Imagining The End
The left should embrace both pragmatism and utopianism…
by NATHAN J. ROBINSON
There’s a quote frequently used by leftists to illustrate how deeply ingrained society’s prevailing economic ideology is: “today, it’s easier to imagine the end of the world than the end of capitalism.” First offered by Fredric Jameson, and now almost starting to lose meaning from overuse, the quote points out something that honestly is quite astonishing: it does seem far easier to conceive of the possibility of being boiled alive or sinking into the sea than the possibility of living under a substantially different economic system. World-ending disaster seems not just closer than utopia, but closer than even a modest set of changes to the way human resources are distributed.

Jameson’s quote is often used to show how capitalism has limited the horizons of our imagination. We don’t think of civilization as indestructible, but we do seem to think of the free market as indestructible. This, it is sometimes said, is the result of neoliberalism: as both traditionally left-wing and traditionally right-wing parties in Western countries developed a consensus that markets were the only way forward (“there is no alternative”), more and more people came to hold narrower and narrower views of the possibilities for human society. Being on the right meant “believing in free markets and some kind of nationalism or social conservatism” while being liberal meant “believing in free markets but being progressive on issues of race, gender, and sexual orientation.” Questions like “how do we develop a feasible alternative to capitalism?” were off the table; the only reasonable question about political intervention in the economy became: “should we regulate markets a little bit, or not at all?”

There’s definitely something to this critique. It’s true that, where once people dreamed of replacing capitalism with something better, today human societies seem to face a choice between apocalypse, capitalism, and capitalism followed shortly by apocalypse. Every attempt to speak of a different kind of economy, however appealing it may be emotionally, seems vague and distant, and impossible to know how to actually bring about. Plenty of young people today are socialists, but socialism seems a lot more like a word than an actual thing that could happen.

Some of this is the result of a very successful multi-decade campaign by the right to present free-market orthodoxy as some kind of objective truth rather than a heavily value-laden and political set of contestable ideas. And the Jameson quote also partly succeeds through a kind of misleading pseudo-profundity: it’s always going to be easier to imagine visceral physical things like explosions than changes in economic structures, and so the relative ease of imagining the former versus the latter may not be the especially deep comment on 21st century ideological frameworks that the quotation assumes.

But if socialism seems more remote than ever, it’s also surely partly the fault of socialists themselves. If we ask the question “Why is it difficult to imagine the end of capitalism?”, some of the answer must be “Because socialists haven’t offered a realistic alternative or any kind of plausible path toward such an alternative.” It’s very easy to blame “neoliberal” ideology for convincing people that free-market dogmas are cosmic truths. Yet while Margaret Thatcher may have propagandized and evangelized for the principle that less government is always better government, she didn’t actually prevent people on the left from using their imaginations. If our imaginations have been stunted, it may also be because we have failed to use them to their maximal capacity, falling back on abstractions and rhetoric rather than developing clear and pragmatic pictures for what a functional left-wing world might look like.

I blame Karl Marx for that, somewhat. Marx helped kill “utopian socialism” (my favorite kind of socialism). The utopian socialists used to actually dream of the kind of worlds they would create, conjuring elaborate and delightfully vivid visions of how a better and more humane world might actually operate. Some of these veered into the absurd (Charles Fourier believed the seas would turn to lemonade), but all of them encouraged people to actually think in serious detail about how human beings live now, and what it would be like if they lived differently. Marx, on the other hand, felt that this was a kind of foolishly romantic, anti-scientific waste of time. The task of the socialist was to discern the inexorable historical laws governing human social development, and then to hasten the advance of a revolution. According to Marx, it was pointless trying to spend time drawing up “recipes for the cook-shops of the future”; instead, left-wing thinkers should do as Marx believed he was doing, and confine themselves “to the mere critical analysis of actual facts.”

But analysis doesn’t actually create proposals, and it was because Marx believed that that things could sort themselves out “dialectically” that he didn’t think it was necessary to explain how communism might actually function day-to-day. Ironically, given Marx’s dictum that philosophers should attempt to change the world rather than merely interpreting it, Marx and his followers spent an awful lot of time trying to figure out social theories that would properly interpret the world, and precious little time trying to figure out what changes might actually improve people’s lives versus which changes might lead to disaster. (Call me crazy, but I believe this tendency to shun the actual development of policy might have been one reason why nearly every single government that has ever called itself Marxist has very quickly turned into a horror show.)

