Some time ago, Shapiro gave a lecture on the mission of Western civilization, arguing that the West has always been at the forefront of defending freedom and fighting totalitarianism. This, of course, is not true. Fascism and Nazism were created by the Germans, who, until the middle of the twentieth century, had long been the driving force of philosophical thought. They were also the authors of Marxism, which the Russians undertook to put into practice as an experiment.
In my view, Shapiro is wrong: the West was not at the forefront of the struggle against totalitarianism. At different periods in history, the West itself produced totalitarianism; over the past several years, it has instead displaced and sublimated the totalitarianism from which it once fled.
I am writing about this because my own line of thought cannot go very far without engaging with Marxism. Marxism and Freudianism were the main soil in which twentieth-century continental philosophical thought—predominantly French—grew.
The idea of Marxism was largely based on the proposition that social being determines consciousness—that is, whether he wants to or not, a person will change when the means of production change, followed by social relations, and finally the person himself.
The Russian experiment showed that this was not entirely true, and the Russians very quickly realized that people would not change by themselves or spontaneously develop a desire to work. Before long, they were forced to adopt the Moral Code of the Builder of Communism, while control and propaganda intensified over time, despite the fact that private property had been reduced to a minimum.
In one of my posts, I wrote that ethics comes before economics. In the case of communism, the experiment demonstrated that the ethics proposed by the communists did not lead to the construction of a communist society, but instead produced a totalitarian system.
The liberal—or, by today’s standards, old-liberal—system proposes a different ethical model: human desires are unlimited, while resources are limited.
This lengthy introduction had only one purpose: to bring the problem into sharper focus. What kind of social order will be built in ten, twenty, or fifty years if the current trends toward automation continue? The Russian experiment showed that the means of production will not change human beings, and that universal prosperity—in other words, a universal basic income—is unlikely to be possible.
On the other hand, the capitalist model, in which numerous small and medium-sized entrepreneurs compete for customers and arrive at an equilibrium between quality and price, will not work either. Most likely, only a few monopolistic corporations will remain.
What new model of the human being is being proposed for the current means of production? In Elon Musk’s dreams, it is something frightening: apparently, a cyborg living on Mars, with a psyche stored on a microchip. At least, this is how Elon Musk appears to see the world. It sounds almost like a parody, but this vision is being presented to us with frightening seriousness.
In any case, on the one hand, we are being told that in time there will be something close to communism. Yet no theoretical justification for this quasi-communism—or for the social order corresponding to it—has been presented to us.