Radical Humanism and Anthromodernism for the 21st Century
* Book: Paul Mason. Clear Bright Future: A Radical Defence of the Human Being
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Review
""By my reckoning, Paul Mason’s Clear Bright Future (2019) has received somewhat less attention than its landmark predecessor PostCapitalism (2015). Perhaps Brexit has sapped us of the ability to be otherwise stimulated, but there may be other explanations: as a piece of work it is more wide-ranging and eclectic (I cannot help but think of Mason as a kind of Anglo-Zizek at times), and perhaps less obviously zeitgeisty. However, its thesis is no less audacious than the prior book and, if its subject matter appears any less ‘of its moment’ than Post-Capitalism’s timely economic critique, that is only a symptom of the advanced philosophical decay upon which Clear Bright Future’s ire rests.
This is a book about the abandonment of humanism and, in lockstep, of a human future. It will not seem mysterious that this interests the author of a blog called Anthromodernism. But Mason is not doing anything as narrowly academic as defining a new humanism. He is attempting nothing less than to refound the normative basis for left-wing organisation in the 21st century. That this requires a robust (if only preparatory) theoretical elaboration of a ‘radical humanism’ is clear, and Mason provides one.
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I’ll give you my verdict at the outset: Clear Bright Future is a treasure-trove of good ideas and deserves to be treated as a seminal text of the 21stcentury humanist left. Among its many ‘anthromodernist’ charms are:
- A furious critique of academic anti- and post-humanism from the Marxist structuralist dead-end of Althusser through high postmodernism (Foucault, Baudrillard) and its decay into posthumanism (Braidotti, Hayles, Harraway)
- Dedication to the serious pursuit of a theory of human nature, based on a) contemporary scientific research into how we differ from our great ape forbears (Tomasello), and b) the theories of species-being, alienation and ‘historical self-creation’ which root the early Marx’s account of human nature
- Militant anti-Nietzcheanism e.g. this apt paraphrase of Lukacs: ‘Nietzsche’s genius … was to develop a reactionary, romantic pessimism for all time – so that future generations of “spiritual” rebels who hate the working class, and want to celebrate the biological greatness of a few elite men, could always return to his aphorisms as if they were new’ (186-187)
- The insistence that ‘reading Arendt is not enough’, that is, that the liberal-left humanists of the post-war period (Orwell, Arendt, Levi etc) are insufficient guides to the present encroachments of the far-right, and that the humanism we need will have to reckon far more concretely with Nietzschean irrationalism and the problematic of American empire and its decline
- A strong theory of the psychological power of neoliberalism rooted in what I would call ‘reification critique’, whereby the stultifying power of the system is exercised at the level of expectations (curtailing them) and experience of economic life (tending to confirm the neoliberal mantra: There Is No Alternative)
- A basically correct analysis of the alt-right as about denying all forms of universal humanity and endorsing every form of biological hierarchy (again, Nietzsche)
- A materialist theory of information (based on modern science and Marx’s labour theory of value) to counter the ‘digital idealism’ of the tech giants determined to see themselves and their projects as being above earthly concerns; this smartly roots Mason’s call to arms against ‘algorithmic control’
- The unfashionable insistence that the 21st left needs a moral philosophy –Mason’s preferred system is Aristotelian virtue ethics (he regards this as the only available system compatible with humanism); this will be controversial for some Marxists, but Mason’s case that a moral system of some sort is needed seems unanswerable given the urgent need for an ethics of artificial intelligence
- A commitment to the basics of Marxist theory (theory of history, labour theory of value and theory of human nature) alongside a reasonable account of its historic deficiencies (on feminism/sexuality, ecology and the more esoteric natural-scientific applications of the dialectic)
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As mentioned at the outset, however, there are some areas of weakness which I’ll briefly touch upon to conclude.
The first is a lack of engagement with thinkers inside the New Left who were Marxist humanists of precisely the sort Mason now enjoins us to be. Mason does make several references to the humanism of Erich Fromm of the Frankfurt School and the Marxist theorist (and Trotsky’s secretary) Raya Dunayevskaya (incidentally, it is well worth checking out the work of the Marxist Humanist Initiative, which takes its theoretical cue from Dunayevskaya’s work), and E.P. Thompson, a founding figure in the British New Left, gets a couple of cursory mentions. The really egregious omission, however, is the Welsh cultural critic and novelist Raymond Williams, whose work (like Thompson’s) provided a strong countermanding force to the Althusserian drift of the academic left in the late 60s and 70s, and from which some of the most useful strains of Marxist cultural work now proceed (including, arguably, Mason’s own). Williams is also a key figure in the development of ‘reification critique’, having been strongly influenced by the Lukács of History and Class Consciousness. I have argued elsewhere that Williams’s conjoining of traditional British empiricism with Western Marxist, ‘rationalist’ emphases was a unique event in the history of Marxism. His work remains a rich seam of resistance for Marxist humanists worldwide to draw on in the fight against reification.
