MIA > Archive > Kidron > Presence of Future
From some unidentified specific time, but perhaps it was in the late 1980’s, it seems that Mike was despairing that the toolkit he had available as a political economist was no longer sufficient, in and of itself, to tackle the enormous issues confronting political revolutionaries of the day. For him, the world had changed so much, and the ecological threat was so great, that the old certainties of the left were no longer quite so certain.
Labels never meant anything to Mike – he always followed where he believed the evidence led – but he no longer described himself as a revolutionary socialist, rather he was a revolutionary ecologist, a “red-green” (see the extract of Chapter 2).
He realized that, if he wanted to attempt to identify the issues, define the problems and suggest solutions he needed to study a wealth of different subjects and disciplines. He read voraciously and, for the last 10 or so years of his life, he dedicated himself to writing The Presence of the Future: The Costs of Capitalism and the Transition to Ecological Society.
The book is breath-taking in its scope and in its ambition. It is a work of great scholarship, yet it is written beautifully, and in a way that it understandable to the layman. The eight chapters totalling several hundred pages take us through history, philosophy, economics, psychology, sociology, anthropology, ecology – all brought to bear as Mike rages against the system that is destroying the planet and destroying its peoples. Richard Kuper has, I think, described it best in his Introduction to Capitalism and Theory: Selected Writings of Michael Kidron.
“... through years of personal upheaval and illness, Kidron laboured away at a more theoretical understanding of the system as a whole. With an ambition reminiscent of Marx in his early manuscripts, Kidron now tried to link the economic underpinnings of the system to the disastrous environmental impacts on the one hand, and its effects on the individual psyche on the other. Vast accumulations of data, and enormously wide-ranging reading on history, psychology, war, and personal life, fed into the outline of a new synthesis and major work entitled provisionally Presence of the Future: The Costs of Capitalism and the Transition to Ecological Society. The book was to remain unfinished – radically unfinished in many ways ...” (Kuper, 2018)
Two excerpts from the book have been previously published. A short, but heavily-edited piece, from Chapter 3 Human Nature of the draft, now titled The Injured Self appeared in the Socialist Register 2002. A longer and, arguably more important piece, appeared in the International Socialism Journal Number 96 Winter 2002 with the title Falling Growth and Rampant Costs: Two Ghosts in the Machine of Modern Capitalism. This was Chapter 7 of Mike’s draft which had the original title of The Bottom Line. A further edited extract from Chapter 5 of Mike’s draft that had the original title of Politics will appear in the International Socialism Journal soon.
We are, however, fortunate that amongst the papers Mike left at his death was an outline of the arguments that he intended his finished book to address. It was written in May 2000. It is reproduced here in full (warts and all – it clearly had not been readied for publication) before we present a series of 9 new extracts from the draft book:
It is a matter of profound regret that the book remained unfinished at Mike’s death. Had he finished it I am certain that, even if we were to disagree with some of the direction that Mike had travelled, we would have had an inspiring testament to his memory in our hands.
Those who say that Mike’s politics effectively ended at the IS Conferences in 1968 when he had disagreements over the IS turn to a Leninist-type organisation, or in the IS journal number 100 in 1977 when he backtracked from some of his own work on the Permanent Arms Economy, are so wrong. Those who say that, in whatever imperfect way, he was somehow reaching out to the Extinction Rebellion generation 20 years before their time, might be nearer the mark.
1. The latest draft of the book is held by the Kidron family.
2. The draft book is not properly paginated.
3. There is no complete Table of Contents – the version shown here has been produced to give a better idea of the scope of the book.
4. The draft book is unfinished. It is clear from notes attaching to the draft and comments/notations in the text that Mike Kidron was intending to revisit many sections. If there are factual errors in the text or out of date data we can be fairly certain that these would have been corrected as work progressed.
Last updated on 13 November 2019