The Necessity of Social Control

Istvan Meszaros

• Editorial: Monthly Review Press
• Año: 2014
• ISBN:
  9781583675403
• Categoría: Politica e relazioni internazionali
• Categoría: Politica sociale

As John Bellamy Foster writes in his foreword to the present book, “István Mészáros is one of the greatest philosophers that the historical materialist tradition has yet produced. His work stands practically alone today in the depth of its analysis of Marx’s theory of alienation, the structural crisis of capital, the demise of Soviet-style post-revolutionary societies, and the necessary conditions of the transition to socialism. His dialectical inquiry into social structure and forms of consciousness—a systematic critique of the prevailing forms of thought—is unequaled in our time.”

Mészáros is the author of magisterial works like Beyond Capital and Social Structures of Forms of Consciousness, but his work can seem daunting to those unacquainted with his thought. Here, for the first time, is a concise and accessible overview of Mészáros’s ideas, designed by the author himself and covering the broad scope of his work, from the shortcomings of bourgeois economics to the degeneration of the capital system to the transition to socialism.

1. THE NECESSITY OF SOCIAL CONTROL

IN THE DEEPLY MOVING final pages of one of his last works Isaac Deutscher wrote:

The technological basis of modern society, its structure and its conflicts are international or even universal in character; they tend toward international or universal solutions. And there are the unprecedented dangers threatening our biological existence. These, above all, press for the unification of mankind, which cannot be achieved without an integrating principle of social organization. . . . The present ideological deadlock and the social status quo hardly serve as the basis either for the solution of the problems of our epoch or even for mankind’s survival. Of course, it would be the ultimate disaster if the nuclear super-powers were to treat the social status quo as their plaything and if either of them tried to alter it by force of arms. In this sense the peaceful coexistence of East and West is a paramount historic necessity. But the social status quo cannot be perpetuated. Karl Marx, speaking about stalemates in past class struggles, notes that they usually ended “in the common ruin of the contending classes.” A stalemate indefinitely prolonged and guaranteed by a perpetual balance of nuclear deterrents, is sure to lead the contending classes and nations to their common and ultimate ruin. Humanity needs unity for its sheer survival; where can it find it if not in socialism.¹

Deutscher concluded his work by passionately stressing: “De nostra re agitur”—it is all our own concern. Thus it seems to me right to address ourselves on this occasion to some of the vital problems that stood at the center of his interest toward the end of his life.

All the more so because the “status quo” in question is a historically unique status quo: one that inevitably involves the whole of mankind. As we all know from history, no status quo has ever lasted indefinitely, not even the most partial and localized ones. The permanence of a global status quo, with the immense and necessarily expanding dynamic forces involved in it, is a contradiction in terms: an absurdity that should be visible even to the most myopic of game theorists. In a world made up of a multiplicity of conflicting and mutually interacting social systems—in contrast to the fantasy world of escalating and de-escalating chessboards—the precarious global status quo is bound to be broken for certain. The question is not “whether or not,” but “by what means?” Will it be broken by devastating military means, or will there be adequate social outlets for the manifestation of the rising social pressures that are in evidence today even in the most remote corners of our global social environment? The answer will depend on our success or failure in creating the necessary strategies, movements, and instruments capable of securing an effective transition toward a socialist society in which “humanity can find the unity it needs for its sheer survival.”

1.1 The Counter-Factual Conditionals of Apologetic Ideology

WHAT WE ARE EXPERIENCING today is not only a growing polarization—inherent in the global structural crisis of present-day capitalism—but, to multiply the dangers of explosion, also the breakdown of a whole series of safety valves that played a vital part in the perpetuation of commodity society.

The change that undermined the power of consensus politics, of the narrow institutionalization and integration of social protest, of the easy exportation of internal violence through its transference to the plane of mystifying international collisions, etc., has been quite dramatic. For not so long ago the unhindered growth and multiplication of the power of capital, the irresistible extension of its rule over all aspects of human life, used to be confidently preached and widely believed. The unproblematic and undisturbed functioning of capitalist power structures was taken for granted and was declared to be a permanent feature of human life itself, and those who dared to doubt the wisdom of such declarations of faith were promptly dismissed by the self-perpetuating guardians of the bourgeois hegemony of culture as “hopeless ideologists,” if not much worse.

