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A Philosophical Quest for
Twenty-First-Century Socialism
Joel Kovel
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Socialism, Socialism and Democracy, 26:2, 107-118
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A Philosophical Quest for
Twenty-First-Century Socialism
Joel Kovel
Istvan Meszaros, Social Structure and Forms of Consciousness. Volume I:
The Social Determination of Method; Volume II: The Dialectic of Structure
and History (New York: Monthly Review Press, 2010, 2011)
When I reviewed Istvan Meszaros Beyond Capital in 1997,
1
I called
it his chef-doeuvre and the denitive Marxian synthesis for the present
moment. Now, 14 years on, we have another moment and another
massive study by this remarkable man called by Hugo Chavez the
pathnder of twenty-rst century socialism.
The two syntheses are necessarily linked and cover some of the
same ground. But they are also quite distinct, and comprise a sequence
in which Social Structure and Forms of Consciousness is positioned to
carry forward the argument of Beyond Capital. I wrote of the earlier
work that it dealt with four major themes:
1. The nature of capital and its distinction from capitalism;
2. An extended theory of structural crisis;
3. A powerful and lengthy critique of some actually existing allegedly
post-capitalist societies: the Soviet model as well as the still existent,
at least nominally, market socialism;
4. A vision of the necessary and sufcient conditions for socialism to
become the positive transcendence of capitalism.
Social Structure and Forms of Consciousness deepens the rst theme,
largely sets the third aside, and dwells on the fourth. The chief
reason for this is that the structural crisis of capital (the second
theme) has evolved to the point of demanding a deeper and more
urgent reection hence the new moment. The 1990s seemed a
time in which to re-evaluate the still-smoking ruins of the Soviet
system and ponder the fading claims of social democracy, or as some
would have called it, the Third Way. The status of the victor,
global capitalism, meanwhile, seemed assured and remained so
during the expansive 90s. Today, the conventional wisdom has been
1. Monthly Review, March 1997, 4454.
Socialism and Democracy, Vol.26, No.2, July 2012, pp.107118
ISSN 0885-4300 print/ISSN 1745-2635 online
http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/08854300.2012.686283 #2012 The Research Group on Socialism and Democracy
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turned upside down: neither traditional socialism nor Third-Way
social democracy can command the attention of serious people inter-
ested in the future of society. In the meantime, the grinding crisis of
capital has caused numerous cracks to appear in its system, including
those stemming from its ecological crisis featuring aggravated aggres-
sion over declining resources and chaotic interactions of pollution,
species loss, and increasingly catastrophic climate change. Given the
unprecedented state of affairs, it is little wonder that speculation
about capitals collapse is rife, something unthinkable a decade or
two ago, when neoliberal hubris and triumphalism stimulated by the
passing of the Communist era still reigned. We are in uncharted
waters indeed, and the need for a thinker of Meszaros stature to
resume his project of systematic critique is great.
Meszaros does not see capitals end as imminent. But nobody is
more rmly convinced that it neither has nor deserves a future and
that the moment of its downfall is gathering. Nor is there anyone with
a greater polemical gift, presented so fearlessly, to give this point the
urgency it deserves. Social Structure and Forms of Consciousness is remi-
niscent of Meszaros The Power of Ideology (1989), a sustainedandpower-
ful tirade against the bad faith of intellectuals I could never again, for
example, read Theodor Adorno with the awe demanded by the
Academy after perusing Meszaros demolition of the celebrated Nega-
tive Dialectician. But where the earlier study was, as the title claimed,
a study of the ideological justications comprising capitals inner
walls of defense, the extensive critique here has a larger purpose than
the critique of ideology. It is rather the vehicle Meszaros will use to
explore the innards of capital itself and to trace the rise of its ascending
period and the pitch of the present decline as it heads toward downfall.
Meszaros may have the fervor and moral clarity of the Old Testa-
ment prophet hurling imprecations against a wayward Judea; but it is
not his business to predict the exact time of the end or even its inevit-
ability, nor will he rest with some variant of the Biblical theme that God
is punishing the ruling power like a severe parent chastising a wicked
child. No, his project is to lay bare the inner mechanisms by which
capital brings doom upon itself so that people may, nally, awaken
and rise against it. He knows that capitals end will be determined
by the militancy, faith, perseverance, organization and creativity of
those who will it to end. As he sums it up in the Introduction to the
rst volume, The Social Determination of Method:
. . .it is indispensable to focus also on those elements of the theories in question
(of the various exponents of capital) which must be and can only be
108 Socialism and Democracy
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aufgehoben; that is, dialectically superseded/preserved by being raised to a
historically more advanced level, so as to be put to a socially positive use.. . .