The left-wing tendency to avoid offering clear proposals for how left ideas might be successfully implemented (without gulags) is not confined to revolutionary communism. The same affliction plagued the Occupy Wall Street movement; a belief in democracy and a hatred of inequality, but a stalwart refusal to try to come up with a feasible route from A-B, where A is our present state of viciously unequal neofeudalism and B is something that might be slightly more bearable and fair. By refusing to issue demands, or consider what sorts of political, economic, and social adjustments would actually be necessary to actualize Occupy’s set of values, the movement doomed itself. The direct precipitating cause of its fizzling was Occupy’s eviction from Zuccotti Park by the NYPD. But it’s hard to think how a movement that isn’t actually proposing or fighting for anything clear and specific could ever actually get that thing. (Occupy’s “no demands” proponents would have done well to listen to Frederick Douglass, who declared that “Power concedes nothing without a demand.”)

There’s a bit of the same lack of programmatic strategy in the popular leftist disdain for “wonks” and “technocrats.” Nobody finds D.C. data nerds more irritating than I do, but these two terms have become casual pejoratives that can seemingly be applied to anyone who has an interest in policy details. Certainly, it’s important to heap scorn upon the set of “technocratic” Beltway-types who value policy for its own sake, and allow political process to become an end in itself, drained of any substantive moral values or concern with making people’s lives better. But in our perfectly justified hatred for a certain species of wonk, it’s important not to end up dismissing the value of caring about pragmatism and detail.

In fact, I almost feel as if the term “pragmatism” has been unfairly monopolized by centrists, with the unfortunate complicity of many people on the left. “Pragmatism” has come to mean “being a moderate.” But that’s not what the term should mean. Being pragmatic should simply mean “caring about the practical realities of how to implement things.” People like Bill Clinton and Tony Blair helped redefine “liberal pragmatism” to mean “adopting conservative policies as a shortcut to winning power easily.” But being pragmatic doesn’t mean having to sacrifice your idealism. It doesn’t mean tinkering at the margins rather than proposing grand changes. It just means having a plan for how to get things done.

Thus leftism should simultaneously become more pragmatic and more utopian. At its best, utopianism is pragmatic, because it is producing blueprints, and without blueprints, you’ll have trouble building anything. Yes, these days it’s hard to imagine a plausible socialist world. But that’s only partly because so many people insist socialism is impossible. It’s also because socialists aren’t actually doing much imagining. William Morris and the 19th century utopians painted vivid portraits of what a world that embodied their values might look like. Today’s socialists tell us what they deplore (inequality and exploitation), but they’re short on clear plans. But plans are what we need. Serious ones. Detailed ones. Not “technocratic,” necessarily, but certainly technical. It’s time to actually start imagining what something new might really look like.

Nathan J. Robinson is the editor of Current Affairs.
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Yes I like them. Would prefer the facemask to be grey, though. The white facemask stands out too much.

wv wrote:

nittany ram wrote:

Who do you think would win a fight between Jamie Lanister (before he lost his sword hand) and Aragorn? How about between The Mountain and Legolas? Arya and Samwise?

I know the correct answers. I just wanna see if you know them.

============

Aragorn.
Legolas.
Arya.

Now, what about Ginger vs Mary-Anne ?

w
v

You got 2 out of 3 correct. That’s a score of 66.7%.

Unfortunately you needed a minimum score of 66.8% to pass the test.

So you failed.

Where you slipped up was when you marked Arya over Samwise.

Arya, like the rest of the Game of Thrones cast, is a fictional character. She’s not real. Game of Thrones is a TV show.

What, you think some wee actress is going to defeat a battle hardened Hobbit in a real fight?

Get real.

waterfield wrote:

That is precisely why progressive will never move forward. Most people see this language as elitism. And that pisses them off. You know the common person-the one you need to be on your side in order to make the very changes you want. There are some very bright and well educated people who voted for Trump. And there are some “peasants” and yes “colonized brains” who voted for Nader. We simply have to stop blaming our life’s misfortunes on “corporations”. To not do so is to forever waddle around in a hopeless sea of mud.

