Karl Marx was born to a Jewish family in Trier in 1818, and died in 1883, but the spirit of Marx has lived on far beyond his biographical lifespan. So far in the story, the relationship to capitalism of the flesh-and-blood Marx, and of those who have claimed his legacy, has been oppositional and full of strife. The dialectic famously emphasizes contradiction and class struggle. The rejection of the openness or ‘nonidentity to itself’ of democratic capitalism by revolutionary movements has led to hideous new forms of totalitarianism. Instead of violent conflict and negative critique, I am interested in empathic dialogue and deconstructive-positive synthesis. I want to stay faithful to the originality of Marx’s moral-ethical ideas while at the same time beginning a process of healing between Marx and our existing society.

The book that I have read about Marx that most inspired me was Marx’s Theory of Alienation by the Hungarian Marxist philosopher István Mészáros, published in 1970. Mészáros argues that the first full-fledged elaboration of Marx’s philosophical system is to be found in the theory of alienated labor of the Economic and Philosophical Manuscripts of 1844 (also known as “The Paris Manuscripts”), which were first released by Soviet Marxologists in 1932. In this seminal text, Marx writes of the estrangement or alienation of the worker under capitalist conditions of production both from the process and from the product of his labor, as well as from social-psychological reality. It is the chain of overseers in the power hierarchy of the mainstream capitalist organization who dictate to the worker what he must do in his daily activity and how he must go about doing it. Not only is the product of his work an alien fetishized commodity, but “the worker sinks to the level of the most abject commodity.” Forbidden to be active in freedom, the worker “does not affirm himself in his work, but denies himself, feels miserable and not happy, does not develop free physical and mental energy, but instead disciplines his physical nature and ruins his mind.” “The more the worker works himself to the limit… the poorer he and his inner world become.”

But Marx is not against work per se, which he regards as a healthy ‘objectification’ of man. In a possible future ‘non-alienated’ variation of work, man will come to be truly human for the first time. He will realize what Marx calls man’s ’species-being’. Objectification is something like the creative and meaningful métier of the artist. But “in the sphere of political economy [capitalist organization under the prevailing paradigm], this realization of labor appears as a loss of reality for the worker.” Man is estranged from his own body, from nature, from other human beings, and from his spiritual dimension. One might say, to paraphrase Jean Baudrillard, that the real has been preceded by simulation models.

In The German Ideology (1845), probably heavily influenced by Robert Owen, Marx writes of the utopian possibility of transcending the division of labour, and what this could mean for individual happiness. In positive freedom, man would “do one thing today and another tomorrow, hunt in the morning, fish in the afternoon, rear cattle in the evening, criticize after dinner, do exactly what we feel like doing at the moment [wie ich gerade Lust habe], without ever becoming hunter, fisherman, herdsman or critic.” In the capitalist mode of production as we know it, “each man has a particular, exclusive sphere of activity, which is forced upon him and from which he cannot escape. He is a hunter, a fisherman, a herdsman, or a critical critic, and must remain so if he does not want to lose his means of livelihood.”

In contemporary society, even among those in the very highest income brackets, one lives as a slave to work and a specific profession. The hunter is the corporate lawyer who works sixty hours a week in a fancy international law firm, can be summoned to the office on any given Sunday when ‘billable hours’ beckon, and whose exact whereabouts are always known even when on vacation in Mali. The fisherman is the information technology specialist in a large bank who works 9 am until 9 pm. While riding the commuter train, he stays informed of the latest industry developments by reading the trade magazines. The herdsman is the small business owner, say an optician, who works 6 days a week to get everything done. He spends his Sundays sleeping, except for waking up for a few hours to clean the apartment and do the laundry. The critical critic is the junior professor in the university ghetto where knowledge is confined to its officially designated location, cut off from real applications. He must endlessly publish books and articles that only colleagues in his narrow field will read, and whose primary purpose is to maintain his credentials in the system.

In a postcapitalist mode of production, which Marx in The German Ideology calls communist society, which Murray Bookchin more recently called post-scarcity anarchism, and which I call the project of invention of a radical high-tech enterprise, “nobody has one exclusive sphere of activity but each can become accomplished in any branch he wishes.” What the Soviet Marxist-Leninist translator Salomea Ryazanskaya renders as ‘accomplished’ is the German ausbilden, a verb in wide circulation in the current German economy referring to vocational education. The media, technology, futuristic design, and alternative renewable energy company that brings together people in the arts, humanities and critical social sciences with talented hands-on programmers, engineers, los amantes de hardware, and graphic designers will offer permanent continuing education in all theoretical, practical and poetical subjects as a matter of course.

