1.1 The winner baffled
Never was there so late. With the collapse of socialism, its time dissolves and becomes history. The familiar constellation of the global society of the period after World War II crumbles before our eyes so incredibly sharp. This is the end of an era and yet a question arises spontaneously: at the end of which was? From the perspective of the conflict between West and East, gone into the background, it would seem at first glance that the West has triumphed and that the system has proved the best.
If the concept of conflict between systems was understood literally, then it can not be do more than take note of a social policy, economic theory and practice of colossal proportions that no one would ever have thought possible (and even less so in so short a time). "A specter is haunting staggering" (Süddeutsche Zeitung ). In the Soviet Union, but not only there, you go to the repudiation "of the idea of \u200b\u200bthe dictatorship of the proletariat" and the celebration of private property while it is being proclaimed the transition to a market economy in accordance with the principle of competition. Together with the central giant fell into the knee with the companies its suburbs, regions subject to it and its ideal standard-bearers. The Democratic Republic Germany has put an end to his day and even suicide in Hungary ", the capitalist becomes the positive figure." In Italy the Communist Party, whose passage into the ranks of social democracy, however, had already consumed a long time, ensures that "the hammer and sickle but with plenty of scrap iron," while the Italian intellectual class, with its challenge of Marxism, is making a " patricide disinterest. " Libya's Gaddafi "attempts a cautious move away from rigid socialism of the revolution." In Ethiopia, Mengistu "renunciation of Marxism," Mozambique, as well as Angola, turn their backs "impoverished Marxism" while the Hanoi government "Relies on John Maynard Keynes."
This anthology of quotations, drawn from publications since 1989, could easily continue ad libitum. It is no wonder then that more of an ideologue of the apparent victor in history has fallen prey to euphoria. In the summer of 1989 Francis Fukuyama, deputy director of the planning staff of the Ministry of Foreign Affairs United States, in an article in the quarterly The National Interest , decreed in such haste as the know-all "end of history, a ruling which, if disclosed was meteoric and since then is repeated ad nauseum. As if that were not enough Fukuyama's thesis was based on the Hegelian conception of a "final form of the rational society and the state" whose authentic, as individuals, their realization would be the American way of life . And the columnist of the 'International Herald Tribune Charles Krauthammer thought that was the answer, at least embarrassing, to the' Plato's question about the best form of government. "
Indeed it is virtually impossible to challenge the evidence of a victory on the Western world continue to be valid if the criteria of previous systemic and especially if a conflict appears metacritica even inconceivable. But this is precisely the dilemma. It is true that the West has acted in a conscious and self-conscious on that land now under the illusion of treading in triumph? Moreover, if the negative reaction of the Western left the tearful cries of jubilation official of the leaders of the market economy, is just a pity the gerontocracy ineligible for state-owned economy to Potjomkin treated as innocent victims of "arrogance and aggression Permanent imperialism "1, this means only that the exponents of this Left does not include any more reality and act as combatants of the Cold War, bruised and suffering from the ailments of old age, who suddenly feel rejuvenated as a but they do not know what to do with the bride had a gift. The spectral character of the forms of ideological reaction to the sight of the collapse of the East, coming both from the field of the left than the right, on the one hand refers to the fact that all these forms belong to an era now twilight, but on the other hand there you recognize, like lifting a veil, the singular lack of basic social processes of the subject. The actors in the global constellation
hitherto existing shed the mask - and not only on both banks of the Elbe -, evident in their pitiable condition of mere automata of a blind and objectified historical development that is behind them. This is precisely the reason for the loss of the West before the collapse of his sworn enemy, the system of socialism, and that is one with the shock of such a gerontocracy of socialism. A strange winner, stunned by his own superiority and the consequences of his victory. But it was not the work of Western political classes during the conflict to cause systemic collapse of socialism, but rather the dramatic failure of its internal functional mechanisms, then the inability to perceive this potential crisis and disaster by elites both political and economic spheres, which certainly does not lack the information, brings out the truth on both sides of the holders of power, at least outwardly, to be afflicted by the same form of blindness.