My second area of disagreement with Mason concerns his reading of contemporary work in continental materialism and realism (the New Materialisms and ‘speculative realism’) as the latest instalment in the lineage Althusser > postmodernism > posthumanism > X. Mason provides an interesting overview of the philosopher of science Bruno Latour’s development and the rise of ‘flat ontologies’ which place all objects, including human beings, on the same causal plane; thus, as Latour infamously claimed, ‘[Louis] Pasteur can be understood as an event occurring to lactic yeast’. While Mason’s arguments here are subtler than I have space to evidence, he does appear to regard both new materialism and speculative realism (Graham Harman is singled out) as consistent with the postmodern disintegration of objectivity, e.g. ‘By [Harman’s] reckoning, not only are human beings and, for example, Lego bricks, equally capable of knowing the world, the whole of reality is scientifically unpredictable’ (181).
Certainly, the new materialists and realists are, for the most part, anti-humanists. I am more hesitant than Mason, however, to consign them to the postmodern gulag, since they are also avowedly anti-postmodern (indeed, this is practically their raison d’etre). The success of the new materialists and realists is as much a cause as a symptom of the decay of academic postmodernism. Whether we can enlist them as allies in so radical a project as a ‘humanist materialism’ in unclear – probably not. Nevertheless, just as liberal humanists must be our contingent allies against the jubilant inhumanity of the Nietzschean right, so too must the new materialists and realists be our allies against postmodern idealism, relativism and irrealism.
The third and final issue I have with Mason’s account is the gravest. I’ll spend only the briefest of times on it here, but rest assured a deep dive will be forthcoming on this blog. This is Mason’s replacement of the working-class or proletariat with the ‘networked individual’ as the primary agent of history (a through-line argument from Postcapitalism). The central political argument is Gorzian: ‘the modern, global working class no longer thinks or acts like the classic proletariat of the twentieth century – and no amount of exposure to the class struggle will remedy this’ (230). What has taken the proletariat’s place as the ‘natural’ agent of history (i.e. proper successor to the bourgeoisie) is the ‘networked individual’ who, Mason argues, ‘“bears” the characteristics of future liberated humanity much more clearly than the coal miners of my grandfather’s generation’ (233).
The question here is why Mason feels it necessary to make the coal miners of his native Leigh stand in for the working-class as a whole. There are good historical reasons for making factory and extractive workers the standard bearers of the industrial working class, but even for Marx ‘industrial’ simply meant productive of surplus value, which in 2019 includes vast swathes of the services sector. I fail to see why Mason’s descriptions of the unique situation of the ‘networked individual’ should not be ascribed to the ‘networked working-class’ i.e. the working class as it is understood by the most advanced socialist parties and movements today. In the context of Mason’s argument in Clear Bright Future, one reason presents itself above all others: that the working-class was only ever able to organise itself around ‘working-class interests’ (particular), not ‘the interests of humanity’ (universal). Ironically, given Mason’s antipathy toward much of the New Left, this argument echoes Anderson and Nairn’s post-war complaint that the (British, specifically) working-class was only capable of ‘incorporated’ or reformist actions, never ‘hegemonic’ or revolutionary-historic ones, a view with Leninist roots. To this, of course, Mason might well respond that Lenin was right. But then, is there not a risk that the ascription of historic leadership to the networked individual issues in a vanguardism of the most networked?"
Discussion
See: Reification Critique vs Ideology Critique
Anti-Humanism vs Radical Humanism
"There are two godfathers of modern anti-humanism in Mason’s schema: Nietzsche on the right and Althusser on the left. The links between Nietzsche’s ‘will to power’ amoralism, thirties fascism and the modern far-right are clear (Mason gives a detailed and convincing account). With hierarchy assumed to be a given in social reality, the pursuit of equality becomes a form of stultifying decadence to be purged, lest the ‘last man’ come to rule over a ruin of mediocrity. How we get from Althusser to a modern left which, in Mason’s view, is uniquely ill-equipped to confront the Nietzschean inhumanity of the modern right, requires some more unpacking.
Althusser’s Marxist structuralism was explicitly anti-humanist, an attempt to defend the superiority of the Leninist party model against humanist and autonomist attacks in the era of the early New Left. This involved rejecting the ‘early’, humanist Marx and claiming the later work of Marx (Capital) as an anti-humanist enterprise. For Althusser, Marxism described history as ‘a process without a subject’ i.e. a process in which human beings participate less as conscious agents and more as the fine components in the working of a social Swiss watch. ‘If you want another word for a process without a subject,’ says Mason, ‘then “machine” would be an accurate substitute’ (176). This is the ur-claim of Clear Bright Future: that we are spiralling towards machine control by big data, AI and their billionaire proprietors, and that what this means is the loss of the 360-degree, fully rounded human being that the Left should be identifying and emancipating.