But where now are the days when one of President Kennedy’s principal theorists and advisers could speak about Marx and the social movements associated with his name in terms like these:

He [Marx] applied his kit-bag to what he could perceive of one historical case: the case of the British takeoff and drive to maturity; . . . like the parochial intellectual of Western Europe he was, the prospects in Asia and Africa were mainly beyond his ken, dealt with almost wholly in the context of British policy rather than in terms of their own problems of modernization. . . . Marx created a monstrous guide to public policy. [Communism] is a kind of disease which can befall a transitional society if it fails to organize effectively those elements within it which are prepared to get on with the job of modernization. [In opposition to the Marxist approach the task is to create] in association with the non-Communist politicians and peoples of the preconditions and early takeoff areas [i.e., the territories of neocolonialism] a partnership which will see them through into sustained growth on a political and social basis which keeps open the possibilities of progressive democratic development.²

These lines were written hardly a decade ago, but they read today like prehistoric reasoning, although—or perhaps because—the author is a professor of Economic History at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.

In this short decade we were provided with tragically ample opportunity to see in practice, in Vietnam and in Cambodia, as well as in other countries, the real meaning of the program of “partnership” intended “to see the politicians of the early takeoff areas through” to the disastrous results of such partnership,³ under the intellectual guidance of “Brain Trusts” which included quite a few Walt Rostows: men who had the cynical insolence to call Marx’s work “a monstrous guide to public policy.” Inflated by the “arrogance of military power,” they “proved,” by means of tautologies interspersed with retrospective “deductions,” that the American stage of economic growth is immune to all crisis,⁴ and they argued, with the help of counter-factual conditionals, that the break in the chain of imperialism was merely an unfortunate mishap that, strictly speaking, should not have happened at all. For

if the First World War had not occurred, or had occurred a decade later, Russia would almost certainly have made a successful transition to modernization and rendered itself invulnerable to Communism.⁵

We might be tempted to rejoice at the sight of such a level of intellectual power in our adversaries, were it not terrifying to contemplate the naked power they wield in virtue of their willing submission to the alienated institutions that demand “theories” of this kind so as to follow, undisturbed even by the possibility of an occasional doubt, their blind collision course. The hollow constructions that meet this demand of rationalization are built on the pillars of totally false—and often self-contradictory—premises such as, for instance:

1. Socialism is a mysterious—yet easily avoidable—disease which will befall you, unless you follow the scientific prescription of American modernization.

2. Facts to the contrary are merely the result of mysterious—yet easily avoidable—mishaps; such facts (e.g. the Russian Revolution of 1917) are devoid of an actual causal foundation and of a wider social-historical significance.

3. Present-day manifestations of social unrest are merely the combined result of Soviet aspirations and of the absence of American partnership in the societies concerned; therefore, the task is to checkmate the former by generously supplying the latter.

THEORIES RESTING ON SUCH foundations can, of course, amount to no more than the crudest ideological justification of aggressive American expansionism and interventionism. This is why these cynical ideologies of rationalization have to be misrepresented as “objective social and political science” and the position of those who “see through” the unctuous advocacy of “seeing the politicians of the early takeoff areas through”—by means of the “Great American Partnership” of massive military interventions—must be denounced as “nineteenth-century ideologists.”

The moment of truth arrives, however, when the “mishaps” of social explosion occur, even more mysteriously than in the “early takeoff areas,” in the very land of “supreme modernization” and higher than “high mass-consumption”—namely in America itself. Thus not only is the model of undisturbed growth and modernization shattered but, ironically, even the slogan of “sustained growth on a political and social basis which keeps open the possibilities of progressive, democratic development” ideologically backfires at a time when outcries against the violation of basic liberties and against the systematic disenfranchising of the masses is on the increase. That we are not talking about some remote, hypothetical future but about our own days, goes without saying. What needs stressing, however, is that the dramatic collapse of these pseudo-scientific rationalizations of naked power marks the end of an era: not that of “the end of ideology” but of the end of the almost complete monopoly of culture and politics by anti-Marxist ideology successfully self-advertised up until quite recently as the final supersession of all ideology.

1.2 Capitalism and Ecological Destruction

A DECADE AGO THE Walt Rostows of this world were still confidently preaching the universal adoption of the American pattern of “high mass-consumption” within the space of one single century. They could not be bothered with making the elementary, but of course necessary, calculations that would show them that in the event of the universalization of that pattern—not to mention the economic, social and political absurdity of such an idea—the ecological resources of our planet would be exhausted well before the end of that century several times over. After all, in those days top politicians and their Brain Trusts did not ride on the bandwagon of ecology but in the sterilized space-capsules of astronautical and military fancy. Nothing seemed in those days too big, too far, and too difficult to those who believed—or wanted us to believe—in the religion of technological omnipotence and of a Space Odyssey around the corner.

