Seventeen Contradictions and the End of Capitalism (42 page)

There are plenty of contemporary signs that the enlightened humanist tradition is alive and well, perhaps even staging a comeback. This is the spirit that clearly animates the hordes of people employed around the world in NGOs and other charitable institutions whose mission is to improve the life chances and prospects of the less fortunate. There are even vain attempts to dress up capital itself in the humanist garb of what some corporate leaders like to call Conscious Capitalism, a species of entrepreneurial ethics that looks suspiciously like conscience laundering along with sensible proposals to improve worker efficiency by seeming to be nice to them.
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All the nasty things that happen are absorbed as unintentional collateral damage in an economic system motivated by the best of ethical intentions. Humanism is, however, the spirit that inspires countless individuals to give of themselves unstintingly and often without material reward to contribute selflessly to the well-being of others. Christian, Jewish, Islamic and Buddhist humanisms have spawned widespread religious and charitable organisations, as well as iconic figures like Mahatma Gandhi, Martin Luther King, Mother Teresa and Bishop Tutu. Within the secular tradition there are many varieties of humanist thought and practice, including explicit currents of cosmopolitan, liberal, socialist and Marxist humanism. And, of course, moral and political philosophers have over the centuries devised a variety of conflicting ethical systems of thought based in a variety of ideals of justice, cosmopolitan reason and emancipatory liberty that have from time to time supplied revolutionary slogans. Liberty, equality, fraternity were the watchwords of the French Revolution. The earlier US Declaration of Independence, followed by the US Constitution and, perhaps even more significantly, that stirring document called the Bill of Rights have all played a role in animating subsequent political movements and constitutional forms. The remarkable constitutions recently adopted in Bolivia and Ecuador show that the art of writing progressive constitutions as the basis for regulating human life is by no means dead. And the immense literature that this tradition has
spawned has not been lost on those who have sought a more meaningful life. Just think of the past influence of Tom Paine’s
Rights of Man
or Mary Wollstonecraft’s
A Vindication of the Rights of Woman
within the English-speaking world to see what I mean (almost every tradition in the world has analogous writings to celebrate).

There are two well-known undersides to all of this, both of which we have already encountered. The first is that however noble the universal sentiments expressed at the outset, it has time and again proved hard to stop the universality of humanist claims being perverted for the benefit of particular interests, factions and classes. This is what produces the philanthropic colonialism of which Peter Buffett so eloquently complains. This is what twists Kant’s noble cosmopolitanism and quest for perpetual peace into a tool of imperialist and colonial cultural domination, currently represented by the Hilton Hotel cosmopolitanism of CNN and the frequent business-class flier. This is the problem that has bedevilled the doctrines of human rights enshrined in a UN declaration that privileges the individual rights and private property of liberal theory at the expense of collective relations and cultural claims. This is what turns the ideals and practices of freedom into a tool of governmentality for the reproduction and perpetuation of capitalist class affluence and power. The second problem is that the enforcement of any particular system of beliefs and rights always involves some disciplinary power, usually exercised by the state or some other institutionalised authority backed by force. The difficulty here is obvious. The UN declaration implies state enforcement of individual human rights when the state so often is first in line violating those rights.

