UNDERNEATH ALL CRITIC
The left, the war and the capitalist ontology
Robert Kurz
April 2003
After the war it is like saying before the war, since the capitalism means, in its essence, aggression, destruction and self-destruction. The end of the cold war didn't bring the Peace Dividends (the expression already reveals an illusion in regard to the character of the economic terror), but rather it marked an historical starting point of the global barbarism, the social decadence and the brutal wars of world order made by a world police under the aegis of the last world power, the USA. The facts’ phenomenology is unequivocal, but the interpretations differ, since the classic conceptual apparatus has become obsolete. Not in last term, this is applied to the reactions of what it is left in the entire world of the left. The irresistible tendency toward the « political pragmatism » and the false immediatism of the effectiveness desire in the social level, without proceeding previously to a clarification of the own assumption, take on straight line the paralysis of the thought and of the performance of the capitalism critics. Because of that, it becomes necessary a theoretical debate of principles, a reappraisal of the modernization history, a renovation of the radical criticism of the political economy and of the political theory of the crises.
THE MODERNIZATION AND THE ABUSIVELY SIMPLIFIED CRITICISM OF THE CAPITALISM
The modern system producing of goods, also known as capitalism, doesn't constitute an unequivocal identity, but rather it gears down in structural and historical contradictions. Far from being a state, rather it represents an irreversible process. That is why the capitalism is permanently in conflict with itself. The universal competition also appears as the combat among immanent polarities and as the fight of some new conditions against other old ones; that is developed, however, in the environment of a common system of references. In the criticism of the capitalism we can distinguish, under this aspect, two historical paradigms.
Approximately from the XVI century until the beginning of the XIX century, from the rural wars until the ludits, the social movements fought, basing on traditional considerations characteristic of agrarian societies around a «moral economy" (E.P. Thompson) and many times under religious appearances, against their forced integration to the new conditions of impertinence of the « abstract work » (Marx). For those times it didn't exist yet a concept that designated the capitalism that was only in an embryonic state of formation and, for that reason, neither there was any perspective of an emancipation that points beyond the Modernity producer of goods.
More or less starting from the middle of the XIX century, the own criticism of the capitalism began to move in the field of the «abstract work», converted meanwhile in a firm object by force of the intense education and introjection and of the formal categories of the modern system producer of goods (value form, subject form, industrial economy, general form of money, market, state, nation, democracy, politics). The Enlightenment philosophy, that had given the fundamental ideological legitimation to the bourgeois subject, also became the positive foundation of the left ideas history. The left and the social movements began to act in the «iron corset» (Max Weber) of the capitalist categories as bourgeois subjects. United to this, the adoption of the « sexual dissociation » (R. Scholz) of all the life moments don't fit in the value form, and without it the relationship of the capital could not exist. The women were transformed in the « women of the rubbish » of the reproduction and of the capitalist history; as usual they were also simultaneously active, by means of a « double socialization » (R. Becker-Schmidt), in the predominant forms of the « abstract work », in the politics, etc., they stayed as subordinate. The character structurally « masculine » of the bourgeois competitive subject was reproduced in the modernization left.
To that extend the critic of the capitalism adopted, thus, the bourgeoisie general way of being and the subject’s bourgeois widespread way, we could speak about the attachment to a capitalist ontology. The "criticism", in this case, is only referred to the modalities in the capitalist way. At the same time, the left took note of certain poles in the capitalist structure (politics in front of economy, subject for opposition to objectivation), without acquiring conscience of these contraries identity. Nevertheless, the left became the « motor " of the capitalist " progress " mainly, in opposition to the recalcitrant forces. Its role was essential in the context of the « modernization a posteriori". In West, the labour movement combated, based on developed capitalist categories, beyond the social improvements, for a full recognition of the salaried workers as bourgeois juridical subjects (association freedom, vote right, etc.). In the East and in the South, the socialist and national liberation movements fought for their independence and for their recognition as national subjects of the world market, so that the « abstract work » and the forms that accompany it had to be still imposed to the respective societies.
The last ones took advantage from the Marx theory, but just the compatible elements with the bourgeois subjectivity, with the enlightened ideology and with a positivist meaning of the «political economy » (labour movement Marxism), summarized in trivial democratic phraseology. There is also « the work » positive ontology and the called classes struggle that, according to the own expression, it is not more than a competition form in the breast of capitalist categories (the capital and the work as two states of aggregation of the value valorisation).
Marx theory that was beyond the capitalist ontology (especially the critic of the fetish) stayed sideway. Although the emancipator desire of the left and of the social movements had their «exuberant moments», those were not able to escape to the gravitational force in the subject's bourgeois way, internalised in spite of the non-existence of the corresponding concept.
