But CB is right in identifying the current mood with the downturn in the fortunes of the left -- specifically, the demise of the labour and socialist movement in the West and unexpected collapse of the socialist experiments in the USSR and China. These are good demonstrations both of how quickly conditions can change, and their effect on the zeitgeist -- in this case, one of hopelessness. Previous changes ran in the other direction. I'm reminded of all the those brooding Cuban writers and artists weaned on surrealism and the theatre of the absurb who overnight began energetically churning out sunny posters and optimistic paeans following the Cuban Revolution, an abrupt mood swing earlier earlier experienced by the Russian and Chinese intelligensia at the time of their social upheavals -- and, before them, the the romantic artists and intellectuals both during and after the French Revolution.
Marv Gandall
----- Original Message ----- From: "Charles Brown" <cbrown at michiganlegal.org> To: <lbo-talk at lbo-talk.org> Sent: Thursday, July 22, 2004 11:18 AM Subject: [lbo-talk] Anti-Chomsky Reader
>
>
> Doug asked this tough, but important, question:
>
> "What is it about the left that it draws so many people of gloomy
> temperament who only want to see the worst in the world? We used to
> be about possibility, transformation, finding the seeds of the new in
> the womb of the old. Now we're about why everything sucks and is
> getting worse."
>
> ^^^^
>
> CB: Maybe, even though we should have pessimism of the intellect and
> optimism of the will, if our generation experienced advances in our youth
> followed by regressions in the last 30 years ( in some summary sense),
it's
> hard to fulfill the ideal of optimism of the will. In other words, it is
> not so much that the left draws people who have gloomier temperments than
> average, but rather left people's moods are reflective of an objective,
> historical downturn. Maybe we need a secular form of the "power of
positive
> thinking", since there _is_ a certain reciprocal influence between the
> movement leaders' subjectivity and the objective situation; that is, if
the
> left, leaders of the movement, are blue, this aggravates the downturn in
> objective conditions.
>
> I agree with Doug, if he implies we on the left have a responsibility to,
by
> act of will, accentuate the positive, even if we feel gloomy based on what
> our intellects tell us.
>
> Jeremy Cronin touches on this topic in his Monthly Review article
> "Post-Apartheid South Africa: A Reply to John S. Saul"
>
> Cronin says: "Saul's article has two layers, two sensibilities, two
> organizing paradigms running through it. To borrow and amend Gramsci's
> epigram, we have, woven imperceptibly together, a healthy pessimism of the
> intellect, and a problematic cynicism of the will."
>
> And further
>
> " There is much by way of emphasis and detail that I would want to
qualify
> or amend, but I agree substantially with the broad analysis of the last
> twelve years or so in South Africa that Saul makes in his
> pessimism-of-the-intellect mode. So what's the problem? The problem is
that
> this general analysis is continuously trumped by another paradigm, another
> sensibility. This second approach is announced in the very title of the
> article, "Cry for the Beloved Country: The Post-Apartheid Denouement," and
> in the opening paragraph: "A tragedy is being enacted in South Africa, as
> much a metaphor for our times as Rwanda and Yugoslavia..."(p. 1). Note the
> literary and rhetorical flourishes: "denouement," "tragedy," "metaphor,"
and
> a title that evokes the novel (Cry the Beloved Country) by the doyen of
> white South African liberalism, Alan Paton. They announce a paradigm of
> imminent closure, the revolution that is about to be (has always been
about
> to be) betrayed. This is Greek tragedy, and as Brecht said of such
tragedy,
> it renders the spectator a passive observer. All we can do is emote, as
Saul
> himself says: "One does not know whether to laugh or cry..." (p. 1).
>
> But the imposition of this tragic reading onto what is, in my opinion,
still
> a relatively open-ended, complex, and highly contested reality results in
a
> number of internal disjunctures in the course of Saul's article."
>
> http://www.monthlyreview.org/1202cronin.htm
>
>
> >From the South African context we have "pessimistic intellect/optimistic
> will" type slogan "The struggle continues; victory is certain" , when the
> objective conditions under Apartheid were quite gloomy.
>
> Gramsci himself was probably in the Fascist prison when he coined the
> "motto".
>
> Charles
>
>
>
>
> ___________________________________
> http://mailman.lbo-talk.org/mailman/listinfo/lbo-talk
>