[tt] [technoliberation] Rikowski's Marxist critique of H+

[Eugen Leitl]

----- Forwarded message from "Hughes, James J." <James.Hughes at trincoll.edu> -----

From: "Hughes, James J." <James.Hughes at trincoll.edu>
Date: Thu, 3 Jan 2008 14:15:26 -0500
To: technoliberation at yahoogroups.com
Subject: [technoliberation] Rikowski's Marxist critique of H+
Reply-To: technoliberation at yahoogroups.com


http://www.springerlink.com/content/ahj6338kr7a3vgdb/fulltext.pdf

Rikowski, Glenn. 2003. "Alien Life: Marx and the Future of the Human,"
Historical Materialism 11(2): 121-164.

...transhumanism avoids analysis of the social force that invades the
human whilst also setting limits to what the trans/human is and can
become; it avoids capital and the constitution of the 'human' in
capitalist society. Thus, as a result, transhumanism engenders dreams
and fantasies. Posthuman politics remains abstract. These apparently
bold thinkers shy away from the
impossibility of many of the futures they envisage, whilst
under-analysing a transhuman future dominated by capital. In the event,
they misread history and fail to adequately ground their own project.
Perhaps what the transhumanist movement really needs, therefore, is a
project based on Marxist theory that can open up the future in ways that
excite transhumanists. A
Marxist transhumanism suggests itself here, together with a posthuman
politics based on destroying the social force that blocks the emergence
of cuddly forms of the posthuman: capital...

...Humanism, on this basis, is our collective freedom to decide what the
'human' is to become, free of the fetters of capital. In toto, capital
limits what we can become. For our becoming - as a species - is an
expression of the 'becoming of capital' that Marx wrote about in the
Manuscripts,2 capital as a 'force we must submit to'.

Humanism becomes possible only on the abolition of capital as social
force, and this presupposes the destruction of capitalist social
relations and the social universe of capital, whose substance is value.
On this account of humanism, there is no 'essence' of the 'human', no
'getting back to where we once belonged'. Today, humanism is the
struggle for an open future. The social universe of capital must be
imploded in order to set in train the project of humanism as social
reality....







 
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