The future is inestimable. After the obvious failure of the Marxist telos and liberal capitalist ‘end of history’; and the persistence of imperialism, war and the rising new authoritarianisms across the globe, this should be obvious. Society runs on the significations it produces and the imaginary that those significations become embedded in.
Marxism and Communism were capitalist countercultures; this view is explicitly taken up by two of the most interesting figures to come from the extreme left of the Socialist movement, Jacques Camatte and Cornelius Castoriadis.
The idea of overcoming capitalism by using its presuppositions or on the basis of how it has changed the planet (industrialisation, centralisation, etc.) or that Communism is immanent but a prisoner of capitalism cannot be squared with history. Historical materialism often appears as a backwardly constructed functionalism, especially when its adherents have been hard pressed to make a single correct prediction based on its suppositions.
In this essay I wish to explore the idea of leaving Capitalism in distinction to passing through or overcoming it (as per the classical conceptions of socialism) in the aforementioned writers work.
“Each society creates its own forms. These forms in turn bring into being a world in which this society inscribes itself and gives itself a place. It is by means of them that society constitutes a series of norms, institutions in the broadest sense of the term, values, orientations and goals” Castoriadis, The Greek and the Modern Political Imaginary.
For Castoriadis, each type of society is constructed around a sui genesis series of social imaginary significations which congeal into the social imaginary of that society. Historically ideas and concepts have been transmitted from other eras and societies through historical rediscovery and inter-societal interactions, but more often than not these transpositions have been anaclitic, that is to say there is a leaning on relationship where elements are taken on but meaning is furnished anew.
From his essay ‘Marxism and Revolutionary Theory’ (1961-65) onwards Castoriadis considers Marxism irreconcilably split between a historical struggle for human autonomy against alienating and exploitative social systems, as best exemplified in Marx’s short historical masterpiece The Civil War in France, and a positivistic notion of historical progress based around the idea that development of the productive forces as an ultimate good and the Base/Superstructure conceptualisation of creation in the socio-historical. The latter was developed as an inescapable schema in which the human element was almost completely smothered, and projected back through history. In short, Marxism is imbued, root and branch, with the capitalist imaginary.
“From the outset, and sometimes also later on, Marx was inspired by the best in this historical creation. From the outset too, however, he displayed the rationalistic,scientistic, theoreticist tendency that rapidly gained the upper hand and practically crushed the other one. This second tendency induced him to seek an overall and complete explanation of society and of history, to believe that he had discovered it in the “determining” role of production, and, finally, to erect the “development” of production into the universal key for the comprehension of history and the Archimedean point for the transformation of society. Marx was thereby led, in fact-and regardless of what at times he might have continued to think and to say—to narrow down greatly the field of the movement’s preoccupations and aims; to concentrate completely on questions of production, economy, and “classes” (defined on the basis of production and economy); and, quite naturally, to ignore or to play down all the rest, saying or implying that the solution to all other problems would arrive as part of the bargain when the capitalists were expropriated. The political question in the broad sense (the question of the overall institution of society) and the political question in the narrow sense—power, its nature, how it is organized, the possibility of the collectivity effectively exercising it, and the problems this exercise of power raises—are ignored or, at best, envisaged as corollaries that will be established as soon as the main theorem is demonstrated in the practice of revolution.” Castoriadis, ‘Socialism and the Autonomous Society’.
Every civilisation has its rendezvous with a Godhead, whether totemic father or cultural constant. For Castoriadis, Capitalism – the first social system in which the economy takes the predominant role is – despite the persistence of traditional ideology of different kinds – the quest for ever increasing outputs/profits for fewer inputs/investment is part of a wider drive for ‘rational mastery’. One can see this throughout the classical period of capitalism, the statist/corporatist model of the Cold War and the current neoliberal/austerity turn. This key signification of Modernity permeates our world – in the way we conceptualise the physical world as science, the raising of children, our interactions with each other and the way we assign value to all phenomena –it is how nature becomes ‘natural resources’ and how creativity is judged as worthwhile or not.
