En Passant

We socialists sometimes say we are the children of the enlightenment. I might add some of us think we are not just its children but its true inheritors.

What was the Enlightenment and why is it relevant today?

The development of capitalism in the bosom of feudal Europe created the need for an understanding of the world around that went far beyond religion and other superstitions. 

The emergence of capitalism saw a battle between the emerging bourgeoisie and the old feudal order. In England and the Netherlands revolutions created a space for that bourgeoisie to extend the market and wage labour.  Their economies flourished.

At this stage the bourgeoisie was a progressive and radical force against feudalism, needing some way to understand the world around it, a world soon to become its own. The old ideas – the religions, superstitions and other prejudice, stood in the way of the development of capitalism and understanding its working.

In this space there arose a wide range of thinkers from what we now recognise as different disciplines. Spanning centuries they included peopel like Descartes Voltaire, Rousseau, Leibniz, Locke, Diderot, and later Smith, Ricardo and the like…

What they had in common, as Chris Harman put it in his magnificent A People’s History of the World:  

was a a belief in the power of rational understanding based on empirical knowledge. This had to be applied to the world, even if meant challenging existing myths and established beliefs. Such an approach represented a challenge to many of the institutions and much of the ideology of existing European societies.

It was this materialist questioning that gave intellectual expression to the French and American revolutions and with them the bourgeois ideas of liberty, equality and fraternity.

This ferment of materialist ideas both led and followed the development of capitalism.

And yet the kernel of rationality that the bourgeoisie required could frighten it. Thus Adam Smith and Ricardo danced around or recoiled from the consequences of the development of the idea, however inchoate, that under capitalism it was labour that created value.

The materialist conception of the world, and society, continually challenged the irrationality of the Church, of the rulers themselves, and the reactionaries who opposed the changes being wrought in society. It did so because the very way society was organised was changing.

However by the mid 180os the bourgeoisie in Europe and North America (and other developed outposts of capitalism) was no longer revolutionary or radical.

It wanted to cement its rule, not question the regimes in power.  Rational materialist ideas, especially as they spread into political and economic discourse, provided the basis for a further radical re-constituting of society – one in which the bourgeoisie no longer existed. 

So the system developed rational irrationality, especially in the field of economics, to mask an essential truth – that workers create society’s wealth. 

Once the bourgeoisie became the ruling class the need for rationality, while it still existed in the realm of production, withered in the  realm of civil society. Irrationality began to re-assert itself as a handmaiden of the bourgeoisie. It climbed the stairs hand in hand with with reaction.

As Marx put it in the Communist manifesto:

The bourgeoisie cannot exist without constantly revolutionizing the instruments of production, and thereby the relations of production, and with them the whole relations of society. Conservation of the old modes of production in unaltered form, was, on the contrary, the first condition of existence for all earlier industrial classes. Constant revolutionizing of production, uninterrupted disturbance of all social conditions, everlasting uncertainty and agitation distinguish the bourgeois epoch from all earlier ones. All fixed, fast frozen relations, with their train of ancient and venerable prejudices and opinions, are swept away, all new-formed ones become antiquated before they can ossify. All that is solid melts into air, all that is holy is profaned, and man is at last compelled to face with sober senses his real condition of life and his relations with his kind.

This constant revolutionising requires an understanding of the material world. The scientific method is part of that project. It became entrenched in the realm of ideas for capitalist production and military might. Joseph Widulka describes this method as follows:

The scientific method is the best way yet discovered for winnowing the truth from lies and delusion. The simple version looks something like this:  

• 1. Observe some aspect of the universe.
• 2. Invent a tentative description, called a hypothesis, that is consistent with what you have observed.
• 3. Use the hypothesis to make predictions.
• 4. Test those predictions by experiments or further observations and modify the hypothesis in the light of your results.
• 5. Repeat steps 3 and 4 until there are no discrepancies between theory and experiment and/or observation.

 When consistency is obtained the hypothesis becomes a theory and provides a coherent set of propositions which explain a class of phenomena. A theory is then a framework within which observations are explained and predictions are made.

It is the scientific method which a large number of scientists in a wide range of disciplines have used to determine that the earth is warming and that the cause is man made – namely greenhouse gases, in particular CO2. These gases are the result of the way production is organised under capitalism.

This theory may be proved wrong.  However none of the deniers (of either global warming or of the role humanity plays in it) have been able to date to scientifically undermine the theory. 

Their assertions are either untrue or based on observable facts that do not undermine at all the essence of the theory - that humanity’s greenhouse gases are causing global warming. 

Those who deny global warming often claim to march under the banner of scepticism.

In fact, scepticism is part of the scientific method.  It is also an important part of the Marxist approach to knowledge.

But scepticism is based on rational scientific methods, not opposition based on faith or belief or a lack of evidence.

In essence the deniers are the inheritors of a old world where superstition ruled. They thrive in an intellectual environment where capitalism depends on irrationality as a prop for  its ideological justification.  

But that very life support irrationality is justifying not treating an illness that will kill the patient. That is the dilemma for capital around the world, a dilemma Copenhagen is showing the bourgeoisie and its politicians are not up to solving. That role belongs to ordinary people.

The irony of the Enlightenment is that is has helped liberated capital pollute the planet. 

Some see the Enlightenment as rabidly pro-capitalist production. It is true that capital has created what John Bellamy Foster, drawing on Marx,  calls a metabolic rift between humanity and the Earth. 

Marx, in analyzing a soil crisis in Britain, described the contradiction between nature and capitalist society as “an irreparable rift in the interdependent process of social metabolism”.

He went on to say that “capitalist production only develops the techniques and the degree of combination of the social process of production by simultaneously undermining the original sources of all wealth — the soil and the worker”.

With the consequences of this metabolic rift between capitalist production and the planet now threatening the existence of humanity, the project of the Enlightenment is only half complete. 

Only when labour  overturns the rule of capital can rationality truly be won and with it the restoration of humanity’s relations with our Earth.