Reading competing analyses of the current situation one might initially imagine that we are all living in different worlds. Where some see a global convergence around the secular ideal of scientific-technological progress and economic growth and development others see a clash between civilizational ideals among which there can be no compromise. Where some see global proletarianization and the emergence of a revolutionary “multitude” others see the rise of a global middle class. I have devoted a great deal of attention in pervious analyses to the first debate –that between the “end of history” and the “clash of civilizations” theses, arguing that neither is adequate and that we are, in fact entering a period of civilizational crisis in which the old secular ideal (in both its technicist and humanistic forms) has been called radically into question but nothing has yet emerged to replace it. I will return to this question towards the end of this essay, but I would like to begin with what is happening at the structural level (of how our society is organized to realize the civilizational ideal to which it is ordered, which remains, objectively, technicist secularism). More specifically I would like to look at the question of the current configuration of class forces and of the situation of social classes as civilizational actors. As we will see this has profound implications for the possibility of defining a new, postsecular civilizational ideal and a postcapitalist social order.
Fundamental to the original formulation of historical materialism, as opposed to the various utopian socialisms which Marx and Engels criticized in their Communist Manifesto was the idea that the process of capitalist development would eventually obliterate the peasantry and the petty bourgeoisie, stripping them of even modest control over the labor process and means of production and thus create a mass base for socialism. Once one was reduced to abstract labor how, after all, could one fail to adopt its point of view? And what could that point of view be except that of socialism, of the collective, rational allocation of the social surplus product in such a way as to best promote human development and civilizational progress? Closely associated with this is the idea that under capitalism there is a ruling class –Capital or the “bourgeoisie” (in my mind never a particular useful term, since it refers to where one lives rather than to one’s position in the relations of production). This class consists of those who own and live off their ownership of the means of production, i.e. on profits of enterprise, capital gains, interest, rents, etc. , rather that wages or the immediate, precommodified direct products of their labor. This class is understood to in one way or another control the state apparatus, whether directly or in virtue of the way that apparatus is structured. Socialism, whatever else it involves, presupposes displacing Capital as the ruling class a creating a “worker’s state” in which the proletariat (perhaps with allied petty bourgeois and peasant elements) rules.
A great deal of later historical materialism is devoted to trying to understand why most historic socialist revolutions were primarily peasant revolts and why industrial workers, the supposed core of the proletariat, have not generally been especially interested in revolutionary socialism, preferring social democracy or “the welfare state,” and sometimes even supporting fascist movements. We will not rehearse these theories here. I have already done so in other contexts (Mansueto 1995, 2002a, 2010). They pertain, in any case, to configurations of social forces which are passing away and in some cases long gone. And the verdict of this long self-criticism of dialectics in practice is clear. Historic socialism was, on the side of the peasants, artisans, newly proletarianized industrial workers and humanistic intellectuals who supported it first and foremost a movement of resistance to proletarianization capitalist development. From the vantage point of the technocratic intellectuals and state capitalist forces which ended up dominant in most actually existing socialist regimes it was a mechanism for accelerated industrialization. Fully proletarianized workers have rarely supported revolutionary socialist movements and the technocratic (as opposed to the humanistic) fraction of the “new class” to which advanced industrial and information economies (capitalist or socialist) give birth eventually abandons it.
Less attention has been devoted to the problems with the historical materialist idea of the ruling class. This is, in large part, because until relatively recently the idea had rather more merit. And where ever one stands in the debate between instrumental and structural theories of the capitalist state, it is still possible to demonstrate that major political parties in advanced capitalist countries are largely funded, and therefore significantly influenced, if not actually controlled, by competing fractions of Capital and that the structure of the capitalist state, based as it is on legal concepts of “right” which derive from the idea of property, inevitably reproduces capitalist relations of production.
