We see the problems besetting the planet, we hear the television and radio news, we read the reports, and demand that something should be done. We call on others to do something. When we demand the same thing of ourselves … we suddenly see where the blockage is. It’s easy enough to say that it is time for action. It’s when we try to engage in effective action we suddenly realise why the much reported problems of the world are going unchecked. The social relations within which we are located constrain us and limit our choices. Our will is not free. And we lack the mechanisms that enable us to act as we know we should. On an individual level, these social structures keep us acting in set patterns, often implicating us in the destructive behaviour we are seeking to end. We do not freely choose to do what we want to do and what we know we ought to do. Instead, within social relations, we are locked into patterns of behaviour that have us repeating the actions that, in their cumulative effect, are bringing about the very social and environmental crises we are seeking to end. In this pathos of unconstrained individual actions producing a collective constraint, structure continues to win out over agency. Confronted by and experiencing these collective forces, we rationalize our individual culpability by saying that ‘we have no choice’. And in so doing, we reinforce and perpetuate the destructive patterns of behaviour that are sending the planet to hell in a handcart. ‘We are not responsible’. And that’s the truth. The entire system of collective forces is irresponsible, anonymous, no-one is in charge. All we have is ‘the system’ and its imperatives.
Well, we do have a choice. Those collective forces which constrain us are our own powers in externalised form. We are charged with the duty to associate together, resume control of those powers and assume conscious, collective responsibility for them. That is a collective endeavour. But we also have an individual voice.
'Real social involvement is moral involvement. For although a great political movement that seeks to shape the world in its own image is called to life by the world's needs, and though its fundamental direction is determined by the development of social relations, nevertheless each individual's participation in any specific form of political life is a moral act for which that individual is wholly responsible.
No one is relieved of either positive or negative responsibility on the grounds that his actions formed only a fraction of a given historical process. A soldier is morally responsible for a crime committed on the orders of his superior; an individual is all the more responsible for acts performed—supposedly or in fact—on the orders of an anonymous history. If a thousand people are standing on a river bank and a drowning man calls for help, it is almost certain that one of the spectators will leap in to save him. This quasi-statistical certainty concerns a thousand people, but it does not eliminate the need for a moral evaluation of the specific person, that one in a thousand, who does jump into the river. Experience can assure us that one such man will be found in the crowd; and this certitude is analogous to those rare historical predictions that occasionally come true. But to be that precise person who, out of a thousand potential rescuers, carries out the prediction, which was based on large numbers, one must perform "by oneself," as it were, an action subject to moral judgment. By analogy, if there exists a social system which requires criminals for certain tasks, one can be sure it will always find them. But it does not follow that every individual criminal is absolved of responsibility, because in order to designate oneself for the role of such a tool of the system one must be a scoundrel "by oneself," one must voluntarily perform a specific act which is subject to moral judgment.
Thus we profess the doctrine of total responsibility of the individual for his deeds and of the amorality of the historical process. In the latter we avail ourselves of Hegel; in the former of Descartes. It was he who formulated the famous principle, whose consequences are not always visible at first glance, "There is not a soul so weak that it cannot, with good guidance, gain an absolute mastery over its passions." This means that we cannot explain away any of our actions on the grounds of emotion, passion, or the moral impotence to act differently, and that we have no right to transfer the responsibility for our conscious acts to any factor which determines our behavior; because in every instance we have the power to choose freely.
This assumption—which, as I have mentioned, can be accepted without contradicting the deterministic interpretation of the world—must also be extended to all the justifications we find for ourselves in historical necessities and historical determinism. Neither our personal, supposedly invincible emotions ("I could not resist the desire"), nor anyone's command ("I was a soldier"), nor conformity with the customs of one's environment ("everybody did it"), nor theoretically deduced exigencies of the demiurge of history ("I judged I was acting for the sake of progress") —none of these four most typical and popular rationalizations has any validity. This is not to say that these four types of determination do not actually occur in life, but merely to state that none of them releases us from individual responsibility, because none of them destroys the freedom of individual choice. Individual action remains in the absolute power of the individual.'
Leszek Kolakowski, Marxism and Beyond, 1969: 161/162
We walk the main roads of our life on our own:
Not I, not anyone else can travel that road for you
You must travel it for yourself. . . .
—Walt Whitman
To say ‘I have to’ when acting against one’s will is to evade choice and abrogate responsibility. And that is precisely why our individual actions take alien collective form. Of course, authorities, bureaucracies, officialdom pass the book and say ‘not us’, ‘we are not responsible’. They are mere functionaries of the system which, in Max Weber’s words, proceeds ‘without regard for persons’. This is true, to an extent. Alasdair MacIntyre exposed the extent to which such rationalisation is a bureaucratic and managerial ideology. It serves powerful interests for power to be rendered neutral, impersonal, inevitable and unalterable. But it is only persons who can restore regard to its central place in social life. If not you, then who? The bureaucrats and the managers are the beneficiaries of the impersonal system. But what about those caught within its circles of dependency? What about you? In saying, ‘I choose’, we reclaim our personality. Saying ‘I choose’ opens the world up to a wider set of possibilities. If we can choose together, we reclaim our social power. Assuming responsibility for social and ecological health, we are standing up and declaring our intent to make conscious choices. This is not a question of being a martyr to the cause or being willing to be a victim of the system. Kolakowski’s ethic of responsibility is quite stern, and leaves the individual having to confront huge social and political powers. The ethic of responsibility I am seeking to define has no need of martyrs, saints, messiahs, to lead the way, that’s just another form of evading responsibility. In affirming our power as choosers, we step out of constraining structures and define ourselves as active agents exercising our freedom and our will. We do this as individuals, but we also need to do this together in a public life that is able to constrain the accumulated collective force of our individual actions. And when we do this, we go beyond the model of human beings as autonomous choosers. Not everything in the social and ecological world in which we live is a matter of choice. This world is not made by a matter of conscious choice by individuals in this sense. We don’t create our reality in this way.
In The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte (1852), Karl Marx wrote that: ‘Men make their own history, but not of their own free will; not under circumstances they themselves have chosen but under the given and inherited circumstances with which they are directly confronted. The tradition of the dead generations weighs like a nightmare on the minds of the living.’ This can be read as a demand that we do come to make history as a result of our own choosing, overthrowing the ‘nightmare’ of our own social powers taking alien form and oppressing us in the shape of political oppression, economic crisis or environmental degradation. But Marx is more sociologically subtle than this, going further than individual will and choice to address the collective mechanisms of social control. That is an important point. In a world in which we are dependent on others in society and dependent upon nature, an individual doesn’t ‘choose’ to be poor, or oppressed, or hungry. These are the impacts and effects of a wider social system, and changing that requires collective action. At the same time, joining with others remains a matter of individual moral choice…