资本主义早已吸其了它的教训
发布时间：2010-09-24 22:07
分类名称：默认分类
1-Capitalism abandoned the hierarchical Fordist structure of the production process — which, named after auto maker Henry Ford, enforced a hierarchical and centralized chain of command — and developed a network-based form of organization that accounted for employee initiative and autonomy in the workplace. As a result, we get networks with a multitude of participants, organizing work in teams or by projects, intent on customer satisfaction and public welfare, or worrying about ecology.
In this way, capitalism usurped the left’s rhetoric of worker self-management, turning it from an anti-capitalist slogan to a capitalist one. It was Socialism that was conservative, hierarchic and administrative.
The anti-capitalist protests of the ’60s supplemented the traditional critique of socioeconomic exploitation with a new cultural critique: alienation of everyday life, commodification of consumption, inauthenticity of a mass society in which we “wear masks” and suffer sexual and other oppressions.
The new capitalism triumphantly appropriated this anti-hierarchical rhetoric of ‘68, presenting itself as a successful libertarian revolt against the oppressive social organizations of corporate capitalism and “really existing” socialism. This new libertarian spirit is epitomized by dressed-down “cool” capitalists such as Microsoft’s Bill Gates and the founders of Ben & Jerry’s ice cream.
2-
There are (at least) four such antagonisms: the looming threat of
ecologicalcatastrophe; the inappropriateness of
private propertyrights for so-called “intellectual property”; the socio-ethical implications of
new techno-scientific developments(especially in biogenetics); and, last but not least,
new forms of apartheid, in the form of new walls and slums.
The first three antagonisms concern the domains of what political theorists Michael Hardt and Toni Negri call “commons” — the shared substance of our social being whose privatization is a violent act that should be resisted with violent means, if necessary (violence against private property, that is).
The commons of external natureare threatened by pollution and exploitation (from oil to forests and natural habitat itself);
the commons of internal nature(the biogenetic inheritance of humanity) are threatened by technological interference; and
the commons of culture— the socialized forms of “cognitive” capital, primarily language, our means of communication and education, but also the shared infrastructure of public transport, electricity, post, etc. — are privatized for profit. (If Bill Gates were to be allowed a monopoly, we would have reached the absurd situation in which a private individual would have owned the software texture of our basic network of communication.)
3-
In short, without the antagonism between the Included and the Excluded, we may well find ourselves in a world in which Bill Gates is the greatest humanitarian fighting poverty and diseases, and NewCorp’s Rupert Murdoch the greatest environmentalist mobilizing hundreds of millions through his media empire.
In contrast to the classic image of proletarians who have “nothing to lose but their chains,” we are thus ALL in danger of losing ALL. The risk is that we will be reduced to abstract empty Cartesian subjects deprived of substantial content, dispossessed of symbolic substance, our genetic base manipulated, vegetating in an unlivable environment.
These triple threats to our being make all of us potential proletarians. And the only way to prevent actually becoming one is to act preventively.
The true legacy of ‘68 is best encapsulated in the formula
Soyons realistes, demandons l’impossible!(Let’s be realists, demand the impossible.)
Today’s utopia is the belief that the existing global system can reproduce itself indefinitely. The only way to be realistic is to envision what, within the coordinates of this system, cannot but appear as impossible.
http://www.inthesetimes.com/article/continued/3751/the_ambiguous_legacy_of_68/
