Although there are endless excellent reasons to reject and challenge the predatory rule of capitalism, Löwy points specifically to how the resistance was (and is) triggered by the ways in which the capitalist order relentlessly degrades the imagination and disenchants the world through alienation and reification, processes which he says characterize “the deepest principles of oppression at work throughout the social fabric.” Romantic anticapitalism targets those effects of the capitalist system that are “experienced as misery everywhere in capitalist society. What is involved is the all-powerfulness in this society of exchange-value—of money and market relations—i.e., the phenomenon of reification” and its corollaries, “social fragmentation and the radical isolation of the individual in society.” The positive values of Romantic anticapitalism, according to Löwy, are “an aggregate of qualitative values—ethical, social, and cultural—in opposition to the mercantile rationality of exchange value.”
One central facet is “the development of the self in all the depth, breadth and complexity of its affectivity, and also in the free play of its imaginative capacities.” Another, dialectically related, is “unity, or totality: unity of the self with two encompassing totalities—the universe of nature, on the one hand, and on the other the human community. While the first Romantic value constitutes its individual—even individualistic—moment, the second is trans-individual or collective.” This manifests itself by pitting “the Romantic quest for integration and harmony” against “the capitalist principle of domination and exploitation of nature.”
Donald LaCross, Introduction to Michael Löwy’s Morning star: surrealism, marxism, anarchism, situationism, utopia