Many things have changed in this short decade. The arrogance of military power suffered some severe defeats not only in Vietnam but also in Cuba and in other parts of the American hemisphere. International power relations have undergone some significant changes, with the immense development of China and Japan in the first place, exposing to ridicule the nicely streamlined calculations of escalation experts who now have to invent not only an entirely new type of multiple-player chess game but also the kind of creatures willing to play it, for want of real-life takers. The “affluent society” turned out to be the society of suffocating effluence, and the allegedly omnipotent technology failed to cope even with the invasion of rats in the depressing slums of black ghettos. Nor did the religion of Space Odyssey fare any better, notwithstanding the astronomical sums invested in it: even the learned Dr. Werner von Braun himself had to link up the latest version of his irresistible “yearning for the stars” with the prosaic bandwagon of pollution (so far, it seems, without much success).

“The God that failed” in the image of technological omnipotence is now revarnished and shown around again under the umbrella of universal ecological concern. Ten years ago ecology could be safely ignored or dismissed as totally irrelevant. Today it must be grotesquely misrepresented and one-sidedly exaggerated so that people—sufficiently impressed by the cataclysmic tone of ecological sermons—can be successfully diverted from their burning social and political problems. Africans, Asians, and Latin Americans (especially Latin Americans) should not multiply at pleasure—not even at God’s pleasure, if they are Roman Catholics—for lack of restraint might result in “intolerable ecological strains.” That is, in plain words, it might even endanger the prevailing social relation of forces, the rule of capital. Similarly, people should forget all about the astronomical expenditure on armaments and accept sizeable cuts in their standard of living, in order to meet the costs of “environmental rehabilitation”: that is, in plain words, the costs of keeping the established system of expanding waste production well oiled. Not to mention the additional bonus of making people at large pay for, under the pretext of “human survival,” the survival of a socioeconomic system that now has to cope with deficiencies arising from growing international competition and from an increasing shift in favor of the parasitic sectors within its own structure of production.

THAT CAPITALISM DEALS this way—namely its own way—with ecology, should not surprise us in the least: it would be nothing short of a miracle if it did not. Yet the exploitation of this issue for the benefit of “the modern industrial state”—to use a nice phrase of Professor Galbraith’s—does not mean that we can afford to ignore it. For the problem itself is real enough, whatever use is made of it today.

Indeed, it has been real for quite some time, though of course, for reasons inherent in the necessity of capitalist growth, few have taken any notice of it. Marx, however—and this should sound incredible only to those who have repeatedly buried him as an “irretrievably irrelevant ideologist of nineteenth-century stamp”—had tackled the issue, within the dimensions of its true social-economic significance, more than one hundred and twenty-five years ago.

Criticizing the abstract and idealist rhetoric with which Feuerbach assessed the relationship between man and nature, Marx wrote:

Feuerbach . . . always takes refuge in external nature, and moreover in nature which has not yet been subdued by men. But every new invention, every new advance made by industry, detaches another piece from this domain, so that the ground which produces examples illustrating such Feuerbachian propositions is steadily shrinking. The “essence” of the fish is its “existence,” water—to go no further than this one proposition. The “essence” of the freshwater fish is the water of a river. But the latter ceases to be the “essence” of the fish and is no longer a suitable medium of existence as soon as the river is made to serve industry, as soon as it is polluted by dyes and other waste products and navigated by steamboats, or as soon as its water is diverted into canals where simple drainage can deprive the fish of its medium of existence.⁶

This is how Marx approached the matter in the early 1840s. Needless to say, he categorically rejected the suggestion that such developments are inevitably inherent in the “human predicament” and that, consequently, the problem is how to accommodate ourselves⁷ to them in everyday life. He already fully realized then that a radical restructuring of the prevailing mode of human interchange and control is the necessary prerequisite to an effective control over the forces of nature that are brought into motion in a blind and ultimately self-destructive fashion precisely by the prevailing, alienated and reified mode of human interchange and control. Small wonder, then, that to present-day apologists of the established system of control his prophetic diagnosis is nothing but “parochial anachronism.”

TO SAY THAT “THE COSTS of cleaning up our environment must be met in the end by the community” is both an obvious platitude and a characteristic evasion, although the politicians who sermonize about it seem to believe to have discovered the philosopher’s stone. Of course it is always the community of producers who meet the cost of everything. But the fact that it always must meet the costs does not mean in the least that it always can do so. Indeed, given the prevailing mode of alienated social control, we ca...