The Knowledge of a Better World

international | anti-capitalism | other press Monday August 15, 2005 17:19 by Michael A. Lebowitz - Monthly Review

This is a short exerpt from an article by Michael A. Lebowitz from the current edition of Monthly Review which has a series of articles on the theme "Socialism in the 21st century". The entire article and others can be found on the Monthly Review site.

There is an old saying that if you don’t know where you want to go, then any road will take you there. I think that recent years, years of neoliberalism, imperialist outrages, and the virtual destruction of almost every effort to create an alternative, have disproved this saying. Our experience tells us that if you don’t know where you want to go, then no road will take you there.

Our greatest failing is that we have lost sight of an alternative. And, because we have no grand conception of an alternative (indeed, we are told that we should have no grand conceptions), then the response to the neoliberal mantra of TINA, that there is no alternative, has been: let’s preserve health care, let’s not attack education, and let’s try for a little more equality and a little more preservation of the environment. Because of our failure to envision an alternative as a whole, we have many small pieces, many small noes; indeed, the only feasible alternative to barbarism proposed has been barbarism with a human face.

Let us think about a real alternative to barbarism, a grand conception but yet a very simple one. I have in mind a simple idea expressed by Karl Marx in 1844 (but which runs throughout his work)—the unity of human beings based upon recognition of their differences. That is a conception which begins from the recognition that people are different—that they have differing needs and differing capabilities—and that they are interdependent.

Whether we act upon the basis of this understanding of our interdependence or not, we cannot deny that we produce for each other, that as beings within society, there is a chain of human activity that links us. We produce inputs for each other, and the ultimate result of our activity is the reproduction of human beings within society. We can think of this as the activity of a collective worker, as that of the human family, or as that of the family of workers; but, this chain of human activity exists whether we consciously produce on this basis or not—whether we understand our unity or not.

In fact, as we know only too well, outside of little oases (some societies, some families), in this society we do not consciously produce for the needs of others, and we do not understand our productive activity as our contribution to this chain of human activity. Instead of valuing our relationship as human beings, we produce commodities, we value commodities; instead of understanding this chain of human activity as our bond and our power, we understand only that we need these commodities, that we are dominated by them.