Future History

"If you do not change direction, you may end up where you are heading."

 -Alan Cohen, The Dragon Doesn't Live Here Anymore (1981), (attributed incorrectly without source to Lao Tzu)

Not long ago I came across a twitter "thread" or whatever the kids are calling them these days, inviting people to speculate (or opinionate) on why the revolution has not yet come.  As a frame, assume that the focus of the replies is mostly on what's keeping the revolution from happening in the European sphere and diaspora-- the countries of origin of the global forces responsible for near universal human malaise, and particularly the United States.  The answers tended to fall along these lines:

• The people are stupid (deceived, cowed, kept too dumb to know they're miserable, lazy, overweight, distracted, addicted to consumption)
• The police who work for the owner class are heavily militarized
• The opposition has no leadership; the left is fragmented; the people atomized
• The owners' long-term investment in securing the perpetuity of their wealth and their global dominance by economic blackmail, by force and by the effective exercise of power over the systems of resource distribution, justice and communication has paid off and will continue to do so for the foreseeable future.

I can understand a general lack of faith in the human materials at hand (especially in the West) that the would be revolutionary has to work with, but I was a bit dismayed by the preponderance of variations on the blame-the-victim quality of the first category which seemed to predominate among the volunteered responses. Speaking for myself, I'm reflexively a bit more partial to the last two items in the list. 

As it happens, I've been reading Karl Marx's Theory of History by G.A. Cohen, and it weighs in on the topic.*  Working backward from the Revolution, Cohen says that we will know the revolution is complete when books like his and Karl Marx's are no longer necessary to explain how the needs of people are met.  A person has a need; labor is done to meet the need; the need is met.  No explanation necessary.  This says Cohen, is socialism.  In comparison, our current system is hidden beneath a labyrinth of forces of production and production relations that obscure the path between need and fulfillment, in fact subverting even the concept of need as being that which a commodity stimulates rather than the other way around.  It takes science to make visible what processes and relations have hidden, but the effect is clear: the stifling of human potential and happiness for all but a few wherever capitalism reigns (setting aside the destructive effects on the planet for the time being).

According to the science laid out in Marx (in Cohen's philosophically oriented interpretation of it which is not without some controversy), the forces of production are what drive the organization of society.  Humans have a demonstrated tendency to improve the forces of production with advances in technology or the deployment of innovations in processes or the adoption of new resources as they are discovered and developed.  The "relations of production"-- the institutions, hierarchies and offices that people and drive the engine of production such as ownership, management, investment, government, regulation, labor, distribution, reproduction, education-- tend to be conservative and lag behind the advances in the "forces of production" - the technological and other innovations as well as the material conditions that produce the goods that meet human needs.  But they will adapt -- as they have done from primitive communism to slavery to feudalism to capitalism-- and while it's not inconceivable that the forces of production might be forced into a reversal by material conditions or a concerted effort to retreat from a path (say by the insufficiently anticipated depletion of a critical resource), the tendency is to adapt in whatever way possible to retain a beneficial technology.  What characterizes progress beyond capitalism?  Why, Socialism!

If there is anything to this theory, it might not be unreasonable to expect that if the revolution is coming, it will likely be preceded by a sufficient accumulation of innovations in production or resources that will collectively make obsolete ownership by capitalists of the means of production and the consequent need of workers to be dependent on underselling their labor to bosses in order to afford survival.  What might this accumulation look like?  An abundance of free, renewable energy, like wind, hydro, geothermal or solar power is a start.  Perhaps unlimited, uncensored public ownership of the internet as a means of spreading information and building networks of knowledge, solidarity and worker power.  Worker owned factories and farms increasing in response to capital's myopic tendency to starve the root in order to engorge the head.  History would likely need to proceed through a transition from private ownership of the means of production to communism (or if you prefer, non-ownership) through a phase in which ownership is communal and public.  The Dictatorship of the Proletariat if you will, which will wither and die when it becomes a fetter on achieving fully automated luxury communism, say.  The upshot is that we will then have a world in which the vices in which we engage to cope will no longer interest us.  No one will be stuck in a dead end job in order to stay alive long enough to work themselves out of debt.  Dream it and do it will be the order of the day.  Need it and it shall be yours.  The culture wars will have ended because we will all have won.  The struggle long attributed to human nature and thought by conventional wisdom to be the very reason for things continuing to be the way they are--which has made the subjection of the impoverished and powerless many to the wealthy and powerful few (and the ambition of some to seize wealth and power for themselves rather than working shoulder to shoulder with their brothers and sisters to make a just, free and plentiful world for all in which everyone by virtue of being alive and human can live to their full potential) seem so necessary and unavoidable-- will simply be over.

Cohen was writing in the 1970's before the conquest of history by neoliberalism and the advent of what Yanis Varoufakis calls "Techno-Feudalism"-- a terrible development which could well be a transition out of Capitalism and into something else, if not something worse-- and there is a temptation to dismiss it as a quaint relic of a bygone era that is receding at light speed into the ancient past.  But this would be a mistake.  For one thing, it is a very thorough analysis that rewards the effort of reading it (and it's not a completely painful experience).  It also affords a very clear picture of what a revolved society should be like-- a model for Being Purely Human Together to keep the mind from succumbing to despair.  

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* To the topic at hand, almost as if anticipating the twitter discussion particularly with respect to the responsibility of the chained masses in the holdup of their own revolution, at one point in the book Cohen discusses the case of the "Unlocked Door" that a prisoner doesn't think to open as an illustration of the precept that you can't be free if you don't know you're free.