Civic Virtue

versus
Corporate
Self-Interest
The Decisive Battle of the 21st
Century
Atle Hesmyr
Nisus Publications
1

Civic Virtue Versus Corporate Self-Interest;

The Decisive Battle of the 21st Century is an
essay from the book, Civilization, Oikos, and
Progress; Enlightenment versus Barbarism in
History (2013: Nisus Publications).

Copyright: Nisus Publications, 2013

nisus2014@gmail.com

Nisus Publications
2

Civic Virtue versus Corporate

Self-Interest the Decisive
Battle of the 21st Century
Introduction
The primary progressive focus for humanity as a whole
was, until fairly recently, to provide adequate means of
subsistence for the vast majority, in order to emancipate
the individual from material scarcity and toil, so that he
or she may be able to take an active part in the formation
of society and fulfill their potentialities as fully
developed human beings according to the standards of
the actual time period. This was a part of the political
program of the Enlightenment Era, manifested through
publications such as the French Encyclopaedia.
Obviously, the distribution of benefits and burdens
within society, and the control of the means of
production the issues which among radicals throughout
more than two centuries have been labeled as the social
question have varied with different social structures
and historical epochs. This distribution varies in its
character from a fairly egalitarian profile in the early
phase of human existence, in various tribal societies, to
an immense accumulation on the part of a few privileged
3

strata in cultures as for instance the Aztecs and the early

civilizations in Mesopotamia and Egypt. However, the
capitalist stage stands out as the most uneven when it
comes to the distribution of the means of subsistence, and
one in which the vast majority has had to bear the
burdens, while often being impelled to sacrifice their
lives in an effort to achieve the benefits on behalf of a
tiny minority. This inequality remains an affront to
reason and even common sense to this very day making
way for the resent Occupy movements around the
western world. The form that this inequality acquires
surely takes on a different character from the early stages
of capitalism some 200 years ago, when the social
question fomented militant artisanal and workers
movements which fought for their economic and political
demands in revolutions, general strikes and other forms
of mass mobilization against the brutalizing effects of
capitalism at that stage in history. The working class
struggles in the western world, which undoubtedly was
the cradle of that economic system, subsequently bore
fruits in the form of raised living standards and of
determining importance for the continued existence and
expansion of capitalism to this very day increased
purchase power among the vast majority, at least in the
western world. Without denying the fact that the
tendencies to a novel poverty among underprivileged
people in industrialized countries, it is safe to say that
direct material need and general scarcity to an increasing
4

extent has been relocated to the mass of people in the so

called Third World or the Global South these days
even reinforced by the utterly immoral Land Grabbing
resulting from the present food crisis, which will
accompany our species for decades to come. The Third
World populations are held in an iron grip in which they
are forced to deliver raw materials to the industrialized
world (including the aggressively expanding China),
rather than being left an opportunity to embark on
projects by means of which they would be able to feed
their own and develop their own competence and
industries. As everyone knows, this development is
enforced by supranational organizations like the World
Bank and the International Money Fund in concordance
with multinational companies operating within trades like
mining, agribusiness, etc. and in a weird companionship
with the more or less autocratic regimes in the countries
targeted for exploitation even though their dealings are
portrayed by neo-liberal taletellers as some kind of
natural law. Demands of nullification of debts on
behalf of poor countries have hitherto been turned
down by the above mentioned supranational
organizations, which in itself testify to capitalisms
inherently
immoral
character
and
grotesque
consequences. As for the hopes of leftists and
ecologically oriented individuals, NGOs and popular
organizations for radical change in the direction of a
libertarian, rational and ecological society on a global
5

scale, they will largely depend on their ability to develop

determined and well organized grass roots movements
precisely in the western world in which a cult of
consume hedonism now prevails and on these
movements capability to materialize into lasting and
vital counter institutions to capitalism, corporate power
ensembles, the nation state and transnational institutions
like the European Union.
In view of todays social, economic and ecological crises
it seems rather appropriate to pose the following
question: Why is the present political agenda to such an
overwhelming extent marked by the prevailing
astonishing degree of apparent consensus and obedience
towards the power apparatuses in the western world not
to say in the world at large and why is it that we
witness so few attempts by broader social segments to
achieve new institutions which may confer upon the
public a new empowerment with respect to taking back
power and control over the direction that society takes?
Have the hierarchical social structures of today to such an
extent been reified into a hierarchical sensibility, that
these facts in combination with the hedonist
consumerism of mass society are having a numbing
impact upon the inborn and inherent drive in every
human being to try to influence the direction that society
takes and to have a stake in the decisions which concerns
its development, potential progress, and future
happiness? And another question which poses itself in
6

this context is: How are the very terms development,

progress, and happiness defined by the commoner in
the street?

Capitalism and Growth for its own sake

In pre-capitalist eras in tribal societies, in the Classical
world, the Middle Ages and early modern times up to the
revolutionary and Napoleonic wars the interaction
between man and his natural surroundings, and the
ecosystems that support the whole web of life, was
preoccupied with the provisioning of the means of
subsistence, and only secondly was there ever a question
of acquiring surpluses for accumulation. To the extent
that hoarding was involved, the surpluses were largely
intended to meet the needs of the whole population
notably the inhabitants of the early cities, such as was the
case with the granaries in Europes middle ages. A
considerable part not to say all of the towns of the
Middle Ages had such provisions for distribution in times
of failing crops, starvation and hunger, and they were
quite often administered and tended to by highly
democratic assemblies. Hence, the surpluses were
redistributed to the citizens in equitable portions as their
needs may have dictated. Moreover, this kind of
management was an instance of a community oriented
economic system which also reached into the
7

countryside, where it could take the form of common

lands, communal grain mills, saw mills, and so on. At
these stages of social development, there were attached
strict taboos on individual economic gain with some
exceptions during the fall of the Roman Republic and in
the declining stages of the Roman Empire and to the
extent that the accumulation of riches, capital and
resources in general took place, the processes were based
on land grabbing campaigns like the Enclosure
movements in Britain from the 16th century onwards.1
Merchants who happened to earn fortunes on their
voyages and trading activities in city ports and other
regional markets were obliged to invest their earnings in
landed estates, just to escape the taboos and convictions
of the community at large against the accumulation of
money gains.
The contrast between these pre-capitalist epochs and the
present globalized capitalism is stunning. From being
associated with the strictest taboos within the framework
of predominantly pre-market societies, traits such as
monetary self-interest and personal economic gain have
been turned into a fully acceptable, indeed, natural
drive among our species, accompanied by the designation
of capitalism as a natural law. In this context, Karl
Polanyis description of this drastic overturning is quite
striking, in the way he addresses the issue in his work,
The Great Transformation.2 Admittedly, one should not
suppress the fact that humanity, during its 200 years of
8

