Content provided in partnership with
Business Services Industry
10 The subject of freedom at the end of history: socialism beyond humanism
American Journal of Economics and Sociology, The, Jan, 2007 by John Sanbonmatsu
ABSTRACT. The postmodernist turn in theory left the status of humanism in some doubt. This chapter argues that a recuperation of a specifically socialist humanism is both possible and desirable, but only by overcoming the anthropocentrism of radical humanism. Renaissance and Enlightenment conceptions of the subject were rooted in an untenable dichotomy between the human and the animal, in ways that vitiated the idea and ideal of universal freedom. By conflating subjectivity as such with human subjectivity, humanism created a diremption in the world that placed the knower (human consciousness) on one side, and the merely known (objectified Nature) on the other. Marxism and socialist humanism reproduced this error in ways that have undermined the socialist vision of universal emancipation, misconstrued the nature of the subject, and overlooked the significance of human domination of other animals. The author advocates a new approach, what he calls metahumanism, to affirm a "two-sided" freedom in which the liberation of other animals from human oppression, and the emancipation of ourselves as animals--that is, the restoration of the sensual dimension of existence, free sexual expression, and valorization of the labor and love of the body--would become central features of a new movement for civil and cultural reform.
I
Introduction
My OBJECTIVE IN THIS SHORT ESSAY is to clarify the nature of the subject and its relationship to historical possibilities of freedom. My purpose in doing so is to help prepare the ground for a comprehensive new theory and practice of liberatory politics, what I have elsewhere called metahumanism. (1) Metahumanism is my term both for an emergent social movement--the world historical movement to establish a new form of civilization based on social equality, justice, and reconciliation with nature--and for the theory that seeks to ground that movement. In essence, metahumanism is simply the ethical ontology, and political practice, of universal freedom.
My project, in a sense, takes up where humanist critical theory left off 40 years ago, when Anchor Books published Socialist Humanism: An International Symposium (1965). Conceived and edited by Erich Fromm, the symposium included essays from practically every significant critical or socialist theorist in Europe and the United States, including Raya Dunayevskya, Herbert Marcuse, Lucien Goldmann, Bertrand Russell, Ernst Bloch, Galvano della Volpe, Bronislaw Baczko, Norman Thomas, and Mathilde Niel, among others. What bound this otherwise diverse set of contributors together was consensus on a single point: that socialism entailed humanism, and that humanism entailed socialism. The tenor of the collection was optimistic and forward-looking. As Fromm wrote in the book's introduction, the symposium was intended to demonstrate "that socialist Humanism is no longer the concern of a few dispersed intellectuals, but a movement to be found throughout the world, developing independently in different countries." (2)
As it turned out, however, the socialist humanist movement was already at its apogee, and it swiftly declined in the years that followed. The explosive growth of the New Left movement in the late 1960s, with its sudden spontaneous energy and critique of alienation, both concretized socialist humanist ideals and at the same time privileged practice over theory in a way that tended to militate against the kind of grand theoretical synthesis Fromm and others had hoped for. (3) With the collapse of the New Left in the 1970s, and the further weakening of working-class movements throughout the world over the next two decades, the Left as such went into retreat and socialism all but disappeared from political discourse. The Marxist theory of revolution was seen to be a dead letter issue, and Marx's conception of the historical subject was criticized for leaving out, among others, women, people of color, and gays and lesbians. By the 1980s, many critical philosophers had also turned against the very idea of humanism and "the human." Structuralist and poststructuralist theories decentered the subject and in effect reduced it to the status of a thing. With Enlightenment exposed as a destructive myth and Reason shown to be little more than an idealist conceit disguising the will-to-power of a particular historical subject (the white European man), postmodernists held that we were now free to embrace the more liberatory discourse of "difference." The dis-integration of the unitary subject, on this view, yields a multitude of political and aesthetic possibilities, an infinite play of identity as multiplicity. (4) Anti-humanist poststructuralism is still seen by many to be an improvement over totalizing conceptions of the subject in classical Marxism, as well as a tonic to the liberal myth of a self-identical subject immune to historical contingency and power.
The main trouble with the postmodernist rejection of the subject in theory, however, is that it has fatefully coincided with the obliteration of the individual human and nonhuman subject in social or historical fact. That subject is faced today with annihilation from two sides. On one side lies the threat of outright biological extinction from any combination of ecological catastrophe, natural or human-produced plague, or nuclear war. On the other lies alienation, the destruction of autonomous thought and culture, and the reduction of life-world to the commodity. Renunciation of the subject in theory, while originally intended as a radical gesture, is in the present context thus all but indistinguishable from celebration of reification. As the systemic ecological and social contradictions of capitalism as a world system intensify, undermining every basis for future ecological survival, democracy, the comity of nations, and, in a word, the possibility of human happiness and nonhuman well-being, the objective need for an alternative form of human civilization becomes ever more existentially urgent. Without proper philosophical ground beneath its feet, however, any attempt by critical praxis to transform the world is likely to be doomed to strategic incoherence and a lack of fundamental clarity on the ethical dimensions of its own practice. Hence the urgent need, not for further celebration of fragmentation and chaos (which is largely what passes for "critical" theory today) but, on the contrary, for a robust conception of the subject and a general phenomenology of its freedom.
