Seeking Wisdom and Doing Justice

Anthony Mansueto

with Maggie Mansueto

University of New Mexico – Gallup and

Seeking Wisdom

There can be little doubt that the events of 11 September 2001 marked a shift in the tenor of world events. Three years ago, as the second Clinton government neared the end of its term and as the stock market was nearing new heights, one might well have been tempted to believe neoliberal theorists who claimed that history, if not quite at an end, was clearly on their side. Free trade and the free movement of Capital were the order of the day. Ideologically driven hold-outs, who in any case seemed to control only a few “rogue states,” were gradually giving way before the combined force of economic embargo and military bombardment, and being replaced by regimes focused on finding their niches in the global market order. Global Capital was, in other words, everywhere triumphant. And even those who had the insight to see that the neoliberal house was, in fact, built of cards, tended to have recourse to an analysis which sounded a great deal like historical materialism. After the defeat of the Leninist-led national liberation movements the formation of a unified world market was, at long last, uniting the dispossessed and setting the stage for an international -–no global— challenge to Capital. If the future didn’t belong to Frederick Hayek and Francis Fukuyama, then clearly it belonged to Marx. A Weberian “war of the gods” (Weber 1919) seemed every bit as unlikely as a renaissance Maoist millenarianism.

Today, of course, it just such a war that we are being called on to enter. Samuel Huntington’s Clash of Civilizations (Huntington 1993) has replaced Francis Fukuyama’s End of History (Fukuyama 1989) as the “Little Red Book” of the foreign policy establishment, and al Qaeda and Hizbut Tahrir have displaced the World Social Forum and Autre Davos as the vanguard of the opposition.[1] What has happened?

The answer, I would like to suggest, is that the advocates of global religious warfare were there all along, waiting for their moment, and that neither the neoliberals nor the neosocialists understand the real dynamics of the present period. Does this mean that Huntington and Hizbut Tahrir are right? By no means. What it does suggest is that struggles over fundamental questions of meaning and value remain central to global political dynamics in a way that neither the neoliberals nor the neosocialists are capable of understanding, and that these struggles are deeply interwoven with (indeed are merely the ideal side of) the struggles over ecosystem integrity and resource allocation which we saw played out in the streets of Seattle and Davos.

In order to make sense out of this situation –and figure out where the neoliberals and neosocialists and religious warriors of all stripes fit into the puzzle-- we need a new kind of social theory, one which avoids both economic and ideological reductionism, which takes seriously both the material conditions under which human societies develop and their ordering to transcendental ends, and which analyzes the dynamics of technological, economic, political, and ideological regimes against the background of both.

***

We humans are complex beings, deeply rooted in material reality, but driven by profound spiritual aspirations. We are, on the one hand, animals, whose world is defined, at least to begin with, by what we know with our senses and who strive for ever more diverse and intense sensory experience. It is this desire for pleasurable sensation which motivates us to do what we need to in order to survive and reproduce and ensure the survival of the species. In this sense we are not too different from dogs, who charm us precisely because we share so much in common with them. Unlike dogs, however, we can abstract from the images we garner from the senses and rise to ever higher principles. We can ask what things are and what they mean and our sensations are thus always meaning laden --and all the more pleasurable or painful because of this. We want to know what the world means and to understand the significance of our place therein.[2]

These twin aspects of human nature –material and spiritual-- come together in the one activity which appears to be uniquely human and which, were we to meet other species which engage in it, would define them as our close comrades in the cosmic hierarchy: the act of production or creativity. Unlike other animals, who merely reproduce, making more of their own kind, and unlike the angels of Catholic doctrine who contemplate God and manage God’s creation, but do not themselves engage in material creation, we humans are constantly engaged in creating new and more complex forms of organization: new technologies, new relationships and social structures, new forms of art, science, and wisdom. The emergence of this new capacity is partly a result of our materiality and finitude. The earth on which we evolved was already full of organisms which prosper simply by means of rapid reproduction, so that the death of large numbers of individuals is of little concern, and had it share of those which exploit narrowly defined niches on the basis of great physical prowess. We humans are neither rabbits nor lions. Big-brained weaklings that we are, we take too long too gestate and grow to maturity for what population biologists call an “r-strategy” centered on rapid reproduction to be realistic. And yet we could hardly hope to compete with the large carnivores, who best us in strength, speed, agility --and thus the ability to hunt. We had to learn how to make things.

But production is also, from the beginning, an intellectual act, and thus never purely material. It involves an understanding of both the raw material and some end or purpose. And even the most rudimentary ends --to help procure food, for example—have a profound spiritual dimension. We seek to escape our finitude, at least for a while, and to persist in Being. And once our more basic needs are taken care for, we quickly turn to the pursuit of more complex ends which, taken together, amount to civilizational progress or spiritual development. The development of humanity’s productive capacities thus involves not only scientific progress, which helps us to understand better the matter on which we work, but also sapiential[3] progress: an ever deeper understanding of the end to which humanity, and the universe as a whole, are ordered. I have argued elsewhere that we must take claims regarding these ends seriously as metaphysical propositions (Mansueto 1998, 1999, 2001, 2002). Whether or not one does this, it should be clear that one must take them seriously as social facts. Civilizations are nothing more or less than the product of our efforts to achieve definite spiritual ends under definite material conditions, by means of definite social structures, and cannot be properly understood without reference to all three types of factors. In place of historical materialism, which attempted to explain history in terms of the interaction of two factors (the force and relations of production, or technology and economic structure), with the ecosystem largely ignored and politics and culture understood as a superstructure which is at best “relatively autonomous,” I propose the following:

1. The material basis for the development of civilization is the human organism and the ecosystem or ecosystems it inhabits, which constrain profoundly the range of survival strategies which are open to it and thus the whole pattern of social development.

2. The formal cause of human civilization is social structure. Social structure includes:

2.1. technological structures, i.e. particular ways of reorganizing physical and biological matter,

2.2. economic structures, i.e. particular ways of organizing human labor and centralizing and allocating resources,

2.3. political structures, i.e. particular ways of building and exercising power,

2.4. ideological-cultural structures, i.e. particular ways of organizing our experience of the universe, including ways of approaching fundamental questions of meaning and value, and

2.5. psycho-social structures, i.e. particular ways of organizing the human psyche to serve the aims of the society in question.

3. Determination of the ultimate final cause of human civilization in general is a matter for metaphysical and ethics rather than social theory. The proximate final cause of an individual civilization, is, however, simply the way in which that civilization understands its end or teloV: i.e. the way in which it answers fundamental questions of meaning and value. Thus Medieval Europe understood itself as ordered to Esse as such, Medieval India to the union of Brahman and atman.[4]

The lines between material basis and social structure and social structure and teleological ordering are a bit ambiguous. Absolutely speaking the material basis is confined to the ecosystem. Technology and economics are just as much social products as politics and culture. Relatively speaking, however, the whole “built up” infrastructure of a society, including its technological apparatus and the social surplus it can generate, constitute the material foundation on the basis of which political and cultural realities develop. A religious ideology is, similarly, an integral part of the social structure, i.e. the way a particular society is organized, and not itself an end or teloV. We gain access to the way a society understands its ends, however, by analyzing its ideological-cultural structure. The same is true of the relationship between the various instances of the social structure. Organizing labor and centralizing and allocating resources both involve building and exercising power. Building and exercising power, similarly, generally involves an appeal to fundamental principles and values. This is true even in predominantly secular societies. These categories should thus be used flexibly in a way which serves the purposes of the particular analysis which is being carried out.

From this point of view it is possible to identify several different levels of social analysis: civilizational, structural, etc. The category of a civilization is at once broader than that of social structure and more specific. It is broader in the sense that any given civilization may undergo a change in social structure and still remain identifiably the same. This is because civilizations are defined by a definite ideal. Thus the Puebloan peoples continue the civilizational tradition of the Anasazi, but by very different means. At the same time each civilization has its own unique ideal, and any attempt to classify these ideals can only be approximate. Broadly speaking it is possible to distinguish between nonaxial (band, tribal, communitarian, and archaic), axial (tributary and petty commodity), and modern (capitalist and socialist) civilizations. Nonaxial civilizations sense no fundamental disharmony in the universe, in human society, or in the human soul which must be resolved. Their aim is to preserve, not to restore. Axial civilizations, on the other hand are founded on an effort to resolve just such disharmonies: human finitude, sin, attachment, etc. Modern civilizations reduce these disharmonies to technical or structural problems and claim to be able to resolve them by means of science and technology (including the social sciences and political technologies). The ideals which constitute civilizations are constrained and shaped by the social conditions under which they develop. Thus the connection, for example, which we have already noted, between the emergence of petty commodity production and the phenomenon of the axial age. But they also represent at least a partial grasp of the truth and can thus continue to motivate human action long after the conditions which gave birth to them have vanished. When this happens, the meaning of these ideals inevitably changes, though this may happen consciously, when the ideals constitute a living tradition which values both continuity and change, or unconsciously, as fundamentalists reassert what they imagine to be ancient and unchanging truths but which (even when the words remain the same) are really innovations.

