The Left has grown enormously in recent years. Yet the disconnect between the boldness of our ideals and our power to win transformative change has endured. As we contemplate the future, what histories do we see for ourselves? And how do we know if what we see is a vision or a fantasy?
October 2011. We moved together through the dark night like a murmuration of birds through the sky, congregating at Congress Plaza in Chicago by the thousands. I’d march with crowds before. I’d organized meetings and rallies. But this time felt different. Heart pounding, breathing quickened, exhilaration at our collective power permeated my being. The revolution felt like it might be just around the bend.
I was in my fourth year of graduate school and the end of my modest stipend was in view, my doctorate far from it. No number of wood-paneled seminar rooms could obscure the fact that I was training for a job that by and large no longer exists. Others that night were buried under mountains of debt or had lost homes or jobs. Our experiences were uneven in ways I didn’t appreciate in the rush of the moment, but we knew we were getting screwed and we knew who was screwing us. As we echoed each other’s stories through the human microphone, we found each other in the organic unity of our anger.
By then, the Occupy Movement was capturing headlines across the country, its message like a magnet: “We are the 99 percent.” In Chicago, even the 1-percenters showed up to play their part. A shiny black limo drove down Michigan Avenue that night, as if on parade. A man in a suit leaned out the window yelling, “Get a job, losers!”
Yet, his presence felt like a sign of our power. He was drawn to us, a lone voice drowned out by the unified chants of thousands. He felt like a cartoonish caricature of his class: Wile E Coyote suspended in mid-air over a cliff, not yet realizing he was about to plummet. We had our hands on the pulse of history, not him. The foundations were cracking, he just didn’t know it yet.
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Street protests produce a collective ecstatic experience. Surrendering to the chants and movements of the masses induces a sensation of self-transcendence. Growing up in an evangelical family, there is something familiar here: an event that serves as an emotional touch stone. Like an alter call, these moments serve as an initiation rite for the young and newly politicized, a re-affirmation for veterans and saints of the movement.
But like church camp, the feeling of transcendence fades as everyone returns to the rhythm of daily life. Day-to-day organizing can be tedious: filled with long planning meetings, knocking doors, and writing emails. Filling a few cars full of canvassers on a Saturday can be a struggle, making call after call, crossing names off a list.
Yet it is these moments that produce the most profound transformations. Over the last decade, through an endless series of conversations, trainings, and campaigns, my life has become interwoven with many others. My understanding of the ways my own experiences connect to others across borders of race and class, gender and nation, has expanded. Our differences have not disappeared, but the “me” I once was has now re-emerged inside a bigger “we” that identifies simply as “the movement.”
There is a harmony between these cadences: the rush of social upsurge, the slow patient work of building power one day at a time. To be initiated into the movement is to join this dialectic, the dance between a feeling of revolution around the bend and the reality of slowly building power one day at a time.
* * * * *
May 2017. I was sitting outside in Minnesota with a group of organizers on an unseasonably warm evening, discussing the remarkable growth of social movements over the last several years. One labor leader marked the contrast with his own political awakening in the 90s. “It felt like waking up during a long night,” he said. At the “end of history”, the best the left could do was carry the torch faithfully through, keeping the flame alive for a moment when it could catch. Many of the Gen Xers present nodded knowingly. For those forged during the uprisings of the 1960s, the long night has been longer still.
As a millennial, I have come of political age during the moment for which my “movement elders” have been waiting. The disintegration of the neoliberal order is pushing us towards large-scale social transformation, even if the promised land is not yet in view. From the Democratic Socialists of America (DSA) to community groups and labor unions, organizers from every generation talk about raising our aspirations—and we are finding ourselves less alone. Since 2008, a slow crescendo of movements in the streets, the work place, and the ballot box have radicalized multi-racial young and working class communities. Many professionals are moving left, too.
In contrast to the dormancy of the 90s, my experience in the 2010s has been marked by disconnect. Reality has proved stubbornly resistant to our exuberance. In the Obama era, we trudged along. In Chicago, we talked about transformative change in basements on the South Side — nationalizing the banks, creating millions of public jobs — but our victories were modest. We spent most of our time battling the bipartisan austerity agenda. Since 2016, when the Republicans rode the Tea Party movement into office, the disconnect between our vision and what we are strong enough to win has reached a fever pitch.
