Koula Mellos

The post-modern challenge to community

The contemporary post-modern view of modernity is a wholly negative assessment and a serious condemnation of modernity’s political legacy. The critique of universality seeks especially to undermine the Hegelian and Marxist theory of community as a social form of solidarity, equality, freedom and justice. For post-modern critique, which rejects the dialectical logic of identity, the principle of universality is oppressive rather than emancipatory, totalitarian rather than liberating. In some ways post-modern critics and Marxists share the values of freedom and creativity but differ diametrically on the requisite conditions for their materialisation. Whereas Marxism calls for community in which necessity is reconciled with freedom and where the particular is reconciled with the general, post-modern critics call for a freeing of the particular from the general as a condition for community of diversity. There are some disturbing elements to this post-modern call for pluralism. Rather than a community of diversity, postmodern pluralism may be characterised as an aggregate of particulars which ranges from a wholly conflictual network of distinct identities, as it does in Lyotard and the Foucault of the genealogy of power, to solitary particulars as it does in late Foucault. It is questionable how either variant of pluralism makes gains over the Marxist notion of community. In this paper I shall argue that neither the contributions of Foucault nor that of Lyotard, two disparate representatives of post-modern thought, is acceptable as a programme for social liberation. Foucault rejects the modern rationally grounded principle of universality, not only as an epistemological principle but also as a principle of ethics and aesthetics. His genealogy of power, ’ however, concentrates on universality as transcendent truth which it claims legitimises modern science and which at the same time provides norms for social behaviour serving therefore as a medium of ethics. This contention was made much earlier, of course, by Nietzsche and was later incorporated in the critique of instrumental reason by the theorists of the Frankfurt School. Foucault’s contribution is practical. He seeks to corroborate this Nietzschean claim by his critical account of such institutions and practices as the penal, medical and educational in modern society. His indictment of universality is made on the grounds of its practical effects: it operates as a disciplinary mechanism in normalisation processes of bringing the particular, individual behaviour in tune with scientifically established truths. By virtue of its truth, the general becomes a norm, a rule demanding compliance. Not only does

Neo-Malthusian Theory

In the late 18th century, Thomas Malthus, an English political economist, advanced a theory of crisis in his Essay on the Principle of Population,1 based on a posited relation of disproportion between the rate of demographic growth and the rate of growth of food supply. According to this thesis, population naturally increases in geometric ratio but the means of subsistence, or agricultural production increases only in an arithmetic ratio making it impossible for agricultural production to sustain growing populations indefinitely. These two opposing natural tendencies generate periodic crises of food supply corrected by reduction of population size. Malthus describes two distinct forms of checks on population size: ‘positive’ checks such as war, epidemics, famine, and ‘preventive’ checks such as various forms of birth control, including abortion, and infanticide. Since food scarcity, however, is the condition for the operation of these checks, it is the ultimate check on population increase.

Ecology According to Gorz

The theoretical work of Andre Gorz has a narrower focus than does that of Bookchin. Its object is contemporary social relations in advanced industrial social formations and in particular capitalist social formations. In theorising his object Gorz appeals to Marx but the socio-ecological theory he arrives at has more in common with Bookchin than with any tenable reading of Marx. The key to this paradox is the implicit premise of Gorz’s general social theory which is one and the same with that of Bookchin, namely an anthropology of self-sufficiency. It is this premise which clouds Gorz’s reading of Marx and yields a theory of revolution as one of individual self-management which converges with Bookchin’s theory of revolution as self-activity.

Theory of Eco-development

The term ‘eco-development’ was coined by the Secretary General of the 1972 Stockholm Conference of the Human Environment, Maurice Strong. He used it to mean an alternative form of economic development to the present pattern of economic expansion. In its present usage it refers to more than an economic theory. It is also a social and political theory associated with such names as Ignacy Sachs, Johann Galtung, Howard Daugherty, Charles JeanneretGrosjean. It is espoused by many economists and developers associated with various organisms of international organizations, as for example, the UNEP/UNCTAD Symposium, Cocoyoc, 1974, the UN Conference on Raw Materials and Development, New York, 1974, and research centres affiliated with international organisations such as the Centre international de recherche sur l’environnement, Paris, and the International Institute for Environment and Society, Berlin, as well as some state governmental departments such as Environment Canada, CIDA, and the Science and Technology Council of Mexico.

Leiss’s Critical Theory of Human Needs

The contribution of William Leiss to socio-ecological theory has much in common with that of Bookchin and Gorz. They all purport to reveal the contradictions of social relations of exploitation and domination and to point the direction to a just society and sound ecology. Leiss focuses his critique of exploitative and repressive social relations of the capitalist form in particular, on the level of exchange of commodities, i.e. the level of circulation of capital. He does this in the belief that the crisis of society and ecology is generated by expanding consumerism which he sees as an aberration of human needs and as the source of ecological destruction. His critique of consumerism and indeed his theory of conserver society to which the critique takes him assume an anthropology of human nature remarkably similar to that of Bookchin and Gorz. We shall try to demonstrate in this section that it is another variation of the anthropology of asocial self-sufficiency. We shall argue the sense in which this conception of human nature underlies his critical proposition of consumerist human needs and his programme for a conserver society.

Theory of Eco-anarchism: Bookchin’s Critique of Authority

Bookchin’s sociological analysis is a social critique. Its focus is authority. In our reading of his critique of authority, it is not simply a critique of relations of subordination and superordination in which one has the right to command and the other the duty to obey. It is, rather, a critique of social relations as such. This is the interpretive hypothesis we suggest for capturing the sense of his social critique. Bookchin perceives all relations of authority as relations of domination which could be formalised, in his understanding of them, as hierarchical relations of inequality in which A dictates the action of B and B submits to A’s directives. Such relations are necessarily social relations.