in the colorful world of political philosophy, there are old habits die hard. One of these is the tendency on the part of the ultra-left thinkers, to camouflage their own ideas (always the same) behind a veneer of apparent modernity. Typically, though, just barely scratch the surface to find themselves in the hands of the usual two or three Marxist dogmas, recycled as best and exhibited to the public as if they were absolute and revolutionary innovations.
It is a attitude altogether understandable, when you are forced to support and disseminate theories that history regularly deals with counterfeit in merciless fashion. Moreover, as explained Karl R. Popper in very difficult times, “Marxism has died of Marxism” because of the obstinacy of the Marxists to want to protect the hard core of its scientific paradigm with ad hoc hypothesis more fanciful and improbable, every once the logic, facts or history it dismantled long ago.
No wonder, then, that today the political non-fiction market offers us clearly inspired by Marxist titles disguised as treaties of futurology . It is the “ad hoc hypothesis” of the time in which we live. In recent weeks, the UK, the books of this kind are actually two arrived, almost simultaneously: PostCapitalism: A Guide to Our Future by Paul Mason and Inventing the Future: Postcapitalism and a World without Work Nick Srníček and Alex Williams. The keyword of the two titles, as you might guess, is “Post Capitalism”. That is yet another prophecy about the end of the bloody economies based on free market that for centuries haunted the thinkers of the Left Bank . And the sauces used to mask this junk from Marxist aftertaste, as mentioned, are borrowed from the bizarre but fascinating hybridization between new right and new left that characterized the so-called Californian Ideology (John Perry Barlow, Louis Rossetto) at the beginning of the nineties, before it degenerated emasculated by every breath libertarian in technological determinism of the Cybercommunism by Richard Barbrook, not coincidentally another British sociologist of Marxist school.
Yes, because although at first glance the two books in question invoke slogans disappeared from the vocabulary of European or American left at least since the late sixties, actually the philosophical root, economic and sociological of the two works is, sadly, remains the same. Mason, Srníček and Williams, they look good from using terms like “socialism”, “social democracy” and “communism”, but their criticism of the old Left is not of substance, but of method. In recent decades, in short, the left was wrong because it did not find the courage to say that the overcoming of capitalism is “possible and necessary.” While, on the contrary, the end of capitalism has never been so close.
In fact these imaginary scenarios of the “post-capitalism” remain a horizon sketched, never explained to the bottom and defined solely by contrast. But above the Mason work showcases the embarrassing tendency to historicism that is, the belief that the unfolding of history is governed by immutable laws that has crumbled even the best theories of Marxism.
Both books, then, share a visible state of excitement about the advent of a “new man” (also an old Marxist dream) capable of leading humanity towards the post-capitalism. Srníček and Williams often indulge in fantasies on the border with the “transhumanism”. Mason prefers to think of a “connected man” capable, thanks to social networks, to become the vanguard, not the proletariat, but of the networked generation that gave birth to so-called “Arab Spring” (a blockbuster!) and the various movements “Occupy” around the world.
Nihil sub sole novum, in fact. Even in full digital revolution Marxists remain Marxists. Only now, instead of to Uncle Joe, believe to Twitter.
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