| 2. On the Universal Will |
 |
 |
| Written by Ianko Stoianov |
| Sunday, 28 September 2008 00:19 |
|
2. On the Universal Will
More than 240 years have passed since Jean-Jacque Rousseau wrote that ?Man is born free; and everywhere he is in chains.?1 Yet, man is still not free in the existing state organisation based on the principle of private property of exploiting type. Rousseau?s statement is still as true in the modern world of triumphing liberal capitalism as it was in his epoch. Unlike the apologists of liberal capitalism, he was one of those honest and great men who invariably inspire the political fights of humanity against a world of total lack of genuine political freedom. The pitiful and pathetic professional liars whom the Big Bourgeoisie hire will never ever write about the actual world of tremendous exploitation of man by man and dispossession of the people of its sovereignty. Absolutely advantageously for them, of course. It is utterly advantageous for these spineless lackeys and servants, who are in the pay of Big Capital, to be blind for the truth and to paint and glorify the paradise of private property, in which they mercifully are allowed to live: such is their prize for brainwashing the people; for this reward they unhesitatingly go to all lengths. True, these birds in golden cages pay the price and deservedly lose the real paradise of conscientious search of the truth; yet, there is an abundant and never ending supply of them. Rousseau also notices them; he says: ?According to Grotius, doubtful whether the human race belongs to a hundred men, or that hundred men to the human race: and, throughout his book, he seems to incline to the former alternative, which is also the view of Hobbes. On this showing, the human species is divided into so many herds of cattle, each with its ruler, who keeps guard over them for the purpose of devouring them.?2 Why do they do it? Rousseau knew the answer: ?truth is no road to fortune, and the people dispenses neither ambassadorships, nor professorships, nor pensions.?3 This is the reason why ? according to him, ? Grocius had not ?adopted the true principles?4 Will we continue to tolerate the absurdities of a world of apparent injustice? No! The humanists want to create a state of a new type, which is a republic of just freedom and uncompromising free search of truth. The humanists know that their will has all the might of the absolute rational will to realise its volitions, to constitute the actuality of its urges and aspirations and establish a form of association in which only the in-and-for-itself-having itself absolute property ? and therefore, the universal right of Man to just political power based on this property ? is true and just. This is the highest task of the rational universal will, its most essential moment. While all humanists wanted to achieve just equality on Earth, Jesus Christ looked for it ? or pointed it out ? in the sky; he taught that all people are equal in the eye of God. Developing his idea we can say that God also wills all people to be in total possession of the universal will here, on Earth, i.e. God wills that everybody lives in a state, in which justice is the unconditionally highest virtue, which determines all other virtues so that they are ethical only when they have justice as their most essential and immanent moment. The members of a humanist society are brought up to have a will for these ethical virtues; they wish freedom, equality and fraternity in their most humanist and just form. The directed towards the common interest will is true and capable of constituting a just order only when it aims at and achieves the truly universal. Justice of the laws of universal will ? of the Absolute Rational Will, ? is the highest end of the organised as a state political community. True democracy as well as true sovereignty can only be based on laws, which are an expression of the universal will and exist as a result of its free self-determination. The Universal Will has never aimed at and will never aim at utopia; it is the absolutely actual. What it aims at is creating a just, equal and free society of human beings. While it is the absolute rational divine will, which humanity wills to achieve, the General Will is the existing constitution of the organised as a state political community. At every stage of its development the peoples develop their General Will aiming permanently at the Universal Will, which they will to know and want. As for the question of state power, only the will of the sovereign people can be in full conformity with the Universal Will, which rules the world. Volens Populi, Volens Dei. The will of the people is the will of God. The humanist state can exist only due to the absolute and permanent might of the people?s will to defend their public property. No other will expresses the divine will better than the will of the people; no other will can realise the divine principle of this will ? Rule yourself ? better than the sovereign people?s will. Today we say that just Freedom is the basic and inalienable sacred public property of each political community, and therefore, of each human personality; not only is it a basic and inalienable right of each human being, but it also determines his supreme duty to fight and even engage in battles for it and constantly defend it from all kind of oligarchs, plutocrats, tyrants and their servants. The