THE END OF THE MODERNIZATION MOVEMENT
The critical reappraisal here sketched of the modernization history is necessary so that we can understand, in contrast, the conditions of contemporary crisis later to the change of epochs. In the third industrial revolution of the microelectronics, the capitalist development reaches its historical limits. The manpower becomes superfluous in a way that can no longer be compensated. With it, the own capital is melting the substance of its accumulation. In West, the microelectronic rationalization leads to a structural and irreversible massive unemployment; the systems of social security and the respective infrastructures are dismounted. Parallel to this development, the capital refuge itself in the apparent accumulation of the financial bubbles. In the East and in South, entire national and regional economies enter in collapse, in fact because, in face of the lack of financial capacity, they cannot make the microelectronic « upgrade » of their production and, this way, they slip toward a position closer of the productivity and profitability schemas of the world market. Simultaneously, a looting economy is developed that seizes the ruins of the reproduction in decadence.
The result of this development is designated as globalisation. The global process of capacities closing of excess production that stopped to be profitable develops miserable and barbarian areas of crisis, while the capitalist reproduction is diluted in transnational chains of wealth creation. The traditional export of capitals is substituted by the outsourcing [literally, « search of resources outside": delegating works from one company to another, when these are no longer profitable for the first one] of functions in the area of the industrial economy, commanded by the equally transnational capital of the financial bubbles. The functional and regulators of the national economies spaces are destroyed and, even in the centres, the state gives up its traditional role as «ideal collective capitalist". What it is left in the field of the "deregulation", is to sacrifice step by step their regulative competitions and to continue its functional mutation toward the repressive and exclusive crisis administration. The territorial principle of the sovereignty entered in erosion because it became obsolete to consider the whole populations as « collective manpower". The parts of the internal functions of the sovereignty, without excepting the violence apparatus are more and more «privatised» or assumed by malefactors' bands, gentlemen of the war, princes of the terror, etc.
On one hand, by this way all « national development » has become a bad joke. The logic of the « movements of national liberation » of the periphery loses any perspective of success. Also the « classes struggle » in the field of the capitalist ontology has become obsolete, in parallel with the decadence of the « abstract work". The juridical bourgeois subjectivity of the salaried work loses its substance. The relationship of sexual dissociation that accompanies it gives place to a post-modern « brutalisation of the patriarchate" (R. Scholz) in whose field the whole weight of the crisis is discharged on the women and, especially, on those that inhabit the miserable areas and the poorest segments in the societies, as long as a masculine violence without north swells until the terror practiced by adolescents.
On the other hand, the same development makes that the imperial competition around the territorial division of the world stays without effect. The place of the old expansionary national powers is occupied by an security and exclusionist imperialism collectively democratic and led by the last world power, the USA that acts as protective power of the global imperative of the valorisation. The purpose consists on maintaining the world subjected at all costs to the control of the capitalist categories, although these had lost its reproduction capacity.
The wars of world order organized so far, from the Soviet Union collapse, against Iraq and the rest of Yugoslavia, the terrorist mega-attacks* of September 11, the military campaign in Afghanistan and the massive « destatisation wars » carried out in vast parts of the world demonstrate that the global securitary imperialism can reach only victories in the Pyrrhus’ way, having to fail ultimately, since he is himself the one who reproduces, one and another time, the ghosts of its own system crisis. At the same time, with the end of the occasion of the nineties financial bubbles, the threat of a world depression induced by the hyper-indebted central economy of the USA exists, that would drag behind it all West and, simultaneously, it would take to the end of the financing capacity of the military machine supported by the high technology.
Inside the democratic global imperialism, certain legitimising contradictions and even panic reactions have become evident, like it happened during the long pre-match ceremonies (prolegomenons) of the most recent campaign against Iraq demonstrates to what extent the situation is mature. The last world power, without any competition at military level, is willing to opt for the forward fugue in company of some vassals, in order to establish an immediate global military regime that hurtles overboard the legitimation foundations of the capitalist world settled after 1945 by the own USA (UN, international right, etc.) The « old Europe » of Schröeder, Chirac and others insists on that same legitimation, mainly for lack of means of power and own control and, in consequence, fearing to loose the control on the future developments. However, the dynamics of the world crisis, including the barbarian processes, can no longer be stopped in the frame of the actual system. The performance of the Bush administration is characterized, in great measure, for irrational features and is inserted fully in the same dynamics. The negation of the " sovereignty " is a logical part of this clinical diagnosis, and the bourgeois contractual relationships, as a whole, become expired.
