The future has disappeared from the dominant worldview. --As David
Bidussa writes, "the dominant dimension of "eternal present" includesnot only the abolition of the ability to perceive change, but also the
inability or freezing of any aspiration for change". And further on:
"But without waiting, is it possible to think of an investment in
improvement?". ---- The question does not only concern the anarchist
movement which, as is known, places its hopes for a better world in the
future, in which solidarity and freedom replace the war of all against
all and the oppression and exploitation that derive from it. The
question concerns the majority of people who inhabit the planet, given
the nightmarish reality they already live and which is destined to
worsen due to wars, hunger, disease, climate change.
UNCTAD, the United Nations Conference on Trade and Development, in its
annual report claims that foreign direct investment has fallen by 10%
globally and by 7% in underdeveloped countries. Furthermore, the report
reveals a crisis in investment in the Sustainable Development Goals
(SDGs), with a decline of more than 10% in 2023. Two sectors, agri-food
systems and water and sanitation, have seen fewer internationally funded
projects in 2023 than in 2015, when the SDGs were adopted.
This is accompanied by other data from the United Nations that show how
hunger, thirst, lack of housing and adequate healthcare are extremely
urgent problems. Despite economic growth in recent years, the number of
people living below the poverty line, however ridiculously low, is
increasing. The objectives of Agenda 2030 are increasingly distant. The
ambitious project of the United Nations to eradicate poverty, reducing
income inequality by 2030 cannot be achieved within the capitalist mode
of production.
The same system of sustainable development goals and foreign direct
investments does nothing but enslave underdeveloped countries to the
noose of debt: even if the money actually goes where it is needed, the
indebted country will be forced to integrate into the world market, that
is, to produce those raw materials required by the market, obtaining the
capital necessary to honor the debt maturities through exports. In this
way, more and more areas will be taken away from the production of food
products for production, both because they are destined for cultivation
for industry, and because they are destined for extractivism.
Although 194 governments are part of the Conference, none of them is
able to commit to respecting the agreements signed. Also on this
occasion we see not only the uselessness, but also the damage that
governments do. As Pyotr Kropotkin said: "If it becomes the regulator
and guarantor of the rights and duties of each individual, it perverts
the sense of justice: it qualifies as a crime and punishes every act
that offends or threatens the privileges of rulers and owners, and
declares as just, legal, the most atrocious exploitation of the
miserable, the slow and continuous moral and material assassination,
perpetrated by those who own to the detriment of those who do not own".
We must therefore free ourselves at the same time from governments and
from private ownership of the means of production. The productive forces
liberated by capitalist development, productive forces capable of
destroying the planet, are incapable of guaranteeing a dignified life
for every human being. These productive forces must be removed from the
dominion of individual profit, as today, they must be domesticated, made
tame, civilized through a plan of economic development. They must be
subjected to a conscious management of human affairs by the community,
that is, to a socialist society. The first step to do this is to
reconquer the future, the ability to imagine a new society beyond the
capitalist nightmare. To remove the productive forces from the logic of
individual profit and submit them to the free association of people, an
act of imagination and an act of will are necessary. It is necessary but
not sufficient: the will must be accompanied by a precise program for
social transformation, for the transition from the current mode of
production to the superior one.
As Errico Malatesta wrote: "returning from South America and passing
through Barcelona, writing in the "Productor" of that city, I drew
attention to the absurdity of the belief in abundance and tried to
demonstrate that the damage caused by the capitalist system is not so
much the creation of a swarm of parasites, as that of preventing the
possible abundance, stopping production at the point where the
capitalist's profit ceases.
I insisted on the issue almost everywhere. (...) that period of
illusions[is]definitively overcome. Today the experience of recurring
famines and the experience of the Great War[the First World War,
ed.]have convinced everyone that, if the production potential of the
modern world is truly immense, actual production is insufficient even to
guarantee that low level of well-being to which capitalism forces
workers. Today everyone is convinced that to have abundance you have to
work and a lot, and that therefore the problems of work and production
are the most important, in view of any social transformation".
In this regard I report the considerations of a Marxist economist,
Ernest Mandel, who at the beginning of the 1960s of the last century
outlined the problems of an organization of production oriented towards
the satisfaction of social needs rather than the achievement of
individual profit.
