Enthusing the masses
A long read (as usual). The bottom line concerns the need to enthuse and inspire the people, not stupefy them - 'all that is solid melts into air, all that is holy is profaned' wrote Marx. Resolidifying points to a self-socialisation from below, new ties and relations, building solidarity, communities of practice, sense of belonging, meaning, a genuine public life, reclaiming the physical, political and ethical commons (embedded in forms of social mediation, associative democracy and economics etc etc).
The capital system is a universal acid that dissolves all ties and social bonds into the nexus of callous cash payment (a phrase from the The Communist Manifesto which Marx took from conservative Thomas Carlyle in Chartism, Past and Present). The liberal Keynes wrote: ‘Modern capitalism is absolutely irreligious, without internal union, without much public spirit, often, though not always, a mere congeries of possessors and pursuers.’ Keynes, J.M., ‘A Short View of Russia’ in Essays in Persuasion (New York: Harcourt, Brace, 1932).
Social atomism below and political centralisation above as two aspects of the same diremption, and addiction in between to numb the pain. It’s a systematic disempowerment – what Marx called the alienation of social power. In atomistic civil society, the individual “is active as a private individual, regards other men as means, debases himself to a means and becomes a plaything of alien powers.” (Marx Early Writings, OJQ 1975: 219).
The atomisation of life – ‘free to choose’ (Milton Friedman), the dissolution of social ties and purposes into subjective choice, preference, morality as mere value judgments, the world as market place, the destruction of collective bonds, social control, solidarity, the associative space of civil society, all social forms of meaning and power, enabling individuals to associate together to solidify their social power over the external force and constraint of capital, accumulative imperatives, ‘the market.’ ‘The rule of property’ over ‘the rule of man’ as Marx put it ages ago – the removal of common ground so that people have nowhere to come together to form the warm, affective social bonds and ties to give meaning, belonging, power, solidarity, control to establish a form of social self-constraint, and uproot the external constraint of ‘the system’ and its personifications, a system that, in the words of Marx’s great critic Max Weber, proceeds ‘without regard to persons.’ And without regard to nature and the ecology of the planet too. The realm of use value (true wealth, labour and nature) is bracketed out when the pursuit of exchange value is the bottom line.
In the words of R.H. Tawney:
‘It is that whole system of appetites and values, with its deification of the life of snatching to hoard, and hoarding to snatch, which now, in the hour of its triumph, while the plaudits of the crowd still ring in the ears of the gladiators and the laurels are still unfaded on their brows, seems sometimes to leave a taste as of ashes on the lips of a civilization which has brought to the conquest of its material environment resources unknown in earlier ages, but which has not yet learned to master itself.’
Religion and the Rise of Capitalism 281
By Andrew Sullivan
This nation pioneered modern life. Now epic numbers of Americans are killing themselves with opioids to escape it.
"It’s been several decades since Daniel Bell wrote The Cultural Contradictions of Capitalism, but his insights have proven prescient. Ever-more-powerful market forces actually undermine the foundations of social stability, wreaking havoc on tradition, religion, and robust civil associations, destroying what conservatives value the most. They create a less human world. They make us less happy. They generate pain.
This was always a worry about the American experiment in capitalist liberal democracy. The pace of change, the ethos of individualism, the relentless dehumanization that capitalism abets, the constant moving and disruption, combined with a relatively small government and the absence of official religion, risked the construction of an overly atomized society, where everyone has to create his or her own meaning, and everyone feels alone. The American project always left an empty center of collective meaning, but for a long time Americans filled it with their own extraordinary work ethic, an unprecedented web of associations and clubs and communal or ethnic ties far surpassing Europe’s, and such a plethora of religious options that almost no one was left without a purpose or some kind of easily available meaning to their lives. Tocqueville marveled at this American exceptionalism as the key to democratic success, but he worried that it might not endure forever.