Thus the early Marx envisions a replacement of work by play, creativity, freedom for the individual, diversity of activities, and deep respect for scientific knowledge (including the social sciences and the human sciences) – while retaining productivity. I have cited passages on creativity and diversity of activities that are explicitly in favor of their advancement, but there is much controversy in the scholarly literature over the status of play in Marx’s thought. One could supplement to these early writings of Marx works like Herbert Marcuse’s Eros and Civilization or Norman O. Brown’s Love’s Body.

To best clear up the uncertainty, I quote from The Revolution of Everyday Life by Raoul Vaneigem, the Situationist thinker whose book was widely read by the activist participants in the May-June 1968 student-worker near-revolution in France: “Modern technological expertise, just as it makes everything considered ‘Utopian’ in the past a purely practical undertaking today, also does away with the purely fairytale nature of dreams. All my wishes can come true from the moment that modern technology is put to their service.” Homo Ludens or ‘Man the Player’, to use the phrase of the Dutch cultural historian Johan Huizinga, is reborn in the potential possibilities of New Media and New Technologies.

Whereas Marx has historically been the reference for communist and social democratic political programmes, the time is now ripe [the fruit has ripened] for a fresh approach that realizes his vision of an alternative to work – being active in freedom – in the pragmatic experiment of a singular capitalist enterprise. The pragmatic-utopian company called SHAPIRO TECHNOLOGIES, engaged in a holistic project to change the world for the better, will be based on the twin principles of friendship and “not working.”

Although it is possible to engage in constructive dialogue with well-meaning politicians of progressive governments, well-meaning academics of progressive universities, and well-meaning journalists of the progressive media, I do not believe that those agents and institutions can be the primary operators or locations of the laboratory of change. Ideas of social change implemented at the level of the whole of society, or political change carried out at the level of the state, correspond to the era of universality and the universal, and that era is now over. To the current era of globalization and the global corresponds a new kind of agency of change which can only be a singularity. As Jean Baudrillard said, “in the fragments of this shattered mirror of the universal, all singularities re-emerge.” Only in the crucible of a semi-protected singular situated project where values and messages retain their strength and do not get diluted can the pragmatic-utopian transition from work to its liberating successor be initiated.

We are living in a society of rampant self-imposed workaholism. As Erich Fromm wrote in his prescient book The Fear of Freedom, published in 1942, modern man “has not gained freedom in the positive sense of the realization of his individual self; that is, the expression of his intellectual, emotional and sensuous potentialities.” Everywhere we look, people are working longer and longer hours in an effort to escape from themselves and the terrifying questions: what would they do with their lives if their day, week, and year were not structured by the routines and obligations of work? Who am I and what is the meaning of my life? The society of workaholism is “adverse to human happiness and self-realization.” Workaholism is chiefly an inner compulsion.

“What was new in modern society,” Fromm remarks in his brilliant and appropriately sweeping analysis of Modern European History, “was that men came to be driven to work not so much by external pressure but by an internal compulsion, which made them work as only a very strict master could have made people do in other societies. The inner compulsion was more effective in harnessing all energies to work than any outer compulsion can ever be.” Constantly working one’s arse off is not a sign of inner strength, but is rather “a desperate escape from anxiety” or “a reassurance against an otherwise unbearable feeling of powerlessness.” Although Western Man has formally gained abstract and concrete freedoms from outside authorities (freedoms that must always be defended), modern social conditions plunge him into the abyss of unacknowledged feelings of aloneness, insecurity, fear, anxiety, and insignificance.

In The Fear of Freedom, Erich Fromm was mainly concerned with achieving an understanding of the social psychology of mass support for Nazism. What is the character structure of the man for whom freedom is too heavy a burden to bear, and from which he seeks escape by submitting to a cruel and absolute authority? One submits to authority to squash all doubts. This fundamental insight of Fromm’s is allied with the well-known study of The Authoritarian Personality carried out by Theodor W. Adorno and other researchers working at the University of California at Berkeley in the 1940s.

