CORONA V _ R _ S
Remove the I and U and take them elsewhere into the building of a new public community based on the unity of each and all.
Only I and U can break the chain and stop the spread of this virus, and of the other viruses that have infected politics and society to separate individuals from one and another and from their own selves. Only U and I that can remake the chain through the bonds, ties, and loyalties we forge in relation to each other; only U and I can make society anew in the aftermath of the forces that tear society apart. The worst thing that can happen is for people, in the combination of desperation and impoverished public imagination, to limit their horizons to the return of normality. If the world returns to normal, then these crises will continue, their impacts becoming increasingly damaging and unsustainable. The normal was the problem and will remain the problem so long as society is untransformed.
As Bruce Springsteen sings in Keep Your Eyes on the Prize:
“The only chain that a man can stand is that chain of hand on hand, keep your eyes on the prize, hold on.”
Many are familiar with Rousseau’s quote ‘man is born free but everywhere is in chains.’ Many who cite that quote misunderstand Rousseau’s intent. Rousseau was not arguing against chains as such as inimical to freedom. On the contrary, he was arguing for the need for human beings to move to a state of civil freedom through their forging of the legitimate chains of public community. His target was the illegitimate chains of the fraudulent social contract based upon relations of exploitation and domination. This problem has always been one of illegitimate chains and their overthrowing in favour of forging the legitimate chains of a genuine public community.
I shall take the opportunity to restate my conception of rational freedom as the master theme of my work in political philosophy and ethics. This principle holds that the freedom of each individual is conditional upon and co-existent with the freedom of all individuals and that such freedom requires a social-institutional framework and infrastructure of good government as the supreme communities of a range of communities and intermediary associations. U + I + the (moral, social, natural) environment comprises the “happy habitus” and is constituted by legitimate chains, the self-assumed obligations, the links, loyalties, ties, and solidarities that we forge ourselves in public life and social interconnection.
Since human beings are social beings, it follows that each needs the other in order to be himself or herself. The discrete, pre-social, self-possessing individual who contracts into society to secure and/or advance self-interest and contracts out again at will is a fiction which, if made the basis of social practice, undermines human sociality to the detriment of real individuality. Freedom is, therefore, both personal and interpersonal and attainable only in internal connection with others within a welter and complex of relationships, ensuring that the freedom of some individuals is not achieved at the expense of the freedom of others. There is a need, then, to create and sustain the forms and structures of real community as the conditions of a socio-relational freedom uniting each and all, and thus remove the Social-Darwinist potential that inheres in those individualist conceptions of freedom that see human beings as separated from one another and engaged in an endless competition for scarce resources. No individual can be fully free unless all individuals are free, and all cannot be free in conditions which are based on the separation of individuals from each other, only in conditions which emphasise the unity of each and all in community. The individualist conception of freedom is blind to the collective conditions of freedom and so paves the way for the Social Darwinist predation that undermines freedom from within.
Or, in a nutshell:
“The basic law of capitalism is you or I, not you and I.” (Karl Liebknecht).
Socialism isn't about "free stuff," as its critics allege, it's about public life. Opponents of socialism, of course, have a vested interest in caricature. They are not engaging in ‘debate’ at all, but deliberately engage in fallacious reasoning in order to mould and manipulate minds to keep them within the narrow parameters of the existing order.
To gain further insight into the conception of rational freedom adumbrated above, it may be profitable to investigate the work of Martin Buber on the importance of I-Thou relationships in community as against the I-It relationships of the alienated social world. That flags up the religious roots of rational freedom, highlighting the extent to which interpersonal activity is forged within a transcendent standard, ideal, and hope and is not merely conventional and relative to time and place.
There is a standard that exists outside of the bonds we forge. We may praise the solidarity and collective spirit that human beings routinely show in time and place, but we need to be aware that cooperation is not a virtue in itself. It matters a great deal with whom we cooperate and to what ends. The cooperative instincts of human beings have been frequently hijacked by free-riders in different societies and diverted to private ends, serving the interests of some at the expense of others. Here, the Social Darwinist menace inherent in individualist conceptions of freedom expresses itself in a fake communality and collective purpose. We should have no truck with surrogate communities and instead constitute real community as a community that respects and realises difference.