And it hasn’t. What has happened in the past few decades is an accelerated waning of all these traditional American supports for a meaningful, collective life, and their replacement with various forms of cheap distraction. Addiction — to work, to food, to phones, to TV, to video games, to porn, to news, and to drugs — is all around us. The core habit of bourgeois life — deferred gratification — has lost its grip on the American soul. We seek the instant, easy highs, and it’s hard not to see this as the broader context for the opioid wave. This was not originally a conscious choice for most of those caught up in it: Most were introduced to the poppy’s joys by their own family members and friends, the last link in a chain that included the medical establishment and began with the pharmaceutical companies. It may be best to think of this wave therefore not as a function of miserable people turning to drugs en masse but of people who didn’t realize how miserable they were until they found out what life without misery could be. To return to their previous lives became unthinkable. For so many, it still is.
If Marx posited that religion is the opiate of the people, then we have reached a new, more clarifying moment in the history of the West: Opiates are now the religion of the people.
To see this epidemic as simply a pharmaceutical or chemically addictive problem is to miss something: the despair that currently makes so many want to fly away. Opioids are just one of the ways Americans are trying to cope with an inhuman new world where everything is flat, where communication is virtual, and where those core elements of human happiness — faith, family, community — seem to elude so many. Until we resolve these deeper social, cultural, and psychological problems, until we discover a new meaning or reimagine our old religion or reinvent our way of life, the poppy will flourish.
We have seen this story before — in America and elsewhere. The allure of opiates’ joys are filling a hole in the human heart and soul today as they have since the dawn of civilization."
The UK has just appointed a minister for loneliness. The threat of isolation is hardwired into modern life. ‘Modern life is lonely. We all need someone to help’
That isolation comes from specific relations:
‘Constant revolutionising of production, uninterrupted disturbance of all social conditions, everlasting uncertainty and agitation distinguish the bourgeois epoch from all earlier ones. All fixed, fast-frozen relations, with their train of ancient and venerable prejudices and opinions, are swept away, all new-formed ones become antiquated before they can ossify. All that is solid melts into air, all that is holy is profaned, and man is at last compelled to face with sober senses his real conditions of life, and his relations with his kind.’
‘The bourgeoisie, wherever it has got the upper hand, has put an end to all feudal, patriarchal, idyllic relations. It has pitilessly torn asunder the motley feudal ties that bound man to his “natural superiors”, and has left remaining no other nexus between man and man than naked self-interest, than callous “cash payment”. It has drowned the most heavenly ecstasies of religious fervour, of chivalrous enthusiasm, of philistine sentimentalism, in the icy water of egotistical calculation. It has resolved personal worth into exchange value, and in place of the numberless indefeasible chartered freedoms, has set up that single, unconscionable freedom — Free Trade. In one word, for exploitation, veiled by religious and political illusions, it has substituted naked, shameless, direct, brutal exploitation.’
Marx and Engels, The Communist Manifesto
Social atomism below and political centralisation above proceed hand in hand as two sides of the same coin of diremption. Thomas Hobbes in 1649 wrote of the ‘war of all against all’ that could only be constrained with the strong authoritarian state, the ‘Leviathan.’ That state is part of the capital system’s command structure. And hasn’t brought civil peace at all, merely regulates it, whilst rivalry and competition and the separation that breeds it loom ever larger.
Freud couldn’t believe that centuries of progress, the advance of reason and science, could have made something like the First World War possible. He wondered why so many could be so enthusiastic about something so monstrous. ‘Civilisation and its Discontents’ remains a good read, ‘Thoughts for the Times on War and Death’ (1915), ‘Why War?’ with Albert Einstein (1932).
Since 2001, the U.S. government has spent more than $1.8 trillion in the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq – that’s $8.3 million per hour. 'Mark my words, America’s war spending will bankrupt the nation. For that matter, America’s war spending has already bankrupted the nation to the tune of more than $20 trillion dollars.'