capitalist development, has achieved an immense growth

in economic productivity and, hence, laid the foundations
for a society in which material uncertainty and scarcity is
done away with in a great many regions of the world at
least superficially and at the present stage. However, as
long as the same economic and social system has led to
an ever increasing accumulation on behalf of a tiny
fraction among us whether in the form of capital goods
or real estate, monopolization and undemocratic social
structures its development has not turned out favorable
for the vast majority of the global populace. The paradox
which rests in the lack of consistency in the relationship
between the rhetoric of progress, democracy and
civilization, portrayed by todays mainstream
vocational politicians, bureaucrats and economic elites,
and the alarming poverty among underprivileged people
in the western world as well as the great majority in the
Third World, is especially illustrious. Thus, more is to
be demanded than slogans of relegating poverty to
history if the termination of this social vice is to be
achieved once and for all. The question remains whether
it would be possible at all to reform capitalism
(understood in the widest sense as an economic system
based on currencies, exchange of goods and
accumulation of capital) in such a way that it can turn
into an economic system which meets basic economic
needs among the majority of the worlds populations,
viewed in the light of the vast amount of struggles which
9

have been launched by trade unions, political parties and

social democratic governments for approximately 150
years. The very term capitalism belongs to the rather
ill-defined ones in our era, largely due to the
dichotomizing effects of the monopolization of economic
alternatives by the Marxist tradition. Moreover, on top of
all this come the overwhelming and in the worst of
cases irreversible ecological despoliations produced by
capitalism during its history unavoidable consequences
of an economic system obsessed with the rapidest
possible profits at the cost of human welfare and
ecological integrity, which already in the late 1930s was
summed up by Carl O. Sauer with the words on behalf of
the western world that we have not yet learned the
difference between loot and yield.3
The above mentioned warped conditions concern the
direct human and ecological consequences of globalized
capitalism, which has turned growth for its own sake into
a sort of mantra. We are not here talking of growth in any
organic sense, but rather of a process which fosters the
inorganic by undermining ecological and human
diversity, turns human beings into labor tools and passive
consumers, and plunders this fertile planets initially rich
webs of life. It is a growth which, as already alluded to,
has as its main goal the facilitation of economic gain
among individual entrepreneurs heading gigantic
corporations very often in businesses which directly are
threatening life on this planet in its entirety, such as
10

petroleum industry, arms production and genetic

modification. The democratic control over these
businesses is virtually zero and, in view of this fact, all
talk about proliferating democracy in the Arab world
and the East in general becomes utterly vacuous. In
fact, it is all about an effort to camouflage the self
interest behind getting access to the natural resources in
these areas and thus nothing more than imperialism
redressed and recycled, staging a scramble for Africa
2.0.
Improved economic conditions for the public at large, in
the western world as well as in the Third World, are to
be considered as more or less wayward paraphernalia of
economic growth, and even in the best of cases they
favor only a tiny minority seen from a global
perspective. I Norway one has been so overwhelmingly
privileged as a result of the oil adventure that a fairly
numerous part of the populace certainly by the help of
redistributing mechanisms has been able to reap the
fruit of whatever growth has taken place, even though
economic inequality is increasing also over here. The
equalization that social democracy in this country
attained in the first decades following World War 2, is
about to be reversed, concomitantly with the increase in
public poverty resulting from the neo-liberal ideology
and its grip on political parties which traditionally have
belonged to the Left and despite the fact that these
parties have obliged themselves to the tending of the
11

Welfare State and maintain their rhetoric to this end, if

only not to lose their share of the electorate.
Accompanying this developments there are several forms
of alienation going on which leave their mark on the
living conditions of the citizen; apart from the minimum
of influence on her or his working places (despite all the
rhetoric to the contrary), it is mainly the overwhelming
political disempowerment which stigmatizes the
personality of the citizen in our own age and leads to an
increasing sense of isolation and lack of community to
identify with and influence in any constructive and
creative manner aspects of modernity which certainly
have taken on a largely universal character.4 This
palpable sense of being suspended to the sideline
politically and/or socially will have to be considered as a
vastly underestimated factor as regards the mental as well
as physical health of every citizen. In this respect all the
formulas of psychotherapy and other kinds of modern
treatment prove largely inadequate, unless they at the
very least contribute to the understanding in the
respective patient of how this disempowerment and
alienation influences his or her health.5
As regards economic activity these days it is mainly
preoccupied with the enlargement of short term economic
gain for the single entrepreneur. It is not questioned
whether the actual businesses in themselves actually are
of vital avail to the public at large, or whether they are
ecologically sound and responsible and contribute to the
12

enrichment of natural evolution in a wider and long term

perspective. Neither are the kinds of substantial needs
people may have addressed in any meaningful way. Quite
to the contrary, everyone is free to employ without
scruples the most aggressive sales techniques in order to
maximize profits, and hence contribute to the creation of
new and constructed needs ever so often. In a hazy
society in which people rarely have time to communicate,
even in their closest relations, and in which the social
media have become substitutions for face-to-face
dialogue, it is self-evident that there will be a shortage as
far as reflecting on basic material needs and their
adequate satisfaction goes not to say a tremendous
decline in literacy and even a sort of modern
analphabetism. The focus is largely turned onto what the
Joness got and an obsession with not lagging behind
in the social and material race, and most of all to keep up
with the pace of consumerism and its frequent irrational
demands in the warped sense of progress in our era.
As a twin companion of aggressive marketing
techniques, lobbyism such as it proceeds within
parliamentarian and republican political systems alike
is no guarantee for democracy whatsoever. In fact, the
matter is quite to the contrary and the disturbingly high
level of corporativism it involves has been of great
concern to historians and sociologists since the opening
decades of the 20th century. Within this social and
political structure it is obviously the particular interests
13

with the largest amount of economic resources which get

their way, very often camouflaged as satisfying the need
to create new employment or save the prevailing one
an argument which has been retorted to time and again to
justify one disputable business after the other. One of the
most grotesque examples of this happened in Germany,
where there were concerns about the many accidents on
the Autobahn and talk about reducing the speed limits.
The story goes that the leading executives within the
prosthesis industry protested vehemently against this
(!) True or not, the fact remains that the very logic of
capitalist production and distribution eventually will lead
to such utterly dismal and immoral outcomes, as is
demonstrated by the steadily more sophisticated
techniques of planned obsolescence as an engineering
tool utilized within mass production. In any case, I am
afraid the list of such horrible instances would be
overwhelming was there ever to be conducted an
encompassing analysis of the matter.6

