Faith, or The Stories We Tell
If we do not believe we can win, we will not win. How can we learn from the past in order to invent a new concept of political faith to guide us in today’s pessimistic world?
1
After taking power in January 1933, Adolph Hitler immediately eviscerated his enemies. In March, the Nazis opened their first concentration camp in Dachau, designed specifically for the regime’s political opponents. Their primary target: the Communist Party of Germany. By the end of the year, the Nazis had obliterated what was at one time the third largest communist party in the world.
The German communists saw their world collapse. Their comrades were killed, their families torn apart, their organizations annihilated, and their country soon ravaged by total war. Half of all party members would find themselves in Nazi jails, prisons, and concentration camps. There, they endured terrible repression – disease, torture, beatings, humiliation, malnutrition, forced labor, and death.
Yet many miraculously survived. Communists actually enjoyed higher survival rates than all other inmates. What’s more, they not only managed to stay physically alive, their spirit also remained unbroken. If anything, some became even more committed. As Karl Schirdewan – who spent three years in a Nazi prison and another eight in concentration camps at Sachsenhausen and Flossenbürg – later recalled: “Despite all the suffering and all the dangers that I had experienced, my worldview had been strengthened.”[1] When they emerged from the camps, they were ready to get back to work and more certain than ever that they would win. How?
2
If the history of those who dedicated their lives to fighting for universal emancipation holds a lesson for us today, it is that anyone who wishes to change the world in a progressive direction should anticipate hardship.
You can expect packed schedules, constant insults, strained familial relations, and existential precarity. You will face defeat, suffering, heartbreak, and loss. The Indian revolutionary Kondapalli Koteswaramma, for example, was hounded by the state, spent five years underground, lost numerous comrades, saw her beloved party shatter, and outlived her two children – one was disappeared by the state and the other committed suicide. “Is my life a dream? Or is it just a stream of tears? Can I really survive with this heart that burns?” She concluded: “Misery appeared to be my full-time, lifelong companion.”[2]
The more serious your work, the more consequential your campaigns, and the closer you are to victory, the more ferocious the repression. Abuse, poverty, ostracism, blacklisting, physical assault, imprisonment, and death. Nor should you think this fate is reserved only for those unfortunate enough to live in autocracies. Even those residing in the most liberal democracies of the world have experienced a catalog of brutality that has often included outright murder.
To fight to change the world is to experience constant defeat. The problem, then, is how to maintain your convictions in the face of this inevitable hardship. How do you endure? How do you keep fighting? How do you stop yourself from giving up? How do you stay true?
Generations of people who sought to realize a better future have had to confront this fundamental political problem. But it was arguably the communists who were compelled to dwell on it the most thoroughly. Unlike the social democrats, communists thought the new world would not come about through legislative reforms, parliamentary maneuvering, and the evolution of capitalism. In their view, the inequities of this world are so deep, the risk of cooptation so great, and the guardians of order so formidable that the only way forward would be to organize a mass revolution that could resist repression, overthrow the institutions of the status quo, and create a new egalitarian system. Since this strategy for winning a new world entailed considerable risk and certain repression, the entire communist project depended on a robust answer to the problem of faith.
To meet the challenge, communists developed a range of solutions. One was to cultivate a culture of sociability. Communists believed that the hardships they faced were too great to bear in isolation, and that a rich community of friends was vital to survival. In the Nazi camps, for instance, communists cared for one another, listened to their travails, and elevated each other’s spirits.
Communists also created many overlapping organizations – unions, study groups, cooperatives, mutual aid societies, cultural associations – with the party at the center. This was not simply because they believed that organizations were the only way to unite popular efforts into a meaningful force for change; they also believed that organizations could provide valuable resources to withstand hardship. It was the party that provided those German communists with a network of assistance that kept them alive in the camps – comrades found ways to distribute bread, clothing, shoes, and medicine.
