[Marxism] The new historical simultaneity

["ivonaldo.leite" <ivonaldo.leite@xxxxxxxxxx>]

THE NEW HISTORICAL SIMULTANEITY.

By Robert Kurz (http://www.geocities.com/grupokrisis2003/rkurz_en154.htm)

The debate about the globalisation seems to have arrived currently to a 
exhaustion state. This is not due to a weakening of the underlying process, but 
to the lack of air for new interpretive ideas. Almost nobody dares to speak of 
the end of the history of the modernization. It is certain that meanwhile whole 
libraries were already written on the fact of the globalisation of the capital 
(the transnational dispersion of the economic functions) and the separation 
between the national economy and the world market and the whole previous 
referential framework remains diluted. But the consequences to take out of that 
recognition were delayed most of the times up to now. The old concepts still go 
to tow, although they no longer correspond to the new reality.

For years the maximum of the critical reflection was considered to defend the 
national particularity in front of the abstract universality in the modern way 
of capitalist production. In the 70s, the so-called euro communism affirmed 
that the Marxist theory had been frequently too universal and, consequently, 
should be finally «summarized"in national terms, in order to create a popular 
socialism with the "colours" of France, Germany, Italy etc. But that 
announcement was already reactionary in the same moment of its formulation. In 
the process of the globalisation, the relationship finally was reversed. The 
own national particularity became empty abstraction, though present it is true, 
but only as silt of a time already past. The history is national only as 
history of the past, but not of the future. From now on there will no longer be 
more French, German, Brazilian, Chinese history... The historical concretion in 
the immediate referential space of the world society will no longer refer in 
the future to the particularities and the national contexts, but to the 
transnational ones. That is also applied (and directly) to cultural identities, 
social movements and "post-political" conflicts.

The forced national community is not, however, the only essential 
characteristic of the past that becomes obsolete. The spatial structure of the 
national particularities reciprocally defined was also chained to a temporary 
structure of stages of capitalist development reciprocally defined. The 
universe of the nations was an universe of historical no-simultaneity. 
Considering that the modern system producer of goods had only extended 
gradually from Europe in the XIX and XX centuries, the diverse ages of the 
capitalism were followed immediately one after another. What was still the 
future for some, was for others the present or the immediate past. That 
unevenness of the historical time caused by itself the paradigm of the 
"development "that was presented in the capitalist categories like a recovery 
race of the historical retarded ones. Great Britain, Germany and other 
continental European countries during the XIX century went through a similar 
"recuperating modernization"; in the XX century, in front of the West, Russia, 
China and the ex-colonial countries of the global south confined their selves 
to repeat the same thing. The nation became the specific space of the 
historical no-simultaneity.

The classic western labour movement was also determined by a similar paradigm; 
in this case the "recuperating modernization" did not refer, or at least not in 
first line, to the position of the own nation in front of the most advanced 
nations, but above all the judicial and political of the salaried worker in 
front of other social classes, inside the same nation. It was at stake the 
"recognition" of the wage earners as juridical subjects of their work force and 
as full citizens. The right of universal and equal vote, women's juridical 
equality, strike right, association freedom, meeting freedom and the autonomy 
in the wage negotiation were important contents of that "recuperating 
modernization" bound to the internal social relationships; was only reached, 
even in the most advanced western countries, during the XX century. The 
external recognition of the historical retarded ones in the east and the south, 
as nations in the world market, corresponded to the political and juridical 
internal recognition of the wage-earners as citizens and right subject.

But that recognition was, in some respects, a historical trap. Then, as the 
societies of the diverse world regions were confirmed and established as formal 
subjects of the capitalism in the same way that the individual wage-earners, 
they were also this way condemned inevitably to the national and social forms 
of the modern system producer of goods. Both the States of the "regenerating 
modernization" and the labour parties and the national unions suffered a 
mutation, becoming executioners of the false "natural laws"of the system. Under 
the globalisation conditions, all of them have nothing else to do but to 
administer in a more or less repressive way the capitalist crisis. What the 
social democracy had already practiced previously from the First World War is 
now repeated to global scale.

Perhaps it is thought that this negative development paled the glory of the 
"national liberation" and of the national labour parties. In certain way it is 
also just like that. All over the world a strong dissatisfaction burns facing 
to the political instances of the traditional left that lost completely its 
opposition quality, exactly in the moment of the new world crisis, since they 
remained linked to the paradigms of the «regenerating modernization", already 
emptied of matter. But those paradigms are so deeply ingrained that they 
continue being effective even among the dissatisfied ones. There is something 
phantasmagoric in the manner of the new opposition, facing the 
former-opposition now entered in the representation of the dominant system, 
abides blindly to the obsolete patterns of the submerged universe of the 
no-simultaneity. The criticism to the crisis' co-administration in which the 
old national liberation movements and the traditional labour parties that 
arrived to the power participate, is revealed this way weak and not very 
trustworthy, since it wants to repeat in the content, once again, what 
objectively failed a long time ago.

