The path of despair

Hegel argues somewhere that an awareness of the inadequacy of our conceptions is what propels us towards self-criticism, making intellectual progress—which, for him, is the same as progress per se—possible. He calls this "the path of despair". Amid the current fad for shallow self-help books and studies of the "economics of happiness", it might be worth remembering that happiness is not the main goal of progress, freedom is. From the vantage point of enhanced freedom, people might be in a better position to hammer out whatever happiness is for them.

After the Iraq war, it became clear to me that, whatever the mainstream of Western left is, I'm not really a part of it, either in terms of philosophical outlook or political inclination. However, I do still consider myself a Marxist of sorts—in the sense that most of my political "starting points" come out of that tradition—and I still think that progress should be possible in extending the areas of popular political an economic control. I think of this as "socialism", although I don't suppose it really matters what its called. Is there an economics possible that raises living standards for most people on the planet and gives them greater control over their own lives? This has been our Holy Grail for some time, of course, but is still probably the most important question facing the left in this generation. There can’t be any socialism unless we get a plausible answer on this. But it is a huge task. To get anywhere would require a large number of like-minded, flexible-thinking, knowledgeable and talented people working closely together over many years. After Iraq, however, and the apparent retreat of many into the safety of the broad political dogmas that existed beforehand—most obviously, an oddly reactionary brand of "anti-imperialism"—it doesn’t seem as though the conditions are in place for the "ruthless criticism of all that exists". This would be only the starting point for such a programme, which would also have to turn its sceptical gaze in multiple directions, towards itself as much as to the outside world. Perhaps one reasons that this doesn’t happen very readily is that, for many, the left is something like a family, and, at the social-psychological level, not many family members want to risk becoming an outcast by speaking out of turn.

Right at the beginning of The Phenomenology of Spirit, Hegel says this:“The more the ordinary mind takes the opposition between true and false to be fixed, the more is it accustomed to expect either agreement or contradiction with a given philosophical system, and only to see reason for the one or the other in any explanatory statement concerning such a system. It does not conceive the diversity of philosophical systems as the progressive evolution of truth; rather, it sees only contradiction in that variety. The bud disappears when the blossom breaks through, and we might say that the former is refuted by the latter; in the same way when the fruit comes, the blossom may be explained to be a false form of the plant's existence, for the fruit appears as its true nature in place of the blossom. These stages are not merely differentiated; they supplant one another as being incompatible with one another. But the ceaseless activity of their own inherent nature makes them at the same time moments of an organic unity, where they not merely do not contradict one another, but where one is as necessary as the other; and this equal necessity of all moments constitutes alone and thereby the life of the whole. But contradiction as between philosophical systems is not wont to be conceived in this way; on the other hand, the mind perceiving the contradiction does not commonly know how to relieve it or keep it free from its one-sidedness, and to recognize in what seems conflicting and inherently antagonistic the presence of mutually necessary moments.”

And, if you can get past the fancy language and the romantic metaphor, I think it’s the same with, say, Hayek, or neo-liberalism, or whatever is the left's current demonic totem. We should be asking: What in these outlooks is useful? What can be usefully absorbed? What remains after an all-out criticism to be absorbed? That is, there has to be an appreciation and a firm grasp of Hayek and of neo-liberalism, of their strong points and achievements, as well as their weaknesses and faults, before they can be superseded. The same applies to all previous intellectual and practical efforts towards developing a socialist economics, including the holy-of-holies, Capital. From the point of view of empirical investigation, it means distinguishing capitalist propaganda from results. For example, where have their development efforts or their standard macroeconomic policies been successful, and why? And where have they been unsuccessful? Do they have any tools that we can reuse? Despite the colossal scale of the current financial-economic crisis, I personally haven’t yet seen anyone coming close to grasping the nettle. Certainly not the so-called "hard" left, whose ham-fisted/ hare-brained attempts to oppose the injustices of capitalism somehow always reek of injustice themselves, appear not to have picked up any tips from the disasters of the 20th century and, somehow, intimate the preparation of something worse than run-of-the-mill late liberal/social-democratic capitalism. (Sometimes—who could have conceived it?—even the imperialists appear to be more progressive.) But also, if a bit more depressingly, not even intelligent Marxists such as Robert Brenner (to judge by his organisation's website), who otherwise looks pretty much correct, so far as I can see, about the causes of the current crisis being found in the monetary response to the problem of long-term decline in profitability in the advanced capitalist states.