nodernity, western thi abating its vision of the workd, its valDes and its perspectives?
That is a complex ques tion. The idea of Marxism is that the working class is the inheritor of the most advanced gains of the bourgeoisie, of rationalism, the phi losophy of the Enlightenment and the Prench 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.
Onthe other hand there exists, within the socialist moverent 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 siled 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 in into the USSR. the motor car. tic element of Marxism, which In chis there is an insufficiently It is a type of divine being that exists within the overall phicritical vision in relation to the demands human sacrifices: losophy of Marx and in part of technical and productive appa- every week-end, in every capi- the Marxist tradition of the 20th ratus and the overall relations of tal city of the world, there are celluty. production compared to the cri infinite lists of casualties from It is not a question of returning tique of private property. accidents, a slaughter of men, to the past but of imagining a It is not only a problem of con- women, children which is ac- future in which valid elements tinuity of the productive appa- cepted as inevitable, as a natural from the past - from a human, ratus but of a question of how phenomenon. cultural, social and ethical point to make urban life more civi There are more deaths than in of view - which were destroyed lised, of relations between peo many wars. There are certain by capitalist modernity, can be ple, of the relationship to models of consumption, en re-established, though obviNature. demic within modern society, ously with a new form. The problem is to know that are lethal from an ecologi- Marx himself speaks about this whether socialism itself repre- cal, human and social point of when he writes about the comsents a new paradigm of civili- view. munal society which existed in sation or merely a perfecting of This leads to another set of the past and was destroyed by existing society. problems. In the way in which capitalism and private property. The place occupied by the socialism is an attempt at creat- Socialism will be a new commumotor car in modern socity is a ing a new model of civilisation nal society, but naturally not the good example of what is said is contained the idea of rebuild- same as primitive communism. above. It is incredible that the ing, rediscovering or reformu- That also applies to other phewhole of economic, social and lating elements from the nomena of cultural and social: urban life, housing, leisure pre-capitalist past that was de- life. I time, ideology, and so on are stroyed by bourgeois moder-