Our demands have moved from the margins to the center of the Democratic debate, but day to day, we are just trying to hold our ground. The resurgent right is successfully destroying decades of reforms at what feels like an unprecedented pace. President Trump has delivered on key conservative priorities as Republicans work overtime to lock in structural reforms for the long haul.
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The left’s position today harkens back to the experiences of even earlier generations. In a period of prolonged crisis following the Soviet revolution and World War I, the European working class mounted significant revolutionary efforts. The prospect of a truly world historical leftward turn appeared possible, only to end tragically in defeat.
“Crisis creates situations which are dangerous in the short run,” wrote the communist leader Antonio Gramsci from Mussolini’s jail, “since various strata of the population are not all capable of orienting themselves equally swiftly, or of organizing with the same rhythm. The traditional ruling class, which has numerous trained cadres, changes men and programs and, with greater speed than is achieved by the subordinate classes, reabsorbs the control that was slipping from its grasp.”
Gramsci’s warnings about the cadence of crisis ring true today. Looking around, we find that we are far from the only ones with a movement. Propelled by the Fox News, the Tea Party emerged two years before Occupy. While President Trump represents a change of guard, the “trained cadres” of the right are remaking American conservativism while leaving the fundamentals untouched: keeping the economy firmly in the grip of financiers and fossil fuel corporations as they energize the racist, religious, and nativist right.
We have struggled to hold this contradiction: the truth of our new-found strength and reminders of our relative weakness. Some days, it feels like the crisis of neoliberalism is their crisis, a crisis created by and afflicting the ruling class. When we’re honest, we recognize that this moment also exposes our crisis, the crisis of a left that remains small and fractured, out-paced by reactionary forces, uncertain about how to take power and what to do if we can.
* * * * *
Crises create space for new political possibilities because they involve a breakdown of existing social relations. For that reason, they are disorienting and dangerous. The future becomes far more indeterminate than in times of stasis and weighing the likelihood of various resolutions becomes difficult.
Liberals are surprised by these moments: Everything is working just fine! For young leftists, crises confirm our theory of history and have the psychic import of prophesy fulfilled: See, the end of capitalism *is* nigh!
Captive to such moods, we can misjudge the balance of forces—our strength in comparison to the power of ruling class—and mistake the likelihood of our desired outcomes. In the gap between the possible and the actual, it is often fantasy that does the heavy lifting.
“One’s own desires and one’s baser and more immediate passions are the cause of error,” Gramsci writes, “in that they take the place of an objective and impartial analysis … In this case too the snake bites the charlatan—in other words the demagogue is the first victim of his own demagogy.”
In the midst of passionate upsurge, driven by rage and what Gramsci calls “infantile forms of optimism and folly,” we at times succumb to our own inflated rhetoric. But replacing “self-deception” with “analysis” is a tricky business. Gramsci refers to what’s at stake in such an effort as “the construction of present and future history.” This is a call to see ourselves as historic actors, but it hints at the notion that action requires imagination. We can only act in light of some construct of how the past got us to the present and how it might be projected forward into the future. What then can future histories be but collages of past experience, cut and pasted, different arrangements of analysis, memory, desire, and cognition?
In this way, image proceeds action:imago in Latin, phantasia in Greek. Yet, the double-meaning of these words reminds us that the line between imagination and imaginary, between vision and fantasy, can be vanishingly thin — and devastatingly consequential.
During an interview that appeared just days before the 2016 election, the novelist Mohsin Hamid put the general challenge facing all future-looking souls quite aptly: “Part of the great political crisis we face in the world today is a failure to imagine plausible desirable futures. We are surrounded by nostalgic visions, violently nostalgic visions.”
One naturally hears in Hamid’s words a description of the resurgent, nationalist right, but the notions of plausible desirability and nostalgia are also applicable to the left.
While our movements have answered Margret Thatcher’s proclamation that “there is no alternative” with the booming street chant that “another world is possible,” the vexing problem for left authors of future history has been to craft new images that are not merely desirable, but plausible—and not just for ourselves, but for the millions who’d also need to believe in them if they are to be realized.
