grandhotelabyss:—Toby Green and Thomas Fazi, “The Left’s Covid Failure”Our authors provide many good
grandhotelabyss:—Toby Green and Thomas Fazi, “The Left’s Covid Failure”Our authors provide many good answers in their essay. Especially important is an issue we’ve discussed here before: the left’s misreading of neoliberalism as the retreat of the state, when in fact neoliberalism is the fusion of the state and the corporation.But there is a problem of longer standing here, a question of culture more than economics or political science. I recently saw a Twitter thread by a right-winger quarreling with Boomercon-style rhetoric denouncing today’s left-liberalism as “communist” when so much of what the right complains about is now enforced in corporate workplaces and through corporate media, not communism’s overweening state. Yet this semantic debate seems to me to miss the point. In the end capitalism and communism are the same. Marxists always believed this. This is the dialectical view of history. Communism is what capitalism—a vast improvement on feudalism—would be if only it could properly consummate itself in the universal liberation of man’s productivity, rather than letting itself be hindered by top-hatted fatcats’ monopoly on the new means of production. It’s an attractive theory, so attractive we might miss the assumption slipped in: that the human being is best conceived as inert matter actuated by regimes of labor, in short a kind of robot, one in need of management if it’s to perform its labor with maximal efficiency. Don’t take it from me; take it from Gramsci:In America rationalisation of work and prohibition are undoubtedly connected. The enquiries conducted by the industrialists into the workers’ private lives and the inspection services created by some firms to control the “morality” of their workers are necessities of the new methods of work. People who laugh at these initiatives (failures though they were) and see in them only a hypocritical manifestation of “puritanism” thereby deny themselves any possibility of understanding the importance, significance and objective import of the American phenomenon, which is also the biggest collective effort to date to create, with unprecedented speed, and with a consciousness of purpose unmatched in history, a new type of worker and of man.[…]It is from this point of view that one should study the “puritanical” initiative of American industrialists like Ford. It is certain that they are not concerned with the “humanity” or the “spirituality” of the worker, which are immediately smashed. This “humanity and spirituality” cannot be realised except in the world of production and work and in productive “creation”. They exist most in the artisan, in the “demiurge ”, when the worker’s personality was reflected whole in the object created and when the link between art and labour was still very strong. But it is precisely against this “humanism” that the new industrialism is fighting. “Puritanical” initiatives simply have the purpose of preserving, outside of work, a certain psycho-physical equilibrium which prevents the physiological collapse of the worker, exhausted by the new method of production. This equilibrium can only be something purely external and mechanical, but it can become internalised if it is proposed by the worker himself, and not imposed from the outside, if it is proposed by a new form of society, with appropriate and original methods.In other words, capitalism cruelly imposes the (true, necessary) view that your “humanity and spirituality” aren’t real; communism will talk you into it so sweetly you’ll think it was your idea in the first place. Even to speak of communism and capitalism may be quaint by now, with European governments again imposing the totalitarian state-terrorist policy of lockdown—the universal quarantining of the healthy with the sick—which we have to hope we can ban by national or international law once the fog of panic propaganda lifts. One wants to speak of biological fascism, but this is redundant: fascism always was a biological regime, with the Nazis regarding “the Jew” as a bacillus. Pace Bratton, there is no ethical way to take “the epidemiological view of society.” Such a view is nothing less than itself the origin of totalitarianism, whether totalitarianism in its specific forms reaches for a justifying rhetoric of the left, the right, or the center.To anticipate a straw-man rebuttal, the alternative is not primitivism or old-time religion or any other “retvrn.” We can in theory learn to live with our machines and not at their mercy, “to imagine what we know,” as Shelley put it. If there is a solution, we find it in the living Romantic tradition Marxism traduced with its scientism: a comprehensive view of the human being not as mere matter, biological or mechanical, but as irreducible imaginative agent, capable of transformative vision no matter this or that person’s occupation or social role. “Idealist!” the comrades will object, and maybe so, but then again materialism was always going to lead right here, to this hell where we find ourselves. If we don’t find some way or other of saying “soul,” then we’re not going to have anything to say at all when somebody comes around who thinks “humanism” is a punchline and can’t therefore think of a reason we shouldn’t all be drowned like kittens in a burlap sack. -- source link