Material superfluity and consumerism in the

western world
With the overblown productivity of capitalism there
opened up in the decades following World War 2 new
vistas in the direction of achieving a state of society in
which economic scarcity was done away with, which
14

eventually would have drastically reduced the toil of

labor for the common citizen. In turn, this would have
liberated time and energy for each citizen to acquire a far
more rewarding life than what traditional wage labor and
the 8 hours day (which once was a radical socialist
demand) entails for the vast majority. The scarcity which
for centuries had been employed to justify economic
exploitation and hierarchical social structures, and on
which orthodox Marxism had based its analyses, seemed
increasingly to be perpetuated more in the form of myths
than reality. Already towards the closing of the 19th
century Peter Kropotkin, in his works Conquest of Bread
and Fields, Factories and Workshops7, had suggested
that the duration of the work day could be reduced to a
fraction for all members of society, and even be
reorganized into a variegated, individually gratifying and
meaningful content, without infringing on the availability
of material goods for society at large. The traditional
bourgeois reality principle and the protestant work ethic
were later to be challenged anew through works like
Herbert Marcuses Eros & Civilization8 and Murray
Bookchins Post-Scarcity Anarchism9, to be followed up
by the growing countercultural movement in the 1960s
and 70s. As mentioned by Bookchin in one of his essays
from this period, more and more people found out that
they could live satisfied lives simply by reaping the scrap
from the capitalist feast, and instead concentrate their
energy on political and cultural interests (were they not to
15

succumb to drug related life style experiments), instead

of wearing themselves out in futile working routines
regimented by a dehumanizing and exploitative
economic system.10 The material superfluity struck
everyone and everywhere in the affluent western world
leading for instance to the news that shoplifting
acquired
epidemic
proportions,
as
Bookchin
11a
summarizes in his review of this era.
However, in this process in which the well known
pendulum swung from a widespread subscription to the
economic imperatives of increasing productivity and
focus on conventional wage labor as the central aspects
of life and into the counterculture of the 60s and 70s
and its increasing orientation towards life style oriented
and consumerist hedonism, one is able to detect the
limitations of this semi revolutionary era when it comes
to the possibilities of achieving lasting social change in
the direction of a libertarian, rational and ecological
society. Every historical epoch has its limitations
economically as well as ideologically and the late 20th
century is no exception from this rule. It is quite
understandable that the emphasis on consumption begun
to reach an utterly disproportional scale in the advanced
stage of capitalism and mass culture throughout the
century and especially in the aftermath of World War 2.
After all, new markets and increased exchange of goods
is the essence of the inherent need within this economic
system for expansion, whereas lasting balance and
16

responsible and equitable distribution is out of the

question. On the other hand, it is an equally dismal fact
of history that the so-called counterculture was unable
to form persistent political and social counterinstitutions, and that the New Left for its part largely
became atrophied into orthodox and authoritarian parties
a fact that contributed vastly to their alienation from the
public at large. The kind of optimism revealed by Ivan
Illich in the following quote from his late 1960s writings
tells a whole lot about what was lost from the
potentialities of the counterculture:
We can only live these changes; we cannot think our
way to humanity. Every one of us, and every group with
which we live and work, must become the model of the
era which we desire to create. The many models which
will develop should give each one of us an environment
in which we can celebrate our potential and discover
the way into a more humane world. 11b
Some 40 years ago there may still have seemed to time
for such an innocent optimism apart from the fact that
the planet already at that moment was largely
plundered, as Fairfield Osborn put it in the wake of
World War 2. The environment which Illich alludes to
and the individuals respective location on the surface
of the Earth has since then deteriorated further (leaving
Ebenezer Howards Garden City movement as a long
gone dream), notably to the extent that even basic protein
17

nourishment is expected to be provided synthetically. So,

what kind of human potential will have the slightest
possibility of realization within such a context, remains a
very open question indeed if there will not occur an
immediate ecological awakening and a massive revival of
the kind of vision expounded by Howard and his
colleagues more than hundred years ago.
Instead of paving the way for a new public sphere, in
which every citizen would be able to materialize her or
his own potentialities and gratify their needs as homo
politicus, the left radicals and countercultural movement
throughout the 1970s became once more obliged to live
out their lives in the private sphere extending into the
party apparatuses apart from fulfilling their
obligations as homo economicus in their respective
work arenas, struggling to keep up with the Jones
the very essence of a dehumanizing mass society.
The above mentioned tendency was reinforced by the one
dimensional focus among social democrats on economic
aggrandizement on increased living standards and
material welfare often at the cost of issues like the
need for reviving time honored standards of quality
production, political participation among the public in the
basic formation of society (cf. demands for direct
democracy) and hence also in the democratic control of
productive and natural resources. Apart from the fact that
social democracy, in those countries where it has been in
18

a position to play a determining political role, has

contributed to a more equal distribution of economic
fortunes among the inhabitants of the respective countries
(especially in Scandinavia) a fact that should not be
ignored the agency of the social democratic parties
have also more sinister and unfavorable sides. As long as
their policies since World War 2 have not challenged
capitalism in any substantial way, they have largely
contributed to legitimizing this economic system, paved
the way for massive bureaucratization and
disempowerment, and reduced citizens into consumers,
electorate and tax payers exclusively. Moreover, the
bureaucratization and top-down structures and attitudes
have, in combination with the consume manic orientation
of the individual through electoral propaganda, TVcommercials and the mass media in general, also led to
an increasing adherence to extreme populist parties on
the political Right.
The emphasis on private economic consumption without
regard for long term resource balances divested of
ethical and political aspects concerning central issues
such as the quality of the products consumed, the
individuals autonomous self-definition of its own needs,
and community control over production and distribution
of goods and burdens easily turns into a dead end track
where society is operating like a train on autopilot.
Fundamental questions are not discussed, means are
turned into ends, and the directionality of society
19

disappears.
Concomitantly
with
political
disempowerment, consumerism and mass society has a
tendency to undermine the individual not only as homo
politicus, but also as a basically creative being. Mass
culture, passivity and a mentality of on-lookers are
spreading and reinforcing the elitist structures and the
hierarchical sensibility for which oligarchic institutions
have laid down a seemingly solid social basis. Neither
have hierarchical and top heavy labor organizations,
which in the previous century happened to outnumber
their anarcho-syndicalist opponents, had anything else to
offer than to further adherence to narrow economical
particular interests among the specific vocational groups,
only interspersed with a rhetoric of solidarity with the
poor and underprivileged of this world.
Amidst the material abundance there continually prevails
a looming and threatening economic insecurity, resulting
from the fact that the vast majority of people have been
divested of the control over the political decisions which
pertain to her or his economic concerns, as well as over
social developments at large. Economic crises and
oscillating conjunctures may at any moment occur and in
such instances strike harder the lower down the social
ladder one moves measured according to the
conventional monetary income ratings. Due to the lack of
democratic institutions in which one would be able to
influence social developments in a direct and responsible
manner, and thus to have an impact on the distribution of
20

goods, benefits and burdens, many people relate to the

executives of the state banks as if they were the shamans
of the modern age on whom the hopes for the future
rested. Their conjectures and prognoses rest on a
projection of status quo into the future, and in this way
reflect the so called self-regulating mechanisms and the
hidden hand of the global market, in which political
influence and control by the public is reduced to an
absolute minimum. Indeed, they belong to another planet
let us say Mars, where everything is barren and
inorganic already more than to the living Earth which
deserves a moral, ecological, community oriented and
confederal economy, based on an authentic oikos and an
empowered demos, in which markets retain the once
civilizing effects they entailed as long as they were
subsumed under ethical and ecological considerations
as for instance in the cradle of western civilization,
Ancient Greece.12
In societies which contrary to 18th century
Enlightenment philosopher Benjamin Franklins advice
has sacrificed human freedom in order to attain
somewhat more economic security, we find that there is
very little left of both. In both cases the explanation is to
be sought for in the general public disempowerment
which has been consolidated through the elitist and
hierarchical political and economic system which we try
to endure at the present stage. However, such a system is
a highly precarious one, as overwhelmingly testified by
21

