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Growing up in Marianao, a city next to Havana, Cuba, in the early 1950s, I remember the excitement of people in the neighborhood when our city’s side streets were paved and the road connecting Marianao with the capital was widened.
Even my Jewish immigrant parents, who just a few years earlier had discovered that their entire families had been wiped out in the Holocaust, partook of this hopeful sense of progress. Neither they nor our neighbors, nor Cubans in general, took for granted that it was inevitable.
This experience and others like it explain how material progress became part of what sociologist Alvin Gouldner called my “domain assumptions” — the fundamental inclinations and ideas about politics and the world that shape an individual.
These beliefs were further reinforced when I attended the University of Chicago in the early ’60s. From that city’s elevated train, I could see the dilapidated and impoverished South Side ghetto, reminiscentof the poverty I remembered from home. While I was certainly aware that my view in favor of material progress was not universally shared by the broad political left in the United States at that time, I was struck by the growing numbers of left-wing academics and intellectuals who began to question the notion and desirability of progress.
Prominent among these currents was the Frankfurt School, a part of the intellectual-political phenomenon that Perry Anderson called “Western Marxism” — a diverse grouping of scholars that included people like Walter Benjamin, Lucio Colletti, Lucien Goldmann, and Karl Korsch. Despite their varied perspectives, all of these thinkers had one thing in common: their reaction to the defeat of classical Marxism by fascism, Stalinism, and social democracy, and their tendency to shy away from politics and economics and to concern themselves with philosophical questions, usually with an idealist bent divorced from practice.
The revolt against classical Marxism helps explain the gap that has developed between left-wing activists and organizers — who share a practical belief in progress that conditions their involvement in social struggles — and many left-wing intellectuals, who foreground a critique of these terms.
The most influential of those Western Marxists is perhaps Benjamin, not only because of his profound pessimism that has touched many contemporary left-wing thinkers, but also because he presents the most compelling and drastic critique of progress. Benjamin’s criticism was, to a large extent, a reaction to the social democratic conception of progress, which was highly influential in Germany during his life. In his “Theses on the Philosophy of History,” Benjamin argued that progress is traditionally viewed as a gradual, irresistible, boundless, and automatic process continuously ascending in a linear way. But these assumptions, he argued, dogmatically equated the general progress of “mankind” with the growth of human ability and knowledge.
This dogma, argued Benjamin, recognized “only the progress in the mastery of nature, not the retrogression of society,” and had led to the “corruption” of the working class through the perpetuation of the lie that “factory work which was supposed to tend toward technological progress constituted a political achievement.”
Benjamin not only criticized the social democratic conception of progress; he altogether negated the possibility of progress as he understood it. “The concept of the historical progress of mankind,” he wrote, “cannot be sundered from the concept of progression through a homogeneous, empty time.” Progression, for Benjamin, blew apart the whole notion of progress because, according to him, historical time is discontinuous, made of sudden, catastrophic moments, when the oppressed revolutionary classes “blast” a specific era “out of the homogeneous course of history.” It is in those moments, Benjamin averred, that revolutionaries, like “tigers leaping into the past,” resurrect practices and ideas dating back hundreds of years from societies totally unrelated to theirs, thereby bringing the past into the present.
To be sure, Benjamin was a revolutionary. But he was influenced by Judaism as well as by Marxism; he conceived of revolution as a sudden cataclysmic, messianic event that would put the brakes on the “locomotives of world history,” avoiding new disasters rather than opening up a brighter future.
Unlike his contemporary Antonio Gramsci — a leader of the Italian Communist Party, active in the 1920 general strike in Italy, who spent years in a Fascist prison — Benjamin never belonged to a political party and had no experience in political movements. He had no conception of political action as a means of obtaining power or as a method and process of organization, struggle, and education. Amid one of the darkest periods in history, Benjamin’s views were understandable; they expressed not only a profound pessimism of the intellect but also of the political will.
In negating progress, Benjamin the revolutionary leaves the purpose of a revolution unanswered. For the revolutionaries themselves, he argues, it is not the future of their revolution but the memory of their “enslaved ancestors” that makes them rebel and fight. Looking back rather than forward, he wrote,
Social Democracy thought fit to assign to the working class the role of the redeemer of future generations. . . . This training made the working class forget both its hatred and its spirit of sacrifice, for both are nourished by the image of enslaved ancestors rather than by the ideal of liberated grandchildren.
Benjamin’s sentiment drives home how the historical consciousness of oppression prevails in all kinds of movements — ethnic, nationalist, and socialist — and registers the need to vindicate injustice, aggression, and even violations of honor and dignity underlying the anger that motivates struggle and sacrifice.
There are no revolutionary social movements without passion and hatred of oppression and exploitation. Although, as C. L. R. James warned in The Black Jacobins, it is a tragedy when this turns into a desire for vengeance that “has no place in politics.” But what is the point of revolution without the perspective of a better future? Is it only to avenge the past?
