Two Faces of Hope

The terrible smoke from local forest fires drove us out of here for the last couple of days so on our way out of town I stopped at the wonderful Book Exchange and picked up some beach reading. (We went to Lake Couer d'Alene, heart of awl, in Idaho) One was a short collection of essays by Rebecca Solnit called, simply, Hope in the Dark. Written in the despair that followed the amazing activism in the Spring of 2003, it is a call to renewed organization and agitation and a reminder that we can't always know the results of our actions of struggle and resistance.

The other book I picked up that day is The Legacy of Ernest Mandel (I know,I know, I have a "narrow focus") which is a great introduction to a theorist and activist of whom I had little knowledge. But what a wonderful surprise! A direct heir to the Trotskyist foundation of revolutionary socialism, his writing and lifelong activism exude the kind of hope Solnit writes of despite the vast differences in approach. As an economist and social scientist, Mandel worked through a Marxist lens to form critical analysis of both "late capitalism" (the title of his most famous work) and of Soviet bureaucratism. Because of my poverty of economics training ,I struggle with all the formulaic jargon of "social product" and theory of value,etc. but I think the spiritual Marxism, the revolutionary humanism and allegiance to Enlightenment values (with all the tension that entails) for which he dedicated his life should be an inspiration to all of us trying to find light "in the dark". Coupled with my recent reading of Murray Bookchin I am discovering my own (till lately unknown) theoretical roots.

What was fascinating were the points of divergence in these two works dedicated to hope. Solnit, who in a more post-modern vein takes great pains to avoid labels, finally confesses to having anarchist tendencies in line with the new "horizontalism" and associates more broadly with the "anti-corporate globalism" struggle and other "progressive" causes (environmentalism, indigenous rights,fair trade etc) than with world revolution or the Left per se. In what I criticize as a sentimental, "New Age" approach, she says :"When we talk about a movement we are not talking about a specific poulation or a specific agenda but a zeitgeist, a change in the air." All in all it smacks of liberalism with it's "pathological pacifism" and reformist tendency. While I dont dismiss her efforts in dealing with real issues, nor have a problem with incremental change as a tactic, it is telling that in many of the instances she cites as reasons for hope in 2003, things are now reversed in 2007. Mandel ,on the other hand, remained an unapologetic Marxist to the end and when others were scurrying for new labels or modifiers he was doing the hard work of analyzing the complex structures of capitalist logic and opening avenues for new inquiry. Im honored to call them both comrades and am more convinced than ever of the truth of my path.

Here is a taste of the Ernest Mandel we need in our present struggle: " Socialists believe that Doomsday can still be averted if we increase the degree of rationality of our collective behavior, if we strive to take the future into our own hands. That is the freedom and self-determination we are fighting for. To believe that humankind is incapable of it is not 'being realistic'. It is to assume that men and women are congenitally unfitted for self -preservation. But that is utter superstition, a new version of the myth of 'Original Sin' " Hope, all the way baby.