This is an interesting essay which discusses pessimism and revolutionary optimism. I found it an informative and enlightening read and it’s made clearer some of my thoughts on why I think even left-wing media can be pretty subpar sometimes.

It’s way too long to quote fully here, so I’ll be summarizing and giving some quotes. I’ve brought it down from 15,000 words to 5000 words for easier digestion; the essay itself has many footnotes and a lot of evidence for those who aren’t already convinced of the claims below. I’m also going to rearrange the essay slightly, so that there’s two main sections: the first section is on the problem of pessimism, while the second section is on what concrete reasons there are to believe that a genuinely better world is coming. The first section is here, while the second is in the comments.

The author begins by talking about his experience watching an expose of the arms industry and its control over politicians, saying that:

As excellent as it is, I did come away from it wanting more; for as much as it exposes the sheer scale of corruption and profit behind war, it seldom shows the cracks in the hegemony it depicts, or lends the countervailing forces of resistance as having any kind of hope. While I am glad it treats the subject with the seriousness that it deserves, and does not try to placate the viewer with promises of mere reform, the documentary leaves the viewer with the feeling that war is eternal.

This is a frequent problem in political media, or media in general: simply depicting a problem is not enough. Portraying or pointing to the inequalities and abuses of capitalism has to come with the practical solutions to these problems, otherwise it is an exercise in despair – an informed despair, yet despair nonetheless.

This is critique as exposure, shining a light on the problems as opposed to demonstrating the fallibility of these problems. Something missing from documentaries and books like Shadow World is the premise that despite the overwhelming power of the U.S Empire, it is inevitable that it will fall. The brilliance of a work like Marx’s Capital is that it demonstrates the sheer power of capitalism, its ability to extract immense quantities of wealth and social control, while simultaneously showing the power of labour, the protagonist who will break its chains and bring in the next necessary stage in human development.

He then quotes Sobrina de Alguien, who distinguishes between the historicization of an issue versus its fetishization; the latter treating issues as eternal, and the former treating them as having beginnings and endings. While glorifying problems is usually bad, even depicting them as bad but nevertheless part of an eternal human condition is also not good. It’s also, not coincidentally, undialectical - one of the things that dialectical materialism asserts is that no state of affairs is permanent, change is inevitable, and things are always coming and going on various timescales. Villains (people, countries, corporations, etc), are richly described so that we fully know their faults, we can boo them, and we can fear them, but there isn’t any discussion of their weaknesses, nor how to fight them.

This leads naturally onto another type of depiction of issues: that which talks about how utterly powerful and frightening and insurmountable something is - the CIA, massive corporations, militaries, climate change - but at the end, instead of no positive message at all, it gives a vaguely and naively optimistic message which doesn’t remotely address how the problem could be solved. For example, a climate change documentary that details how utterly fucked the world is for a solid hour and then at the end, shows a five minute clip talking to a tiny charity in fucking Nebraska which designs cooling vests for dogs or something, as if that’s meant to give you hope that enough small charities and individual action can combat the combined carbon output of every corporation on the planet. He says:

…there is a difference between this naive optimism and the concrete optimism I advocate; we should have more than the simple ability to posit a better world, we need to scientifically prove that the better world is both possible and necessary.

He gives an example of the destruction of Libya by NATO. A bad analysis will merely talk about the sheer power of the military-industrial complex. A slightly better (but still bad) one might have an interview afterwards with a Libyan who gives a somewhat hopeful message about how things might get better, eventually. A good analysis will show how the internal antagonisms of imperialism will lead to its eventual dissolution; in the example of Libya, he says that the immediate aftermath has not led to revolutionary consequences inside the country itself, but Libya’s example has been informative for other developing countries; a warning message that you cannot trust the Western financial system:

This has led cooperation by these countries in the face of this threat: the recent success of the Forum on China-Africa Cooperation Summit (FOCAC) is explicitly aimed at mending the “historical injustice” dealt by the West, with African leaders extolling China’s role in “combating colonialism”. We can see that learning from experience is difficult, but it is the only way that change occurs; every terrible action by imperialism has its opposite reaction, and the historical experience only strengthens the appeal of countries like China that offer an alternative path. Imperialism’s self-interest, a system based on creating instability, cannot create a stable situation for its self-perpetuation.

The Demiurge is a figure in Gnosticism which created the imperfect material world in which we are trapped. The only escape, Gnostics proclaim, is via salvation of the mind, because trying to change the material world is pointless. Nowadays, there are some who claim that the power of capitalism is inescapable: it is the modern demiurge. This usually leads to nihilism and despair:

From this vantage point of endless horror, the system seems immense and unsolvable, with revolutions impossible despite historical evidence to the contrary. This nihilism and fetishisation of power flattens different wielders of power as having the same self-interested goals, or sees the system of power as controlling every actor on the global stage; this is what leads some to conflate “Soviet power, Marxist ideology or radical Islamic fundamentalism” as having the same “profoundly undemocratic” mechanisms.

