Old Gods, New Enigmas by Mike Davis

Author:Mike Davis
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Verso Books

There is a legend about a certain species of caterpillar that can only cross the threshold of metamorphosis by seeing its future butterfly. Proletarian subjectivity does not evolve by incremental steps but requires non-linear leaps, especially moral self-recognition through solidarity with the struggle of a distant people, even when this contradicts short-term self-interest, as in the famous cases of Lancashire cotton workers’ enthusiasm for Lincoln and later for Gandhi. Socialism, in other words, requires non-utilitarian actors, whose ultimate motivations and values arise from structures of feeling that others would deem spiritual. Marx rightly scourged romantic humanism in the abstract, but his personal pantheon—Prometheus and Spartacus, Homer, Cervantes, and Shakespeare—affirmed a heroic vision of human possibility that no longer seems to have any purchase in our fallen world.

The ground condition for the socialist project is the realm of freedom immanent in the advanced industrial economy itself. To achieve the principal goal of socialism—the transformation of surplus labor into equally distributed free time—radical chains must be translated into radical needs.

Revolutions of the poor in backward countries can reach for the stars, but only the proletariat in advanced countries can actually grasp the future. The integration of science into production, compelled both by inter-capitalist competition and working-class militancy, reduces the necessity (if not the actuality) of alienated toil. Already in The Poverty of Philosophy (1847), Marx had argued that “the organization of revolutionary elements as a class supposes the existence of all the productive forces which could be engendered in the bosom of the old society.”330 A decade later, in the Grundrisse, he predicted that, “to the degree that large industry develops, the creation of real wealth comes to depend less on labour-time and on the amount of labor employed” than upon “the general state of science and on the progress of technology, or the application of this science to production.” At this point, “the surplus labour of the mass has ceased to be the condition for the development of general wealth, just as the non-labour of the few has ceased to be the condition for the development of the general powers of the human mind.” Then it will be both materially possible and historically necessary for the workers themselves to appropriate their own surplus labor as free time for “the artistic, scientific etc. development of the individuals.” “The measure of wealth is then not any longer, in any way, labour time, but rather disposable time.”331

But such an appropriation can never occur if the goal is framed simply as redistributive justice, income equality, or shared prosperity.332 These are preconditions for socialism, not its substance. The new world, rather, would define itself by the satisfaction of “radical needs” generated by the struggle for socialism itself, and incompatible with the alienation of capitalist society. According to Lebowitz, “They include the need for community, for human relationships, for labor as an end (life’s prime want), for universality, for free time and free activity and for the development of personality. They are qualitative needs—in contrast to the

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.