This is particularly important in a period of transition toward a historically
viable social order.. . . [P]roperly engaging with the problems at stake constitu-
tes a contribution to a much needed transition to what Marx called the new
historic form which appears to be a literally vital dening characteristic of
our time.. . . [T]he long persistent objective challenges calling for historically
vital answers are more pressing today than ever before. That is the true
measure of the task for the future. (I-23)
2
Volume I may be regarded, therefore, as a kind of case-book of
intellectual pathology structured around a series of chapter-length
dissections of the necrotic tissues of thought that evades, denies, or
mysties the central insight advanced by Marx that everything in
capitalist society is congured around the domination of labor,
thereby causing a fundamental split that breaks down any effort to
assert a universal process. Since asserting universality is what the
leading intellectuals of the Western tradition in modernity try to do,
they end up caught in one hopeless contradiction after another.
This applies to the principal thinkers of the early modern period,
especially Hegel for Meszaros, the king-pin of Western thought
the great dialectical thinker who time and again violated his own
principles of dialectics;
3
it obtains as well for Kant and Adam
Smith, who were at least capable of making powerful generalizations
because their work, like that of Hegel, belongs to capitals ascending
phase. And it applies to the intellectual stars of more recent times,
when capitals decline exposes deep ssures in their works, until
this eventuates in the barrens of post-structuralism and post-moder-
nity, where the claim of universality is simply abandoned and left to
rot. His accounting is of how brilliant minds actively make their
2. Unless otherwise stated, all italicizations in quotes are Meszaros own.
3. To give an example that will recur later in this review, Meszaros, in criticizing Hegels
ethnocentricity (endnote 42, I-203), calls attention to a passage in The Philosophy of
History, in which the African Character is dened by perfect contempt for huma-
nity. . .the fundamental characteristic of the race. Hegel continues, This contrasts
with the principle of the North, characterized by instinctually correct behavior
among us. Meszaros accurately observes that this dichotomization is in no way
consonant with the spirit of [Hegels] own philosophy, and he goes on to spin out
the further lapses in dialectical integrity resulting from efforts to paper over the
gaping hole in the theory. He concludes the note by observing that by having it
both ways, (Hegel is) betraying through such eagerness and concomitant philosophi-
cal inconsistency his ideological interests. In the text, he adds a salient observation of
particular interest for this study, that Hegel could not help being hostile even to the
mention of the word nature, since nature represents. . .the philosophically inferior
domain of sensuous determinations. (185)
Joel Kovel 109
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own. . .illusions, which happen to be ideologically most convenient illu-
sions, corresponding to the vantage point of capitals social metabolic
order (I-17) and, it goes without saying, are duly rewarded for
their effort, as Milton put it in Paradise Lost, to justify the ways of
God to man.
It is an impressive catalogue, unfolding chapter by chapter.
Meszaros rst target is the fetish of Science, in which the mastery
of man over nature stands in for the mastery of man over man,
with examples from Descartes to Max Weber and Karl Mannheim.
Second, he critiques the tendency toward formalism, a generator
of reication that turns direct human relations into abstractions,
for example, in the false equalization of people before the commod-
ity; or in crudities of bourgeois common sense that mystify
Human Nature by raising vulgar cost-benet analysis to a canonical
principle of thought. Meszaros sees through the pomposity of
Edmund Husserl grinding out scientistic nonsense such as rigor-
ous phenomenal reductionism; nor is he satised with the efforts
of his admired Jean-Paul Sartre, who blocks his own powerful Cri-
tique of Dialectical Reason by reifying the formal structures of
history.
4
Third, we have the standpoint of isolated individuality, that club
with which bourgeois ideologues beat anyone who dares insinuate that
collective and communal life such as is crushed by capital in all but a
few instances of intentional or religious communities is essential for
human existence. Here the nub is the elevation of the Ego, repository
of isolated individuality and the cornerstone of capitals personhood,
into a self-subsisting human essence.