But Fromm also has a lot to say about the workaholic personality of ordinary capitalist society in terms of individual submission to the regime of corporate and organizational authority. ‘Bullying’ in the workplace (strangely called ‘mobbing’ in ‘Germanized English’) could be fruitfully explained in relation to the bully’s goal of “submission to powers above and domination over those below.” Germans call this ‘the biker mentality’.

Consistent with the early Marx’s idea of a positive realization of man in work that he calls ‘objectification’, Fromm sees the potential emergence of a true individual with a real self as being inseparable from the activity of bonding with nature and other human beings. The growing freedom of the individual takes place through the two primal vital forms of love and work, and “in the genuine expression of his emotional, sensuous, and intellectual capacities.” Creativity, playfulness, and connectedness to the world give to man the inner strength to attain authentic freedom, self-determination, self-integrity, and independence – modes of existence that are, after all, his human rights. “Progress for democracy,” Fromm concludes, “lies in enhancing the actual freedom, initiative, and spontaneity of the individual, not only in certain private and spiritual matters, but above all in the activity fundamental to every man’s existence, his work.”

A few high-tech companies like Google have started the trend of developing a ludic internal culture. At the Internet technology company that redefined the search engine, one can play table tennis, billiards, foosball, volleyball, video games, go swimming, or work out in the gym at any time of day. As one employee interviewed for a report about Google aired on the Oprah Winfrey Show in 2007 said: besides from play and games, one has the responsibility to “in between do some work.” Another Googler said: “It’s the next best thing to not working.” All meals, snacks, and drinks at the many gourmet cafeterias in Googleplex corporate headquarters are free. You can get a massage or a haircut, get your teeth cleaned or your shoes repaired, drop off your laundry or your dry cleaning. The learning of foreign languages is emphasized, and it is recommended to bring one’s dog to work (has anyone at Google read Donna Haraway’s When Species Meet or Nicole Shukin’s Animal Capital?).

The philosophy is that one should have a great time at work. Small creative, flexible, autonomous project teams make up the organizational matrix, as opposed to hierarchies, bureaucracies, or big monolithic teams. Other Google employees interviewed on the Oprah report say that workers are encouraged to work on whatever they think is important, and to decide for themselves what makes sense to do for their project. As Dr. Taraneh Razavi, one of the in-house medical doctors at Googleplex whom any employee can consult for free said on the 2007 NBC Today Show Exclusive Report “Inside Look at Google: “There’s a culture of appreciating your environment, your fellow human being, how it should be in Utopia.”

Operating in the sectors of technology, media, futuristic design, and alternative renewable energy, what would a hyper-modern organization that combines profitability with anarchist free association look like? What has not yet been done by any high-tech company is to come to the awareness that it is human knowledge in all established scientific and academic fields that can take the lead in making the highest quality and most profitable technology products.

Most New Technology and New Media companies, including Google, still have a geek-nerd mentality, sticking with the assumption that the personnel that you need to be successful is a bunch of MIT- or CalTech-caliber engineers. But the truly vast untapped wealth of the ‘knowledge society’ lies in the extant resources of the division of knowledge known as the ‘arts and sciences’ (here Shapiro breaks into song: Far Above Cayuga’s Waters with its waves of blue, stands our noble Alma Mater glorious to view). Individuals who really know about literary narrative and art-aesthetic theory can contribute to producing the best computer-animated films. Those who know cultural theory can help realize the best physical/virtual reality environments. The most well-rounded graphic designers – who at least in Germany’s top colleges for Gestaltung are required to be educated in cultural studies – can develop the most innovative and coolest websites. Scholars in the field of ’science fiction studies’ – a convergence of literature and media Wissenschaften that I believe is now at the absolute forefront of knowledge in the humanities – can be instrumental in advancing all of the anarcho-Marxist science-fictional-becoming-real company’s projects and products.

In considering how to develop their products – in technology, design, media, or ecology – companies like Google, and all of those other “American-ized” companies owned by Wall Street investors and the financial markets, are only interested in making money, no matter how (Anything for Money). The only fields of knowledge that they give a damn about are marketing, a certain narrow (pre-Heideggerian) vision of technology, usability studies, statistical modeling/surveying/ forecasting, and bits and pieces of second-hand watered-down psychology and sociology. Their primary attitude towards really deep scientific and academic knowledge, especially anything to do with cultural studies or with literature, is to make fun of its supposed uselessness.