How then do we imagine left future history? And how do we know if what we see is a vision or a fantasy?
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September 2012. I’m in a non-descript church hall (again) where Richard Healey is leading a workshop. His warmth, enthusiasm, and professorial demeanor stand out against the drab background. Richard is a veteran movement organizer who helped found the New America Movement and is the son of the legendary communist leader Dorothy Healey.
Richard walks us through the history of dozens of major right-wing reforms over the last 40 years, following Louis Powell’s historic 1971 memorandum, which called on the corporate right to remake every major institution in American life. He then turns to us: what values, what ideas, are central to our vision for how the world should look, forty years from today?
Since meeting Richard that day, I’ve worked with him on many similar workshops and trainings. He reminds me, based on more than five decades of this work, that almost all of us can readily articulate the moral underpinnings of an alternative. And we know quite well about the near-term policies we’re working day and night to win right now. The trouble creeps in when we’re asked to think about the path from here to that far future. Say, imagining what we can win 10 years from today. What steps lie between a campaign to close the local immigrant detention center, say, and the demand for global citizenship? In session after session with activists and organizers, we’ve grappled with filling the space between: the seemingly infinite paths that proliferate before us.
There is something about this pattern that repeats itself at the theoretical level. Owing to its namesake, who was remarkably mum on the subject, Marxism has always been an apophatic tradition, with a deep focus on analyzing of the present state of affairs and an optimism about the organic emergence of an alternative from below. Theorists have put forward various strategies for the transition to socialism, but the difficulty of puzzling through the path from here to there often makes our visions appear like elaborate thought-castles (or perhaps co-ops) floating in the distance.
The problem is reinforced by the collapse of the 19th and 20th century pathways for the left and the historic actors who populated them. Whatever their various strengths and flaws, neoliberalism has gobbled up what remained of experiments in communism, social democracy, and various third-world nationalisms alike. With the collapse of Latin America’s pink tide in recent years, 21st century socialism also appears to be off to a rough start.
It is here that the idea of “future history” and violent nostalgia converge. Unlike on the right, the violence of our nostalgia is not so much about the content of our fantasies (though sometimes that too), but about the way they press on our imagination, condemning us to rehash the past, trapping us in replay loops, hampering our capacity to dream new dreams.
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March 2020. For most of us, the 2020 election has been the pre-eminent magnet for imaginary thinking: the fulcrum toward which our psychic energy strains, the bearer of our hope for escaping the interregnum. Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Warren promised to break with the tepid tinkering of the Obama era, with plans to inaugurate a “political revolution” and push for “bold, structural reform.” For more than a year, we have built a future history in our mind’s eye where Bernie Sanders was cast as a more successful Eugene Debs, or Elizabeth Warren as a Louis Brandeis.
We, too, became protagonists: the organized, multi-racial, working class. In dreamscapes that cobbled together images from the 1930s labor movement with the 1960s freedom movements, we imagined ourselves winning Franklin D. Roosevelt’s freedom from want and fear. Under a Sanders’ Administration, we hoped that something more than a New Deal redux might emerge. While Sanders’ own talk of “democratic socialism” has remained something of a floating signifier, we’ve been busy imagining gradual shifts in ownership and control by means of nationalizations of key industries, worker ownership schemes and sovereign wealth funds.
This imagined path beyond neoliberalism, beyond capitalism, drew its energy from the swelled membership numbers of the Democratic Socialists of America (DSA). But it has also been buoyed by an alarming degree of confidence that left ascendency is inevitable: We may be losing now, but the majority is already on our side! If we can put Bernie Sanders in the White House, we can unlock a chain-reaction that will catapult us toward a socialist future. There is something irresistible about this kind of thinking. I, too, have found myself caught up in the euphoria, the sense of inevitability.
Now, this future history has evaporated like a fever-dream. Its loss has been nothing less than soul-crushing. We had strained body and mind, every fiber of our being, to make the imaginary real. We believed so fervently that the center could not hold, but despite our growing strength, the cadres of the ruling class have yet again reabsorbed “the control that was slipping from its grasp.”