The difficulty with the humanist tradition in short is that it does not internalise a good understanding of its own inescapable internal contradictions, most clearly captured in the contradiction between freedom and domination. The result is that humanist leanings and sentiments often get presented these days in a somewhat offhand and embarrassed way, except when their position is safely backed by religious doctrine and authority. There is, as a result, no full-blooded contemporary defence of the propositions of or prospects for a
secular humanism even though there are innumerable individual works that loosely subscribe to the tradition or even polemicise as to its obvious virtues (as happens in the NGO world). Its dangerous traps and foundational contradictions, particularly questions of coercion, violence and domination, are shied away from because they are too awkward to confront. The result is what Frantz Fanon characterised as ‘insipid humanitarianism’. There is plenty of evidence of that manifest in its recent revival. The bourgeois and liberal tradition of secular humanism forms a mushy ethical base for largely ineffective moralising about the sad state of the world and the mounting of equally ineffective campaigns against the plights of chronic poverty and environmental degradation. It is probably for this reason that the French philosopher Louis Althusser launched his fierce and influential campaign back in the 1960s to eject all talk of socialist humanism and alienation from the Marxist tradition. The humanism of the young Marx, as expressed in
The Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts of 1844
, Althusser argued, was separated from the scientific Marx of
Capital
by an ‘epistemological rupture’ that we ignore at our peril. Marxist humanism, he wrote, is pure ideology, theoretically vacuous and politically misleading, if not dangerous. The devotion of a dedicated Marxist like the long-imprisoned Antonio Gramsci to the ‘absolute humanism of human history’ was, in Althusser’s view, entirely misplaced.
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The enormous increase in and nature of the complicitous activities of the humanist NGOs over recent decades would seem to support Althusser’s criticisms. The growth of the charitable industrial complex mainly reflects the need to increase ‘conscience laundering’ for a world’s oligarchy that is doubling its wealth and power every few years in the midst of economic stagnation. Their work has done little or nothing in aggregate to deal with human degradation and dispossession or proliferating environmental degradation. This is structurally so because anti-poverty organisations are required to do their work without ever interfering in the further accumulation of the wealth from which they derive their sustenance. If everyone who worked in an anti-poverty organisation converted overnight to
an anti-wealth politics we would soon find ourselves living in a very different world. Very few charitable donors, not even Peter Buffett I suspect, would fund that. And the NGOs, which are now at the centre of the problem, would not in any case want that (though there are many individuals within the NGO world who would but simply can’t).

So what kind of humanism do we need in order to progressively change the world through anti-capitalist work into another kind of place populated by different kinds of people?

There is, I believe, a crying need to articulate a secular
revolutionary
humanism that can ally with those religious-based humanisms (most clearly articulated in both Protestant and Catholic versions of the theology of liberation as well as in cognate movements within Hindu, Islamic, Jewish and indigenous religious cultures) to counter alienation in its many forms and to radically change the world from its capitalist ways. There is a strong and powerful – albeit problematic – tradition of secular revolutionary humanism both with respect to both theory and political practice. This is a form of humanism that Louis Althusser totally rejected. But, in spite of Althusser’s influential intervention, it has a powerful and articulate expression in the Marxist and radical traditions as well as beyond. It is very different from bourgeois liberal humanism. It refuses the idea that there is an unchanging or pre-given ‘essence’ of what it means to be human and forces us to think hard about how to become a new kind of human. It unifies the Marx of
Capital
with that of
The Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts of 1844
and arrows in to the heart of the contradictions of what any humanist programme must be willing to embrace if it is to change the world. It clearly recognises that the prospects for a happy future for most are invariably marred by the inevitability of dictating the unhappiness of some others. A dispossessed financial oligarchy which cannot any more partake of caviar and champagne lunches on their yachts moored off the Bahamas will doubtless complain at their diminished fates and fortunes in a more egalitarian world. We may, as good liberal humanists, even feel a bit sorry for them. Revolutionary humanists steel themselves against that thought. While we may
not approve of this ruthless approach to dealing with such contradictions, we have to acknowledge the basic honesty and self-awareness of the practitioners.

