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Concretizing the Vision of a New Human Society We live at a moment in which it is harder than ever to articulate a liberatory alternative to capitalism. As we all know, the collapse of state-capitalist regimes that called themselves "Communist," as well as the widespread failures of social democracy to remake society, have given rise to a widespread acceptance of Margaret Thatcher's TINA – the belief that "there is no alternative." Yet the difficulty in articulating a liberatory alternative is not mostly the product of these events. There has been a lot of progress – in theory and especially in practice – on the problem of forms of organization – but new organizational forms by themselves are not yet an alternative. It, too, failed to articulate a liberatory alternative, offering in place of private- and state-capitalism little more than what Hegel ( Science of Logic , Miller trans., pp. Is it possible to make the vision of a new human society more concrete and determinate than it now is, through the mediation of cognition? The character of the new society can only be concretized by practice alone, in the course of trying to remake society. They stop short of even trying to remake society totally – and for good reason. When masses of people require reasons before they act, a new human society surely cannot arise through spontaneous action alone. And exposing the ills of existing society does not provide sufficient reason for action when what is at issue is the very possibility of an alternative. If the movement from theory is to respond adequately to the challenge arising from below, it is necessary to abandon the presupposition – and it seems to me to be no more than a presupposition – that the vision of the new society cannot be concretized through the mediation of cognition. We need to take seriously Raya Dunayevskaya's ( Power of Negativity [ PON ], p. 184) claim in her Hegel Society of America paper that "There is no trap in thought. The Problem of "Blueprints" Neglect is not the only reason why revolutionaries have failed to concretize the vision of the new society. It is important to recall that Marx was grappling with some honest-to-goodness blueprints of a future society. Dunayevskaya wrote that once Capital was finished and Marx was faced with the Gotha Program in 1875, "There [was] no way now, now matter how Marx kept from trying to give any blueprints for the future, not to develop a general view of where we're headed for the day after the conquest of power, the day after we have rid ourselves of the birthmarks of capitalism" ( PON , p. "In a future society, in which … there will no longer be any classes, use will no longer be determined by the minimum time of production, but the time of production devoted to different articles will be determined by the degree of their social utility." Even more important than Marx's explicit statements about the new society is the overall thrust of his critique of political economy. By doing this, he helped to clarify what the new society must not and cannot be like – which is already to tell us a good deal about what it must and will be like. Proudhon gives us as the regenerating formula of the future – is therefore merely the scientific expression of the economic relations of present-day society" (Marx, POP , Ch. But this simply means that Marx rejected a particular kind of attempt to concretize the vision of the new society, not that he rejected the task itself. Like the Proudhonists and utopian socialists with whom Marx contended, many folks seem to think that concretizing an alternative to capitalism is simply a matter of articulating goals and then implementing them when the time comes. What we need to do when easy answers are demanded, I think, is convey the lessons we have learned – that the desirability of proposed alternatives means nothing if they give rise to unintended consequences that make them unsustainable, that political change flows from changes in the mode of production, and so forth – while also saying that which can be said about the new society, as concretely as it can be said. All proponents of workers' self-emancipation agree that the policies of the future economy are to be decided upon by the working people themselves, but thinking simply cannot be shoehorned into the old problematic of "who decides?" Once again, a well-meaning attempt to posit spontaneity as the absolute opposite of vanguardist elitism ends up by placing the entire burden of working out a liberatory alternative to capitalism on the backs of the masses. In part, we face limits because we are the products of this society, not the new human beings that might emerge in a free society. But this does not imply that concretization of the vision of the new society is a task that can be foisted onto future generations. The new society will either begin to be created by human beings who are themselves the creations of capitalism, or it will not be created at all. Because there are limits to how concretely the vision of the new society can be worked out in advance, we cannot give a blueprint for the future. 116-17) writes that "the first few decades after the socialist revolution can best be understood as a transition to socialism." Market allocation will exist during these decades of transition, as will "a substantial private sector" and "people who will be allowed to take from what society produces according to their property and not according to their work."