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Another solution was to practice revolutionary rituals. Communists believed that hope must be regularly maintained through concrete practices – signing party cards, paying dues, attending meetings, displaying symbols, singing anthems, studying texts, commemorating holidays, and so forth. Rituals would renew one’s faith during times of adversity. In the Nazi camps, some communists used cigarettes to pay dues – this of course did nothing to fill the party’s coffers, but it gave inmates a sense of routine, meaning, and purpose.
Communists also learned various techniques to help them respond to hardship that would break most people. One of these was to manage expectations. If you believed you could somehow make it out without a scratch, you were in for a sore disappointment. On the other hand, if you expected suffering, then you were in a better position to endure when it inevitably arrived. As Sohan Sing Josh put it, “The mother has to suffer from the travails before the birth of a child, so we who want to bring into being a new order, shall have to pass through periods of travail before the advent of the red dawn of the new order.”[3]
Another technique was to reframe suffering as a way to sharpen one’s skills. Recalling his time as a guerilla fighting the Somoza dictatorship in Nicaragua, Omar Cabezas argued that hardship “was what helped forge in each of us the steel that was needed to overthrow the dictatorship. Our skin was weathering, the look in our eyes hardening, our eyesight sharpening, our sense of smell keener. Our reflexes – we moved like animals. Our thoughts were hardening, our hearing was more acute, we were starting to take on the same hardness as the jungle …”[4]
3
But the glue that held it all together was a narrative. The communists solved the problem of faith by telling themselves a story about the future. They believed that the new world was not just a desirable dream, but something inscribed in the course of history. As Karl Marx once wrote, “revolutions are the locomotives of history.”[5] Like railroads, history travels in a single linear direction; it does not move backwards, nor side to side, but only forwards, to a terminus. Its direction cannot be changed, but its speed can, and that’s what revolutionaries must do: drive the train of history forwards.
History was heading towards this new world. It had a purpose, a direction, and a goal. To fight for that goal was to “swim with the tide of history.” Of course, they would face setbacks, but victory was inevitable. As Rosa Luxemburg put it, “The whole road of socialism – so far as revolutionary struggles are concerned – is paved with nothing but thunderous defeats. Yet, at the same time, history marches inexorably, step by step, toward final victory!”[6]
Anchoring their politics to a teleological narrative supplied communists with great confidence. It allowed them to overcome suffering, explain away their numerical insignificance, connect their everyday actions to a broader historical mission, give them a sense of purpose and meaning, and sustain their faith in the end goal no matter how many defeats they faced. They might die today, but eventually they would win.
More than anything, it was this belief in an eventual communist victory that gave those German communists the courage to survive the Nazi camps. As Jean Améry – himself a camp survivor – once wrote: “Their universe was vaster than ours, more extended in space and time, above all more comprehensible: they had a key and a point of leverage, a millennial tomorrow so that there might be a sense to sacrificing themselves, a place in heaven or on earth where justice and compassion had won, or would win in a perhaps remote but certain future …”[7]
The communists always sought scientific justification for their views, and so they argued that they could prove the veracity of their story. That proof, they claimed, was to be found in history itself. Historical developments showed that their narrative was accurate. Over the course of the twentieth century, communists saw empires collapse, old regimes crumble, liberation struggles surge, workers’ movements grow, and revolutions erupt. Communist regimes took root, socialist economies appeared to be catching up to capitalist ones, the capitalist world seemed moribound. It was not hard to believe that history was unfolding as their story had foretold. As Angela Davis put it, “we were absolutely convinced that in our own lifetimes we would experience the end of capitalism.”[8]
It is difficult to communicate the kind of optimism that the communists of the twentieth century felt. They lived in a world in which their heroes were alive, their revolutions were winning, and their prophecies were coming true. As one US communist proudly told his daughter: “When I was born, not one country was communist, and now look. One third of humankind.”[9] All defeats were temporary; on the whole, everything was going according to plan.
While communists could for many years maintain this narrative by selectively pointing to a wide range of external referents, history soon took a different turn. In the 1970s and 1980s, a number of major events raised serious questions about the story communists had told themselves for so long. Countless struggles ended in defeat, socialist economies slid into terminal crisis, communist movements transformed into capitalist regimes, communist regimes went to war with each other, revolutionary ideas lost their ability to convince, and the forces of order unleashed a devastating capitalist counterassault.
