LAO-TSE AVEC MARX

From Perry Anderson, 'The River of Time', NLR 26 (2004):

Classically, utopias were imagined as islands, enclaves or colonies—

delimited spaces, either segregated within the world, or projected beyond

it. Today, would not the appropriate utopia have to be globalized, the

whole earth brought under the wing of that butterfly, fluttering so well

and so fast? But we can also envisage the renewal of utopian energies

more historically. No-one has captured that other tempo more strikingly

than Jameson, in one of those unexpected sentences that are his signature.

It comes from Brecht and Method, where he writes:

Stasis today, all over the world—in the twin condition of market and globalization,

commodification and financial speculation—does not even take on

a baleful religious sense of an implacable human nature; but it certainly

seems to have outstripped any place for human agency, and to have rendered

the latter obsolete. That is why a Brechtian conception of activity

must go hand in hand with a revival of the older precapitalist sense of time

itself, of the change or flowing of all things; for it is the movement of this

great river of time or the Tao that will slowly carry us downstream again to

the moment of praxis.

Lao Tse floating towards Marx. Is the torrent of capital now churning

too fast for such a rendezvous? Later, Jameson raises that objection himself.

Others might question the paradox of an activism delivered by a

drift with the stream. But the power of the image remains. It requires

no attentisme. The Tao Te Ching is also a cry of social anger, a ça ira of

its times. ‘Exterminate benevolence, discard righteousness’—‘the people

will be a hundred times better off’. Few words knock so sharply on our

door, in an age of institutional piety of which Confucius could only have

dreamt. Should we call them too utopian?

(sent from Mr. Toscano)