Arrigo Colombo
1. The
advancement of our research into utopia and the emergence of justice
Besides, Bloch had never influenced
our intuition or our research, rather we had been spurred on by the
consideration of the history of utopia I mentioned above. Our research had
unearthed and replotted a course which followed the trail of those movements,
the “religious salvation movements”, starting with Jewish Messianism, on which
the evangelical message was grafted, whilst millenarism had already come into
being two centuries earlier. Later Christianity developed Mediaeval and modern
heresy, which, with Puritanism and its transposition of the religious design to
a political one, was to trigger the second series of movements, the “modern
revolutionary movements”. Both these sets of movements embodied the utopian
design as the design of the society based
on justice, and later of the fraternal society.
We had already briefly encountered
justice in the previous and
prehistoric phase: the phase of myth, the golden myth, the golden age at the
dawning of humanity, or at least, that is, in the works of poets like, for
example, Hesiod, Catullus and Ovid. Later, however, justice was to become a
dominant category in Jewish Messianism. Thus in Jeremiah the “Messiah”, the
consecrated one, the Redeemer, was known as “Yahweh-our-justice”; His city was
known by the same name. Throughout prophetism He was heralded as the upholder
of justice for His people who were oppressed by other peoples, especially by
the great empires of Assyria, Babylon, Persia, Alexandria and Rome. He was also
seen as the founder of a just society, which would be free of tyrants and
oppressors, where the weak – the poor, the orphans, the widows – would be
protected. It is also significant that
the charismatic and prophetic figure who founded the Essenian Movement was
known as the Master of Justice. Furthermore, throughout Messianism justice was
never simply considered in the fundamental biblical sense of the transcendent
perfection of God in Himself and in relation to His creation (a perfection
which a person of faith strives to imitate) but rather justice was seen as a
fair relationship between individuals, in society and in the city.
For this relationship to be fair it
had to be one in which human dignity and rights were respected. This was the
concept of justice that came to light: justice as the reciprocation of the dignity and rights of human beings, of every
person to every person, in their own
existence and in coexistence. Since a human being is, by constitution, a
coexistent being in that he/she is one of a species, a model which exists in
multiplicity, in an unlimited potential totality of individuals (and yet
persons, not merely a species but a soul-species – soul, a word which is today
often avoided or rejected but which is crucial). And that is realized through
generation, then growth and maturity up to independence; a process which takes
place in coexistence, in extremely intimate moments such as intercourse,
pregnancy and nursing, but also at school and at work, in short universal human
co-operation. Consequently, reciprocation of human person and to human person
in him/herself and in all spheres into which human coexistence extends: the
family, love, friendship, association, school, the church and the factory. And
last of all in his/her relationship with the polis, the state, which through the surrender of their rights by
individuals becomes a principle of rights. This involves mutual reciprocation,
of the polis to the individual, of
the individual to the polis.
Hence
Ulpian’s famous definition, “stabilis et perpetua voluntas [speaking here of
virtue] ius suum cuique tribuendi” (a firm and perpetual will to attribute to
everyone his right) may still be relevant if we attribute this «ius suum» to
the human being as such, not to one of his/her particular prerogatives, such as
material possessions, class, intelligence and culture or economic and social
status.
This concept of justice taking root
and flourishing in humankind is, of course, rebuffed by the post-modernists and
post-metaphysicians. They either slight anything which has the substance of
being, or they deconstruct it until – or at least they think – it loses its
substance, leaving us with the individual as the partner of “discourse”, since
the whole reality is reduced to discourse (according to the theory of
Habermas), as the “narrative unit of a life” (as described in a short essay by
Ricoeur). However, I have already spoken at length about the philosophical
alienation of the post-modernists and their “destructive thinking” in my book
on utopia (L’utopia. Rifondazione di un’idea e di una storia), as I have
too of Rawls with his mental constructs, his justice made of liberty and
inequality, his ideological theorization of the bourgeois system (§§ 43.3, 59).
Thus if justice is reciprocation of
the dignity and rights of human beings in their existence and coexistence, then
its essential elements must be liberty, equality and solidarity. Liberty coincides with human dignity and
rights and this dignity lies in self-consciousness, self-determination,
self-construction, autonomy. It is here that human rights take shape and
prevail, allowing nobody to interfere but requiring everybody to acknowledge,
respect and reciprocate such rights, albeit within the bounds of ethics
governing the individual. Equality
involves every human being enjoying equal dignity and rights simply by virtue
of being human, but with everything such dignity and rights bring with them, in
material possessions, spiritual and cultural assets and even social assets. Solidarity is to be found in
coexistence, in co-operation, in the great human undertaking in which everyone
is procreated, grows and matures to the historic levels of needs and culture;
the necessary reciprocation of each individual, the active commitment of
everyone.