Social structures are more easily classified. Several distinctive types modes can be identified:

v Band societies are found in a variety of ecosystems, and generally have hunter-gatherer technology, a kinship system which only weakly influences the formation of actual groups, and a totemic religious structure which brings clans together for occasional religious festivals.

v Tribal societies are also found in a variety of ecosystems, but persist longest on open steppes or grass lands with large populations of ungulates. They have generally developed advanced hunter-gatherer or pastoral nomadic technologies which allow them to exploit these herds, sometimes supplemented with raiding or trading, and have strongly developed kinship systems which largely organize social life, and polytheistic religions often characterized by the emergence of a male sky gods with warlike characteristics, such as the Aryan Indra or the Turkic Tengri.

v Communitarian societies are found in ecosystems which make the cultivation of food relatively easy, and have developed horticultural or agricultural technology. Land is generally owned by the clan or village and is often periodically redistributed. A strong kinship system is cross-cut by social forms which transcend kinship ties, such as the village itself and various religious societies. The polytheistic religions of communitarian societies are characterized by a strong emphasis on fertility rituals and are often dominated by a goddess of wisdom and fertility, such as the Keres Sussistinako or the universal Mediterranean goddess which forms the background of the cults of Isis and Demeter.

v Archaic societies are found especially but not exclusively in riverine ecosystems and have advanced horticultural or agricultural technologies. Surplus is centralized and reallocated by a temple complex, which may or may not form the center of an urban concentration. The polytheistic religious ideologies of archaic societies are characterized by the emergence of an increasingly well-defined high god concept, often associated with the sun. The Anasazi stage of the Puebloan civilization is characteristic of this form, as is the Mississippian civilization.

v Tributary societies are often founded as nomadic raiders conquer communitarian or archaic riverine communities and impose rents, taxes, and forced labor, eventually building large urban centers and transforming the religious structure in a way which leads to a predominance of divine monarchs who integrate both warlike and priestly functions, such as the Egyptian Ra or the Bablyonian Marduk.

v Petty commodity societies generally emerge in coastal or oasis ecosystems on the basis of specialized agricultural production. Resources are allocated by a market in goods and services, and political structures, which may vary from relatively democratic city state forms through large military empires, focus their attention on capturing as much surplus through trade as possible. Religious ideologies undergo a process of rationalization as myth gradually gives way to philosophy and new religious movements emerge with a greater focus on ethical conduct, social justice, and spiritual development. [5] These ideologies gradually assert ever increasing influence, both by hegemonizing state structures (Confucianism in Han or Sung China, Dar-Al Islam) or by building monastic or mendicant communities which become major economic and political as well as cultural actors (e.g. the Mahayana Buddhist monasteries of T’ang China or the Benedictine monasteries of Medieval Europe; the Sufi orders throughout Dar-al Islam, but especially Central Asia, and the Mendicant orders in late Medieval and Baroque Europe and in New Spain).

v Capitalist societies are defined by the development of industrial technologies, and markets in labor power and capital as well as goods and services. Political organization varies, but generally involves some sort of representative format except in transitional periods, but is strongly subordinated to the market, which it serves. Religious ideologies emphasize submission to a sovereign God who is a reflex of the mysterious imperatives of the market order, or else disappear altogether.

v In socialist societies the state displaces the capital markets as the principal resource allocator, something which generally reflects a teleological ordering to civilizational progress rather than capital accumulation and luxury consumption, although the markets in goods and services, and in labor power, remain.

The way in which a particular society is structured in turn constitutes a definite complex of social actors. The most important of these are social classes, which are constituted first of all by position with respect to the economic structure, but which also develop their own characteristic forms of political organization and their own ideologies. These may be a refraction of the larger aims of the society as seen from their social location, but if the structure of the society is deeply in contradiction with either their survival or their development, oppressed social classes in particular may develop revolutionary ideologies which at least aim to become alternative civilizational ideals. Class struggles are thus never purely economic --even political-economic-- in character. They are always, simultaneously, direct or indirect struggles around fundamental questions of meaning and value. Peoples are groups of human beings which, generally speaking, share a common homeland and have a common history and culture. While they may have been incorporated into a larger civilizational complex, they often have distinctive beliefs and values which may be a variant on the dominant ideology of the civilization, but may also reflect an alternative civilizational ideal which has been subordinated to those of the dominant peoples in the civilization. When the oppressed classes and peoples of a civilization cannot resolve its internal contradictions, these contradictions are often resolved for them by invading peoples who impose an entirely new civilizational ideal. This was the role of the Germans and Arabs in the collapse of Roman Civilization. Gender, i.e. the meaning which a people or a civilization attaches to sexual difference, as expressed in the sexual division of labor, power relations within the family, kinship, and larger social networks, and in the dominant ideology and culture, can also form a line of demarcation along which social struggles unfold.

Now human societies develop as human beings pursue the Good as they understand it, given the constraints imposed on their perceptions by the material conditions and social structures. They develop social structures in order to make possible the pursuit of the Good under those material conditions. When those structures begin to hold back their ability to pursue the Good they challenge and attempt to modify them, sometimes gradually and incrementally, sometimes through revolutionary upheavals. Particular ways of understanding our End or purpose (i.e. particular ideologies) can serve either as catalysts for change or as means of social control.

In analyzing the dynamics of human societies it is necessary to distinguish between civilizational, structural, periodic, and conjunctural crises.[6] A civilizational crisis takes place when, generally after a succession of structural crises, people actually lose faith in a civilizational ideal and stop pursuing it. A structural crisis, on the other hand, arises from a contradiction between the social structure or complex of structures by which the civilization organizes its activities on the one hand and the underlying material conditions (i.e. the ecosystem) and/or the real ends to which people aspire. Structural crises can be, but are not always, resolved by fundamental structural change. Anasazi-Pueblo civilization expanded beyond the carrying capacity of the ecological niche it inhabited and responded to the resulting crisis by decentralizing, abandoning large temple complexes of the sort we see at Chaco for the scattered villages which we now see among the Puebloan peoples, a shift which may also reflect changes at the religious level (Stuart 2001), but which also reflects significant civilizational continuity. Roman civilization ran into a structural crisis because its basic strategy–using the surplus generated by chattel slavery to buy into the Silk Road trade— ran into insuperable limits. Logistic and ecological factors made further expansion impossible, bringing an end to the wars of conquest which provided a steady supply of slaves. The empire was forced to shift from the use of chattel slaves to the use of settled, dependent peasants, known as coloni and to significantly increase rates of exploitation. This exploitation was legitimated as service to the common good using Christian religious ideals, something which allowed the empire, but not, perhaps, Roman Civilization, to persist in parts of the East, where elements of the old structure served a new ideal. In the West and in the Masreq and the Mahgreb, this system lacked credibility and Roman Civilization was displaced by the religious civilizations of Christendom and Dar-al-Islam, both of which were inspired by ideals radically different from those which shaped Rome.

Periods are characterized by well defined approaches to resolving the fundamental tensions or contradictions within a particular social structure. One might, for example, speak of a democratic period in Hellenic Civilization, in which land reform and political concessions helped to ease the contradictions between the Athenian peasantry and the large landowners without, however, fundamentally altering the basic, petty commodity/chattel slave structure of the society. Welfare state capitalism was also such a well defined period. Periodic crises occur when a given way of containing contradictions stops working without, however, necessitating a global change in social structure. Subperiods of various degrees of importance are defined by lesser shifts in strategy by the ruling classes, often in response to the development of new adversaries or competitors.

By a conjuncture we mean a definite moment in history defined by a specific constellation of social forces which come together to affect, or attempt to affect, change in the teleological ordering of a society (i.e. a civilizational change), in its underlying structure, or in the strategy of the ruling classes.

***

What can this approach to social theory tell us about the current situation? In order to answer this question, we need first to define the main structural dynamics of our civilization. I would like to suggest that Marx’s analysis of these dynamics, while it had considerable merit, did not go deep enough. Marx understood brilliantly the capitalist structure of our society, including its internal contradictions. In doing so, however, he implicitly made reference to a larger civilizational ideal, whose aims and values he embraced, and against which he measured the successes and failures of capitalism. He argued, in effect, that capitalist relations of production, because they allocate resources to those activities which yield the highest rate of return for the investor, rather than those which promote the most rapid development of human productive capacities, stood in the way of the complete realization of the larger promise of what is usually called modernity: i.e. a humanity which is fully and completely its own master and which has achieved mastery over its natural environment. It is to this larger promise of modernity that he ultimately owed allegiance (Marx and Engels 1848/1978, Marx 1967/1967).

The reasons for the limitations of Marx’s perspective are not hard to find. Modernity was still young, and just then facing its first fundamental crisis. Historical materialism offered an analysis of that crisis and socialism a strategy for resolving it by means of fundamental structural transformation. Specifically, replacing or supplementing the capital markets with the state as the principal resource allocator allowed the continued progress of modern civilization: i.e. progress in technological mastery over the natural environment, which would not otherwise have been possible. The relative success of socialism for nearly 150 years defines an entire epoch in the history of modern civilization, as some regions adopted socialism and others resisted. The current crisis, however, runs much deeper. While it includes a crisis of capitalism and indeed of socialism, it is fundamentally a crisis of modernity itself. Let me explain.