In this essay I would like look at the emerging configuration of class forces globally and ask what this configuration of forces implies for the possibility of civilizational and structural transformation. Specifically, I will argue that the rise of what Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri call “the multitude” is by no means incompatible with what the National Intelligence Council sees as the rise of a global middle class, and that both are part of a larger process which includes the decline of the traditional liberal bourgeoisie and its displacement by a “new global elite” which is itself at once highly privileged and significantly proletarianized. Our adversaries and our protagonists are less and less well defined groups of people or even broad social categories and more and more impersonal –and contradictory– structural and cultural dynamics. This has profound implications for the creation of a postsecular, postcapitalist politics.
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I have discussed the phenomenon of the new global elite in earlier essay. Fundamentally, this group is defined by its reliance on monopoly rents on skill and innovation, rather than ownership of capital for its income. In this sense, it is best regarded as “petty bourgeois” and as the highest stratum of what historical materialist theory in the late twentieth century called the “new petty bourgeoisie” or the “professional middle class.” This stratum is convinced of its superior intellect and work ethic, and inclined to believe that a combination of good intentions and technical expertise can solve any problem which is actually susceptible of solution (what is often called “solutionism”). It is also inclined to believe that those below them on the social ladder are there first and foremost because they are less capable. While this group vacillates wildly in its political behavior, between a technocratic moderate neoliberalism focused on state-led investment in education and technological development and a libertarian rejection of social responsibility and state intervention of any kind, its organic politics is that of philanthropocapitalism and social entrepreneurship and its native spirituality somewhere on the spectrum between New Age subjective idealism (the world is what you make it) and feel good New Evangelicalism (I’ rich because God loves me more).
What has received less attention is the gradual, though far from complete, degradation of the liberal bourgeoisie into this stratum. Marx already knew that capitalist development would proletarianize more than a few capitalists. What he did not realize was that its tendency (asymptotic, perhaps, but real nonetheless) is to proletarianize all of them. A fully globalized information economy means that one’s capital is essentially never secure and the ownership of capital confers less and less security and autonomy with each passing year. And how does one buttress that security? By becoming a world class innovator who can generate and capture new surplus as the old sources dry up. This means, in effect, becoming a member of the new global elite, a very high level “expert,” even if that expertise is in the area of portfolio management or serial entrepreneurship. And of course investors and entrepreneurs alike know that they are not really autonomous. They are, ultimately slaves of the global market: house slaves or even palace slaves, but slaves nonetheless.
In mature capitalism, it is Capital, not capitalists, that rule.
This transition within the traditional liberal bourgeoisie is marked by the fact that many of its most social responsible elements, led by investor Warren Buffet, have pledged to give away at least half their wealth. By any ordinary measure their heirs will still, of course, be tremendously privileged. But the ambition of earlier generations of capitalists, to create a family dynasty which was free of market pressure and able to devote itself to public service and civilization building (or to decadence and conspicuous consumption) is gradually disappearing.
This is, in turn reflected in what might be mistaken for an “inability of the ruling class to rule,” –one of Lenin’s conditions for a revolutionary situation. It seems impossible for any of the various fractions of Capital to form a stable governing coalition and address the global civilizational problems which even they recognize (climate change, demographic inversion, economic stagnation). But what is really happening is that while various economic sectors do indeed fund and thus exercise considerable control over the principal political parties, these sectors themselves have constantly changing interests and are unable to adopt what Gramsci called a “global” as opposed to a “partial” perspective on politics. In contemporary parlance, they lack a vision for the future and have been reduced to interest group politics, leaving political parties increasingly vulnerable to domination by irresponsible, acivilizational or anticivilizational forces such as the Tea Party.
At the cultural level, this dynamic is reflected in the declining support for the historic cultural institutions of the liberal bourgeoisie: the liberal Protestantism and the liberal arts university. Liberal Protestantism (which, we must remember, directly or indirectly founded and sponsored many of the great private universities in the United States) was all about seeing the hand of God in capitalist civilizational progress, even if that required philanthropic initiative or state intervention. The liberal arts university was about cultivating leaders who could see beyond money making and take responsibility for civilization (without, of course, undermining the structures which generated the surplus which made their leadership possible). This ideal is now globally under attack, especially at institutions serving the working classes, an issue we will take up in another article. But the attacks have not spared elite institutions. When an institution like Northwestern University is requiring that all of its students justify both curricular and extracurricular choices based on their impact on their readiness for the workforce we know that not only the liberal ideal (Protestant or humanistic) has been abandoned but that the ruling class itself (in the sense of those with the resources to retire from moneymaking and focus on civilization building) has contracted to the point that it can no longer drive the mission of more than a handful of institutions. Even the children of Capital are being required to acquire marketable skills.