The world is flattened - everybody is evil. Perhaps you then excuse or even justify NATO imperialism as merely combatting Chinese/Russian imperialism, or you say that anti-colonial projects should not be supported because they still have poverty or hierarchy. This is not merely an information gap. Well-meaning people very familiar with imperialist wars can fall into the trap: sure, the Korean War was bad, but every communist revolution has led to yet greater mass murder and socialist countries are poverty-ridden, so the only path left is reformism! Even many leftists can tumble into this (Losurdo talks about this tendency within Foucault and Adorno in Western Marxism).

The late Mark Fisher fell hard into this flattening of the world. He criticized how society was unable to picture anything beyond capitalism and urged radical thinking, and yet paradoxically seemed unable to find a socialist state that he was willing to support, and floundered around fighting strawmen. The 1973 Chilean coup was seen by Fisher as the disappearance of a near-divine strain of socialism: non-authoritarian, democratic, and technological. The author remarks that the briefness of socialist Chile is precisely because of its non-authoritarianism, with Allende ignoring Castro’s warning to take control of the military in the event of an imperialist attack. Further, if Allende’s Chile had lasted for much longer, then it is inevitable that liberal academic consensus would have put it in the same category as Fisher’s hated, totalitarian USSR and China. Just as the Holodomor was an invented genocide to discredit Stalin (alongside false assertions that he was an all-powerful dictator), Allende would have been tarred as a brutal strongman for some invented or exaggerated atrocity.

Another paradoxical aspect of Fisher was that he discussed the “purity fetish”; that material good should be prioritized over ideological perfection. He was unable, however, to cast aside his own purity fetish towards the USSR and China; the former who defeated the Nazis and liberated concentration camps at catastrophic cost to themselves, and the latter who has lifted hundreds of millions out of poverty and had created one of the largest manufacturing bases on the planet even at the time of Fisher’s death. He instead directed the criticism of purity fetishism towards communists for not accepting social democratic parties in Western Europe which have generally failed to produce significant results. Fisher’s rejection of Leninism is odd considering its success throughout the developing world, either through communist movements applying his methods directly, or via non-communist liberation movements nonetheless inspired by them. In all, Fisher seems blind to imperialism. This blindness leads to confusion about why there are few strong worker movements in the imperial core and the resulting cultural stagnation.

Thus, despite his insistence on an alternative, he dismisses all real attempts to build one.

The dark mood emerging since the fall of the Soviet Union, the proclamation of the “End of History” and the failure of the Occupy movement, is coming to an end; since roughly 2020, the decline of the United States as global hegemon and the obviousness of its internal and external antagonisms has created a new influx of class consciousness. The process is by no means complete, with many still holding pessimistic attitudes about the omniscience of capitalism – but I contend that the historical forces that should generate optimism are only increasing. The genocide in Palestine, the climate crisis and potential for all-out war with Russia and China are ominous clouds hanging over the world, but these are symptoms of a much larger historical process that should be cause for hope: the collapse of the American epoch.

There is a difference between defeatism and realism: one deflates and stultifies action, while the other guides action towards positive ends.

The author goes on to say:

The power of capitalism, the appearance of an all-powerful Demiurge, is undone when we are able to recognise the world as changing over time; this is the Hegelian and Marxist notion of “History”, a dynamic process based on interconnected and material struggles, rather than “history”, a collection of isolated events with no underlying logic.

Without an understanding of how quantitative changes turn into qualitative changes, it is easy to see small wins as isolated, without their transformative potential in aggregate. A lack of process thinking creates “Messianism”, the belief that the world should be changed in one fell swoop; this binary logic is endemic to Western thought and a major factor in the pessimism seen among the Left. A combination of intense pessimism towards the construction of socialism in the short-term, and an intense utopian optimism that the revolution should arrive “all-at-once”, is a fundamental issue that prevents a grounded understanding.

Even after a glorious revolution, the problems that beset a nation or people are highly limiting; the historical evidence shows that isolated socialist countries are constantly under siege from imperialism, and utopia can only be constructed by accepting long and necessary historical processes. As pointed out by Losurdo in Western Marxism, even Lenin was not immune; the difference between his more messianic rhetoric before the revolution, and the sober tone he adopted afterwards, is a testament to the difficulties in changing an entire society’s mode of production.

Exposing the darkest depths of capitalist and imperialist logic is vital to stave off the naivety of liberal reform. No anti-pessimist is advocating for sticking our heads in the sand because some defeats are too discouraging to admit. Even the most discouraging and horrific parts of the system should, and must, be studied and understood, but that study must include those who fight against the horrors and sometimes win, and precisely how self-destructive those horrors are to the system they attempt to reinforce.

Now that the American Epoch is ending, the world is seeing a more distributed balance of power. Thus, our optimism is not founded on imagining a better world, it is justified by the new world emerging before our eyes. Challenges and contradictions will remain, History never ends, but we should hold dear to the knowledge that it is progressing.