More devastating still, voters in the Democratic Primary dealt a blow to our theory of change. We spoke about the multi-racial working class as if it was already united and self-aware—or perhaps out of a hope that our passionate incantations could make it so. But while our ideas are popular, the primary results have shown that our candidates have yet to win the trust of many Black voters, nor have they brought young voters to the polls in the numbers needed to enact a sea change in our national politics. We fervently believed that high turnout would demonstrate the energy of the left, but we saw in the primary that the momentum largely lies with voters in the center.
Across the left, we find exhortations to avoid despair. Now is the time for action, we are told, not commentary and self-criticism. There is an element of truth here. In every historical period, cynicism is political poison. In the Trump era, it may well be suicide.
But something else is at work here, too. We avoid examining our own failures, perhaps because it can be so utterly painful. Now more than ever, we cannot afford to look away. If we do not grieve dreams that have died, they will haunt us like ghosts, clouding our vision of the present.
Throughout the Democratic primary, we have over-estimated our own strength, projecting an on-going political task—building an organized, multi-racial working class that is united behind a vision for transformative change—as a fait accompli. Some on the left have been overly focused on vanquishing the center, losing sight of the growing strength of the right.
Now, the balance of forces has been laid bare: the left is only one part of a broad and heterogenous set of social forces arrayed against President Trump, who has consolidated his hold on the Republican electorate.
The fight, of course, is far from over. Even had we possessed sufficient strength to propel Sanders or Warren into office, the stacked Courts and anti-democratic Senate would have meant formidable headwinds in our efforts to break with the era of reformism. But should we succeed in mobilizing enough voters to defeat Trump, there is hope yet of unleashing a cycle of progressive change. We remind ourselves that Franklin D. Roosevelt was no New Dealer at the start either. It took the communists and the labor movement to bring about large-scale change.
Despite Joe Biden’s sheer ineptitude and stubborn intransigence, he is a familiar political animal: a politician who rides the prevailing winds. If we can shift those—along with Congress—there is hope yet. Still, we cannot know precisely which way our favored wave of structural reforms shall break, as it crashes upon the shoals of a system that has already seen its share of structural change from the right. Whether we can breach the barriers is an open question.
* * * * *
Of course, what is the alternative?
If one imagined left future history reboots a more inclusive version of the New Deal playbook or better yet an American iteration of the Swedish model, there are still pockets on the left whose imagined future histories include visions of a rapid, radical rupture. As the editors of the new magazine Commune proclaimed in their inaugural 2018 essay:
While others offer social democratic fantasy from a past that cannot return, we bring you instead the future, a magazine … that knows what so many already intuitively recognize: capitalism can’t be made more tolerable, couldn’t be saved even if we wanted to, and won’t be voted away… On the left, we must admit, congruent nostalgias dominate. The politics of the thirties and sixties, a workers’ movement and a technocratic social democracy, rise up like phantoms. They rise up into a world which lacks the affordances of those moments almost entirely; they feel solid and familiar to the exact extent that they are airy impossibilities.
There is something delectable in their declaration. They bring the transgressive nature of direct action to life on the page. While most people on the left—including earlier proponents of similar tendencies—have embraced the electoral path as a central component of the road to socialism, Commune’s editors boldly denounce it as a mirage. Among grassroots organizers, a parallel belief in the power of “civil resistance” has gained traction, based on the idea that a militant minority can topple a government, if not build a new one.
The power of Commune’s position comes from the plausibility of their critique. A shadow does lie over the ballot box. The problem with the workers’ movement and the social democratic path is precisely that our moment lacks the “affordances” of the past, as US hegemony wanes and the industrial working class has relocated and been extinguished. The arcane U.S. electoral framework does make radical change from within look like an airy impossibility.
There is a kind of argumentative slight-of-hand in the offing here, for the plausibility of the critique belies the implausibility of the proposition. After the 2016 election, but before the appearance of Commune, John Judis offered me a withering critique of this kind of imaginary road beyond neoliberalism, beyond capitalism.
