Modernity
is based on the demand for emancipation of human beings through their
liberation from the fetters of social determination in its traditional forms of
the past. This liberation called for a renunciation of the dominant forms of
power recognition ----- in the family, in communities within which are
organised modes of life and production and in the State ---- until then based
on a metaphysical concept generally expressed in religious terms. It therefore
implies separation between State and religion, radical secularisation as a
condition for deploying the modern forms of politics. This separation by no
means calls for abolition of faith but it implies refusing to subject reason to
any dogmatic interpretation of faith. It therefore means that the search for a
possible reconciliation between reason and faith should be left to the free
discretion of individuals ; it refuses to lend credibility to any form of
religion imposed by power or social conventionality, thereby making religion a
strictly private affair.
The
concomitant dawn and development of modernity and capitalism are not a matter
of chance. The social linkages attributed to the new production system of
capitalism implied free enterprise, free access to markets, and proclamation of
the inviolable right to privateownership ("rendered sacred"). The
economic life thus emancipated from the tutelage of the political power that
characterized the regimes previous to the era of modernity is established as an
autonomous domain of social life solely influenced by its own laws. Capitalism
substitutes for traditional determination of wealth by power an inverse
causality relationship that establishes wealth as the source of power. However,
the modernity really existing to date, in other words, the type whose deployment
has remained enshrined in capitalism, is ambiguous with respect to this issue
concerning the relationship between power and wealth. Modernity is actually
based on the separation between two spheres of social life : the one involving
management of the economy that it ascribes to the specific logics of wealth
accumulation (private ownership, free enterprise and competition) and the one
concerning management of State power through the institutionalised practice of
political democracy (civil rights, principles of the multiparty system, etc.).
This arbitrary separation between the two areas of economic and political
management of the society neutralises the potential liberating power proclaimed
by modernity.
In
fact, the modernity deployed under the limiting constraints of capitalism is
contradictory, as it promises more than it can produce, thereby generating
unfulfilled hopes.
Modernity
initiates a potential and far-reaching social progress that amounts to
emancipation and is attested by the progress of political democracy, although
it has been limited. It has legitimized the action of the dominated, exploited
and oppressed of social classes and made it possible for such groups to
gradually snatch from the power of the dominant capital, democratic rights that
have never been spontaneously produced by the logic of capitalist expansion and
accumulation. It has liberated a political transformation promoting the
development of class struggles and establishing between politics and class
struggles the sense of equivalence underscoring the two terms. At the same
time, however, it has invented and developed the means enabling it to curtail
the potential power of liberating democracy.
Simultaneously,
capitalism accompanied by modernity led to a development of productive forces
at a rate unprecedented in history. The potential of such a development would
help in finding solutions to the crucial material problems facing humanity as a
whole. But the logic that commands capitalist accumulation forbids that things
assume such a dimension through an ever-increasing polarisation of wealth on a
scale unknown until then in world history.
Contemporary
humanity is therefore confronted by the contradictions of such modernity--- the
only one with which we have so far been familiar -- that is just the modernity
initiated by the capitalist era of history. These contradictions express the
destructive threefold dimension of capitalism and the form of modernity
accompanying it, for that matter.
Capitalism
and its modernity destroy the human being, who is reduced to the status of a
commodity ; human beings being reduced to the status of a labour force bought
and sold on the market. The economic alienation whereby this relegation is
expressed deprives democracy of its liberating potential. Democracy is degraded
and rendered meaningless whenever it is established under such conditions, that
is, virtually in centres of the system, which are the sole entities benefiting
from the development of productive forces. Authentic politics ---- whereby
human creative potential is expressed --- is replaced by an illusive media --
which I call "low intensity democracy" show democracy of low
standard, based on hollow consensus constructed and manipulated by the capital
dominating the economic system.
Supported
by the logic of the short-term rationality of the economic calculation,
capitalist accumulation and modernity simultaneously destroy the natural bases
of social reproduction and life, as attested by the serious ecological problems
and the repeated selective disasters (the mad cow is a good illustration of
this phenomenon); The
global polarisation encouraged by capital accumulation on this scale annuls for
the majority of the human race --- those on the peripheries of the system ---
any prospect of satisfying the needs promised by modernity and consequently
hampers the entrenchment of democracy even, degraded as it were in the centres
of the system. For the majority of the human race, capitalism is an odious
system and, for that matter, the accompanying modernity is a tragic farce.
4. The
contradictions inherent in the capitalist phase of modernity annulled the
rational utopia project as formulated at that time, through which the exclusive
rationality of capital reproduction was actually expressed. These
contradictions virtually obliged the dominant capital to place its development
in a context increasingly modulated by conflicts between the requirements of
the capital logic on the one hand and the logic that the system's victims
managed to impose in a given place and time on the other hand. The "pure
capitalism" formatted by the traditional armchair economists has to be
substituted by a really existing, pragmatic capitalism adapting to market
regulations imposed by social relations and to international conflicts that
call into question the structures established within the global system. In this
sense too, if the ideology of modernity begun with capitalism claimed "to
make a clean sweep of the past" by replacing it with the utopian ideal enshrined
in the exclusive rationality of capital accumulation. Yet, in fact, capitalism
had to adapt to a number of characteristics inherited from its antecedents. The
really existing modernity therefore becomes a patchwork that contrasts with the
consistency of its founding theoretic theses.