Literary theory teaches us that the most advanced form of play, the telos of the West’s recursive autopoietic storytelling historiography, is that play which henceforth takes place in the boundaries between reality and fiction. The instituting of the ‘new real’ – ‘how does the new come into the world‘? – comes about when one is playing in that borderland. In the pragmatic-utopian high-tech enterprise imagined and lived in our science fiction fantasy-becoming-reality, the arts, the humanities, the critical social sciences, and the biological-ecological natural sciences – which have heretofore been ignored by Silicon Valley-type companies – will be at the center of a joyful renaissance. La Gaia/Gaya Scienza. The most creative people in these disciplines of enlightenment will be brought together with a selected group of talented programmers and technologists (and semi-pro baseball players and semi-addicted horse racing gamblers). The company will have its own built-in University, spearheaded by a great modern historian: someone like George Steiner or Dominick LaCapra.

Inventing the opposite of workaholism, the radical high-tech enterprise will encourage the enjoyment of life and the all-around human development of post-workers (not postal workers) who will work when they want, in individual freedom and mutual responsibility. Pioneers of ’social choreography’ like Michael Dodt, Jeffrey Gormly, and Regan O’Brien will play a major role in originating the company’s internal culture and in composing and arranging the patterns of dancer-like preparedness, diversified rotation of activities, and radically disruptive events for individuals, teams, and the organization as a whole. The raison d’être of the company is to empower artists. Many artists have made the courageous decision to live without financial security for the sake of their creativity, and they are existentially vulnerable. This is the draconian choice that the capitalist mode of production forces on nearly all of us: be a financially secure cog in a corporate machine or be a starving artist. Artists deserve our deepest respect and support. The artist is the role model for the successor to the worker in the postcapitalist mode of production. His activity is expressive, spontaneous, creative, playful, audacious, breaking of taboos, self-managing, flexible, inflexible, and grounded in freedom.

As Erich Fromm, no lightweight he, writes, “The subordination of the individual as a means to economic ends is based on the peculiarities of the capitalistic mode of production, which makes the accumulation of capital the purpose and aim of economic activity.” The next stage of human freedom in the postcapitalist mode of production would entail a deconstructive synthesis of the accumulation of capital and the practice/realization of freedom for the free creative artistic worker.

Corresponding to the postcapitalist mode of production there needs (Baudrillard was wrong when he said that there are no needs!) to be a post-capitalist profit model, where the good born from promiscuous cultural intercourse gets rewarded without excluding anyone from enjoying the gift. The lack of conceptualization of a ‘de-re-constructive’ (Wolfgang Schirmacher) profit model is reflected in the crisis that is occurring in the production and dissemination of music, as the cost of reproduction approaches zero, and the cost of enforcing intellectual property rights (busting kids who download free music) becomes prohibitive. Private competitive consumerism has a rival: participatory global networking. How this can become an organizing principle for mobilizing human intentionality is an unfolding story. Are we at the very beginning of a new mode of production based on fertile social interplay?

In her recent book Verflüssigungen (“Liquefactions”), the German social activist Adrienne Goehler writes about the appearance of a ‘culture society’, to a certain degree in the tradition of the American management professor Richard Florida, who has written about the rise of the ‘creative class’. For Goehler, the current state of German society is exhaustion and barely breathing, physically and psychically. It is difficult to know how things can continue forward. Within our society, there is an entire group of individuals with a great deal to offer whose wealth has barely been tapped into. These are the artists and scientists. “Artistic as well as scientific work lives from a mixture of self-reflection and creation of the new: new forms of thinking, designing, seeing.”

In honour of Groucho Marx:

Artists and scientists are an inspiring, uninspiring, half-inspiring, and perspiring force in, for, and not of our society. They shall not perish from the Earth. What we need and do not need, and believe that we need even though we do not need, and believe that we do not need even though we need, is the strengthening and weakening of experimental thought, action, and psychedelic trips. The heart of capitalism (the heart of a champion, heart of a dog, heart of darkness, of evil, of fire, of gold, glass, glas, heart of hearts, of iron, of life, of mine, heart of stone, of the matter, of worship) – in the positive and negative and neutral and double-reverse-secret (National Lampoon’s Animal House)  senses that we understand and misunderstand and three-sixteenths understand it – is creativity and destruction.