history, and the power apparatus whose self interest it is

to maintain and elaborate it further becomes increasingly
dependent upon retorting to dirty tricks in order to bring
about some sort of consensus, consent and
togetherness within the economically privileged nation
states and continents. Among those tricks is the well
known and often temporarily successful attempt to
conjure up images and nightmares of foreign enemies
and threats to the Nation, for all they are worth. In
combination with the fear of losing the material well
being which at enormous costs has been achieved
through the toil and suffering of previous generations, the
fear of foreign powers and the phenomenon of terror
conducted by fundamentalists, come to occupy a large
part of the public attention thereby removing the focus
on the need and the opportunities for taking back the
control over social developments. Indeed, quite to the
contrary these factors contribute in the short term to the
peoples sense of being ever more dependent upon
central authorities and an army of experts, with
presumably superhuman and magical abilities to cure
societys vices. The hope, on the other hand, rests in
the eventuality that this disempowerment becomes
unendurable and, as such, gradually becomes
demystified, addressed and rectified by wide segments of
people, sustained by a new enlightenment and well
organized campaigns for a direct democracy, and that a
revitalized citizenry slowly and unremittingly overcomes
22

the traumatic experiences with authoritarian forms of

planned economy which mushroomed in the 20th
century. This seems to be the only way in which the
universalized, dehumanizing and anti-ecological market
economy and its infamous hidden hand may be
divested of its hegemonic role so that it no longer
possibly can be considered as a natural law.
The globalization of the world economy, which
primarily is directed towards meeting the needs of
multinationals for cheap labor, raw materials and
expanding markets, is about to cause an unprecedented
cultural homogenization and ecological destruction
maybe beyond repair, in addition to entangling the vast
majority of people into a nexus of disempowerment,
poverty, endless toil and denigration. The struggle, on the
other hand, against these dismal prospects is marked by a
lack of popular organizing in the western world,
paralleled by nationalist parties and movements in the
Third World, which frequently rest on orthodox and
outdated Marxian analyses. The attempt to rewrite
Marxs analyses and critique of capitalism to fit the
present state of affairs, is not favorably positioned to
achieve constructive counter-institutions to the
globalization of corporate capitalism. The tendency
among todays leftists to hail state leaders such as Hugo
Chavez for his efforts to nationalize the Venezuelan
economy, will have to be considered as reactions on the
part of the Left resulting from a starvation of good
23

news. Historically, such schemes for nationalization

may have resulted in a somewhat more equal distribution
of economic assets and goods, but at the same time
produced highly authoritarian social structures and led to
the formation of new social and political elites, apart
from being overwhelmingly oblivious to ecological
concerns in most cases. To view the populations of the
Third World as the new proletariat in the lack of
such a class consciousness in the industrialized or postindustrial world simply in the futile attempt to reconcile
theories of yesterday with the present realities, will only
result in a mystification of the struggle for radical social
change in the 21st century, as well as in wrapping the
historical context in which Marx himself developed his
economic analyses and political theories in an
obfuscating and opportunistic ideological veil. Such kind
of historical numbness is the very least we need in the
present critical global situation.
The ongoing struggle against the global hegemony of
corporate capitalism and the further plundering by
multinationals of this planet and their exploitation of the
worlds poor and underprivileged, has in the recent
decades been headed by various grass roots movements
in the so-called developing countries in the global South,
represented by the regular organization of World Social
Forum, later to be accompanied by the Occupy
movements in the west. Obviously, this struggle cannot
be won exclusively by people in those developing
24

countries. Parallel movements for direct democracy and

community control over the economy in the Western
world are wholly indispensable if the socially warped and
ecologically disastrous tendencies are to be reversed and
steered into a constructive direction. The vistas for these
movements may, if they lead to a broad popular control
over social development and the economic dispensations
in various areas of the Third World, entail an
alternative path for the whole of humanity. One can
detect the possibilities for a more organic development
based on direct public participation in the decision
making processes, in combination with the utilization and
refinement of local and regional resources, coordinated
through confederated municipalities, villages, cities and
wider regions a so called bottom-up organizational
structure on an ever widening scale. Hierarchical social
structures and top heavy political systems may in this
way be challenged and attacked at the root, and the
parallel movements for a libertarian, rational and
ecological society in the West and in the Global South
would be in a position to enrich and complement each
other. Hence, one could foresee the eventuality of
achieving a public understanding of humanity as a united
and universal humanitas in a non-hierarchical world
free of oppression and material need, thereby producing a
kind of confederal globalization from below.

25

Eudaemonism and universalism the need for

a higher synthesis
In pre-capitalist stages of the human project of liberation
the pendulum swung between various hedonist
movements and dispensations on the one hand and
ascetic ones on the other. The former emphasized a
disproportionate satisfaction of all the desires of the
flesh more or less as an end in itself and as a road to
emancipation. Under social conditions marked by
economic scarcity such a stance necessarily limited their
agenda to elitist sects and movements. Their aims were
rarely in a position to become succesful, hence they
remained primarily at the level of imagination and
became the object of detailed literary adventures and
utopias. The ascetic tendencies which deserve a place in
humanitys historical liberatory project were socially
more oriented towards the actual limitations of social and
economic reality and less utopian and they took as
their point of departure the prevailing material scarcity
by proposing that the road to liberation entailed giving up
bodily pleasure and instead directing attention towards
the spiritual aspects of life. To put the issue in a wider
contextual scrutiny it is worth noting that for Nietzsche,
in his unrelenting lamentation of what he considered the
modern anemia of western civilization, the ascetic
position was a main target of reproach for his analysis of
the alleged decline.13 However, a certain degree of undue
26

dichotomizing was one of the characteristics of his mode

of thought, bringing him into an almost obsessive quarrel
with Christianity instead of taking his point of departure
in the Enlightenment era and its prospects for human
progress and ascendency towards perfection.
Apart from their emphasis on egalitarian and mutual
social structures within their movements the hedonist and
ascetic tendencies throughout the pre-modern era had
very little in common. Moreover, it would not be very
meaningful to try to rank them in view of their various
achievements and promises. However, in the light of
history, the former will have to be considered as having
more strength, vitality and progressiveness of vision.
While the ascetic tendencies and their approach largely
embodied an acceptance of the unequal distribution of
wealth, in addition to their susceptibility to the myth that
nature as such is stingy, the hedonist ones represented
challenges to both of these trends. Hence, they paved the
way and laid down the foundation work for the socialist
and anarchist movements which were to leave their
definitive mark on the 19th and in part the 20th
century. The social question, concerning the control
over societys economic productive forces and the
distribution of wealth, attained a main focus among these
modern movements, and maxims like from each
according to his or her ability, to each according to his or
her needs was thoroughly debated and circulated among
the working classes.14
27