Contemporary
peoples are therefore faced with the challenges inherent in the really existing
capitalism and modernity. The attitudes and postures in which the different
political and ideological trends of the contemporary world find expression
should be appreciated by the yardstick of the nature of their response to this
explicit or implicit challenge.
The
dominant ideology merely seeks to ignore the challenge. Such ignorance is
expressed naively, in spite of the possible sophistication of its language by
the Anglo-American ideologists of liberalism. This "discourse of the
replete groups" recognises individual liberty, the sole human value to
which it relegates modernity. It does so at the price of ignoring that, in the
context of capitalism, this liberty becomes the type that allows the strongest
groups to impose their laws on others, that this liberty is completely illusory
to the greater majority (the liberal hypothesis imagines that every individual
can become a Rockefeller, as it was formerly said that every soldier had in his
haversack a marshal's baton) and that it clashes head-on with the aspiration
for equality that constitutes the foundation of democracy.
This
same fundamental ideology is shared by all defenders of the impassable horizon,
the "end of history". The most extremist elements do not hesitate to
accept that society be viewed as a jungle "of individuals" or to
sacrifice the possible peaceful intervention of the State for principles of a
management that relegates public authority to the functions of an instrument
exclusively in the service of the "winners". Their concept is not
different from that of a Mafia-like capital dictatorship. Others who wish to
give a human dimension to such dictatorship try to attenuate the extremism of
the exclusive principle of individual freedom by diluting it in propositions
that associate it with other pragmatic considerations of social justice and
"recognition of differences", especially community differences.
Post-modernism also comes within this context of negation of the challenge as
it is expected to "accept" and "adapt" to the contemporary
reality, to "manage" it solely at the lowest possible immediate
level.
For
the greater majority groups, this modernity in question is simply odious,
hypocritical and based on the cynical practice of "double standards".
Their rejection is therefore violent and this violence is perfectly legitimate.
The really existing capitalism and the accompanying modernity have nothing to
propose to these majority groups. However, rejecting constitutes a negative
act. Efficiency demands that it be accompanied by a positive alternative
proposal. It is here that the inherent inadequacies of the reflections and
projects can annihilate the efficiency of the revolt and eventually include it
in the de facto context of submission to the requirements of capitalism and the
modernity that are said to be rejected. The main illusion is sustained by the
nostalgia for the pre-modern past. This nostalgia has its defenders in the centres
as well as in the peripheries of the system. In the centres, the nostalgia for
the past may appear as a daydream without considerable scope, conservative
expression and a means whereby the replete groups can attenuate the dangers
inherent in the liberating demands by victims of the system, thereby relegating
modernity to an inconsistent patchwork blending manipulated vestiges of the
past and the exigencies of the present.
In
the peripheries, however, the backward-looking posture stems from a violent and
justified revolt of which it merely constitutes a neurotic and powerless form
because it is simply based on ignorance about the nature of the challenge of
modernity.
Attachment
to the past is expressed in various languages, generally those given a
religious interpretation from a fundamentalist perspective, which actually
masks a conventional conservative option or these of ethnicity credited with
specific virtues transcending the other dimensions of social reality --
especially the classes. The common denominator between all these forms lies in
their attachment to a culturalist thesis whereby religious and ethnic groups
might be characterised by trans-historical features that could define
intangible identities. Even though they have no scientific basis, these
postures are no less capable of mobilising the masses marginalised and rendered
helpless by the disruptions wrought by capitalist modernity. However, by this
very fact, they constitute the effective mechanisms for the manipulations that
form part of the strategies reinforcing the de facto submission to the joint
dictatorship by the dominant forces in the capitalist globalisation process and
its local and subsidiary communication channels. Political Islam as well as
political hinduism are good examples of this mode of management in the
peripheral capitalism. In Latin America and Africa, the proliferation of
obscurantist "Sects" supported by North America out fit, in order to block
the theology of liberation, manipulates the helplessness of the marginalised
groups and their revolt against the conservative official church.
As a
counter point, facing the challenge of modernity implies that the
contradictions of the modernity introduced by capitalism should be measured
along with the conception of a vision of society capable of surpassing such
contradictions and situated in the future rather than in the past. This posture
implies that emphasis be laid not on the differences inherited from the past
but on those that the future invention generates through its own movement (Cf.
Diversity inherited from the past and diversity in the future invention).
The
conservative and reactionary forces dominating the contemporary scene at the
global level and in the local societies are determined to thwart the
unaccomplished project of modernity, by imposing solutions that are
inconsistent but effective in the short term. Such answers associate the
reproduction of past appearances and the exigencies inherent in pursuing the
destructive capital accumulation.