If communists had once appealed to history to prove their story, history now worked against them. The result was a catastrophic crisis of faith. One by one, revolutionaries everywhere began to reject the old story, disavow their beliefs, and rethink their commitments. Their entire revolutionary matrix collapsed. Communism was already dead before the fall of the Berlin Wall. And one of the most important reasons for its collapse was that people had stopped believing in the story that had sustained them.[10]
4
Although the communism of the last century may be exhausted, and most people who fight for a better world today don’t call themselves communists, there is much that can be learned from this history. Since communists claimed they were fighting for the same goals that many people struggle for today – to end racism, sexism, capitalism, and imperialism – one can go so far as to say that it is necessary to revisit this history. This is especially true because the problems that communists encountered in their quest to create an egalitarian world are still with us. One of the most important of these is political faith.
We are living through another era of unrest. In recent years, millions of people have begun to make their voices heard, take to the streets, and call for an egalitarian society beyond capitalism. What’s remarkable, however, is the pervasive hopelessness of this new cycle of struggle. Many are pessimistic that things will get better. Speaking of people’s attitudes today, the veteran French communist Alain Krivine remarked: “They’re disgusted, but they no longer believe.”[11]
These are of course difficult times – terror, war, genocide, pandemic, social collapse, economic dislocation, and ecological meltdown. But this is not the first time that those wishing for a better future have had to endure suffering. And yet we are more hopeless than those communists scheduled for extermination in Nazi death camps. Where the people of the past exuded unbounded optimism even in the most impossible situations, those of the present are perennially disheartened.
This kind of pessimism is often most pronounced not among the apolitical, but rather among those who wish to do good in the world. Those who are in the trenches today cannot help but see the awesome challenges before us. The organizations of the left have largely collapsed, the old political coordinates have been scrambled, the far right seems ascendent everywhere, and liberals appear more interested in stopping the partisans of emancipation than avowed fascists.
And even if we were to seize an opening, it is difficult to believe that we can make a profound difference when we know what happened to all those who fought for similar ideals before us. We live amidst the ruins of their utopias, and are reminded of their defeats at every turn. Even their victories ended in failure, and some of those failures led to calamity. What can we hope for?
If the communists learned to expect hardship while never losing faith in victory, we seem to expect almost permanent defeat. Many today no longer even believe in the possibility of victory, and they have responded by developing an array of therapeutic mechanisms to help them cope with the painful reality of endless loss without redemption.
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As justifiable as today’s pessimism may be, it is ultimately destructive. If we do not believe we can win, then we will not. We cannot create a new world unless millions of people decide to fight for it, and outside of a handful of diehards who have made perennial struggle the purpose of their existence, most people will not seriously commit themselves to what will be a long and costly struggle unless they thought they could win. Simply put: belief in victory is the crucial ingredient needed to motivate people who desire something better to risk everything – their time, their jobs, their comfort, their health, everything – to change the world. Without it, most people will likely slide into nihilism, quietism, hedonism, lifestylism, individualistic survival strategies, or doomsday prepperism.
This is one of the burning problems of our time. Our world is on fire. We know things are getting worse. Everyone is disgusted. And some are acting. But we have relatively little collective political faith. Anyone who has thought about changing the world today has confronted this problem more often than they would care to admit. How do we maintain genuine hope in a better world despite all the horrors around us?
5
We must find a new solution to this old problem. This is no easy charge, but we do have one important advantage over those who came before: we can draw on their laboratory of political experiments.
We can reactivate some old solutions. In our atomized world, for instance, it is worth revisiting the emphasis on rituals, sociability, and collective organization. Today, when activists encounter defeat, despair, and exhaustion, many tend to retreat into their apartments to stream television shows alone. Their solution is not only passive, individualist, and consumerist; it separates their private life from their political subjectivity.
