stone bench, and waiting for their turn; and two men, each with a piece of rejected cloth on his back, are just leaving the room, one of whom is clenching his fist in rage, whilst the other, putting his hand on his neighbours arm, points up towards heaven, as if saying: be quiet, there is a judge to punish him. This whole scene is going on in a cold and unhomely looking lobby, with a stone floor: only the manufacturer stands upon a piece of carpeting; whilst on the other side of the painting, behind a bar, a view is opened into a luxuriously furnished counting house, with splendid curtains and looking-glasses, where some clerks are writing, undisturbed by what is passing behind them, and where the manufacturer’s son, a young, dandy-like gentleman, is leaning over the bar, with a horsewhip in his hand, smoking a cigar, and coolly looking at the distressed weavers. The painting has been exhibited in several towns of Germany, and, of course, prepared a good many minds for Social ideas.”
The realist painting of Karl Wilhelm Hübner and Engels’ Rapid Progress of Communism in Germany are not on the agenda of political art today. I took the quote from a book edited by Lee Baxandall and Stefan Morawski, Marx and Engels on Literature and Art, published in New York by International General in 1974, the publishing project of conceptual art curator Seth Siegelaub. In the first edition of the book, published by Telos Press in 1973, this text is omitted. It is most likely that this short text of Engels, praising the realist art form as a successful propaganda tool, was not something that would fit the taste of academic new leftists from the Telos journal.
True to the fact, it was Karl Hübner's 1844 painting The Silesian Weavers that solidified the argument of Socialist-Realists in the Soviet Union in the late twenties, that the aesthetic tendency of Marxism was the realism of this sort. At the same time, this same painting, to the horror of avant-garde artists, paved the way for merging socialist art with the symbolist-religious-realism of the Wanderers – it became the ground for the pact between Isaak Brodsky and Ilya Repin in 1926!
Thus, the place this painting occupies in the history of political art is not part of the brighter side of the story. To my knowledge, there is at least one attempt to comprehend the role of this painting from a historical-materialist point of view. Margaret Rosen’s 1984 book, Marx's Lost Aesthetic: Karl Marx and the Visual Arts, observes that Engels hasn't made any explicit reference to the realism of the picture, but has praised it for having “prepared a good many minds for Social ideas.”
Also, despite its Nazarene-looking aesthetic (religious symbolist painters enjoying the support of officials), The Silesian Weavers seems to be more of an ironic interpretation of Christian Kohler's religious Hagar and Ismael, than a moralistic depiction of class struggles. The main political position of the painting, if there is any, is its productivism influenced by the Saint-Simonians. Thus, the form of the painting is more related to economic “productivism” and philosophical ”materialism” than to aesthetic ”realism”.
Nevertheless, the space between the actors (subjects) of the painting and their expressions (correlation between the hand and the eye) solidifies the identification expected from each of the participants. Every subject is in its right place – the bad ones on the bad side, and good ones on the good side. Regardless of its materialist-productivist aesthetic, from our contemporary point of view, Hübner’s painting is a conservative artwork. It catalogues the people, their expressions, anger and dreams, from a very predictable position. In order to demonstrate this, we have to dissect the painting, and then collect the scattered pieces to see what energies were unleashed in the riots that were not included in representation.
This mental experiment is possible today. In 1844, both for Hübner and for Heinrich Heine (author of the famous poem The Silesian Weavers), the Silesian riots were not a mere social motif for artworks. The riots were an actual situation that demanded an immediate response. The painting and the poem served this purpose. They were activist propaganda artworks. As such, they were successful, as Engels noticed. But like all propaganda, the field of their communication is mostly based on objective conditions: it has to spread its message in every sector of society. Thus, not only those who have rioted, who might riot, or are sympathetic towards the people that are rioting, but also clerks in offices, professors in universities, proletarians in cities and those of different nationalities should also relate to it themselves. Propaganda means objective effect. If we are considering the subjective configuration of the riot, then we have to look elsewhere.