It is failing to do so, argues Mason, because the Althusserian ejection of human agency from history discredited Marxism and gave non-Marxist postmodernists like Foucault and Baudrillard license not only ‘to remove almost every other dynamic that might make sense of material reality: class, capital, laws of motion and – ultimately – the knowability of the world’ (177), but also to produce ‘an anti-theory about human beings: their selves are shattered, their agency is gone, their scientific thought is really ideology’ (177). When postmodernism fell into a cycle of deconstructive repetition in the 90s, argues Mason, posthumanism emerged as its natural successor, rooted in the same principles (Althusserian ones, in Mason’s genealogy, but we might also add Nietzschean and Heideggerian) but more outwardly forward-thinking and programmatically radical. From Haraway’s A Cyborg Manifesto to Hayles’s How We Became Posthuman, any sense of the human being as the centre of political agency, much less a revolutionary subject, is dissolved by what is intended to be the emancipatory fragmentation and absorption of the human (however gendered, racialized or classed) into technology and, more recently, non-human nature.
The posthumanists wanted to avoid alienation and inter-species hierarchy. The actual result, Mason argues, is that the universal human being now stands in the path of two juggernauts, the Nietzschean far-right (which relishes intra-species hierarchies) and the algorithmic control-machine, with little to say in its own defence.
Mason fears, I think rightly, that the intentional occlusion of the human being by parts of the academic left renders the rights (human and liberal) we already have suspect and those we will demand in the future philosophically baseless. ‘I want to defend the idea,’ says Mason, ‘that every one of us – the transgender activist in London, the female factory worker in Guangdong, the Kanak teenager fighting for independence on New Caledonia – has a universal quality from which inalienable human rights derive’ (198-190).
It seems remarkable, in retrospect, that a universal conception of the human being requires the kind of tentative, preliminary account that Mason offers in Clear Bright Future. Surely a left which is serious about taking power, about building the capacities of human beings acting collectively to transform society, would have a sound, materialist theory of what humans actually are? Surely we should know what makes human beings more likely to bring about communism than, say, apes or robots? It turns out we (the left) don’t. Troublingly, liberals do, in a scrappy combination of evolutionary biology, behaviourism and a quasi-religious theory of free will descended from the Christian conception of a soul which is free only because it must be judged (whence the liberal conception of the legal person). But the problem with the ‘liberal human’, aside from its well-documented degeneration into homo economicus, is that it is entirely genetic and therefore static, being the product of an evolutionary process too slow to have produced significant further changes since the dawn of man.
Mason’s alternative ‘radical humanism’ has two complementary pillars: modern science and Marxist humanism. He identifies, first, some essential differences between humans and other animals: we are lifelong learners; we develop a self-conscious identity; we teach each other to reason i.e. ‘to make conscious, reversible choices between two or more actions’ (138); we do operational logic in our heads; we not only make things but ‘imagine the thing to be made in advance and create the tools to make it’ (138); we communicate through complex verbal and written languages which we can alter at will and use to pretend and speculate, to ‘imagine how the world might be different’ (138); we live in ordered and hierarchical groups like other animals but, unlike them, we can ‘consciously change the structure of the hierarchical groups we live in, and even reject hierarchy entirely’ (138).
This list, while persuasive as to human distinctiveness, doesn’t distinguish a Marxist humanism from a liberal one. To do that, Mason appeals to the early Marx and contemporary work linking the early evolution of human beings to the production of culture and language (Tomasello). The capacities which differentiate human beings from other animals also differ, says Mason, in that they are more intensely social, reflecting the inherently social nature of human labour. Our ability to reason abstractly, speculate about different realities and communicate complex ideas through language are part of our productive toolset, and they all exist to facilitate uniquely human forms of evolutionarily adaptive sociality.
With concepts such as ‘alienation’ and ‘fetishism’, Marx was getting to heart of what makes humans beings distinctive: we make things, including meanings, for other people, literally alienating or separating off parts of ourselves to do so. Not only does this ability determine the basic mechanics of history (production of surplus expropriated by ruling classes, forces/relations of production, crisis and revolution) but it also accounts for the intensely social character of cultural forms, which are themselves uniquely human. Mason draws on Tomasello’s work to show that modern cognitive science and evolutionary anthropology confirm the humanist hypotheses of the early Marx, demonstrating that we produce languages and cultures ‘less as a way of transmitting knowledge [and] more as a way of organizing collaboration’ (215). That ability to collaborate, moreover, is our primary evolutionary advantage.
The crucial step then is to recognise, as Marx did, that ‘because culture and language are evolutionary products … to understand human nature you have to accept it has a history’ (216). This is where a radical humanism starts to differ massively from a liberal one, since for liberal humanists there is only a ‘pre-history’ of human nature, namely, the evolutionary process leading up to homo sapiens. After that, we are what we are, as defined by our evolved genetics. A Marxist humanism, by contrast, in recognising that culture and language are no less parts of ‘human nature’ than basic biological characteristics, can insist that changes in cultural and social forms must be considered changes in human nature enacted by human beings themselves. Human history, of course, is nothing but changes in cultural and social forms; we are the only animals with a history, in this sense. And since we make that history in the self-development of our own relations with each other, we are constantly making and remaking our nature (which, contra posthumanism, doesn’t cease to be human simply because it changes): ‘human nature includes both biology and history’ (216)."