A reasoned utopia and economic fatalism (Pierre Bourdieu)

scanner Pierre Bourdieu A Reasoned Utopia and Economic Fatalism To the town of Ludwigshafen, its mayor, Mr Wolfgang Schulte, and the Ernst Bloch Institute, my warmest thanks for the honour I have been awarded, which associates my own name with that of one of the German philosophers whom I most admire.1 My thanks also to Mr Ulrich Beck for the very generous address he has just given He leads me to think that we may, in the near future, see the utopia of a European intellectual collective, which I have long advocated, brought into being My only criticism of this eulogy is that it is really too generous, especially in the way it attributed to my individual personality alone a number of properties or qualities which are also the product of social conditions I cannot help feeling that in being so honoured, in being brought into the orbit of a great defender of utopianism—these days so often discredited, dismissed and ridiculed in the name of economic realism—I am being authorized, indeed urged, to try to define what the intellectual’s role can and should be in relation to utopia in general and European utopia in particular Let us acknowledge the fact that we are currently in a period of neo-conservative reconstruction But this conservative revolution is taking an unprecedented form: there is no attempt, as there was in earlier times, to invoke an idealized past through the exaltation of earth and blood, the archaic themes of ancient agrarian mythologies It is a new type of conservative revolution that claims connection with progress, reason and science—economics actually—to justify its own re-establishment, and by the same token tries to relegate progressive thought and action to archaic status It erects into defining standards for all practices, and thus into ideal rules, the regularities of the economic world abandoned to its own logic: the law of the market, the law of the strongest It ratifies and glorifies the rule of what we call the financial markets, a return to a sort of radical capitalism answering to no law except that of maximum profit; an undisguised, unrestrained capitalism, but one that has been rationalized, tuned to the limit of its economic efficiency through the introduction of modern forms of domination (‘management’) and manipulative techniques like market research, marketing and commercial advertising This is the text of Pierre Bourdieu’s speech of acceptance of the Ernst-Bloch Preis der Stadt Ludwigshafen, 22 November 1997 125 The misleading aspect of this conservative revolution is that it retains nothing, apparently, of the murky pastoral Black Forest beloved of the conservative revolutionaries of the 1930s; it is trapped out with all the signs of modernity After all, it comes from Chicago, doesn’t it? Galileo said that the natural world is written in mathematical language Now people are trying to make out that the social world is written in economic language It is through the weapon of mathematics—and also that of media power—that neoliberalism has become the supreme form of the conservative counterattack, looming for the last thirty years under the name of ‘the end of ideology’ or, more recently, ‘the end of history’ What is presented to us as an uncrossable horizon of thought—the end of critical utopias—is really none other than an economistic fatalism which can be criticized in the terms used by Ernst Bloch in Geist der Utopie when addressing such economism and fatalism as there is to be found in Marxism: ‘The same man—Marx—who stripped production of all its fetishized characteristics, who believed he could analyze and exorcize all the irrationalities of history as being simply obscurities due to the class situation or the production process, obscurities which had not been seen or understood and whose influence therefore seemed inevitable; the same man who exiled from history all dreams, all active utopias, every “telos” recalling the religious, behaves towards the “productive forces”, the calculus of the “process of production”, in the same over-constitutive manner, finding the same pantheism, the same mysticism, and claiming for them the same ultimate determining force that Hegel had claimed for the “idea” and Schopenhauer for his alogical “will”.’2 This fetishization of the productive forces resulting in fatalism is to be found today, paradoxically, in the prophets of neoliberalism and the high priests of the Deutschmark and monetary stability Neoliberalism is a powerful economic theory whose strictly symbolic strength, combined with the effect of theory, redoubles the force of the economic realities it is supposed to express It ratifies the spontaneous philosophy of the people who run large multinationals and of the agents of high finance—in particular pension-fund managers Relayed throughout the world by national and international politicians, civil servants, and most of all the universe of senior journalists—all more or less equally ignorant of the underlying mathematical theology—it is becoming a sort of universal belief, a new ecumenical gospel This gospel, or rather the soft vulgate which is put forward everywhere under the name of liberalism, is concocted out of a collection of ill-defined words—‘globalization’, ‘flexibility’, ‘deregulation’ and so on—which, through their liberal or even libertarian connotations, may help give the appearance of a message of freedom and liberation to a conservative ideology which thinks itself opposed to all ideology In fact, this philosophy knows and recognizes no purpose but the everincreasing creation of wealth and, more secretly, its concentration in the hands of a small privileged minority; and it therefore leads to a combat by every