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Camatte thinks that the logic of capitalism has taken over the movements that stood for its abolition, from Against Domestication:
“All the movements of the left and right are functionally the same in as much as they all participate in a larger, more general movement towards the destruction of the human species. Whether people stay confined within certain obsolete strategies and forms, or whether they submit to the mechanisms of technology -either way the result is the same. Historically, the categories of left and right seem to emerge as a duality at the beginning elf the nineteenth century when the capitalist mode of production was beginning to exert its real domination over the process of production, and was becoming a true social force. Thus certain people like Carlyle found themselves in opposition to the apologists of capital, but it was left to Marx to go further: he affirmed the necessity of developing productive forces (and therefore science and technology as well), and at the same time denounced their negative effects on people in the immediate situation. But he thought that all this would eventually lead to a contradiction such that the development of productive forces would no longer be possible without the destruction of the capitalist mode of production. Thereafter these forces would be directed by people themselves, and alienation would cease to exist. But this was to presuppose that capital would not be able to become truly autonomous, that it could not escape from the constraints of the social and economic base on which it is built: the law of value, the exchange of capital and labour power, the rigorous general equivalent (gold), and so on.”
It is rather a strange hypothesis in which the laws that Marx saw underpinning capitalism have ceased to be valid but while the formal categorisation of forms of society in the historical materialist framework (modes of production) remains unchallenged. One would think that the failure of the content of the theory would result in a revision of categories.
Instead, perhaps we should say that power (class power, power of men over women and families, the power of ideological authority, and counter-power) exists and operates through the culture we live in, through certain significations written anew by human action, the anonymous collectivity of humanity. (Nitzan and Bichler’s Capital as Power project is probably in the most thorough attempt to think through the idea of a post-Marxist anti-capitalist theory of the global economy, and thinking about their work could useful for the idea of leaving capital).
Camatte continues:
“Revolution can no longer be taken to mean just the destruction of all that is old and conservative, because capital has accomplished this itself. Rather, it will appear as a return to something (a revolution in the mathematical sense of the term), a return to community, though not in any form which has existed previously. Revolution will make itself felt in the destruction of all that which is most “modern” and “progressive” (because science is capital). Another of its manifestations will involve the reappropriation of all those aspects and qualities of life which have still managed to affirm that which is human. In attempting to grasp what this tendency means, we cannot be aided by any of the old dualistic,manichean categories. (It is the same tendency which in the past had held back the valorization process in its movement towards a situation of complete autonomy.) If the triumph of communism is to bring about the creation of humanity, then it requires that this creation be possible, it must be a desire which has been there all the time, for centuries.”
For Camatte, capital has become autonomous and its one-time gravedigger has now become fully integrated into its system. The ‘mode of production’ has domesticated the dominated subject. The system runs on its own logic and if human beings are able to escape it then the answer is a fundamental break and a return to a human community.
Would this human community be an outgrowth of our non-alienated species-being? Marx’s labour-centric vision of man suggests so but every society creates its own image of humanity, and Marx’s idea of man was extrapolated from the society he lived in. Camatte’s idea of man’s nature perverted by class rule is an untenable continuation of Marx’s idea, where could man draw this perversion from? The desire to return is dangerous, there is no lucidity in an imagined returned to a situation we have no consciousness of, and lucidity is certainly necessary for consciously transforming society.
Castoriadis’s position is far more tenable than Camatte’s whose extreme reification of the ‘capitalist mode of production’ (CMP) cannot account for the continued functioning of society – creative interaction is needed for that – and any idea of a human community needs furnishing with meaning itself, it does not lie outside of history or as an outgrowth of biology/psychology. In the process of assigning meaning, the presence of possibility for the provision of the most basic biological necessities aside, there is nothing intrinsically human about human societies that are not the creation of the human imagination through sublimation. The assigning of meaning is our own act, the question becomes whether is it done in heteronomy or autonomy.
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In the final sentence quoted Camatte talks of Communism, let us take a short diversion.
The socialist movement, in the broadest sense, up to and including the Second International, for all its flaws, was at least was endowed with a socialist social imaginary that was plausible and foundational to its political aesthetic. Charles Fourier’s phalanstère was intended to be a social environment where the interplay of human passions, harmonious feeling and thought, could be reconciled to the benefit of the individual and collective. Imagining the merging of human labour and ‘non-productive’ human activity (play, sensual pleasure, etc.) on an egalitarian basis in line with the seasons, numerology and the empowerment of women was an audacious conceptualision of the end of poverty and hierarchy. The communities he inspired may have inevitably failed but he – like those he influenced – Breton, Benjamin, Marcuse and the Situationists amongst others – have provided much inspiration to the construction of visions beyond capitalism.
