Random Thoughts On Civilization

I’m not going to write anything profound here. I recently read Agnes Humbert’s wartime memoir and had the opportunity to travel to France and participate in some of the social and class struggles taking place there. In returning to the US, and to the struggles taking place here, I spent some time reflecting on what makes up the fabric of civilization and how sheer that fabric can be at times.

Humbert makes the point somewhere in her journal that the anti-fascist effort was an effort against a broader and more deeply rooted barbarism, that the struggle for civilization and against barbarism is the real job of society and that society must stoop to barbaric means on occasion in order to defend itself. Humbert states this as the conundrum civil society faces without suggesting a path or method that gets us out of the box. We know from her life and example that Humbert was a woman of the left who engaged in active resistance to fascism, that she fought to survive while imprisoned as a slave laborer by the Nazis, that she became a postwar administrator and nazi hunter in liberated German territory and that she struggled through the immediate postwar period with some misgivings and with her antiwar sentiments.

Putting aside Humbert’s petit-bourgeois biases, which were formidable, we can agree from the standpoint of 2009 that she raised a key question about civilization and barbarism for our times—and she was not alone in doing so, of course. The easy answer for us is that socialism will resolve the contradictions between civilization and barbarism by bringing the means of production and distribution under social control, struggling against all forms of alienation and insisting upon complete equality between people under conditions of expanding class struggle and people’s power. This is summed up in our historic slogan “Socialism or barbarism!”

It should be so easy. Bourgeois science and the dominant trends in writing and understanding history depend upon the idea that civilization belongs to the west and the north and to those societies which developed mercantile and industrial class relations early on. It became the mission of these societies to transmit civilization and culture to the south and to those territories and people who did not develop as much of the north and as western Europe and the US eventually did. These prejudices even affected marxism and the left generally. It has become part of our job to deconstruct and disrupt this imperialist paradigm and to replace it with a partisan social structure that liberates and recreates civilization. It has been our historic goal to do this without counter-posing nihilism to society and without adopting barbaric means and ends.

Traditional marxism has seen civilization in terms of class society, including all of the historical periods existing between tribal communism and the hoped-for communism of the future. Since all historical periods occurring with class divisions are described as “civilization,” the word itself should be freed from being confused with some bourgeois concept of social superiority. Moreover, marxism has broken “civilization” away from the imposed bourgeois opposition between civilization and barbarism. We generally counterpose socialism to barbarism instead, recognizing that class societies impose their own forms of barbarism on all of us by being based on tyrannies of commodity production, commodities and the appropriation of surplus value by a minority (the capitalists). We assume that the logical goals, conscious or not, of science and most social production are the eventual abolition of class relations and alienation. For the purposes of this posting, however, I am using “civilization” to refer less precisely to the relatively advanced forms of social relations which insure some levels of social protection and participation.

Likewise, “civil society” has been used historically by marxists to refer to specific social formations—the historic associations between people which developed independently of the state and the family in Europe’s 17th century as commodity production and the rule of bourgeois law broke down feudal society. The term has reemerged to refer either to political and economic citizen’s associations which play an activist role or to the petit-bourgeoisie themselves. I have refrained from using “civil society” here in its marxist sense or in the less common way of describing a class or class relationship.

Marxism is correct in our concepts and in our language and the goals of marxism remain well within humanity’s reach. For the purposes of this posting, however, I am going to step a bit outside of our marxist framework.

Civilization—that advanced form of social relations which insure some levels of social protection and participation—is indeed threatened by forms of barbarism intimately tied to capitalism. If the class relations and antagonisms which necessarily form the base of capitalist society do not themselves work against civilization--and they certainly do--then the ecological and environmental crises and the never-ending cycle of permanent arms and war economies in conflict with one another do. Civil society—the activism of citizens insisting upon democratic rights and wielding democracy for the greatest good—has as one of its primary tasks struggling against enforced capitalist complacency and fear and their mirror images of anarchism and nihilism as civilization stumbles under its capitalist-created burdens. The contending forces in these struggles are never equal. Given the possibilities of gaining or losing power, each side will then use barbaric methods. What marxism can provide under these circumstances is a sort of generalized road map and method which helps the proletariat, oppressed nationalities and others move forward and not doom ourselves to barbarism of our own making.

Whether we use marxist, bourgeois or other definitions, civilization remains a relative concept. We dispute with the bourgeoisie and others what exactly civilization is relative to, but the relativism of civilization cannot be doubted. In the US it is the fashion of the far right to attack “relativism,” but they don’t believe what they’re saying and neither should we. There is no end-point, no pure civilization, no point where human beings can rest with the assurance that they have reached their full potentials and achieved a fully civilized world. If this is the case, then we have a spectrum of choices and opportunities that are limited only by the development of our means of production and distribution, our specific economic and political state, our numbers and our will.

On one end of this spectrum we can see societies which have in place social and communal structures which protect and empower people and which enable discourse and action. And not only that, but at this end of the spectrum we find civil society fighting not just to defend these gains but also to expand them. Under these conditions culture flourishes. There is constant and obvious contradiction at work here because the dialectic of struggle is playing out. On the other side of the spectrum there are the wars and disasters and either totalitarianism or the abandonment and deprivation of the masses of people. Tilting seriously and dangerously in that direction are the capitalist governments which so often provoke these crises and depend themselves upon armies and prisons, borders, a minimal social safety net, the misuse of the world’s resources and an outdated division of labor to maintain place and order. The blinding lie of our time may be that these latter conditions are civilization.