I would like to pick up on some of the questions relating to
science, nature and industrialisation that Mark and others
have raised and to look somewhat critically at the way in
which thinkers such as Camatte oppose the human to science
and to industrialisation. Mark says: "The only way to stop
ecocide, democide and resource-depletion, is to get rid of
capitalism altogether, forever. This means also getting rid
of (and not extending and further developing) capitalist
industry, science and technology." If we are looking for
consensus on the way forward, then this looks to me like a
good place to start. But it does raise a couple of
questions, like: What is non-capitalist industry, science
and technology? We have never experienced these, just as
none of us has ever lived outside of capitalism in any other
way.
Mark opposes to capitalist science the following: "We need
to recreate a world where the human being is the template,
and where the things we make are built to a human (not
inhuman) scale." Why don't we discuss this further, since it
seems to me if we can get to the point of imagining what
this might mean in practice then we will have gone a long
way in pursuit of the aims of this list?
Like Mark, Jacques Camatte also opposes the human to the
scientific. He tends though to identify the human with
nature, as in the following from his essay Against
Domestication: "Both God and humans yield in turn to
science, which is at once the goddess and servant of
capital: science presents itself in today's world as the
study of mechanisms of adaptation that will assimilate human
beings and nature into the structure of capital's productive
activity." Camatte argues that capital is both revolutionary
and despotic in its restless destruction of all familiar
forms of life, human and natural. This is where I hear an
echo of Mark's demand for "true life sciences". So on the
one side we have capital and science-as-we-know-it and on
the other we have life, that is, human beings and nature.
Camatte says: "The human being is dead and is no more than a
ritual of capital."
Now I would like to problematise this a little. Let me state
my reasons for wanting to do so. I still tend to think, like
most marxists and unlike Camatte, that the revolutionary
aspect of capitalism is an enabling condition for socialism
and that socialism only becomes thinkable once the
superstition, illiteracy and idiocy of feudal and medieval
society has been swept away by capitalism. As Bordiga says:
"Capitalism is the revolution in agriculture". I think this
is a precondition too for socialism. But I am willing to
have my mind changed on this, especially since capitalism is
now a deformation far beyond anything imagined by Karl Marx,
and, as Mark has noted, it produces massive surplus
population that is not at all classically proletarian. So
shifting from the classical Marxist theory of socialist
revolution would mean being able to theorise a socialism
that is a revolution of humanity-as-a-whole against the
destructive despotism of capital, not just a revolution of
the proletariat in the classical marxist sense. This is
Camatte's project, and for reasons that I have now given it
is an attractive one if we can come to understand it. But in
understanding it we would have to go beyond Marx on value
and the development of the productive forces.
But my misgivings about this sort of project remain when I
read Camatte saying: "Revolution now can no longer be taken
to mean just the destruction of all that is old and
conservative, because capital has accomplished this itself.
Rather it will appear as a return to something (a revolution
in the mathematical sense of the term), a return to
community, though not in any form that has existed
previously. Revolution will make itself felt in the
destruction of all that is most "modern" and "progressive"
(because science is capital). . If the triumph of communism
is to bring about the creation of humanity, then it requires
that this creation be possible, it must be a desire that has
been there all along, for centuries."
Everywhere in these formulations I am seeing humanity
opposed to capital and to science, and now to progress as
well. Humanity appears then as some pre-existing essence
that must be rediscovered or recreated (which?). Clearly
Camatte and his line of thinking is as far opposed within
the revolutionary tradition to the anti-humanist and
structuralist marxism of a Louis Althusser (for example) as
one can get. But what is this human being then? It appears
here as the untheorised and unconditioned, that which we
intuitively know if we have any desire within us for
communism. It is the implicitly known on which we must base
the unknown, the future communism.
It is when we come to matters of reproduction and to
feminism that Camatte's identification of the human with
nature becomes particularly apparent: "* there are people
who say that only science and technology can be relied upon
to provide the answers - which would explain why certain
women in the feminist movement are able to envisage their
emancipation through parthenogenesis or by the production of
babies in incubators." He goes on to say in a footnote: "If
men are no longer needed (because of parthenogenesis) and if
women aren't needed either (since embryos and even ovaries
may be developed in vials), then we are left with the
question of whether there is any need for the human species
after all. Has it not become redundant?" Camatte quickly
goes on to affirm the value of the feminist movement and its
contribution to the revolutionary movement. But I sense
something of a contradiction here. The radical feminism that
he is criticising, which dates back to Shulamith Firestone's
extraordinary Dialectic of Sex (1970), only elaborates in an
admittedly extreme form the basic premises of much
mainstream modern feminism. The word 'modern' here is
crucial. Is feminism within a non-modern non-scientific
(frankly, non-capitalist) context possible? If so, it is a
very different feminism to the one that we know with the
centrality of the reproductive rights issue. How do
reproductive rights arise without the technologies of
contraception, abortion or sterilisation, leaving aside the
'test tube technologies' mentioned above? So is communism
pro-life then? This would certainly fit with Camatte's
notion of the revolution against capital as a rejection of
everything that is "modern" and "progressive" and his
remarks that capital is death.
In this discussion one is clearly only one step away from
the return of "human nature", that spectre that marxists
have tried so hard to exorcise, especially the anti-humanist
strands that reject the early Marx of the 1844 Manuscripts,
and his talk of species-being, in favour of the later
'scientific Marx' of Capital. As the ecological debate
unfolds and the question of what it is to be human presents
itself with more urgency, it becomes clearer that this issue
is far from settled.
Let us try another approach to this question and locate the
human somewhere BETWEEN the natural and the scientific.
Camatte does say in another footnote: "Human beings are not
constantly immersed in nature: existence is not always at
one with essence, nor being with consciousness, and so on.
This separation brings into being the need for
representation." Once one represents, however, one builds a
model of the world, as cognitive science has more recently
made us aware. And models are more or less efficacious in
controlling the world and nature. One doesn't have to admire
Camille Paglia to note that much of what it means to be
human is to struggle AGAINST nature. Human beings build
shelters, make weapons, invent fire and agriculture,
domesticate animals, smelt metals, etc. as part of this
primordial struggle. (They also dye and cut their hair, work
out at the gym, perfume themselves and apply cosmetics). All
of this is most certainly connected with the fact that being
human means representing the world rather than instinctively
responding to it. To be human means more than being animal -
it means harmony with nature cannot be taken as a given. It
means being scientific as well as natural and it means this
long before capitalism comes on the scene.
But it is obvious what the return to humanism in the
revolutionary movement means - it means an opposition,
growing fast in the face of ecological disaster, to the
anti-humanism of the leninist tradition and much other
twentieth century scientism, which reached its pinnacle in
the supreme ugliness of structuralism and
post-structuralism. So yes, the question is what is a
science (and technology and industry) that is fit for human
beings. The struggle to be human must mean a struggle
against the specific scientific and technological project of
capital, but it must also be FOR something else. The
struggle to define the latter is itself a revolutionary
activity.
Tahir
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