In William Morris’s News from Nowhere the future socialist order was craft orientated communism in medieval robe. In design and aesthetics nature was simply adorned with the beauty of handicraft folksiness. Egalitarianism had brought together physicality and mind in a valuable amalgamation. Outdoorsy men and self-possessed domestic women (his imagination sadly and strangely didn’t stretch to the end of the gendered division of labour) living in an idyll not quite rural or urban. The plentiful social product was plain and simple goods for the consumption of the classless population.
This ‘utopian’ content of the socialist imaginary was also important to the Second International. Marxism was ‘true’, Socialism as the inevitable progress in history, future communism was abundance provided by modern technique without the parasitical bourgeoisies. At first glance these things sit uneasily with what was the everyday work of the movement: struggles for suffrage, working class representation and improved wages and conditions. However, it surely functioned as a consolation for many socialist workers and party militants in the vicissitudes of their struggles. History was on their side, the science that powered production lines, steam trains and newly developed electrification infrastructure also guaranteed the programme of the party and the movement of history.
The new and importable technology that created the conditions for the rise of a working class in European Russia over the course of decade or so also gave rise to fantastical visions of a technologist communist utopia. The bestselling literature in the early RSFSR of which the earliest and best examples were Alexsandr Bogdanov’s Bolshevik Science-Fiction novels from the pre-revolutionary period.
Bogdanov’s two works of Socialist science fiction, Red Star (1908) and Engineer Menni (1912) sketch an idea of a future socialist society better than most, often criticised for being proto-Stalinist if anything their historically determinist narratives of large-scale industrial (if relatively pollution free) technologically advanced societies are straight from the imaginary of Second and Third International Marxism. Rationalisation based on capitalist principles (in Red Star computers work out and deliver statistics by the second) plus Marxist ideology makes a socialist state, Lenin would have surely added ’…and the rule of the Party of the Working Class’ and agreed.
Richard Gunn has written of how Utopian thought deals in space, whereas Apocalyptic thought deals in time. The original utopian fictions explored the topography of ideal-type societies, as Gunn calls them, by negotiating their terrain. Often this consists of little more that listing opulent constructions and the grand dedicatees of luminous towns, such as in Capanella’s ‘City of the Sun’, surely a foundational text of bourgeois ideology in its praise of empirical reason and the great minds of great men. Literary utopias often emerge at times of great change; an ideal-type society with two key concepts of 20th Century capitalism – computation and mechanised mass production – can be seen on Bogdanov’s Socialist Mars.
That imaginary has clearly failed, socialism is not inevitable and the idea of the continued expansion of the productive forces as the key driver of historical progress, whilst being clearly not tenable in itself, is not compatible with the continued existence of a habitable planet. Capitalism has not become a fetter on the development of the productive forces, quite the contrary (which is not the same thing as saying that there are not better things to allocate resources toward). So the socialist movement is left with no clear view of its mission, its aims and, therefore, a practice that breaks with past failures. The sects continue to run as theological operations dependent on hero worship of long dead figures and bad faith hermeneutics. The larger parties of the left long for an age of party-states and working class mono-culture that thankfully won’t be coming back.
We can observe two contradictory visions of Communism – capitalist abundance without class rule and a return to humanity with the end of alienating capitalist methods which both feature in Marx’s conception of communism – and putting aside the important question of whether communism is a psychically plausible idea (see the sub-chapter on ‘Communism in its Mythical Sense’ in The Imaginary Institution of Society) – we can see that Camatte has opted for an extreme version of the latter. It is to his credit, and places him far in advance of much of the revolutionary left these days, that he sees capitalist technology as being not value neutral but part of the synergy of relations of domination.