However, the diversity of opinions within the socialist

movements were immense and may be illustrated by the
fact that while Marx considered the demand for the eight
hour workday as progressive, Kropotkin a couple of
decades later on figured, as mentioned above, that a
fraction of this duration would have been adequate to
satisfy the basic needs of everyone. While Marx and his
economistic social analyses largely prolonged the
conception of nature as stingy as intractable matter
which human societies with their centralized and
bureaucratically administered industries had to conquer
and subdue in order to divest it of its scarce
resources, Kropotkins works are ripe with a view of
nature as fertile and generous, and overwhelmingly
apprehensive of human technological innovations to the
extent that these were of a decentralized kind, formed in
a human scale and subject to the influence and control of
the actual citizen, including farmers, artisans and manual
laborers in general. Kropotkin also repeatedly stressed
the need for a combination of brain work and manual
work for human beings to reach fulfillment, while Marx
was apt to divest the workers of the tools and
capability of the former.
In todays polarized world in which one part of
humanity the populations of the Third World and
underprivileged people in industrialized or post-industrial
countries are living in utter poverty and material need,
while large segments of people in these rich countries
28

and the elites in the former countries, are living in vast

material abundance, the libertarian Left is confronting
novel challenges when it comes to creating the basis for
radical social change in the direction of reason, liberation
and ecological responsibility. Globalized capitalism has a
grim tendency to reduce everything even aspects of our
most intimate and personal sphere into commodities,
and to reduce rich organic structures into polluted and
lifeless debris. It has proved to be economically highly
productive (as understood according to the conventional
assembly line logic which, however, hardly harmonies
with productiveness seen in an evolutionary and basic
material sense cf. the phenomenon of planned
obsolescence already discussed in the former essays), and
at the same time undermined the organic web of society,
disturbed the ecological balances of the Earth, pulverized
community spirit and reduced us to freewheeling
individuals who are more or less successfully
manipulated into believing that freedom and
happiness may be achieved through the consumption of
mass produced commodities indeed, that this
metamorphosis of means into ends constitutes the
essence of democracy and thereby destroying any
meaningful sense of value in the process.
We are at present in a situation where the hedonist stance
in the form of consume hedonism can no longer play
any progressive role, more specifically among the
materially well off populations in the industrialized or
29

post-industrial countries. The pleasure which may be

obtained through the consumption of mass produced
goods will in any case be overshadowed by the
disempowerment and alienation that we experience at the
political and economical level. The dehumanization
implied in this entire process leads unwittingly to the
further escapism into consumerism on other levels of life,
and obliviousness towards scarcity and need among
people among the utterly underprivileged groups of our
species, destroying human lives in an immense scale
exemplified by the humanly produced (through so-called
green house induced global warming) heavy drought
and famine on Africas Horn. In the industrialized, or
even post-industrial, countries we are marked by this
warped and unjust social structure on a daily basis;
people in the Global South (or the Third World) dream
of having a share in the abundance, without any
preconceptions of the backside of the coin. On top of this
dehumanization there follows our bad conscience as a
result of this abundance which dont absolve because of
the widespread disempowerment confused by the
myths that we live in democratic societies and hence
have chosen to live like we do. Thus, there are many
concepts which stand in need of definition suggesting a
new Enlightenment just to secure that the concerned
citizen will become able to address the issues involved
and take an active part in the creation of a new public
sphere where community development is discussed and
30

formed, and political decisions are made in face-to-face

assemblies.
Due to the lack of penetrating recognition of the causes
behind the social and ecological crisis of our time, there
have popped up a wide array of life style oriented
responds to these grave issues. Among those is the focus
of deep ecology on what is being labeled voluntary
simplicity, hence, a modern variety of the ascetic
attitude, with the main difference that in its modern outfit
it originates in privileged social strata. It entails to a large
extent a reflexive reaction against consumerism and overconsumption, and takes on an apolitical stance towards
our modern crisis by blaming rationality (especially
western), science and technology for our present
malaise. An analysis and critique of capitalism as such
and more profoundly, of hierarchy and exploitation are
non-themes within deep ecology, a dismal fact that go
a long way to explain the tendencies towards antihumanism, misanthropy and insensitiveness towards the
worlds poor which have erupted in the name of deep
ecology during the past two or three decades. To
moralize over the lifestyle of the individual and appeal to
ethical consumption within the framework of an
inherently amoral not to say immoral economic
system like globalized profit maximizing capitalism, is in
the best of cases producing confusion and in the worst of
cases it becomes utterly reactionary. The possibilities for
taking an active part in the formation of society and
31

community development, the economic structures and

priorities, and the ecologically responsible designs that
are needed and in this manner define ones own needs
as fully realized human beings through genuine
character building processes belong to the democratic
demands which have to be met if society as a whole is
not to disintegrate into an authoritarian, repressive and
barbaric dystopia.
The history of philosophy has rather often been marked
by incompatibilities between human beings essence on
the one hand and their existence on the other. Thinkers
like Hegel and Marx are representatives of the former
stance, while existentialists like Kierkegaard and Sartre
have taken up the fight for the latter. Briefly stated, the
essence philosophers put the emphasis on the
commonly human traits when it comes to production,
cognition, etc. and the human community at large,
while the existentialists focused on the individual and its
presumably autonomous life among the masses. As
regards the essentialism of Hegel, and its potentially
totalitarian implications, note the following bombastic
exclamation from his Ivory Tower: the knowledge
of essence is firmly established as superior to empty
knowledge14 On whose mandate anyone can claim to
overrule the knowledge attained by others as empty
whether it be that of farmers, artisans, sculptors,
fishermen, or others which certainly has legitimized
anything from the Moscow Processes in the 1930s, via
32

Holocaust, to Maos cultural revolution and the mass

slaughters they involved not to mention later efforts at
totalizing human existence in the name of politics
the question can only be answered by way of the means
chosen by Alexander the Great in antiquity; by
consulting the Oracle.15
A kindred parallel to this duality is to be found in the
polarization between universalism (a rational social
order, etc.) and eudaemonism (the pursuit of
happiness). Of causes which I will soon touch upon I
will contend that today on the basis of the lections of
history there remains a need to transcend both of these
extremes and unite the viable elements in both of them
into a new synthesis. Postmodernism has in a multitude
of ways given us the opposite due to its tendency to strip
the universe of any coherent meaning and directionality,
at the same time as an uncritical attitude towards the
social dislocations produced by capitalism results in
narrowing the opportunities for the individual to
experience happiness into a question of purchase
power in an highly impersonal marketplace.
The autonomous or, rather, atomized individuals
search for happiness within the framework of the existing
social system, has in several ways been depicted as a
human right, and it sure is comfortable to effortlessly
subscribe to such an abstract and vague right.
However, the question remains whether the traditional
33

concepts of happiness is much too narrow and

insufficient, to the extent that the citizen or villager is
bereft of their opportunity to creatively form their own
communities and undertake qualitatively enriching
production. Without the presence of the above mentioned
criteria, existence becomes highly limited, vacuous and
anemic; the sense of community evaporates, and the
notion of existential meaning as such is dramatically
challenged on a day-to-day basis. In our time we
paradoxically witness that the individualist happiness
industry with all its glossy magazines and
commercials reach ever so new heights. If the
preconditions for humanity at large to achieve genuine
happiness really were at hand, one would not have
thought it probable that the mass publications and TV
media would pay such a disproportionate attention to the
issue.
The combination of the largely undefined and hollow
conception of happiness on the one hand, and an
increasingly
authoritarian,
one-dimensional
and
homogenous society on the other, in which political and
economical power is concentrated on fewer and fewer
hands, bears testimony to the fact that we are at best
finding ourselves in an entrenched social state. In the
worst of cases we are confronting utter reaction and
fascist tendencies, represented by corporativism and the
whole paraphernalia of statist power. The more energy
the individual will have to spend under such conditions
34

