1968 or 1989?

In the latest issue of TIME magazine, Martin Ivens laments the fact that 1968 seems to be valorised as a watershed year to a far greater extent than 1989. The first of these dates marks the student uprisings in Paris, the US and elsewhere, as well as any number of movements associated with it — such as the civil-rights movement, the anti-Vietnam war movement and the women’s movement — while the second marks, for Ivens, especially the fall of communism as symbolised by the breaching of the Berlin Wall.

Even Gordon Brown, the British prime minister, scandalously (according to Ivens) omits “anti-communism” from his book on “political courage” where he offers eight “profiles” of women and men who struggled against scourges such as Nazism, racial injustice in the US and apartheid in South Africa. Ivens questions this tendency to celebrate the downfall of regimes and invidious practices in a manner which betrays that the people who do this, like Brown does, are members of the 1968 generation, in thrall to the cry for freedom that reverberated through that year.

In place of such glorification of the 60s, Ivens wants to give 1989 its due as the year when the Wall came down, symbolising the collapse of the dreadful system of communism, and effectively signalling the victory of capitalism in conjunction with liberal democracy. He grants that 1968 was surrounded by much more that is, at first sight, worth commemorating, such as the anti-Vietnam war demonstrations, the music and the clothes associated with the sixties, compared to which 1989 was much more prosaic. However, when all is said and done, he believes, 1989 should rank as a more significant date to commemorate than 1968, despite the relative quiet courage and unassuming manner on the part of those who resisted oppressive communist rule in East bloc countries, in the face of relentless persecution.

To be sure — as he grants — there was the massacre in Tiananmen Square and there was Romania, but except for these, the world’s turning of its back on communism was fairly bloodless and peaceful. In the final analysis, Ivens would rather that we play down 1968 and commemorate the fall of communism in 1989 with greater fanfare.

While I share Ivens’ happiness about the fall of communism as it was practised — just think of the writers and scientists who exposed its horrors to the world, ranging from Czechs Milan Kundera and Vaclav Havel to Russians Alexander Solzhenitsyn and Andrei Sakharov — I cannot agree with him that 1968 has been exaggerated in its historical or symbolic importance, or that “everyone” is aware of this. On the contrary, while world leaders who were young at the time — such as Brown — may recall the heady atmosphere, refulgent with hope for a better, freer world, not tainted by war, political corruption or shallow materialism, most people alive today have very little knowledge of, or interest in what it stood for. For this reason it should be recalled and commemorated, just as the fall of communism should. Besides, Ivens seems to forget that, in the final analysis, the rejection of communism, too, issues from the valorisation of human freedom that reached a kind of zenith in 1968. (And I should add, as a footnote, that the humanities at universities worldwide are the intellectual custodians of this freedom, on which their pursuit is predicated.)

But lest anyone should dismiss 1968 for what is sometimes perceived as its hopelessly unrealistic take on what human beings really are, let me remind them that this idealism of the time reflects what I prefer to think of as its utopian character, not so much in the dictionary sense of reflecting “admirable but impracticable ideas”, but rather in the Adornian sense of a fiction which, by its very impossibility of being realised, nevertheless embodies the kind of human social aspirations that show existing society up for what it is, with all its oppression, cynicism, exploitation and hollowness, in this way indicting it as a place unfit for human beings, and therefore always in need for improvement. Needless to say, not only Soviet communism, but also American (or global) capitalism would be susceptible to such indictment.

And this should not surprise anyone. After all, despite their fundamental differences as economic systems in terms of the ownership of the means of production — public, in the case of communism and private, in the case of capitalism — in practical terms they have a lot in common, for instance regarding a certain deplorable social phenomenon, namely conformism.

In the case of communism it is political conformism that is ruthlessly enforced from the politburo or its equivalents down (as still evident in China, and to a certain extent in the ruling party in South Africa today), in the name of “discipline” or under the subterfuge that everyone is (supposed to be) “equal”, while with capitalism it is a kind of economic conformism that is more subtly enforced, ostensibly in opposition to the putative class equality of people under communism.

Under capitalism one is encouraged to develop one’s economic potential to compete ruthlessly with everyone else for as big a slice as possible of the economic cake, as long as it is done without rocking the boat of economic conformism too much. That is, while everyone is in principle entitled to participate in a market economy, on whatever small a scale it may be, this must be done in accordance with the rules of the marketplace, to begin with, which is not without its own cost.

But more importantly while everyone has the right to prosper and climb the socio-economic ladder, this would be unthinkable without conforming to the economic practices of those who occupy the highest echelons of capitalist society. And this amounts to a mutual scratching of backs, or practice of “quid pro quo”, as it were, which (needless to say) hardly ever occurs without some kind of moral compromise (but with mutual economic benefit, of course), such as price-fixing, kickbacks, bribes, “commission(s)” of various kinds, and so on. (I need not elaborate on this by referring to endless examples; suffice it to remind oneself of something like the allegedly “improper” financial relations between the environmental assessment company, Bohlweki, and the “hopeful” prospective developers of the Wild Coast toll road in the process of carrying out an environmental impact assessment for the proposed toll road in 2003 — something that rightly led the minister of environmental affairs and tourism to rejecting the EIA report and commissioning a new one.)