I quote now an extract fromThe Collective Manifesto “Despite everything,” The pandemic as a return of bodies (the translation is rough, but I have tried first and foremost to express the gist of the piece):
"For the past forty years, we have witnessed the triumph and dominance of the neoliberal system in every part of the planet. [The Social Darwinist menace inherent in individualism I referred to above, a view based on a liberal ontology that falsely separates individuality and sociality.] Among the different trends that go through this type of system, one in particular seems to be the lie forma of the time: that of considering bodies as a simple background noise disturbing the account of power. Because real bodies, always too "heavy" and too opaque, désirants and alive, escape the linear logic of predictability. The objective of neo-liberalism policies and practices has always been aimed at territorialisation these bodies, to virtualise them, to make them a manipulable material, a "human capital" to be used at its discretion in market circuits. [this is what Marx analysed in terms of ‘commodification,’ reducing the diversity of all things to the one standard in capitalist exchange and exploitation.] They are required to be disciplined, disciplined without criteria, flexible, ready to adapt (leitmotiv of our time) to the needs determined by the macro-economic structure. [to the accumulative imperatives of the capital system rather than ends established by the realization of essential healthy potentials of human beings as social beings actualising in community with others.]
In this extreme abstraction, the bodies of the non-papers, the bodies of the unemployed, the bodies of the "not right", bodies drowned in the Mediterranean, or those of the holding centres, in short the bodies of the supernumerary become simple numbers, at zero value, without any corporéité and therefore, deep down, without humanity.
In the technoscientifique world, this trend is expressed in the form of an "anything is possible" that does not recognize any biological or cultural limit to the pathological desire for organic deregulation. [this is the capital system as a transgression of essential human potentials, capacities, and needs, as well as a transgression of social limits and planetary boundaries. This is the triumph of ‘the machine’ over man.] It is now about increasing the mechanisms of the living, the possibility of living a thousand years, even becoming immortal! This is nothing short of the desire to produce a post-organic life in which one can go beyond the constraints of the bodies, by nature too imperfect and fragile. The catastrophic acceleration of the over the past thirty years reflects the disastrous effects of this "anything is possible" anthropomorphic that not only ignore but crush the deep singularities of organic process. [This is an anti-essentialism, a reduction of human beings and their innate potentialities to the system and systemic regulation, the subordination of human beings within a regime of accumulation.]
It is in this world convinced that it could get rid of the life-specific limits that the pandemic has emerged. In a catastrophic way and under the threat, we suddenly realize that the bodies are back. They have become, overnight, the main issues of the situation and the policies implemented. The bodies remember us. And this comeback seems to open a new window from which we can see several possibilities for action. First of all, we must see that power can, when it wants, implement the policies necessary to protect and protect the living. [We can, in other words, reclaim politics in its original sense of human self-actualization in the social context of community. We can recover power as ‘power with’ each other as against the dominant notion of ‘power over,’ the power that some exercise over others. We can recover the notion of power as inherent essential potentiality and its exercise as a flourishing of ourselves in relation with others. Such a power implies the recognition of limits. Flourishing is based on a fulfilment in recognition of limit.]
The King is naked! In stupor, world finance leaders understood that the economy, their sacred monster, was incapable in the end of continuing without living slaves to function. After trying to convince us that the only serious "reality" of this world was determined by economic demands, [the accumulative imperatives of capital] leaders of (almost) all over the planet have shown that it is possible to act otherwise, even to defeat the world economy. This is a kind of confession from those who had categorically argued that all policies (social, environmental, health...) must have to deal with the "economic realism" built into an authoritarian God that could not be disobeyed.
However, one fiction should not be hunting another. The fiction of neo-liberalism, which has maintained the illusion of a society composed of self-reliant and self-sufficient individuals, has been supplemented and even supplanted in recent weeks by another imaginary story that claims that we would now all be "in the same boat." We are far from criticizing the invitation to solidarity. [Rather than reject the invitation to solidarity, we need to scrutinize its terms critically, and embrace only those forms that are genuinely life-enhancing and mutually supportive.] It would be a mistake, however, to believe that the collective nature of the threat would come to magically erase the differences between bodies. [A collective threat in itself does not produce genuine human collectivity. On the contrary, a collective threat impacts in a differential and highly iniquitous way on people and society existing in the context of social division and asymmetrical relations of exploitation and domination. Such is the society of the contemporary world. Assertions of commonality and community in this context are mere top-down surrogates, abstractions and fictions which reify the unity and universality human beings require in order to actualize their potentials, turning those potentials into their opposites.]
