ABSTRACT
This chapter discusses the limits of Karl Marxism, a project which, understandably in a period of material scarcity, anchored the social dialectic and the contradictions of capitalism in the economic realm. The dialectic of bureaucratic state capitalism originates in the contradiction between the repressive character of commodity society and the enormous potential freedom opened by technological advance. The absolute negation of the state is anarchism — a situation in which men liberate not only "history", but all the immediate circumstances of their everyday lives. Thus the means and conditions of survival become the means and conditions of life; need becomes desire and desire becomes need. The point is reached where the greatest social decomposition provides the source of the highest form of social integration, bringing the most pressing ecological necessities into a common focus with the highest utopian ideals. The most important process going on in America today is the sweeping de-institutionalization of the bourgeois social structure.
