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The Neolithic Age, Capitalism, and Communism

Let's start by being ambitious, in terms of both time and space. We shall go back to a few millennia before our own time and also, as is fashionable, we shall take a look at the fate of our beloved planet, revered by some contemporary believers under the name of the goddess Gaia.

It has become commonplace today to announce, for various reasons, that the end is nigh for the human species as we know it. From the typically messianic perspective of a certain brand of ecology, the predatory excesses of the evil animal that is the human being will soon bring about the end of the living world. And then, from the perspective of runaway technological development we are told, in no particular order, of the takeover of all labour by robots, the sumptuous delights of the digital realm, automated art, deadly microplastics, and the threat of superhuman intelligence.

Consequently, we see the emergence of menacing categories such as transhumanism and the posthuman, or, in the other direction, a return to the animal, depending upon whether we listen to the prophecies of the tech industry or laments about the wounds inflicted on Mother Nature.

I regard all of these prophecies as so much ideological rhetoric designed to obscure the real danger facing humanity today, namely the impasse into which we are being led by globalised capitalism. It is in fact this social form, and it alone, which, wedded as it is to the pure notion of private profit, authorises the destructive exploitation of natural resources. That so many species are endangered, that the climate is still running out of control, that water is becoming a rare treasure - all of this is a by-product of the ruthless competition between predatory billionaires. And the fact that scientific development is anarchically enslaved to the imperative of producing saleable technologies has the same origin. Ecological preaching, which, despite its prophetic excesses, is often based on convincing descriptions, is in general becoming pure propaganda, useful to states that want to show everyone how caring they are, and transnational firms that, for the greater good of their turnover, are eager to make people believe in the noble and fraternal natural purity of the goods they traffic in.

Moreover, technological fetishism and the uninterrupted succession of 'revolutions' in this domain - the 'digital revolution' being currently the most fashionable - has constantly served to convince people that we are simultaneously heading for a workless paradise of helpful robots and universal laziness, and witnessing the human intellect being overtaken by electrical 'thought'. Today, not a magazine is published that does not present its astonished readers with the imminent 'victory' of artificial over natural intelligence. But in the majority of cases neither 'nature' nor 'artifice' are correctly or clearly defined.

Since the very origins of philosophy, it has often been asked what the word 'nature' means. It has meant the romantic reverie of sunsets, the atomic materialism of Lucretius (De natura rerum), the innermost being of all things, Spinoza's Totality ('Deus sive Natura'), the objective flipside of all culture, the countryside as opposed to the suspicious artifices of the city ('The earth does not lie', as Marshall Pétain said), biology as opposed to physics, the scope of cosmology as opposed to the minuscule neighbourhood of our planet, invariant tradition as opposed to frenzied innovation, natural sexuality as opposed to perversion .. Today, I'm afraid, 'nature' refers principally to nothing much more than the peace of gardens and villages, the touristic charms of wild animals, the beach, and the mountains where you might spend a pleasant summer. So who could possibly imagine that man is responsible for this Nature - man, who even now is nothing more than a thinking flea, hopping around on a secondary planet in a medium-sized solar system on the edge of a commonplace galaxy?

Since its origins, philosophy has also thought technics, or the arts. The ancient Greeks meditated on the dialectic of technè and phusis, situating the human animal within this dialectic and thus paving the way for the idea that the human is 'only a reed, the weakest in nature, but [.] a thinking reed', which, according to Pascal, means: stronger than Nature, and closer to God. They long ago realised that the animal capable of mathematics would achieve great things in the material order. And are these 'robots' we hear so much about anything more than calculations assembled into the form of a machine, numbers crystallised into movements? They certainly count faster than we do, but it is we who designed them for precisely this task. Even if a crane can lift a huge concrete pole to a great height, it would be stupid to conclude from this that humans are incapable of doing so and that we are witnessing the birth of some muscular transhuman giant .. Similarly, counting at the speed of light is not a sign of unsurpassable 'intelligence'. Technological transhumanism just replays the same old trope, an inexhaustible theme in horror films and science fiction, of the creator outmanoeuvred by his creature, either so as to revel in the coming of the superman, which has been overdue since Nietzsche announced it, or to become fearful and take refuge under the skirts of Gaia or Mother Nature.

Let's get things into perspective.

For four or five thousand years now humanity has been organised by the triad of private property, which concentrates enormous wealth in the hands of tiny oligarchies, the family, in which wealth is passed on via inheritance, and the state, which protects both property and family by means of armed force. It is this triad that defined the Neolithic age of our species and we are still living in that age, indeed perhaps more so than ever. Capitalism is the contemporary form of the Neolithic: its enslaving of technics to competition, profit, and the concentration of capital only brings to an apotheosis the monstrous inequalities, social absurdities, military massacres and deleterious ideologies, which throughout the historical reign of the class hierarchy have always accompanied the deployment of new technologies.

It should be clear that technical inventions were the initial conditions for the arrival of the Neolithic Age, not its result. Looking at the fate of our own animal species, we can see that sedentary agriculture, the domestication of cattle and horses, pottery, bronze, metal weapons, writing, nationhood, monumental architecture, and monotheistic religions are inventions at least as important as the aeroplane and the smartphone. What is human in history has always been artificial by definition, otherwise the humanity we know, Neolithic humanity, would not exist, but only a humanity that was still close to the animal realm - something that did indeed continue to exist in the form of small nomadic groups for around two hundred thousand years.

Fearful, obscurantist primitivism has its roots in the fallacious concept of 'primitive communism'. Today it takes the form of a cultic belief in friendly archaic societies where babies, women, men, and old people lived fraternally along with mice, frogs, and bears. Ultimately, all of this is nothing more than ridiculous reactive propaganda, since everything points towards the fact that the societies in question were extremely violent, constantly labouring under the yoke of necessity, just struggling to survive.

Moreover, to talk today in hushed tones of the victory of the artificial over the natural, of the robot over the human, is a ridiculously regressive point of view, a real absurdity. Our reply to these terrors and prophecies should be as follows: a simple axe, or a trained horse, to say nothing of a papyrus full of signs, are already exemplary trans- or posthuman items; the abacus already made it possible to calculate much faster than with the fingers of the hand.

The question of our time is certainly not that of a return to primitivism or a messianic terror in the face of the 'ravages' of technology, nor is it that of a morbid fascination with the science fiction of all-conquering robots. The real task before us is to make a methodical and urgent exit from the Neolithic. This millennial order, which values only competition and hierarchy and tolerates the misery of billions of human beings, must be overcome at all costs, before we witness the unleashing of more of those wars that have been the preserve of the Neolithic since its emergence, technologised conflicts in the lineage of the two World Wars of 1914-18 and 1939-45, in which tens of millions died. This time it could be many more.

The issue is not technology or nature, but the organisation of societies on a global scale. It is about insisting that a non-Neolithic social organisation is possible, meaning: no private ownership of what should be common, i.e. the production of everything necessary for human life, and everything that makes it worthwhile. No family inheritances, no concentration of wealth. No separate state to protect the oligarchies. No hierarchical division of labour. No nations, no closed and mutually hostile identities. Collective organisation of everything pertaining to the collective interest.

All of this has a name, a fine name:...