Consider, as one example, the revolutionary humanism of someone like Frantz Fanon. Fanon was a psychiatrist working in hospitals in the midst of a bitter and violent anti-colonial war (rendered so memorable in Pontecorvo’s film
The Battle of Algiers –
a film, incidentally, that the US military now uses for anti-insurgency training purposes). Fanon wrote in depth about the struggle for freedom and liberty on the part of colonised peoples against the colonisers. His analysis, though specific to the Algerian case, illustrates the sorts of issues that arise in any liberation struggle, including those between capital and labour. But it does so in stark dramatic and more easily legible terms precisely because it incorporates the additional dimensions of racial, cultural and colonial oppressions and degradations giving rise to an ultra-violent revolutionary situation from which no peaceful exit seems possible. The foundational question for Fanon is how to recover a sense of humanity on the basis of the dehumanising practices and experiences of colonial domination. ‘As soon as you and your fellow men are cut down like dogs,’ he writes in
The Wretched of the Earth
, ‘there is no other solution but to use every means available to re-establish your weight as a human being. You must therefore weigh as heavily as possible on your torturer’s body so that his wits, which have wandered off somewhere, can at last be restored to their human dimension.’ In this way ‘man both demands and claims his infinite humanity’. There are always ‘tears to be wiped away, inhuman attitudes to be fought, condescending ways of speech to be ruled out, men to be humanised’. Revolution, for Fanon, was not simply about the transfer of power from one segment of society to another. It entailed the reconstruction of humanity – in Fanon’s case a distinctive post-colonial humanity – and a radical shift in the meaning attached to being human. ‘Decolonisation is truly the creation of new men. But such a creation cannot be attributed to a supernatural power. The “thing” colonised becomes a man through the very process of liberation.’ It was therefore inevitable in a colonial
situation, Fanon argued, that the struggle for liberation would have to be constituted in nationalist terms. But ‘if nationalism is not explained, enriched, deepened, if it does not very quickly turn into a social and political consciousness, into humanism, then it leads to a dead end’.
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Fanon, of course, shocks many liberal humanists with his embrace of a necessary violence and his rejection of compromise. How, he asks, is non-violence possible in a situation structured by the systematic violence exercised by the colonisers? What is the point of starving people going on hunger strike? Why, as Herbert Marcuse asked, should we be persuaded of the virtues of tolerance towards the intolerable? In a divided world, where the colonial power defines the colonised as subhuman and evil by nature, compromise is impossible. ‘One does not negotiate with evil,’ famously said Vice-President Dick Cheney. To which Fanon had a ready-made reply: ‘The work of the colonist is to make even dreams of liberty impossible for the colonised. The work of the colonised is to imagine every possible method for annihilating the colonist … The theory of the “absolute evil of the colonist” is in response to the theory of the “absolute evil of the native”.’ In such a divided world there is no prospect of negotiation or compromise. This is what has kept the USA and Iran so far apart ever since the Iranian Revolution. ‘The native sector’ of the colonial city, Fanon points out, ‘is not complementary to the European sector … The city as a whole is governed by a purely Aristotelian logic’ and follows the ‘dictates of mutual exclusion’. Lacking a dialectical relation between the two, the only way to break down the difference is through violence. ‘To destroy the colonial world means nothing less than demolishing the colonist’s sector, burying it deep within the earth or banishing it from the territory.’
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There is nothing mushy about such a programme. As Fanon saw clearly:

For the colonised this violence is invested with positive formative features because it constitutes their only work. This violent praxis is totalising since each individual represents a violent link in a great chain, in the almighty body of violence rearing up in
reaction to the primary violence of the coloniser … At the individual level, violence is a cleansing force. It rids the colonised of their inferiority complex, of their passive and despairing attitude. It emboldens them and restores their self-confidence. Even if the armed struggle has been symbolic, and even if they have been demobilised by rapid decolonisation, the people have time to realise their liberation was the achievement of each and every one …
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But what is so stunning about
The Wretched of the Earth
, and what indeed brings tears to the eyes on a close reading and makes it so searingly human, is the second half of the book, which is taken up by devastating descriptions of the psychic traumas of those on both sides who found themselves forced by circumstances to participate in the violence of the liberation struggle. We now know much more about the psychic damage suffered by those US and other soldiers who engaged in military action in Vietnam, Afghanistan and Iraq, and the terrible scourge on their lives as a result of post-traumatic stress disorder. This is what Fanon wrote about with such compassion in the midst of the revolutionary struggle against the colonial system in Algeria. After decolonisation there is an immense work that remains to be done, not only to repair the psyches of damaged souls, but also to mitigate what Fanon clearly saw as the dangers of the lingering effects (even replication) of colonial ways of thought and being. ‘The colonised subject fights in order to put an end to domination. But he must also ensure that all the untruths planted within him by the oppressor are eliminated. In a colonial regime such as the one in Algeria the ideas taught by colonialism impacted not only the European minority but also the Algerian. Total liberation involves every facet of the personality … Independence is not a magic ritual but an indispensable condition for men and women to live in true liberation, in other words to master all the material resources necessary for a radical transformation of society.’
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