Marxism and Absolute Hospitality

LIZÁRRAGA, FERNANDO ALBERTO

Londres

Conferencia; Historical Materialism 2th Annual Conference; 2023

Historical Materialism Journal - SOAS University of London

Struggles for a decent place to live –caused by rocketing housing crisis, massive flows of refugees due to poverty, environmental devastation, and war, amongst other capitalist evils–, pose practical and theoretical challenges to Marxism. The world has become an inhospitable place for humans and other species. Recent developments in Ecosocialism call for radical actions to (re) make a hospitable world by stopping and reversing climate crisis. From a normative perspective seeking to sketch the contours of a desirable society, the lack of attention to the ideal of hospitality in the Marxist tradition seems puzzling. It has been suggested that hospitality is the opposite of alienation and that Marx’s internationalism foreshadowed a hospitable world where alienation would be superseded and persons could finally feel at home on this Earth. Ancient nomadic societies practiced hospitality as a rule; it was sacred among the Greeks; early Christian communities deemed it a chief virtue; the French Revolution enshrined the right to hospitality only to abolish it for fear of the risks involved in creating a society without closure. In fact, classical models of hospitality, both historical and literary, were mostly perfectionist and isolated. Marx’s vision advocated for a hospitable world community, able to satisfy everyone’s needs. Socialist utopias such as William Morris’s News from Nowhere pushed the limits of imagination towards societies based on gifts, pleasant work, environmental stability, the absence of coercion, and capable of accommodating dissent and difference. The ideal of absolute hospitality, coined by Jacques Derrida, might thus prove useful within a Marxist normative perspective. So, a hospitable socialism would be characterised not only by the abolition of alienation but also by unlimited openness to the other –both human and non-human–; non-instrumental reciprocity; transcendence of law and the State; and the ability to embrace uninvited others and unexpected events.