The reason for this is not hard to find and has to do with what, to my mind, is the very (mostly overlooked) essence of capitalism, namely the unavoidable reduction of the wide diversity of value(s) in life to one measure of value, to wit, exchange value, better known by its visible signifier: money. Much has been written on money by among others that marvellous Marxist thinker Terry Eagleton, whose writing serves to remind readers of the fact that although most people experience money as something concrete (notes and coins), they forget that these visible objects are mere symbols of something entirely abstract, more accurately reflected as such by the numbers or abstract quantities one sees when you look at your bank account balance on the internet, for instance.

Why is this significant? Because money as the abstract medium in terms of which exchange value is indicated, functions in a reductive manner regarding ALL other things of value, from motor cars and electric appliances, to diamond rings, bunches of flowers and food, from the most expensive kind (caviar) to the humble potato. Everything, no matter what its value to you, personally, might be, can be expressed in terms of its exchange value, or money. Your cell phone, perhaps a year old, may still be functioning perfectly, but after a year’s use its exchange value will have dropped considerably, even while its “use value” is as high as ever. As far as this kind of item is concerned, it does not really matter except to the degree that you may fall for a commercial advertising the latest model phone just because it has convinced you that yours is “so last year” and prompt you to spend money you could have saved, unnecessarily, on a new phone.

But where this reduction of “use value” — or what I prefer to call “intrinsic value” — is very important, is where people or other living beings are concerned. From the moment when a person, a “consumer”, has assimilated the lie, that ALL value can be expressed in terms of money, that even their own value, or that of their spouse, their children, parents, friends, colleagues, and so on, can in principle be reductively stated in terms of money, or exchange value, he or she has lost a bit of their humanity (like the people “consumed” by the zombies in Zack Snyder’s film Dawn of the Dead, where the zombies are easily recognisable as a metaphor for consumers).

The attempt — so often come across these days — to convince young people that they should learn to “brand” or “market” themselves is just such an example of converting or reducing the value of a person to money. Needless to say, no person’s value CAN be expressed in terms of money, not even a person who has been retrenched because, under current economic circumstances, he or she is no longer “valuable” (that is, useful for generating profit) for the company. It is well known among psychologists that such people experience a tremendous drop in self-esteem or self-worth, which is not at all surprising in a society that values money above all. And it takes a lot of effort to convince such people that their worth exceeds any monetary figure that the current economic system would attach to them.

And yet, people are infinitely more valuable as people, animals as animals, plants as plants, mountains as mountains, the sea as the sea, than money could ever be an indication of, despite which one encounters ludicrous phenomena such as the attempt to “brand” a continent, like Africa. How could anyone who still calls him or herself a human being believe that the mountains of Africa, her forests, her rivers, her animals, her people, could be reduced to a “brand” with the implication that the value of all these things can be expressed in terms of money, or exchange value?

Who would part with a beloved pet like a cat, dog or horse if a sufficiently high price were to be offered for such an animal? (At the same time, I would bet that there are people around who would exchange their own grandmothers, wives or children for the “right” price in a society like ours that worships money.) If you would, you don’t know the meaning of love.

I know that — even if you hate capitalism (as I do, and as many colleagues and friends of mine worldwide do) — we cannot avoid participating in a capitalist economy, because we live in it. But we CAN minimise the extent to which we are exploited by the system and fight for its regulation where necessary. For example in South Africa one can hardly do without a cellphone for obvious reasons. But one could use an “old” one (6 months or more) for as long as it works properly and — like I do — mostly use it for SMSing or texting, except on the odd occasion when one cannot avoid phoning someone in connection with something urgent. And when cellphone companies phone you with offers of contracts on which one can “save” a lot of money (lol), with new phones and “upgrades” thrown in, remind them (as I do) that cellphone costs in South Africa are among the highest in the world and that you will use them; NOT the other way around. Needless to say my cellphone costs are ridiculously low.

Here I have not even touched on the highest cost of capitalism as an economic system impossibly predicated on endless growth (within a finite ecological system), namely its immeasurable cost regarding the degradation of the natural environment (although I have written on it several times before on this blog). I need to return to this topic in light of a very disturbing if enlightening BBC Four documentary on “The mathematics of chaos” that I saw recently. But for now, suffice it to say that although Ivens is undeniably right in rejoicing in the demise of communism in 1989, he has good reason to look forward to the demise of an equally unacceptable economic system, namely capitalism (which has already been severely compromised by the recent global financial crisis and the expanding recession). In the place of both of these systems, and avoiding the paralysing choice between them, one should work towards a system that incorporates elements of both, but in such a way that neither people nor nature is repressed or exploited. Celebrate 1968 AND 1989.