The very essence of modernity is to understand in order to control. This dynamic plays itself out in a number of different ways. Throughout most of the history of human civilization tecnh meant the ability to understand the internal dynamism of various forms of matter (especially forms of living matter) so that they could, quite literally, be cultivated. Medieval alchemy represented a particularly advanced development of this approach, rooted in Aristotelian (teleological) physics. Modern industry, on the other hand, is based on a physics which has abandoned explanation for rigorous, mathematical description, the search for meaning in favor of the ability to control. By reducing matter to the local motion of point particles in time, mathematical physics transforms nature into a machine which can, quite literally, be disassembled and put back together to serve some other purpose. And this is precisely what industry does. Fossil fuels are burned to release energy, which is used to break down other forms of matter and then recombine them in a way which reflects the will of the entrepreneur –or in its socialist variant, of the state. And industry does the same thing with human labor. Ancient communities are broken down and their members scattered to the far corners of the earth, only to be reassembled by market forces or bureaucratic decree; ancient skills are lost as tasks are broken down into their component parts, so that they can be performed by unskilled workers (or rather workers whose skills no longer matter) or even by machines.[7]

Modern economic systems and modern states do essentially the same thing. Earlier forms of economic organization tapped into the surplus generated by peasant communities and used it to further the aims of the civilization in question. Sometimes this was done in a measured way which respected the rights of the peasant communities to the resources they needed in order to survive, reproduce, and develop themselves; sometimes it was done in ways which were brutally oppressive. Sometimes the surplus was invested in new technologies, in public life, and in the arts, sciences, philosophy, and religion; sometimes it was used to support luxury consumption and wars of conquest. But with the exception of relatively small groups of slaves, throughout most of human history the people retained control over the immediate process of production. And, as we noted above, as axial age and post-axial age religious and philosophical systems (Buddhism, Confucianism, Hellenistic philosophy, Christianity, and Islam) gained influence, they both shaped the way states taxed and spent and gave birth to powerful, economically active monasteries and other religious institutions which directed a significant part of the social surplus product to higher, noneconomic goods. Capitalism and socialism both, on the other hand, by reducing essentially the entire population to the status of wage-laborer, place the whole productive capacity at the disposal of the society’s principal economic organizer, and strips workers of both their entire surplus product and of day to day control over the labor process. Capitalism goes somewhat further in this regard, making even the entrepreneur the slave of the capital markets, which demand that he provide them with the highest possible rate of return on their investment. Socialism turns out to be a somewhat less radical form of modernism, in this regard, with lax labor discipline and a commitment to use the social surplus product in ways which promote civilizational progress. There is still, however, a profound contradiction between those who are able to participate directly in the civilizational progress made possible by socialism –party elites and the higher intelligentsia—and those whose labor generates the surplus which makes that progress possible: the agrarian and industrial proletariat and the lower and middle intelligentsia, and within the higher intelligentsia between those who accept the official, materialist definition of civilizational progress and those who advance alternative civilizational ideals. It should be noted however, that the population did not, on the whole, welcome the efforts of so-called “reform communists” like Gorbachev, whose first priority was to improve market discipline and reduce “corruption,” i.e. to reduce the time and resources which were not available to the principal economic organizer for allocation.

In the political and ideological arenas modernity is defined by the closely related ideals of sovereignty (Maritain 1951) and secularity. By sovereignty we mean the idea that the state stands outside and above the whole social formation, which it is able to reorganize at will. By secularity we mean a way of life which, while not necessarily atheistic, excludes or is at least untouched by the ideal of spiritual development. Sovereign states must be secular, because the recognition of some transcendental term to which they are accountable undermines their autonomy, and inevitably constitutes sapiential authorities of some kind which compete with the secular political leadership and undermine the unitary power of the state. Under capitalism sovereignty and secularity mean creating the conditions under which markets (which, Hayek 1988 to the contrary, do not develop spontaneously) can operate freely, something which means excluding from public discourse transcendental principles and values in terms of which the market allocation or resources might be challenged. Under socialism sovereignty means that the judgment of the state (or rather the party) regarding resource allocation is final, and that it may not be challenged by minorities either inside or outside the party by appealing to higher principles.

Here again socialism turns out to be the more moderate form of modernism. The socialist state is, first of all, not truly unitary because of the presence of a party/state duality, or even a party/state/enterprise plurality in which the party tends to put principle above pragmatism and the state puts power interests above any purely economic rationality. In the Soviet Union, furthermore, sovereignty was constructed by stages. Initially it seemed Lenin’s intent to allow the existence of a sapiential authority outside the party, or at least partly outside it, but within the Marxist camp, in the form of the Communist Academy and the Institute of Red Professors, which were the predecessors of the Institute of Philosophy of the Soviet Academy of Sciences. Stalin and Mitin put an end to this when they transferred sapiential authority to the Ideological Department of the Central Committee, and assigned the Institute of Philosophy essentially technical and advisory functions (Joravsky 1961, Rowley 1978). Finally, at the end of the Soviet period Gorbachev moved to transfer power from the party to the state, creating and assuming an Executive Presidency and effectively replacing the Politburo with a National Security Council.

Modern ideology is always secular, even when it is religious, and is deeply bound up with this whole ideal of sovereignty. The Protestant Reformation, which gave birth to the modern religion par excellence, rejected rational metaphysics and mysticism in favor of faith and revelation and substituted submission to the sovereign will of God, who condescends to save us even though we do not and cannot merit it, for the ancient ideal of spiritual development. The most radical form of Protestantism, dispensational premillenialism, goes so far as to argue that the moral teachings of Jesus do not apply in the present “Church Age,” because they form part of an earlier Jewish dispensation. Faith, understood as blind submission to God’s plan, is all that matters. But even for liberal Protestantism, concern for social ethics means limiting the damage from industrialism and capitalist development, not challenging the primacy of material progress among our civilizational ideals. Militant atheistic secularisms simply substitute human sovereignty, achieved by means of scientific and technological progress and social reform, for divine.[8] Central to this project is a radical critique of all transcendental principles, whether known rationally or on the basis of mystical experience, in favor of purely secular, inner worldly ideals. As I have shown elsewhere (Mansueto 1988, 1995) it is, in fact, quite impossible to ground such inner worldly ideals as civilizational progress on a purely secular basis, something which contributed in no small measure to the instability and eventual collapse of socialist modernism.

It is just precisely this modernist dynamic which people around the world are at long last beginning to reject. This rejection is, to be sure, still incipient and uneven. On the one hand, it is increasingly apparent that industrial claims on the ecosystem and both capitalist and socialist claims on human labor have undermined the integrity of both the ecosystem and the social fabric, calling into question the long-term sustainability of our civilization. On the other hand, like the peoples of Europe and the Mediterranean Basin during Late Antiquity, the peoples of the earth today aspire to more than material prosperity. People want to engage in creative, meaningful labor, over which they exercise a significant measure of control, which makes a real contribution to civilizational progress. They reject the idea that free elections are all that there is to democracy and increasingly reaffirm the rights of particular communities to self-governance. Above all they want to develop spiritually. Thus the rise of diverse movements which counterpose the ideal of spiritual development to both modern secularity and the demand of fundamentalist religion for submissive obedience.

A word is in order at this point regarding the much vaunted phenomenon of postmodernism or postmodernity. This term is used in a wide range of different senses, to mean many different things. Generally speaking, however, postmodernists share the critique advanced here of modernity defined as “understanding in order to control.” Following Heidegger, however, they locate the origins of this dynamic in “metaphysics” or “ontotheology,” i.e. the attempt to rise rationally to first principles, or more broadly in totalizing metanarratives which seek to give global meaning to history and the human condition. As I have argued elsewhere (Mansueto 1998, 1999) this is, in effect, an attack on transcendental meaning and as such forms an integral part of the modernist dynamic. Specifically, by “deconstructing” the ideological basis for the existence of autonomous sapiential authorities they leave no power standing except the marketplace. Postmodernists may see themselves as representing a sort of fourth epoch in human civilization, which recognizes the disharmonies of the universe, human society, and the human society, but which forswears any effort to resolve them through either religious or secular means. In reality, however, they are nothing but ideological apologists for capitalism, who portray as inevitable the sufferings caused by capitalism, and thus neutralize the opposition of those sectors of the population (the vast majority) for whom neoliberal triumphalism lacks credibility.

None of this, to be sure, should be taken to imply an endorsement of religious fundamentalism as an appropriate answer to the crisis of modernity –on the contrary. But it does define the beginnings of a profound civilizational crisis in the context of which the appearance of such forces should not be surprising. We need next to analyze the dynamics of the present period and conjuncture, to see why these forces were able to rise to such prominence.