But if both factions are overwhelmed by the power of social processes similar to that of a natural phenomenon, then one could assume the existence of a common basis to both systems antagonists. E 'therefore possible that the land on which they have battled is now starting to falter. And in the middle-class journalism to the triumphant cries but a bit 'naive ideologues of immediacy, are already beginning to stir and cautionary voices doubtful: "It will be really the perfect society, forever destined to triumph over socialism? "(Dönhoff Gräfin, Die Zeit 22/09/1989). In all fairness the company of the Western system does not seem to have even the air. However, some bad feeling on the part of individuals who, despite everything, consider this system as their system and then they take the defense, could be interpreted as a self-indulgent to mitigate a bit 'deep satisfaction at the triumph.
Whatever the wisdom of moderation dripping the Western consciousness manifest in relation to their victory - and live only to prevent the unleashing of God's wrath in because of their hubris - it is rather to understand whether the particular crisis of the system loses, he represented only the beginning of a total crisis that could threaten the presumed winner, and that has its roots in the fundamentals common to both systems, if it were just these funds could provide a solid basis for a metacritica. Certainly, the bourgeois ideology of modernity has already produced long items such metacritica but was unable to penetrate the foundations of society that remain enigmatic. Since the early 50's theories of "convergence" in the West had predicted a realignment, for better or worse, of these forms of society, only in appearance, seemed to be mutually exclusive.
On the one hand the internal affinity was reduced to those on common assumptions of modern technology and natural sciences, especially by all those currents inspired by the cultural pessimism that charge the crises in the twentieth century the industrial base of society as such (see eg Freyer 1955) and admit a possibility, if anything, exceeded only by reference to a sale ontological irrepressible. Secondly the idea of \u200b\u200bconvergence is nourished by all the economic doctrines, impregnated with Keynes, who argued the absolute necessity an interpenetration of both market mechanisms as the state regulation: the East was to legitimize the role of the market and West should have done the same with the state. But this view is limited to enable the dualism that characterizes eclectic in many ways, the modern bourgeois consciousness theory: the relationship between market and state assumes the appearance of a conflict but indissoluble marriage between reality and its concept and the same is true for dyads as "individual" and "society", "production" and "circulation" or "economy" and "political" and so on. Again a historical element, specific companies is converted with a modern spirit conciliatory and moderate pessimism, in an ontological element.
However we have not seen or to assimilate a reconciliation between the market and the state nor a process of ontological transformation of industrial societies highly scientific, but only to a historic collapse. If this breakdown does not indicate the victory of the Western market system - which is designed as a training totally alien to socialism ignominiously departed - but it highlights a common basis to both systems, unsafe, and on Sunset Boulevard, then a that basis must be sought beyond the paradigm of industrial society and over the relationship between the market and the state. The market and the state, just as the agents of technology and science set in motion, obeying the logic of basic social deeper, identify it as the work company fails to appoint an absolutely fundamental ontological condition of humanity.
If the perplexity of the most thoughtful among the "winners" represent something much more self-criticism of a hypocritical the number one story after all very sure of himself, if indeed the same gradual maturing objectively a global crisis of such proportions as to justify much more seriously than you had anticipated the ominous portents of skeptical voices that call for caution, in that case this crisis should be located at that level on which you will find all the social systems of modernity yet known. The expression crisis of labor society in circulation for some time, while alluding to a particular problem so far, without reference to the basic forms of society, may have originated from the presentiment of this metacrisi developing.
1.2 abstract labor as a mechanism for its own sake
may seem all the more strange to talk of a crisis of society in the work, since, as bourgeois ideology, and Marxism the labor movement - and even greater extent - have always identified in the "work" the essence of supra-human, Marxism became what his eyes seemed to be a positive foundation in the universal core of his criticism of bourgeois society. The social and historical anatagonismo of modernity, which the Marxists conceived as class struggle was fought on the common ground of labor society, the limits of time and become visible in the final crisis is approaching.
work as such, defined in its arid abstraction, it is not in any way a supra-category. In its historic form it is nothing specifically that the use abstract and corporate human labor power and raw materials. In this sense it is specific to modernity and as such has become an unquestioned assumption in equal measure of both systems of post-war antagonists. Nevertheless, the work in its singular abstraction can also be determined by the equally distinctive character of an end in itself. This tautological is the element that distinguishes both the bourgeois West and the modern labor movement, the pride fetish against an expenditure of labor-intensive and the greatest possible, unencumbered by practical needs, subjective and sensitive, becomes visible in the "point of view of the worker" and ethos of abstract labor.