We of course cannot – and, were it even possible, should not – directly replicate the old communist subculture, especially considering that it, too, was not without its problems – insularity, hierarchy, dogmatism, sectarianism. But we may be able to at least adapt some of its organizational innovations to our contemporary political context. Indeed, turning to the past does not just help us translate old solutions to new conditions, it also allows us to identify pitfalls to avoid. After all, the past partisans of emancipation largely failed, and if we do not take stock of their mistakes, it is almost certain that we will repeat them.
Nowhere is this clearer than their story about history. Our predecessors showed that while an organized life world is vital to survival, those who wish to fight for change also need a cohesive mental framework to guide their actions. We simply cannot persist without telling ourselves at least some kind of a story. But our predecessor’s experiences also show that the particular story that they adopted – a teleological narrative about the inevitability of a better world – leads to a dead end.
This, Wendy Brown explains, is our problem: we need a new approach to political faith that “does not falsely ground itself in the notion that ‘history is on our side…’”[12] This hoary tale is not only unconvincing; it will set us up for the same failures. Our task, then, is to find another story that will help us maintain hope in a better world. How can we invent a new framework that offers no guarantees, makes no promises about our victory, recognizes that emancipation may never arrive, and takes into account the openness of history all while still somehow managing to sustain our commitments, keep us true to our politics, and inspire us to stay active?
There are some possibilities already on the table. One of the most common approaches is not only to reject the inevitability of the new world, but also to remove the very notion of an end goal as such. This idea is incidentally not new; it was perhaps most famously expressed by Eduard Bernstein years ago when he wrote: “The movement is everything, the final goal is nothing.”[13]
The great merit of this approach is that it aspires to find a way to sustain hope without depending on teleology. Instead of anxiously worrying about whether we are reaching the end goal, we can focus on empowering ourselves as political subjects to make meaningful changes in the present. Our efforts might one day realize a new world, and even if they don’t, that’s perfectly fine. In the process, we will have experienced the joys of working together to make a better world, we will have given our lives purpose, we will have made a difference, and we might have even improved society.
One major problem, though, is that without an end goal it would be difficult to measure our progress. How would we know if we are winning or losing? If we are just running in circles? If we are realizing our dreams or undermining them with opportunist compromises?
A related difficulty is that without this goal, it is unclear how we would distinguish our political commitments from those who pursue other rival projects. What, for example, would separate a socialist from a liberal – especially when we acknowledge that in their everyday activism they might often be doing the same kinds of work?
But the most significant limitation of this approach is that it may not convince people to dedicate their lives to the cause of universal emancipation in the first place. However problematic, a telos animates people like nothing else. If we reduce the struggle for emancipation to waging an endless string of campaigns without ever concerning ourselves with the end goal of eventually winning a new world, then one might reasonably ask: What’s the point? Most people might decide that their time would be more fruitfully spent painting, gardening, or raising children. It is hard to stir hope without an end goal, grand vision, or feeling that we are moving towards something.
Another alternative responds to this dilemma by attempting to reconcile contingency with a sense of historic mission. This idea, too, is not a new one; it was most poignantly captured by Walter Benjamin’s famous commentary on Marx’s metaphor of the locomotive: “Marx says that revolutions are the locomotive of world history. But perhaps it is quite otherwise. Perhaps revolutions are an attempt by the passengers on this train – namely, the human race – to pull the emergency brake.”[14]
Benjamin reintroduces a linear conception of history – yet it’s one that does not lead to the promised land but the apocalypse. The struggle for emancipation is no longer about driving history forward along its supposedly natural path to the new world but about disrupting its trajectory in order to save humanity from catastrophe.
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This view has become attractive today, and it is easy to see why. Many people rightly believe we are heading for disaster, and that if things continue, it is likely that misery will increase, society will unravel, wars will escalate, and the planet will die. Instead of unconvincing optimism, this way of thinking registers the painful realities that many of us experience in the present and the anxieties we feel about the future.
The great strength of this approach is that it rejects the certitude of victory, but in a way that may still motivate us to fight. We might lose; but if we do not take action, then all is certainly lost. Although nothing is guaranteed, our actions matter. There is meaning, there is a goal, and there is a way of measuring our progress.
