The dream and the thing

By Dalia Céspedes

As soon as I open "Il Sogno di una Cosa," the novel by Italian poet Pier Paolo Passolini, I find this marvelous quote from the prophet Karl Marx, theologian of the working class:

"Hence, our motto must be: reform of consciousness not through dogmas, but by analyzing the mystical consciousness that is unintelligible to itself, whether it manifests itself in a religious or a political form. It will then become evident that the world has long dreamed of possessing something of which it has only to be conscious in order to possess it in reality. (September 1843.)"

I will not stop to mock the German’s lack of foresight, he who promoted dogmas that still weigh on that consciousness he attempted to reform. However, while still admiring the beauty and high-mindedness of that paragraph, I relate it to a text that I found in the Cuban literary journal "The Scribe’s Writings," which reprinted (from the website Liberación) the "Six Letters to the Lefts" by Portuguese sociologist Boaventura de Souza.

What primarily summons our attention in Souza’s writing is the way he reviews, like someone running a cloth over a dirty lens, the points of view and behaviors of those movements and trends that, more than 200 years after the French Revolution, we feel obliged to call "the left." Or what the Portuguese writer purposely calls "the lefts."

The "high-intensity" democracy is, according to Souza, the most valued tool (not to say the last tool) remaining for these movements in their resistance to a capitalism that is more corrosive than ever. And in which cases it is a real resistance and in which a simple exercise in adaptation is a question that these letters cannot overlook.

Democracy of high intensity is, then, reciprocity and cooperative work, an egalitarian spirit (not egalitarianism), a collective responsibility not acquired at the expense of individual dignity, a willingness to hold an open reflection with nonmilitants, a distribution of information that is neither indiscriminate nor discriminatory, to propose a culture "of hope, happiness and life," instead of a malevolent broadcast (I can’t think of another epithet) of violence and fear.

It is obvious that, facing a utopic or almost utopic world where hope, happiness and life prevail, rather than the crime of a lesser existence and the resignation that accompanies it, De Souza cannot but turn to that image of highest realization that is, for humans, the myth of growth. To grow in what direction? Or, a more painful and fertile question: To grow as conscious beings or as slaves of growth?

Therefore, the troublesome actuality, more troublesome because Marxism itself became a political-religious doctrine of Marx’s dream: to transform consciousness, the only door to the transformation of the living thing.

Boaventura de Souza’s luminous text is pregnant with questions. It could be said, without an intent to reproach, that the questions in his text are more important than the suggestions. How could it be otherwise if we take into account the current state of the thing and the dream? To breathe from these answers we need more than just progressive proposals that make us long for an unreachable future.

The apocalyptic profusion of prescriptions, a sign of the times, barely leaves us space to organize ideas, not to say to learn to think anew. Thought, buried in commercial-like slogans, be their purpose ideological or spiritual, has regressed to a Stone Age muttering typical of those who applaud shadow images projected on the wall of a cave that becomes increasingly narrower.

Let’s admit it. If we have gone from Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony to reggaeton, from Chaplin to soap operas, from Ghandi the pacifist to Obama the Nobel Peace Prize winner, could it be because the wheel of our thought process – fatigued after such doubtful advances – decided to roll backward without even stopping?

Between the late 19th Century and the first half of the 20th, human consciousness suffered three disasters and traumas equal to the most violent tsunamis or earthquakes.

First, the failure of industry in providing the promised way out of the onerous labor conditions and misery. Remember the punctuality of that marvelous libel called "The Right to Sloth," by Lafargue, in this aspect at least, sharper than his father-in-law. Compare the art of the Italian futurists with that of the abstract expressionists in New York and you’ll see what mental landscape I’m talking about.

Second, the Soviet Union, mother of some lefts and stepmother of others, betraying the collective faith in an ideal world reachable by ideal roads, offered us a bloody version of the Machiavellian imperial show where the end justifies the means. One example among thousands: Mayakovsky, as he went from an enthusiastic collaborator to an exemplary suicide.

Third, the traumatic World War of 1939-45, brought to an end by two atomic bombs in Hiroshima and Nagasaki, was followed by the false peace that many called the Cold War. This false peace, which underhandedly undermined the possibility of the "never again" that emerged from Auschwitz, is, in my opinion, the worst trauma of all, bequeathing to us a heavy conviction in the impossibility of harmony, in the need for antagonism to generate development.

In the end, it prepared us to become complicitous spectators of that spectacular farce that runs through and permeates institutions such as the United Nations, the Olympic Games or the Nobel Peace Prizes.

I myself confess that I’m not one of those who are scared by an optimistic idea. To smile during a storm is something I learned from my elders and the poets, who were and are to me (as they are to children) the true and forever subjugated hope. Didn’t that poet of action and parable say that we have to be like children to understand what we are and what awaits us?

I am not surprised, then, that, when mentioning the movements of "the indignant ones" and Occupy Wall Street, De Souza asks: "Are they mad or are they a portent of the challenges ahead?"

The creation of consensus that said movements propose and practice (and I stop here to caution that creation, in its natural and poetic sense, is not synonymous with manipulation) primarily implies understanding that the pyramidal forms of distribution of goods are obscene and obsolete. And is there any good better than consciousness?

I don’t mind being redundant when I say that what’s needed are circular modes of circulation for all the material and, above all, immaterial goods, because (and in this, I disagree with the elderly Marx and his no less materialistic adversaries) our first steps toward a long-dreamed-of world will be taken not in the field of economics but in the field of free and libertarian education.

Of course, when and why did circulation cease to be circular? Clearly, we’re dealing with a progressive degeneration and we’ll have to again learn to dream of the circle, the image of the universe. It doesn’t seem as if the economists, the entrepreneurs and their financiers are the ones who can teach us. They have a long road to retrace before abandoning the archaic pyramid of the law of value. Just looking at the reality before us we realize that, if we do not assume the patience of Penelope to weave an accord worthy of the ignored consciousness, Odysseus won’t have time to return to Ithaca, or an Ithaca to which he can return.