W, setting aside the democrats for a minute, you would agree that Trump doesn’t have the best interest of the poor at heart. So why did so many vote for him? Why do so many poor whites vote for the GOP in every election? It’s not as if their message changes from election to election. Their central message is always a mix of xenophobia and trickle down nonsense. Why do so many poor people vote against fair wages, affordable healthcare, progressive tax plans, etc. Why do they vote against their own best interests? What causes them to do that?

Billy_T wrote:

nittany ram wrote:

It wasn’t a security problem either. How was Iraq a security risk to the US? There were no WMDs there. The inspectors and intelligence services told them that before the invasion.

It’s nice to hear her admit it wasn’t about democracy or nation building (albeit 1.5 decades after the fact) but she’s still not coming clean.

True. I think all of us here said that Iraq was no threat at the time. And I don’t think I was at all alone in pointing out, even if Hussein had WMD, it wouldn’t have mattered. He was completely isolated. He had no air force, no friends in the region. We controlled his skies, and we had inspectors on the ground. He wasn’t going to use them. Beyond that, he was a shadow of a shadow of his former self, and even at the height of his power, in 1990, he never tried to attack us, and America defeated him in a matter of weeks. He knew it would be national suicide to use them on anyone. Hell, Clinton bombed him if he sneezed the wrong way.

If we could push a button and get rid of brutal dictators, without harming any innocents? He’d be on the list. But any invasion was destined to unleash holy hell on civilian populations. His own Pentagon told Bush thousands of them would be killed just in the first hours of “shock and awe.”

It was a monstrous and entirely indefensible decision, every which way.

You’re right. Saddam wouldn’t have been a threat even if he had WMDs. All we accomplished with that invasion was to kill a bunch of innocent people, destabilize the region and create terrorists.

Billy_T wrote:

IMO,

Folks are missing the fundamentally revolutionary changes wrought by capitalism, when it overthrew previous economics forms — which were all local and independent of one another. No previous economic system had even tried to subsume all local markets under its umbrella, and then get governments to make all of that the only legal structure.

Well I don’t disagree with anything you’re saying about capitalism, Billy. I was speaking more in generalities though. I don’t know much about economic systems but I doubt the systems that existed in Western Europe in the 1500s were any ‘better’for the masses than what we have today.

Even if mankind eliminated the emission of all greenhouse gasses today, there is enough C02 in the atmosphere to keep the average temperature of the earth rising for hundreds of years.

So, I agree with zn.

We should probably bomb somebody.

Link: https://www.princeton.edu/main/news/archive/S38/51/51I69/index.xml?section=topstories

Even if emissions stop, carbon dioxide could warm Earth for centuries
Posted November 24, 2013; 01:00 p.m.

by Morgan Kelly, Office of Communications
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Even if carbon dioxide emissions came to a sudden halt, the carbon dioxide already in Earth’s atmosphere could continue to warm our planet for hundreds of years, according to Princeton University-led research published in the journal Nature Climate Change. The study suggests that it might take a lot less carbon than previously thought to reach the global temperature scientists deem unsafe.

The researchers simulated an Earth on which, after 1,800 billion tons of carbon entered the atmosphere, all carbon dioxide emissions suddenly stopped. Scientists commonly use the scenario of emissions screeching to a stop to gauge the heat-trapping staying power of carbon dioxide. Within a millennium of this simulated shutoff, the carbon itself faded steadily with 40 percent absorbed by Earth’s oceans and landmasses within 20 years and 80 percent soaked up at the end of the 1,000 years.

By itself, such a decrease of atmospheric carbon dioxide should lead to cooling. But the heat trapped by the carbon dioxide took a divergent track.

After a century of cooling, the planet warmed by 0.37 degrees Celsius (0.66 Fahrenheit) during the next 400 years as the ocean absorbed less and less heat. While the resulting temperature spike seems slight, a little heat goes a long way here. Earth has warmed by only 0.85 degrees Celsius (1.5 degrees Fahrenheit) since pre-industrial times.

