Hope After

Hope?                                                                                       BY RONALD ARONSON

Is there reason to hope today?

            Whose voice asks this? Sadly, virtually all of humanity might be posing the question today, after a century that can best be depicted by setting one melancholy inventory atop another: of mass murders, of disastrous betrayals of revolutionary hopes, of the torments and disillusionments of progress. The question, so fitting at the end of the millennium, would certainly have sounded strange, as would today’s spontaneously skeptical answers, in the mouths of those living at the century’s beginning. Save for a few oddly peevish thinkers such as Nietzsche and Sorel, 100 years ago a millennial hope was in the air, yoked to the expectation of massive technological, political, and social change. Science and technology, embodied strikingly in new inventions but most decisively in industrialization, promised lifting the heaviest of humanity’s timeless burdens, including starvation, toil, and plague. Progress would fulfill humanity’s deepest longings for a life of plenty, physical security, and social peace.

            Completing the drive towards political democracy, and expanding it to mean social democracy, would bring the fruits of science within everyone’s reach. Thus was a deep confidence in human nature combined with faith in technology and a belief in structural social change to yield the greatest of human secular hopes: the socialist vision. A society of equals based on collective ownership of the means of production, socialism promised to abolish classes, domination, and exploitation and to install the first genuine democracy. Based on the industrial revolution, socialism proclaimed a society of plenty permitting the fullest possible individual development and eliminating the division of labor.

            Posing a combative alternative to the private appropriation of the fruits of human labor, socialism was in most other ways the extension of Western Enlightenment values, including the commitment to equality, democracy, and science. Its vision of a classless society opposed the acquisitive society, but in its own way claimed to realize its civilization’’s deepest longings for a collective life of peace and plenty as chronicled by Ernst Bloch in The Principle of Hope. As Bloch says, “to be human really means to have utopias” (Jan Robert Bloch 1988, 33) Socialism is utopia’s name, but its roots reach into each individual’s most intimate longings: “Once he has grasped himself and established what is his, without expropriation and alienation, in real democracy, there arises in the world something which shines into the childhood of all and in which no one has yet been: homeland” (Bloch, 1986, 1375-76).

            Marxists and other socialists were not alone in their profound hopefulness about what lay ahead, because progress seemed to be advancing inexorably on a multitude of fronts, centered on the mass production permitted by modern industrial techniques. The prospects for education and democratization seemed no less dazzling than those of scientific and technical progress. Whether or not human progress was to be kept confined within the structures of capitalism seemed more a family quarrel within a larger civilizational project. The dawning of the twentieth century opened on a forward-moving industrial civilization that could quite plausibly put human happiness on the agenda for the first time ever.

            Socialism expressed the West’s unbounded hope that had previously been embodied in its religions, a collective and universalist hope which was now secularized. Belonging to this world, the peaceable kingdom was understood to be realizable, projected as the far horizon of actual social movements and their struggles.”Reason cannot blossom without hope, hope cannot speak without reason,” Bloch says, in a statement that has become famous. He adds: “both [are] in Marxist unity - no other science has any future, no other future any science” (Bloch 1986, 1367). First fleetingly in the French Revolution, and then above all in Marxism, the deepest hopes of humanity became a practical project, an aspiration being posed by these struggles. For Bloch all hope anticipates a better world in the future, and in the modern world every act of hoping aims to create that world, based on real present tendencies. According to Marxism, the inner logic of specific class conflicts was leading to a revolutionary transformation of the social system aiming at abolishing, once and for all, classes, domination, poverty, and war. This would lead to the end of history as we know it - the blind struggle of forces beyond human control - and the beginning of a new kind of history, where social reality would be subject to the conscious control of equals acting democratically and collectively. Bloch rejects the idea that the world is becoming better by itself: “militant optimism” is required, that is, human action based both on human will and scientific analysis of what is possible. According to Marxism, the decisive change is the working class achieving political power. Accordingly, those committed to its possibility were expected to join the workers in making this happen. The worldwide socialist and Communist movements were hope mobilized, hope in action.

An Illusion's Passing?

            Much of the twentieth century has centered on this hope, its militants promising to fulfill it, its parties explaining why this was or was not the right moment, its opponents struggling ferociously against it, its successful revolutionaries working to realize it under impossible conditions and betraying it again and again - and in the end its people and leaders summarily liquidating it. Given the meteoric career of Marxism, it is worth recalling that already in the century’s first years the actual trend of events was undermining its optimism: Bernstein’s Revisionism and Lenin’s vanguard party were responses to the fact that the progress of working-class organization and struggle was not leading to a socialist transformation but rather to mild demands and moderate changes. In Herbert Marcuse’s words, Leninism resulted from a negative fact, namely that the link was loosening between “the proletariat and progress” (Marcuse 1961, 17).