means, including the destruction of the environment and human sacrifice, against any obstacle to the maximization of profit Supporters of laisser-faire, like Thatcher, Reagan and their successors, are careful in Ernst Bloch, L’esprit de l’utopie [1923], Paris 1977, vol i, p 290 126 practice not to ‘laisser faire’ but, on the contrary, to leave a free hand to the logic of financial markets by waging total war on trade unions, on the social achievements of the last couple of centuries, in a word against all the forms of civilization associated with the social state Neoliberal policy can now be judged by its results, which are clear for all to see, despite systematic efforts to prove, through statistical sleight of hand and gross trickery, that the United States or Britain has achieved full employment There is mass unemployment; what jobs there are have become precarious, the resulting permanent insecurity affecting an increasing proportion of the population, even in the middle classes; there is profound demoralization linked to the collapse of elementary solidarities, especially in the family, and all the consequences of this state of anomie: juvenile delinquency, crime, drugs, alcoholism, the reappearance in France and elsewhere of fascist-style political movements; and there is a gradual destruction of social achievements, any defence of which is denounced as old-fashioned conservatism To this we may now add the destruction of the economic and social foundations of humanity’s rarest cultural achievements The autonomy enjoyed by the universes of cultural production in relation to the market, which had increased continuously through the struggles of writers, artists and scientists, is under increasing threat The dominion of ‘commerce’ and ‘the commercial’ increases daily over literature, notably through concentration in the publishing industry which is increasingly subjected to the constraints of immediate profit; over cinema—we may wonder what will remain, in ten years’ time, of a European experimental art cinema—unless something is done to give avant-garde producers the means of production and, perhaps more importantly, distribution All this, without mentioning the social services, doomed either to submit to the directly interested orders of state or business bureaucracies or to be economically strangled What, I will be asked, is the role of intellectuals in all this? I make no attempt to list—it would take too long and be too cruel—all the forms of default or, worse still, collaboration I need only mention the arguments of so-called modern and postmodern philosophers who, when not content with leaving well alone and burying themselves in scholastic games, restrict themselves to verbal defence of reason and rational dialogue or, worse still, suggest an allegedly postmodern but actually radical-chic version of the ideology of the end of ideologies, complete with the condemnation of the grand narratives and a nihilistic denunciation of science How, in this somewhat discouraging environment, are we to avoid becoming demoralized? How are we to restore life, and social strength, to the ‘considered utopianism’ of which Ernst Bloch speaks in reference to Francis Bacon?3 For a start, what should this phrase be taken to mean? Giving a rigorous meaning to the opposition drawn by Marx between ‘sociologism’ (pure and simple submission to social laws) and ‘utopianism’ (the adventurous challenging of these laws) Ernst Bloch describes the ‘considered utopian’ as one who acts ‘by virtue of his fully aware foreknowledge of the objective trend’, the objective, and real, possibility of his ‘epoch’; one who, in other words, ‘anticipates psychologically a possible Bloch, L’esprit de l’utopie, vol 1, 176 127 reality’ Rational utopianism is defined as being both against ‘pure wishful thinking (which) has always brought discredit on utopia’ and against ‘philistine platitudes concerned essentially with facts’; it is opposed to ‘the—ultimately defeatist—heresy of an objectivist automatism according to which the world’s objective contradictions would be sufficient in themselves to revolutionize the world in which they occur’ and at the same time to ‘activism for its own sake’, pure voluntarism based on an excess of optimism.4 So against this bankers’ fatalism, that wants us to believe the world cannot be any different from the way it is—wholly amenable, in other words, to the interests and wishes of bankers—intellectuals, and all others who really care about the good of humanity, should re-establish a utopian thought with scientific backing, both in its aims, which should be compatible with objective trends, and in its means which also have to be scientifically tested They need to work collectively on analyses able to launch realistic projects and actions closely matched to the objective processes of the order they are meant to transform Reasoned utopianism, as I have defined it here, is undoubtedly what is most lacking in Europe today The way to resist this Europe—the one that bankers’ thought is trying to railroad us into accepting—is not to reject Europe itself from a nationalist position, as some do, but to mount a progressive rejection of the neoliberal Europe defined by banks and bankers Of course, it is in their interests to make out that any rejection of the Europe they favour is tantamount to rejecting Europe in any form But in rejecting a Europe defined and dominated solely by the banks we will be rejecting banker’s thought, a process that—under neoliberal cover—ends by making money the gauge of all things, even the value of men and women in the labour market, and so on from one thing to the next through all the dimensions of existence; a process that, by setting profit as the sole