2. The course of construction: the religious
salvation movements, the modern revolutionary movements
Research into utopia, which
throughout the past century advanced from the literary to the historical level
and then to the peoples’ movements, uncovers a course which hinges on justice
and matures in time to construct the society based on justice. I have spoken
above of two major streams of these movements which have spanned nearly three
millennia: the “religious salvation movements” and the “modern revolutionary
movements”. There is, however, a previous phase which spans this whole stretch
of history, that which we call the “implicit popular project” phase, which
concerns the conditions of people, above all of peasants (and to a no small
extent townspeople): conditions of hard labour, scarcity, ignorance,
subordination, exploitation, oppression and widespread poverty; conditions of injustice where human dignity
and rights are violated, and later still conditions of servilism and slavery;
conditions which embody a conscience, a tending towards justice, the just
society, quite simply the implicit popular project. The existence of this
project is corroborated (as well as by utopian myths, which I will not go into
here) by three sequences of events: the popular revolt, which is endemic
throughout the history of humanity; the processes of democratisation (Athens,
Rome, the Mediaeval free cities); the modern revolutions. But I will not expand
on these events here, as I have dealt with them in my book quoted above, L’utopia, especially the modern
revolutions, including the so-called “bourgeois” revolutions, whose motive
power and more advanced design are popular (§§ 9 and 25-29).
Thus,
if the two streams of popular movements mentioned above chart a particular
course through history, one which was eventually to lead to Western
civilisation, the Jewish-Greek-Christian and later European sphere, that of the
implicit popular project and particularly popular revolt is one we might rather
call planetary, even though it was restricted to civilisations (not including
the so-called “primitive” cultures) which instituted forms of oppressive and
despotical power.
Therefore the society based on
justice has its antecedent and together its permanent site, we might say its
most profound historical upholder, in the conditions, conscience and popular
tension of the “implicit project”. This project comes to light in the first of
the “religious salvation movements”, i.e.
Jewish Messianism, and throughout the prophecies several essential elements
stand out: justice, of course, as described above; peace (including peace with
the animal kingdom); peoples united in worshipping God and in justice;
prosperity. And this is no longer merely a project but rather a prophecy, the foretelling of a future
reality, of a justice which will be achieved, albeit with the help of faith.
Millenarism,
a movement which is not very well-known, has a considerable historical
importance in that it runs from the 2nd century before Christ
throughout the entire Roman Christian period, the Middle Ages and modern times,
with its zenith in America in the 1800’s; a movement, moreover, which always
finds much popular support, which is indeed mythical but which expresses
admirably how people tend towards justice (see the acute, suggestive work by
Norman Cohn). Its utopian design is the same as that of Jewish Messianism from
which it derives, although often with a far stronger earthly, material
emphasis: justice, peace, prosperity, the unification of humankind which are,
however, reserved only for the righteous and the elect, who are first and
foremost the poor, since the ungodly were all wiped out in the eschatological
battle. Here we sense a strong spirit of
resentment and revenge.
In the evangelical message (an expression preferred here to
“Christianity”, which is a far too complex and contrasted phenomenon), which
stems from Judaism but alters it drastically, the design of a society based on
justice has already been acquired, even though it is transcended in a far
higher design, the “fraternal society”, the law of love. We seldom come across
the word justice, except in the transcendent biblical sense mentioned earlier,
but its principle and spirit are acquired and exalted. Above all, in the
proclamation of the gospel to the poor, in their blessedness which also becomes
their earthly and material redemption, as we see in the primitive apostolic
community described in Acts where
possessions are communal, where those who have share their possessions
according to each individual’s needs, so that “there was not a needy person
among them” (2, v. 42-47; 4, v. 32-35): earthly redemption for the poor,
therefore the end of poverty. It was also the end of wealth in its
expropriable, discriminative sense: the rich and the poor, the strong and the
weak, the exploiter and the exploited, the oppressor and the oppressed; the
all-time extremes of an unjust society.