According to Mandel, the productive forces that humanity has today
(1960) allow us to satisfy basic needs without any transitory phase of
accumulation and further development of industry: "Of course, we should
redistribute the existing productive forces on a colossal scale, convert
the automobile industry into a tractor and agricultural machinery
industry, orient the chemical industry exclusively towards the
production of fertilizers, plastic materials for construction and
pharmaceutical products, concentrate scientific research on the problems
of nutrition, clothing, housing and health, and devote the greater part
of world production to underdeveloped countries."
The author then identifies two insurmountable obstacles to satisfying
needs on the existing productive base.
"First of all, for a non-negligible part of humanity, the needs
currently satisfied far exceed these basic needs. The majority of the
inhabitants of the industrially advanced countries are not satisfied
with eating, drinking, dressing soberly, being housed as best they can,
allowing their children to learn to read and write and taking care of
their health in a summary way. The universal expansion of the production
and circulation of goods over many centuries has broadened its horizon
beyond the narrow confines of its region or its native country. It has
determined a universalization of needs, which, in essence, corresponds
to a first awareness of the unlimited possibilities of free human
development. The inhabitants of the industrially advanced countries want
to beautify their homes, vary their clothing, free themselves from heavy
housework (heating, washing heavy linen, etc.), have fun, travel, read,
learn, increasingly protect themselves against disease, increasingly
prolong their existence, and educate their children more adequately.
The satisfaction of these fundamentally healthy needs - to which, no
doubt, mercantile industry has added artificial or artificially
increased needs - is partly assured in the most advanced capitalist
countries. Radical elimination of the industrial sectors that allow
these non-elementary needs to be satisfied would already mean causing a
fall in the standard of living of a good part of the inhabitants of the
industrialized countries. It would be in a certain sense a "socialism of
poverty", which would replace rationing through the wallet with
rationing through the membership card or the limited assortment of
products. Instead of allowing a universal development of human
possibilities, a "socialism" of this kind would produce a man even more
limited and less satisfied than the average inhabitant of today's
advanced capitalist countries.
Furthermore, even the inhabitants of the underdeveloped countries have
become aware of the enormous possibilities of contemporary technology,
thanks to the "effect of imitation and demonstration". They ardently
desire to reach the same level of civilization and comfort as the
inhabitants of the advanced countries. Like the latter, they are not at
all willing to accept an ascetic socialism, in which rationing takes the
place of abundance.
Now, the present productive forces are absolutely insufficient to
provide all humanity with modern comforts. A new, strong expansion of
the productive forces is therefore indispensable to ensure industrial
goods in abundance for all the inhabitants of the Earth. This expansion
certainly requires that today's world industrial production be doubled
or tripled. It entails the necessity of a transition phase between
capitalism and socialism, a phase of socialist accumulation. During this
phase, on the basis of the socialization of the great means of
production of exchange, world planning of the economy, a great
of development of the productive forces (mechanical human, which implies
in particular a gigantic effort of education) such as to make possible
an economy that distributes goods and services in such a way as to
satisfy all the needs of its associates."
Today we know better than Ernest Mandel did sixty years ago that the
production process must be transformed to reduce its environmental
impact, and one can double or triple the production of certain goods and
services, only by reducing or eliminating those productions that are
unnecessary or harmful.
"Finally, the current level of civilization and well-being of the
advanced capitalist countries, while surpassing the miserable level in
the underdeveloped countries, is far from ideal. If you see multiple
phenomena of waste and useless luxury and if from the point of view of
food and clothing in the richest countries we are approaching ideal
physiological norms, urban planning, housing, individual and collective
transport, secondary and higher education, health measures (above all
scientific research, artistic development, the organization of popular
tourism, the diffusion of books in general) suffer from underdevelopment
and glaring deficiencies".
The opposition between libertarian and authoritarian communism is
therefore not about the recognition of a need for a transition phase,
but about who commands: if power must be concentrated in a single point,
the workers' government, or if it must be distributed in the association
of free communities of producers and consumers. Again, if the
development of productive forces is a necessary and sufficient condition
for the transition to a communist society, or if before this there is
the practice of freedom and solidarity that creates the conditions,
rather than a more or less large mass of goods and services.
We as an anarchist movement must be able to answer these questions, for
a future that could also be near.
Tiziano Antonelli
https://umanitanova.org/allarrembaggio-del-futuro-necessita-e-problemi-del-superamento-del-capitalismo/
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