Luces Rojas

For a Socialism of Lightness

Luis Fernando Medina

Spanish version

Weeks before dying, Italo Calvino left written five lectures, out of six he was supposed to give at Harvard and which he would never get to deliver: his Six Memos for the Next Millenium. In them he discussed values that he envisioned as growing in importance in modern society, emphasizing as was to be expected given the speaker and the audience, how should literature embody them. The first one was titled: Lightness.

For Calvino, the world of the 21st century, which he did not get to witness, would be a light world, one that would float in ceaseless movement. Calvino remarked how while the previous industrial revolutions had populated our imagery with rust, soot, iron and cogs, the productive revolution of our time was the revolution of electrons, bits and pixels full of information that float, noiseless and weightless. When Calvino died the internet was still just an incantation shared by a few engineers but surely had he lived into our days he could not have but smiled at the notion of "the cloud" that collective monument to lightness where we house the equivalent to uncoutably many libraries of Alexandria without so much as laying down a pillar.

Surely there are writers that might take up Calvino's concerns about lightness in literature. Let's deal here with other domains of imagination: politics and economics. We have entered the era of lightness but we still use the categories of the previous era. We live in a world in which the production of symbols, information, knowledge, meanings keeps growing in prominence, a world of lightness that makes increasingly possible the spontaneous encounters of people and ideas, the incorporeal traffic of concepts and fantasies. And yet our political debates are still stuck in the times when the production of goods was the utmost imperative to stave off the specter of scarcity, if not hunger.

Let's take for example the debate, almost closed, between capitalism and socialism. To declare onself a socialist is a gesture as archaic and inteligible as to declare onself a Rosicrucian. But, paradoxically, the production of symbols, knowledge, information and meaning is at its best a socialist enterprise.

The identification of capitalism with the market and of socialism with the State is a lazy prop validated by certain historical accidents better discussed elsewhere. What has distinguished the socialist tradition since its origins has been its endeavor to create spaces of social cooperation protected from the imperatives both of states and markets. To be genuine and robust, such spaces need to be egalitarian, with organizational structures as horizontal as possible, affording their members high degrees of autonomy that allow them to cooperate freely, without the constant threats coming from political expediencies or balance sheets. Well, this description is also a good description of what happens in the best organizations dedicated to the production in the world of lightness, be they universities, labs, studios, etc., regardless of whether they are private or public. This is not an accident. Such production requires cooperation, flexibility, autonomy, freedom of experimentation, and many other features that would result uncomfortable in a public bureaucracy or in a private enterprise. In a word, they require socialism.

There already exists in our society a privileged segment that enjoys such lightness, emancipated from the tyranny of machines, organization charts or even geographic location, working in fluid hierarchies, with access to productive leisure, with job security and opportunities for experimentation and reinvention. But instead of expanding such spaces, instead of making them accessible to more people, the prevailing trend is the opposite: better conditions for those who inhabit said enclaves but more precariousness, less bargaining power, less leisure and with worse equality, and less autonomy for those who remain outside.

It is not hard to see what kind of steps could revert such trend. For instance, a universal basic income would contribute significantly to expand the citizens' conditions of autonomy and security giving them the opportunity of changing path, of embarking in new endeavors. Policies of full employment, some already used in the past, others that remain to be designed, would improve the employees bargaining power in face of the hierarchies that dominate the productive system. A higher education not tied to criteria of profitability would form citizens better prepared for this world of exploration and inventiveness. Even small steps such as giving incentives to co-ops through government purchases, akin to those given in the US to minority-run businesses, could contribute to create an "ecosystem" of firms friendlier to the citizenry.

This is not the place to pronounce on whether these specific ideas are good or not. What is remarkable is that they are almost unthinkable. They are unthinkable because they generate inefficiency. By market criteria, socialism is inefficient and efficiency has become the polar star of our ideological firmament. The time has come to question such primacy.

Our obsession with efficiency was relatively understandable in a world where there were not enough material resources to ensure everyone's subsistence. It is an obsession that has served to justify many miseries (and much squandering) but that is a topic for another moment. The issue at hand is that we need to learn how to question efficiency, a concept that becomes ever weightier in an ever lighter world.

Inefficiency is like cholesterol. There is good cholesterol and bad cholesterol and there is good inefficiency and bad inefficiency. We can all come with examples of bad inefficiency: corruption, sloth, red tape, just to mention a few. But there is also good inefficiency. Many projects, the result of creativity, autonomy and solidarity, are inefficient when judged by market criteria. The challenge for the future is to find the way to bring out more of the good inefficiency and less of the bad one. But to take up that challenge we need the language to formulate it. It does not take a genius to understand who benefits from the current political language. By the same token, this world of lightness poses a challenge to our vocabulary, our political imagination. After all, as Calvino warned, lightness is not triviality. Quite the opposite, true lightness involves invention, reinterpretaion, questioning.

I have made such an opportunistic use of Calvino's beautiful essay that the least I can do to make up for the theft is to give him the last word. Were I to choose an auspicious image for the new millennium, I would choose that one: “The sudden agile leap of the poet-philosopher who raises himself above the weight of the world, showing that with all his gravity he has the secret of lightness, and that what many consider to be the vitality of the times –noisy, aggressive, revving and roaring– belongs to the realm of death, like a cemetery for rusty old cars".

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