Shining a light on the path ahead

At the UN, Venezuela's President Hugo Chavez holds up his well-thumbed and carefully annotated copy of the book "Mas alla del Capital" (Beyond Capital), a previous work by the crucial Hungarian Marxist Istvan Meszaros

The president and the philosopher: socialism in the 21st century

Saturday, February 21, 2009 - 11:00

By Jeremy Smith

The Challenge and Burden of Historical Time: Socialism in the Twenty-First Century

By Istvan Meszaros

Monthly Review Press, 2008

480 pages, $59.49

Istvan Meszaros has produced what might yet prove a manifesto for the new socialism, 21st century socialism, in The Challenge and Burden of Historical Time. A veteran dissident Hungarian Marxist, Meszaros was an assistant of Georg Lukacs (one of the major Marxist philosophers of the 20th century) prior to the 1956 Hungarian revolt against Soviet authority.

Meszaros fled Hungary with the Warsaw Pact invasion of 1956, having suffered persecution for his open public criticism of the Stalinist bureaucracy that had seized political command in the late 1940s. He remained consistent to his beliefs and principles at that time and continues to do so today, five decades later.

Renowned author of numerous works on capitalism and socialism, Meszaros's new book has champions that should make socialists sit up and take notice. Hugo Chavez is featured on the front cover with a snippet of his judgement of the book: it "illuminates the path ahead". Chavez continues (on the back cover), Meszaros "points to the central argument we must make in order ... to take to the offensive ... throughout the world ... in moving toward socialism".

Thanks to the New York Times, the president's approval of this philosopher has been made notorious. Philosophers rarely attract the admiration of presidents, at least since the close of the 19th century. But then, Meszaros is no ordinary philosopher, just as Chavez is no ordinary president.

Another fan is John Bellamy Foster, the activist-Marxist scholar (just like Meszaros in fact) who, in a generous foreward, applauds this book's breadth and depth of world-historical analysis. The philosophical message has to do with humanity's choices and the prospects of survival that capitalism sets before us.

Part of the revolt against capitalism and the creation of a new social order must involve a new type of historical time, "a radical openness to history", as Meszaros puts it. In contrast, the ideologues of capital would prefer that we believe that history is closed.

Francis Fukuyama expressed this sort of opinion in the early 1990s in a representative philosophical tract that captured the general outlook of ruling elites at that moment of the fall of "communism" in the USSR and eastern Europe.

Not only did Fukuyama urge an erasure of alternatives from political debate and action, he presented collective amnesia as the condition of the new world order after "communism".

While the past is slowly forgotten (time is "annihilated", "degraded"), capitalism orients people to "short termism" pithily summed up by great German philosopher Georg Hegel's phrase the "eternal present".

Meszaros battles ideas that are inherent in capitalist conceptions of time. He argues for "socialist historical time" and demands us to accept the challenge to transform the world entirely. This goes beyond the patterns of ownership of production — important though these are — to reach for a thorough remaking of the world's economy and human relationships with the global environment.

However, this represents not only today's challenge. It is also the socialist burden. The endless growth of obscene inequalities and the threat to the planet's fragile ecology mean that the socialist project is not a luxury option for humanity or an aspiration for a future age, but a pressing necessity for survival right now.

On the face of it, this may appear a set of moral arguments for socialism. However, the essays of The Challenge and Burden of Historical Time sum up so much more.

The global contradictions of capitalism's "social metabolism" are analysed in great detail. First of these is the contradiction between globalisation of capital and economic movements and the national form of states.

Competition and tendencies towards monopoly control are in constant struggle with one another. The obliteration of time inherent in the logic of capital stands against real human efforts to reclaim time and the limits this places on the extraction of surplus value.

Above all else, the internal need for endless growth opposes the undeniable demands for environmental sustainability. Capitalism cannot survive with limitless expansion; or indeed survive without it. This is one of Meszaros's 16 contradictions of contemporary capitalism which leaves the deepest impression.

One criticism of the work is a matter of form. This book repeats early moral arguments for socialism and against capitalism. Many of its key themes reoccur throughout the collection of long essays. With some better organisation of materials, it could be an easier read for busy activists — all without any compromise of its potent arguments.

There are also points of debate for socialists. At times, Meszaros assumes that capitalism has a repressed tendency towards world government, a proposition undermined by his own demonstrated analysis of modern nation-state formation.

Elsewhere in the book (and often), Meszaros overstates the economic power of US imperialism to the neglect of other industrialised capitalist nations, a prolonged case put in doubt by his own analysis of the "plurality of capitals". But these are items of ongoing discussion and should not discourage potential readers from this rich volume which covers so much ground.

After all, 21^st century socialism demands debate. Its viability calls for a "critical evaluation" of socialism's past after the horrors of Stalinist totalitarianism and the shortfalls of parliamentary social democracy.

Meszaros advocates those movements coming into force now (one led by Chavez), which are capable of building a 21st century socialism, which must eclipse the failures of its 20^th century predecessors and create a world beyond the bleak capitalist present.