Artists are the most and the least creative people. Artists are the most and the least destructive people. Are they people? Or are they animals? Mere insects, from the Zoroastrean perspective. The mark of Zoro. Marx re-marks Marx. Sex with animals. But with which animals? And what kind of sex? And will it be satisfying? And will they still respect us in the morning? Living in an artistic and in an unartistic way is, was, and always will be one of the highest and one of the lowest, or six of the highest and half-a-dozen of the lowest, aspirations of civilization and its discontents. Socialism or barbarism? Barbarism or a trip to the barber? Red Barber. The Scooter. Routine fly ball to right field, caught by Maris. Congratulations to the 2009 Yankees.

If artists were supported as essential to enterprises rather than pushed to the edge of starvation, or to the brink of obesity, stuffing themselves with Hamburger Royals with lettuce and tomatoes (Quentin Tarantino and John Travolta, Pulp Fiction) whenever they get the chance, then economic growth (supposedly our principal goal, as articulated by all the political and economic and sports broadcasting pundits on TV, including Bozo the Clown and Santa Claus is Coming to Town) would either increase a hundredfold, or decrease tenfold, or multiply by six factorial, depending on whether it’s Tuesday or Thursday. If it’s Tuesday, this must be Belgium. Otherwise, an MIT student newspaper. No soap, radio. Have a banana. Hava nagila. With sour cream. And chives.

Unemployed and underemployed intellectuals, academics, scientists and artists are the great untapped intellectual capital of capitalist society today. Yesterday as well. Tomorrow, who knows? The day after tomorrow, even worse. Or better? Or butter? Or margarine? Certainly better from the Mongolian point of view. How to live in a non-capitalist way in a capitalist society? Or in a capitalist way in a non-capitalist society? Or the worst of capitalism combined with the worst of communism. That’s the current Chinese formula. How to live when others are dead? How to live when raindrops keep falling on my head? How to die away from one’s death? To be reborn on the eve of one’s birth. (Antonin Artaud) That is the question. The answer is forty-two (Douglas Adams).

What is a deconstructive synthesis? We have to do the hard work of thinking (which Heidegger says that we are avoiding) how two things which have heretofore been separated can be united, without losing the power of either of them in the synthesis. This is a nearly impossible work, but it is essential to the future of humanity. Henceforth, there will take place a transference of “hard work” from its classical location in drudge to the realm of hard thinking, which is the only area where “hard work” henceforth needs to be exercised.

[ED: See ‘mind is a muscle’: http://choreograph.net/articles/flexistentialism-mind-is-a-muscle]

István Mészáros, Marx’s Theory of Alienation (New York: Harper Torchbooks, 1972) (originally published in 1970).

In our co-authored essay “The Car of the Future,” Alan Cholodenko and I further explain what is a deconstructive synthesis: “The methodology to be pursued in designing the ‘Car of the Future’ is to first identify all of the binary oppositions which define the ‘Car of the Past and Present’ and then to rethink each area to which a given duality belongs as embodying a to-be developed hybrid of the two previously opposed terms. Here our methodology is very influenced by both Derrida’s deconstruction and Buddhism, and there is a significant difference between it and the Marxian dialectic. While Buddhism and deconstruction have their differences, they share the fully hybrid form that says that at once both of the prior oppositions A and B are true, and neither A nor B is true: both and neither at the same time. In our methodology, the ‘synthesis’ (which is not one) is a sort of “impossible possible” that preserves the truths of A and B even while negating them, without being watered down. The Hegelian-Marxist dialectic errs in not preserving enough the truths of A and B when making the synthesis C. Many Marxists tend to want to make the previous oppositions irrelevant.”

http://www.noemalab.org/sections/ideas/ideas_articles/pdf/shapiro_car_of_the_future.pdf

Karl Marx, Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts of 1844 (translated by Martin Milligan, edited by Dirk J. Struik) (New York: International Publishers, 1976) (originally published in English in 1959); pp.77, 81, 79.