But this approach, too, is not without its drawbacks. It motivates, but through fear. People are driven to act not by a rousing vision of tomorrow, but rather by despair about today. This can only take us so far. Pessimistically fighting a rearguard struggle to prevent things from getting worse is far less empowering than confidently fighting a forward-looking struggle to create a new world. You need something to fight for.
This way of thinking can also give way to a kind of “lesser-evilism.” When the objective shifts from winning a new world free from domination to preventing the apocalypse, any alternative that is slightly less bad becomes acceptable. We have to act now, and our choices are limited, so we must make pragmatic compromises at the expense of our ideals. The goal, then, is not fighting for universal emancipation; it is voting for a bankrupt Democratic Party in the hopes that we can slow ecological collapse. This is the opposite of inspiring – and it won’t even work.
And here we return to the crux of the problem. The inherent pessimism of this approach does not necessarily lead to collective struggle at all. When presented with a narrative of society driving full speed ahead to the abyss, some people will again wonder why they should even bother. Why, they will ask, should they waste their life trying to stop something that is most likely going to happen anyway? They may respond not by joining hands in a grand struggle for a better world, but with nihilism, hedonism, or individualistic survivalism – they will try to weather the disaster on their own, turning even more forcefully against collective action.
6
I believe it is possible for us to invent a better solution to this problem, and I would like to end by drawing on insights from the past to suggest some elements that might help us collectively develop a way to cultivate hope today. In keeping with this essay’s focus on the stories that make political faith possible, I will limit myself to sketching the outlines of a different general mental framework that could replace the old teleological narrative of certain victory.
First, we are not fighting for a utopia. I suggest that we rethink our goal not as a world without flaws, but rather one in which there is no domination. There will still be sadness, suffering, and misfortune, but these will no longer be caused by systems of domination such as capitalism. This is of course still a wildly ambitious aim, but it is more manageable than fighting for a perfect society free of all misery, suffering, and unpleasantness.
Second, we would do well to accept that our commitment to this goal is based not on scientific proof but a decision. When it comes down to it, the founding question of all politics is this: do you believe it is possible to create a new egalitarian world that is free from all domination, oppression, and exploitation? Is universal emancipation possible?
One’s answer to this question can only ever be subjective. If you answer “yes,” then your response is grounded in faith, since there is no evidence that such a world can ever come to be. And if you say “no,” then you are also relying on faith. You can rightly argue that all hitherto history has been one of domination, and that every attempt to change this state of affairs has failed, but this itself would not prove the impossibility of a new world.
I am here reminded of Bertolt Brecht’s famous poem about the sixteenth-century tailor from Ulm who invented a flying machine. The local bishop insisted that this was impossible, since humans by nature cannot fly, and that this man was a fool for trying. “It’s just a big lie / We men are not birds / mankind will never fly.”[15] When the tailor tested his new machine, he fell to the ground, dead. The bishop confidently announced: see here, this is proof, flight is impossible.
The point of the poem, of course, is that this specific experiment in flight failed, but it did not prove that human flight as such could never happen. Just because an attempt to do something has ended in failure does not mean that it is impossible. At best it means that the goal in question is challenging, highly improbable, or requires a new approach that has not yet been discovered.
But there is another layer to this parable. Both the imaginative tailor and the stubborn bishop were acting on faith. Both could appeal to the limited scientific scholarship available and to the record of past attempts at flight, but this could not on its own settle their dispute. And both of them made their decisions based on faith.
The same must be said about emancipatory politics. The emancipatory hypothesis cannot be proven one way or another – it comes down to a leap of faith. This might admittedly seem like an odd way to inspire hope in the politics of universal emancipation, but it does hold advantages, perhaps the most important of which is that it can help inoculate us from the trauma of inevitable defeats.
Historically, one of the most common reasons why partisans of emancipation lost hope in the cause was that they encountered crushing defeats that seemed to contradict their purportedly scientific story that history was moving in the right direction. But if we accept that our politics was always about faith, then no amount of defeat can logically convince us to abandon our views.