***

The present period remains, fundamentally, one of sorting out and realignment in the wake of the crisis of socialism and the collapse of the Soviet bloc. Neoliberals assumed that this period would, in effect, be a kind of “mopping up” operation as the final residues of resistance to global capital were pacified, either by co-optation or by force. Thus the popularity of the “end of history” thesis in the years immediately following the collapse of the Soviet bloc. The reality, of course, has been very different. The defeat of modernity’s internal, socialist opposition does not mean the resolution of the contradictions of either capitalism or of modernity itself. On the contrary, without an opposition to discipline its excesses, the internal contradictions of capitalism and indeed of modernity have, if anything, become more exacerbated, giving rise to new forms of opposition and new forms of resistance. In order to understand the specific form of these contradictions, however, and of the resistance they have engendered, we need to analyze the present period against the background of the preceding “socialist” era.

As Marx demonstrated, capitalism naturally and inevitably tends to generate two types of crisis tendencies. On the one hand, as production becomes more technology intensive, profits decline, leading to a tendency for capital to be reallocated to low-wage, low-technology activities --e.g. to banana plantations in Honduras rather than to railroads and steel mills in Pennsylvania (Marx 1867/1977). This redeployment temporarily restores equilibrium, but in the long run lower wages mean lower demand, resulting in profound tendencies towards underconsumption (Marx 1848/1978). The result is the impoverishment of the working classes and the emergence of an organized opposition to Capital.

As these tendencies became apparent in the late 19^th and early 20^th century, five distinct responses became apparent. The strongest countries –the United States in particular-- used the super-profits from colonial exploitation to cut their own working classes in on mass consumption. Transfer payments funded more by deficit spending than by taxation ensured that even among the unemployed effective demand never dropped too low. Collective bargaining agreements ensured that wages increased with productivity, especially productivity in the automobile and other consumer durables industries, while military expenditures subsidized the development of new technologies –nuclear energy, jet and rocket propulsion, and electronics and information processing. State subsidies allowed an entire generation of workers, mostly the children of immigrants, to acquire (an admittedly rather watered down) university education and enter the ranks of the professional middle class, leaving behind the urban ethnic neighborhoods which had been the crucible of resistance to capitalism and modernity, for suburban tract developments utterly devoid of beauty and culture where the only possible aim was to consume. The whole physical infrastructure of the United States was rebuilt in a way which made it structurally dependent on the automobile and thus on fossil fuels in a way which was unheard of in the rest of the world. The result was a long wave of growth from roughly 1945 to 1968 which, coupled with the anticommunist hysteria of the 1950s, effectively silenced any real opposition (Davis 1985).

Countries which lacked colonies, because they were late in unifying and industrializing (Germany, Italy, and Japan) or which were rapidly losing them to rising imperial powers (Spain and Portugal), had to fight hard to keep what they had and gain more. This entailed a radical militarization of society, something which was brought about by means of authoritarian mass movements which tapped into national, popular, religious, and even democratic ideals to legitimate the most antipopular and antidemocratic policies. This strategy, generally called fascist after its Italian variant, was ultimately a failure, and Continental Europe and Japan had to find a way to resolve the contradictions of capitalism on the basis of a much reduced colonial empire.

Most analysts of the post-World War II period (Aglietta 1987) have seen the US and European responses to the internal contradictions of capitalism as similar, with Europe, for various historical reasons, developing a stronger workers movement and a more complete welfare state. This analysis ignores significant differences in both production and consumption patterns between the two regions. Where the US pioneered the mass production of cheap consumer goods for an enormous internal market which was guaranteed, in part, through transfer payments, Europe focused on the production of high quality capital and consumer goods for export to the wealthiest consumers around the world, something which made possible massive increases in real wages without state subsidy. Subsidies were used, rather to protect a culturally valuable peasant population which might otherwise have succumbed to international competition and the “rationalization” of agriculture. The products exported were not necessarily based on cutting edge technologies; they were simply the best products of their kind available anywhere: fine wine and cheese, luxury automobiles, designer clothing and kitchen equipment, etc. Europe’s seizure of this niche, which once belonged to China and India, was probably a legacy of the guild system, which created an economic culture focused on competition based on quality rather than price. Mass consumption in Europe is, furthermore, largely collective and takes the form of access to health care, transportation, and education far beyond what most people in the US would ever imagine possible. To the extent that consumption is individual it consists largely in far greater leisure time than that enjoyed by most North Americans, in the enjoyment of the fruits of civilizational progress, if not participation in their creation, and a smaller quantity of higher quality consumer goods than is the case in the US. While the automobile and suburban sprawl have certainly made their mark on Europe, real urban and village communities remain intact, providing a context out of which a rich and varied public life can emerge. It is just that workers and peasants are linked –literally, by high quality public transportation systems, and figuratively, by an educational system far more rigorous than that in the US-- to participation in the goods of human civilization.

Japan followed a unique strategy which utilized postwar US reconstruction aid to rebuild its industries and position itself as an exporter of increasingly high-end industrial goods, often implementing US technological innovations more rapidly and more effectively than the US itself. Japanese corporations, rather than being dependent on the capital markets for investment, essentially own each other in an interlocking network of cartels. Shinto and Confucian values mobilize the population for hard work and low levels of consumption while state subsidies protect culturally valuable agricultural sectors such as rice production.

The weakest links in the capitalist chain –Russia and some of the colonies—broke with capitalism entirely and modernized on a socialist basis. The Soviet bloc in particular, after some hesitation in the 1920s, followed a strategy of primitive socialist accumulation and rapid industrialization. This made the Soviet Union a major industrial power and provided the economic base to contribute to the defeat of fascism. After the Second World War the resulting surplus was invested in building the planet’s premier scientific and cultural apparatus and in raising a significant portion of the population from the ranks of the industrial proletariat to the intelligentsia. The result was a society which could pride itself on having the highest percentage not only of scientists and engineers, but also of philosophers on the planet (Mansueto 1995). China, on the other hand, followed a strategy of rural demand led industrialization, which probably left a higher percentage of the surplus in the hands of the (still mostly rural, peasant) population, but did less to promote broad civilizational progress (Mansueto 1995). Many countries in the Third World followed a moderate version of one or the other of these socialist strategies, often under the guise of a national or religious ideology: ; e.g. Arab, Islamic, African, or Buddhist Socialism (Mansueto 1995). The rest, unless they could extract monopoly rents on resources (mostly fossil fuels), floundered.

Throughout most of the postwar period, despite slight adjustments and occasional crises, the United States and the Soviet bloc both advanced their causes primarily by means of a war of position in Asia, Africa, and Latin America. Neither gave serious consideration to the idea of forcing revolutionary change in the other. The United States called this “containment.” The Soviet Union called it “peaceful competition.”

To what extent were these attempts to resolve or mitigate the contradictions of capitalism also attempts to resolve or mitigate the contradictions of modernity? This is a difficult question, a rigorous answer to which would require a more extended analysis than is possible in the context of this paper. I would like to suggest, however, that challenges to modernity at the level of the conscious leadership of the popular movements were more influential than most analysts allow, and that the mass base of these movements (especially the peasantry and the petty bourgeoisie but also the working class) understood their struggle as antimodern as well as anticapitalist. It must be remembered, for example, that among the governing parties in postwar Europe, Christian Democratic parties figured very prominently. These parties were, to an extraordinary degree, influenced by the Thomist Jacques Maritain (Maritain 1937), who mounted a powerful critique of modernity. While often their policies looked simply like a moderate social democracy, there were differences. Christian Democrats are largely responsible for the state subsidies which have protected the peasantry and traditional petty bourgeoisies in Europe; they are also primarily responsible for the creation of the European Union and significantly responsible for the creation of the United Nations, which represent a fundamental challenge to the concept of sovereignty, which we have shown to be among the cornerstones of modernity. And Christian Democracy, of course, represents above all an attempt to integrate a commitment to democracy and pluralism with a rejection of secularism. More broadly, I would suggest, the fact that Europeans have been more insulated from market forces than North Americans, but less dependent on state bureaucracies than citizens of the Soviet bloc, lead to a focus on integral human development which is now bearing fruit in a rich spiritual culture. The Vatican may regard Christian Democracy as a failure, because it failed to win the Europe over to loyalty to the “hierarchy” and the “magisterium,” but this is because the Vatican itself misunderstands actual historical Catholicism, which has never been about the Crucified Messiah and his priests, but rather about the all sided cultivation of human capacities, including, but not limited to, spiritual self-cultivation. A Europe in which Celtic neopaganism and other non-Christian spiritualities flourish and in which committed Catholics are challenging the hierarchy in ways they have no where else: these are the real legacies of Christian Democracy, which did not so much promote Catholicism as create a social space in which diverse forms of spirituality could flourish.

Certain Third World indigenous (Arab, African, and Buddhist) socialisms, as well as Gandhi’s satyagraha movement, also represented a challenge to modernity simply by giving premodern religious or other popular traditions a role in shaping public policy. Despite their bad press many of these regimes (e.g. that of Julius Nyere in Tanzania and that of U Nu in Burma) achieved extraordinary gains in basic human development (life span, literacy, etc.) given the low priority placed on economic growth and surplus generation (Mansueto 1995).

