It is generally accepted that the term ‘historical
materialism’ was never used by Marx himself (any more, indeed, than that of ‘dialectical
materialism’, coined by Joseph Dietzgen in 1886). Likewise that there are many passages
in Marx’s work where he significantly qualifies his ‘theory of stages; the most
well known of these, dated 8 March 1881, being his draft reply to Vera Zasulich-
one of the most interesting figures in Russian populism. The fact remains that
Marx, as against several representatives of early socialism, never really
managed to break from the main aspects of the modern myth of Growth. From this
point of view, the ‘Podolinsky affair’ seems very relevant. This Ukrainian
socialist (1850-91) was in fact one of the very first scholars to demonstrate –basing
himself among other things on the second law of thermodynamics – the ecological
limits that any project of unlimited growth would inexorably come up against.
(in this respect he was certainly one of the major precursors of Nicolas
Georgescu –Rosen) In 1882, Podolinsky sought draw the attention of Marx and
Engels to this problem, undoubtedly crucial to the future of socialism, and in
a more general fashion, to any modern society. But as Engels proved incapable
of seeing Podolinsky’s ideas as anything more than a new variant of Malthus ( a particular bete noire), the correspondence came to a rapid end. A brief
allusion to this misunderstanding between Marx and ecology can be found in the
most recent book by Serge Latouche ( Le
Pari de la decroissance, Paris: Fayard,
2006) . . .
To get an idea of the mental universe that official economics inhabits, we can refer to the elementary example offered by Jean Gadry and Florence Jany-Catrice in Les Nouveau Indicateurs de richesse ( Paris, La Decouverte, 2005, p.21): ‘If a country paid 10 per cent of its people to destroy goods, make holes in roads, damage vehicles, etc. and a further 10 percent to repair them, mend holes. etc., it would have the same GDP as a country in which this 20 per cent of the working population were employed improving life expectancy and health, the level of education, and participation in cultural and leisure activities.’ This example helps us to understand the great economic interest that there is, from the liberal point of view (as Mandeville was the first to point out, early in the eighteenth century), in maintaining a high crime rate. Not only is the practice of crime in general highly productive (burning a few thousand cars a year, for example, only requires a very small material and human input, incomparable with the profits it brings the automobile manufacturers). It also requires no particular investment in education (except, perhaps, in the case of computer crime), with the result that the contribution of crime to growth in GDP is immediately profitable, even if it starts very young ( in this career there is no legal limit to child’s work). Naturally, to the extent that this practice is very little appreciated by the popular classes , on the egoistic pretext that they are the first victims, it is indispensable to improve its image, setting up a whole industry of apology or even political legitimization. This work is usually entrusted to rappers, ‘citizen’ film-makers and the useful idiots of state sociology. . .
On March 18 1968, a few weeks before his assassination, Robert Kennedy gave the following address at the University of Kansas:
To get an idea of the mental universe that official economics inhabits, we can refer to the elementary example offered by Jean Gadry and Florence Jany-Catrice in Les Nouveau Indicateurs de richesse ( Paris, La Decouverte, 2005, p.21): ‘If a country paid 10 per cent of its people to destroy goods, make holes in roads, damage vehicles, etc. and a further 10 percent to repair them, mend holes. etc., it would have the same GDP as a country in which this 20 per cent of the working population were employed improving life expectancy and health, the level of education, and participation in cultural and leisure activities.’ This example helps us to understand the great economic interest that there is, from the liberal point of view (as Mandeville was the first to point out, early in the eighteenth century), in maintaining a high crime rate. Not only is the practice of crime in general highly productive (burning a few thousand cars a year, for example, only requires a very small material and human input, incomparable with the profits it brings the automobile manufacturers). It also requires no particular investment in education (except, perhaps, in the case of computer crime), with the result that the contribution of crime to growth in GDP is immediately profitable, even if it starts very young ( in this career there is no legal limit to child’s work). Naturally, to the extent that this practice is very little appreciated by the popular classes , on the egoistic pretext that they are the first victims, it is indispensable to improve its image, setting up a whole industry of apology or even political legitimization. This work is usually entrusted to rappers, ‘citizen’ film-makers and the useful idiots of state sociology. . .