on pursuing the achievement of this vague and scarcely

defined happiness, the more does she or he tend to adapt
to status quo instead of using more time and energy on
changing society through well directed and organized
political activities. Instead of being active citizens,
people are reified into masses, and automatically
simplified and regimented into passive consumers, tax
payers and electorate.
As regards universalism and the struggle for a rational
social order, which has been the main project for the Left
in its critique of capitalisms irrational, repressive and
anti-ecological consequences, we witnessed in the
previous century that the project of the Left indeed was
in a position to produce utterly reactionary and
dehumanizing results as well. One need only mention the
Soviet Union under Stalin and China under Mao, who in
their own way contributed to rendering criticism of
capitalism into an almost impossible venture for the most
part of the 20th century. Such criticism became an
immense challenge, and all the more momentous as
regards the unorthodoxy of campaigning for a viable
third way for humanity that is towards a libertarian
and ecological socialism.16 Despite all their mutual
differences eudaemonism and universalism, as
schematized above, share the tendency to perpetuate the
pacifying and disempowering of the individual in their
respective manners, and thereby subverts the living web
in a vital and pulsating community. Since we at present
35

happen to find ourselves in a situation where at least in

the rich, industrialized or post-industrial (imperialist)
countries consumerist hedonism and its companion
eudaemonism rules and puts its strong mark on the
prospects and choices of the public, the challenge for
todays left libertarians is to set some beacons afire
which may enlighten and guide the public on its way
towards a new public sphere which may serve as a basis
for the re-empowerment of the individual. Capitalism has
to be challenged unless it shall be permitted to rage on
and subvert the preconditions for complex life forms
including humanity on this planet. However, for this
project to be successful there is the absolute demand of
such a movement that it does not once again degenerate
into reprises of historical blind tracks in this respect.

Ethical, social psychological and ecological

causes for direct democracy
To conclude this essay I will briefly touch upon some
humanistic arguments for a direct, participatory
democracy. On the one hand, the particular interests
which splinters todays society and make it impossible to
materialize the opportunities to build an authentic and
global human community need to be addressed in a
thoroughgoing and challenging way, while on the other
hand the common human and ecological stakes which are
36

at present gravely threatened, stand in need of

coordinated efforts to reverse the hazardous trends facing
our species and the ecological integrity of the entire
planet. This planet can no longer withstand being reduced
to a toy ground for cynical corporate agents in a basically
immoral globalized market. The fact that a few
multinationals are about to grab their share of the
world in order to achieve short term economic gain,
represent a dramatic threat against any meaningful
concept of democracy as well as against the ecological
balance systems of the Earth. From the point of view of
the individual these facts represent the disempowerment
which in the long run deprives it of any notion that it is
positioned and able to influence its own life situation, the
development of society in general, and the future of the
Earth. Hence, by being simultaneously told that
representative democracy and parliamentarianism
constitutes an authentic democracy, while the historical
roots of democracy in institutions based on popular
assemblies run by directly democratic bodies which
still represent a viable alternative to todays
disempowering social structures the confusion among
the general public becomes highly complete. One is over
again reminded that one bears the responsibility for the
present social, economic and ecological crisis, but
simultaneously denied the institutional fundament for
addressing these urgent issues. The resulting malaise is
not likely to produce anything but depression on a vast
37

scale underpinning the businesses of the

pharmaceutical industry and their deliverance of
Somas to the public and the only possible options
left for addressing and rectifying the situation seem to go
by way of directly democratic institutions and a
vehement insistence on quality production in all aspects
of life, representing ethical and humanistic challenges to
the malevolent techniques of planned obsolescence
which contribute to the plundering of our planet. As
insisted upon by social psychologist, Erich Fromm, in his
introduction to Ivan Illichs Celebration of Awareness
more than four decades ago:
human radicalism questions every idea and every
institution from the standpoint of whether it helps or
hinders mans capacity for greater aliveness and joy.17
A crucial precondition for the demand for direct
democracy to be successful in the long run is the
observation that every single adequately functioning
citizen is capable of addressing and tending to their own
flourishing and welfare, and hence to form their
communities in a rational and ecological way. Indeed,
humanity cannot be viewed as split in two different types
of beings those who rule and those who are being ruled
among whom the former represent a tiny, exclusive
minority. The hierarchical sensibilities which have
underpinned the present oligarchic and elitist social
structures have deep historical roots. However, history is
38

full of examples of efforts to equalize these structures

and establish egalitarian and largely non-hierarchical
ones in their place. One of these examples is the ancient
Greek polis, whose popular form of democracy despite
all its failures and shortcomings remains a lasting
tradition which has inspired subsequent radical
democratic movements, and which even today may be
revitalized and expanded to suit the demands of our own
age. Etymologically, there are interesting facts which
illustrates the gap which has opened between the
founders of our civilization and our present anemic
culture. For instance the word idiot, which has its origin
in ancient Greece, has gone through a dizzying
transformation. For the ancient Greeks the term was used
with respect to citizens who, despite the fact that they had
a legitimate and constitutional right to participate in the
public assembly (ecclesia), kept away from the decision
making processes which continually went on there. Thus,
an idiot was a private person a person who did not
take part in the common good of society, but clung to his
own particular interests to the detriment of the
community at large. In our own age, under
representative democracy and parliamentarianism, and
of course under theocratic and despotic governments as
well, the institutional foundations are laid down for
reducing the vast majority among humanity to, precisely,
idiots (!) in the sense that this majority is not expected to
participate in the formation of society and attend to the
39

common good, but rather live isolated and atomized

private lives and leave the decision making to
professional politicians, who in their turn develop their
own particular interests and become annexed to the
corporate executives and succumb to bureaucratic
rigidity. It is in such a conceptual context that one must
understand
Rousseaus
contention
during
the
Enlightenment era that popular sovereignty cannot be
represented.18
The ancient Greeks conceived of the direct political
participation among the citizens as an essential part of the
formation of their characters (paideia), which constituted
the citizens (whom in that era were limited to native
males, albeit mandated by the women in the oikos
sphere) as moral agents in society and their
participation in the ecclesia was one of necessity, and
hence limited to the most minimalistic degree rather than
seen as some kind of career opportunity. It lies close at
hand to contend that without precisely such a
participation, any focus on ethics tend to be considered as
a strange, repulsive and meaningless attempt at
guardianship by various executors of authority in their
denigration of the dignity and self respect of the many
(passing under the label paternalism throughout
history). The inevitable result has been that most people
in such a context, as a spontaneous and natural reaction,
distance themselves from politics as well as ethics, and
instead try to achieve the above mentioned vague and
40

hollow happiness within their narrow private spheres

within the frameworks of whatever social system may
persist for the time being. The road for the individual to
freedom, responsibility, creativity and happiness rests
in this authors view upon the establishment of social
institutions based on direct participation among the
citizenry in political life, to the extent that we remain
zoon politikon. It is within these libertarian institutions
that the individual would be able to lay down the
foundation for his or her existence as creative and
ethically conscious beings in the fullest meaning of these
terms in which the focus in a liberatory way may be
drawn away from consumption of mass produced and
mediocre commodities and towards creating quality in all
facets of life. Viewed from such a perspective it makes
some sense to consider the formation of society as the
highest possible form of art, in which everyone should
have an equal stake and which would eventually establish
a rock solid basis for the development of the ethical
standards of the individual as well as for her or his
aesthetical abilities and ecological sensibility.
This leads us to the need for reevaluating the traditional
economistic perspectives of the orthodox Left and its
tendency to reduce human beings as such into homo
economicus at the cost of the ethical, aesthetical and
ecological aspects of life. Such a reevaluation does not
imply that one has to ignore economic conditions
pertaining to production, distribution, consumption, etc.
41

