Daily Times

For Gramsci, culture being a social relation, influences the individual in his self-organisation to “discipline one’s inner self, a coming to term with one’s own personality: it is the attainment of higher awareness with the aid of which one succeeds in understanding one’s own historical value, one’s own function in life, one’s rights and obligations. But none of this comes through spontaneous evolution. Instead, through a series of actions and reactions that are independent of one’s own will, as is the case in the animal and vegetable kingdom where every unit is selected and specifies its own organs unconsciously, through a fatalistic natural law.” He refuses to recognise the claim of certain nations as ‘civilised’ ones since, so far, human beings “possess a veneer of civilisation…one only has to scratch them to lay bare the wolf-skin underneath. Instinct has been tamed but not destroyed and still the right of the might is the only right that is recognised.” The ‘clash’ theory of Huntington, a colourless intellectualism, is the living proof of this.

Through revolutionising productivity and by the division of every segment of labour, capitalism has left the individual completely alienated from his labour. The commodity fetishism culture is stabbed in the back, the market wins, ever changing fashions, each lacking the experience of the past, radically different from its predecessor, passing through the process of abstract labour, overtakes sanity. The reality — of human potentialities and the congealed labour of immediate producer — is interred. The form disguises the phenomenon and all that links with the core, with ‘essence’ disappears from sight. The irony is that no one recognises the producer, not even the producer himself. He discovers himself in wage alone; the human becomes a thing, a product that consumes its self-created ‘value’. “The finished pattern of economic relations as seen on the surface,” Marx says, “is very different from and indeed quite the reverse of and antagonistic to its inner essential but concealed core and the concepts corresponding to it.” Nothing can be more precise than this.

Does revival of undisguised, more human culture remain a possibility? For this the forgotten part of culture has to be invoked, which carries the aggressive impulse of refusal, of negation, of resistance. Until then this possibility will remain a utopia. “Laughter,” Howard Zinn says, “is the enemy of tyranny.” Today “the object of laughter is not the conforming multitudes but rather the eccentric who still ventures to think autonomously” (Horkheimer). Despite the transformation of this tradition, to unmask the deeds of those who govern, ‘the rebel’ is left with one subtle recourse: to “revive the desperate laughter and cynical defiance of the fool…(even) the words given to protest assume a childlike, ridiculous immaturity. Thus, it is ridiculous and perfectly logical that the Free Speech Movement” terminates “in the row caused by the appearance of a sign with a four letter word”(Marcuse). Protesting against hegemonic norms, the language of affluence, against instinctual taboos, against production and utilisation of means of destruction is the only way to reinstate culture to its original peaceful pedestal.

The division of culture between western and eastern hemisphere is more a division of capitalist and pre-capitalist norms. No caste, creed, or colour can withstand the might of industrialisation brought about by productive forces through the capitalistic mode of production. The ancient civilisations of the world such as the Chinese and the Japanese have given in to the global culture led by industrial nations. This adoption is the child of necessity that, due to the hectic nature of production, demanded instant legitimacy and received it immediately. Even the tribal or/and feudal countries that continue to bind their masses in outmoded norms eclipsed by history are not immune to this change. The upper echelon has already embraced it. The middle classes, while desperately holding on to the (pre-capitalist) moral/religious ties, are lustily eyeing this compulsive change. No sooner does the decayed, locust ridden tribal ruling class of the Arabian peninsula crumble, then the tempest of erotic impulses kept hidden and repressed will inundate the shores of old customs. The empire will fall and the people will elope industrial culture. All absurdities of circumcising or baptising culture according to religious needs will evaporate into thin air. Sartre correctly points out: “Culture does not save anything or anyone, it does not justify. But it is a product of man: he projects himself into it, he recognises himself in it; that critical mirror alone offers him his image.” Under historical necessities the human being knows how to change the mirror to see in it a new image of himself.

Conversely, civilisation is described by Freud in a most explicit manner. He says: “Each individual contributes to his renunciations (first under the impact of external compulsion then internally) and from these resources the common stock of material and ideal wealth of civilisation has been accumulated.” For him, civilisation is both un-freedom and repression. “The history of mankind,” he says, “is the history of repression by civilisation”. Here one can see an ever-fading, vague demarcation that once, especially prior to the arrival of the capitalistic mode of production, discerned culture from civilisation. The former once probably had more to do with ‘agriculture’ while the latter with ‘civility’ or unlimited senseless productivity, a hallmark of technical rationality or lack of it. In the modern era, civilisation can be defined as a one-dimensional culture where its values are not overtly denied but negated covertly through their incorporation by the dominant interests into hegemonic order with the tacit consent of the exploited but subservient majority. Consequently, in society a “comfortable, smooth, reasonable, democratic un-freedom prevails”. In the name of security people submit to authority while compromising their liberty.

Civilisation today more or less stands as the antonym of barbarism. Though for both Engels and Rosa Luxemburg, nothing is more barbaric than this civilisation itself, which is based on capitalism, an antithesis of socialism. After the fall of the Soviet Union, historian Eric Hobsbawm, while identifying capitalism with barbarism, wrote” “The world may yet regret that, faced with Rosa Luxemburg’s alternative of socialism or barbarism, it decided against socialism.” In recent times, among the flag bearers of barbarism, Islamic State (IS) and the ragtag army of al Qaeda, (though Israel can be conveniently added to this list) are at the forefront; both incidentally and allegedly are backed by the west. The premise of civilisation versus barbarism is augmented by Adam Ferguson as he states that “not only the individual advances from infancy to manhood but species itself from rudeness to civilisation”. But, yet again, Marcuse differs with this proposition. He suggests that “the facile historical parallel with the barbarians threatening the empire of civilisation prejudges the issue; the second period of barbarism may well be the continued empire of civilisation itself.” This endorses the above stated premise of both Engels and Rosa. For Spengler there is a definite relationship between culture and civilisation, though it is not of simultaneity but of “necessary organic succession”. For him, civilisation is the ultimate fate and end of every culture. Lukacs ends this debate by stating civilisation as the rule of man over the nature in which man ends up with the disastrous outcome of being ruled by “the very means that enabled him to dominate nature”. Hence, the Freudian concept of domination, liberation and re-domination continues.

Whatever these definitions are, in today’s world, both these terms are used interchangeably. But the idea behind them is hegemonic control of the world for dominant interests. Mukesh William is succinct when he says “culture exists in a lived global experience and not in the politics of nations”. What is the culmination point of culture and civilisation? Perhaps no one has explained them better than Marcuse. While describing the fate of culture he says: “When it becomes possible to have real enjoyment without any rationalisation and without the least puritanical guilt feeling when sensuality in other words is entirely released from the soul then the first glimmer of a new culture emerges.” Once civilisation redeems itself from alienated labour and becomes non-repressive, in “this genuinely humane civilisation, the human existence will be play rather than toil, and man will live in display rather than need” (Marcuse).

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The writer is based in Australia and has authored books on socialism and history. He can be reached at saulatnagi@hotmail.com