THE CAPITALISM CRISIS AS LEFT CRISIS
The conventional critic to the capitalism is paralysed by this development, since it cannot be liberated from its attachment to the forms of the modern system producer of goods. If the Marxism of the labour movement, in the history of the system ascent, had still justified its pretence of a politic control and regulation, next to a « political economy » simplified abusively by a positivist approach and a developed analysis of the historical movement of accumulation based on the same one, all this complex, however, was ignored in the deposit of the old irons as " economicist ". The terror to the categories has been reduced, inside the left discourse to a thoughtless background noise. What is left of the left is revealed complacently, in its ignorance, as the remaining manure of subject’s bourgeois form, reduced to the apoliticism, to the culturalism and to the « ideological criticism » lacking of any foundation in terms of form critic and real analysis. In this deplorable condition, it is no longer able to explain the new wars of world order.
From a superficial point of view, the result consists on an unyielding polarization among a wide current of traditional anti-imperialists, on one hand, and a sectarian minority of pro-western warmongers, on the other. Both proceed from an anachronic retro-projection of the phenomenons of the current crisis about the time of the world wars, although some prefer the pattern of the first World War and the other ones that of the Second World War. Both whisk away the existence of a crisis and a limit for the reproduction of the world capitalism, without making the minimum effort to offer a theoretical justification. Some sympathize with a « nationalist » feminism of blood and earth; others, due to the lack of reflection about the bond between the value form and the dissociation logic, reduce the relationship between sexes to a secondary empiric-sociological problem. Some criticize the globalization inside reactionary moulds because, in their opinion, it subdues the " nations " and their " cultures "; the other ones pose, in great measure, as « swindlers of the globalisation", when supposing, to back current of the facts that the world after the end of the cold war would have returned to the competition of national-imperialistic powers around the territorial redistribution. Beyond the current question of the war, the differences and the likeness demonstrate that this left is condemned to ruminate until the exhaustion the bourgeois subject's contradictions in the limits of the capitalism inside the corsets of its own closed intellectual horizon.
Both invoke with the same acritical ingenuousness the essential topics related with the fact that the real capitalistic ontology and the metaphysics were based in the enlightened philosophy. The anti-imperialists returned to an ordinary Leninism of tavern hallucinate with the return of an association between the labour class struggle and the « national liberation". Just as in its time the regime of Vietnam’s national development was dedicated with all candour to copy the Constitution of the USA, and the bureaucracy of the RDA gorged of removing the « legacy » of the prussian enlightenment, in their crazy repetitive compulsion, these seek to hoist the rotten bourgeois ideals from the classist and third world perspective against the ghost of the national-imperialistic western bourgeoisies.
The regressive anti-imperialists confer an unexpected relief to the fact, never clarified in a critical way, that already the ideology of the " modernization a posteriori» of Marxist inspiration connected well with « nationalist » legitimations of the ethno-cultural kitsch. Even in the original versions of the XVIII century, the anti-Enlightenment was a product of the own enlightenment and a moment of the bourgeois self-contradiction. The racism and the declared anti-Semitism of the major illuminist Kant and of most of their intellectual cousins from the European West had their origins in the field of logical immanence of the enlightened subject. More clearer is the nationalist and anti-Semitic degradation of all the residual projects of a « national development »; proclaimed under the conditions of its historical untimeliness and seconded by a pseudo-Leninist attendance; post-religious ideologies of madness and murder have been superimposed in any way, as harmful grasses, as a continuation of the competition by other means.
The warmongers’ raving is not smaller as much hard as softcore that now paradoxically retro-project the same promise, deeply missed, of the enlightened ideals of the capitalism about the western security imperialism of crisis. After that the « development a posteriori » had succumbed hopelessly in the crash with the world market, it is in fact the military machine of the last capitalist world power the one that supposedly will bring the liberation of the sufferings of the regimens they administer after its fall.
The saying of the primary democratism is in rise, as if the democracy was not a show populated by subjects of the market and money and as if the Westerners conditions of pedestrian area even those that are already in erosion) can be forwarded, independently of the corresponding capacity to resist the world market, through bombings of high technology as if there were e-mails. Any youth of the antifascist combats recently converted to the virtues of the pro-westernism and of the euro-centrism, and that yesterday he still ignored what would be the formal context of a society, he wastes away the neurons worried by the question in Iraq the « bourgeois relationship forms » could be established by the infantry of the USA. Like if Iraq lived perhaps under "pre-bourgeois" conditions, as if the marrow of the legal way and, thus, in the way of bourgeois relationship was not the pure and hard usual violence, and as if Iraq, or Afghanistan, the former Yugoslavia, etc., was not school examples of the « bourgeois relationship forms » under the impossibility conditions of the capitalist reproduction.
MOVEMENTS OPPORTUNISM, INSULTS TO MOVEMENTS, OR RUPTURE WITH THE CAPITALIST ONTOLOGY?