On March 18 1968, a few weeks before his assassination, Robert Kennedy gave the following address at the University of Kansas:
Our
Gross National Product . . .counts air pollution and cigarette advertising, and
ambulances to clear our highways of carnage. It counts special locks for our
doors and the jails for the people who break them. It counts the destruction of
the redwood and the loss of our natural wonder in chaotic sprawl. It counts
napalm and counts nuclear warheads and armored cars for the police to fight the
riots inner cities. It count’s Whitman’s rifle and Speck’s knife. And the
television programs which glorify violence in order to sell toys to children.
Yet the Gross National Product does not allow for the health of or children, the
quality of their education or the joy of their play. It does not include the
beauty of our poetry or the strength of our marriages, the intelligence of our
public debate or the integrity of our public officials. It measures neither our
wit or our courage, neither or wisdom nor our learning, neither our compassion
nor our devotion to our country, it measures everything in short, except that
which makes life worthwhile.
Forty years later, it would certainly be extremely hard to find a representative of the left or far-left in France able to formulate such a radical critique of the ideology of Growth. . . .
In a letter to Humphrey House of 11 April 1940, George Orwell summed up his position on socialism in the following words:
The English intelligentsia . . . have become infected with the inherently mechanistic Marxist notion that if you make the necessary technical advance the moral advance will follow of itself. I have never accepted this . . . A year ago I was in the Atlas mountains, and looking at the Berber villagers there, it struck me that we were, perhaps, 1,000 years ahead of these people, but no better than they, perhaps on balance rather worse. We are physically inferior to them, for instance, and manifestly less happy. All we have done is advance to a point at which we could make a real improvement in human life, but we shan’t do it without the recognition that common decency is necessary. My chief hope for the future is that the common people have never parted company with their moral code.
The ‘conservative’ dimension of Orwell’s socialism is immediately clear here.* Its essential principle is less nostalgia for a vanished world than a determined opposition to the moral pessimism of the Moderns. It is this constant refusal to drown the ‘common people’ in the icy waters of egoistic calculation that enabled Orwell to criticize simultaneously both liberalism and totalitarianism. It has not been sufficiently indicated, from this perspective, that the rival ideologies both base themselves on the same negative view of man, forged as we have seen in the conditions of seventeenth century Europe. It is only by reference to this common starting-point that it is philosophically possible to grasp their actual differences. From the moment it is postulated that people are moved only by ‘love of themselves and unconcern for others,** there can be only in fact two coherent solutions to the modern political problem. Either one decides to accept ‘men as they are’, and must then resign oneself to playing to their egotism to construct the realm of lesser evil. Or else on maintains the project of a realm of the good (in other words, the utopia of the perfect world), but its triumphant advent is necessarily subordinated to the fabrication of a new man. If the Orwellian idea of a decent society escapes these contradictions, it is because it is rooted, on the contrary, in a far more nuanced and clearly more realistic understanding of people.
The work of self-institution required by such a decent society implies, in fact, continuous support from moral possibilities that already exist, possibilities that the first task is to radicalize, internalize and universalize, rather than eliminate in the name of a ‘progressive’ battle against all figures of tradition, held to be equally repressive. It is only on this ‘conservative’ condition that the different inventions of the human mind (above all, the conquests of science and technology) can receive a human meaning and possibly contribute, within appropriate limits, to the real appropriation of collective existence . . .