criterion for evaluating education, culture, art and literature, condemns us to a flat philistine civilization of fast food, airport novels and TV soaps Resistance to the bankers’ Europe—and the conservative restoration it promises—can only be European And it can only be really European, in the sense of freed from interests, assumptions, prejudices and habits of thought that are national and still vaguely nationalist, if it is the deed of all Europeans, in other words a concerted combination of intellectuals from all the European countries, of trade unions from all the European countries, of the most diverse associations from all the European countries This is why the most urgent task at the moment is not the composition of common European programmes, but the creation of institutions—parliaments, international federations, European associations of this or that: truckers, publishers, teachers, and so forth, but also defenders of trees, fish, mushrooms, pure air, children and all the rest— within which some common European programmes can be discussed and elaborated People will say that all this exists already, but in fact I am quite certain of the contrary—there is no need to look any further than the present state of the European federation of trade unions; the only Ibid., pp 180, 178 128 European international body really under construction and possessing some level of effectiveness is that of the technocrats, against which I have nothing whatsoever to say, indeed I would be the first to defend it against the simplistic and usually stupidly nationalist or—worse still— populist doubts being cast on it Lastly, to avoid having to give a general and abstract answer to the question I began by asking—concerning the possible role of intellectuals in constructing the European utopia—I would like to say what contribution I personally hope to make to this immense and urgent task Convinced that the most yawning gaps in European construction are in four main areas—the social state and its functions; unification of the trade unions; harmonization and modernization of the education systems; articulation between economic policy and social policy—I am currently working, in collaboration with researchers from different European countries, on the conception and fabrication of the organizational structures essential for carrying out the comparable and complementary research that is needed to give utopianism in these matters its reasoned character, especially, for example, throwing light on the social obstacles to a real Europeanization of institutions like the state, the educational system and the unions The fourth project, which is particularly dear to my heart, is concerned with the articulation of economic policy and what we call social policy, more precisely the social effects and costs of economic policy It involves trying to track down the primary causes of the different forms of social misery that afflict men and women in European societies; and this nearly always takes us back to economic decisions It is an opportunity for the sociologist, who is not normally called in, except to mend crockery broken by economists, to remind us that sociology could and should play an initial part in political decisions which are increasingly left to the economists or dictated by economic considerations of the narrowest sort Through detailed description of the suffering caused by neoliberal policies—along the lines of the descriptions in La Misère du monde5—and through a systematic cross-referencing of, on the one hand, economic indices concerned with the social policy of businesses (redundancies, management methods, salaries and so on) as well as its economic results (profits, productivity and so on) with, on the other hand, indices of a more obviously social type (industrial accidents, occupational diseases, alcoholism, drug use, suicide, delinquency, crime, rape, and so on), I would like to raise the question of the social costs of economic violence; and thus try to lay foundations for an economics of well-being that would take into account all those things that the people who run the economy, and economists, leave out of the more or less fanciful calculations in whose name they purport to govern us In conclusion, therefore, I need only formulate the question which ought to be at the centre of any reasoned utopia concerning Europe: how we create a really European Europe, one that is free from all dependence on any of the imperialisms—starting with the imperialism that affects cultural production and distribution in particular, via commercial constraints— Pierre Bourdieu, ed., La Misère du monde, Paris 1993 129 and also liberated from all the national and nationalist residues that still prevent Europe from accumulating, augmenting and distributing all that is most universal in the tradition of each of its component nations? To end with a wholly concrete piece of ‘reasoned utopianism’, let me suggest that this issue, which I regard as crucial, be placed on the programme of the Ernst Bloch Centre and of the international organization of ‘reflective utopians’ whose seat it could become Translated by John Howe 130 ... cultural production and distribution in particular, via commercial constraints— Pierre Bourdieu, ed., La Misère du monde, Paris 1993 129 and also liberated from all the national and nationalist... occur’ and at the same time to ‘activism for its own sake’, pure voluntarism based on an excess of optimism.4 So against this bankers’ fatalism, that wants us to believe the world cannot be any... the way it is—wholly amenable, in other words, to the interests and wishes of bankers—intellectuals, and all others who really care about the good of humanity, should re-establish a utopian thought