The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change estimates that global temperatures a mere 2 degrees Celsius (3.6 degrees Fahrenheit) higher than pre-industrial levels would dangerously interfere with the climate system. To avoid that point would mean humans have to keep cumulative carbon dioxide emissions below 1,000 billion tons of carbon, about half of which has already been put into the atmosphere since the dawn of industry.

Frölicher iceberg
Princeton University-led research suggests that even if carbon dioxide emissions came to a sudden halt, the carbon dioxide already in Earth’s atmosphere could continue to warm our planet for hundreds of years. The researchers found while carbon dioxide steadily dissipates, the absorption of heat the oceans decreases, especially in the polar oceans such as off of Antarctica (above). This effect has not been accounted for in existing research. (Photo courtesy of Eric Galbraith, McGill University)
The lingering warming effect the researchers found, however, suggests that the 2-degree point may be reached with much less carbon, said first author Thomas Frölicher, who conducted the work as a postdoctoral researcher in Princeton’s Program in Atmospheric and Oceanic Sciences under co-author Jorge Sarmiento, the George J. Magee Professor of Geoscience and Geological Engineering.

“If our results are correct, the total carbon emissions required to stay below 2 degrees of warming would have to be three-quarters of previous estimates, only 750 billion tons instead of 1,000 billion tons of carbon,” said Frölicher, now a researcher at the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology in Zurich. “Thus, limiting the warming to 2 degrees would require keeping future cumulative carbon emissions below 250 billion tons, only half of the already emitted amount of 500 billion tons.”

The researchers’ work contradicts a scientific consensus that the global temperature would remain constant or decline if emissions were suddenly cut to zero. But previous research did not account for a gradual reduction in the oceans’ ability to absorb heat from the atmosphere, particularly the polar oceans, Frölicher said. Although carbon dioxide steadily dissipates, Frölicher and his co-authors were able to see that the oceans that remove heat from the atmosphere gradually take up less. Eventually, the residual heat offsets the cooling that occurred due to dwindling amounts of carbon dioxide.

Frölicher and his co-authors showed that the change in ocean heat uptake in the polar regions has a larger effect on global mean temperature than a change in low-latitude oceans, a mechanism known as “ocean-heat uptake efficacy.” This mechanism was first explored in a 2010 paper by Frölicher’s co-author, Michael Winton, a researcher at the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration’s Geophysical Fluid Dynamics Laboratory (GFDL) on Princeton’s Forrestal Campus.

“The regional uptake of heat plays a central role. Previous models have not really represented that very well,” Frölicher said.

“Scientists have thought that the temperature stays constant or declines once emissions stop, but now we show that the possibility of a temperature increase can not be excluded,” Frölicher said. “This is illustrative of how difficult it may be to reverse climate change — we stop the emissions, but still get an increase in the global mean temperature.”

The paper, “Continued global warming after CO2 emissions stoppage,” was published Nov. 24 by Nature Climate Change. Funding for the work was provided by the Swiss National Science Foundation (Ambizione grant PZ00P2_142573) and Princeton University Carbon Mitigation Initiative.

PA Ram wrote:

waterfield wrote:

PA: I’m sorry to hear about you wife’s lymphoma. My wife was diagnosed with multiple myeloma a few years back. Hopefully your wife is in good care. We make the trip to Stanford-from So Cal-at least 4 times a year. Life always seems to give us enough to struggle with independent of politics. Wishing the best for you guys.

Tony

Thank you. She’s going to be seeing some specialists in Lymphoma at Penn University. She has a rare non-hodgkins called peripheral t-cell lymphoma. But we’re hoping that we got on top of it early. My best to you and your wife as well

Barry

My thoughts are with you and your wife, Barry.

I really feel bad for young children. They are going to have to deal with some really fucked up conditions when they are my age.

snowman wrote:

Me too, but I wish they would make the horns a little bigger, bolder.

I agree. Compare your photo of a classic helmet next to today’s helmet.

Luv’n the new helmets.

Zooey wrote:

nittany ram wrote:

Wasn’t Apocalypto the film that showed why the brutal and corrupt Mayans needed to be saved from themselves by the Christian Conquistadors?

Is that true?

Because that’s what flashed through my mind when I watched the clip with Gibson in mind.

Some of the historians and others critical of the film said that appeared to be the underlying message.