Our decision to embrace emancipatory politics was never based on proof. When we surveyed the evidence before making a decision, we saw a mountain of failures. And yet, we still said “yes” because we concluded that all these defeats did not amount to a definitive proof one way or the other. So if we face new defeats in the present, this may be personally unfortunate, but it only confirms what we already knew. If we are staying true to the same line of thinking that led us to say “yes” in the first place, then this new defeat should in no way disprove the possibility of making the new world. Despite the defeat, nothing has changed. The same reasons why we said “yes” are still on the table – the only difference is that we now have experienced more discomfort. Grounding our politics in faith instead of allegedly rational proofs is liberating.
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Third, it is still possible to believe that our actions today can help us progress towards our end goal without relying on teleology. Allow me to explain. The tortuous journey to a world without domination, oppression, and exploitation will be filled with numerous problems. These cannot be exclusively identified through academic study because we cannot know in advance what these problems are. They are obscured.
It is only through struggle that we can make visible the problems that we will have to solve. Mao Zedong once said that to know the taste of a pear is to transform it by eating it. The only way to know the pressing problems that must be solved in order to create a new world is to repeatedly fight to win that world. Every serious bid for emancipation brings to light new problems.[16]
This is true even if these attempts end in failure. While a defeat can never thoroughly disprove the possibility of universal emancipation, it can show that the specific way that we tried to realize that end goal might not work, and that we should try to find a new approach to the same goal that takes into account lessons from this most recent defeat. Defeats can be productive.
The numerous emancipatory struggles of the last century may have ended in failure, but they nevertheless made visible a wide range of political problems that remain with us today. For example: How do we know who our friends and enemies are? How do we defend egalitarian experiments from inevitable repression? How do we create unity while respecting important differences? How do we maintain faith in our cause while facing hardship and defeat?
Moreover, some emancipatory struggles might not just reveal unresolved problems; they might find solutions to those problems – solutions that might be adopted the next time around. Even if we fail, then, we will have illuminated problems, and possibly even devised lasting solutions to some of those problems, which would put the next generation in a better position than we were. They are not, in other words, condemned to reinvent the wheel.
We can therefore still believe in the notion of cumulative progress. The slate is not wiped clean with every failure. Every attempt to realize the goal of universal emancipation furthers the general project. Our failures are not in vain. Our sacrifices matter. As Joe Slovo once put it: “heroic failures (as long as we don’t consciously plan for them and we learn not to repeat them) have their own way of contributing to ultimate success.”[17] We may never see our new world, but by fighting to get there, we are increasing the chances that the future generations might see it.
Fourth, we should broaden our time horizon. There’s often a tendency among those who commit themselves to emancipatory politics to believe that they must make a new world in their lifetime. They feel a kind of urgency to win now. So when the anticipated new dawn does not arrive, they lose hope.
We can avoid this by dramatically expanding our temporal scope. After all, humans have existed for hundreds of thousands of years, and – as Alain Badiou reminds us – while there were plenty of emancipatory revolts throughout the ages, it was really only in the twentieth century – with the Bolshevik Revolution – that the first of these actually succeeded in surviving for a long period of time, inspiring many other egalitarian struggles.[18]
The Bolshevik experiment no doubt failed. But its failure does not mean that the goal of emancipation is invalid. That goal lives on, and will live on for as long as there is domination in this world. We should therefore not see the failure of the Bolshevik revolution, and the political sequence that it initiated, as the end of the long struggles for a better world. When we expand our time horizon, we realize that in some ways it stands at the beginning.
As transformative as it was, the twentieth century was a mere blip in the long history of our species. There is so much more history to go, so many more opportunities ahead. If not in ten years, then a hundred; if not a hundred, then three hundred. We have many years ahead of us to keep trying – to make discoveries, uncover new problems, devise durable solutions, and take meaningful steps towards our goal. As Louis Althusser once put it, “the future lasts a long time.”[19]
I am aware that today’s partisans of emancipation generally dismiss this kind of thinking. What matters is the here and now. But such an intense focus on our own time is not only ridiculous when one recognizes the vastness of our universe, it also creates unnecessary anxiety. We fall into the trap of thinking that if we do not win soon, then all is lost. Ignoring just how much time we have artificially inflates our own importance – and given the difficulty of our task, this can only lead to despair.
