By becoming a totalitarian destructive order, capitalism called into question the modern way of thinking based on existential apriorism and the corresponding idea of progress. In that context, humanism with its essential character and its critique of capitalism that departs from the essential criteria were also called into question. By increasingly destroying life on Earth, capitalism abolishes that ontological relativism based on existential certainty. What indeed exists is, thus, determined by capitalist annihilation with its totalitarian character. Nothing is no longer just not being or essential nothingness, but a complete and final perishing of humankind.
It is necessary to create a way of thinking that will enable proper understanding of the ruling tendency of global development and, on the basis of the humanist legacy, establish a broad social movement that will work to prevent the destruction of life. From a historical point of view, the mind acquired self-consciusness from man’s struggle for freedom. Considering the fact that capitalism dramatically threatens the survival of the living world, the contemporary mind can acquire self-consciousness from the struggle of humankind for survival. The criticism of capitalism based on essential relativism should be replaced by a criticism that departs from the existential challenges capitalism poses for humankind. Instead of a dominating destructive mindlessness, which leads to total annihilation, a life-creating mind should be affirmed, a mind that can create a humane world.
The life-creating quality as a universal and totalizing principle should become the starting point in the struggle against capitalism. It acquires a concrete historical meaning relative to capitalism as a totalitarian destructive order from the life-creating potential of nature and man. The life-creating quality means bringing to life the life-creating potential of the matter, living nature, man, history, human society… The most important result of the practice of life-creating must be a society that is a community of free and creative people and nature as a cultivated life-creating whole. Capitalism does not animate but rather destroys the life-creating potential of matter, living nature, history… It instrumentalizes and degenerates man’s life-creating powers: they are used to create a „technical world“, where there is no place for either nature or man.
The human life-creating quality involves freedom, which means overcoming sheer naturalness through an active and changing relation to nature and through the creation of a new world. The specific life-creating potentials of man, as the highest form in the evolution of nature, represent a bond between nature and man and are the bases for the evolution of man as a specific natural being. It is about turning man from a sheer natural being into a libertarian being. Through a cultivated life-creating practice, man turns from a generic being into an emancipated life-creating being, which does not only reproduce its life-creating capacity, but creates his own world. In that sense, we should differentiate between the life-creating quality as the creation of sheer life and the life-creating quality as the creation of a humane world. In other words, a difference should be made between naturalistic and historical life-creating principles: the essence of the naturalistic life-creating principle is determinism; the essence of the historical life-creating principle is freedom.
The life-creating nature of man, as a natural and human being, can be realized only in nature as a life-creating whole. Man’s active relation to nature gives a possibility to overcome sheer naturalness, if that means the preservation and development of nature’s life-creating powers. The life-creating principle is the umbilical cord connecting man and nature and turning them into a life-creating whole. Living nature is not mere matter, but, through the life-creating process of evolution, a formed and thus specific matter, which as such forms the basis of the human world as a specific universe. It is organized as a life-creating organic whole that creates higher living forms, which means that it is characterized by a life-creating activism. Man is the highest life-creating form in the evolution of living matter through which nature became a self-conscious, life-creating whole. Man’s libertarian and creative practice is the power which gives matter a historical dimension, which means that through it a meaningless mechanical movement becomes a meaningful historical movement. Man’s universal and creative being, which has limitless self-reproductive potential, represents the basis of the human life-creating principle. Each creative act opens in man a new creative space, and so on, ad infinitum. Man’s becoming a self-conscious historical being, which means a being of the future, is the most important result of the realization of nature’s life-creating potentials, and the ability to create its future is the most authentic expression of the life-creating force of human society.
Not only does capitalism, as a totalitarian destructive order, destroy history, it also destroys the evolution of living beings, which above all means the evolution of human beings as the highest form of life on the Earth. It is a capitalistically conditioned mutation of man, which amounts to a his degeneration as a natural, creative and social being. Capitalism destroys man’s naturally- and historically-conditioned life-creating potential and reduces him to a technically organized entity, at the same time reducing human society to a mechanical ant colony. Thus, it degenerates and destroys the life-creating potential of living matter accumulated in the human genome over more than three billion years of evolution, as well as man’s creative capabilities, which are the product of historical development and can only be realized within society as a humanized natural community. In essence, capitalism devalues and abolishes man as a humane and natural being. The ever more present thesis that “traditional humankind” has become obsolete and that a race of cyborgs should be created, indicates that man as a human and natural being has become an obstacle to the further development of capitalism and, as such, is an unnecessary being.
The bridge to the future man has built during his historical existence has begun to crumble. The capitalist propaganda machinery works to prevent man from becoming aware of that process. To make matters worse, capitalistically degenerated lifecreates a type of consciousness that prevents people from realizing the nature of the looming threat against humankind. Capitalism imposes a way of thinking that does not allow man to pursue answers to questionsthat are of vital importance to his survival and freedom. At the same time, the economic downfall of capitalism, which directly threatens the lives of an growing number of people, marginalizes the questions which are of paramount importance to thesurvival of humankind and relativizes their dramatic character. How important is the destruction of forests and the melting of glaciers to a man whose family is dying in poverty? The most fatal consequences come from the fact that the existential challenge posed by capitalism to humankind stands in complete contradiction to the nature of man created by capitalism. That man is a petty bourgeois, who does not feel any responsibility for the survival of the world or for whom the question of survival comes down tothe question of his personal survival. A spontaneous reaction of the atomized petty bourgeois to the increasingly realistic possibility of global annihilation is not to prevent global demise, but rather to find a safe retreat for himself. All the more so as the preservation of the bridge poses a challenge which far surpasses man’s individual powers, and man, as a lonely individual, feels helplessness before the imminent cataclysm. The most important task of the life-creating mind is to point out the existential importance of sociability and, thus, to increase the need of man for his fellows. Without an emancipated and fighting sociability, man is condemned to a solitary and lethal hopelessness.
Translated from Serbian by Vesna Todorović (Petrović)
English translation supervisor Mick Collins