            Then in 1914 European workers marched off to die fighting each other as their parties supported the rival national causes, finishing the Second International and its dream of proletarian internationalism. Certainly the Bolshevik Revolution resulted, but even its spellbinding boldness could not hide for long an outcome that dashed Marxist anticipations of capitalist collapse, international revolution, and socialism arriving in the most advanced industrial societies. Instead, what was fated to be called socialism appeared in a country that was too poor and too backward to fulfill its promises. That colossal misadventure was one premise of socialist hope in the twentieth century; the other was the fact that even during its spectacular collapse of the 1930s capitalism was too sturdy and deeply rooted, and its historically most sophisticated working classes neither powerful nor unified enough, to actually undertake systemic transformation. Socialism, especially in its Communist variant, remained the center of hopes throughout the rest of the century, but in a climate of brute violence that generated what François Furet has analyzed as one wave of hopeful self-deception after another. That was on the one side; on the other Social Democracy usually operated in a climate of compromise and reformism that made significant and concrete improvements but was itself accompanied by its own illusions, including what Bloch dismissed as the “social-democratic automatism” that allegedly saw the world getting better all by itself.

            Disaster followed upon disaster even as the Soviet Union became and remained the century's axis of hope. Behind the crushing of the Kronstadt rebellion lay the substitution of the working class by the party and the party by its leadership; soon the leadership would be substituted by one man, Stalin, who would launch equally mad campaigns of terror and overnight industrialization (Aronson 1983, 64-133). The Soviet Union’s spectacular horrors - “the liquidation of the kulaks,” the purges, the Moscow Trials - were there for all to see, as was the cynicism of the Hitler-Stalin pact. The victory over Hitler, the postwar wave of revolutions, the imposition of “Peoples’ Democracies” on Eastern Europe, and the power and prestige of the French and Italian Communist Parties, made it plausible that Communism was indeed the world's future. Ugly perhaps, but once industrialized and educated, was it not capable of becoming democratic, of acquiring a human face? Could not these stable, powerful societies that had already accomplished so much at such great human cost now redeem that suffering by reforming and thus transforming themselves?

            On the other side, Social Democracy created several of what are still the world’s most civilized societies. And their democratic reforms certainly kept hope alive, even among many of those who demonstrated and agitated in Poland, Czechoslovakia, and East Germany in the 1980s. Socialist radicals and Communist reformers on both sides of the East-West divide looked forward to the withdrawal of Soviet rule and the end of the Communist monopoly to provide the opportunity for building a new nonauthoritarian democratic socialism. The collapse, however, meant not the beginning but apparently the end of energies for building an alternative future. It was as if the polar opposition between the two systems was needed in order to imagine a “Third Way.” Writing during the last days of the one system, Norberto Bobbio declared that

the greatest political utopia in history ( . . . ) has been completely upturned into its exact opposite. It is a utopia which, for at least a century, has fascinated philosophers, writers and poets ( . . . ); which has shaken whole masses of the dispossessed and impelled them to violent action; which has led men with a high moral sense to sacrifice their own lives, to face prison, exile and extermination camps; and whose unequaled force, both material and spiritual, has at times seemed irresistible, from the Red Army in Russia to Mao’s Long March, from the conquest of power by a group of resolute men in Cuba to the desperate struggle of the Vietnamese people against the mightiest power in the world. In one of his early writings - why should we not recall it? - Marx defined communism as “the solution to the enigma of history.” (Bobbio 1991, 3-4)

            The final years of the twentieth century have dealt contemptuously with Marxism’s hope. If we cannot read The Communist Manifesto today without being struck by its prophetic grasp of the global capitalist system, neither can we see its hope for proletarian revolution as anything but an extravagant prophecy whose time is past, a fantasy fit for a self-mocking anniversary edition of Marx and Engels’ classic, stylishly designed for coffee tables (Dobnik 1998). As Furet concludes at the end of The Passing of an Illusion, his study of the Communist idea in the twentieth century, the returns are in on two centuries of the Left’s hope. The collapse of Communism draws a circle around the secular hope of an entire civilization, and labels it “illusion.” And the consequences are enormous. “The downfall of Communism has affected not only Communists and Communist sympathizers. For many others it has forced a reconsideration of convictions as old as the Western Left, even of democracy itself, starting with the sense of history by which Marxism-Leninism claimed to give democratic optimism a scientific guarantee” (Furet 1999, 502). Lacking a sense of direction, “history has become a tunnel that we enter in darkness, not knowing where our actions will lead, uncertain of our destiny, stripped of the illusory security of a science of what we do.”