Fourth, Meszaros dissects the preoccupation with negativity,
behind which he identies (with a characteristically difcult phrase)
the circular presupposition and glorication of the false positivity of
the existent (I-94). Again Hegel is singled out, for failing to see
4. Basically, this resulted from Sartres inability and/or refusal to grasp the essentials of
Marxs ontology regarding human beings as social animals who collectively produce
their world, and for whom, as the Sixth Thesis on Feuerbach puts it, the self is the
ensemble of social relations. Instead, the profound barrier between the individual
and the other developed in Being and Nothingness is transferred into his massive
marxisant study, Critique of Dialectical Reason, where it prevents the development
of a vital collectivity and hence, a viable social alternative to capitalism. The critique
of Sartre is the most extended and perhaps the most interesting, insightful and
moving of all the portraits dispensed by Meszaros. It combines a sharp critical eye
with affection and compassion. For whatever the shortcomings of the great existen-
tialist, these were overridden by the generosity of spirit and courage that
accompanied them.
110 Socialism and Democracy
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negativity in historical-materialist terms, which allows him thereby to
mystify the positive side of things. Meszaros traces this in the lineage
from Hegel to Heidegger and, beyond, to the emancipatory thought
of Sartre and Marcuse. The net effect is a return to Kant and the con-
joined tendency to disregard the key role of socially effective
mediation in bringing about the necessary structural change (I-97).
He nds that philosophers who dwell on unmediated negation are des-
tined for political futility and despair a misfortune such as befell
Sartre and Marcuse, the outstanding philosopher-radicals of the
middle third of the twentieth century.
Fifth, we have distortions in historical temporality, a verdict that
depends on whether the instance occurs before or after Marx. Pre-
Marxian formulations, as in the case of Giambattista Vico, could gener-
ate works of genius, albeit attenuated by a lack of theoretical develop-
ment. As for post-Marxist historiography, he takes up the case of
Hannah Arendt, darling of liberal academia, and is properly scathing
in his assessment. Arendts distorted vision of a totally unrecogniz-
able Marx blatantly valorizes a bourgeois society of isolated individ-
uals and dismisses the inconvenient truth of Marx with the claims that
in classless society the best mankind can do with history is to forget
the whole unhappy affair (I-131f).
Sixth, Meszaros considers the question of the dualisms and
dichotomies that suffuse capitalist society, ranging from the notions
of fact and value, to those of use and exchange, or quality and quantity,
or abstract and concrete, theory and practice, subject and object, and
more that is, all those dimensions of the bourgeois universe that
are made to stand in for its fundamental antagonisms and which
remain thoroughly unintelligible (I-186) unless seen in relation to
the deep and abiding fractures of capitalist society an insight forbid-
den by the dominant ideological powers. The basic structural antagon-
isms between capital and labor, therefore, are both disguised and
sustained by a fog of false choices and false divisions, often celebrated
under the rubric of diversity.
Seventh and last in this rogues gallery of bourgeois mystication,
we nd the mangling of unity and universality, or as Meszaros
puts it in a characteristically thorny subheading, The Incorrigible Cir-
cularity and Ultimate Failure of Individualistic Mediation (I-205). It is
impossible, he writes, to squeeze the desired unity and universal-
ity out of the fragmented multiplicity of isolated individualities (I-
206), though this has not discouraged an endless stream of ersatz think-
ers from trying to do so.
Joel Kovel 111
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The Marxian reorientation of method
The critique of bourgeois philosophy clears the ground for positive
achievement. As stated at the beginning of the nal, and book-length,
chapter of the rst volume, and into the second volume, The Dialectic of
Structure and History, the paramount need is to appropriate a qualitat-
ively different, non-antagonistic way of mediating the social metab-
olism. Crucially, this now extends into the domain of nature,
heretofore a relatively neglected dimension, but one whose importance
cannot be over-stated. For if it proves impossible. . .to elaborate a non-
antagonistic mode of mediating the relationship between humanity and nature
as well as among the individuals themselves, that would make the feasi-
bility of instituting a genuine socialist productive order itself rather
bleak (I-280, italics added). This is a major break with the history of
socialism, and to a degree, with Beyond Capital itself, which sounded
the theme, but not with such weight.
5
All of which is tting given
the darkening clouds of ecological collapse appearing between the
publication of the two works. Meszaros states the reason for the
break with admirable clarity: it is that the productive processes of
capitals destructive production are actively engaged already today in
inicting irreversible damage on nature itself, undermining therefore
the elementary conditions of humankind (I-279).