The evangelical message demolishes
wealth and power since they are forms of evil, forms of discrimination and
oppression. Wealth is “unjust”, a wealthy individual may not receive God’s
“kingdom”, that is to say the society of salvation, the fraternal society: “It
is easier for a camel to go through the eye of a needle than for a rich man to
enter the kingdom of God”, as the famous quotation goes. But this is no mere
saying, snubbed by ideological tradition, the tradition of a society and a
church governed by wealth, rather it is one of the main themes throughout the
evangelical message. When it comes to might, the unilateral power of one person
over another, the evangelical message is radical. It allows no form of
superiority, social prestige or doctrinal intellectual moral power (one may not
be called lord, father or master, occupy the highest seats in the synagogue or
the best seats at dinner). Instead we must use our prerogatives as gifts to
serve our brothers.
The
evangelical design puts an end to every form of human discrimination, starting
with economic discrimination which is the greatest and which has, to a certain
extent, given rise to and sustained all other forms: between the rich and the
poor, the strong and the weak, the master and the slave, servant or subordinate
(here the wage contract comes in). It brings the end of all kinds of religious,
ethnic, social and sexual discrimination. As Paul explains, there is no
difference between Jews and Greeks, between Greeks and barbarians, slaves and
free persons, between men and women, there is only brotherhood which contains
the highest form of justice.
So if Jewish Messianism was
prophecy, then the Gospel is proclamation and foundation (“I will found my ekklesìa”, my ecclesial assembly,
community); it is already a construction
of the fraternal society which incorporates and transcends the society of
justice. This construction is marvellously elevated, it is an historical
novelty, but it does not last because it immediately gets entangled and lost in the webs of power and hierarchy
of society in its attempt to alter it, even as early as the apostolic era, as
we see in the Pastoral Epistles, the last in Paul’s corpus. It then continues to get lost in the webs of power and
wealth until it finally goes adrift in the “imperial model”: the pope, emperor
and superemperor; the bishops and princes; all coming together in the
long-lasting feudal system. A model which basically still lives on today. There
had been, however, some form of construction: that of a community.
Next comes Mediaeval heresy, as it is called, a term which will be used for
the moment (although strictly one should speak of alternative ecclesial
movements and leave the question of orthodoxy for the time being), which is nothing
other than an attempt to return to the evangelical message in its authenticity,
the ecclesial community in its original, unaltered state. This is why poverty
is so important here (the poor of Lyons, the poor of Arnold of Brescia, and of
Lombardy), as is the “spirit” (in Joachim of Flora and throughout the
“spiritual” stream) and the lay state; redemption of the poor, of the people.
It is an attempt to carry on building what Christ and his Apostles began, i.e.
the just and fraternal society, since the fraternal society embodies the just
society at its highest level. Thus we have a whole chain of movements spanning
five centuries, starting in the 11th century, in 1056, the year
which saw the rise of the Milan Pataria, all of which are immediately wiped out
by opposition only to regroup and start all over again. This chain continued up
to the days of Wyclif, of Hus and of the Bundschuh, to 1517, the year of
Luther’s “theses”, reaching the age of modern
heresy and therefore Lutheranism, Calvinism, Anabaptism and Puritanism, its
pillars, if we can call them that. However, with so many complex movements, the
design inevitably modulates and swings on its axis. Nor can we say that Luther
or Calvin fight for a church of the poor; the former enjoyed the support of princes
and was a fierce opponent of the Peasant War and the latter was backed by the
bourgeoisie, yet both strive for a people’s church. But it does not matter that
the design oscillates. What does matter
is that its substance remains intact until we reach English Puritanism in the
1600’s, when it moves from the religious into the political, triggering off and
shaping the first of the modern
revolutions, the first sine addito
revolution. There are no revolutions before modern times, no global subversive
movements by the people for freedom, which is the meaning of the word
revolution in its strict sense.
Here we are talking about four
revolutions: the English Long Parliament Revolution, 1640-1653; the French
one; the Russian one; the student revolts of the Sixties and Seventies. Their
design is the same: the society based on justice; however this term is seldom encountered in debates or in
“charters”, unlike other words such as liberty, rights and equality, though, as
we have seen, these are nothing other than factors of justice. What does appear are the structures
of the just society, its progressive construction. Therefore, if the «religious
salvation movements» phase is the design phase and the attempted abortive construction
phase, in alienation and annihilating struggle, then the “modern revolution
movements” phase is quite definitely the construction phase. Construction begins, proceeds, reaching
our times and continuing through our disheartened skeptical age.