Hope against Hope

            Looking back on the Left’s career of hope in the last quarter of the twentieth century is a bit like following the story of the Joad family in John Steinbeck’s The Grapes of Wrath. Loss follows upon loss, defeat builds upon defeat. Just when things cannot seem to get any worse, they do. And again. Think of them; at first victims of natural disaster - drought and dust storms - they are evicted from their farm and pile themselves and all their belongings into a truck. Optimistically setting out for California, they experience one catastrophe after another: Grandpa and then Grandma die, a retarded son drifts off, they say goodbye to a husband and his dying wife with whom they made most of the trip. The Joads are forced to shift ground and regroup continually, but they adapt each time as the space available for survival shrinks with each new blow from police, vigilantes, growers, and nature. By the end of the story, the preacher is dead, Tom is on the run, Rose of Sharon’s baby is stillborn, and the shrunken family is still without work or home. Driven by flood from a boxcar they share with another family to seek higher ground on foot, the remaining few Joads come to a pause in an abandoned barn, where Rose of Sharon suckles a starving man. Almost everything has been lost, but they will keep on.

            The closing of the Left’s century mimics the Joad’s actual story rather than Steinbeck’s optimistic reflections on the meaning of their itinerary. He wanted his readers to see an entire people transforming its sense of individual and personal suffering into a shared militancy: we confronting collectively the same social evils, cohering into an unstoppable transformative force. Steinbeck had the good sense to confine these thoughts largely to the interchapters devoted to little essays on the social system. By the end Tom has become one such militant, replacing the dead Casey, but the decimated family literally manages to keep its head just above water.

            As we finish reading the novel two generations later, Steinbeck’s prophecy has aged much more than the story. Paradoxically, The Grapes of Wrath did not at all foreshadow an ever-widening American mass consciousness of the need for democratic and socialist transformation. Strikingly enough, the Joads’ move from defeat to disaster to bare survival, their learning how to hang on while remaining human, anticipated the repeated trials of hope in the second third of the twentieth century, so poignantly captured in the lone high note at the end of Thomas Mann’s Doctor Faustus that keeps on, in spite of everything. This is the hope of the camps, the survivors of the century’s various refugee, work, concentration, and extermination sites. This sheer hope against hope for individual survival, so far from the vision of utopia which Ernst Bloch proclaims as the essence of being human, is however deeply connected with the hope for the peaceable kingdom (Aronson 1983). But the twentieth century’s most hideous contradiction was that the catastrophic conditions demanding such hope for survival - as the Soviet Union of Nadezhda Mandel'shtam’s Hope against Hope - were often produced by societies claiming to pursue that peaceable kingdom.

            The history of the Left seems to come down to this today: most of its proponents have become like Steinbeck himself became, no longer on the Left, or like the Joads, they barely hang on. The Left’s century began with the anticipation of a new world that would do away with human exploitation; it ended with the vision’s abandonment rather than its realization. 2000 hails not the dream’s achievement but its collapse as a viable and broadly shared hope for the future. The century’s end is witness, in Furet’s challenging formulation, to The Passing of an Illusion. Whatever its continuing explanatory value as a system of analysis, Marxism is kaput as a project of social transformation (Aronson 1995). The century’s greatest system of secular hope has been revealed, by history itself, to be an illusion. If socialism converted millennial longings previously expressed in religion into a secular form, their force sustained from The Communist Manifesto to the disintegration of the Soviet Union, the twenty-first century begins with this hope in tatters.

Hope Privatized

            At least on the scattered and dispirited Left. Strangely enough, it is the Right today that has been celebrating the End of History. Or, since hope is such an uncommon mood on the contemporary Right, a singular individual, Francis Fukuyama, has developed the new system of practical hope. According to Fukuyama, we are warranted in talking, like Marx and Hegel before him, about the end of history because capitalist democracy is the final destination towards which human development has been heading. The market economy has defeated “economic justice,” and liberal democracy has won a decisive intellectual and political victory, suggesting a “common evolutionary pattern for all human societies” (Fukuyama 1992, 48). Today there is no alternative. A generation after Marcuse forecast it in One-Dimensional Man, we live in a worldwide “society without opposition,” not because of the totalitarian force of its repressive productivity, as Marcuse feared, but because it has achieved its goals. As Fukuyama says,