John left a graduate program in philosophy in the 60s to become an editor at Socialist Revolution, then went on to a career in mainstream journalism. In his telling (a not uncommon one), the abject poverty of the working class in the 19th century created the conditions under which socialist revolution constituted a plausible horizon. In the 20th century, the welfare state ameliorated capitalism’s excesses and stratified the working class, validating Eduard Bernstein’s much-derided revisionism. As such, John argued:
The idea of revolutionary socialism that would abolish the capitalist class appeals primarily to young intellectuals. It is a surrogate for religious belief in a hereafter. It is over the horizon. It has no surface plausibility on the basis of which you could build a mass movement. You have to build a movement on what is, and what people want now… and make an argument for how to achieve it. That leads toward some American form of social democratic politics. It doesn’t lead toward a politics based on the abolition of capitalism.
John is right about the fantastical nature of revolutionary future histories and about who they appeal to. Indeed, as with the word “God,” it is difficult to conceptualize what talk of “revolution” in the US means today. We can add that social transformations sparked primarily by direct action—whether or not they have involved force of arms or non-violent forms of resistance—have often betrayed their own ideals, as the chaos mounts and the external pressure grows.
Yet, perhaps because I belong to the class to whom this kind of thinking appeals, I feel the resonance of this revolutionary longing, vibrating like a street chant through my being. I cannot avert my mind from contemplating future histories of this sort. Mostly though, I imagine living through them on the other side of the equation, where we find ourselves in various catastrophic contexts not of our own making.
If revolution feels beyond the pale, the apocalypse certainly doesn’t.
* * * * *
April 2020. I wrote those words of foreboding months ago. Now they increasingly describe reality. As the global Covid-19 pandemic unfolds and armed militias occupy state capitol buildings, my mind races towards even more apocalyptic future histories. The disease and measures required to contain it are bad enough. Millions in this country, and billions around the globe, face extreme material peril as the economy grinds to a halt. But it’s the political dimension of the crisis, and the ways it accelerates human suffering, which keeps me up at night.
We are back to a moment of acute crisis, rapidly dwarfing the events of 2008. The trained cadres of the right are once again outpacing us, capitalizing on their superior power to control the response and re-shape the agenda. If a “war time” boost in popular approval enables Trump to win a second term, it doesn’t take an active imagination to picture the gloves coming off. And there is still the very real possibility that Trump and the Republicans will use the pandemic to undermine the election or even prevent the peaceful transition of power. Together with ascendant rightwing nationalists across the globe, the pandemic is increasing the likelihood of grave future histories of a kind that we haven’t seen since the last century, including a much more violent return to great power conflict.
In the back of our minds, behind the pandemic, images linger of the coming environmental collapse that we have yet to forestall. The pandemic itself is a morbid symptom of the relationship between capitalism, environmental degradation, and public health—and how quickly these three interrelated features of our collective life might spiral out of control. Everywhere now, these images simultaneously crowd out our visions of utopia, as the world comes closer and closer to resembling Octavia Butler’s prophetic Parable of the Sower. They hang like an hourglass over the prospect of any return to gradual reforms and half-measures.
While the fuel for revolutionary longing in the 19th century was that capital posed an existential threat to the working class, today it might arise from a different kind of danger: the unfolding environmental collapse and massive disruptions that are sure to follow in its wake. The pandemic, like the 2008 financial crash, is like a flashlight, exposing the rot that lies at the core of neoliberalism, hidden by the darkness of ideology. For those with eyes to see and ears to hear, the utter depravity of a global order that sacrifices human lives at the altar of corporate profits is coming starkly into view. The sheer insanity of thinking markets are an adequate mechanism for distributing basic goods and services is more evident by the day. Anyone with a heart can see the cruel ways in which race, imprisonment, immigration status, and nationality are being used to rob people of the dignity they deserve.
For better or worse, radical social change has tended to occur in the tumult of such moments. The crisis demonstrates, to paraphrase a recent headline in the New Yorker, reality’s endorsement of our political vision. Surely, we as global community must see that now is time to kill the great god Mammon, when our very survival as a species is increasingly under threat.
* * * * *
“Pessimism of the intellect” has always been for me less like an imperative and more un mode de vie. The moral case against the current state of affairs is unimpeachable and the need for “another world” is more pressing than ever. But we live now—or so it sometimes feels—in a present where all the exits to desirable futures are blocked.