There are various reasons for this pessimism,
the historical scepticism of our age,
especially the last decade, the end of the millennium. Firstly, the modern bourgeois conscience,
modern reason, has reached a crisis point, after much violent exaltation in
attempting to resolve the whole of reality in itself. This crisis has lasted a
century and a half, bringing with it the death of God, of man, of values and
moral obligations, of history, provoking the mythical wait for the end of the
West, of civilization and history, and finally nihilism. This is true, at
least, in the intellectual, philosophical and literary world. Secondly, the
scourge of the two world wars, the persistent rage of peoples against peoples,
global slaughter, atrocities, death camps, and then the institution of
totalitarian regimes, Communism and Nazism, oppressive and despotic regimes,
the surge back of barbarities into and out of “civilized” Europe. In
particular, the seventy-year-long duration and expansion of Soviet Communism
which becomes a galaxy of police states and attempts to enslave the planet with
the brutal death toll of a hundred million (see Courtois et al. 14). This is
followed, paradoxically, by the collapse of communism and with it of the
utopian design it embodied which had, to a certain extent, engendered this
communism which was to bring about the
“kingdom of freedom” with the end of alienation and expropriation of human
labour, the raising of working conditions and living standards so that man
could be a “total man” ( Marx’s phrase), radical equality and consequently a
classless society, all this giving hope and strength to humanity. Inevitably,
the collapse of communism brings about a surge in capitalism, the “liberal
state”, an unjust society with capitalism as its warped soul. At the same time
the working class climbs into the middle class and slowly disappears after two
centuries of being the historic upholder of the process towards freedom and of
the construction of the just society.
These, then, are the reasons for
this historical pessimism, but there are even stronger reasons for the
optimism, the confident hope in the present-future. These lie in the very
process of history I have reconstructed so far, starting with Jewish Messianism
in around 1000 before Christ, the era of David with its early Messianic
allusions (see 2 Sam 7; 1 Chron 17, the prophecy of Nathan), and
the religious salvation movements right up to Puritanism and the English Long
Parliament Revolution. It is here that construction, the phase of construction, begins. The task now is to briefly trace and
review this last crucial phase, highlighting its structures.
3. Construction
from the English Revolution to the present day
A good starting-point would be the main ethical principles which reach maturity
in the modern conscience: the principle of the human being which emerges with
Humanism in the 1400’s and shines and develops throughout the age through the
human dignity, the dignity of person, dignity and rights; the principle of
liberty and liberties (conscience, thought, speech, the press, action,
association), of equality and of the sovereignty of the people which comes to
the fore in the English Revolution (but the principle of equality is, of
course, fiercely opposed by the privileged classes and their ideologists, by
capitalists and the bourgeoisie: in my argument the bourgeoisie is the class
holding the capital); the principle of reason and interiority – by which it is
one’s right and indeed duty to act according to his inner reasoning – which
reaches maturity in the sphere of modern reason; the principle of solidarity
which takes shape in the united fraternal struggles of revolutions, as well as
in the united struggles of the working class; also in the process of the
unification of humanity which possibly begins with the great geographical
discoveries, developing with the birth and growth of a universal technological
and political practice, one of communication and information which result in
ubiquity and collective presence, in the forming of an international community
which spans the planet, of a global economy.
The historical endorsement of the development
and establishment of these principles is to be found in the peoples’ charters: the English Agreement
of the People in 1647-49; the Declaration of American Independence in 1776; the
First Declaration of the Rights of Man
and of the Citizen in 1789; the Constitutional Charters of America and the
French Revolution in particular; and then the other democratic constitutions;
the Atlantic Charter, the United Nations Treaty and subsequent charters
and pacts. Herein lie the mark and the seat of the modern ethical conscience
and its principles, not in the thinking
and writings of philosophers which are often alienated or aberrant,
especially since the great crisis mentioned earlier, which is still under way.
As a result of a rejection of the foundations, of powerlessness to found a
principle, and of a rejection of truth and certainty, albeit finite (human
truth can be but finite), ethical obligations cease being peremptory,
“categorical” in the Kantian sense, only to become “weak”, valid only if
accepted, albeit within the supposedly universal “community of discourse” (the
theory of Habermas again). Consequently, in the face of so much uncertainty, we
need to know whether “not to kill”, “not to enslave our fellows” is a final
obligation, one which is inflexible and
unyielding, because if it is weak then it will not bind the conscience
inflexibly and thus we may kill; if it
is not accepted by the community of discourse, then again we may kill. But what
unyieldingly binding force can this community exert on a person, on his
autonomy? If ethical obligations are not categorical then individual judgement
comes into play, leaving humankind at the mercy of social chaos. This brings us
back to the concept of bellum omnium
contra omnes, but no longer as a mere hypothesis. Thus philosophers go on
expressing their impotence and defeatism in books and newspapers. Thank
goodness the principles and ethical obligations taken up by the modern
conscience are securely safeguarded in the peoples’ charters.