We who live in stable, long-standing liberal democracies face an unusual situation. In our grandparents’ time, many reasonable people could foresee a radiant socialist future in which private property and capitalism had been abolished, and in which politics itself was somehow overcome. Today, by contrast, we have trouble imagining a world that is radically better than our own, or a future that is not essentially democratic and capitalist. Within that framework, of course, many things could be improved: we could house the homeless, guarantee opportunity for minorities and women, improve competitiveness, and create new jobs. We can also imagine future worlds that are significantly worse than what we know now, in which national, racial, or religious intolerance mades a comeback, or in which we are overwhelmed by war or environmental collapse. But we cannot picture to ourselves a world that is essentially different from the present one, and at the same time better. Other, less reflective ages also thought of themselves as the best, but we arrive at this conclusion exhausted, as it were, from the pursuit of alternatives we felt had to be better than liberal democracy. (Fukuyama 1992, 46)

            This fulfillment of hope is also its radical deflection. If Fukuyama is right and the good society has largely been achieved, the public world, as Perry Anderson summarizes it, would be “no more than the instrumental space in which substantive private goals of diverse kinds may be pursued” (Anderson 1992, 335). What remains are no longer grand social hopes, but only partial and limited social projects and an infinity of individual ones. The foreclosure of the Left’s great secular social hope, socialism, leaves us with a new subject to ponder: the privatization of hope. Not that all hope had historically been only collective. Indeed, as other articles in this issue testify, hope has long been a deeply personal as well as a deeply civilizational question: it emerges naturally in the face of catastrophes and extreme suffering, indeed in the face of mortality and the vicissitudes of any and every life. But what distinguishes the newly privatized hope is precisely the mutation of what had previously been regarded as public themes into private ones.

            Although many conservatives were taken aback by Fukuyama’s claims, the deepest current of his argument is wholly in keeping with the ideological trends of the past two decades. These have implored us to turn away from the public realm as a terrain for improvement and change, to cut our losses there and limit our involvements, and to instead encourage individual responsibility, personal initiative, and the centrality of people’s private activities. Our social order, except where it has tried too hard and done too much, may not be perfect but it is good enough. The political realm, at best, provides for the essentials of common life, setting rules and providing the absolutely essential infrastructures for private activities, including economic activity. Individual’s lives are mostly to be lived in and through these private pursuits.

            This is an argument, but it is much more. Obviously it has been fortified by the disintegration of Communism, and along with it any sense of alternative. Since overly ambitious collective hopes have resulted in disaster, we are certainly not wrong to limit ourselves to more humble and limited goals. In this sense historical reality has forced us to rethink the broad curves of remaining development that our counterparts anticipated a century ago, and have led us to be skeptical about trusting historical trends, human nature, or progress. After progress, after Communism, and after the Holocaust, we cannot help but be skeptical about grand hopes and projects. The career of Ernst Bloch should be caution enough: his momentous study of hope pointed to the Soviet Union of Stalin’s last years as its realization (Aronson 1995, 261-66). But the shrinking of collective hope has also been powerfully accentuated by the actual evolution of the most advanced contemporary societies: the global economy, the internet, and the ceaseless commercial creativity of consumer capitalism, have generated a field of dazzling possibilities for individual initiative. At the same time, the subversive power of capitalist modernity has rapidly undermined the hold of traditional roles over the past generation. The word “lifestyle” permeates contemporary conversation for good reason. Individuals are now free as never before to live as they wish, to adopt or design precisely the religions, modes of behavior, and identifications they desire. As the political world has become more unseemly and its conflicts intractable and endless, and as individuals are free simply to opt out of seeing themselves as participants, no wonder more and more people, especially in the United States, have chosen freedom from politics as their personal direction. “Libertarianism” expresses that sense of individuals being on their own, asking only to be left alone. At a time when individual careers seem more than ever open to people of talent, social collectivities have lost more and more of their force and meaning.

            In such a situation the privatization of hope and the abandonment of grand visions may be no tragedy but rather the token of a profound social progress. Insofar as the right conditions of living have been largely achieved, it is certainly appropriate for people to turn their energies to realizing themselves individually, and to struggling against the social obstacles to doing so. Hope would then understandably be redefined, because we are reaching the end of one major phase of history: the privatization of hope would be a token of achieving the good society. We would henceforth need just enough collective energy to maintain the common conditions of our well-being, to then freely devote the bulk of our time to individually defined pursuits. Once it is achieved, the peaceable kingdom needs guardians, but not militants.

            The militants of the obsolete grand hopes, such as the priesthood that once called itself Communist, would be revealed to have championed a false hope, one too sweeping to be realized democratically, one too oppressively social to be natural to a free people. One that promised too much from social change, and thus had to take refuge in illusion. Ernst Bloch’s vast study of hope would then reveal a horizon beyond all possibility, a collective wish that passed easily into apologetics, but ultimately had no purchase on reality. It would be reinterpreted as an understandable subjective longing but not objective trend, possibility, or even desirable goal (Aronson 1995, 279-80). Intense and broad collective hope, however noble, would then be understood as a deviation from the only realizable and responsible kind of hope, the kind guiding individual lives and family struggles.