Socialist movements, furthermore, even when they had a modernist and militantly atheistic leadership, found their mass base in the struggle of peasants, artisans, workers, and intellectuals to resist modernity. William Sewell, for example (Sewell 1980) has shown that French socialism had its roots in the struggle of the artisans to resist industrialization and capitalist development. I have shown (Mansueto 1985) that the same was true for both Sicilian and much Italian socialism and for Italian and other immigrant socialisms in the United States. Similar arguments have been made for Russian socialism reaching back to the narodniki, and for Mexican socialism reaching back to the time of Zapata, though the specific role of religion was not always adequately acknowledged (Radkey 1958, 1962, Venturi 1968, Wolf 1969). More recently, the argument has been carried over into an analysis of the “high” tradition of socialism, with thinkers such as Scott Meikle (Meikle 1985) and James Daly (Daly 2000) arguing for the centrality of an essentialist metaphysics and a natural law ethics to the integrity of Marx’s thought. This should not be taken to mean that Marx was a convinced critic of modernity, but it does suggest that his relationship to modernism is ambiguous at best.

What happened? Why did the postwar period of prosperity come to an end? Why did socialism, and diverse attempts to mitigate the contradictions of capitalism by means of state intervention, ultimately fail? The answer to this question is complex. On the one hand, the tendency of capitalism was and is towards the establishment of a unified global market in which resources can be instantaneously reallocated without respect to national borders or indeed any other nonmarket factor. During the period immediately following World War II, US industry was sufficiently productive to compete effectively on a global scale in spite of the fact that US wages were significantly higher those paid throughout much of the rest of the planet. This high wage competitiveness was even more true of Europe. US (and European and Japanese) capital, however, continued to redeploy itself from the imperial metropoles to low wage areas of Asia, Africa, and the Americas --a process which had begun in the late 19^th century. High levels of deficit spending, meanwhile, necessary to finance transfer payments and military spending, led to high interest rates and difficulties in capital formation. The result was economic stagnation in the metropoles, as investment and thus productivity failed to keep pace with wages, and proletarianization and underconsumption throughout the Third World.

In response to this crisis social movements emerged which challenged not just capitalism but modernity itself. The student movement of the 1960s was above all a protest against the transformation of that which had at least imagined itself a free (petty bourgeois) intelligentsia into intellectual wage labor in service to Capital. It is not surprising that these radicalized students were equally reluctant to become intellectual servants of the socialist party-states. The new wave of national liberation movements which emerged in the 1960s and 1970s, like earlier socialist movements, had their principal social base in an often deeply religious peasantry and looked forward not to primitive socialist accumulation or Cultural Revolution on the Chinese model, but rather to restoration of the historic rights and popular-religious traditions of the peasant communities. Now, however, there was a difference. The Catholic Church, which had been moving towards an alliance with the popular classes since at least the middle of the nineteenth century, took the decisive step of opening up the possibility of collaboration and even strategic alliance with the communist movement, something which forced the international communist movement to rethink its attitude towards religion. By the time Pope Paul VI died in 1978, it would not have been too much to speak of a de facto strategic alliance between the Vatican and the Kremlin against the United States and against global capitalism. Catholic priests, religious, and lay pastoral agents formed part of an emerging revolutionary leadership which was no longer wedded narrowly to modernity.

Capital was divided over just how to respond to these movements and to the larger economic crisis. The more progressive, globalist wing of Capital based in finance capital and high technology industries in the US, and in the high-end export sectors in Europe and Japan simply called a halt to increases in real individual and social wages while they focused on investment in selected regions of Asia, Africa, and Latin America. The long-range strategy seems to have been for these regions to take over lower and mid- technology industrial production –and become large scale importers of high-technology capital goods from the United States and Europe. This approach was accompanied by a greater emphasis on human rights in the Third World and by a more or less laissez-faire approach to the national liberation movements, based on the conviction that it was economics and not geopolitics or ideology which would drive history in the long run. Capitalist or socialist or something in between, countries like Nicaragua and Angola and Iran would be dependent on investments from the imperial metropoles, on which they would have to pay interest or dividends, and if they succeeded in industrializing, they would become net importers of high-technology capital goods. It didn’t really matter what party was in power there, or what their attitude was towards capitalism.

This strategy failed to take into account both the crippling effect which loan payments were already having on newly industrializing countries, something which made the hope of transforming them into a real market for capital goods largely vain, and the dynamics of unequal exchange (Emmanuel 1971) which mean that low-wage countries always lose in trade. It also failed to take into account the very real threat posed by the national liberation movements, which were no less radical for being more religious and were not about to be co-opted. Finally, the globalists failed to take into account political dynamics on the home front. Throughout the postwar period a New Right based in declining industries such as textiles and other low technology, low wage (and mostly nonunionized) manufacturing sectors had been gradually gaining force. This sector made very effective use of evangelical, and especially fundamentalist, Protestantism as a linking ideology which permitted it to create a mass base among broad layers of the petty bourgeoisie and the nonunionized working class suffering from the same process of marginalization. Central to the political line of the Right was a policy of much sharper confrontation with the Soviet Union and China. Partly this was an attempt to appeal to patriotic and religious identities to win acquiescence for attacks on wages in an effort to renew (at least temporarily) the global competitiveness of low wage, low technology industries in the US. Partly it was an attempt to make the planet safe, once again, for the redeployment of capital to low wage, low technology activities abroad.

Ultimately it was the inability of the dominant, globalist sector of the US ruling class organized in the Trilateral Commission and represented by the Carter government to respond effectively to the concerns of marginalized elements in the working class and petty bourgeoisie which tipped the scales and allowed the Right to seize control of the agenda and the Presidency in 1980. A similar group had already come to power in Great Britain in 1978. Containment and co-optation of the popular movements both at home and abroad gave way to an all out attack. This was reflected both in attempts to dismantle as much as possible of the welfare state and postwar collective bargaining arrangements as possible, and in a decision to actually win the Cold War.

This latter decision almost certainly caught the globalists off guard. One likes to think they would have resisted had Reagan’s policy actually led to armed conflict with the Soviet Union. But the seizure of power by the Right was accompanied by an ill-timed attempt of on the part of the Soviet bloc to address internal economic problems –an effort which led, ultimately, to its collapse.

The specific reasons for this decision to reform and its precise timing remain a matter of debate. A few points are, however, clear. First, whatever its social costs, Stalin’s strategy of rapid industrialization had succeeded, and formed the basis in the succeeding generation for large-scale investments in education which created a large, highly literate intelligentsia with rapidly rising expectations –expectations the Soviet economy was not really structured to meet. On the one hand, only a small sector of this intelligentsia really participated in the civilization-building achievements of the Soviet system in a way which brought direct, personal satisfaction. Working as a line engineer in a backward industry or teaching music in a regional university simply doesn’t bring the same rewards as being a lead engineer in the world’s premier space program or dancing with the Bolshoi Ballet. And the Soviet economy was structured to emphasize accumulation and investment, not mass consumption, which might have offered this stratum some compensation for their low status and humdrum existence. At the same time, the old mechanisms of ideological legitimation, which called on personal sacrifice in support of civilizational progress, were failing. This is partly because the teloV of civilizational progress could not be adequately grounded by the atheistic and materialist ideology of the Communist Party, and partly because human beings, however much they aspire to contribute to civilizational progress, also aspire to higher, spiritual ends which that ideology denied. The result was growing cynicism and discontent.

Initially, Soviet advocates of perestroika argued simply that socialist property relations, and in particular the centralized planning apparatus, were too advanced for the still rather low level of development of the productive forces. Gradually this initial thesis was displaced by the more radical claim that the command economy itself had become an obstacle to development of the productive forces. While extraordinarily effective in mobilizing the resources for rapid industrialization, an economic system structured around state ownership of the means of production and allocation of resources by centralized planning agencies could not organize the complex activities which characterize a complex industrial society. "Socialist" norms defending the rights of workers, furthermore, became an obstacle to labor discipline. Soviet workers in effect became lazy and inefficient, at the same time they were demanding improved individual consumption standards. Gorbachev's own analysis is typical in this regard.

At some stage, --this became particularly clear in the latter half of the seventies-- something happened that was at first sight inexplicable. The country began to lose momentum. Economic failures became more frequent. Difficulties began to accumulate and deteriorate, and unresolved problems to multiply. Elements of what we call stagnation and other phenomena alien to socialism began to appear in the life of society. A kind of "braking mechanism" affecting social and economic development formed. And all this happened at a time when scientific and technological revolution opened up new prospects for economic and social progress.

Analyzing the situation, we first discovered a slowing of economic growth. In the last fifteen years the national income growth rates had declined by more than a half and by the beginning of the eighties had fallen to a level close to economic stagnation...

The gross output drive, particularrly in heavy industry, turned out to be a top-priority task, just an end in itself. The same happened in capital construction.

It became typical of many of our eeconomic executives to think not of how to build up the national assets, but of how to put more material, labor and working time into an item to sell it at a higher price...

