As Michael Hardt has put it, if capitalism stands for private property and socialism for state property, communism stands for the overcoming of property as such in the commons. Socialism is what Marx called "vulgar communism," in which we get only what Hegel would have called the abstract negation of property, that is, the negation of property within the field of property--it is "universalized private property." Hence the title of the Newsweek cover story of February 16, 2009: "We are all socialists now," and its subtitle, "In many ways our economy already resembles a European one," is fully justified, if properly understood: even in the US, the bastion of economic liberalism, capitalism is having to re-invent socialism in order to save itself. The irony of the fact that this process of coming to "resemble Europe" is further characterized by the prediction that "we [in the US] will become even more French" cannot but strike the reader. After all, Sarkozy was elected as French president on a platform of finally finishing off the tradition of European welfare-state socialism and rejoining the Anglo-Saxon liberal model--and yet the very model he proposed to imitate is now returning to just what he wanted to move away from: the allegedly discredited path of large-scale state intervention in the economy. The much-maligned European "social model," decried as inefficient and out of date under the conditions of postmodern capitalism, has tasted its revenge. But there is no reason for joy here: socialism is no longer to be conceived as the infamous "lower phase" of communism, it is its true competitor, the greatest threat to it. (Perhaps the time has come to remember that throughout the twentieth century social democracy was an instrument mobilized to counteract the communist threat to capitalism.) Thus the completion of Negri's title should be: Goodbye Mr. Socialism ... and Welcome, Comrade Communism!
What the communist fidelity to the proletarian position involves is thus an unambiguous rejection of any ideology implying a return to any kind of prelapsarian substantial unity. On November 28, 2008, Evo Morales, the president of Bolivia, issued a public letter on the subject "Climate Change: Save the Planet from Capitalism." Here are its opening statements:
"Sisters and brothers: Today our Mother Earth is ill....Everything began with the industrial revolution in 1750, which gave birth to the capitalist system. In tow and a half centuries, the so-called "developed" countries have consumed a large part of the fossil fuels created over five million centuries....Competition and the thirst for profit without limits of the capitalist system are destroying the planet. Under Capitalism we are not human beings but consumers. Under Capitalism Mother Earth does not exist, instead there are raw materials. Capitalism is the source of the asymmetries and imbalances in the world." (Evo Morales, "Climate Change: save the planet from capitalism," available online [....])
The politics pursued by the Morales government in Bolivia is on the very cutting edge of contemporary progressive struggle. Nonetheless, the lines just quoted demonstrate with painful clarity its ideological limitations (for which one always pays a practical price). Morales relies in a simplistic way on the narrative of the Fall which took place at a precise historical moment: "Everything began with the industrial revolution in 1750..."--and, predictably, this Fall consists in losing our roots in mother earth: "Under Capitalism mother earth does not exist." (To this, one is tempted to add that, if there is one good thing about capitalism, it is that, precisely, mother earth now no longer exists.) "Capitalism is the source of the asymmetries and imbalances in the world"--meaning that our goal should be to restore a "natural" balance and symmetry. What is thereby attacked and rejected is the very process that gave rise to modern subjectivity and that obliterates the traditional sexualized cosmology of mother earth (and father heaven), along with the idea that our roots lie in the substantial "maternal" order of nature.
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