Ralph Miliband beat me to the punch by about thirty years. One of the most commonly heard slogans on the Left these days is ‘Pessimism of the intelligence, optimism of the will’. This is always attributed to Gramsci, but was actually borrowed by him from Romain Rolland, who belonged to a very different political tradition. It is readily taken on the Left to enshrine the only wisdom appropriate to the present epoch: it is in fact an exceedingly bad slogan for socialists. For it tells us that reason dictates the conviction that nothing is likely to work out as it should, that defeat is much more likely than success, that the hope of creating a social order free from exploitation and domination is probably illusory; but that we must nevertheless strive towards it, against all odds, in a mood of resolute despair. It is a ‘noble’ slogan, born of romantic pathos, but without even the merit of plausibility: for there is not likely to be much striving if intelligence tells us that the enterprise is vain, hopeless, doomed. Yet, it is the mood in which much of the thinking of the new revisionism is cast. Via Tim Holmes
Posted on: Thu, 08 Jan 2015 23:15:04 +0000
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