Another important stage in the construction of
the society based on justice is the democratic
model, which comes into
being with the English Revolution. Fundamental to this model is firstly the law
(the will of the monarch or aristocrat is no more); secondly parliament, which
acts as the organ of the law elected by the people so that the people
themselves, through their representatives, are the principle of law, subject
only to laws made by themselves; and thirdly a single judicial body which is
the same for everyone. At first parliament invited little participation by the
electorate, especially since one of the Houses was based on hereditary peerage
amongst the nobility, but it later broadened until universal suffrage was
finally achieved, with an upper House based on a hereditary system which still
partially survives in Britain nowadays, though only with a limited power.
Otherwise, the democratic model prevails
on a global scale.
It is one of the first major stages
in the restitution of power into the hands of the people, though here only half
complete: representative democracy,
mediated control, where the people’s only intervention is as voters once every
four or five years (and in referenda
in certain countries) with no chance of a prior examination of the candidates,
a set mandate, or an assessment of their work. The representative body is
governed by the parties which in a practical sense handle the election side of
things by themselves, manipulating the consensus in more ways than one, through
both their supporters and the mass media. Similarly the same parties tend to
handle power outside parliament on its own too, taking possession in more ways
than one, in every way in fact. The consequence is the so-called party power whose price society has
already paid and is still paying today.
The final stage is direct democracy where the people have
direct control of political power at all levels
through assemblies, the earliest
and best example of which is ancient Athens, an unparalleled model, a point of
brilliance which has been aspired to ever since. There was a tending towards
such direct democracy through the whole modern democratic process, which was
already evident in the political designs of the Peasant War of 1524-25; then
again in the English Revolution with Winstanley in particular; in the French
Revolution through the Constitution of ’93, in the revolutionary sections of
Paris City Council, in the Babeuf movement; throughout the French utopian stream
of the 1800’s from Fourier to Proudhon; in the Paris Commune in 1871; in the Soviet Revolution of February 1917, the
real start of the Russian Revolution; in the student revolts of the Sixties and
Seventies; and finally in the political design of perestroika. Such an insistent return indicates historical and
moral tending towards the sovereignty of the people, its achievement. The
bourgeois theorists – as early as Rousseau – claim this is impossible and scoff
at the idea: such an achievement could only be possible in a small country the
size of a canton or a province, whereas today’s cities alone are big if not
enormous. Ancient Athens was not small, however. It numbered around 500,000
inhabitants, though its citizens, those who had the right to take part in the
assembly, totalled only around 30,000, a number which seems quite awesome for
an assembly today. In actual fact, these theorists were so skeptical because
they never seriously considered the matter. We (our research group), on the
other hand, have tackled it and certainly haven’t found it impossible to solve.
Big comes out of small (see La Russia e
la democrazia 63-153; and Schiavone 1997). As parliaments fall prey to
party power, to lobbies, to
corruption and to the greed of political parties, the people begin to show
intolerance and disgust for politics and politicians, which is a further sign
of a historical tendency towards direct democracy.
There are still further stages in the
construction of the society based on justice. The French Revolution sees the
destruction of the power of the monarchy and the aristocracy, which had
dominated the entire history of humanity, the beginning of the end for
monarchies and empires until by 1848 monarchs are surrendering their power to
the law, to parliament. With the First World War the continental empires come to an end: the Hapsburg, the Prussian, the
Russian and the Ottoman Empires. Even the Chinese Empire had ceased to be by
1912, leaving only the Japanese which comes to an end with World War II. It is
when at last the colonial empires
expire that the principle of the self-determination
of peoples comes to the fore.
Moreover in the French Revolution slavery
was abolished; reintroduced by Napoleon, the great despot and butcher,
suppressed again in 1815, subsequently abolition was gradually accepted
everywhere throughout the century. Then the death
penalty was abolished in the 1800’s and more definitively in the next
century, even though there are still major exceptions and huge delays in
countries such as the United States, despite their claiming to be the moral
guide for the human race – a poor claim. The state has no right to kill a
citizen because its power comes from the surrender of rights of the citizens
themselves (“sovereignty and laws […] are but the sum of minimal portions of
the private liberty of each individual”, as Beccaria forcefully pointed out in
his Treatise on crime and punishments
§ 28) and such surrender cannot be total or he who surrenders is lost; nor can
individuals surrender the right to live or die since it is a right they do not
possess.