The country became "accustomed to giving priority to quantitative growth in production" over qualitative growth, extensive accumulation priority over intensive (Gorbachev 1987: 18-20).

To remedy this situation Gorbachev proposed a return to market norms, in the context of a mixed economy.

Our aim is to create a mixed, multiform economy in which all forms of property ownership develop freely ... in order to give the biggest number of working people the opportunity to become owners (Gorbachev 1991).

Agriculture and much of industry would be reprivatized, and price controls and other mechanisms of centralized planning gradually abandoned. The Soviet Union would be preserved as a unified market in which a mixed economy could develop, while the Soviet state continued the generous support for education, research and development which have been one of its greatest strengths.

Gorbachev calculated, quite correctly, that if he was to defeat entrenched bureaucratic elites in the party and state bureaucracies he would need the support of the people. This meant an end to repressive strategies for political control, and ultimately the establishment of a multiparty system. He did not, however, understand that much of the regime’s residual legitimacy rested on precisely the lax labor discipline and “corruption” he proposed to bring to an end. In short, Gorbachev proposed a more intensely “modern” socialism, and the people said no.

Gorbachev also failed to count on the dramatic change in political-theological line and geopolitical strategy on the part of the Vatican. Integral to the geopolitical strategy of the Right was an attack on the de facto alliance between the Vatican and the Kremlin. There is significant evidence that the United States intelligence networks played a significant role in the 1978 election of John Paul II, and possibly the demise of his short-lived predecessor John Paul I. (Ezcurra 1986). Unlike their predecessors, John Paul II, Joseph Cardinal Ratzinger, and their allies seemed intent on a European future for the Catholic Church. Central to this strategy was a reconquest of what they saw as a more conservative Central and Eastern Europe, which might serve as a counterweight to a very secular Western Europe, which they had already lost. The result was to catalyze the emergence of the first really effective mass movement against a socialist state, the Polish Solidarnosc, and ultimately of mass movements throughout much of Eastern Europe. It was successful resistance there which ultimately tipped the scales within the Soviet Union. When Gorbachev proved himself unable to deliver on the –ultimately entirely unrealistic-- consumer demands of the Soviet people, he was swept away in a tide of popular discontent which took the Soviet state and the socialist system with it.

The collapse of the Soviet bloc had the effect of postponing the showdown between the globalist and nationalist wings of the US ruling class. Global capital celebrated its victory and went about creating a new system of global institutions which would effectively insulate its rule from democratic pressures within the US or other nation states. New investment opportunities in the former Soviet bloc and lower wages within the US (a result of Reagan’s attack on labor), meanwhile, permitted a global economic recovery. New technologies developed largely as a spin-off from high levels of military spending, such as personal computers and the internet, created new opportunities for investment, while lower taxes and lower federal spending allowed money to flood the stock market, creating a temporary boom which “floated everyone’s boat” and temporarily eased internal political tensions, creating an appearance of a ruling class consensus which was globalist and secular. It even appeared that there might be elements within the new ruling bloc willing to address the ecological and labor concerns raised by the left opposition to globalization.

Europe had been developing, throughout this period, along rather different lines than the United States. Its high-end export strategy left it less vulnerable to the effects of globalization and the redeployment of industrial capital to the Third World, though not entirely immune. While Social Democratic and Christian Democratic governments generally accepted the need to contain increases in individual and social wages, even the most right-wing refrained from the sort of wholesale assault on the welfare state which marked the Reagan and Thatcher governments. In fact, they were often beaten back when they proposed even modest cuts. Europe did not bear the economic burdens of the military industrial complex, but also did not reap the benefits of high-tech spin-off. As a result, Europeans experienced a less dramatic crisis in the 1970s and 1980s, and a less dramatic “recovery” or boom in the 1990s. The principal political-economic “event” of the 1990s was not the internet or the stock-market boom, but the continued expansion and ever deepening economic integration of the European Union, which by the end of the decade had agreed on a common currency and had effectively put an end to national borders within Europe. While elements within the European ruling classes clearly see the establishment of the European Union as a way to impose greater world-market discipline on the planet’s most privileged working classes, there is little evidence that they either can or want to go as far as the US in this respect. The principal political contradictions within Europe have to do, rather, with the question of just what European integration means. To what extent should the European Union, and participation in the larger global market, be allowed to efface national and local cultural specificity, including locally specific production methods which have been the source not only of local pride but also significant export revenue? What does integration mean for democracy? How far should Europe expand? Can Europe accommodate former Soviet bloc countries with different economic, political, and cultural histories and traditions? What about an Islamic country like Turkey? To what extent should a commitment to pluralism be allowed to compromise secularism, as Islamic immigrants bring to Europe its first intensely religious minority in a century? Many feel that Europe, whether understood as the home of secularism or as the core of a New Christendom, is under assault from both a global capitalist culture which is associated with the United States, and a resurgent Islam which, in the case of Spain, speaks openly about a Re-reconquista and about recreating al-Andalus. The result has been that Europe, as well, has witnessed the rise of a new Right committed to something like a clash of civilizations. The difference is that this Right is more popularly based, and less an instrument of powerful ruling class interests, though there can be little doubt that fear of the economic and cultural implications of immigration from Islamic countries is behind what little support there is in Europe for the United States’ war on Islam.

Those who believed the new consensus of the 1990s would be enduring not only overestimated the contribution of technological advances such as the internet; they underestimated the long term economic implications of globalization for the US. A fully unified global market means a United States in which industrial wages have been driven down to “world” levels, or else a US in which there is no longer industry, at all and in which the population is divided between a small elite of “symbolic analysts[9]” as Clinton Labor Secretary Robert Reich called them, and broad masses of impoverished service workers (Reich 1992). Clinton had no better plan for addressing this reality than did Carter back in the 1970s. Modest community college scholarships, Clinton’s idea of “investing in human development,” are not enough to make everyone an investment banker or a software engineer, and even if they were, then these groups would no longer be able to attract the monopoly rents on skill which form the basis of their prosperity. The effect was to undermine support for Clinton –and his anointed successor—among the working classes and petty bourgeoisie.

The impact of globalization has not, however, been confined to the working classes. Globalization means a US in which the ruling class consists of core finance capital and a few highly innovative technology companies able to survive because they earn monopoly rents on their innovations. Everything else can be done more cheaply elsewhere. While it is, to be sure, possible to redeploy manufacturing overseas, service industries cannot be redeployed and US firms operating overseas face both competition from local and European firms, against which they enjoy no competitive advantage in a fully unified global market, and resistance from workers whose wages are being driven below the value of their labor power. Even those who survive would likely find themselves displaced from the upper echelons of the ruling class by the finance-high tech alliance.

This is the key to understanding the Bush “coup.” Initially the choice of Bush as a Republican Presidential candidate had little to do with struggles within the ruling class and everything to do with the desire of Republican political operatives to agree on a candidate early enough to have a chance against the anointed successor of a popular incumbent. Globalists within the Republic party assumed that if George the Second didn’t share his father’s globalist convictions it was simply because he lacked any convictions at all. It was up to them to supply them. The Right certainly didn’t seem to see him as a one of their own, though insiders may have been aware of a marked evangelical streak in what little thinking he did. The difference is simply that the antiglobalists knew he was their only hope. When the results of the election were in doubt they leaned on the Supreme Court. Once he was in office they began a war of position with the globalists who, like Colin Powell, held the key foreign policy positions. This war of position was made easier by the events of 11 September 2001. And while it is still going on, the antiglobalists have clearly won important victories and appear to have the upper hand.

What do they want? There are, broadly speaking, two things which low-technology capital can do to improve its position in the short to medium run. First, direct US military occupation and administration of significant regions of the world would give US capitalists a comparative advantage over European and Asian competitors that otherwise seems forever lost. Second, creating a rising tide of anti-Americanism abroad is the one way to slow the pace of globalization, or even temporarily reverse it, without giving quarter to the antiglobalization left, which is generally internationalist and sees its critique of the global market as a way of supporting wages both in the US and overseas. Military empire abroad and a war economy at home: this is a best case scenario for those sectors of capital unable to compete in the new conditions which emerged in the 1990s. It is also what the Right wanted in 1980 and thought they had in 1984, until it was (inadvertently) stolen from them by Mikhail Gorbachev and John Paul II.

What does this all have to do with struggle over fundamental questions of meaning and value, and with the crisis of modernity which I analyzed above? Everything. First, it is largely by means of appeal to the “early modern” ideology of nationalist Protestantism that the Right has been able to build its base among the traditional petty bourgeoisie and working class of the United States. The idea of a “clash of civilizations” between Christian “America” and Islam, essential to creating both a military empire and a war economy, follow necessarily. Second, what we have said about the Right in the United States is equally true of those other advocates of a clash of civilizations: Islamic Fundamentalists, Hindu Communalists, Russian “Eurasianists,” and all the rest. Fundamentally they represent local elites unable to compete in a unified global market, and equally unable to meet the demands of their workers, peasants, and petty bourgeoisies without calling their own privileges into question. If the “end of history” thesis was simply a way of stifling resistance to a neoliberal world order which threatens the very future of humanity by making it seem inevitable and beyond challenge, the “clash of civilizations” thesis is a way of legitimating a retreat from globalism without awakening a powerful popular movement.

