Dear editors,
We are the inheritors of the collapse of emancipatory politics. An immense gulf separates us from the radical political movements of the past, which sought to harness and advance the freedom of modernity through far-reaching social, political, and economic transformations. On this side of world history, these movements, and indeed the very notion of modernity’s emancipatory character, appear naive. And yet, despite our impoverished political imagination, our society retains its revolutionary potential; whether we accept it or not, we are still living through the ongoing centuries-long total transformation of human life. Emancipation today thus depends on our willingness to recover and advance the modern project for freedom. As Trotsky wrote in The History of the Russian Revolution,
The swift changes of mass views and moods in an epoch of revolution thus derive, not from the flexibility and mobility of man’s mind, but just the opposite, from its deep conservatism.
In modernity, social relations developed from a source of oppression into the constitutive forces of individual and collective liberty. Systems of free labor and exchange replaced older ones rooted in bondage and force. By participating in the rapidly expanding social division of labor, modern subjects could establish themselves as independent individuals capable of exploring the open-ended possibilities of modern life. This new freedom became increasingly identified with modern, commercial society, and the commitment to realize its tenets became the hallmark of radical politics. Thus, the philosophes of the Enlightenment sought to construct a form of politics adequate to the new historical possibility of, as Thomas Paine put it, “[beginning] the world anew.”
That historico-political project has long been in profound crisis. The nineteenth and twentieth centuries were less vindications of its vitality than they were the fatal reefs upon which it crashed and shattered. By the end of the twentieth century, many thinkers rejected the core premises of modern social life and embraced “postmodernity.” For the postmodernists, the concept of society itself was just another metaphysical myth, naively propagated by “grand narratives.” Postmodernism rejects the notion that there is any purpose to history, or that our epoch may overcome itself to a higher social form. Instead, freedom itself is mercilessly interrogated, tabooed, and ultimately convicted as a ruse.
The skepticism towards modernity is not unfounded. In the wake of the failure of emancipatory politics, modern social relations necessarily appear to be regressive power relations, not the foundations of our freedom. Foucault, for instance, did not doubt that domination was always freedom’s secret mistress.
But rather than uncritically upholding or nihilistically condemning modernity, we might instead attempt to regard it as an incomplete project. Such an orientation demands a certain conservatism, a principled commitment to defending civil society against the ever-growing power of the state, as the only basis on which the historical problem of freedom can be adequately grasped and worked through. The absence of emancipatory possibilities today mustn’t lead one to throw the baby out with the bathwater, to mistake modernity’s historically specific crisis for an indictment of it.
For it is capitalism—a relatively new chapter in modernity’s history—that constantly revolutionizes our social relations, yet only for the narrow and regressive purpose of reconstituting capital, thereby foreclosing on the possibility of transforming society towards open-ended collective and individual freedom. “There’s nothing left to conserve” has always been the barbaric watchword of capitalism. The promise of modernity remains, and it is up to radicals to defend it.
Unabashedly,
Jack Wagner
Image: Gustave Caillebotte, Paris Street; Rainy Day, oil on canvas, 1877, (Art Institute of Chicago, Illinois).