[2] As Schweikart and Lawler are quick to point out, these are fatal concessions to their position. It seems to me to be by far the most successful attempt yet to articulate a concrete and feasible vision of what Marx called the lower phase of communism – even though Albert has recently pooh-poohed the idea that the higher phase of communism is possible.[3] Parecon is a vision of a democratic society without value production, the commodification of labor-power, markets, or money, and with little if any division between mental and manual labor. Yet parecon, as Albert and Hahnel are aware, is only a model of how a non-capitalist economy might function once all the elements are in place and the new society is standing on its own feet. 22) quotes the passage from Hegel I quoted earlier, on the "empty negative, the abstract infinite … a presumed absolute." She then says "we have come to where we part from Lenin." He interpreted the end of Hegel's Logic as a "transition to … Nature ," which Dunayevskaya seems to construe as implying that practice, or perhaps objective development, is what concretizes the Absolute, realizes the notion of the new society. She then notes that, on the contrary, Hegel went on to clarify that the passage of the Notion into reality is not a transition, but an "absolute liberation": [The unification of the Notion and reality] has not issued from a process of becoming , nor is it a transition , [… but] an absolute liberation . 22) argued, because he "didn't have Stalinism to overcome" and therefore "transitions, revolutions[,] seemed sufficient to bring the new society." But when "the totalitarian one-party state [is what] must be overcome", there is a need for "a totally new revolt in which everyone experiences 'absolute liberation'" (Dunayevskaya, PON, p. Capitalism therefore cannot "become" a new society; it cannot gradually cease-to-be as the new society comes-to-be. Directly Social Labor This does not mean that the new society can emerge full-blown from nothing; what is at issue is rather the new society developing on its own new foundations rather than becoming-through- another . In the CGP, Marx was careful to stress that the higher phase of communism can come only at the end of a long, hard road, and that the new society will still be very defective on the day after the revolution, "when it has just emerged after prolonged birth pangs from capitalist society." Yet I think that there is an important sense in which he theorized this emergence as an absolute liberation rather than as a transition. They were trying to institute equal exchange in a society dominated by the law of value, while Marx was theorizing a society in which that law has been abolished. Whereas the commodification of labor-power is, in Marx's view, the defining characteristic of capitalism, the CGP projects an absolute liberation from wage-slavery (the commodification of labor-power), beginning at the very start of communist society. It seems to be a law of equality because, if the same amount of labor is needed to produce two different products, and if exchange takes place in accordance with the law of value, then one unit of the first product will exchange for one unit of the second. Equality would reign, in the sense that equal contributions – equal amounts of work – would result in equal rewards. Now in the CGP ­– after a nearly 30-year span of theoretical work on the issue – Marx says that this, precisely this, is what will be different in communist society, from the very start. "The same amount of work which [a worker] has given to society in one form, he receives back in another" (Marx, CGP). This differs from the Proudhonist-utopian proposals for equal exchange, because they were proposals for what to do in a commodity-producing society , and in such a society "the exchange of equivalents … exists only on the average and not in the individual case" (ibid.). What will be different about the new society, even as it has just emerged from capitalist society, is that equivalent exchange will indeed exist in the individual case; That would be the case in a socialist society that has just emerged from capitalism – according to Marx as interpreted by Dunayevskaya. That is how it is and must be – in a capitalist, commodity-producing society. So one of the most fundamental tasks we face today, I believe, is to work out how to create the social conditions such that each hour of labor will really count as equal – beginning on the day after the revolution. from end of "Can the Znet Demand to Produce Vision Lead to Vanguardism?" ( ), posted on Dec. 18, 2003. 24-26) claim that Marx also recognized the need for a transitional market society, citing the immediate measures that the Communist Manifesto proposed in order to encroach on "the rights of property, and on the conditions of bourgeois production." Lawler (pp. 42-43) also claims that Marx accepted that a transitional market-socialist society would precede the first, lower phase of communism by writing that "Between capitalist and communist society lies the period of the revolutionary transformation of the one into the other" ("Critique of the Gotha Program" (CGP)). In any case, he ignores the fact that the CGP states – twice – that the first phase of communist society emerges from capitalist society. nature versus science thesis examples for the birthmark nature versus science thesis examples for the birthmark