Benjamin was not the only one looking backward. There is another left-wing current that has oriented itself to the past, not as a memory of oppression that feeds rebellion but as a recollection of the past with which to criticize the present. Left-wing romanticism looks backward and attempts to recreate elements of an idealized community lost centuries ago.
Michael Löwy and Robert Sayre identified various strands of left-wing romanticism in their study Romanticism Against the Tide of Modernity. “New Rousseauism,” for example, looks at the dawn of human history as an idealized golden age. Alain Caillé, one of its exponents, argues that primitive societies were characterized by key features — limited needs and little interest in accumulation, which both resulted from less emphasis on work and production and more on leisure devoted to sleep, play, conversation, and the celebration of rites — that modern society should learn from.
The German Marxist Ernst Bloch, an altogether different kind of romantic thinker, has also caught the attention of the Left once again. Condemning the hostile relation with nature and greed for profit that overrides all other human motives in industrial capitalist society, he imagines the Middle Ages as a golden era. Bloch singles out artisanal production — which wrought both superior-quality products and intrinsic satisfaction for producers, in contrast to modern workers’ lethargy and hatred of work — as a cornerstone of the ideal society.
Perhaps the most influential romantic discussed by Löwy and Sayre is Ferdinand Tönnies, considered the founder of German sociology. Tönnies penned the famous work Gemeinschaft and Gesellschaft (Community and Society) in the mid-1880s. “Gemeinschaft” referred to the face-to-face relationships of families, neighbors in small towns ruled by custom, mutual assistance, and concord, while “gesellschaft” consisted of the impersonal, transactional relations that characterize the social life of cities and nation-states, and of technological and industrial progress driven by the competitive profit motive.
Löwy and Sayre declared Tönnies a “resigned Romantic thinker” whose nostalgia for rural and small-town gemeinschaft, with its family-based economy and its delight in creating and conserving, was heightened by his realization that it couldn’t be recreated and that gesellschaft’s social decadence was inevitable.
In unearthing features of a bygone era and brandishing them as antidotes to the ills of capitalism, these left romantics played down the brutality of the societies that had generated those ostensibly positive features. By extolling limited needs and desires, for example, they ignored their basis in precarious societies existing on the edge of hunger, subject to the vagaries of weather and nature and hampered by severe limitations in the means of transport and communication. Their simple needs were a function of their confinement to a local, narrow world, not an option that they chose.
Similarly, artisanal work in the Middle Ages rested on primitive technology designed mostly to serve the needs of the upper strata, and it was often inadequate for feeding and clothing the population. The medieval artisan guilds whose strict regulation controlled production were an expression of a profoundly hierarchical society where the honors and riches bestowed on feudal lords and their retinues contrasted with the misery of the surrounding villages and countryside.
The Dutch historian Johan Huizinga, in his study of France and the Netherlands in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries, describes these societies as ruled by a “violent tenor of life,” pervaded by illness, calamities, and indigence, totally exposed to the brutalities of nature. Depicting in stark terms what that society was like, Huizinga writes that lepers sounded their rattles and went about in processions while beggars exhibited their deformities and misery in churches, and frequent executions were the source of cruel entertainment and excitement.
Moreover, Tönnies’s highly idealized rural and village gemeinschaft ignores how the elements he highlights — personal relationships and mutual assistance regulated by custom and not the market — were part and parcel of an extremely oppressive society, intolerant of individuality and dissent.
E. P. Thompson was highly skeptical of this romantic vein, which spurned material progress and strongly influenced the 1950s British New Left. In his 1959 essay “Commitment in Politics,” Thompson viewed the New Left’s communitarianism as a return to the “old, cramped, claustrophobic community which was based on the grim equality of hardship.” He also rejected the notion that privacy and a sense of community are necessarily opposed. Community, he wrote, “if it arises in the present generation, will be far richer and more complex, with far more insistence upon variety, freedom of movement, and freedom of choice.”
This doesn’t mean there is nothing to learn from past societies. It simply suggests that changing the problems and conditions of modern urban life must be done within the context of modern urban life itself.
A critical attitude toward those who bring about or support progress through oppressive and exploitative actions, however, is as necessary as a critical attitude toward those who romanticize the past.
German chancellor Otto von Bismarck and Singaporean prime minister Lee Kuan Yew, for example, relied on highly exploitative, oppressive methods and even massacres to pursue modernization and economic growth.
The pursuit of modernization at all costs has proponents on the Left as well. Russian socialist historian Roy Medvedev argued vehemently against Isaac Deutscher’s accolades for Joseph Stalin as one of history’s greatest reformers for his rapid industrialization and collectivization of the USSR, which, for Deutscher, realized many of the ideals of the October Revolution.
