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The Challenge of Anti-humanism Today by J.
Skolni
2007 Anne Jaclard’s development (News
&
Letters, June 2004) of the essay by
Raya
Dunayevskaya from the 1965 collection
Socialist
Humanism raises some very important
points
about humanism today, a still maligned
and
much misunderstood concept. I agree
wholeheartedly
with her judgment about the urgent
need to
proceed anew to concrete truths in
order
to meet today’s theoretical and practical
challenges. I also agree that this
task requires
concretizing an alternative to capitalism
as best we can, as even the possibility
of
social revolution scarcely registers
in most
Left perspectives. This type of concretization
would go a long way in the theoretical
battle
against anti-humanism, an enduring
phenomenon
that continues to pull people away
from Marx’s
humanism. The lack of a clear distinction
from bourgeois humanism has given anti-humanists
a new lease on life at time when a
willful
disregard of the rigor of thinking
an idea
to its conclusion prevails.
THE POLITICS OF ANTI-HUMANISM Some
of the
fiercest attacks on humanism come not
from
the religious fundamentalist Right
that wants
to subsume humanity and the individual
beneath
its deity and personal crusades, but
also
from the Left that shuns humanism by
reducing
the human subject to a mere juridical
or
discursive illusion of bourgeois institutions
or ideology, leaving only bodies and
power.
It is thus easy for some on the Left
to find
commonality with various strains of
philosophy
overtly or covertly associated with
National
Socialism, as the German Right formulated
its own reactionary denunciation of
liberal
democracy, bourgeois humanism, individualism
and market society. These currently
fashionable
figures, such as Martin Heidegger,
Carl Schmitt,
Paul De Man and, to a lesser extent,
Ernst
Jünger, were the militarists and fundamentalists
of their time. Most of them were German
Catholics
who saw the irrational charismatic
warrior
hero as the only hope for the continuing
prominence of German blood and soil.
Some on the Left see the excavation
of such
ideas, most recently Schmitt’s, as
an aid
in their exposés of the vacuity of
liberalism
and capitalist ideology.(1) The controversy
between leftist and liberal responses
to
the NATO bombing of Serbia brings this
issue
to life, especially when the former
deride
the latter as "military humanists."
In the ideological morass after 1989,
it
is no wonder, then, that leftists can
find
some solace in Schmitt who once famously
remarked "whoever invokes ‘humanity’
lies."(2)
Due to their abstract refusal of this
society
based on a simple rejection of liberal
values,
sections of the Left and Right converge
on
what amounts to a ROMANTIC critique
of capitalism
with abstract appeals to non-alienated
forms
of life and "community",
whether
lost or not yet found. The irony is
that
the very Left which denounces the notion
of "human" as nothing more
than
a "Western Enlightenment"
construct
— a despotic universal abstraction
used to
justify imperialist war and to dehumanize
populations — holds up its own abstractions
such as difference, otherness and power,
which often remain ideological reflections
of our present stage of capitalism.
Today’s
ideology readily concludes that individual
human self-development is liberal mythology
and that history is an incoherent mess,
an
unintelligible series of events signifying
nothing.
This theoretical embrace of certain
right-wing,
anti-modern, and counter-enlightenment
ideas
seems to mirror the practical ambivalence
of other sections of the Left towards
the
reactionary anti-imperialism of groups
like
Al Qaeda, of certain stripes of religious
fundamentalism, and of an undifferentiated
Iraqi "resistance." All else
becomes
subsumed beneath the need to fight
Western
rationalism, just as with Western imperialism.
Such attitudes, which obscure the capitalist
mode of production as the determining
factor
of imperialism and its racist ideology,
have
become more pronounced in a unipolar
world
in which there are no state powers
left to
tail-end that are sufficiently strong
to
mount a challenge to U. S. dominance.
The difficulties of envisioning a different
future seem to end in either romanticism
or else tail-ending reactionary anti-imperialism.
What connects these baleful practical-theoretical
developments on the Left is a desperation
attributable to a conceptual deficiency
regarding
alternatives to capitalism, which leads
to
retreat or the fetishization of power
as
an end-in-itself.
The descent into pure power politics
illustrates
how urgently we need to concretize
the possibility
of alternatives to capitalism, towards
which
this year’s News and Letters class
series
provides the initial steps. The classes
illustrated
how the salient question we face is
not one
of POLITICAL power. Without concretizing
the ECONOMIC, as well as political
and human,
transformations, needed to ground a
truly
new human society whose "ruling
principle"
is "the full and free development
of
every individual," (Capital volume
I,
page 739), another world will remain
out
of reach.