Unfinished Business

            What is wrong with this picture? Some of its obvious limitations have been spelled out by writers expressing the Left’s traditional concerns, notably Perry Anderson and Robert Heilbroner. In “The Ends of History,” an extended essay on Fukuyama, Anderson comes at the end to explore the fit between Fukuyama’s vision and the real world. The simple fact is that capitalist prosperity has been extended from the West and Japan to only four other countries (Taiwan, South Korea, Singapore, and Hong Kong), all authoritarian, two of them city-states. That is, there is simply no basis for proclaiming that the entire world is en route to the conjunction of political democracy and capitalist well-being that alone would justify the privatization of hope - where the great mass of the world’s people would be genuinely free to pursue individually self-determined goals. The significant fact making possible Fukuyama’s argument is not democratic-capitalist fulfillment but Communist collapse, and the second does not ipso facto entail the first.

            And if it were achieved? “If all the peoples of the earth possessed the same number of refrigerators and automobiles as those of North America and Western Europe, the planet would become uninhabitable. In the global ecology of capital today, the privilege of the few requires the misery of the many, to be sustainable” (Anderson 1992, 352-3). Anderson quotes well-known statistics about income and consumption disproportions between the West and the rest of the world, concluding with the most striking of them:

If all human beings simply had an equal share of food, at a diet with less than half American consumption of animal-based calories, without altering any other distribution of goods whatever - scarcely a radical demand - the globe could not support its present population; were US food consumption to be generalized, half the human species would have to become extinct - the earth could support no more than 2.5 billion inhabitants. (Anderson 1992, 353)

            A minimal demand of equality - that everyone have enough to eat - would have revolutionary consequences. At the end of his study dissecting the Communist illusion that caused so much suffering in the twentieth century, Furet resigns his reader to the constant regeneration of such illusions. They are contained, he argues, in the contradiction between the capitalist society’s promises of equality and their inevitable inequality. Furet does not carry this discussion further, perhaps because he is drawing lessons about Communism and not capitalism, but if one of the cautionary lessons to be drawn from the twentieth century is the danger of illusory and unrealizable hopes, another is certainly the force of people demanding being treated with some degree of equality.

            For his part, Fukuyama seems to remain unaware of the explosive force of any such built-in “contradictions.” After Communism he and many conservatives share another, perhaps equally devastating, kind of illusion: it is the faith that the masses of the world will either not demand the limited equality Anderson speaks of, or if they do, “we” will somehow “find a way” to meet the demand short of radically redistributing wealth from the North to the South. This illusion becomes acutely dangerous under conditions of globalization, and specifically the instantaneous access - available to anyone possessing the technical means - to what is going on everywhere in the world. Whether it is spelled out under the old name of “socialism” or not, victorious capitalism cannot help but generate the need for a collectively understood and democratically administered alternative.

            In his conclusion to Visions of the Future, Robert Heilbroner tries to articulate his “hopes for the very long-term prospects for humankind” (Heilbroner 1995, 115). His first concern is the same as Anderson’s, namely that

humankind must achieve a secure terrestrial basis for life. The earth must be lovingly maintained, not consumed nor otherwise despoiled. The atmosphere, the waters, and the fertility of the soil must be protected against poisoning of any kind from human activities. The population of the globe must be stabilized at levels easily accommodated to the earth’s carrying capacity under technological and social conditions that we - and presumably they - would find agreeable. Without such a stable foundation, there seems little chance to attain a level of civilization unmistakably more advanced than our own. (Heilbroner 1995, 115)

            This cannot be done, Heilbroner insists, within a social order depending on ceaseless accumulation, and as long as the divide continues between wealthy and poor regions. But capitalism shapes every aspect of human life today, and it most sharply aggravates inequalities as it endangers the ecological basis for human life on the planet. Two other changes, undoubtedly connected, are required if a better civilization is to be possible: the human community must learn how to protect itself against wars between peoples and states, and “human nature” - including “unconscious drives and fantasies” - must be given a more central cultural and educational role.