If not ‘material’ progress, where can we the find the resources to change society? Camatte’s ‘This World We Must Leave’ has an interesting take on this question:
“Marx shows well that religion is a feeling (more than a consciousness) of something I call lost, but it is also the formation of another community. Now, it can be an alternative to capital, limited certainly, but operative. It is true that in accomplishing its different modernisations the church destroys itself, it tends to lose progressively the memory of what had been lost”
This amounts to creating a myth of consciousness itself, albeit it a relatively benign one. Camatte understands that leaving capital involves a fundamental break with both the reification of the world and the bureaucratic order that it entails but cannot break with the value-centric rationalisations of its self-image:
“We must abandon this world dominated by capital which has become a spectacle of beings and things…. One must reject the presuppositions of capital, which immerse in a distant past, to escape the grip of capital (moment of the dissolution of the primitive communities) and, simultaneously, one can supersede Marx’s work which is the finished expression of the arrival at totality, the accomplished structure of value, which, with its mutation of capital, has set itself up as the material community. One must envisage a new dynamic, for the capitalist mode of production will not disappear following a frontal struggle of people against their present domination, but by a huge renunciation which implies a rejection of a path used for millennia. The CMP does not decay but has a downfall” Camatte, This World We Must Leave.
But to found a new social order it is necessary to collectively create institutions, and a socialist (or autonomous) society this needs to be done autonomously, i.e. in a historically conscious way that acknowledges our needs, desires and limitations. As Johann Arnason has put it:
“The first step towards a restoration of the meaning of autonomy is a kind of demythologization: a retreat from the phantasms of absolute abundance and unlimited control over nature. These phantasms had, in a previous phase, counted for something in the attractivity of the socialist movement, but they were, on closer examination, extrapolations of the capitalist imaginary. They were, in other words, the principal reasons for describing classical Marxism as a capitalist counter-culture. A new commitment in favour of self-limitation was essential to the redressing of the revolutionary project. But this was only a prelude to a more positive reaffirmation of autonomy. This other part of the argument could begin with a new interpretation of the history of the working class, concentrated on the aspirations and episodes which had gone beyond the framework of capitalism.” Arnason, The Imaginary Dimensions of Modernity.
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Reading The Making of the English Working Class we can see that an entire socio-historical movement was born by the anonymous making/doing of many thousands of people – now this, plus the French tradition and the 1848 revolutions, etc – were of course extremely important to the development of the socialist movement and Marxism. The rise of an industrial working class in the context of ‘the development of the productive forces’ gave us Marxism in its highly determinant form that was part of the politics of all its major practitioners. We have seen recent struggles throw up some new ideas and some older methods – some literally ancient – popular assemblies, election and instant revocation of deputies, occupation of public spaces – here we are thinking of Occupy, the Indignados, the movements of the squares, small scale attempts at direct democratic administration of both services and struggle in the free Syria cities and Nuit Debout – we should not kid ourselves of the embryonic and possibly stalled nature of these attempts but they are real in a way the failed textbook theories of the old left aren’t. No attempt can be made to try to theorise a strategy for these movements, or a new making/doing outside of them. We can, however, continue to think about how a historical orientation could enrich struggles like them we might participate in and how possibly we avoid the old flawed methods of struggle based on a determinist and elitist conception of politics and historical change.
There is no question of a return to nature – if such a thing were attempted the institutions of that society would be no more ‘natural’ than any other – but the preservation of the natural world does need to be a key signification of any socialist order.
We must proceed with the least unconsciousness possible whilst being clear than there is no question of the elimination of the unconscious or that the representations the psyche brings forth, even in an autonomous society, will always be beneficial to society. However, it is possible to create social institutions that can help alleviate psychical suffering.
A new society would need a new imaginary and that has to be created consciously and collectively. We believe that creating a society based on human needs, the reduction of alienation and social suffering and instead a nurturing of the lucid and creative potentialities of humanity is possible. To move toward that we need to leave capital and consciously move to something else – this idea of exit has good significations – its stresses our need to act and that history is not on our side, it stresses that the social system we live in is not a station of the cross but a social world born of the anonymous collective of human beings acting, for the most part, in heteronomy. The question of human autonomy and its limits as discussed by Castoriadis and Arnason seems to me to be a fruitful first step for moving toward a society not born in closure.
by Joseph Aylmer