Nowhere is this Protestant ethos of abstract labor in a society shaped to become a working machine - which as Weber pointed to the historical and ideological brand of capitalism - was carried out with greater fervor and rigor in the labor movement and formations of socialism.
does not matter if the reasons justifying the subordination of man to machine the work is no longer related to individuals but rather to the state and its economic metaobiettivi; submission to the abstraction "work" appears only in a more coarse and stiff, as they do not yet have the fallacious semblance of a personal purpose. Would be most valid mutatis mutandis the lesson of Max Weber:
But above all the "summum bonum" of this age, the gain of money and more money, so bare of any order or simply eudaimonistic hedonistic is designed in such purity as a goal in itself, that in the face of happiness and usefulness of the individual appears as something entirely transcendent and even irrational.
The gain is considered as the goal of human life, and not as a means to satisfy their material needs. (Weber 1920)
But this inversion in the context of the "sense" subjective, by which Max Weber describes a reversal, but does not perceive clearly, in the reproductive process of society (3) could only derive historically from religious-ideological climate of Protestantism, but under the new (middle-class ) created in this context should not necessarily be limited to this particular place in history with its disguise ideals
's ability to concentrate the mind, as the attitude of those who feel forced in front of their work, they are here in especially frequently combined with a strict economy which calculates the gain and its degree, and with a strict rule of himself and a propriety, which remarkably increase the capacity to work.
E 'this is the better place for that approach to work as a goal in itself, as a vocation, which requires capitalism, here it is most likely to win, thanks to religious education, the traditionalist routine. [...] The hatred and persecution of Methodists, for example, workers had to endure from their fellow workers in the 18th century, had no connection with their religious eccentricity [...] but with the hard work that was their specific . (Weber, op. Cit.)
Socialism of the labor movement was never too far away from this framework to the fetishistic reasons, its ancient Protestantism. If he put religion at the office of the abstract work, it transformed it into a secular religion of national wealth and totally foreign to the deified human needs, its socialism for the Russians, on the threshold of the modern bourgeois, more or less a substitute appropriate that the religious element was constitutive of the capitalist mode of production in Western Europe after the Reformation.
stakhanovites Alexei, the man on the night of August 31, 1935, in the Donetsk basin, would have less than 102 tons of coal extracted during a round of five hours and 45 minutes, became an icon and a myth of Soviet work, and he embodied the very principle of capitalist abstract expense of labor in which the work is placed as an end in itself tautological. The natural character of the 'ideology of tons "is limited merely to express this principle as abstract material and products, deprived of their sensible qualities. It 'very pervasive in this regard the observation of Thomas Mann, who in June 1919, in the reflections on the composition of his novel The Magic Mountain notes:
(...) This paper on the work abstract does not see diminished its value to the fact that it was composed in the language of the artist rather than in the critical political economy. It 's a direct attack, liberating and prophetic, that glorification of the work that has made it the de facto socialism in the labor movement a mere "extension" of the principle of capitalism instead of a factor able to work to overcome: the social reality of the Union Soviet socialism, assumed precisely the historical task of imposing such a principle.
1.3 The social form of commodity-producing system
Undoubtedly, the Protestant principle of diligence abstract and detached from the sensitive content does not express simply a moral postulate, on the contrary its peculiar morality stems from the formal structure of a society in which work becomes an end in itself and the society itself in a time machine to the expenditure of labor power. But was this social form that defies Weber (and not only to him) which ended with the so presume as an axiom. Only by taking the moves from this form, the determination of which seems to create enormous difficulties, you can understand the work of the modern era in its historical specificity, beyond any fundamental ontological condition.