The state of a left radicalism, not very appetizing, that in both sides of the immanent polarization, denied itself, should not confuse with the mass movements in gestation against the war, the capitalist globalisation and the disassembly of the social system. Although these are not "innocent", but rather, the same as the general society conscience, they are impregnated by the interpretations of crisis of the bourgeois ideology, they are not committed with the same ones, neither they are as tangled in anachronic patterns as the residual left. The way that will be followed by the true movement stays open. In any event, the false alternatives of the left’s retrograde speech don't have anything to contribute to an emancipated orientation
The opportunism of the traditional anti-imperialists’ movement ignores the basic currents of nationalist and anti-Semitic outlook or even, in an attitude of a certain ideological degeneration, itself assimilates them as something positive. The inverse attitude that consists on the insults to the movements on behalf of the left warmongers discredits the necessary critic completely, by its pro-capitalist and pro-imperial references. The same false alternatives that in the question of the war threaten with reproduce themselves in the question of the combat against the disassembly of the social system, according as
some ones behave in an opportunist or positive way in front of "ethno-political" formulations of the social question, just as the other ones denounce any sketch of a social outlook movement a priori as being suspicious of anti-semitism.
In this context, it is certain that the moral and theoretical breakup of the Marxism of the labour movement and of the anti-imperialism in products of decomposition of the enlightened ideology, enriched with nationalist and anti-semitic elements, constitutes the main tendency. However, a contrary, critic and emancipated tendency, is blocked precisely by the fact that the pro-western agitators in favour of the "bourgeois relationship ways" have trenched in a large part of the confused left means; and their voice volume, their advertising presence and their tourism of congresses evolve in inverse proportion to their theoretical substance. They are cad to the point of accusing the movements of a "criticism abusively simplified to the capitalism ", as if their own apology of the subject's bourgeois way and of the metropolitan capitalism of fat cows in quick breakup was not long time ago below all critic. The radical left will lose its fight against the nationalist and anti-semitic tendencies and regressively national-keynesianists inside the movements, if it doesn't discharge from its speech to the ideological operators of the antiaircraft batteries of the crisis imperialism and of the lobbyists of the humanitarian and industrial complex posted behind the battle fronts of the world order wars.
A new paradigm of the radical criticism, nevertheless, only will find when the left will be able to jump above its historical shade, in order to be liberated from the ontology and from the capitalist subject's way. It would be necessary an emancipated Anti-Modernity that, in its current state of obsolescence, is so essentially nonviable as the old movements of the "abstract work"; however, after the passage for the modernization history, it could stand out for the first time for a focus that was beyond the system producing of goods of the valorisation logic.
THE "IRON CORSE" OF THE CAPITALIST CATEGORIES HAS TO BE BROKEN, AND NOT IN LAST PLACE REFERING TO ITS FUNDAMENTAL LOGIC OF A SEXUAL DISSOCIATION RELATIONSHIP. THE GOAL CAN ONLY CONSIST ON A SELF-MANAGE SOCIETY OR OF COMMITTEES BEYOND ALL MASCULINITY AND FEMININITY, BEYOND THE MERCHANDISE AND DE THE MONEY FORMS, BEYOND THE MARKET AND THE STATE, BEYOND THE POLITICS AND THE ECONOMY. FOR THE PURPOSE OF BEING ABLE TO SPECIFY SUCH DETERMINATION OF GOALS, THE CRITICISM, SINCE NOW ON HAS TO TEMPORISE ITSELF WITH THE DEVELOPMENT OF THE CAPITALISM CRISIS, THAT IS, IT HAS TO BECOME CONSCIOUSLY, FOR ITS SIDE AND BY TRANSNATIONAL WAY, AGAINST ANY SOVEREIGNTY AND "NATIONAL DEVELOPMENT". IT WILL BE ONLY IN THIS CONTEXT THAT THE FIELD OF THE IMMANENCE ALSO WILL RECEIVE AGAIN A MOVILIZING CONNOTATION, FROM THE GLOBAL ANNULMENT OF THE DEBTS AND THE AGRARIAN REFORMATION, ETC., UNTIL THE CONSEQUENT RESISTANCE AGAINST THE WORLD ORDER WARS AND THE "SOCIAL CULTURE STRUGGLE" AGAINST THE CHEAP MANPOWER CONCEPTION OF THE ADMINISTRATIONS OF CRISIS. (The capitals are our, Contracorriente)
German original: "Unter aller kritik"
www.krisis.org
German-Portuguese translation: Lumir Nahodil
http://planeta.clix.pt/obeco/
Translation of the Portuguese for black Pepper: Round Desk
* Contracorriente’s note:
Mega-SELFATTACKS, according to what really happened.