            What is most remarkable about both Heilbroner and Anderson is that, in different ways, they present worried and self-consciously modest alternatives. While both root themselves in currents of the socialist tradition, both have also labored throughout their careers to integrate that tradition with more established currents and innovative ideas, as well as realistic alternatives. In trying to counter the privatization of hope with an unashamedly social vision, neither writes with anything like the boundless hopes of a Marx, or the exalted optimism of the nineteenth or early twentieth century Left. Even so, Heilbroner is unable to assess the prospects for his hopes being realized and Anderson does so only in the most general terms. Neither writer can point to specific trends and forces making for the changes they see as absolutely essential. They are unable to give their reasons for hope - even though the relatively modest changes they foresee would require a fundamental upturning of our social order, our ways of living, and our political forms. Yet these two of the Left’s best thinkers, correctly, would stress the importance of realism, and thus underscore the conditions of long-term human survival and minimal well-being that must be met if there is to be any stability on earth.

Against Privatization

            This modesty may be warranted by the current skepticism about grand projects - and by the Left’s inability to hitch its star to specific social forces today - but it is belied by other features of contemporary life. For in so many ways our world is truly utopian, an endless carnival of delights. Our collective social power and energy reaches well beyond anything imagined at the beginning of the twentieth century, coming at us in all media, from all directions, all of the time. With appropriate updating, Marx’s breathless description in The Communist Manifesto still captures it best: “Subjection of Nature’s forces to man, machinery, application of chemistry to industry and agriculture, steam-navigation, railways, electric telegraphs, clearing of whole continents for cultivation, canalization of rivers, whole populations conjured out of the ground - what earlier century even had a presentiment that such productive forces slumbered in the lap of social labor?” (Marx and Engels 1976, 489).

            The updating includes not simply the expansion of human powers a thousandfold, but also their globalization and their democratization. Certainly, as Anderson and Heilbroner point out, these productive forces are not equally and freely available to individuals no matter whom or where, but they are at least widely distributed throughout the North and to increasing numbers in the South. We live in one interconnected industrial and commercial world that produces and markets in ways that would have been unimaginable after World War II, dazzling, seducing, offering, and imploring with unbelievable sparkle and vigor.

            By its nature it promises that everyone can enjoy its fruits, and yet by its nature it denies this. In the consumer utopia, hopes and promises about almost everything under the sun are beamed at us all day and night. The ads may appeal to socially passive, separated individuals, and by their nature cannot generate a sense of solidarity, but they nevertheless expand the field of possibility and touch underlying needs. In the long run, will people be able to restrain utopian social hopes as unrealistic when the most fantastic individual hopes are generated without restraint just to keep the economic system producing and selling? In the long run, will hope for a better society be dismissed as frivolous when this society is so patently given over to organized frivolity? In the long run, will people tolerate bending their lives and identities to a grim and ruthless bottom line when so much else about the social order is given over to play and waste?

            But the most important insight into all this was Marx’s, 150 years ago. The breathtaking global society, and its endless fruits, are products of human social labor, no more and no less. They are collectively produced but individually controlled, meeting human needs, however generated, and produced for reasons of individual profit. Today our individual lives are indeed interconnected as never before, and our chances and our well-being are dependent as never before on forces beyond us. The social world informs our lives, our very identities, thoroughly and profoundly. As George Eliot wrote, to be quoted by Michael Harrington in The Other America: “there is no private life which has not been determined by a wider public life” (Harrington 1997, 7). If anything, these words have become even more true in the 125 years since Eliot wrote them, and the 35 years since Harrington quoted them. Separated individuals, yes; on our own, yes; but we are also in the same boat.

            My point is not to start an argument about individual or social ontology but to reflect on the premature foreclosure of social hope and to underscore that hope’s enduring deep sources. Marxist and socialist hopes are indeed shipwrecked, but even in our imagination and if no more than a subjective longing, we cannot abandon the social vision of a peaceable kingdom. After all, hope today, however modest and chastened, must still tap into our deepest experiences, among these both the sense of individual responsibility and social destiny. And, since these subsist in us in antagonism and mutual incomprehension, one would expect any renewed hope to reach beyond the alienations and mystifications of daily life. Hope today would articulate such dimensions in ways that give them their due, even including connecting and reconciling them.

            After Marx, who saw Communism as the liberation of the individual through the liberation of the social, actual historical Communism focused on the demands of the social as construed and directed from above. Lenin’s vanguard party was a decisive step along the way; another was the outcome of the Bolshevik seizure of power: a small and elite party in control of a huge and backward country. As it developed historically, without and against individual rights, Communism destroyed any sense of equilibrium between the individual and the social.

            After Communism we increasingly live our lives as if there is no “commons,” the most vital of social functions increasingly being performed for private gain, our identities and responsibilities discussed as if we were Robinson Crusoes. The community becomes just another interest of the individual taxpayers worrying about their “investment” and how it benefits them, as the collective dimensions of our existence are conjured away. Something deep in the social world, and in each individual, has become increasingly mystified, suppressed from daily conversation and hidden away from those who live and need it. Or it has become mediated by the profit system. Interdependent as never before in history, we paradoxically live our lives increasingly as if we were alone.