This is an essential insight. The question remains, however, of how
well it is developed. In presenting one of his basic categories, that of the
primary and second order mediations, for example, Meszaros does
not mention the human relationship to nature in any concrete sense
among the second-order mediations, those which must be ruthlessly
imposed on society in the interests of capital accumulation. . .no
matter how destructive might be the consequences, including the
potential destruction of humankind itself (I-397). The second-order
mediations are prime battlegrounds of the struggle for socialism. He
writes about one of them the nuclear family as a major eld of con-
testation but does not bring his lens to bear on the gender questions
embedded in this, through which we would nd a grounding in the
sensuous body participating in the physical, natural world, inasmuch
as the patriarchal family carries forth the pathological splitting of civi-
lization, whereby the male represents what is truly human while
women represent nature and mediate nature to the man. The other
5. Beyond Capital, 685, speaks of the systematic devastation of nature without raising
this to the level of demanding a radical alteration of our relationship to nature.
Nature appears, rather, as one of a string of victims, viz: Everything must be absol-
utely subordinated, from nature to all human needs and aspirations.
112 Socialism and Democracy
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secondary mediations alienated means of production, money, fetish-
isms, the control over labor, the capitalist state, and the world market
are also essential zones of struggle, but they are rendered even more
abstractly distant from the relationship to nature in Social Structure
and Forms of Consciousness. We are hard-pressed, therefore, to get a
grip on what a non-antagonistic relationship to nature may be. I shall
return to this question, after summarizing Meszaros principal
advance in socialist praxis.
This is a valorization of the communal system of both production
and consumption (I-296; see also I-333f, 342, 346). He sees this as con-
sistently advocated by Marx himself (as on p. 171 of the Grundrisse),
implying a redenition of the socialist path, now to consist of an
exchange of activities and not of products. The concept requires a
thorough transformation of production and a downgrading of the
importance of money, along with a vision of going radically beyond
capital and its organization of labor. Meszaros penetrates deeply into
the subjection of labor by its own fetishized production, in a brilliant
passage elaborating on Marx:
[W]ithout understanding the precise nature of the capital systems objective
circularity through which living labour becomes capital and as personied
capital confronts as well as dominates labour there can be no escape from
the vicious circle of capitals expanded self-reproduction. For the power dom-
inating labour is the circularly transformed power of labour itself, assuming a
stunted/travestied form and asserting itself in the mind-boggling fetishistic
situation when the product is the proprietor of the producer. (I-328f, quoting
Marx)
Thus fetishism, derived from the structural domination of labor,
rules over the panoply of failed thought explored in Meszaros
journey through bourgeois intellectual desolation. It can only be over-
come and supplanted through the communal-organic system of
freely associated labor and its exchange of activities. This is the funda-
mental conclusion of Volume One, spelled out in its 172 page nal
chapter. It stands as an opening of a dramatic and radical path
toward a socialism for this century. But we are not even halfway
through! For a second volume looms ahead, extending 505 pages
onward. One picks it up looking for the further development of these
ideas, especially the suggestion of a non-antagonistic relationship to
nature, the importance of which cannot be overstated according to
Meszaros.
However, although there are magnicent passages in the second
volume in particular, an extended and brilliant discussion of the
Joel Kovel 113
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Base-Superstructure problem these only glance off the question of
our relationship to nature. It must be said that Meszaros swerves
away from his own prescription, leaving a feeling of incompletion
about the work as a whole as well as a lack of clarity about the relation-
ship between the rst and second volumes which it may be added, is
nowhere spelled out, not even in the introductions to each. Indeed, the
second volume, though titled The Dialectic of Structure and History, has a
certain shapelessness to its own structure. I would suggest that this is
not happenstance but stems from something amiss with Meszaros fun-
damental conception of the humanity/nature boundary.
Meszaros often criticizes the common bourgeois trope of naturaliz-
ing history for example, he writes about David Ricardo: Again, the
historically specic is turned into the allegedly natural and thereby
that which is in reality transient is given the status of a natural necessity
(II-278). However, if bourgeois thought uncritically naturalizes history,
we can also say that socialist thought is prone to historicizing nature,
seeing it as more or less purely instrumental to human purposes. In
this respect socialism reects the civilization from which it arises
that of the West, within which both capitalism and anti-capitalism
have germinated and where nature tends to remain radically
Other, and subject to humanitys lordship.