This particular form of existence of the work with his concept, is in fact incompatible with all earlier social formations in human history, since in the latter work, its product and appropriation of the latter, they remain essentially in their actual form, immediate and sensitive as "use values" in the language political economy. Although the work as labor in the sense of the ancients, namely fatigue and misery, occupying the whole horizon of life most people, this fact was, however, correlated with the degree of development of productive forces in the relatively small "process of metabolism with nature" (Marx), the work was a necessity imposed by nature, but precisely for this reason it was not a waste of abstract labor power and an end in itself of the company. In
goods-producing system of modernity, the logic of necessity is reversed: the extent to which the productive forces, thanks to industrialization and highly scientific, coercion and break the cage of "first nature", they are again trapped by secondary social coercion, generated unconsciously. The form of social reproduction based on the commodity becomes a "second nature" the need for which, as in the case of "first nature" is opposed to individuals blindly and binding, although its matrix is \u200b\u200bpurely social. The company
labor understood as an ontological concept, is merely a tautology in the past because the social organization, whatever its forms derived from the work was necessarily characterized. Of a society without work than you could fantasize, maybe naive in the representations of Paradise or the fables of the land of Cockaigne. But since the Renaissance, the natural correlation between effort and production of wealth was exploded by money.
To modern consciousness the fact that living labor by dead labor is transformed into the production of goods and thus "represents" (Marx's expression) in the form of embodiment of money is obvious. In fact, although the real money a category that has broken through different historical formations, the category of fundamental economic value that lies within it, has been the subject of systematic reflection only in the modern economic theories. In the goods-value products are abstract things, deprived of their sensitive content and only in this peculiar form of delivering the social mediation. Marxian critique of political economy in this economic value is determined in a purely negative, as a form of representation completely separated from any concrete content and sensitive reified , fetishistic , And died of abstract social labor past, embodied in products and where the trend within the movement and immanent formal relationships of exchange leads him to become money because "something abstract." The value is the trademark of a company that is not master of himself.
In contradiction to this view, the bourgeois theory, beginning with his classic, accepted this form as if it were a priori, in fact giving up all attempts to fathom. It is precisely his "natural" seemed to be the best proof of its ontological nature, free from any further clarification from the theoretical investigation. But in this way the inversion that replaces the "first nature "with the" second "reports a cover-up: this inversion have been set up all of the modern society and it is precisely in order to rise to the character itself of modern business.
The goods in premodern societies was something quite different from the goods of the modern age: it could not in any way as a form of social reproduction, while being a mere "form of niche" (Marx) in the context of relations of production and ownership typical of economies "natural" in those circumstances the company as a whole was not depicted as a producer of certain goods. The work aimed at producing goods (for example the work of craftsmen in the cities) remained confined within the horizon of the social use value: this production was intended only for the exchange of concrete objects. For this reason, we can correctly claim that these products are "exhausted in use value" (Marx), but had to go through the abstractions inherent in the process of market exchange.
But that's not the case with the modern production of goods. The value, the figure of the surplus , never high in the past to the status of relations of production, is no longer just a form of social mediation of use-values \u200b\u200bbut sensitive ends instead interact with itself tautologically with : fetishistic process becomes self-reflexive and so is the abstract labor as a mechanism end in itself. Now this process does not "run out" more in use value, but it manifests itself as self-movement of money namely how to transform a amount of abstract labor and died in a greater amount of abstract labor and death (capital gains ) and then as a tautological process of self-reproduction and the money only in this form becomes capital and thus becomes a modern. But the existence of money as capital expenditure shall release the Working from the creation of significant value in use and converts it to an end in itself abstract. The work now appears to live only as an expression of empowerment dead labor, while the product is just as sensitive and specific expression of abstraction-money.
The human and material resources (labor-power, tools, machinery, raw materials and finished products) are no longer used tout court to the satisfaction of needs in the "process of replacement with nature" but are tautological self-reflection of the money creates "more money". In other words, the practical needs may continue to be met unless there is a production of surplus value, detached from any sensitive content and that it is stated in the course of an unconscious process as the production of abstract corporate earnings. The exchange market is no longer aimed at the social mediation of goods for use but rather the realization of the gain that is the metamorphosis of the work in dead money, and the mediation of property use is just a byproduct of this phenomenon particular process that takes place in terms of money.