One of the main stages in such
construction, possibly the most important and most crucial in the history of
humanity, is the rise of the working
class and the improvement in working conditions and living standards in the
19th and 20th centuries:
a rise in income, and an improvement in social security, education and
culture and general well-being. This process is still under way to this day,
even in economically and culturally advanced countries. Indeed labour is still mostly subordinate
work, often exploited, and will continue to be so as long as the wage contract
lasts, until the workers themselves own and run the business. Income, on the other hand, falls due to
exploitation and the unilateral profits of the owner and is cut into by illegal
uncontracted labor and all kinds of underpaid labour, before finally being
devoured by consumerism as people are coaxed into making purchases which are
often superfluous and useless. This is the “affluent society”, a society of
material well-being which blows up out of all proportion resulting in waste and
causing serious problems of justice, of fair distribution of wealth and
problems of resources and the environment. Social
security, welfare, and national insurance, have reached a good standard, at
least in Western Europe. Yet there are still major problems, especially with
the expansion and quality of health care, with relief for the underprivileged
and with fair pensions. A key point here is job security, which in recent years
has been under vicious attack by technological unemployment under the tendency
of capital towards profit in a system, which still lacks global provisions by
the community for all its members. In
particular what is lacking is what we
call the “framework society” in which the production-labour-wealth situation is
handled rationally (there is no shortage of instruments to this end these days)
so that each individual can be guaranteed not only a job, but “his/her” job,
one that suits the person he/she has trained to become. Compulsory, free education, regardless of quality, is
still too short-term, consisting mostly of just elementary and middle school,
whereas it should at least go up to university level if people are to acquire
an adequate grasp of their cultural heritage, seeing as it belongs to them in
any case, and if, at this crucial point, the all-time disparities, popular
ignorance and incompetence regarding a work of art, a Greek temple or classical
music, are to be ended. Well-being or
prosperity has always been part of the utopian design, of its archetype (cp. L’utopia § 4); one of the highest
aspirations of humanity, of those all-time popular conditions I have discussed
which are marked by hard work and destitution.
This
economic and cultural rise as part of the construction of a just society is
significant in that it finally overcomes that popular condition for the first
time; a condition which saw people reduced to poverty and ignorance, to the
hard materiality of labour which consumed all their time and energy,
restricting any mental or personal growth, any personal expansion, and yet
their potentially marvellous world contained such unlimited potential for
expansion. Such expansion, such humanity, humanitas,
homo humanus, was available only to a small privileged minority while the
majority were trapped in the inhuman. The fact that all this went on in
supposedly civilised regimes leads us to conclude that “primitive” conditions
must have been better. We need only think of Columbus’s admiration for the
“primitive” people he encountered. This is why this process, this monumental transition, is so critical.
It marks the beginning of “history” in the Marxian sense, no longer inhuman but
human. The beginning: I have given a brief account of what has been built and
what, in an inevitably limited view, is still lacking. This leads to the
conclusion that well-being is imbued with ill-being. But I will come back to
that later.
At the basis of this rise, what made
it possible, are the two great inventions of the modern bourgeoisie: technology
and capital. Technology, or rather science-technology-industry, is production
according to universal models and thus can satisfy universal human needs;
«technics», i.e. production of single models and items, could not meet these
needs since production remained too limited in size. The process of capitalization through the reinvestment of part of the
profits, which results in continual expansion, prepares the material – financial and instrumental – ground for
unlimited expansion of technological production, the growth of global wealth
and of the availability of goods to meet human needs. Such a rise, however,
would never have taken place, without the working
class struggle, one which involved a hundred years’ fighting, and
revolution.
The student revolts of the Sixties and Seventies form the fourth modern
revolution which, albeit atypical, brings about the end of the repressive society, a society which acknowledges human rights
but stops them from being enforced through customs, ideological pressure –
false reasoning, false morals – and the law,
for reasons of privilege and power: male power, religious power, power
of the adult, of the “normal” person, of a race (a word which is in frequent
use but of uncertain meaning) or an ethnic group. With this comes the end of
every kind of discrimination and marginalization: the assertion of the dignity
and rights of children, women, youth, social outcasts, the disabled and the sick
(especially the mentally ill with a really human attitude towards all kinds of
mental illness); the rights of blacks in a white society (the great struggle
for civil rights in America), and of ethnic and religious minorities. At the
same time there is a reassessment of sexual morals. Here again we have a monumental leap, even though this
process is still under way.