* As is well known, Orwell some times presented himself as a ‘Tory anarchist’ in order to provoke the bashful left intelligentsia. The same attitude can be found in Paul Goodman, and important figure in the American anarchist movement, and one of the founders of the homosexual rights movement, when he defined himself as a ‘Neolithic conservative.’ He also wrote: ‘As a conservative anarchist, I believe that to seek Power is otiose . . .; I am eager to sign off as soon as conditions ae tolerable, so people can go back to the things that matter, their professions, sports, and friendships. Naturally, politics should not be for me’.- New Reformation: Notes of a Neolithic Conservative (New York: Vintage Books, 1971, p. 202. Orwell would have subscribed to these lines without hesitation.
** “We are not angered against men by seeing their hardness, ingratitude, injustice, pride, love of themselves and unconcern for others: they are made that way, it is their nature.’ (La Bruyere, Les Caracheres, “De l’homme).
Forty years later, it would certainly be extremely hard to find a representative of the left or far-left in France able to formulate such a radical critique of the ideology of Growth. . . .
In a letter to Humphrey House of 11 April 1940, George Orwell summed up his position on socialism in the following words:
The English intelligentsia . . . have become infected with the inherently mechanistic Marxist notion that if you make the necessary technical advance the moral advance will follow of itself. I have never accepted this . . . A year ago I was in the Atlas mountains, and looking at the Berber villagers there, it struck me that we were, perhaps, 1,000 years ahead of these people, but no better than they, perhaps on balance rather worse. We are physically inferior to them, for instance, and manifestly less happy. All we have done is advance to a point at which we could make a real improvement in human life, but we shan’t do it without the recognition that common decency is necessary. My chief hope for the future is that the common people have never parted company with their moral code.
The ‘conservative’ dimension of Orwell’s socialism is immediately clear here.* Its essential principle is less nostalgia for a vanished world than a determined opposition to the moral pessimism of the Moderns. It is this constant refusal to drown the ‘common people’ in the icy waters of egoistic calculation that enabled Orwell to criticize simultaneously both liberalism and totalitarianism. It has not been sufficiently indicated, from this perspective, that the rival ideologies both base themselves on the same negative view of man, forged as we have seen in the conditions of seventeenth century Europe. It is only by reference to this common starting-point that it is philosophically possible to grasp their actual differences. From the moment it is postulated that people are moved only by ‘love of themselves and unconcern for others,** there can be only in fact two coherent solutions to the modern political problem. Either one decides to accept ‘men as they are’, and must then resign oneself to playing to their egotism to construct the realm of lesser evil. Or else on maintains the project of a realm of the good (in other words, the utopia of the perfect world), but its triumphant advent is necessarily subordinated to the fabrication of a new man. If the Orwellian idea of a decent society escapes these contradictions, it is because it is rooted, on the contrary, in a far more nuanced and clearly more realistic understanding of people.
The work of self-institution required by such a decent society implies, in fact, continuous support from moral possibilities that already exist, possibilities that the first task is to radicalize, internalize and universalize, rather than eliminate in the name of a ‘progressive’ battle against all figures of tradition, held to be equally repressive. It is only on this ‘conservative’ condition that the different inventions of the human mind (above all, the conquests of science and technology) can receive a human meaning and possibly contribute, within appropriate limits, to the real appropriation of collective existence . . .
* As is well known, Orwell some times presented himself as a ‘Tory anarchist’ in order to provoke the bashful left intelligentsia. The same attitude can be found in Paul Goodman, and important figure in the American anarchist movement, and one of the founders of the homosexual rights movement, when he defined himself as a ‘Neolithic conservative.’ He also wrote: ‘As a conservative anarchist, I believe that to seek Power is otiose . . .; I am eager to sign off as soon as conditions ae tolerable, so people can go back to the things that matter, their professions, sports, and friendships. Naturally, politics should not be for me’.- New Reformation: Notes of a Neolithic Conservative (New York: Vintage Books, 1971, p. 202. Orwell would have subscribed to these lines without hesitation.
** “We are not angered against men by seeing their hardness, ingratitude, injustice, pride, love of themselves and unconcern for others: they are made that way, it is their nature.’ (La Bruyere, Les Caracheres, “De l’homme).
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