Social class, gender, economic domination, military violence or patriarchal oppression are all realities that articulate our bodies in different ways. Let us not be rocked by this romance of the lockdown, which aims to make us forget these differences."
I agree very much with this. We live in divided societies, and assertions of commonality and unity in such a context is an ideological project designed to rationalize and conceal the roots of division. A genuine commonality is concerned to uproot the socio-economic and psychological bases of division, disunity, disconnection, and discord.
I would add a crucial rider here. Just as there is no virtue in cooperation and unity as such, nor is there any virtue in difference as such. The Collective Manifesto rightly contests the differences at the heart of the iniquitous societies of our day, differences which assertions of unity in face of a common threat are inclined to occlude. That same occlusion is also a hallmark of a certain, dominant, strand of environmentalism. I have frequently criticized the tendency of certain mainstream environmentalists to practice a ‘classless’ politics in a class society, making general appeals to all ‘humankind,’ ignoring the very real differences that exist to separate human beings from one another, and pit their interests against each other. To think that these interests, stakes, and positions can simply be ignored by general appeal, on account of the climate crisis constituted a threat to all, is a crass political error that leaves environmentalism without structural capacity, social relevance, and material futurity.
At the same time, I would avoid the Romantic delusion that the world is made entirely out of differences, and that we merely construct identities in order to get by. The differences identified above are socio-economic and cultural ills that separate human beings from each other and turn human beings against each other. On the basis of a liberal ontology gone decadent, some have shown a tendency to make a virtue of difference itself, rejecting each, every, and any common purpose as repressive of and inimical to individuality. Such a view remains entirely within the liberal modes of thought that have us having to make choices between utterly false antitheses, a false commonality and surrogate communalism on the one hand, and a fictional individuality and difference on the other. Neither side is right, both side is false to the human essence.
As Terry Eagleton comments, 'nobody in a world of pure differences would be able to say anything intelligible - that there could be no poetry, road signs, love letters or log sheets, as well as no statements that everything is uniquely different from everything else.'
Issues like this are non-issues arising from a false liberal ontology that separates the pre-social, self-possessing discrete individual from society, turning two essential attributes of humanity - individuality and sociality - as antithetical to each other.
Those interested to pursue the above further should have a read of Terry Eagleton’s After Theory (2003). But if you want me to state the point concisely – since everyone is always so busy in these practical times (or intellectually lazy, and merely want the machine of their choice to simply tell them at the push of a button … that’ll end well, for sure .. ) – the problem is not merely ‘neoliberalism’ but the structural and systemic roots driving the colonization and commodification of ‘the body.’ The capital system has expropriated the body and it will require a substantial social transformation to bring us back to our senses. I have exchanged a few heated words with environmentalists on this in recent times, confronted frequent claims that references to class and capital are ‘outdated,’ ‘antiquated,’ ‘us and them’ thinking and such like. Such notions are indolent – I could simply say typically bourgeois. The assertion of a classless ‘third way’ beyond class analysis and politics is nothing remotely new at all but is as old as class itself, and is still with us precisely because class and class relations are still with us. The assertion of the third way is not the great solution to class struggle its proponents think it is, it is a toadstool that grows on the terrain of class. Those who think a classless third way is capable of transcending class society have no idea the nature of the system they are dealing with, and as a result will fall prey to it, as they have done time and again in history. The fatal error made here is to jump from a view that class and exploitative relations ought not exist – with which those engaging in class struggle are in entire agreement, as the end of that class struggle - to the assumption that class relations simply cease to exist merely by thinking so. That ‘classless,’ socially neutral non-politics misses out the part that is crucial to the abolition of class - the hard work of socio-economic transformation that takes us from the class divided ‘is’ to the classless ‘ought.’ If you practise a classless politics on a class divided terrain then you will remain entirely within the untransformed status quo, with power relations left firmly intact. That constitutes precisely the critical definition of ideology in Marx’s sense.