As President Eisenhower recognized in a speech given to the American Society of Newspaper Editors, on Apr. 16, 1953, the consequences of allowing the military-industrial complex to wage war, exhaust our resources and dictate our national priorities are beyond grave:
"Every gun that is made, every warship launched, every rocket fired signifies, in the final sense, a theft from those who hunger and are not fed, those who are cold and are not clothed. This world in arms is not spending money alone. It is spending the sweat of its laborers, the genius of its scientists, the hopes of its children. The cost of one modern heavy bomber is this: a modern brick school in more than 30 cities. It is two electric power plants, each serving a town of 60,000 population. It is two fine, fully equipped hospitals. It is some fifty miles of concrete pavement. We pay for a single fighter plane with a half million bushels of wheat. We pay for a single destroyer with new homes that could have housed more than 8,000 people… This is not a way of life at all, in any true sense. Under the cloud of threatening war, it is humanity hanging from a cross of iron.”
Why war? War at home and war abroad go hand in hand.
Scientist Carl Sagan calculated that the Cold War had cost some $10 trillion over 40 years. Noel Brown takes up the story: 'I asked Carl what can you buy with $10 trillion? He said everything. Every boat, every factory, every farm, everything.'
I’m for a solidary exchange in society and economics, a society for social use, a society of socialised production in which means of production are concerned with use values, instead of being converted into means of destruction. The whole world over.
There’s the problem. So where is the solution to be found? In restitution. In the practical reappropriation of power alienated to the abstract systemic-institutional world to the social body from whence it originated, and its reorganisation and exercise as social power.
Frome in Somerset has seen a dramatic fall in emergency hospital admissions since it began a collective project to combat isolation. There are lessons for the rest of the country - there are lessons for the rest of the world.
‘Frome is a remarkable place, run by an independent town council famous for its democratic innovation. There’s a buzz of sociability, a sense of common purpose and a creative, exciting atmosphere that make it feel quite different from many English market towns.’
Like I said, resolidify and reclaim the physical, political and ethical commons (that is, don't just assert community or civil society in an untransformed state - restitute power to the social body and organise and exercise it as such).
‘So, with the help of the NHS group Health Connections Mendip and the town council, her practice set up a directory of agencies and community groups. This let them see where the gaps were, which they then filled with new groups for people with particular conditions. They employed “health connectors” to help people plan their care, and most interestingly trained voluntary “community connectors” to help their patients find the support they needed.
Sometimes this meant handling debt or housing problems, sometimes joining choirs or lunch clubs or exercise groups or writing workshops or men’s sheds (where men make and mend things together). The point was to break a familiar cycle of misery: illness reduces people’s ability to socialise, which leads in turn to isolation and loneliness, which then exacerbates illness.’
The thinker who remains the one I trust the most is Lewis Mumford, and I shall supply a link below on his distinction between democratic technics and authoritarian technics. Mumford saw this these problems coming, and he also showed us the way out.
“I would die happy if I knew that on my tombstone could be written these words, ‘This man was an absolute fool. None of the disastrous things that he reluctantly predicted ever came to pass!’ Yes: then I could die happy.”
— Lewis Mumford
If Lewis Mumford was indeed an ‘absolute fool,’ and our all-knowing, self-righteous techno-totalitarian ‘men as gods’ were the great prophets they style themselves as, then we’d never had had a problem in the first place, let alone a problem that gets worse the more these characters solve it.
Lewis Mumford was no fool!
“An age that worships the machine and seeks only those goods that the machine provides, in ever larger amounts, at ever rising profits, actually has lost contact with reality: and in the next moment or the next generation may translate its general denial of life into one last savage gesture of nuclear extermination. Within the context of organic order and human purpose, our whole technology has still potentially a large part to play; but much of the riches of modern technics will remain unusable until organic functions and human purposes, rather than the mechanical process, dominate.”