Marx himself wavered about this point, although he came closer,
especially in his early phase, than any philosopher of the early
modern tradition to grasping it. From the Manuscripts to Capital,
however, we see a subtle yet profound shift: in the earlier work,
humanism and naturalism are seen as mutually constitutive;
whereas the notion of labor in the mature masterwork holds Man to
be entirely active, and Nature as entirely passive, indeed as inert
substance.
6
The tendency has continued within Marxism. Some foolish Marx-
ists claim that in all essential features, nature is a historical product of
humanity. Others take a more nuanced view. Nevertheless, taken all in
all, the humanity/nature interface remains inadequately theorized in
the Marxian tradition. This observation unfortunately applies in the
work at hand to the great contemporary Marxist, Istvan Meszaros.
The problem can be seen from the perspective both of what Mes-
zaros writes about and of what he excludes. The great preponderance
of the thinkers considered in these pages are of European origin,
especially from the High Germanic tradition that peaks in Hegel and
6. Joel Kovel, Marx and Ecology, Capitalism Nature Socialism, March 2011, 417, esp.
p. 11.
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spills over onto post-Hegelian thought in other words, from the foun-
tainhead of humanitys distorted relationship to nature. To be sure,
there have been many contrary voices from within European tradition
to contest this. But none of these get considered by Meszaros, including
Friedrich Schelling, Hegels university roommate and later antagonist,
who expressly tried to develop the category of Nature within German
Idealism and was marginalized as a result.
7
More generally, we note
the absence of three kinds of voices that remain unheard:
. Women
. Non-Western thought
. Excluded currents of Western thought besides Schelling, certain
subterranean currents within Marx and Marxism.
From these categories arise in various and combined ways the
insights that humanity and nature share a common being. Logically
associated with this is the insight that nature, like humanity, manifests
actively formative potentials. And associated with this is the dictum
that one needs to proceed with great care when speaking of the
human relationship with nature, whether the boundary condition is
framed as a question of splitting, or as one of differentiation. That is,
can we speak at all of being outside nature, as though we emerge
from its womb and then leave it behind to look back at it; or are we
always within it, as a part is always subsumed within a whole, and
as we are always rooted in our material esh in contact with the
whole physical universe? Nature, however difcult to dene, always
retains an overriding characteristic: that it cannot be put on a list, or
itemized or, as in the folly of so-called ecological economics, given
a price tag, with reliably ruinous results.
8
It is not, in a word, our
environment, unless it be degraded as such. And so the matter of
antagonism in the human relation to nature needs to be approached
in terms of recognition of nature in ourselves and ourselves in nature.
We cannot take up these issues substantively in this limited com-
munication. But their signicance to a critique of Meszaros lies in
calling attention to his inability to reach beyond the constraints of the
Western post-Enlightenment tradition in which nature, deprived of
agency, submits to the technical mastery of Man. However problematic
7. Slavoj Z

izek, The Indivisible Remainder: An Essay on Schelling and Related Matters

(London: Verso, 1996); Arran Gare, Process Philosophy and the Emergent Theory
of Mind: Whitehead, Lloyd Morgan, and Schelling. Concrescence, Vol. 3 (2002), 112.
8. Consider the title of Socialist Register 2007, Coming to terms with Nature (eds. Leo
Panitch and Colin Leys; New York: Monthly Review Press, 2006), which treats
nature as if it were a stranger sitting across a negotiating table from us.
Joel Kovel 115
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the notion of a non-antagonistic relation to nature, a sound methodo-
logical principle is to stay with what conduces to mutual recognition
and eschew that which blocks mutual recognition. The afictions of
racism and sexism are of the latter type, as recognition of common
ground is blocked under the inuence of imperialism and patriarchy.
Hence the importance of listening to the excluded voices and looking
with a cold eye on those who do the excluding.
As we know (or should know), some of the leading gures of main-
stream philosophy, including Hegel and Kant, evince shocking degrees
of racism, which entails a radical inability to learn from the excluded
voice. Meszaros is quite aware of the racism of Hegel and of Hegels
own inability to comprehend nature (see note 3). But he does not
draw the inference that those excluded from full humanity by the
great philosopher might have something important to say about a
non-antagonistic relationship with nature.
The model of a non-antagonistic relationship with nature does not
need to be manufactured out of whole cloth. We begin, rather, by
returning to the original ways of humankind and resume where their
genius was crushed by empire. Such is the currency of innumerable
spiritual traditions throughout the history of the world.