I have developed my own version of Marxism, my own interpretation of Marx. It is deeply influenced by my teachers at Cornell in the 1970s, Rupert Roopnaraine and Dominick LaCapra. However, the deconstructive synthesis of Marx and libertarianism is very much my own; neither Rupert nor Dominick had any inkling of that; although already back in Spring 1975 (I was nineteen), when I was Dominick’s student in a seminar in Literary Theory, and in lectures on European Intellectual History, I told him about anarcho-Marxism, and, influenced by me, in May 1975, he started to speak in his lectures about Derrida being a sort of philosophical anarchist.

Marx, Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts of 1844; p.79.

Jean Baudrillard, Simulations (translated by Paul Foss, Paul Patton and Philip Beitchman) (New York: Semiotext(e), 1983).

I regard Dominick LaCapra as a great original thinker who has not received sufficient recognition as such. Dominick has received a great deal of recognition in many other areas, including the rethinking of historiography, and as a leading thinker and scholar of the Shoah.

Rupert Roopnaraine is a great teacher of Comparative Literature, and a leading scholar of Caribbean art and literature. Rupert sacrificed his career as Professor of Comparative Literature at Cornell University to become a political activist, and leader of a revolutionary political party, in his home country of Guyana. A sacrificial act for which I have great admiration. Rupert reads Marx as a great 19^th century writer, akin to Dickens or Flaubert (and, I would add, Darwin), and he is also very interested in the economic analysis of Das Kapital.

Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, The German Ideology, including Theses on Feuerbach (translated by Salomea Ryazanskaya) (Amherst, NY: Prometheus Books, 1998).

My idea of synthesizing left-wing anarchism and “right-wing” economic libertarianism was inspired by the concept of the Laissez Faire Bookstore, which was located on Mercer Street in Lower Manhattan, a few blocks southeast of Washington Square Park and New York University, during the 1970s and early 1980s (it still exists as an online bookstore: http://www.lfb.org/). The Laissez Faire Bookstore had left-wing anarchist books on one wall, and “right-wing” libertarian books on the opposite wall.

Regarding the Marx-anarchism synthesis, I was originally inspired to pursue this project during the 1970s when I read books about the French New Left of the 1960s. The French historian of anarchism Daniel Guérin, the German-French-Jewish brothers Gabriel and Daniel Cohn-Bendit, and, to a lesser degree, the Situationists Guy Debord and Raoul Vaneigem, were all anarcho-Marxists.

What is the crux of my disagreement with almost all contemporary Marxist thinkers - Slavoj Zizek, for example, and many, many others? The crux of my disagreement with them is that they are dogmatically and simplistically too anti-capitalist. I am both a critic and an advocate of capitalism. Sweepingly negative statements about capitalism are partly fuelled by the sense of superiority and satisfaction that the "critical intellectual" derives from his "anti" stance.

Marx and Engels, The German Ideology

Herbert Marcuse, Eros and Civilization: A Philosophical Inquiry into Freud (Boston: The Beacon Press, 1955). Norman O. Brown, Love’s Body (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1966).

Raoul Vaneigem, Revolution of Everyday Life (translated by Donald Nicholson-Smith) (London: Rebel Press, 1983); Chapter 23. Note the significance of the number 23 for explaining everything about the universe in which we live. Only the numbers 22 and 36 rival it in importance. Compare the 2007 film The Number 23 (starring Jim Carrey, directed by Joel Schumacher), and/or Robert Anton Wilson, Cosmic Trigger: Final Secret of the Illuminati (And/Or Press, 1977).

Johan Huizinga, Homo Luden: A Study of the Play Element in Culture (translated by R.F.C. Hull) (Boston: The Beacon Press, 1966).

Geert Lovink has introduced the term “notworking” (different from, yet interestingly related to, my term “not working”) in his The Principle of Notworking: Concepts in Critical Internet Culture (Amsterdam University Press, 2005), see also

http://www.hva.nl/lectoraten/documenten/ol09-050224-lovink.pdf.

I hereby invite Geert to become the director of the Dutch division of Shapiro Technologies. The leaders of the pragmatic-utopian revolutionary-reformist company in Germany, Ireland, Spain, Portugal, Italy, France, Switzerland, Grand Fenwick, the USA, Canada, Japan, Australia, Greece, South Africa, Guyana, and Brazil have already been settled upon. As of today, November 26, 2009, each of these leaders has accepted my offer of the position, either in reality or in my mind.