            It remains as true today as 150 years ago: a free society would be one where “the free development of each is the condition for the full development of all” (Marx and Engels 1976, 506). “Each” and “all” now include women as well as men, people of different sexual orientations, former slaves as well as their former masters and the former “white trash” between the two, indigenous people displaced by settlers, formerly colonial people as well as their colonizers. And, in spirit, it includes nature as well as humans. If the old vision of socialism cannot accommodate all of these forces, the twenty-first century’s hope will depend on a new, convincing vision of today’s peaceable kingdom.

            But what then of the original socialist vision? After all that has happened, and not happened, in its name mustn’t we forsake it in the name of hope? On the level of visions and values, there are two recipes for despair today. One, almost completely faded, is the overweening collective vision that powered Communism into its suppression of the most fundamental of individual liberties and democratic rights. The other, still in its heyday, is the suppression of the social and communal. The first became constructed around the illusion that a free people would choose to abrogate their most basic human rights. The second is built around today’s dominant illusion, that social being can be privatized. Any vision of hope that individualizes what is essentially social conjures away a vital dimension of people’s being and the chance of living this in a full, rich, democratic community.

Reasons for Hope

            With his uncanny ability to anticipate themes that would become important much later, Immanuel Kant asked three questions near the end of The Critique of Pure Reason: What can I know? What should I do? What may I hope (645)? My opening question, “Is there reason to hope today?” resolves itself naturally into Kant’s three questions, especially if we change his “I” to “we.”

            What can we know? Obviously we are far from the certainties of Marx and the tradition associated with his name. When recalling of Communism, our first memory is of its crimes, not the least of which is its betrayal of the hopes of several generations of committed and courageous souls, its crime against hope. The decomposition of Bloch’s militant hope leaves two typical figures dominating the scene at century’s end. One is the potty idealist, continuing to try no matter what, out of touch with all possibility for succeeding, a voice growing higher and more childlike with age, weary but maddeningly optimistic, never giving up: hope without realism. The other is the cynic, self-described as a realist but no longer trying to change anything or undermining every effort, infuriatingly precise about limited and scanty possibilities: realism without hope. Gone, or almost, is the type who once sought to combine reason and hope, a gritty sense of limits with a lofty vision of possibility. Marxism’s sense of the alternative coming into being has faded along with Bloch’s science of utopia, as obsolete-sounding as the “people’s banks” of a more innocent hopeful past. Whatever became of the notion of an “historical trend” towards emancipation? In the twenty-first century hope can no longer sound so assured.

            But what can it sound like? The point here is not to reconstruct the actual substance of a renewed hope, but rather to specify its conditions. Setting the task of living and acting in a hopeful way today involves becoming liberated from the conviction that our vision is coming true. On a day-to-day level, hope is nevertheless connected to desiring certain goals, believing that these are attainable, and acting in ways that further these goals. The specific goals must in turn foreshadow or partake of a more fundamental, however distant, vision - either by keeping it alive, or by reminding us of it, or by being a stage along the way.

            But a twenty-first century hope, one containing a vision of human possibility that might inspire people to struggle for a better world, will be meaningless without squarely acknowledging in its central themes the catastrophes of the twentieth century. It will have to be hope after hope. Accordingly it will take all models, all “isms,” with a grain of salt. If it must be faith, it will not pretend to be science; if it places bets on certain historical trends, it will not delude itself into believing that it has discerned the trend; if it is only a few partial projects it will not claim to be the answer to all of humanity’s needs. After the failed and betrayed hopes of the twentieth century, its subjects will be especially militant against any possibility of justifying crimes in its name. It will draw a heavy line between prophesying as a subjective need and any objective claims made by its prophecies. It will shape itself as not asserting objective truth, not announcing the actual historical becoming of a specific form of society. A hope knowing that it is hope rather than historical fact, is a hope without illusions.

            This means abandoning not only the specific hopes made obsolete during the century but also its kind of hope. But how much can be stripped away if we are still to act hopefully? When necessary, it is important to stress, human beings have been able again and again during the twentieth century to live and act decisively while apparently deprived of every possible hope, indeed, when placed in an impossible situation. What should we do? The Warsaw Ghetto Uprising is one answer: rising up against their tormentors with no hope of success, the combatants nevertheless rejected submission and asserted their human dignity. And, in a way, they succeeded, not only holding the Germans at bay far longer than anyone would have expected, but fueling the spirit of resistance elsewhere and leaving a legacy of righteous rebellion for future generations to draw on. All but a handful perished, but for us the combatants have become examples of courage. Desperate, without hope, people in extreme situations act, and in so doing, create hope. In The Grapes of Wrath, Ma Joad does just this. She insists on asserting her basic humanity even as conditions worsen and the family fragments, holding on to her dignity no matter what. No matter what, the situation, or the system, or the executioners, cannot destroy our humanity. If nothing else, the twentieth century bequeaths us such “lessons” of hope.