9
Meszaros
sounds this theme in his second volume when he introduces a category
raised by Marx, of spiritual production (II-143-47). But he does no
more than identify this with art and poetry, as though what the
world regards as intrinsically spiritual, namely, the wealth of religious
traditions, is only residual. There being nothing to examine, the cat-
egory fades away, to vanish from the text.
Meszaros does include Paracelsus, a great intellectual of the six-
teenth century, in both volumes (I-384; II-465). But it is only to
mention him in a sentence or two pertaining to views on work.
These are estimable; but they convey no inkling of the principal inu-
ence of Paracelsus, which was to give the notion of a vital relationship
to nature its philosophical grounding. His politics are worth observing
as well: Paracelsus took the side of Mu nzer and the peasants against
Luther in the wars of that century, for the signicance of which see
Engels The Peasant War in Germany. In their early work (e.g. The Holy
Family), Marx and Engels needed no help to appreciate his greatness
and that of other thinkers like Bo hme and Bruno who have become
marginalized since the Enlightenment and the rise of capitals scientic
apparatus. Their interest did not wane in later years; indeed, it was
stirred when they discovered the First Peoples through the work
9. Joel Kovel, History and Spirit, 2nd ed., Warner, NH: Glad Day Books, 1998.
116 Socialism and Democracy
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of Lewis Henry Morgan. In the last decade of his life nothing more
interested Marx than ethnographic study of those largely forgotten
societies for which a relationship to nature characterized by mutual
recognition was fundamental. It would have beneted Meszaros to
have followed the same line of approach.
The work of three Marxist thinkers would have been useful to Mes-
zaros project, though each has experienced a degree of ostracism from
the post-Enlightenment tradition. One is Stanley Diamond (1922
1991), who developed an interpretation of Marxist anthropology valor-
izing the Primitive as an ontologically richer and more differentiated
mode of being that preserves the mutual recognition of humanity and
nature.
10
Another is Maria Mies, who has given centrality to the female
voice within Marxism.
11
In her work, the essential conditions of Mes-
zaros vision of socialism are seen on the ground, through the activity
of the worlds primary producers, the women of the South.
Most noteworthy, because most directly in the line of Meszaros
genealogy, is Ernst Bloch. I simply do not understand why this great
thinker, who had been a close associate of Gyo rgy Lukacs, Meszaros
mentor, is absent from Social Structure and Forms of Consciousness.
12
To my eye this is a serious loss, as Bloch was the only Marxist to sub-
stantially advance the philosophy of nature by allying himself with
marginalized currents of thought. Bloch also has more interesting
things to say about temporality than any other Marxian philosopher;
and temporality is a theme that Meszaros struggles with in the
closing sections of Volume II. Bloch gives due attention to Hegel, but
more to Goethe and the Bible, and he roves all over human creation,
from the Talmud to the Tibetan Book of the Dead, and from Bach to
the Brothers Grimm and Hans Christian Andersen, in exploration of
the eternal spiritual owering of our peculiar species. His goal, a
vista of which opens up in works such as The Principle of Hope, is to
show how regions of the mind sequestered into daydreams and art
10. Stanley Diamond, In Search of the Primitive (New Brunswick, NJ: Transaction, 1974).
One should also attend to the work of Diamonds mentor, Paul Radin, in this con-
nection: Primitive Man as Philosopher (New York: Dover, 1957 [1927]).
11. Maria Mies, Patriarchy and Accumulation on a World Scale, 2nd ed. (London: Zed,
1998), and (with Virginia Bennholdt-Thomsen) The Subsistence Perspective
(London: Zed, 2000).
12. And virtually absent as well in Beyond Capital and The Power of Ideology, in both of
which we nd only a few fragmentary comments, mainly buried in endnotes, and
even then chiey secondary. One theme is the tension between Bloch and Lukacs.
This may have something to do with Meszaros exclusion of Bloch, though Meszaros
is also critical of his former mentor.
Joel Kovel 117
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can evolve into a technology of alliance with the co-productivity of
nature.
13
And his means are aligned with his ends, with a playful curi-
osity toward the endless wealth of the human imagination opening
upon the inner seas of the world. For the principle of hope is needed,
too, if we are to achieve a viable world.
13. Ernst Bloch, The Principle of Hope (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1986), 68990.
118 Socialism and Democracy
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