‘What may persuade us that certain human bodies lack all claim on our compassion is culture. Regarding some of our fellow humans as inhuman requires a fair degree of cultural sophistication. It means having literally to disregard the testimony of our senses. This, at any rate, should give pause to those for whom 'culture' is instinctively an affirmative term. There is another sense in which culture can interpose itself between human bodies, known as technology. Technology is an extension of our bodies which can blunt their capacity to feel for one another. It is simple to destroy others at long range, but not when you have to listen to the screams. Military technology creates death but destroys the experience of it. It is easier to launch a missile attack which will wipe out thousands than run a single sentry through the guts. The painless death for which the victims have always hankered is now also prized by the perpetrators. Technology makes our bodies far more flexible and capacious, but in some ways much less responsive. It reorganizes our senses for swiftness and multiplicity rather than depth, persistence or intensity. Marx considered that by turning even our senses into commodities, capitalism had plundered us of our bodies. In his view, we would need a considerable political transformation in order to come to our senses.’ (Eagleton 2003: 155-56).
Eagleton comes now to essentialism and the ancient intertwining of ethics and politics. Marx, in many respects, was an ancient in this sense. It is a mode of thinking which is out of fashion in the modern world. But given that the modern world is mired in crisis and seems on the brink of catastrophe, I think we are entitled to explore supposedly ‘outdated’ modes of thought:
‘In his early Paris Manuscripts, Marx was seeking for a way of moving from how it is with the human body to how it ought to be. He wanted an ethics and politics based on our species-being or shared material nature. But this is a notoriously perilous enterprise. Philosophers have generally placed a ban on such attempts to derive values from facts. A straight description of a situation will not tell you what you should do about it. Human nature can be described in a rich diversity of ways, and there can be all sorts of competing versions of it to back up different ethical theories. 'Nature' is a slippery term, gliding between fact (how it is with something) and value (how it should be). It shares this ambiguity with the word 'culture', which some see as the opposite of Nature. We have, in fact, a whole vocabulary which links bodily states with moral ones: kind, tender, unfeeling, touched, touchy, thick-skinned, insensitive and the like. This language seems to imply a connection between how it is with the body and how we should or should not behave. But it is a connection plagued with problems. Being 'kind', in the sense of being of the same species as another, is often enough a reason for killing or being killed, dominating or being subjugated. If we were not 'kind', we might be treated a lot better. Nobody is particularly interested in subjugating beetles.
Or take the idea of human sociality. It, too, is suspended somewhere between fact and value. It is a fact that we are naturally political animals, at home only in society. Unless we co-operated with each other, we could not survive. But sociality can also mean an active, positive form of co-operation, something which is desirable rather than just biologically inevitable. Marx sometimes seems to imagine that sociality is always positive in this way. But a fascist society is also a co-operative one. The death camps were a complex collaborative project. There is a good deal of solidarity between the members of the World Bank. There is no virtue in human co-operation in itself. It depends on who is co-operating with whom for what purpose. Marx sees how some men and women can hijack the social capacities of others for their own selfish purposes. For him, indeed, this is a description of class society. In class society, even those powers and capabilities which belong to us as a species - labour, for example, or communication - are degraded into means to an end. They become instrumentalized for the advantage of others. One can say much the same about sexual life. Sexuality is a medium of solidarity which in patriarchal society becomes a means of power, dominion and selfish satisfaction.
But what if you are not co-operating over anything in particular? You need, of course, to work together to survive economically. Sexuality is necessary if the species is to be reproduced. Co-operation generally has some sort of practical goal. But what if it is enjoyed at the same time as an end in itself? What if the sharing of life becomes its own purpose, rather as in the activity we know as art? You do not need to find an answer to why human beings live together and enjoy each others' company -some of the time, at least. It is in their nature to do so. It is a fact about them as animals. But when it becomes 'fully' a fact - when it exists as an activity in itself, not simply as a means to an end beyond it - it also becomes a source of value. A socialist society co-operates for certain material purposes, just like any other; but it also regards human solidarity as an estimable end in itself. As such, it is beyond the comprehension of a good deal of contemporary cultural theory, for which solidarity means tepid consensus or baleful conformism rather than a source of value and fulfilment.’ (Eagleton 2003: 170-72).
I remain an essentialist in philosophy, emphasising innate healthy human potentialities which are to be realized together in community for freedom as flourishing. The ancients called it ‘happiness.’ And such flourishing can only proceed within the community which unites each and all in solidarity. Add the relation to other beings and bodies in the more-than-human community to give us the interdependence of human and planetary flourishing, then we have U + I + environment that Robert Waller wrote of in Be Human or Die.