L. Panitch. Erik Olin Wright's Optimism of the Intellect

1 Leo Panitch Erik Olin Wright’s Optimism of the Intellect ‘But ultimately, the most central debates within Marxism can only be advanced by studying actual struggles attempting to transform social structures either in the present or the past. To state the issue in somewhat overly-positivistic terms, practice provides the “experimental conditions” for evaluating the adequacy of propositions within Marxist theory, and thus for reconstructing that theory in light of its inadequacies.’ - Erik Olin Wright , ‘Intellectuals and the Working Class’ The Insurgent Sociologist, 8:1, Winter 1978 p. 14 ‘The political conditions for progressive tinkering with social arrangements… may depend in significant ways on the presence of more radical visions of possible transformations. This does not mean, of course, that false beliefs are to be supported simply because they are thought to have desirable consequences, but it does suggest that it is important to seek firm foundations for plausible visions of radical alternatives. - Erik Olin Wright, Preface to Associations and Democracy: The Real Utopias Project Volume I, Verso 1995, p. xi ‘When radical critics of capitalism become desperate for empirical models that embody their aspirations, wishful thinking can triumph over sober assessments. The complementary danger is cynicism; there is great cachet among intellectuals in debunking naïve enthusiasm. What is needed, then, are accounts of empirical cases that are neither gullible nor cynical, but try to fully recognize the complexity and dilemmas as well as the real potentials of practical efforts at social empowerment.’ - Erik Olin Wright, Envisioning Real Utopias, Verso 2010, p. 151 ‘Gramsci is famous for saying that we need pessimism of the intellect but optimism of the will. But we also need a little optimism of the intellect to sustain optimism of the will.’ - Erik Olin Wright, How to be an Anticapitalist, Verso 2019, p. 105 It was both salutary and moving to see Erik Olin Wright reasserting a certain optimism of the intellect towards the end of his life. For most of the last three decades, he had dedicated himself - as in fact had Gramsci in his own time1 - to actually transcending the stated dichotomy between pessimism of the intellect and optimism of the will. Indeed, this was the impulse 1 The phrase ‘pessimism of the will, optimism of the intellect’ has been wrongly assumed to have originated with Gramsci, who in fact borrowed it from Romain Rolland in the course of challenging, in a 1920 L’Ordine Novo article, those ‘anarchists ideologues’ who expected that a proletarian class ‘at present scattered at random through the cities and the countryside… [and] reduced to such conditions of spiritual and bodily slavery… should spontaneously initiate and sustain the creation of a revolution’. Gramsci’s defense of ‘the socialist conception of the revolutionary process’ in the face of this may indeed be seen as what motivated him, as I have recently argued, to show how the fragmentation and subordination of the proletariat might be overcome through the further development of socialist party political organization and ideology so as to better serve the project of broad class formation and hegemonic capacity development. See Leo Panitch, ‘On Revolutionary Optimism of the Intellect,’ in Rethinking Revolution: Socialist Register 2017, London: Merlin, 2016, pp. 356-7. 2 behind the Real Utopias Project, as Erik conceived it in the early 1990s. This was directed at overcoming the naiveté, on the one hand, and cynicism, on the other, of liberal proclamations of ‘the end of history’ at the time, as well as postmodernist rejections of Marxist ‘grand narratives’. Instead, Erik set out to lay the intellectual grounds for an open-ended politics that was still inspired by the goal of replacing capitalist systems by socialist ones: ‘What we need, then, are utopian ideals that are grounded in the real potentials of humanity, utopian destinations that have accessible waystations, utopian designs of institutions which can inform our practical tasks of muddling through in a world of imperfect conditions for social change.’2 Most of us coming out of the 1960s as young intellectuals attracted to Marxism were already concerned with ridding historical materialism of any trace of futuristic teleology. This was part and parcel of defining our intellectual tasks in terms of identifying rather than ignoring the weaknesses of Marxist theory and practice, and trying to develop contemporary Marxism so as to overcome those weaknesses. As what had been intellectually fashionable in the 1970s became intellectually unfashionable by the 1990s, this was also what led (at least some of) us to undertake the task of ‘transcending pessimism’ in face of the despondency that enveloped the intellectual left in that decade. What was required in the context of the triumph of neoliberal capitalist globalization was, we believed, a recommitment to revising