The strategy works, furthermore, because what oppresses the people is not merely capitalism, national or global, though they are certainly capitalistically oppressed and exploited, but rather modernity as such, which has given an alien power (the market and/or the state) absolute control over their entire productive capacity, requiring them to work as only slaves worked in the past, and to be mentally and morally engaged by their work in a way which no slave ever was, in service to ends which (in the case of socialism) are noble but inadequately grounded by the hegemonic ideology, or (in the case of capitalism) ultimately meaningless.

Fundamentalist ideologies are appealing to such constituencies for a number of reasons. First and foremost, they boldly offer meaning and hope in a world drowning in nihilism and despair. Second, they do this in a way which does not require a real break with the hallmarks of modern ideology: skepticism regarding reason, and especially reason’s ability to resolve fundamental questions of meaning and value, and pessimism regarding human nature. Fundamentalist ideologies counsel not a rational ascent to knowledge of God, but rather faith in a revelation the reasonableness of which has not yet been established. And they counsel not an active struggle for spiritual development, but rather submission. They require no break with industrial modes of production, with the larger market order, or with bureaucratic forms of organization, which they simply propose to harness to some higher aim or purpose. People can continue to live their lives as they have, at least in broad outline, while suddenly finding new hope and new purpose. Fundamentalism, in short, pretends to break with modernity, but actually just mobilizes antimodernist discontent in the service of antiglobalist capital.

The clash of civilizations generated by competing fundamentalisms, finally, serves to divide the potential opposition to global Capital. Fundamentalist Moslem attacks on Buddhist shrines and Hindu temples –and on the rights of women-- allow the US to pose as a defender of religious tolerance and human rights and to win to its side constituencies which might otherwise oppose globalization from the left. US attacks on Dar-al-Islam, similarly, force the ummah to close ranks and shun dialogue with kaffirs.

This is the position of the ruling classes, both wings of which represent not so much conflicting civilizations as a sort of two-pronged assault on civilization itself. What about the popular sectors? There can be little doubt that the popular movements worldwide are still in the midst of a period of reorientation and reorganization following the collapse of the Soviet bloc. There are, however, real signs of hope. First, it would be a mistake to say that all local elites have either been hegemonized by global Capital or opted for fundamentalist antiglobalism. On the contrary, while they have been forced to accommodate themselves to the reality of the global market and the strengthened position of the United States during the past decade, the transitional elites of formerly socialist countries in the Soviet bloc and the Third World have by no means made an unambiguous decision for neoliberalism. After a decade of cowering before the US in the hopes of gathering a few crumbs from the capitalist table, Russia is at long last taking measured steps towards independence. Putin is carefully trying to define a distinctively Russian path to development, without conciliating his own fundamentalist right –the Eurasianist bloc (Goubman 1995). The current Chinese leadership is composed largely of technocrats anxious to improve their country’s position in the global market, but debate rages between Neo-Legalists, intent on using state power to back up market discipline, and Neo-Confucians and Populists who remind the leaders that unless they govern in the interests of the people as a whole, they will lose the coveted “Mandate of Heaven.” While the Bharatiya Janata Party in India seems to have largely bought into the “clash of civilizations” thesis, the Indian left, especially the Communist Party of India – Marxist, which has long held the balance of power in Kerala, has a long history of collaboration with popular religious forces, and the influence of the Gandhian tradition remains strong in the countryside. Much of the Third World continues to be governed by parties with roots in Arab, Islamic, or Buddhist Socialism or other populist doctrines which are neither fundamentalist nor radically secularist in character. Many of these elites are simply looking for a way forward.

Second, and more important, there are broad sectors of the population which are clearly looking for an alternative to both secularist, neoliberal globalism and a fundamentalist “clash of civilizations.” Of particular importance in Europe and North America is the large movement of progressive lay Catholics deeply committed to their tradition but disgusted by the decadence of the clergy and the repressive regime of the party currently in power in the Vatican. This sector is complemented by a significant community of liberal Protestants. Overlapping with these sectors is the growing New Age movement, the feminist spirituality movement, neopaganism and earth centered spiritualities, and large communities of converts to Buddhist and other Asian traditions. Reconstructionist Judaism and the Tikkun movement reflect a similar orientation. These sectors are all every bit as hostile to fundamentalism as any secularist, but approach public life and the current situation in a way which is informed, first and foremost, by specifically religious values and thus at least implicitly at odds with the global market’s agnosticism regarding values.

The depth of the opposition is still greater in Asia, Africa, and Latin America. While the wave of national liberation movements which peaked at the end of the 1970s was defeated, the culture it created has not disappeared. The Popular Church and the Theology of Liberation remain significant forces, as do Islamic Socialist organizations such as the People’s Mojahedin Organization of Iran, which has a predominantly female leadership and which is building a global “popular front against fundamentalism,” and the grassroots “engaged” Buddhism represented by leaders such as Thich Nhat Hanh and Acharn Buddhadasa Bhikkhu.

In short what “collapsed” with the Soviet Union in 1991 was the modernist left –the left which was committed to resolving the contradictions of capitalism not so much in order to liberate people and allow them to develop, but rather to place at its own disposal the whole productive capacity of humanity. This modernist left was deeply committed to the ideal of sovereignty and profoundly secular even when it occasionally allied itself with religious forces, in the sense that it believed that progress depended on human control of the universe. The left which remains rejects modernism profoundly, not because it hates science and technology or romanticizes some past golden age, but because it trusts profoundly in the potential of individuals and communities and indeed the universe as a whole to develop themselves, if only they are set free from the bonds of Capital. It stands for a politics which rejects the concept of sovereignty in favor of diffuse and competing centers of authority. It is also, in the very deepest sense, a religious or at least a spiritual left, even when it allies itself with secularists against fundamentalism, in the sense that it is deeply convinced of the ultimate meaningfulness and indeed the sacredness of the universe and of each and every human being. It is, in other words, the party of civilization precisely because it is the party of meaning and of hope. The current situation is not so much a clash of civilizations as it is a clash between the forces of civilization, the popular front of all of humanity’s wisdom traditions, and the enemies of civilization, both secular and fundamentalist, and ultimately capitalist.

This “party of meaning and of hope” does not represent an alternative to organizations such as the World Social Forum, which has been the most important locus for organizing left resistance to neoliberalism; it is, rather, the soul of such organizations. As we have argued since the 1980s it is quite impossible to mount a complete and consistent critique of capitalism from an atheistic perspective. The crisis of the secular left has demonstrated that this judgment was correct. As the opposition to global Capital recovers, it will be the religious left which provides it with its vision and its strategy.

What should that vision and strategy look like?

***

First, any politics adequate to the current crisis must take seriously the full range of human aspirations, which extend beyond a desire to meet basic subsistence needs, beyond even an opportunity to do meaningful work and participate in advancing the progress of human civilization. Human beings seek wisdom. We want to explore fundamental questions and develop spiritually in whatever ways the answers to those questions which we find most satisfying suggest. And we want a society which values that pursuit –which, indeed, without denigrating inner-worldly aims, values wisdom and spirituality above all else. At the same time, this politics must not be confessional, but rather must itself be constituted by a dialogue among representatives of all humanity’s wisdom traditions.

Second, any politics adequate to the current crisis must be founded on a renunciation of the ideal of sovereignty. This means, on the one hand, recognizing the priority of principle over power. Human communities do not so much legislate as discern together the nature of the Good and what it means for them, here and now. At the same time renouncing sovereignty means restoring –or in some cases recognizing for the first time-- the historic rights and legitimate autonomy of tribes, village communities, neighborhoods, guilds, cities, universities, religious communities –in short of the communities which actually carry out the work of humanity and which together constitute the body politic. Only on this basis will it be possible to constitute an effective and legitimate global political authority –something which is demanded by pressing global issues, such as the environmental crisis and by the existence of global economic networks—which is in no sense a World State, but rather a community of communities committed to the development of each and every one of its members.

Third, any politics adequate to the current crisis must at once break the back of both the capital markets and the market in labor power, which make human creativity simply an instrument of private gain and a means of individual survival and consumption interests, and it must do this without simply transferring investment decisions to the state. This means exploring alternatives to both capitalism and socialism –not a “middle way” between the two, but something radically different. On the one hand, any new economic model must restore to as many people as possible control over they own labor power and its use on a day to day basis and it must guarantee that individuals retain at least part of the surplus they produce to use as they see fit. On the other hand, decisions regarding resource allocation must be made in a way which is at once consultative and informed by principle and which guarantees adequate levels of investment in the long term, all-sided development of human capacities.

Finally, any politics adequate to the current crisis must break with industrialism, understood as a technological regime which breaks down matter and reorganizes it rather than tapping into latent processes of development. This implies both a different relationship with our physical and biological environment, which we are in danger of rendering uninhabitable, and a different way of organizing labor. Work must once again become a creative engagement with the matter we work on, which understands the potential of that matter and helps perfect it and which, like the old alchemical technologies, is thus a part of God’s work in the world.

