A reasoned utopia and economic fatalism (Pierre Bourdieu)

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 ha

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 col-lective, which I have long advocated, brought into being My only crit-icism 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 discred-ited, 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-con-servative reconstruction But this conneo-con-servative 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 rati-fies and glorirati-fies the rule of what we call the financial markets, a return

to a sort of radical capitalism answering to no law except that of maxi-mum 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 commer-cial advertising

1 This is the text of Pierre Bourdieu’s speech of acceptance of the Ernst-Bloch Preis der Stadt Ludwigshafen, 22 November 1997.

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2Ernst Bloch, L’esprit de l’utopie [1923], Paris 1977, vol i, p 290.

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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 eco-nomic 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 cal-culus of the “process of production”, in the same over-constitutive man-ner, 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 multi-nationals 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 journal-ists—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 con-servative ideology which thinks itself opposed to all ideology

In fact, this philosophy knows and recognizes no purpose but the ever-increasing 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

3Bloch, L’esprit de l’utopie, vol 1, 176.

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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 solidari-ties, especially in the family, and all the consequences of this state of anomie: juvenile delinquency, crime, drugs, alcoholism, the reappear-ance in Frreappear-ance 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 con-tinuously 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 pub-lishing 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 some-thing is done to give avant-garde producers the means of production and, perhaps more importantly, distribution All this, without mention-ing 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 ver-sion of the ideology of the end of ideologies, complete with the condem-nation 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?3For 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 ‘utopi-anism’ (the adventurous challenging of these laws) Ernst Bloch describes

the ‘considered utopian’ as one who acts ‘by virtue of his fully aware

fore-knowledge of the objective trend ’, the objective, and real, possibility of his

‘epoch’; one who, in other words, ‘anticipates psychologically a possible

4 Ibid., pp 180, 178.

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reality’ Rational utopianism is defined as being both against ‘pure wish-ful 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 com-patible with objective trends, and in its means which also have to be

sci-entifically 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 liter-ature, condemns us to a flat philistine civilization of fast food, airport novels and TVsoaps

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 coun-tries This is why the most urgent task at the moment is not the compo-sition of common European programmes, but the creation of institutions—parliaments, international federations, European associa-tions 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

5Pierre Bourdieu, ed., La Misère du monde, Paris 1993.

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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 ques-tion I began by asking—concerning the possible role of intellectuals in constructing the European utopia—I would like to say what contribu-tion 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 sys-tems; articulation between economic policy and social policy—I am cur-rently working, in collaboration with researchers from different European countries, on the conception and fabrication of the organiza-tional structures essential for carrying out the comparable and comple-mentary 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

educa-tional 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 bro-ken by economists, to remind us that sociology could and should play an initial part in political decisions which are increasingly left to the econo-mists or dictated by economic considerations of the narrowest sort Through detailed description of the suffering caused by neoliberal

poli-cies—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,

man-agement 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,

alco-holism, 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 econ-omists, 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 do 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—

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 sug-gest that this issue, which I regard as crucial, be placed on the pro-gramme of the Ernst Bloch Centre and of the international organization

of ‘reflective utopians’ whose seat it could become

Translated by John Howe