It means rather that economic issues are subordinated to

the political and hence ethical and ecological domain in
the form of a new public sphere in which these issues
should be addressed and decided upon in a democratic
manner. In this manner ethical questions would again be
raised to its honorable position in society and develop
into something qualitatively different than questions of
personal taste in an impersonal, atomizing and
dehumanizing market. As regards societys economic and
technological priorities, the question of why would be
posed before the question of how, as E. A. Gutkind
pointed out nearly sixty years ago.19 Instrumental reason
would once more be located within its proper sphere,
subsumed under ethical and ecological considerations,
rather than tainting rationality as such by representing the
plundering mental equipment of corporate capitalism.
Situated within its proper context and limitations even
instrumental reason may be restored to dignity, notably
through engineering directed towards the research and
construction of eco-technology and installations based on
renewable energy.
As preliminary steps towards building dikes against the
dismal developments we are witnessing, and the huge
challenges which lay ahead, we need counter-institutions
which can represent a counter power to the institutions
and hegemony of globalized capitalism and, first and
foremost, we need a new Enlightenment to encourage
people to reflect and act upon the situation. Rather than
42

absurd encouragements in the vein of ethical

consumption within the overwhelming framework of an
immoral economic system, we will have to take the first
steps towards an ecological economics in which human
interaction with the respective ecosystems which
constitutes its framework, is based on an economic
production and a use of resources which aim at satisfying
authentic human needs accompanied with the
enrichment of the natural environment and the
consequent fostering of evolution, like we are
intellectually positioned to do as advanced products of
this very evolution. Such a communalization of the
economy, through decentralization, direct democracy and
confederalism, would represent a decisive contribution in
the direction of harmonizing communities rural as well
as urban regions and humanity as a whole with the
ecosystems and bioregions of which they are parts and
produce a new and much needed sensitivity towards the
natural world. We would become in a position to develop
complementary, non-hierarchical and organic social
relationships as a prolongation of the parallel
relationships and structures of this kind that we encounter
in ecosystems and the biosphere at large. Our primary
focus would be to become creative beings in the fullest
sense of the term, freed from crippling material need and
economic scarcity on the one hand and senseless
consumption on the other, empowered through a
liberatory globalization from below in the form of
43

democratic and confederal assemblies based on direct

participation from authentically individualized citizens
who occupy ourselves with the common good as a
question of dignity and pride which we would find
natural and appealing to do because of the simple fact
that we would no longer posit personalities which are
warped around particularistic economic concerns.

Future prospects may we still draw lessons

from history?
The road ahead will, however, be a long and windy one.
The present confusion after generations of newspeak
has come to identify parliamentarianism with democracy,
with all its grave implications for the implicit
understanding of the human psyche and the individuals
social compass and other means of orientation in an
increasingly complex world. The overall dismal and
ominous effect is the creeping and expanding degree to
which responsibility is pulverized and deferred to future
generations in the form of looming crises the full extent
of which we wont even be able to imagine. In the
present malaise the other social question concerning
mass society which has been treated upon by
independent intellectuals from time to time since the days
44

of Proudhon and Nietzsche, is fortified with the power

apparatuses of the state as a major backbone. The
principal profiteers of the process remain the mass
manufacturers who may comfortably exploit the urge
for consumption created by the existential void in the
politically disempowered member of a social mass.
As regards parliamentarianism and its social and
psychological implications and long term effects, Elias
Canetti juxtaposed its institutional framework to civil war
in his Crowds and Power (1960) in the following way:
War is war because the dead are included in the final
reckoning. Parliament is parliament only as long as the
dead are excluded.20
The problem is, however, profoundly more disturbing
than is conveyed through his catchy play with words, as
long as the processes involved unrelentingly entail the
abdication by the individual party representative of his or
her ultimate integrity as a citizen, similar to the
mechanisms involved when the electorate presented its
simple yes or no decision at the ballot box. The
physical death of the party representatives is never at
stake in functioning parliament decision making
processes, as Canetti rather ironically presents to us as
our solace. Nevertheless, the kind of mental
abdication involved in the representative system implies
that there are souls for sale in this political bazaar. A
45

considerable element of a human beings soul is traded

off by placing the ethical load on the other whether
present or future in a way that makes the parallel to the
casualties in a civil war disturbingly dismal. Apart from
the immediate associations to the title of a famous Gogol
novel, the whole issue demands radical reforms and
resolutions, lest complete chaos and collapse will
constitute our contribution to the generations ahead.
The whole degrading process depicted above was
foreseen and feared by liberals in the 19th century, who
politically and culturally represented the direct heirs of
the Enlightenment. For historians today to describe the
growth of party systems simply as democratization,
makes as much etymological sense as a prison guard
telling the convict who is taken to the guillotine that he is
about to have a shave. As regards the ordinary party
representative, Canetti succinctly informs us that:
Each is convinced that right and reason are on his side.
Conviction comes easily [!] and the purpose of the party
is, precisely, to keep his will and conviction alive.21
In fact, it takes nothing more to wipe away and reduce to
oblivion the whole essence of the concept of paideia,
which for the ancient Greeks was so intimately
intertwined with their pioneering democratic ideals and
institutions indeed, a Greek participant in the ancient
ecclesia could hardly have imagined any kind of
46

democratic life without it. To them democracy was

something that one does, so to speak, rather than a thing
(read: an institution) that simply and permanently is.
Thus, it was constantly in need of being cultivated like a
fragile plant sprout through the close attention paid by
the polis (community/municipality) member on the
execution of civic virtue informed by the vistas and
hopes nourished on behalf of the community at large. To
the extent that it weakens or fades way entirely through
the pursuit of disproportionate and warping self-interests
and/or pulverization of responsibility for the overall
direction that society takes little or nothing is left of
once upon a time established and proclaimed institutions
than empty shells, which are ruthlessly swarmed by
parasitic corporate agents who freely may display a
character trait which was transformed from a vice to a
virtue in the course of the 19th century: greed.
A close study of the whole problem complexes involved
in this malaise of modernity, to borrow the Canadian
philosopher, Charles Taylors phrase, has pointed the
present author in the direction of confederalism and
direct democracy as the only substantial, long term and
viable solutions on a political level, paralleled by
sufficiently volatile and well rounded economic or
vocational orientations among the majority of the citizens
of which the latter aspect is too comprehensive and
complex to be elaborated on in this essay. Both of these
aspects, however, point back to the roots, if one prefer,
47

