Eugene,
I don't think there is anything in the Marxist tradition that holds that "in remote future, people's interests won't be antagonistic". People's individual interests will most likely always be antagonistic some of the time, complementary some of the time. The question is whether there will be class antagonisms based on private ownership of social means of production and the production of commodities.
As to "one humanity", I'd really be curious to know in more detail what Ilyenkov said. In any event, the history of the past 100 years would lead most to conclude world history is moving in this direction: integration of the economy at the global level and instantaneous communications between any point being pretty strong material foundations for such a develolpment. Everywhere one looks one sees the development of a "world culture" of shared tools and languages. At the same time globalization reduces even national sovereinty (ie the supposed political representation of shared cultural-historical tradiction) to the imperatives capitalist economic system (ie fair competition??) and creates a basic single cultural type toward which all are coerced to aspire: the consumer. At another level, cyberculture contains the seeds of shared universal meanings in the very technological basis of the normalization of languages and codes that allow computers in Taiwan to "talk" to those in Tierra del Fuego through Japanese satellites launched on French rockets built with German components. I think these inherently global technologies are totally indispensable for the global reproduction of the capitalist system (as was put in evidence by the Y2K phenomena). The community that has brought this technology into existence and the members of this community, those whose practical activities maintain it, are necessarily already identifying their audience as a universal, a global audience. They are thus is thus a concrete example of a global human cultural system. It probably wouldn't be hard to show that this community has a great many discourse genres in common. One thing is absolutely certain however: they are the new economic elite, taking on the US government with the support of perhaps 50% of the american public.
Personally I think that the process of globalization is destroying the planet, people throughout the world suffer the depradations of globalism but Americans have yet to feel it too strongly. But I am hopeful that the seeds of that universal human culture will provide the basis for the coordination of those exploited of that system to resist its depradations. The resistance is happening all around, the question that concerns me is: What is the theory of that resistance?
Paul H. Dillon
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