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Let us now turn to what is happening with everyone else: the so called 99%. The first point which I would like to make is that the contradiction between proletarianization and the rise of the global middle class is only apparent. Proletarianization refers to the process by which producers (including producers of services, even intellectual services) are stripped of control of the means of production and forced to work for others. One can be proletarianized and still earn a living wage or even a massive monopoly rent on skill or innovation. The discourse around the rise of the global middle class, on the other hand, refers simply to the fact that a growing percentage of the world’s population has disposable income. While it is true that the criteria used to define disposable income are sometimes so liberal as to be ridiculous (e.g. more than $2 a day), there are more and more people for whom 1/3 of more of their income is not absorbed by basic necessities and are thus entering the consumer economy.
The second point which I would like to make is that these twin developments are not especially propitious for a postsecular, postcapitalist politics. Historic socialism adopted one of two principal economic strategies. The first, associated with Lenin’s New Economic Policy and the early stages of the Chinese revolution focused on carrying out radical land reform to secure the well-being and support of the peasantry and create a demand for manufactured goods. This strategy foundered because peasants, left to their own devices, tend not to produce more than they need to feed themselves, slowing economic growth and sometimes creating food shortages in the cities. It was thus nearly always eventually displaced by one or another form of “primitive socialist accumulation” which extracted surplus from the peasants in order to industrialize rapidly. The Soviet Union had to do this in order to effectively resist the threat of fascism. China did it in order to be able to rebuild itself as a civilizational center and geopolitical power. The expectation was that, on the one hand, the resulting economic growth would eventually eliminate scarcity and that the people, freed from market relationships, would focus on realizing higher spiritual and civilizational aspirations rather than demanding increased access to consumer goods. Both expectations proved false. The Soviet Union fell in large part because it refused to yield to the demand for consumer goods. The Chinese yielded and are now facing both a loss of their comparative advantage in providing low wage high productivity labor and what little remained of popular support for socialism in the wake of the party’s repeated redefinitions of the ideal .
This is important to keep in mind when we try to evaluate the recent wave of popular resistance, from the Color Revolutions to the Arab Spring to the Occupy movements to recent wave of leftist protests against the leftist government of Brazil. Yes, these movements do reflect the aspirations of a largely proletarianized “multitude.” And yes they do reflect real grievances and legitimate demands, whether for a living wage, decent public services, political participation, and government accountability. But no, they are not calling capitalism into question. This is because they cannot, precisely because their social base is so profoundly proletarianized that they cannot really imagine transcending the proletarian condition. The humanistic intellectual, petty bourgeois and peasant reservoir on which historic socialism drew whenever it imagined something more than a reformed capitalism (or a fast track to industrialization) has largely dried up and the social basis for a postsecular, postcapitalist politics with it.
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Or has it?
What I would like to suggest is that while the social-structural bases for transcending technicist secularism and the capitalist structures through which it is current pursued have largely disintegrated, the underlying ontological and physical and anthropological bases for resistance remains, as it must, because neither the secular ideal nor the capitalist structure by means of which our civilization pursues it are tenable. And new social-structural base will emerge.
The ontological base is this: nothing in the phenomenal world has the power of Being in itself; nothing we experience has inherent existence. All depend on an arche which we can think of either as yhwh or Esse, , i.e. the power of Being as such or as pattica samupada , the Jewel Net of Indra, in which all things live in each other’s embrace. While all creative worldly activity is a participation in this, the secularist ideal of transcending finitude and contingency by means of innerworldly civilizational progress (by creating a collective political subject which makes humanity the master of its own destiny or by extending scientific and technological progress to the point that we become effectively omnipotent) inevitably runs up against frustration. Contingent cannot become necessary Being.
