In what way can socialism be considered part of industrial modernity, western thought, sharing its vision of the world, its values and its perspectives?
Jhat is a complex question. The idea of Marxism is that the working class is the inheritor of the most advanced gains of the bourgeoisie, of rationalism, the philosophy of the Enlightenment and the French Revolution.
The working class movement will achieve the promises that bourgeois progress did not carry out. That idea is legitimate so we cannot understand socialism without this element from the Enlightenment. As Ernest Bloch says, concepts such as liberty, equality and fraternity contain a utopian excess which goes far beyond the bourgeois perspective and which will be realised by socialism. On the other hand there exists, within the socialist movement and within the whole thought of Marx, a vision in which the continuity between modern industrial civilisation and socialism is understood in an excessively one sided fashion. The necessity for a break with this model of civilisation is not sufficiently understood. Socialism does not just consist of making the existing productive, industrial and economic system work in a more rational and efficient manner; it doesn't consist of developing the productive forces just through planning.
This concept is not sufficiently critical of the western paradigm of instrumental rationalism and the system of production as it exists. One quite well known example of this is the view of Lenin and other Marxists that Taylorism was an excellent ininto the USSR.
In this there is an insufficiently critical vision in relation to the technical and productive apparatus and the overall relations of production compared to the critique of private property. It is not only a problem of continuity of the productive apparatus but of a question of how to make urban life more civilised, of relations betwéen people, of the relationship to Nature.
The problem is to know whether socialism itself represents a new paradigm of civilisation or merely a perfecting of existing society.
The place occupied by the motor car in modern society is a good example of what is said above. It is incredible that the whole of economic, social and urban life, housing, leisure time, ideology, and so on are! the motor car.
It is a type of divine being that demands human sacrifices: every week-end, in every capital city of the world, there are infinite lists of casualties from accidents, a slaughter of men, women, children which is acceptedas inevitable, as a natural phenomenon.
There are more deaths than in many wars. There are certain models of consumption, endemic within modern society, that are lethal from an ecological, human and social point of view.
This leads to another set of problems. In the way in which socialism is an attempt at creating a new model of civilisation is contained the idea of rebuilding, rediscovering or reformulating elements from the pre-capitalist past that was destroyed by bourgeois modertic element of Marxism, which exists within the overall philosophy of Marx and in part of the Marxist tradition of the 20th century. It is not a question of returning to the past but of imagining a future in which valid elements from the past - from a human, cultural, social and ethical point of view - which were destroyed by capitalist modernity, can be re-established, though obviously with a new form. Marx himself speaks about this when he writes about the communal society which existed in the past and was destroyed by capitalism and private property. Socialism will be a new communal society, but naturally not the same as primitive communism. That also applies to other phenomena of cultural and social life.