This is gaudier in the world movement against the globalisation, with their 
protests, social forums and conferences in Porto Alegre, Paris, Berlin etc. 
That movement is on one hand organized in a transnational way, but, on the 
other hand, paradoxically, it counts apart from its members, with national 
partisan articulations next to the groups operating in the transnational ambit; 
among them there are even those whose mother organizations are in the 
government and they execute exactly the "economic laws" against its effects the 
global social movement fights.

But the content of most of the assertions is the one that mainly remains 
completely strange to the globalisation process. Partially transnational at 
least according to its form, the movement would like to reach a "political 
regulation" of the financial markets and the general conditions of the goods 
production and distribution, although the logic of such regulation was bound to 
the frame of the national State. Therefore they want to revive, from that 
moment even in the global ambit, exactly the procedure that already failed 
historically in the ambit of the national State, the only one appropriate for 
it. It is a hopelessly anachronic and unreal option.

That reducing criticism implicitly starts with the statement that the societies 
could still "grow" in the frame of the bourgeois modernity, although the 
globalisation and the third industrial revolution have already bust (exploded) 
that frame. That is also applied to the economic and philosophical fundamental 
suppositions that are revealed equally anachronic.

In the economic side the expectation is that the gigantic mass of global and 
cheap work force would still represent a reserve for the capital appraisement, 
now no longer under the form of a national development but under the form of 
transnational globalized capital. Some wait and other fear that it could arise, 
once more, an era of traditional exploitation. Partly that alternative leans on 
the concept of "average social productivity". That average degree of production 
scientification is relatively high in the developed capitalist countries and 
relatively low in the countries of the periphery. It is expected that a new 
average of productivity in the mondial ambit takes place with the growing 
globalisation that would be lower in comparison with the current western 
average and higher in comparison with the current one of the east and south. 
Basing on the new standard, it is believed that it will be possible to absorb a 
considerable part of the reservation momentarily with no practical use of the 
global work force in the process of capital appraisement.

But that calculation does not work. How is the average of the productivity 
measured? It is measured in agreement with the average degree of the 
technological scientification of the production. However the frame to which 
really refers that average is decisive. It is unequivocally the 
economic-national frame of the social production. Only in the inner space of a 
national economy are applied the common conditions-limit that can produce in a 
general way something like a "social average". A common level of development of 
the infrastructure, of the education system etc. is part of it. In the 
environment of the world market, however, common conditions-limit like that do 
not exist. For that reason, neither a global average level of productivity can 
be settled. The relationship of the nations or the world regions in the world 
market does not present any analogy with the companies inside a national 
economy. Then, in the global frame it is imposed unavoidably the level of 
productivity of the oldest industrial countries in West, more developed in 
capitalist terms. In the same measure that the national space becomes 
objectively obsolete by means of the globalisation, that level forms the 
immediate global and filterless approach for all the market participants. It is 
illusory the hope that, in the new transnational system of references, the 
average of the social average productivity ends up diminishing and let the work 
force without practical use be articulated again, more easily in the production.

In the philosophical aspect, a similarly anachronic expectation determines the 
thought of the unsatisfied ones. Because the philosophy of the so called 
Illuminism which foundations were settle in the XVIII century, it is still 
considered the impassable horizon of the ideas. They pretend that the world, 
also in that sense, would continue its development within the frame of the 
bourgeois modernity. As for this, the new opposition does not take any step 
beyond the old one. But the paradigm of the Illuminism is equally used up by 
the economy of the modern system producer of goods, of which it was simply the 
philosophical expression. The main ideas of Illuminism, "freedom ", "equality 
"and "self-responsibility" of the "autonomous individual" are, according to 
their concept, carved for the capitalist form of the subject of the "abstract 
work" (Marx), of the owners´ economy, of the totalitarian market and of the 
universal rivalry. Freedom and equality in the sense of the Illuminism were 
always identical to the self-submission of the people to the social forms of 
the capitalist system.

The fight of the classic labour movement and the national liberation movements 
for juridical and political "recognition"could appeal to the Illuminism 
philosophy because its single objective was to enter and grow in those forms 
whose social condition-limit was formed by the nation exactly like in the 
economic aspect. There are only national systems of bourgeois right. Bursting 
the national frame, the globalisation makes obsolete not alone the economic 
form, but also the juridical and political form of the bourgeois subject. The 
Illuminism philosophy is historically completed with that. It does not make any 
sense to invoke again the idealism of the bourgeois freedom, because for that 
kind of freedom there is not further space for emancipation. This is also 
applied to the world regions that were never beyond the dictatorial beginnings 
of a universalization in the subject's modern way. As the economic 
productivity, the bourgeois subjectivity is also measured by the homogeneous 
global standard, where the most of the human beings do not fit.

Evidently the new social movement all over the world did not still take 
conscience of those conditions. The constitution of the capital's transnational 
structures is identical to a time of historical simultaneity. Although the 
situations were different, from the starting point, inherited from the past, 
the problems of the future only can be formulated as common problems to an 
immediate world society. According as much with the form as with the content to 
the old paradigms of the left is obsolete: nation, political regulation, 
bourgeois recognition, Illuminism. The critic should be deeper and understand 
the repressive presuppositions of those concepts instead of claiming its 
ideals. Otherwise it falls in the vacuum without any effect.

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