How do we create such a politics? Our task is twofold. First, we must develop a new generation of leaders. Or, to be more precise, each of the wisdom (philosophical and religious) traditions which wants to participate in this effort must train a new generation of leaders. A society dedicated to the full development of human capacities, and which values the spiritual dimension of human development, must have leaders who actually demonstrate that sort of development. Just how that is understood will vary from one tradition to the next. I can speak only for those who follow the via dialectica. For us the task is especially difficult, since the two institutions we have built as vehicles for our leadership –the university and the revolutionary party—are now among the most discredited on the planet. We must find a new format which, like the university, is respectful of pluralism and which gives truth priority over power, but which like the revolutionary party is authentically committed to the struggle for justice. We must identify emerging leaders who are hard workers, without concern for personal gain, with exemplary fortitude demonstrated through years of hard struggle, and who are deeply in love with Wisdom and willing to accept her discipline –but not that of either the marketplace or would-be tyrants, inside or outside the organization. We must give them a training which we ourselves have purchased only at great price and thanks to countless failures which demonstrated the inadequacy of our own preparation for the tasks we have undertaken. On the intellectual side this means that they must have a synoptic understanding of all the fine and liberal arts and sciences (physical, biological and social), of the hermeneutic disciplines, and of not only the dialectical ascent to first principles, but also of humanity’s other principal wisdom traditions. On the moral side they must be helped to cultivate a degree of virtue which is authentically heroic. And they must have help through the dark nights of the soul which carry us to a knowledge of God beyond that which dialectics alone can afford.

Other traditions will have other priorities for their emerging leaders. Suffice it to say that there can be no room for the perception that these leaders have entered religious life or sought clerical or professorial status because they are looking for a comfortable sinecure –much less because of unresolved psychosexual issues. Secularism and fundamentalism have no better friends than the pedophile priest and promiscuous professor.

Second, we must take dialogue around fundamental questions of meaning and value into the public arena. We must do this both at the leadership and at the popular levels. Statesmen (such as there are), religious leaders, and academics must be challenged to address foundational (i.e. metaphysical and moral) questions and to address each other, both in print and in face to face discussions. This means direct engagement with the mass media and the journalists they employ, who have made themselves obstacles to, rather than vehicles of, meaningful dialogue. Meanwhile, parishes, local congregations, synagogues, mosques, temples, and other organizations which defend meaning and hope must be brought into the public arena, not only to work on issues on which they agree (though this is important) but to debate those on which they differ. Local religious leaders must become authentic mediators between the high order debate carried out between the senior leaders of various traditions and a vigorous local public arena, able at once to explain and defend their own traditions and to encourage respect for and learning from others. Powerful popular organizations based in local schools, religious institutions, and other organizations which defend meaning and hope will be able to demand that senior leaders engage in the kind of discussion we have outlined above. At the same time, dialogue of this sort will catalyze the emergence of a new type of popular organization. Already many religious institutions are actively engaged in struggles for social justice. But the tenor of the movement will be different from much of the religious social activism of the 1980s and 1990s. It will, on the one hand, be more religious, or rather more spiritual, in the sense that the value of transcendental aims will be more explicitly acknowledged. This will not be a movement which uses religious institutions as a base for financial and institutional support, but rather an authentically spiritual movement for the creation of a society which makes possible the full development of human capacities. At the same time the movement will be far more pluralistic than the old religious social activism which was mostly confessional in character. Seekers and those who still have doubts about the ultimate meaningfulness of the universe, but who want to be part of the search and the struggle will be welcome, as will those who understand themselves as religious conservatives who want to protect the spiritual values of human civilization from the degrading effects of the market order.

Clearly it will take a long time to transform the character of public discourse on a global scale. But even a small beginning will serve to immunize the people against the dangerous ideology of the clash of civilizations, while beginning to demonstrate that, the neoliberal triumphalism of the last decade notwithstanding, human history really isn’t at an end.

There can be no doubt that we live in dark times. But those of us who belong to the party of meaning and of hope –which is the only true party of humanity—know that this darkness cannot last forever. The long winter of capitalism and modernity is coming to an end. The false spring of socialism at once gave us a respite and taught us the difference between mitigating contradictions and actually resolving them. Now, beyond the present storm, we can see the first signs of a true spring.

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[1] Hizbut Tahrir is an Islamic fundamentalist organization based in Uzbekistan. See their The Inevitability of the Clash of Civilization, which argues, among other things, that the idea of inter-religious dialogue is just another tactic in the West’s struggle against Islam. The World Social Forum is a global alliance of social movements dedicated to combating capitalist globalization. Autre Davos was a mass action convened by the World Social Forum in 2000 to counter the neoliberal World Economic Forum held annually in Davos, Switzerland.

[2] This formulation, which may see reminiscent of Fromm (Fromm 1947), actually goes much further. For Fromm human spirituality is rooted in a disharmony in our existence. Unlike the other animals we are aware of our finitude and isolation and this gives rise to an existential anxiety which we seek to resolve by various means, some healthy (creative engagement with the world around us), and some not. While Fromm allows for a sort of nontheistic spirituality, he rejects the idea that we might actually be ordered to an end which transcends human development and civilizational progress. My own formulation, on the other hand, treats our animal capacities as the material basis for the development of higher order abilities which are not in conflict with them, but merely transcend them, and takes seriously the reality of the transcendental ends to which we aspire.

[3] I use the term sapiential to include all those disciplines which terminate or claim to terminate in wisdom or knowledge of first principles: religion, philosophy, theology, mysticism, etc. Sapiential progress is progress in wisdom; the sapiential authorities are those authorities whose legitimacy is based on their wisdom: religious leaders but also philosophers, theologians, mystics, and practitioners of connatural or caritative wisdom.

[4] This frankly Aristotelian approach is the result of a dual effort to address developments in the sciences which point towards the need to reintegrate teleological thinking into scientific explanation, an argument which I make in outline form in Knowing God: Restoring Reason in an Age of Doubt (Mansueto 2002), and will I make at much greater length in its sequel, Knowing God: The Ultimate Meaningfulness of the Universe, and an effort to reintegrate both ecological and spiritual considerations into dialectical and historical materialism which, when these are factored back in, is Aristotelian.

[5] This is the so called axial age first described by Karl Jaspers (Jaspers 1956), who points out that the period between 800 and 200 BCE was characterized by the simultaneous origin of the Confucian, Taoist, Buddhist, Hindu, Zoroastrian, Jewish, and Socratic traditions. There is a connection between the development of petty commodity production and religious rationalization. On the one hand the development of markets gave people an experience of the universe as a system of quantities (prices), and thus created the social conditions necessary for the development of formal abstraction and an abstract mathematics. The result was, among other things, a shift from myth to dialectics as the privileged means of ascent to first principles. In a market society, however, there is no global end or purpose to which all activity is ordered. This period was also, therefore, characterized by the emergence of nihilistic and materialist ideologies, such as the Greek Sophists and Atomists, the Indian Caravakas, and the Chinese Legalists, who denied the existence of transcendental principles of meaning and value –and, incidentally, served as effective ideologues for the ruling classes. The axial age movements were, in large measure, an attempt to reground religious and moral discourse in a way that made sense in an age when transcendental principles had been called into question, and to address the growing injustice which characterized petty commodity societies, either by proposing specific reforms, as in the case of the Socratic, Jewish, and Confucian traditions, or by challenging the drive for wealth and power itself, which was seen as the root of injustice, an approach more characteristic of Buddhism and Taoism. For further discussion of this thesis see Mansueto 2001, 2002.

[6] These distinctions derive from Louis Althusser and his followers (Althusser and Balibar 1968/1970), but have been modified to reflect the larger approach to social theory outlined above.

[7] The trend in later industrial societies to employ what is in reality a still very small percentage of workers with some sort of technical training really does little to alter this pattern. The skills involved are still those required by the market or the state. What can be learned in a two year or four year course of technical training, furthermore, even if we arbitrarily house such training in what we pretend to call a “college” or “university,” is far less than was gained in preindustrial times in an apprenticeship of seven years.

[8] One caveat is in order here. Some militant secularism is in fact very far from being atheistic and has nothing to do with the rejection of religion as such, but with a rejection of Christianity and an attempt to make room, under the guise of secular culture, for non-Christian traditions. I have argued that this is precisely the case with the militant secularism of Latin Europe and much of Latin America, where secularism means a rejection of Christianity in favor of crypto-Jewish, crypto-Islamic, pagan, or indigenous cultural currents, under conditions where it would be impossible to be open about such aims (Mansueto 2002a). A similar phenomenon is apparent in the US today as Jews, partisans of neopaganism, the New Age, various Asian religious traditions, and even many Catholics and liberal Protestants line up with the secularists against the Christian Right. Ultimately this is a defeatist strategy because it gives hegemony to forces every bit as committed as the Christian Right to keeping authentic ideals of spiritual development from playing a role in public discourse.

[9] This was the term Reich used to describe innovative problem solvers able to earn what amount to monopoly rents on skill.