            But there is something else. I have already indicated above that a twenty-first century hope can base itself on utopian possibilities inherent in contemporary life, and that beneath or beyond our individual responsibility for ourselves it can express, and appeal to, the repressed social dimension of our lives. Beyond this lies a web of fundamental facts about contemporary life which, paradoxically, the Right upholds in arguments against the Left, even though these facts’ very existence testifies to the concerted action over hundreds and thousands of years of social movements that are the Left’s ancestors. I am referring to the progress in human social morality embodied in a thousand and one steps towards equality, democracy, human rights, and civil rights and embodied in various national constitutions as well as the United Nations Universal Declaration of Human Rights. Dozens, hundreds, perhaps thousands of movements and struggles over time have not only advanced specific freedoms but have contributed to a growing worldwide current of equality and dignity. However ambivalently we may regard scientific and technical progress today, the progress of human aspiration and equality remains unambiguous. But this means that hope today is not ex nihilo: every individual stands on the shoulders of a long tradition of rights won through struggles over time, identities changed through rights won, and social orders shaped in relation to these new relationships (Aronson 1995, 242-9). If the movements retire from view temporarily or permanently, if their individuals’ self-consciousness becomes effaced, if backsliding occurs, not only does the general trend remain, but its batons lie waiting to be picked up and carried forward by subsequent generations into new causes. Surely our being situated in a rich history of struggles and victories is reason for hope, and has a logic of its own. Awareness of this can shape our understanding of the character of hope today.

            What can we hope, especially in ways appropriate to the new century? Nothing as grand as Marxism, and nothing as clear as its version of the peaceable kingdom. Certainly key parts of its vision will be incorporated in a twenty-first century hope, but according to the demands of a new situation. Nevertheless, Marxism encouraged its proponents to see themselves as marching towards Jerusalem; how will contemporary individuals and movements sustain themselves over any long term while seeing themselves in inevitably plural and partial ways? How will individuals and movements keep on without the redemptive conviction so central to Marxism’s appeal? What nurtures hope without grand narratives connected to ultimate goals, tied in turn to specific acts? After all, Marxism’s force was to draw all struggles into a larger struggle, and to focus hope on a single, world-transforming act.

            Nothing new needs to be invented to answer these questions, which are, after all, specifications of Kant’s third question. Their answers already appear in the experience of countless movements for change. Time and again people have created, and lived as, a moral force. In the fleeting utopias of struggle, people have experienced a brief sense of solidarity, of living at one’s full powers, of being oneself but fully integrated into a collectivity. These solidarities inevitably beget a sense of disillusion because life is not like that; daily life resumes and reality sets in. But for a moment we have experienced something well beyond it, living a sense of justice, becoming fully moral and fully who we want to become.

            Is this reason to hope or to despair? The bitterness that so often follows such moments - the search for scapegoats after a strike is lost or a movement wanes - suggests, through the force of people’s disillusionment, that something well beyond their limited objectives has happened. A deep desire has suddenly surfaced, the longing for another world, as that world is created, paradoxically, in communities of struggle. This is what Sartre has described as the “group in fusion” (Sartre 1976, 318-404). Perhaps it can be treated not as another world but as a fragile way of living our own world, a foretaste of an inevitably postponed utopia. I would suggest seeing it not with sadness but with expectation, as a utopia that can be recreated and returned to again and again during the several hundred years before humans actually achieve it on earth.

             Perhaps just achieving this, however momentarily, is a reason for hope. And perhaps if we experience and understand it in relation to the other reasons for hope, we can give satisfying answers to Kant’s three questions. What do we know? We know what amazing possibilities our world has, even if at the moment they remain far from being achievable; we know that history is not bringing about the peaceable kingdom; but we also we know how much has been accomplished toward creating it as well as how catastrophically wrong some of the efforts have gone. What should we do? We should act towards creating the good society as the meaning of our lives today. Doing so joins us with the greatest of historical traditions, is morally right to do, and it enables us to experience moments of solidarity that anticipate utopia. What can we hope?

If we cannot hope that our actions will necessarily lead to the good society, at the very least we can hope that they will keep its tradition alive as one of the most vital of human dreams.

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