The Necessity of Social Control by István Mészáros

Author:István Mészáros
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Monthly Review Press
Published: 2014-03-14T16:00:00+00:00

8.10 The Social Subject of Emancipation and the Power of Emancipatory Ideology

ANOTHER WORLD IS POSSIBLE and necessary. Necessary not in the sense of a fatalistic predetermination but as an urgent and deep-seated need whose realization, or failure to actualize, decides so much for the future. It is obvious that it is not enough to hope for a positive outcome. Ernst Bloch’s Prinzip Hoffnung (Principle of Hope) is on its own not up to the task, however noble and passionate might be one’s commitment to it. The structural antagonisms and explosive contradictions surveyed on these pages have their powerful material grounding, and the paralyzing social inertia arising from that grounding must be countered by a force capable not only of the required radical negation but also of positively instituting a sustainable alternative order. For the “possibility” advocated with reference to “another world” cannot be turned into a lasting reality without the sustained work of the social emancipatory agency equal to the task.

During the last decade we have seen some dramatic confrontations of a predominantly spontaneous movement with the repressive forces of the ruling order. A great variety of groups took to the streets, expressing in a forceful way their condemnation of the gross inequalities of our society, protesting with defiance and courage against the crippling impositions of the established order. This eruption of dramatic dissent represents a major departure not only from the traditional left entrapped by the parliamentary “democratic rules of the game” but also from the “lobbying type” endorsement and respectful submission of “single-issue” concerns to the attention of the economic and political personifications of capital, without challenging the system itself. The groups involved confronted some truly fundamental issues of our time, from the economic decisions reached in the usual authoritarian way at governmental summits and at conveniently prefabricated WTO meetings to the cynical announcement of wars under totally false pretenses. The numbers of people actively involved in these radical protests in different parts of the world could be counted not in thousands but in many millions. Characteristically, the guardians of the ruling order pretended in their public responses to the manifestations of dissent that nothing noteworthy had happened and refused to adjust their dangerous policies, no matter how great the numbers. It is therefore far from surprising that the protesting groups wholeheartedly embraced the idea that “another world is possible.” For their grave concerns cannot be attended to in the present order. With these largely spontaneous developments what clearly appeared on the historical agenda is the need and the positive potentiality of combining the multifaceted groups of protest, including the radical elements of the traditional left and the once greatly neglected hundreds of millions of the peasantry, into an emancipatory force capable of consciously fighting for the envisaged alternative.

This also means the necessary reexamination of the restrictive conceptions of the past. For the social subject of emancipation cannot be arbitrarily/voluntaristically predefined. It can create the conditions of success only if it embraces the totality of sociological groups that

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