freedom of man, the freedom of every human person is possible only as freedom of the society, in the society and through the society. A state power is legitimate insofar as it is in full accordance with the divine principle because of the superiority of the universal will ? the Absolute Rational Will ? in relation to the common will of the living generation and the individual will of every living individual. We cannot and will not allow the common will to be infected and controlled by the irrepressible private-property oriented will of the Big Bourgeoisie, which dresses itself in the robes of liberalism; a will, which is an emanation of the bourgeois egoistic instinct. The humanists know that they have to fight and want to fight not only for the common public good but for the common to all mankind good as well, for the good and welfare of the whole human species. Only when does a sovereign people manifest its political and economic ends through actions of its common will directed towards the public interest and the common to all mankind interest as well, it is a profoundly ethical and political community for it has no other ends but the ends of the Universal Will. A truly legitimate, truly ethical state is a state in which there exists a priority of the common public interests as well as the common to all humanity interests over private interests. Such a state is led by the highest end of every humanist community ? the common human good. Whenever one ruling class ? and it does not matter whether it is the dominating Big Bourgeoisie in modern times, or the ?dictatorship of the proletariat? in Stalin?s totalitarian state capitalism ? usurps the right of self-determination of the sovereign will of the nation, it is illegitimate for it constitutes inequality of the wills of all members of the political community and, in so doing, it raises the inequality of wills to the rank of state principle; it is illegitimate for it is based on the particular will of one class, which enters in possession of the public property belonging to the sovereign and which successfully puts its class will as a replacement of the really common will. Each form of power of only one class is possible only as totalitarian and absolute; it is a theft of public property. Such a social order proclaims the superiority of the principle of private property, subdues everything to it and uses the army and the police as pillars of its totalitarian strength. Just state orders are possible and can exist only through the permanent destruction, constant abolition and decisive refutation of every class will, which would try to usurp the power of the people-sovereign. The humanists want to promote and contribute to the building of a just social order, whose constitution is founded on the principle that the supreme power belongs to the people and the will of the community, i.e. this new social order expresses the highest principle of universal will: Rule yourself. Be in power of yourself. The Universal Will aims at the common good ? the highest end of the organised as a state political community; it aims at public property. The world history presents a narration about the fights of different social classes to become sovereigns and take over the public property. ?Who is in power over the public property?? ? this is the great question of each historical epoch. We know the answer of our epoch: The usurping bourgeois oligarchy is the sovereign for the time being; the peoples are still totally unorganised. The truly singular is universal as well. Being an owner of intrinsic political will and willing to carry out into practice the absolute ends of universal will, Man has always desired to realise the principle of public property. As a principle of the Absolute Rational Will, it is a moment of the absolutely actual which has the infinite urge and power to establish its complete reality. Being the willing itself will, civilised humanity has the infinite urge of the absolute to constitute a humanist form of government and it is bound to realise its volitions and create a humanist form of republic. As far as Rousseau?s teaching of universal will is concerned, it has to be said that it was a superb presentation of the general idea of what must be done but it failed to present the concrete institutions, which were utterly necessary in order to humanise the ancien regime - the existing political and social system in France before the revolution of 1789. No wonder that the concrete determinations of the universal will which the Bourgeoisie ? the leading class of the French revolution ? gave the universal will were definitely in defence of its own interests. Yet, the development of the idea of universal property is absolutely necessary; it belongs to the people. The revolutions and the reforms in favour of universal public property will never be carried out into practice by only one selfish and greedy class; this is the lesson of history. The humanists have the will to define the Universal Will clearly and educate each and everyone sufficiently well about it. The time has come for us to create a new humanist political contract. The humanists want to educate the suppressed classes to fight for their public property; to them it belongs. These classes need a new teaching. The world of thinking and willing human beings is to be rationally organised as a body politic, which signs on a political contract