Throughout history, subjective configurations of art were under strict control of courts and religious institutions. In the mid-19th century, under the influence of the 1848 Revolutions, art tested its forms in the domain of politics formed by the collective will of the people. Thus, since a century or so, the very energy that is at the core of political movements (the people's will) also became the source of artistic experimentations. For example, Eisenstein and Vertov, prior to making their best films, studied the nature of strikes, riots and uprisings from many possible perspectives. These artistic experimentations contributed to introducing certain re-configurations into the image of the workers. Here is how Jacques Ranciere, in 1981’s Proletariat Nights, describe this new register with the example of the weavers:
“Not the partition that fixes the boundary of the reason by separating it from its other, but rather the inner frontier dignifying this thinking that makes the weaver its model and, at the same time, the one excluded from it. Perhaps, then, there is something at stake in our effort to mark the digression that intervenes between the old partitions of knowledge and new distributions that range thoughts, discourses, and images in the twofold registers of class struggle, science and ideology, power and resistance, mastery and dissidence. Perhaps there is a real point in letting the scene unfold as weavers (also shoemakers and joiners) ask themselves about their identity and their right to speak, carried along by the very logic of the disjunction that prompts recognition of one only at the expense of the other.”
If we try to make (political) sense of the rioting weavers from Ranciere's point of view, we might end up trapped in a sort of caricature where people rushing to the house of Mr Zwanziger (the boss) discover they were encompassed into a similarly uncertain antagonism with the master. Accordingly, they would not trash the place and escalate the situation to class war, but instead, consider declaring their subjectivities through the cracks of these ambiguous disjunctions.
This would be true if the world of politics was the same as the world of paintings, where you can portray people according to concepts. But neither Ranciere’s concepts have the characteristics of realist paintings, nor do his politics have anything to do with dividing the axis of class struggles as portrayed by Engels. Ranciere’s proletariat deposited completely different images in the repertoire of communist theory. This new concept of the proletariat (the people) emerged through rethinking the status of the imagery and the dynamics of representation. Instead of scratching the already existing images for better ones, his model is to “shove them aside so that other figures may come together and decompose them.”
If we apply this model to the painting of Hübner, and record the distribution of hands and eyes, we can notice a strong equivalence between them. The social mood of the agents and the expression of their hands are in complete coherence. The cinematic model of representing the proletariat is ultimately based on movement. Things do move in films, but things move even faster during riots and uprisings. The question is how to shape these kinds of movements through images. Harun Farocki's films could be an answer. In most of his films, Farocki tests the limits of gestural expressions (of hands), the capacity of images (of workers), the limits of representation (of class struggles), and the status of the movement (of historical changes). In As You See (1987), weaving is seen as the precursor of digital technology, the dual movement of one and zero. More precisely, this movement occurs through loaded and empty fields. Movement became the principal question, because it is directly linked to time, but also to metamorphosis. As Farocki explains in his essay Written Trailers:
“I refined Kracauer's method in as much as I said: film A shows B acts in a C way, but doesn't know that it tells exactly A if B would act like D. As if the story of a female worker were told like that of a princess. In order to avoid the call for films having to give an example, I then tried to completely ignore the plot. That went so far that I sometimes only paid attention to the space between the protagonists and not at all what they were saying or doing – which is mostly also saying. But then I realised I had to give up this stance of strict denial. It only now become clear that I had stuck to it longer than to communism or revolution.”3
The space between the protagonists, their inner dynamics, their inherent movements: these are the fundamentals of the cinematic model. Alongside this observation, it is interesting to note in which ways formal movements disappear together with communism and revolution. Going back to Engels description of The Silesian Weavers painting, we can detect all kinds of movements with different intensities, clashing with each other and colliding into different temporalities:
forced … threw …destroyed … arrived … read … killed… rushed … dragged … continued … appeared … dispersed … occupied.
This narrative in the form of the movement of verbs is beautiful, but at the end of the day they are presented as the sociological facts. In other words, they are a sort of empirical positivism of the manifesting event. They are to be seen and catalogued. In every real historical revolutionary movement, parallel with the apparent mobility of people and things is one more act that goes beyond given objective conditions and constraints. It traverses in all directions, forwards and backwards, cutting through the definition of finitude and what’s possible.