and developing Marxist theory and practice, not least by ‘rekindling socialist imagination’.3 The Real Utopias Project, conceived as it was when ‘civil society’ was still all the fashion, was running with the grain of the zeitgeist in left intellectual circles. It was also open to the neo- anarchist spirit that infused the new politics of alter-globalization protest on the streets of Seattle, Quebec City and Genoa as well as at the World Social Forums in Porto Alegre at the turn of the millennium. Indeed, as the debilitating pessimism on the Left was succeeded by a starry-eyed optimism about the will of ‘the multitude’, the relevance of the Real Utopias Project only increased. In this respect, Erik’s focus on the need to concentrate on institution-building in civil society was a testament to his own ‘patience allied with perseverance’, as also with Gramsci.4 Indeed, Erik’s carefully considered critique of ruptural strategies of transformation 2 ‘Preface: The Real Utopias Project’ Associations and Democracy, London: Verso 1995, p. ix. 3 See esp. Leo Panitch and Sam Gindin, ‘Transcending Pessimism: Rekindling Socialist Imagination’, Necessary and Unnecessary Utopias: Socialist Register 2000, London: Merlin 1999. As Colin Leys and I put it in the Preface to that volume: “The theme of this volume of the Socialist Register was first conceived in 1995 with the following question in mind: as we approach the end of the millennium, what is to succeed the first great socialist project that was conceived in Western Europe in the nineteenth century, and variously implemented and frustrated by communism and social democracy in the twentieth?... We wanted to break with the legacy of a certain orthodox kind of Marxist thinking which rejected utopian thought as ‘unscientific’ just because it was utopian, ignoring the fact that sustained political struggle is impossible without the hope of a better society that we can, in principle, and in outline, imagine. And we particularly felt that in face of the collapse of communism, as well as the rejection by “third way” social democracy of any identification with the socialist project, there was now, especially in the context of the neoliberal restoration, an opening as well as a need for imaginative thought.’ 4 Gramsci described himself, in a 1929 letter to his brother from prison, in terms of trying to be a man who ‘never despairs and never falls of into those vulgar, banal moods, optimism and pessimism… I’ve always been armed with unlimited patience – not a passive, inert kind, but a patience allied with perseverance.’ Antonia Gramsci, Letters from Prison, New York: Harper and Row 1973, p. 159. 3 could be seen as a contemporary restatement of the case Gramsci had already made on the impossibility of an insurrectionary path to power in states deeply embedded in capitalist societies.5 If ‘Another World is Possible’ was to be more than a slogan it needed the kind of intellectual grounding that had always underpinned Erik’s vocation of developing better Marxist theory. The emphasis on institution-building could thus be seen as offering strategic ballast that was otherwise lacking on the left at the beginning of the twenty-first century. It was precisely this that made the fourth volume of the Real Utopias Project (the first by Erik himself, with Archon Fung), Deepening Democracy, with its analysis of Porto Alegre’s participatory budget (PB) experiment as its ‘centerpiece’, appear so relevant and timely when it appeared in 2003.6 And seven years later it would still remain the real-world centerpiece of Erik’s Envisioning Real Utopias, where ‘empowered participatory governance’ in Porto Alegre was not only presented as ‘the raw material for elaborating a set of general principles of institutional design for invigorating direct democracy’ but as ‘an enormous success’ in its own right.7 The goal set for the Real Utopias Project in 1995 of seeking ‘firm foundations for plausible visions of radical alternatives’ was admirably concretized in the methodological strategy for analyzing empirical cases that Erik articulated in Envisioning Real Utopias in 2010. He stressed the crucial task of revealing the ‘contradictions, limits and dilemmas faced by the real utopian design’, precisely in order to avoid a ‘critical danger in this kind of analysis [which] is that the study of such examples degenerates into propagandistic cheerleading.’ The call for ‘sober awareness’ rather than ‘wishful thinking’ was specified in terms of trying ‘to fully recognize the complexity and dilemmas as well as the real potentials of practical efforts at social empowerment.’8 Such sobriety was sorely missing at the three World Social Forums held in Porto Alegre in 2001, 2002 and 2003. Most of the many hundreds of delegates from abroad 5 See Envisioning Real Utopias, ch. 9. The debt to Gramsci is, however, addressed directly in only one footnote, at p. 332, n. 11. 6 This was not so much the case with the three volumes that appeared before it.

Load more