With the environment crisis in the Seventies
human claims to an unconditional rule
over nature collapses: claims that are foolish in that a human being is
him/herself a part of nature and cannot live or survive unless he/she is in a
natural environment that suits him/her. The unconditional instrumental use of
technology by profit-making capitalism had led to unconditional exploiting of
nature with its potential destruction for profit. So nature as a principle is reaffirmed, not because nature is a
person, but because nature comes before humanity and conditions it: hence the
right relationship (not in the sense of justice, but almost) will be based on
recognition, respect and protection, reciprocation in that sense. In
particular, respect for animals as
humankind’s younger brothers (“teenage brothers”, as Péguy describes them):
this is another analogy, in that throughout evolution animals have prepared and
developed the advent of humanity, without catching it up, and humanity should acknowledge this, we owe it to
animals, to reciprocate.
Perestroika and
the collapse of the conflicting hegemonic blocs bring about not only the end of
the arms race but also – for the first time in history – the beginning of a
process in which arms start to be destroyed and regular armies reduced in size.
The will for peace, which had been expressed throughout the last century
through the various movements and which was sanctioned by the Atlantic Charter
and the United Nations Treaty, grows stronger. The Security Council (albeit
unjust in its structure and organization of deliberative power) becomes more
efficient in its interventions to prevent and resolve local conflicts. An age
of more widespread peace dawns, with the breaking up of national armies to form
a multinational peace-keeping force governed by the community of nations.
Thus far I have tried to paint a
picture of the monumental process which begins with the English Revolution and
is still under way, in the present-future: the construction of a society based on justice. But before I go any further I must point out
several things. Firstly, this construction is still in motion and a long way from completion (though it is impossible
to speak of completion when it comes to the finiteness and historicity of human
matters) in those very countries where it is most advanced in terms of the
economic, political and ethical levels reached. This is the case in Western
Europe and North America where there is tremendous imbalance. We need only look
at the statistics concerning the poor, for example (around 10 million in Italy,
40 million in the United States – by
“poor” we mean with a family income which is lower than half of the average per capita income), concerning
unemployment, drugs, neurosis, and crime. Then there are the poor standards of
education, health and welfare, and inequality with often huge differences in
income. In short, innumerable unsolved problems.
Secondly, this construction proceeds at different rates in the
different continents and nations. The difference in economic and cultural
standards is great, often immeasurable. We need only think of Africa or Latin America
with their widespread poverty,
illiteracy and lack of services, their bidonvilles
and favelas ; and then other
global problems such as dictatorships, fundamentalism, conflicts, and tribal
massacres. Furthermore there are no reasons why these differences cannot be
wiped out. Indeed in many nations they already have been, yet elsewhere they
live on with disastrous, painful results.
Thirdly, this process is uneven, irregular, except maybe in the
global vision of the course replotted by research and conscience. It follows a
broken line, bending, stopping and turning back. It is a difficult course
because of the complex variety of contrasting positions and forces, of opposite
interests, because the past runs back into the present-future and because the whole
is marked by mistakes and transgression.
Finally, I should point out that it
is not exactly a Western or European process – even though the strictly
constructive phase, which starts with the English Revolution, begins and
develops mostly in the West – because
the first phase of the process, i.e. the religious salvation movements, Jewish
Messianism, millenarism and even Christianity, are of Asian origin, from the
near East. This is not too important, however, as the process is universal and concerns humanity as such.
We cannot say that human dignity, liberty and equality only matter in the
northern and not in the southern hemisphere, or that the moral restraints “do
not kill” and “do not enslave your fellows” bind the European but not the Asian
conscience. Ethical principles, the democratic model and the structures of the
just society are universal, as are science and technology and capitalistic
accumulation which contribute to the process, as we have seen.