This movement spreads everywhere, to the past and the future, across the hills of Silesia to the crowded cities of Lancashire and Yorkshire. It is philosophically detected by Karl Marx in his first written text for Vorwarts in 1844. Critical Marginal Notes on the Article ‘The King of Prussia and Social Reform. By a Prussian’ is a critique of socialist Arnold Ruge's dismissal of weaver's riots as a pre-political act. Marx opposes the idea that the riot was ”not an event, and not an alarming event,” and insists that the crude writings of the workers and their demands (even if they are not presented via refined concepts of political theory) are more valuable for advancing communism in Germany than the fine speculation of Proudhon and Ruge.
“It is enough to compare the petty, faint-hearted mediocrity of German political literature with this vehement and brilliant literary debut of the German workers, it is enough to compare these gigantic infant shoes of the proletariat with the dwarfish, worn-out political shoes of the German bourgeoisie, and one is bound to prophecy that the German Cinderella will one day have the figure of an athlete.”
These rioting proletarian theoreticians agree on one basic truth – that within the eruption of violent smashing and trashing, a philosophical thesis is declared: “all uprisings, without exception, break out in a disastrous isolation of man and woman from the community.” This is the answer to Ruge and alike, who claim that spontaneous violent outbursts isolate workers from communities of citizens and the state. Marx, learning his lesson from the riots, argues the opposite: that the communities of citizens and the state are the structures that isolate the weavers. The workers do not riot because they demand better political representation by the state, and equal redistribution of economic wealth; they riot to break from isolation (the void) they are in. Thus the more relevant historical question regarding the past is: would the 1789 revolution have taken place without the disastrous isolation of French citizens from the community? Or to the future: would the Petrograd Soviets rush against the bayonets of the Tsar if they had nothing else to lose except their chains?!
To dismiss the rioting weavers as prepolitical is to misrecognise the energy that trespasses entire levels of state administration. This happens when politics is understood as an affair of state apparatuses mediated through compromise. Today, theories of this sort are to be seen in liberal contempt of “race violence”, “occupation by refugees”, and in the actions of Black Block. They can also be found in Leftist social-democratic platforms propagating constructive civil disobedience. In reality, it is always uprisings that set the tone. Everything declared during riots are more contradictory and complex than bookish politics (“human life is more infinite than political life”).
Marx's final philosophical lesson about the uprisings is this: by disqualifying the etatist politics based on the community of citizens, the violence of the weavers introduces new forms of politics. It does this concretely by:
a. throwing off the political cloak, and,
b. announcing that every revolution overthrows old power, and to that extent it is political.
The Silesian Weavers painting, as with many examples of political art today, is wrapped in a political cloak of community sentiments, citizens activism and state institutions. Before
this cloak is thrown off and discarded, we can neither understand the new politics emerging from the energy of the uprising, nor the forms of artistic configurations that are shaped in these moments.
- Unemployment is no longer clearly separated from employment. The segmentation of labour force; flexibility; outsourcing; mobility; part-time employment; training; internship and informal work have blurred all the separations. In France in November 2005 in the banlieue, the rioters didn’t demand anything, they attacked their own condition, they made everything that produces and defines them their target. Rioters revealed and attacked the proletarian situation now: the worldwide precarisation of the labour force. In doing so they immediately made obsolete, in the very moment in which such a demand could have been articulated, any desire to be an ‘ordinary proletarian’ (Theorie Communiste, Communization in the Present Tense).↩
- The most famous is a poem by Heinrich Heine, The Silesian Weavers, published in 1844. Other is Gerhart Hauptmann's play The Weavers written in 1892. The play inspired Kathe Kollwitz's lithograph and etching series The Revolt of the Weavers (1893-1897). Lenin's sister Anna made a Russian translation of the play in 1895.↩
- Harun Farocki, “Written Trailers.” Harun Farocki: Against What? Against Whom? Eds. A. Ehmann and K. Eshun, 2009, Koenig Books and RavenRow, p. 239↩