— Lewis Mumford
At the root of this malaise is the denial of life inherent in the modern Megamachine's mechanistic way of being, elevating money and power over above people and planet, death over life, destruction above creation. This was the lesson that Mumford sought to emphasize to the end. He exposed 'the myth' that underlay blind adherence to the Megamachine —“the unquestioned notion that technological progress and the advancement of power are the chief goals of the human endeavor” — and showed us that we had the power to refuse the bribe and bullying of the machine.
I keep looking at this question, and keep coming back to the same conclusion – the challenge of civilisation building is upon us. Back in the 1990s I wrote at length on the German ‘socially responsible market economy’ as a wonderful model to follow. In the time wasted since, we have lost the margin for choice we had with respect to the competing models – neoliberalism won out, and the world went the way of the corporate form. As the likes of Kevin Anderson at the Tyndall Centre now tell us with respect to climate change, the only options left to us are radical. I’m just writing on this in terms of the Alternative Institutions Requirement and the Transitions Requirement – what institutions of a viable social and economic order are we proposing, how do they function, how do they avoid the failings of the institutions we are replacing, and how do we get from here to there. That’s nothing less than difficult. But whoever said that constituting a viable social order is easy? I read this article and was struck most of all by the charge of a failure of imagination (and courage, I’d add). And I remember that a slow driver can be as great a menace as a speeding driver. Thinking of Aristotle’s golden mean, I’d say that radical action is appropriate in these conditions. As Aubrey says above, though – let’s do the thinking on this, and get the action right. I’m looking at past experience, and wary of yet another detour. I like what Nicholas Stern wrote when setting out the terms of a climate deal. ‘That global deal must be effective, in that it cuts back emissions on the scale required; it must be efficient, in keeping costs down; and it must be equitable in relation to abilities and responsibilities, taking into account both the origins and impact of climate change’ (Stern 2010). Effective, efficient and equitable – these set the terms of collective action that is comprehensive and coordinated, across and between all sectors, a common ethic that applies to, obligates and inspires all equally. I’m juggling a few writing projects at the moment. One that I need to get back to is the one on Lewis Mumford, whose view strikes me as the most sage and sober of all. Mumford really knew where we were heading with the Megamachine, and is a good guide as to how to get out of its clutches. I strongly affirm Mumford’s emphasis on democratic technics and small scale association as against authoritarian technics and large scale impersonal organisation and technocratic management. I write of Meszaros and Marx and social control above. I’m just as easy with the Jeffersonian vision of township democracy that Mumford affirms. We need to crack the problem of scale, quantity and complexity to overcome the tyranny and violence of abstraction, foster (co)responsiveness and create the means and mechanisms of responsibility (collective and personal).
Here’s a pertinent talk from Mumford. Some quotes: ‘That the spinal principle of democracy is to place what is common to all men above that to which any institution, organization or group may claim for itself. This is not to deny the claims of superior natural endowment, specialized knowledge, technical skill or institutional organisation. All these may by democratic commission play a useful role in the human economy. But democracy consists in giving final authority to the whole rather than the part, and only living human beings as such are an authentic expression of the whole, whether acting alone or with the help of others.’ Mumford goes on to talk about ideas and practices clustered around this spinal principle, ‘communal self-government, free communication between equals, unimpeded access to the common store of knowledge, protection against arbitrary external controls, and a sense of individual moral responsibility for behaviour that affects the whole community.’ He goes on to talk about autonomy and personality, once the possession of kings, as belonging to everyperson. ‘Life itself in its fullness and richness cannot be delegated.’ Democracy, he says, in the primal sense, ‘is necessarily most visible in relatively small communities and groups whose members meet frequently face-to-face, interact freely and are known to each other as persons. As soon as large numbers are involved Democratic Association must be supplemented by a more abstract depersonalised form. Historic experience shows that it is much easier to wipe out democracy by an institutional arrangement that gives authority only to those at the apex of the social hierarchy that it is to incorporate democratic practices into a well-organised system under centralized direction, which achieves the highest degree of mechanical efficiency when those who work for it have no mind and purpose of its own.’ Mumford thus talks about the tension between small-scale association and large scale organization, between personal autonomy and institutional regulation, between remote control and diffused local intervention as creating the critical situation we face today. In the rest of this talk, he contrasts democratic technics and authoritarian technics. Mumford, as I say, resonates most with me, the man is sage and sober. He identifies the key themes of my own work, this notion of large scale ambitious projects succeeding only by being rooted in small-scale practical reasoning, autonomy and responsibility, communities of practice and character, addressing problems of scale, quantity and complexity through forms of social self-government and mediation (themes I have worked through with respect to Plato, Aristotle, Aquinas, the principle of subsidiarity (the idea that power should reside at the lowest level of competence), the idea that the appropriate distribution of power (and representation) may involve a rescaling upwards as well as a descaling downwards, the idea of self-assumed obligation, Rousseau’s expansion of being, Hegel’s Sittlichkeit, Marx’s commune democracy, Bookchin’s confederalism, or what Istvan Meszaros called ‘social control.’ I have all these themes going on - as part of the search for a social metabolic order of rational, common, control recognising conditions of interdependency and interconnection, ensuring harmonious metabolic interaction between the social metabolism and the universal metabolism of nature.
Lewis Mumford - Interview with Modern Visionary (1973)
Mumford is someone who fought to realize the democratic vision and make democracy work. Democracy, Mumford says, ‘is essentially an invention of small society and only can work in small communities. It can’t possibly work in a community of 100 million people.’ The idea that having a whole electorate deciding on everything is democracy is a delusion, it is ‘the worst kind of totalitarian tyranny.’ ‘Democracy depends upon face-to-face relations and therefore upon small communities which then become part of larger communities which have to be governed by a different set of principles.’ This is Aristotle’s idea of the supreme community formed out of smaller communities, each with their own legitimate spheres of competence. It combines representative and direct forms of democracy and, I would add, the substantive democracy pursued by the likes of Rousseau and Marx. Mumford identifies it with the American tradition of Jeffersonian democracy. ‘Jefferson believed that the political system should be based upon the small community and there should be an elected steward for that community who would carry the knowledge needed for the larger community, and would be the bearer of that.’ This is a vision of New England township democracy and community, a ‘profound insight.’ The weakness of the modern political system is that the small unit has never been part of a democracy on the large scale, instead ‘we invented the political party which is an organization that can be manipulated. A real democracy can’t be manipulated because it is too varied.’ What do we have today? ‘Chaos.’ Mumford talks of modern culture as being ‘deliberately indifferent to man’s proper interests.’ ‘The proper interest is the perpetuation of human life in every possible depth, utilizing all its potentialities, not merely one single side of the human personality but everything .. including subjective depths … there are possibilities inside the human personality that haven’t yet been explored, only partly …’ ‘We have thousands of years of labour to perform all over again, just as prologue man did when he invented symbols and learned how to use language. So we have an even greater exploration ahead, provided that we realize that everything that goes on in the outer world must be under the control, under the direction and under the vision of an inner world.’ The vision of Lewis Mumford at 77 Lewis Mumford - Interview with Modern Visionary (1973)
It’s true that in his later years Mumford often despaired for the future of the American and human experiments. In a letter to his friend and fellow critic Roderick Seidenberg, he wrote: “I think, in view of all that has happened the last half-century, that it is likely the ship will sink.” Still, this is a man who closed every book, and nearly every chapter, with rays of hope—none so bold as the last sentence of his final masterpiece, the massive two-volume work “The Myth of the Machine”:
“But for those of us who have thrown off the myth of the machine, the next move is ours: for the gates of the technocratic prison will open automatically, despite their rusty ancient hinges, as soon as we choose to walk out.”
— Lewis Mumford