When interviewed in the Boston Review by Scott Casleton (4 June 2019), Choosing hope, acclaimed American linguist and political intellectual Noam Chomsky made the following challenging observation:
We have two choices: to abandon hope and ensure that the worst will happen; or to make use of the opportunities that exist and contribute to a better world. It is not a very difficult choice.
Chomsky was right. Further, his challenge is as applicable to Aotearoa New Zealand as it is to the planet (obviously the scale is different). Although his is a self-evident choice, it is much easier said than done. The ‘doing’ is very difficult to do.
Noam Chomsky: Choosing hope instead of abandoning hope isn’t a very difficult choice
Four year’s later Chomsky’s “worst” that “will happen” rests with the twin and intertwined catastrophic threats of increasing authoritarian leadership under capitalism and the climate change driven assault on nature which potentially could destroy the planet, or at least devastate its population.
Authoritarianism versus liberal democracy: the dominant struggle
The dominant political struggle in the world is not between the right-wing and left-wing. Instead it is within the right-wing between ‘authoritarianism’ and ‘liberal democracy’. This struggle is presently most visually pronounced in the supposed ‘leader of the free world’ – the United States.
Fascism exists within the extreme of authoritarianism; based on a level of popular support but without an electoral accountability process. But authoritarianism also includes a wider far-right that does give limited recognition of formal democracy. Countries like Hungary, Poland and India come to mind.
Following the threat of fascism in the 1930s leading to the Second World War, a consensus emerged within capitalism that liberal democracy was the political system most suitable for its survival
In effect liberal democracy involved a trade-off with what was then called ‘social democracy’ which at its most radical advocated a reformist rather than revolutionary pathway to socialism.
The trade-off was between support for the continuation of capitalism and expansion of peoples’ democratic rights. These rights were not just electoral; they also involved basic essentials such as income levels, education, healthcare and housing.
Often these expanded democratic rights were genuine and substantive. For several decades the main debate within liberal democracy was often between moral conservatism and social liberalism.
Today, some countries like New Zealand can justly claim to have a genuine liberal democracy. For others, however, like the United States and the United Kingdom, they are increasingly ritualistic.
Since the 1980s the post-war consensus within capitalism has dissipated. Liberal democracy rights have been severely eroded by neoliberalism. Further, social democracy now comprises social democrats afraid of social democracy.
The effect has provided fertile ground in several circumstances for authoritarianism to remerge as its major threat by being perceived as providing strong leadership.
In these circumstances the left-wing is marginalised; largely, but not completely, globally although overwhelmingly in Aotearoa.
Fetishism
Just as it is important to recognise the difficulty of achieving Chomsky’s self-evident choice, it is even more important to recognise that these opportunities do exist and can contribute to a better world. However, there is a huge obstacle – fetishism.
A fetish is an object believed to have supernatural powers or, in particular, a human-made object that has power over others. It has French, Portuguese and Latin origins. Fetishism is the attribution of inherent value, or powers, to an object.
Kaan Kangal: puts fetishism in the context of commodity based economies
However, it is important to put fetishism in the context of a commodity based economy. Here Kaan Kangal, Associate Professor at the Philosophy Department of Nanjing University in China offers helpful insights.
In October 2022 Monthly Review published his article on ‘Young Marx on Fetishism, Sexuality, and Religion’: Marx on Fetishism.
Created ‘gods’
Kangal begins by describing Marx’s earliest known use of the term fetish. This was in 1842 in a polemic against the anti-democratic power division of the Rhenish province in Prussia.
Marx mocked the ruling nobles’ estates as created “gods” for the peasants to worship. The irony he highlighted was that these creations were the handiwork of these same peasants.
In his 1844 Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts Marx described fetishism as the mercantilism view of private property that reduced wealth from being only an object “…to a very simple element of nature.”
Marx’s early interest in fetishism involved areas such as religion, magic and phallus cults. He quotes Christopher Columbus who described gold as “…a wonderful thing! Its owner is master of all he desires. Gold can even enable souls to enter Paradise.”
The young Marx approached fetishism from the perspective of an external observer. But, as his intellectual pursuit extended from philosophy to economics, he began to see it as an internal observer.
That is, he observed, including in Capital, the fetishism of money peculiar to the capitalist mode of production, including its relationship with labour.
Karl Marx: money is the pimp between need and object
Marx was not short of vivid descriptions. In his Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts fetishism makes money the object most worth possessing. “Money is the pimp between need and object, between life and man’s [sic] means of life.”
What drives both capitalism and climate change
There is one thing that capitalism and climate change share – more than anything else, at their core both are driven by the compulsion to accumulate wealth. Capitalism is defined by wealth accumulation in the context of class formations and commodity based economies.
Wealth accumulation also drives climate change. Extractive and allied industries are sufficiently powerful to neutralise the political influence of the overwhelming scientifically based evidence on what the human devastation unchecked climate change will lead to.
These industries reduce the debate over the response to climate change to price signals.
This does not mean that there aren’t forces within capitalism which see it differently and that there is not contestability, particularly within liberal democracies. But the decisive influence rests with the beneficiaries of extraction.
The approach to wealth accumulation as a societal and environmental driver consequently shapes the relationship between right-wing and left-wing. The former dines on it while the latter calls for a fundamentally opposite recipe.
Maintaining the power of wealth accumulation requires continuing the current fetishism of the personal character of the wealthy. Overcoming it to achieve Chomsky’s recommended choice requires debunking it.
Commodity based economies require a sufficient number of people to see wealth accumulation as good and in their interests; as the Rhenish “gods” that Marx mocked in 1842.
Despite successes in some countries, globally authoritarianism has not achieved ‘gods-like’ status. While globally it is contestable, in New Zealand at least genuine liberal democracy prevails.
The power of wealth accumulation fetishism
But wealth accumulation is different. Although contestable and not completely hegemonic, there is a sufficient level of acceptance among the much more populus ‘many’ who are not wealthy that the proportionately very ‘few’ achieve their wealth through their own attributes and character, including ambition.
This fetishism success is despite the empirically strong argument from French economist Thomas Piketty of the far greater role of inheritance in personal wealth accumulation.
John Key: ambition drives personal wealth accumulation
Ambition is the justification of former prime minister John Key, who acquired his personal wealth through successful financial speculation, as reported in the NZ Herald (11 June): John Key: Wealth comes from ambition.
New Zealand, let alone the rest of the world, is not going to be able to use opportunities to successfully pursue the choice of hope (rather than abandoning hope) without challenging the fetishism of wealth accumulation.
Time to get rid of the pimp. To achieve this we need a non-marginalised left-wing including social democrats who are not afraid of social democracy.
Political Bytes 