Toward an ecological society

classes confront each other in a conflict of “interests” that exists beyond their will or even their clear comprehension. That Marx conceives the proletariat as a category of political economy — as the “owner” of labour power, the object of exploitation by the bourgeoisie, and a creature of the factory system — reflects and ideologizes its actual one-sided condition under capitalism as a “productive force,” not as a revolutionary force. Marx leaves us in no doubt about this conception. As the class that is most completely dehumanized, the proletariat transcends its dehumanized condition and comes to embody the human totality “through urgent, no longer disguisable, absolutely imperative need. ” Accordingly: “The question is not what this or that proletarian, or even the whole proletariat at the moment considers as its aim. The question is what the proletariat is, and what, consequent on that being, it will be compelled to do. ”(27) (The emphasis throughout is Marx’s and provides a telling commentary on his de-subjectivization of the proletariat.) I will leave aside the rationale that this formula provides for an elitist organization. For the present, it is important to note that Marx, following the tradition of classical bourgeois political economy, totally objectifies the proletariat and removes it as a true subject. The revolt of the proletariat, even its humanization, ceases to be a human phenomenon; rather, it becomes a function of inexorable economic laws and “imperative need. ” The essence of the proletariat as proletariat is its non-humanity, its creature nature as the product of “absolutely imperative need” — of brute “interest. ” Its subjectivity falls within the category of harsh necessity, explicable in terms of economic law. The psychology of the proletariat, in effect, is political economy. The real proletariat resists this reduction of its subjectivity to the product of need and lives increasingly within the realm of de(27) Karl Marx and Frederick Engels: The Holy Family, op. cit., pp. 52–53. 240 ments could be assimilated in piecemeal fashion to conventional ways of life as has been the case with so many radical ideas in the past. The plan is sensitive to this possibility. From the outset, it adopts a revolutionary stance. Its premise in advance of any design is a culture that is counter to the prevailing one — one that emphasizes community rather than isolation, the sharing of resources and skills rather than their privatized possession, independence from rather than dependence on the bourgeois market place, loving relations and mutual aid rather than egotism and competition. The Blueprint clearly articulates the social preconditions for a free community that other, ostensibly radical, plans leave unexamined. It is humanistic, not “iconoclastic”; it is radical, not “original. ” And whether or not the planners were fully conscious of their historic antecedents, they were presenting a Hellenic vision of urban life. The truly human city, to them, is a way of life (not a mere “design”) that fosters the integration of individual with society, of town with country, of personal needs with social ones without denying the integrity of each. The Sixties have passed — and with them many of the high hopes raised by dropout youth and radical students. An insecure, so-called “middle American” adult public, seeking respite from challenges to traditional values, is trying to entrench itself in the status quo, indeed, to evoke an “innocence” imputed to the past that is apocryphal in any case. Where the counterculture has managed to hold its own against overtly hostile forces, it has had to contend with a political mode of dope-peddling in the form of sectarian Marxism and “Third World” voyeurism. Here, archaic ideologies and modes of organization assume the semblance of “radicalism” and, like toxic germs, fester in the wounds opened by public malaise and political repression. Yet even this ebbing phase of what is surely a much larger cultural and social development could be valuable as a sobering period of maturation. A new world will not be gained merely by strewing the pathway to the future with flowers. The largely intu-