The price that the people paid — the gulag, the purges, the deliberate creation of famines that led to the deaths of millions of people — was enormous, but it only proved, according to Deutscher, the difficulty of the task. This “objectivist” analysis stands above and outside history, ignoring how history was lived by its actors.
Medvedev’s critique highlights how efforts to modernize society or speed up production, and whether they’re desirable in a given place and time, should be assessed according to the ways change affects those who will be impacted by it.
Thompson uses this approach in his analysis of the “machine breakers” — the Luddites of early nineteenth-century England. Viewing the Luddites through a suprahistorical and abstract lens of progress paints them as a reactionary movement because they opposed and resisted the inevitable development of industrial capitalism. But an analysis of that historical moment that takes into account what the Luddites were reacting to and why led Thompson to a very different conclusion.
According to Thompson, the Luddites arose at a critical juncture in which paternalist legislation — which had until then protected the working class — was being abrogated in favor of laissez-faire economic policies, against the will and conscience of working people.
Although the previous legislation had been restrictive and even punitive, it had elements of a benevolent corporate state with legislative and moral sanctions against unscrupulous manufacturers and unjust employers. Even if allowances are made for the cheapening of products under industrial capitalism, it is impossible to designate as “progressive” processes that brought about the degradation of textile workers.
The Luddites were reacting to this loss of protection. Their movement included demands for a legal minimum wage, control of working conditions for women and juveniles, the involvement of guilds to find work for skilled men made redundant by machinery, the prohibition of shoddy work, and the right to open trade union combinations.
These demands, argues Thompson, may have looked backward, but they also contained the elements of a democratic community where industrial growth is regulated according to ethical priorities, and where the pursuit of profit is subordinated to human needs. So while the Luddites tried to revive old customs and paternalist legislation that could never be revived, they also tried to restore ancient rights to establish new precedents for the developing order.
This isn’t a call for resurrecting the working community that the Luddites were struggling to preserve. The triumph of industrial capitalism has established a new kind of society with its own contradictions, oppression, and exploitation, and it has created a working class with new organizing conditions and possibilities for the future.
Today’s Left faces a substantially different situation from the one Benjamin confronted in 1940, when he wrote his theses on the concept of history. At that time, he was a man on the run with no political or personal options who ended up committing suicide, frustrated by his failed attempt to escape Nazi-occupied France.
So while the last half century has dealt serious defeats to the working class and the Left, it has not destroyed left and working-class organizations or physically eliminated their militants in the way that fascism did.
However, the triumph of capitalism after the Cold War has placed the future that Benjamin refused to consider at the center of the current left political agenda. Margaret Thatcher’s slogan of TINA (There is no alternative) is precisely designed to indoctrinate people with the idea that capitalism is the only possible future.
The collapse of the Soviet bloc in the late ’80s and early ’90s was widely interpreted by the Right and by many liberals not as the failure of a bureaucratic economy run by an undemocratic one-party state but as proof that socialism can’t work, resurrecting the arguments that Friedrich Hayek and other conservative thinkers had brandished against the Left decades earlier.
At the same time, the defeats suffered by the working class have stoked a sense of fatalism, and large numbers of workers are increasingly convinced that they are powerless to significantly change their situation through collective action.
Meanwhile, the expanding gap between the left intellectuals and academics who deny progress and the activists struggling for it has created a political-theoretical vacuum. This leaves activists on the ground without a framework through which to respond to both the left currents that oppose progress and the ruling ideology that ignores what progress means in a class society.
To develop this framework, we need a simple definition of progress: the elimination of needless human suffering caused by material scarcity, inequality, and the powerlessness of working people. This definition should acknowledge that Rosa Luxemburg’s fear of barbarism is justified — that barbarism is an ever-present possibility, not just in the distant future but also in the present.
The elimination of such human suffering requires the development of science and technology and a socialist vision of economic growth. Many progressive activists today are skeptical of material growth, for ecological reasons and out of a concern with consumerism. But this often confuses consumption for its own sake or as a status symbol with the legitimate desire to live a better life, and wasteful and ecologically damaging growth with growth as such.
Economic growth and productive investment are requisites for a socialist vision of improving people’s well-being; redistribution of existing wealth is certainly necessary, but it is insufficient to create the material conditions that permit a whole society to lead a healthier, more educated and cultured life.
However, economic growth is necessary but not sufficient for a better life. As Benjamin warned, material progress can and has coexisted with the retrogression of society. This is why politics is central; it is the means to decide what is produced, how, and for whose benefit. For the Left, this means it is necessary to step into the political arena and build the power to counteract the political economy of capitalism with an alternative political economy: an economically viable socialism beyond capitalism.
Progress is not automatic, linear, and irreversible; it is something that has to be fought for and enmeshed with the legitimate desire for a better and more democratic life. That was the task of past generations, and that’s the task of the Left today.
Great Job Samuel Farber & the Team @ Jacobin Source link for sharing this story.