with itself; it develops its principles organically in-and-through its political organisation. It is high time the people became the sovereign and take control over the public property. The people manifests its possession of real freedom in the process of having its collective power, collective sovereignty and equal conditions of freedom within the organised as a state community, in which each human being has the duty and the right to participate in the decision-making process. It is high time the people became the sovereign and take control over the public property. Without all question, the political wills of the members of every political community are truly free only in-and-through their possession of equal conditions of collective power and collective sovereignty over their res publica, in which each human being has the duty and the right to participate in the decision-making process concerning the state. Unlike the government of the bourgeois oligarchy, only the sovereign, i.e. the people as a whole, expresses the common interests and the common will, which manifests itself in the laws of the humanist state. The question is how well the general will ? not the will of all, ? expresses the true universal will? The difference between the general will and the universal will has to be clearly defined. The universal will is the absolute right and the absolute justice, which the sovereign intrinsically aims to achieve while the general will is the actual Universal Will at each stage of its development. The question of global property ? one of the moments of the Universal Will ? is also of extreme importance. The planet and everything on it is a common to all mankind property. It belongs to all of us, not only to the greedy capitalists. The law is a manifestation of the actual justice which the universal will achieves in each concrete historical epoch. For this reason, when the existing law fails to satisfy the wills and the intellects of a nation, its best and humanistically thinking members overcome the existing General Will more often than not with force ? through victorious rebellions and uprisings ? and make a new decisive step towards the universal will. Public property ? the public good ? gives every human person a possession of statesmanlike freedom and demands from him to educate his will and be a statesman, to have a statesmanship will, to act as a statesman ? a member of a sovereign people, which is in full possession of public property. A person acting from the point of view of collective humanist principles becomes a statesman, is acknowledged as a statesman and is brought up to become a statesman. Being afraid of the sovereign, however, the contemporary bourgeoisie prefers to define and bring up man in full conformity with the principle of individuation with the sole purpose to destroy his political will and force him to live in his tiny private world as an unconditionally weak and defenceless individual; an individual who is utterly incapable of fighting together with other members of the society for the right of the whole people to establish powerful state organisations and institutions and constitute itself as a political community possessing and exercising its sovereignty over its sacred and pure res publica. The most hidden dreams of the bourgeois neo-liberal leaders were shamelessly revealed by the first British woman Prime Minister, Margaret Thatcher, whose statement ? " There is no such thing as society: there are individual men and women, and there are families,? ? is one of the commandments of neo-liberalism and the quintessence of the credo of its utopia. This is the revealed secret of the bourgeoisie ? to be confronted by an amorphous mass of apolitical individuals, who the ancient Greeks used to called idiotes; idiotes was an ignorant interested only in his own affairs, useless for the development of the polis, he was not a polites, i.e a citizen. The highest contradiction of the present economic and political system is that particular transnational companies ? the will of few, the will of Big Bourgeoisie ? have the right to possess and decide on the fate of what in fact belongs to humanity. However, it is only the will of all, the peoples? will that is legitimate to have the universal natural resources at its complete disposal and use them responsibly. We come with a new teaching based on humanist justice. In replacement of the permanent and incredibly strong instinct of unbridled greediness, which has played such an important role in the history of humanity, we want to put the instinct for ecological self-preservation, which is not coded directly in human brains. This instinct can only be a product of education, upbringing and wise will. It is true that a politician thinks about the next elections only; a statesman thinks about the next generations. In the end of this chapter it must be pointed out unconditionally clearly and decisively that this manifesto aims at expressing the rational universal will, i.e. at expressing the truly universal, not the phantasmagorias and caprices of billions of private wills ? they are only the accidental which is as unavoidable as it is unimportant and insignificant. However, a manifesto can only set itself the task to express the substantial of all these wills; it is the universal and the rational of the absolutely actual in-and-for-itself having itself rational will. NOTES:
|