4. The
meaning of history, the foundation of hope
The construction of a society based
on justice, then, proves to be a procedure which incorporates and unites the
entire history of humanity – at first this was merely the intention, then it
became a fact – as it takes on universal
value, bringing the whole of humanity together into one universal history. We
might say that all this reaches maturity in the present day. For the moment
everybody only talks of “economic globalisation”, but the process is deeper,
more comprehensive than that. It is a process
of universalisation which embraces
the whole of the human world starting with ethical principles, the political
model, science and technology and therefore industry, the world of objects and
the consumer behaviour, the economy, culture, information and communication,
resulting in ubiquity and collective presence. It is true that today there are
historical cultures that assert their identities by differing from and opposing
the West. First of these is Islam with its ethics and laws which are in some
ways archaic and unfair (polygamy, women’s subordination in more ways than one
and the law of retaliation) and its political models, which are clerical and/or
despotic, both unjust. However, the injustice of such practices is beginning to
become evident within itself.
In short, this process, this
construction of the just society, incorporates the entire history of humanity
and gives it new meaning. This meaning is precisely the construction of the
just society and, later, the fraternal society, a meaning which is truer than
the models of meaning given in the past. the providential one, of human history guided and built by providence (just think of the nodal points of the
incarnation and redemption of the Son and Christ, of the presence and actions
of the Holy Spirit), a transcendental principle, history made by God not by
human beings, accessible only through faith; the modern rational model, a model of reason and liberty which are
indefinitely expanding, an a priori principle even in its fundamental truth;
the Marxian, Marxist model, historical-dialectical materialism, history shaped
by the evolution of production systems which result in the culture, conscience,
society and all its forms, a model which amplified beyond all limits the role
of the economic basis, claiming to draw the entire history of humanity from it.
This was where Bloch came in. Instead, the utopian process, the design and construction of the just society through the
popular movements, religious salvation movements and modern revolutionary
movements, is obtained from history itself, it is simply history: a thread of
history which is the meaning of all history.
This history is a foundation of hope, the foundation of
our hope for humanity. Hope for the past which is so inhuman but which in this
thread of history is redeemed; its inhumanity is transcended by this human
tension which is deeper, more forceful; inhumanity brought and provoked by the
ruling but unjust marginal classes, while the popular tension towards a society
based on justice was human and more forceful, the tension of the vast majority,
of near totality, which, by becoming first a design, then prophecy,
proclamation and construction, gradually eliminated the inhuman.
For the present, on the other hand,
there is the awareness of what has been built over these last three centuries
and of what is still being built, through the modern revolutions, the working
class struggle, its sacrifice, all the movements and their endless
contributions, whose benefits we reap today. This means an incomparably more human condition,
though it cannot be denied there is still a lot to do. As a result, it is
precisely in our times and among our peoples here in the West that it is hard
to understand historical pessimism and scepticism. Maybe this is because of a poor
knowledge and understanding of history or because of the plight and fall of
post-modern philosophers and intellectuals. Yet fear penetrates and pervades
the popular conscience too. Hope and fear, fear where there should be hope.
Nevertheless, there are reasons for this, but contingent reasons, which do not
affect the great historical foundations of hope. Beginning with the
precariousness, the wavering and trembling existence people lead when there is
no job security, insecure or low income and poverty. Then in cases where one’s
job is secure and one’s income good, other factors come into play, such as
organized crime which hounds businessmen and entrepreneurs, petty crime lying
perpetually in wait, drugs and prostitution which plague certain districts, the
invasion of immigrants (as they are regarded, unfortunately). The fear even
penetrates our souls in quieter areas, in small quiet towns; fear more than
hope. Why? Who generates this fear? Certainly the mass media, newspapers and
television, which feed on fear, on crime, accidents and catastrophes, on
anything that attracts attention through fear; they foster evil and neglect
good as the latter is not newsworthy. Then there are the consolidated powers –
capital, party power, the church – which
are keen on conservation; fear encourages this, holding back and holding fast.
It is vital that we fight those who spread this fear through our personalities,
our culture, our critical and creative ability, our ability to resist and fight
and our will for freedom.
At the same time this historical
course forms a guarantee for the future, a course which has run for three
millenniums with three hundred years’ construction. Consequently, it is the
foundation of our hope in the present-future,
of our confident certainty. The category of hope was introduced by Bloch and it
was to hope that he dedicated his monumental and plethoric work Principle of Hope. It was a great intuition which offset the other
fundamental category and existential tone, i.e. anguish, the feeling of
nothingness in the human psyche and conscience; this feeling of nothingness was
offset by the feeling of being in
this nothingness, his operational and constructive capacity for redemption, by
what humanity has actually constructed and redeemed. This hope, this confident
certainty comforts us along the laboured walk of life and history, giving us
strength, driving us to and supporting us in our commitment: to a society based
on justice which we will build and build in fellowship.