Wandering an Eternal Present (Part 2: Just a Burning Memory - Historicism and the Mortality of Ideals)

Revolutionary ideology has (so far), commonly, and quite pompously, assumed itself to be the final stage of human—historical development; even those who portend to be free from historicism cannot help but assume perpetual function in their personal utopias. From the Jesuit Priests of Paraguay, to the Bolsheviks, to the Red Guards, the assumption has been made that no future mutation of politics need replace nor co-reside with the current driving movement. That with one great stroke of ideological truth all politics would be effectively over, made obsolete through one final and dramatic political mission: C’est la lute finale / Groupons-nous, et demain, L’Internationale / Sera le genre humaine!

(It’s the final struggle, come together, and tomorrow, the international, will be the human race!)

With such a mentality, the ultimate goal is post-political neonaturalism, that is, to effectively render unnecessary the need for political struggle by means of societal perfection. It is to this aim, that when a perfect society is to be achieved, politics are to be abolished. In modern times this assumption traces back to Hegelian historicism, which would strongly inform the historicism of both Marx and Fukuyama. Of course, Hegel's self-conscious Geist, Marx’s commonwealth of labor, nor Fukuyama’s neoliberal democracy, have all (as of yet) failed to fulfill the perfection needed for the abolition of the political. In fact, in the goal of neutralizing political struggle, each, in its own right, spurned a counter-politics equally fanatical in opposition.

With the question of politics, and thus political opposition, unresolved, the limited horizon has been the desperate retreat of aging revolutions. The hypernomalized state of the former Soviet Union, and the capitalist realism of contemporary America, are each instances in which a founding myth of social perfection gradually retreated, the founding ideals becoming simply ‘the only available option’; imperfect as it may be. The aggressive momentum of a victorious ideal, becomes vain wandering in a world without future potentials. Precisely because, that ideal believes it must be the historic capstone. This is the recipe for an inevitable failure, as a utopia achieved through the suppression of all new or unorthodox political developments will always collapse under the weight of its own contradiction.

As long as an ideal understands itself to be the driving towards the end of history, its victory will be hollow, and will ultimately yearn towards static self-annihilation. If the left wants to shatter the sense of melancholic aimlessness offered in our eternal status quo, it must also shatter that impulse within itself to reproduce this tragedy in red tint. Revolution cannot be the application of a single perpetual thesis, it must be the establishment of a new epistemological order, an order from which an infinite number of revolutionary ideals can grow and die harmoniously. The only perpetual state is mutation, to embrace any passing ideal dogmatically is to allow it to drag us beneath the rhizomes growing from its rot.

Simple unorthodoxy, however, is not enough to rejuvenate our utopian and revolutionary visions; we need a vibrant and collective unorthodoxy. The contemporary left must adopt an ideal currently alien from its language, an ideal of solidarity in the beauty and intensity of our dreams, not in their semantic and philosophical consistency. An alliance of a shared fanatical energy, not a shared fanaticism.