Robert Kurz
A nightmare of freedom
As you know the concepts of freedom and equality are the central slogan of the Enlightenment. Of these ideals, however, liberalism was not the only one to grab it. Paradoxically, in Marxism and anarchism play a role as big as ... And also for the contemporary social movements, they have a high ideological value.
The left looks at the idols of freedom and equality as the rabbit watch the snake. To avoid being blinded by the splendor of these idols is recommended to search for their social foundations. Marx [1818-83] of these foundations has already exposed more than one hundred years. This is the sphere of the market, movement of the capitalist, the exchange of goods, sale of Universal.
In this sphere dominated a very specific kind of freedom and equality, which refers only to sell what you want - assuming that there is a buyer - and buy what you want - assuming you can pay.
Only in this sense is also present equality, ie equality of the holders of goods and money. In this equality no matter the amount, but the shape social policy. For "cent" buy is not the same as for the dollar, but is the same whether it is "cent" or the dollar: in terms of quality predominates Equality form of money. When buying and selling do not have masters and slaves, order and obedience, but only people free and equal in rights. It 'the same if you are man, woman or child, is the same whether you are white, black or yellow: the customer is welcome in all circumstances. The sphere of commodity exchange is the sphere of mutual respect. Where is the interchange of goods and money you do not have violence. The middle class is always smiling the smile of a salesman.
The sarcasm of Marx refers to the fact that this sphere of the market is only a small piece of modern social life. The exchange of goods or the movement to have assumed a very different sphere, that of capitalist production, the functional area of \u200b\u200bbusiness or the economy of the "abstract labor" (Marx). Here are worth far more different from the movement of goods, hence the smile freezes in the clerk's cynical view of the coordinator of the slaves or prison guard.
In the work, so already wrote the young Marx, the worker "does not feel close to her but out of his mind." Freedom in the production of goods is so small that it can not determine the content, meaning and purpose of what is produced. Even the owners of capital and entrepreneurs have this freedom, since they are under the pressure of competition. From full production following the principles of order and obedience.
Where the system of enterprise economy is particularly "efficient", male and female workers can not even go to urinate with autonomy. This severity productive, as is known, gained unprecedented size in neoliberalism. Apparently only the freedom of movement and equality, on the one hand, and the dictatorship of the production, on the other, contradict each other.
From a purely formal, male and female workers are non-free production because prior to their freedom in the market as commodity owners sell their labor force. Of course, this freedom to sell their workforce is due to coercion, that is not a freedom: the modernization generates these historical conditions in which you have no chance to preserve one's life.
E 'manpower necessary to buy and use it for its own sake of the enhancement of the capital or sell their labor and let this be used for its own sake. When there were still independent producers (farmers and craftsmen), there was a universal market, the majority of social relations took place in other forms. The ascension of the universal market was accompanied by the decline of independent producers. Only with the labor market, ie, only when the human work force took the form of goods, including all other goods were traded as commodities.
Thus the scope of freedom and equality so as there is general because the sphere of non-freedom is constituted in the production. And 'why the universal freedom is also achieved in the form of universal competition.
This problem extends to the field of personal playlist or private, where the goods are consumed and the intimate social relationships are confined to their place. Here you have a lot of activities and stages of life that does not reduce the production of goods (household, child rearing, "love" etc.). In
modernization process, the responsibility for these issues was imposed on the material plane, on the socio-psychological and the symbolic and cultural, women, and as a result of this reason they were socially disvalorizzate: These are moments of social life that are not "worthy of money," ie, they are second-class or lower value in the sense of appreciation of capital. This "split" (Roswitha Scholz) is not restricted to a defined secondary sphere: it goes through the whole process of social life.
Then, in the production of goods, women are generally more poorly paid and it is relatively rare they get to positions of leadership. Predominates in personal relationships a certain code of equality for women that involves a relationship of dependency structure, the same if it is sometimes broken or changed in post-modernity. Similarly, the non-white and non-Western humanity is left to a structural subordination, racist already formulated in the Enlightenment.
only and exclusively in the sphere of circulation, the market, all the reports of their "dominion over" seem extinct. This hypocritical sphere of freedom and equality is not, however, only in structures of dependency in a more direct, it is as simply as a means for end in itself, the exploitation of capital. Since the market does not favor universal, contrary to the exchange between independent producers, the mutual satisfaction of needs, but is only an aggregate or a stage of transition of the capital itself
the contrary, it is only a stage of aggregation or a period of transition own capital. In selling the abstract value is "realized" as money, and this is exactly the function of the exchange apparently free. The original money-capital, which is transformed into commodities by means of production, returns to his form of money multiplied by the profit. And 'what is manifested in the character of capital as an end to itself, that is, make money by earning more money at such "abstract wealth" (Marx) in an infinite progress.
Therefore, when making their freedom and equality in the sphere of circulation, people do nothing but make the 'self-medication "of capital, ie, make that the added-value product or profit are nothing more than a gear for the end of the "realization" of capital. Every act of freedom must make a kind of pumping operation to lead the state capital in aggregate "goods" to the state of aggregation "money." The modern bourgeois freedom
therefore has a unique character: is identical to a higher form, abstract and anonymous servitude. The social emancipation should be free of this kind of freedom, instead of "make it". Things are no better with the concept of equality, which implies clearly a threat to squeeze people in one and the same shape.