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By contrast, recognizing the vast temporality of our task can generate faith. It is not on us alone to win. If we lose today, then others will carry forward the torch tomorrow. When they do, they will have our experiences to learn from. And if they in turn lose, then yet another cohort will continue, drawing from their experiences, and also ours, and all those that came before. We have time. As Võ Nguyên Giáp replied when asked how long the Vietnamese struggle for freedom might last: “It will last as long as necessary … We aren’t afraid and we aren’t in a hurry.”[20]
Fifth, we must remind ourselves that nothing lasts forever. I am sure that some of my suggestions for how we may collectively rethink hope will elicit criticism, and I suspect that the most likely challenge to the line of thinking outlined here will come from those who point to the ecological catastrophe. The planet is dying. And when the planet is dead, emancipation is moot. We do not in fact have all the time in the world.
The impending ecological disaster is of course terrifying. It will mean immeasurable suffering for not only billions of innocent people, but also for all life on this planet – including millions of other species that deserve emancipation. But at the risk of sounding callous, I do not believe that this radically changes anything for those of us who have committed ourselves to the struggle for universal emancipation.
At a purely strategic level, we’ve been here before. It’s worth returning to Badiou’s commentary on V. I. Lenin’s position on the eve of the First World War. Lenin argued that the driving goal should always be the fight for an egalitarian world. Making a revolution to realize that goal was the best way to stop the impending war. But if that failed, then they would have no choice but to use the war as an opportunity to make revolution for that same goal. This is not to say that Lenin cynically welcomed the war, only that he tried to find the best path forward once the war had become inevitable.[21]
I suggest we think of climate change in the same way. The best way to halt the impending death of the planet is to work together to fight for universal emancipation. If we fail to pull that off, and the planet’s demise continues to accelerate, we have no choice but to adapt that goal to the new terrain. The worsening ecological crisis, in other words, will create new conditions with new opportunities to continue fighting for a better world. And who knows: the tipping points – which will necessarily force us into a new relationship with our ecological limits – may mentally unlock new forms of life and collective struggle.
At the temporal level, climate disaster does not mean that we are suddenly out of time. Even if we accept that the ecological catastrophe is unstoppable, and that it is not linear, it will not manifest itself as the sudden extinction of everything on the planet tomorrow. All life on this planet will likely experience a horrifying drawn out death. This is obviously unfortunate, but we will still have time to operate. Our time horizon might be shorter than we would like, but it’s still long in the grand scheme of things.
At the existential level, we know that all things will inevitably come to an end. When all is said and done, everything will crumble, including our imagined egalitarian society. Even if we succeed in creating a new world free from all oppression, domination, and exploitation, it would not last forever. It is likely that it will collapse at some point and have to be won again. Perhaps many times over.
What this means is that we cannot aim for the creation of an egalitarian society that would somehow last for all eternity. In the same way that our commitment to emancipation does not necessarily mean that we must make this new world in our own short lifetimes, it also does not mean that we will have to make it forever. We will try our best to make it for a time.
This is especially important when we realize that the planet that is to sustain this egalitarian society will itself die, taking all of us with it. The planet was always going to disappear, whether that would be in five hundred years, a thousand years, or a billion. All life will end, the solar system will vanish, and the memory of our existence will be erased. Of course, if our end is to come through an ecological crisis, then we should never forget that it was we who brought it on, and that we murdered countless other life forms in the process. But even while acknowledging our responsibility, we must still avoid the depressing trap of believing that fighting for emancipation somehow necessitates the indefinite preservation of this planet.
To be sure, there’s a strong chance that we may never make it to the end goal because all life happens to go extinct before we have the chance. But this was a constant possibility, even before our era of ecological catastrophe. There was always the chance that our struggle for emancipation would be cut brutally short. A nuclear war could have ended life on this planet many years ago. An asteroid could have done the same well before that. We cannot ever completely control the possibility of an abrupt end. The chance that we would never attain the goal was always there.