LIBERALISM AND ITS DISCONTENTS Now
it is
true that liberal legal ideology and
bourgeois
humanism largely amount to a paper-thin
apology
for a most inhuman system, a system
in which
dead labor and the objective factors
of capitalist
production and reproduction rule over
the
subjective dimension, a world in which
things
have power over people. But many anti-humanists
on the Left fail to see this domination
of
OBJECT over SUBJECT, beginning in the
production
process, as the central contradiction
of
the system. Some view the effects of
this
inverted domination as universal. Many
see
the system as constructing the very
idea
of the subject, a concept they believe
to
be secreted by liberal ideology in
the first
place. It follows, for them, that the
way
out of subjection to capital is to
deny subjectivity,
even as they search everywhere for
sources
of resistance, if not agency.
Yet even chemical compounds are agents
and
every material body provides physical
resistance.
What makes us human, what makes us
subject,
is not our sensuous substantial dimension
but our cognitive subjective dimension.
The
retreat from our full living subjectivity
not only marks a withdrawal from history
and from the need to think concretely
through
the idea of revolution from the objectivity
of where we are today. It also marks
an inability
to face adequately the ideology of
economists
and pundits who depict capitalism as
promoting
freedom, democracy and human creativity,
by denying these as goals for liberation
movements. This indicates a profound
crisis
in thought.
Moreover, the legacy of Althusser remains
with us via Foucault and others, who
take
up Schmitt, such as Giorgio Agamben,
Chantal
Mouffe, and Ernesto Laclau. This milieu
associates
humanism with, at best, social democratic
and reformist tendencies such as the
one
represented by Jürgen Habermas’ call
for
the global rule of law and a new normative
foundation for a cosmopolitan society
of
world citizens. They think it radical
simply
to expose the naked power relations
behind
such appeals to universal norms. But
by focusing
exclusively on politics and severing
its
links to economics, these critics reproduce
implicitly the same separation of social
interaction and labor which explicitly
grounds
Habermas’ legalistic approach.(3) Thereby
both sides eliminate the potential
for systemic
change.
Neither camp grasps the root determining
factor: the mode of labor. The connections
that Marx drew between alienated social
relations
and alienated labor fall away. The
liberal
ideals that Habermas sees violated
by the
colonization of society by instrumental
reason
are simply projections of the abstract
equality
of commodity production. That is why
his
project remains as impossible a bourgeois
utopia as Proudhon’s, only less sophisticated
economically. Similarly, by denying
the liberating
capacities of human reason, his various
critics
reduce people to particulars incapable
of
fundamental social change or to objects
incapable
of freedom.
We must project a revolutionary humanist
rejection of both sides of this debate.
Its
premise, however covert, is the supposed
death of the revolutionary SUBJECTS
capable
of emancipating this society. On such
a dogmatic
basis, the remaining possibilities
are either
institutional reform or endless (pointless?)
struggles over power, never mind that
believing
that power arises from political domination
will leave revolutionaries apt to think
that,
after the revolution, they will have
"captured"
power when capital may still dominate.
This interminable debate over humanism
and
reason rarely leaves the surface of
civil
society, the realm of exchange, "Freedom,
Equality, Property and Bentham"
(CAPITAL I, 280). In contrast to the
needed
dialectical reasoning, such first negations
remain at the level of the object they
critique
— capitalism. An adequate solution
must begin
by moving beyond the legal realm of
Habermas
AND the realm of politics advocated
by his
many critics to the mode of production
itself.
None of these antagonists address the
kind
of abstract alienated labor we perform
that
produces the autonomized value (i.
e. capital)
that dominates us. There is today such
a
separation of economics and politics
that
most who have rejected economic determinism
do so to the point of rejecting economics
as an explanation for almost anything,
opposition
to the immediately perceived injustices
of
"the market" notwithstanding.
While it is not surprising that Left
academics
who have given up on revolution would
be
attracted to such ideas, particularly
disturbing
is the perspective of some independent
left
activist-intellectuals, self-described
anti-vanguardists,
who consider their position Marxist,
but
who also incorporate the views of those
like
Schmitt because of their attack on
bourgeois
humanism. This sentiment is shared
by the
many who post to the autonomist Marxist
email
discussion list "aut-op-sy."
Largely
this myopia is a poor excuse for not
fully
acknowledging or accepting Marx’s humanism,
and by extension the totality and specificity
of his critique of capitalism. Some
raised
on vanguardist politics, who have perhaps
broken politically with their pasts,
have
not rethought their philosophical views
and
find in these rightwing perspectives
on liberalism
a justification for their deep-seeded
anti-humanism.
