We have arrived at the moment foretold by the revolutionaries of the year 1848…
January 24th, 2015 ·
We have arrived at the moment foretold by the revolutionaries of the year 1848. The future of the world system at the end of globalization remains tremendously uncertain, but the crisis of capitalism at a time of planetary danger summons at once its dialectical companion, the idea of communism. We cannot indulge the shibboleths of the failure of communism,
if capitalism is itself a failure. It is useful
therefore to consider the question of emergent communism in the wake of the French Revolution in the context of the model of macroevolutionary history demonstrated in World History and the Eonic Effect. The difficulties of historical materialism suggest the need for a larger dimension of the historical, and a look at the place of economic systems in the record of civilization. It is important to take the idea of communism (we must immediately recast the idea as a ‘new communism’) critically, but can we do the same for the delusive dogmas of capitalism? And the issue of evolution in its Darwinian ideology prone to social darwinist manipulations of class warfare becomes the object of critical enquiry. The danger of the current paradigm is the promotion of the idea of capitalism as an evolutionary game of the survival of the fittest. But the reality is the danger of social and species degeneration under the regime of unlimited market civilization. A future evolution of man is not the drama of the last man proposed by Nietzsche, but a social context of cooperation that can allow the development of man in a coherent and caring environment beyond the destructive character of markets: a framework of postcapitalist communism is the foundation for a new and future man, evolving as a species, and not as a series of warring evolutionary degenerates in competition.
1848+: The End(s) of History 