Jean Baudrillard, “The Global and the Universal,” in Victoria Grace, Heather Worth and Laurence Simmons, eds., Baudrillard West of the Dateline (Palmerston North, NZ: Dunmore Press, 2003); p.25.

Erich Fromm, The Fear of Freedom (London and New York: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 2001) (originally published in 1942); pp.ix, 120.

Erich Fromm, The Fear of Freedom; pp.81, 79, 80.

Theodor W. Adorno, Else Frenkel-Brunwik, Daniel J. Levinson, and R. Nevitt Sanford, The Authoritarian Personality (New York: Harper and Brothers, 1950).

Fromm, The Fear of Freedom; p.66.

Fromm, The Fear of Freedom; pp.121, 234.

Available at http://www.youtube.com.

Donna J. Haraway, When Species Meet (Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press, 2008); Nicole Shukin, Animal Capital: Rendering Life in Biopolitical Times (Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press, 2009).

Available at http://www.youtube.com.

In Zen Buddhist meditation and in Buddhist-influenced psychoanalysis/psychothereapy, there is the important notion of “taming” the wild horses and jumping monkeys of the emotions. The great Japanese Zen Buddhist teacher Dōgen (Dōgen Zenji, Dōgen Kigen, or Eihei Dōgen) wrote:

“That you still do not grasp the certainty of this principle is because your thinking scatters, like wild horses, and your emotions run wild, like monkeys in a forest. If you can make those monkeys and horses, just once, take the backward step that turns the light and shines it inward, then naturally you will be completely integrated. This is the means by which we, who are set into motion by things, become able to set things into motion.” Eihei Dogen, Tenzo Kyokun: Instructions for the Cook (Soto Zen Text Project, translated by Griffith Foulk).

This is how I propose that we instead think about capital. Rather than thinking of capital as my enemy (enemies I have none; I have some adversaries), I think of capital as being the wild horses and forest monkeys that are out of control in their fostering of economic inequality, and which need to be brought back to reasonableness.

[ED: "…our concept of work… the concept of art must replace the degenerate concept of capital. Art is really tangible capital, and people need to become aware of this. Money and capital cannot be an economic value, capital is human dignity and creativity. And so, in keeping with this, we need to develop a concept of money that allows creativity, or art, so to speak, to be capital. Art is capital. This is not some pipe dream; it is a reality. In other words, capital is what art is. Capital is human capacity and what flows from it. So there are only two organs involved here, or two polar relationships: creativity and human intention, from which a product arises. These are the real economic values, nothing else…. There is only human capacity and what flows from it. And this can continually be discussed and explored in an ongoing dialogue between people, and lead to endless productivity that builds up and rebuilds the world; that under certain circumstances builds up a whole new cosmos and does not destroy it. "

Joseph Beuys, What is Art?]

To change the world for the better, one must take over the lead of capital. This is the only possible way forward for humanity, the way of liberation, of revolution, and we shall do it. The project of the pragmatic-utopian radical enterprise (my version of Marxism, other to the anti-capitalist dogmatism of mainstream Marxism, and which restores a real future to the legacy of Marx), is to take over the lead of capital. To empower ninety thousand good people with positions of responsibility and privilege in the organization/movement that will steer this leading starship, or fleet of starships. At the lead of capital, we will grab the reigns of those wild horses and steer the beloved equines towards a good future for humanity, and a good future for all sentient beings on our planet.

For more on the new Marxism of “taking over the lead of capital,” see my essay “Re-discovering the Baudreality of America,” in International Journal of Baudrillard Studies, January 2009.

http://www.ubishops.ca/BaudrillardStudies/vol-6_1/v6-1-shapiro.html.

The project of the pragmatic-utopian radical enterprise will be powered by the Big Money to be made investing in and reaping the rewards of the “New Manhattan Project” (with the difference that our project will change the world for the better instead of for the worse) of the invention of the New Computer Science (which is really the invention of Computer Science per se, since informatics has until now only been Computer Engineering).

See http://www.choreograph.net and http://www.daghdha.ie.

Fromm, The Fear of Freedom; p.96.

Thanks to Bernard Tuchman for contributing to the ideas expressed in this paragraph.

Adrienne Goehler, Verflüssigungen: Wege und Umwege vom Sozialstaat zur Kulturgesellschaft (Frankfurt and New York: Campus Verlag, 2006); p.41.