The physical base consists in the fact that the natural world is a participation in the arche. It is not, as secularism, capitalist or socialist presupposed, simply dead matter to be used as we see fit. And it will not tolerate such use. Thus the resistance of nature or physis to the technological onslaught of secular godbuilding projects. Thus the ecological crisis. And thus also our gradual recovery of a sense of reverence and even awe for the beauty and power of physis which, however well mathematical physics may describe it, remains fundamentally divine.
Humanity, as Sartre recognized, is the desire to be God. It is also, however, when it is sane, a recognition that this desire is quite impossible. The boundary between contingent and necessary Being is impermeable and cannot be crossed. This is why ideologies of entitative divinization, from sacral monarchy through capitalist and socialist godbuilding ultimately make no sense. They wreak social havoc when they are pursued and are rejected by the people once they are fully and adequately understood (since what they mean for the people is their transformation into sacrificial victims or “batteries” for the rulers who are the only ones to experience even modest benefits from the doomed quest for divinization).
What human beings (as well as any hypothetical higher beings) can do that minerals, plants, and animals cannot is to participate consciously in Being/dependent origination. We do this by participating in the creative and relational process which is nature and history. And at our best we do it in the recognition that nothing we find and nothing we create has inherent existence; all is participation, relationship, generativity. When we understand this fully, beyond concept and with direct experience, our conscious participation becomes enlightened. When we act on this enlightenment our laboring and organizing and creating becomes an authentic ripening of Being.
None of this has dried up. It is just that as our old structures and institutions have become ossified or corrupt or perverted (turned into ways of making us sacrificial victims or batteries for someone else’s project of godbuilding or divinization) we increasingly pursue these aims outside of or on the edges of institutions, because this is the only place we find space to do so. This is a normal, healthy response on the part of people who have no other way to conserve and cultivate their humanity, their nature, their being/related. But it is not a very promising base for a politics.
So what is our task? And how do we pursue it? If we are to create a postsecular, postcapitalist politics we must find a way to tap into the Base as a source of power. This means repairing old institutions, where this is possible and it means creating new ones. The choice between these options is a false one. A year ago the possibility of a rebirth of authentic spirituality and an authentic witness for justice in the Catholic Church would have seemed impossibly remote. Today, with Francis, it is a reality. The institution is worth engaging and rebuilding. But there are limits. Francis has already shown a profound reluctance –or even an inability– to engage the deepest and most profound perversion of the Church –its misogyny. So there is still a need to build on the outside.
The same is true of other institutions …
But just how do we do this? Engaging and rebuilding institutions requires leadership. And leadership begins with virtue, with excellence, with mana. If we want to articulate a vision of a society ordered to the full development of human capacities then we must first, ourselves, be highly developed. If among those capacities we include spirituality, however we understand it, then we must ourselves live and embody the spiritual ideas we are forging –in fact forge them as we are testing and embodying them. Otherwise our claims on the people will ring hollow.
This does not mean that only the fully enlightened can lead. But the day (thank God!) when credentials, whether scholarly or sacerdotal or political by themselves confer mana are over. We must really embody the meanings and values we articulate and struggle each and every day to embody them more fully.
Second, we must understand institutions as first and foremost structures for cultivating human beings. What we need from people most is not their support but their self-cultivation. While it certainly matters what we believe and where we stand on the issues and while we certainly engage in deliberation and attempt to persuade others (even as we are open to being persuaded by them), what really matters is that we are identifying people who want to grow and develop and that we help them do so. Build relationships. Cultivate human capacities. Above all deproletarianize both ourselves and those we lead. Do not liberate them from Capital only to make them dependent on us. Together articulate a new vision of what it means to be human. Old institutions will change and new ones will be born. And when this happens resources will begin to flow along new pathways –away from those which give the highest rate of return and towards those which best promote the development of human capacities. And a new authority and a new power will be born, the power of the elders and the people together. And Capital will be defeated.