In this way the life process of individuals and society as a whole is subjected to the terrifying banality of money and its tautological self-movement that occurs at the surface in its various historical decline, as the well-known "market economy" modern. Behind the graceful subjectivity that operates the exchange market lies the rugged man of work "that only in extremely rough form takes the shape of a stakhanovites, behind the gleaming facade of colorful boxes of use values \u200b\u200blies the fetish character capital product that reduces them to a ghostly "jelly labor" (Marx). Their existence is only sensitive to a marginal phenomenon and a necessary evil for the process based on the abstract work and money.
The submission of the sensitive content of the work and the needs of blind self-reflection of the money has something monstrous. During the development of modernity this aberration occurred throughout history, and ever-increasing scale, the crisis in which massive human and material resources remain unused because, inexplicably, are no longer able to comply with the processing, an end in itself, working in live money.
On the other hand the development of modern productive forces generated through the steps of an adversarial process closely, leading to a massive expansion of the needs and opportunities for individuals. During the historical influence of the modern system of producer goods eclipse its unintended side effects for a long time its negative content with positive elements. Until this system was able to perform worthily his "civilizing mission" (Marx), it "worked", asserting against all pre-modern relations of production, corporate and static. The crises were nothing but mere interruption of this process of ascent and appeared every time overcome in principle.
Even the modern labor movement was integrated in this constellation of commodity-producing system in his sweeping ascent phase, along with his Marxism, which represents the corresponding theoretical analysis and finally to the genesis of the modern version of the socialist society of work, which collapse has taken place before our eyes. Imprisoned within the horizon of the rise of the historical work the abstract end in itself tautological character of the latter could not be overcome either the ideal plane or on that material.
The 'market planned "Europe, as this definition suggests, not abolished even a small part of the market categories, and for this reason even in socialism remade their appearance all the basic categories of capital: wage, price and profit (business income). The same basic principle of abstract labor was not only assimilated but also enhanced the extreme.
So what is really the difference between the systems is starting to fade? From the beginning he had no real socialism any chance of overcoming the capitalist society of modernity as it was the same part of the bourgeois system of producer goods and therefore it does not replace this historical form of socialization with a different form but simply embodies a distinct stage of development within the same formation epoch . The promise of a post-bourgeois future now reveals its true nature of pre-bourgeois regime of transition to modernity, condemned to stagnation, a fossil of the heroic past of the capital.
Notes 1. Prince Grigory A. Potjomkin (1739 - 1791) was a favorite of Catherine the Great. After the Russian conquest of Crimea took steps to repopulate the territory of the other founding the city of Sevastopol. But to get the approval of the empress did not hesitate to organize grotesque staging, ordering the construction of a large number of fake villages, where buildings had only one side of paper, that the Empress, eager to personally inspect the work of his lover, he could see from the window of his carriage without smell the deception. Often these pseudo-villages were dismantled soon after the passage of the Empress (NDT).
2. At present this argument is presented again, in a formulation more in keeping with the times, by ecologists or fundamentalists who are totally unaware its origin from a Lebensphilosophie full of cultural pessimism, or strive in every way to disown. But critics immediately to the natural sciences and industrialization, as has always been throughout its history almost bisecolare, invariably ends by assuming a value so that nullifies the historical character of social formations and converts the real crisis in social ontological crisis . The fundamentalist irrationalism (both ecological as religious) that draws its substance from its impracticality makes it suitable to the role of ideology legittimatoria negative.
3. Weber, however, unlike Marx, not subjected to any formal criticism of modern society of work, which forms the basis of the nature and ontological appeared instead, an opinion shared by both the rest of the Marxist workers' movement by members bourgeois political economy.
4. Significantly, the critical concept of "value" of the Marxian theory, denounced as a form fetish, it undergoes the ideology of the labor movement throughout the treatment refused by the affirmative definition of the worker as "creator of value." However, through this ideological figure, the contrast is impossible to reconcile, between exchange value and use value sensitive fetishistic finally degenerates into a formless mush no conceptual content.
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