On every side, people hurl accusations of “fantasy” at their political opponents, possessed of a kind of self-confidence that has never been in my grasp. In times this tumultuous, when the future is so unclear, I find myself struggling to delineate where my own sound analysis trails off into “infantile folly”—or outright despair. Which fantasy am I to believe in? I find myself asking.
Here is what I see.
When I survey my own soul and that of my generation, I find a kind of left triumphalism. Unlike the economic determinism that drove earlier generations of socialists, the steam that propels our engine is a kind of voluntarism, a sense that if only we strain hard enough, victory is in sight, despite the forces and conditions arrayed against us.
It is not wrong to describe our fervor as a kind of religious conviction, nor to point out the dangers that here await us. I count as mentors many veteran organizers who pioneered the same debates that we are rehashing now. Each brilliant in their own right, they came to very different assessments of the left’s prospects during the tumultuous window between the uprisings of the late 1960s and the long decline into neoliberalism. I cannot know what the world felt like to them in those years, but I wonder if it was so different from the disorientation I feel now, the loops I find myself thinking in.
Today, across faded sectarian divides, I see memories from those days flash across their eyes and echo in their voices. They caution us, their inheritors, to avoid that infantile optimism and folly that Gramsci warns against; the dangers of ultra-leftism and perils of youthful adventurism. If we deceive ourselves about our relative power, the snake may indeed bite the charlatan. The analytical work that Gramsci advised, carefully studying the balance of forces, remains as vital as ever.
It is quite wrong, however, to condemn all left religious sentiment as worthless. The foundation of progressive thought is the conviction that the world can in fact be better than it is now. That structuring our society in radically new ways could be part of our collective evolution, the realization of our species-being, such that every human being would have what they need to flourish.
When I travel to New York City, I often stay in the Harlem apartment of Libero Della Piana, another Gen X comrade and mentor. His cozy home, wall to wall with books, reveals an organizer with a voracious appetite not just for politics and history, but for science fiction and fantasy novels as well—for how else can we begin to envision the future? During many late-night conversations, he reminds me: the conviction that a better world is not just possible, but inevitable, has played a crucial role in powering millions of people to take great risks, often in situations even more dire than our own.
Like all faith, this conviction is not a static thing. Life on the American left has long involved being a champion, if not of lost causes, then at least of unlikely future histories. I can understand why, as the social movements of the 1960s wound down, many young leftists abandoned radical politics, as calls for socialist revolution faded, and Reagan’s revolution ascended to power. I have deep respect for movement elders who have persisted in a 50-year period marked largely by setbacks.
Escape from the interregnum may not come as quickly as we expect, nor have the resolution for which we hope. Wholesale transformation may be in the cards; we may only see the partial fruits of our labor for transformative change. The future is certain to hold moments of rupture that bring fresh faces to this beautiful struggle, but the slow, vital work of day-to-day organizing will always remain. To think otherwise is make-believe. For this reason, like all adherents, it is crucial that we continue in the practices of a grounded faith—to hold the hope of another world in tension with the work we have yet to do in this one—passing the knowledge of how to do so down from one generation to the next. We must learn from our forbearers, while imagining new ways forward, evolving as the flame is transferred.
“The decisive element in every situation,” Gramsci reminds us, looking to a future as bleak as his jail cell wall, “is the permanently organized and long prepared force which can be put into the field when it is judged that a situation is favorable (and it can only be favorable in so far as such a force exists, and is full of fighting spirit).”
That force, so long small and dormant, is rapidly growing and urgently organizing. If we keep our eye on the balance of forces, we can continue to add to our ranks. Together, we can confront the crisis, as we construct a new majority and then a new world. While every imaginary path we contemplate has uncertain turns and locked doors that our reason and powers of prediction cannot see behind, it is crucial that we remember how often and how readily the world is fundamentally remade, though often in blood, sweat, and tears. Faith, as the 19th century Danish philosopher Soren Kierkegaard portrayed it, is precisely to believe that the impossible is possible. Politics—as the Latin American marxist Marta Harnecker was fond of saying—is the art of making it so.
A version of the essay also appeared on Medium.