Again, this kind of “cosmic” thinking is often disparaged by the more “rational” among us. Instead of esoteric philosophizing about the end of the world, we should be getting down to business, they say. But I would insist that stepping back, confronting our insignificance, and acknowledging the impermanence of everything is not a flight into fancy, but can serve as a powerful basis on which to build the kind of hope we need to sustain us in the long struggle for a better world.
All we know is that we want a world without domination, that we made a subjective decision based in faith that such a world is possible, that our attempts to win that world can improve the chances of subsequent cohorts fighting for the same cause, that we have plenty of time to realize our goal, and that at the end of the day nothing lasts forever.
Salar Mohandesi is the author of Red Internationalism: Anti-Imperialism and Human Rights in the Global Sixties and Seventies and a co-editor of Voices of 1968: Documents from the Global North.
[1] Cited in Catherine Epstein, The Last Revolutionaries: German Communists and Their Century (Cambridge, MA: Harvard, 2003), 99.
[2] Kondapalli Koteswaramma, The Sharp Knife of Memory (New Delhi: Zubaan, 2015), 108 and 112.
[3] Quoted in Ali Raza, Revolutionary Pasts: Communist Internationalism in Colonial India (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2020), 208.
[4] Omar Cabezas, Fire From the Mountain (New York: New American Library), 85.
[5] Karl Marx “The Class Struggles in France,” in Marx Engels Collected Works, vol. 10 (London: Lawrence & Wishart, 1978): 122.
[6] Rosa Luxemburg, “Order Prevails in Berlin,” 1919. https://www.marxists.org/archive/luxemburg/1919/01/14.htm.
[7] Cited in Enzo Traverso, Left-Wing Melancholia: Marxism, History, and Memory (New York: Columbia, 2016), 52.
[8] Angela Davis, An Autobiography (Chicago: Haymarket Books, 2023), xi.
[9] Sharon Temple Lieberman, “The Rehabilitation of Howard Bruchner,” in Red Diapers: Growing Up in the Communist Left, eds. Judy Kaplan and Linn Shapiro (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1998), 221.
[10] On this point, see Alain Badiou, Can Politics Be Thought? trans. Bruno Bosteels (Durham: Duke 2018), 40-69.
[11] Cited in Mitchell Abidor, May Made Me: An Oral History of the 1968 Uprising in France (Chico: AK Press, 2018), 49.
[12] Wendy Brown, “Resisting Left Melancholy,” boundary 2, 26 no. 26 (Autumn 1999): 26.
[13] See Eduard Bernstein, Evolutionary Socialism (New York: Prism Key Press, 2011).
[14] Walter Benjamin, “Paralipomena to ‘On the Concept of History,’” Walter Benjamin Selected Writings vol. 4, eds. Michael W. Jennings et al. (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2006), 402.
[15] Bertolt Brecht, “Ulm 1592,” The Collected Poems of Bertolt Brecht, trans. and eds. Tom Kuhn and David Constantine (New York: Liveright Publishing, 2019), 664.
[16] This quotation is cited in Alessandro Russo’s “The Sixties and Us,” in The Idea of Communism, vol. 3, ed. Alex Taek-Gwang Lee and Slavoj Zizek (London: Verso, 2016), 175.
[17] Joe Slovo, Slovo: The Unfinished Autobiography (Melbourne: Ocean Press, 1997), 171.
[18] Alain Badiou, Petrograd, Shanghai: Les deux révolutions du XXe siècle (Paris: La fabrique, 2018), 9-33.
[19] Louis Althusser, The Future Lasts A Long Time (London: Vintage, 1994).
[20] Oriana Fallaci, “An Interview With Giap,” Fifth Estate 85, August 7-20, 1969.
[21] Alain Badiou, “Thirteen Thesis and Some Comments on Politics Today,” trans. David Fernbach, Verso Blog, January 24, 2023.
