Ye are Many - They are Few!
In
the midst of ideological and economic crises, we find ourselves unable
to venture out from neoliberal capitalism and when we do it is only to
conserve the social democratic post-war settlement which cannot defend
itself. Of course, there are those who might have the audacity to walk
further to socialism as a political alternative to capitalism in its
entirety. We must remember socialism is an intermediate stage which
seeks ultimately to undo itself. The time has come to resurrect the
language of political ideals in this so-called post-political era of
liberal managerialism. This is meant to be a world with no need for
ideas and has moved beyond ideology. The anaemia of discourse as it is
has gone on long enough. This is the time for serious theory as well as
devoted belief and dedicated activism. For these reasons, we should be
on the side of those - from Slavoj Žižek and Alain Badiou to Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri - who have devoted their intellectual capacities to developing a new kind of communism.
Even the enemies of socialism might concede it has some moral weight, but communism is irredeemable by comparison because of 20th Century history. We are reminded that not all socialists are communists, though every communist is a socialist. It should be noted that the idea of communism predates Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels and actually has ancient roots, but this is not reason to step over Marx to his predecessors. As Terry Eagleton reminds us, in classical Marxian terms, the establishment of communism is preceded by the development of the material base to the point at which it can negate itself and drop clean out of consciousness. The material transcends itself at a certain point of superabundance. It was slavery and feudalism which provided the material conditions for capitalism, but it is capitalism which will produce the conditions for socialism and eventually communism. In a strange sense then socialism is indebted to capitalism, but as the great Nye Bevan would remind us "There can be no immaculate conception of socialism."
To
this ultimate end socialism is a self-abolishing project, similarly the
idea of communism will remain relevant until it is realised. The end
and the means are eschew from one another to the point that the material
prosperity, which will fund freedom, is the fruit of unfreedom. As it
is inseparable from the horrors of slavery and market forces which laid
the path to liberation. We might see communism as the escape from
scarcity to the extent that we can actually forget about the very
possibility of it. The Marxist notion of communism requires the
development of the
productive forces, free from the blockages of pre-history, to the extent
that the economic system can give birth to a surplus sufficient for the
abolition of labour and the fulfillment of the needs of everyone.
Capitalism is the only historical mode of production capable of
generating such a surplus, but the forces of production are not
teleological. The system is not in place for the sake of historical
development as it generates the surplus it is committed to the creation
of scarcities.
The
dialectical twist is that it is the materiality will release you from
the forces of the material. We're not free of determinants in class society,
we make our own history but by circumstances we cannot choose as Karl Marx
reminds us in the Brumaire. The real kind of freedom is that where we're determined in
such a way as to sit loose from economic determinants and to free us
from the alienation of labour. As Sigmund Freud foresaw without the
coercive process of labour we would all lounge about in various
postures of jouissance - and this may be le communisme! Here we find the political and the economic are indivisible, as the reality of class society has to be acknowledged in order to
eventually get rid of it. Terry Eagleton draws an analogy with revolutionary
nationalism, where the point is to assert the unique culture of a nation
in order for it to take an ordinary place in the community of nations.
1 comment:
Today is good weather, isn't it?
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