The modernization has pushed humanity, so to speak, in a uniform homogeneous subject of money. But hiding a background of structural dependencies. In reality, the needs, tastes and cultural interests and personal goals of individuals are never "equal", they were only subjected to equality of the commodity form. Consequently, as Adorno said [ 1903-1969], emancipation would be "uneven in peace."
Enlightenment, equality received his false olympians using a trick of prestige of the bourgeois ideologists. The meaning of the concept of inequality has been displaced by sheer diversity of individuals to the subordination of one individual to another. What is itself an expression of mere individual peculiarities, ie inequality, suddenly appears as an expression of dependence. And vice versa: what is in itself an expression of coercion uniform, that is, equality, suddenly appears as an expression of liberation from dependence. We are dealing here, in the ideology modern, with a typical case of Orwellian language.
In fact, the inequality has nothing to do with the domain, and equality has nothing to do with self-determination. It 's the opposite: the equality of its modernity is a relation of domination. The result is a standing contradiction of modern ideology. On the one hand, the sphere of circulation is separated from the whole context of capitalist reproduction and a high ideal. Second, the dictatorship in the actual production and structural disvalorizzazione women are declared as "objective law of nature" intransgredibile. Incessantly look is necessarily played against the other, and it is precisely for this reason that is consolidated in the heads of social relations. Freedom and equality are exactly what Adorno design context of blindness. " The left
inherited blindness with this conceptual apparatus of the Enlightenment. Especially the utopians, social democrats and libertarians, anarchists and dissidents in the countries of state socialism, again appealed to the ideas of freedom and equality, without recognizing that these are limited to the sphere of circulation and unaware of the connection between internal freedom and unfreedom existing in modern times. Today
social criticism seems to fall more than ever in the ideals circulation, which depends on the structural causes: the global crisis caused by the Third Industrial Revolution eject a number each time more people from the real production, forcibly converting them into agents of the movement. How cheap service providers of all kinds, as vendors, street merchants and beggars to how they live now in a paradoxical way the sphere of freedom and equality as the game of a minor job; the dictatorship of the production extends to activities of increasing circulation, up to a poverty entrepreneurship.
Freedom and unfreedom in the near match, but the paradox is ideologically the more assimilated in terms of the ideals of the movement.
To the extent that more and more in the movement of individuals to adapt to themselves as bourgeois and petty-traders as their "human capital", the utopianism of the exchange of goods returned, after the end of socialism in the work, in a neopiccolo-class version. In a society where everyone wants a permanent place for everything and where all social relations are dissolved in a universal bazaar, the growing crisis phenomena are perceived by the crosslinking of life lived in the circulation
compulsive So frankly, a ' intelligentsia vendors themselves interpret the problems arising from third industrial revolution in the form of reports of the movement: "An owner of goods meets the other." The same excess of the production is designed in accordance to categories from "perpetual exchange."
Individuals, whose constitution is not thought critically and are apparently independent of each other "in the sphere of circulation, shall report his" please "and" show goodwill ", rather than compete, all as if the problem was not in the plane of the mode of production and social life, but in terms of a "disease" represented in individual terms, which could be "cured" with educational and therapeutic methods.
The sellers of fake smile is a stylized idealization of reciprocity friendly, no longer characterized by competition, as if it were feasible social transformation staying away from a substantial production and life, and just running utopian constructs relating to the conduct staff, who all have their roots in the realm of the idealized movement - as the bourgeois utopians neopiccolo define themselves as "doctors to the bed joint of the subject."
extent in many countries, the ideology of the exchange is hardly anything more than hobby economy, where it was practiced on a large scale, as little time during the Argentine crisis, sank magnificently. Seems even more inadequate attempt to investigations supported ethnologist Marcel Mauss (1872 - 1950), especially in his main work, the "The Gift", the competition to save the "exchange perpetual" in the form of so-called archaic societies and turn it into an exchange of gifts, namely a kind of permanent Christmas.
This idea of \u200b\u200ba "gift economy" can not, by its nature, go beyond the immediate context of personal relationships, it ignores the scale of the social productive forces and social contexts of highly organized. It would be ridiculous if a person says to another: if I "gift" a kidney transplant, in turn, will "gift" a threshing machine, if you seem honest. The problem is not to show "good will" in a reciprocal manner and individual, but apply with respect, and not in destructive form, the social power (infrastructure, training systems and science, industrial production systems and intangible).
Utopias of the movement, by contrast, always seek a solution and primarily in terms of individual modes of behavior. This means stop the horse by the tail. Instead, through a social revolution of production and way of life, it would be unnecessary movement of goods and competition in markets associated with it, which requires the subject block the movement that makes the ontological claim of the exchange in purified form. The competition must be "moralized".
The social emancipation then appears as a mere consequence of a utopia of freedom and equality of
subject of movement, supposedly "made" in small groups. The issue of solidarity in social practice is converted into an ideological and pedagogical idealism liar, many times psychotherapy, which can be transformed simply in fear of kindness and mutual social control (for example in the form of religious sects). This neopiccolo bourgeois utopianism of human capital in circulation has condemned the sinking as much as all previous utopias.
translation by LPZ
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