or maybe rather along another expanding circle

completed for humanity, according to which the most
precious lessons of history are thoroughly absorbed and
digested by the vast majority among our species. The
lessons, however, could undoubtedly and preferably have
been materialized in political wisdom at a much earlier
stage; Enlightenment philosophes such as Montesquieu
and Rousseau did their best to bequeath the hard earned
fruits of their respective life time studies: For the former,
his stern conviction respecting the indispensability of
high ideals of civic virtue in a democracy or a republic
in general and for the latter, the reasoning which states
the case for public sovereignty and its non-representative
essence. Both based their insights partly on their studies
of ancient Greek and Roman history and the respective
emergence and downfall of their cultures; subjects which
constituted such an integral and, not least, antinationalist part of the work conducted by the so-called
Republic of Letters in the long gone Enlightenment era
of the 18th century.

48

Notes:
1

As for resistance against this degenerative social and

economic process, see H. N. Brailfords classic historical
work on the English Revolution in the 1640s, The
Levellers
2

See Karl Polanyi: The Great Transformation; The

Political and Economic Origins of Our Time, with a
foreword by Joseph E. Stiglitz (1944: Boston: Beacon
Press, 2001). Originally published by Farrar & Rinehart,
New York. Despite its many valuable insights in the
processes leading to a wholly market dominated
economic system, his work is marked by the
conventional statist perspectives which prevailed among
the Left at the time of its writing. Hence, it is of less avail
to us as regards suggestions for economic alternatives
than the ideas presented almost a century earlier by for
example Pierre Joseph Proudhon, who included
decentralism, mutualism and confederalism in his vistas
for a future democratic and ecologically viable society.
See for example his criticism of capitalism in The
Philosophy of Misery; The Evolution of Capitalism
System of Economical Contradictions (1847: La Vergne,
USA: Kessinger Publishing, 2010); De la Justice Dans la
Rvolution (1870: Charleston: BiblioLife, 2010); and Iain
McKay (ed.): Property is Theft!; A Pierre-Joseph
Proudhon Anthology (Edinburgh, Oakland/Baltimore: A.
K. Press, 2011).
49

Carl Ortwin Sauer: Land & Life (Berkeley and Los

Angeles: University of California Press, 1965), p. 154.
4

See the essay Modernity and Individualism in this

collection.
5

For alternatives within mental health care, see the

works of David Cooper, for example The Language of
Madness (1978: Harmondsworth, Middlesex, England:
Penguin Books Ltd., 1980). First edition published by
Allen Lane. Cooper dedicated the book to the first
Revolutionary. In each of us.
6

As for ventures into the barbarous logic of capitalism,

see the overview by David Lester: The Gruesome Acts of
Capitalism (A.K. Press, Edinburgh, Scotland, 2007).
7

For those who may be interested in these subjects, the

following works by life long anarchist, the former noble
Russian, Peter A. Kropotkin (1842-1921), The Conquest
of Bread and the quintessential work on meaningful
work, Fields, Factories and Workshops, will be worth
while reading.
8

For a philosophical analysis of Freuds psychoanalytic

theories and research, see the work by a leading figure at
Institute for Social Research in the post World War II
era, Herbert Marcuses Eros & Civilization (Boston:
Beacon Press, 1955).

50

This subject was treated upon extensively by modern

anarchist, Murray Bookchin, in his 1960s and 70s
essays, collected in Post-Scarcity Anarchism and in the
effort to popularize his ideas and thought, Remaking
Society, both of them available from Black Rose Books,
Montreal, Canada, and A. K. Press, Edinburgh, Scotland.
10

ibid. , p. 189.

11a

ibid.

11b

Ivan Illich: Celebration of Awareness; A Call for

Institutional Revolution (1969: Harmondsworth: Penguin
Books, 1973), p. 17. My italics. A. H.
12

For a highly valuable work on the political and

economic structures of the Ancient Greek era, see the
brilliant works by historian, Moses I. Finley, for example
Democracy; Ancient and Modern. (1973: London: The

Hogarth Press, 1985).

13

A subject which occupied moral and existentialist

philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche to an almost obsessive
extent, and articulated for example in his Genealogy of
Morals (1887: New York: Dover Publications, Inc.,
2003). It is easy to start speculating on whether
Nietzsches opponents clinging to an outworn and
reactionary Christianity retorted to nasty means in their
efforts to silence his fierce criticism, ultimately resulting

51

in his mental illness towards the end of his life. After all,
where reason ends, violence begins as always.
14

G. W. F. Hegel: The Phenomenology of Spirit (1807:

London: Oxford University Press, 1977), p. 329.
Translation by A. V. Miller. (My italics. A. H. ).
15

For a thoroughgoing analysis and discussion of the

complexities and ambiguities of dialectical thinking
including its potentially dangerous traps Jean Paul
Sartres little known writings from the 1940s onwards,
collected in Critique of Dialectical Reason, 2 vols.
(1960: London: Verso, 2004), the original French edition
published by Editions Gallimard, Paris, under the title
Critique de la Raison Dialectique.
16

For those who may be somewhat worn out by 200

years of economic misconceptions, see the historical
documentation of the endless list of alternatives offered
throughout the actual era; historian G. D. H. Coles 5
vols. research presentation, A History of Socialist
Thought, especially volume 1; The Forerunners, 17801850, volume 2; Marxism and Anarchism, and volume 5;
Socialism and Fascism, 1931-39.
17

Erich Fromm: Introduction, in Ivan D. Illich: The

Celebration of Awareness; A Call for Institutional
Revolution (1969: Harmondsworth: Penguin Education,
1973), p. 10. Illichs work represents the Enlightenment
tradition in an exemplary manner rather out of tune
52

with the zeitgeist of the period as he addresses topics

such as the indoctrination by statist institutions of
learning as well as the totalitarian implications of a
technocracy run away on auto-pilot, far beyond
democratic control. For a reconstructive approach to
pedagogy and technology, se for example Illichs other
works; Deschooling Society (New York: Harrow Books,
1972), and Tools for Conviviality (New York: Harper &
Row, 1973), both published in the series; World
Perspectives, vols. 44 and 47 respectively.
18

Succinctly concluded by 18th century philosopher and

musician, Jean Jacques Rousseau in his The Social
Contract: it is clear that this contract between the
people and such and such persons would be a particular
act; and from this it follows that it can be neither a law
nor an act of Sovereignty, and that consequently it would
be illegitimate.
19

See an early attempt at developing a social ecological

analysis of the modern human condition and suggestions
towards its improvement, E. A. Gutkinds Community
and Development (1953).
20

Elias Canetti: Crowds and Power (1960: New York:

The Noonday Press; Farrar, Straus and Giraux, 1984), p.
189.
21

ibid. , p. 189.
53

54