Today's struggle over Marx’s humanism
involves
sharpening our differences with the
ANTI-Stalinist
Left. Even in its anti-authoritarian
guise,
this DISTORTION of the specificity
of Marx’s
work sets back its development, producing
a situation not all that different
from the
history of Stalinist distortions, perhaps
all the more sinister for its veneer
of openness.
In what amounts to a pragmatic tactical
alliance,
which presupposes a separation of theory
and practice, they claim that they
can agree
with the philosophies of Nietzsche,
Heidegger
or Schmitt, while opposing their reactionary
politics. However, if they were to
develop
these lines of thought more deeply
they would
eventually hit their inherent limits.
These
contradictions are only ignored or
left implicit
due to the paucity of theoretical reasoning
on the Left today. Dogmatism, as Jaclard
rightly points out, "cuts off
the dialectic
in thought" and in act. By following
these ideas to their end they would
sooner
or later find their positions transformed
into their opposite.
It is not that these leftists have
acquiesced
to fascism, but the excessive focus
on liberal
ideas without addressing their connection
to the economic substratum amounts
to an
admission that they have nothing to
offer
in the way of an alternative, just
abstract
negation. It is not a matter of will
or intent.
"Ideas," as Dunayevskaya
maintains,
"‘think,’ not sequentially, but
CONsequentially,
related to other Ideas that emerge
out of
HISTORIC ground, and do not care where
all
this might lead to, including transformation
into opposite" (The Power of Negativity,
p. 310).
The old German Right knew VERY WELL
the force
of ideas and saw their philosophy and
politics
as forming a single integral whole.
They
knew very well the significance of
the words
they chose and the consequences of
the arguments
they made.(4) Similarly, neo-conservatives’
influence today, according to one bourgeois
observer, "comes not from their
position
at the apex of the administration,
but the
power of their ideas, which offered
an explanation
for September 11 and a bold prospectus
for
the future."(5) We would do best
to
take this commitment to ideas just
as seriously
as the Right, and to be more militant
in
our embrace of a philosophy of liberation
that is inseparable from our politics
and
our organization.
UNITY OF ECONOMICS AND POLITICS Recreating
Marx’s philosophy of revolution today
involves
meeting the struggles of human subjects,
which themselves embody reason, yet
continue
to hit the wall of the capitalist world
system.
For this an anti-humanist rejection
of liberalism
and a one-sided critique of modernity
will
not do. Today’s attacks on Marx, on
reason,
on humanism, on the idea of freedom
and the
possibility of revolution, and on the
self-development
of the masses to each person are all
connected,
whether they come from the Right or
the Left.
They pose a great danger and remain
the legacy
of the dissolution of Marxism after
1989.
There is a path along which the tired
controversy
over humanism and the battles in the
realms
of politics and law become footnotes
to larger
questions confronting us. Marx and
Marxist-Humanism
must become a pole of attraction for
those
looking for something entirely new.
Only the two-way dialectical movement
from
practice and from theory can break
through
the false universalism and one-sided
individuality
of bourgeois law, and the POWER the
ECONOMIC
system has over us.
How can we step up to this challenge
posed
to creative cognition? We must first
recognize
that a successful revolution will not
only
depend on the right political decisions,
articulating desires, or different
institutional
arrangements. All of these changes
must be
grounded in SOMETHING ELSE. Only the
transformation
of the economic relations of production
will
guard against the pull back to capitalism
and guarantee that alterations in the
modes
of exchange and distribution — not
to mention
changes in culture, consciousness,
justice,
etc. — can be maintained. What happens
after
remains our most important theoretical
task
— can we answer it? We can begin only
by
grounding our reappropriation of Marx's
Marxism
in his critique of political economy.
Only
in this way can we begin to concretize
a
society freed from the power of capital,
what Marx called communism, or real
humanism.
NOTES It is perhaps not at all surprising
to find similar flirtations by some
on the
German and French Lefts in the 1920s
and
'30s. See Richard Wolin, Seduction
of Unreason
—
(Princeton University Press, 2004)
— for
a discussion of the allure that right-wing
thought had for some Leftists during
the
period of fascist ascendancy in Europe.
See
Carl Schmitt's The Concept of the Political
— (University of Chicago Press: 1996).
The
context of this statement was the banning
of war and the depoliticization and
false
neutralization of just wars by the
League
of Nations, which purported to represent
the interests of universal humanity.
See,
among other works, Habermas' The Theory
of
Communicative Action — 2 volumes (Beacon
Press, 1985). See Johannes Fritsche's
Historical
Destiny and National Socialism in Heidegger's
Being and Time — University of California
Press (Berkeley: 1999) — for a philological
investigation of Heidegger and his
relation
to German politics. See Mark Leonard's
"The
U. S. Goes Home: Will Europe Regret
It?",
page W2 in Financial Times (June 26/27,
2004).
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