"Brave New World" or "the Soul of Man under Socialism"? (was Re:Desire & Scarcity)

Carrol Cox cbcox at ilstu.edu
Sun Jan 30 09:40:39 PST 2000


Yoshie Furuhashi wrote:


> Perhaps in your view, (1) "the beginning of pleasant surprises & lasting
> friendships" = (2) "mindnumbing happiness forcibly made 'free' from fear,
> jealousy, anger, sorrow, etc." = (3) the Brave New World. I don't think
> that the first equals the second and the third, nor do I think that
> "happiness" (work of art) is dull or mindnumbing.

Biologically modern humans have been around for roughly 150,000 years. (Language is probably about 100,000 years old. Our linguistic philosophers have 50,000 years of human life to explain. The power and flexibility of thought certainly underwent a huge change with language -- but human thought, including thought devoted to cooperative, social, activities, clearly was rather powerful and flexible without language.)

Now the kind of sharp divisions in human life brought about in late paleolithic times by the early division of labor (and probably the entrenchment of male supremacy and the exploitation of women) leave close to 150,000 years of human life which must be regarded as subhuman by those who fear that communism will be dull and sanitized without the conflicts of capitalism. That is, Eric and others must think that only under the whip of necessity, of torment, can humans be really human.

Now I do suspect that only under the whip of extreme physical and emotional pain could the human species *discover* that it was human (a discovery celebrated in what remains the richest of all the literary works I am familiar with, the *Iliad*) -- but that discovery once made, it seems a bit silly to me for the Erics to wish to continue that pain forever less we "lose" our humanity.

There is more to human possibility than is dreamt of in your philosohy, Eric. I'm sure our distant descendants will find ways to amuse themselves.

Carrol

P.S. One does not envisage the future as a *goal*, for that would reduce our present life to futility, since we will never live in that envisioned future but must live out our lives within the struggle against capitalism. One envisages the communist future to achieve a perspective from which we can view the present as history -- that is, to make the present intelligible and therefore make the struggle against that present possible. See Bertell Ollman, "What We Can Still Learn from the *Communist Manifesto*: The Dance of the Dialectic, or How to Study the Communist Future Inside the Capitalist Present," *Socialism and Democracy* 12 (Nos. 1-2, 1998), pp. 1-6. I have never quite known what to think of Ollman's work myself, but this aspect of it at least is powerfully persuasive.



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