"Socialism can prevail without you or I dying in the guerrillas and if we leave it in time we will live much better. Our work has a level of poetic modification of history: we are the only thing that faces the blatant with the advance of communism, precisely because we do not care that in the long run it wins. (…) A revolutionary is like the saint, the martyr or the virgin, a disgusting advantage ”because“ without the CIA there would be neither history nor dialectics. An agent of the CIA is not only a poet of the revolution but a legitimizer of the revolution (…) he is an aseptic and total hero ”. The long quote belongs to I killed Kennedy, Manuel Vázquez Montalbán's novel published in 1972. It transcribes a conversation between a CIA leader and Pepe Carvalho, a former Spanish communist enrolled in the agency, and reflects the faith of the left in those years when the future would always be better. Not already in Spain, with Francoism still alive, but in the world. A conviction in which the right also participated, after the defeat of the fascisms. Not today.
There is a coincidence in attributing the idea of a historical time with a happy ending for humanity to primitive Christianity: history runs between creation and the end of the world. Saint Augustine adds to the scheme a time that culminates in the final judgment, salvation. John Gray maintains that it was Joaquín de Fiore (1135-1202) who reinterpreted the Trinity in terms of historical time. The stage of the Holy Spirit, after that of the Father and the Son, establishes the kingdom of harmony on Earth. These three phases are similar to the triads of the Hegelian dialectic, in which reason unfolds until it reaches its final realization. Marx will reverse the scheme so that the movement of history does not depend on providence but on human action. It is the action of man that shapes the course of history, its meaning; which, after the slave, feudal and bourgeois times, can lead humanity to the suppression of social conflicts and the redistribution of wealth. The closest thing to earthly paradise.
Very similar to the three phases established by De Fiore, but in a secular version, are those of August Comte: the religious, metaphysical and, finally, the positive stage, dominated by the progress that scientific knowledge implies. Marx participated in the optimism of the Enlightenment, whose central idea was that knowledge led to improve the lives of men. Catherine of Russia asked Diderot for advice and she naively suggested how to organize education: “Its function is not to produce a better educated aristocracy, but it is a weapon against superstition, religious intolerance, prejudice and social injustice. The engine of social and moral progress ”. Education and knowledge would be the basis of a better world.
After the crisis of universalist ideologies (Marxism and liberalism) there has also been the collapse of the last faith: that of everyone converting to capitalist democracy
This idea of progress is projected in Kant who writes in Perpetual Peace : "Moral reason condemns war and makes peace a duty." For Kant the future is not written and the improvements "may be successful or fail", what cannot be done is to abandon the project. "Progress towards the best will never completely regress", because "once nature has developed the seed that it takes care of with extreme tenderness, that is, the inclination and vocation to free thinking", there will always be "some men who think for themselves ”and“ after having freed themselves from the yoke of the minority of age, they will spread the spirit of the rational estimation of their own value and of the vocation of every man to think for himself ”. The novelty here is to think both of material and moral progress (freedom). And the way is no longer Jacobin violence but dialogue and pact.
The idea of social improvement also appears in fiction. Utopias, in general, project a possible earthly paradise, past or future; dystopias, on the other hand, tend to describe a world in which an aggravation of the living conditions (material and spiritual) of humanity as a whole is emerging. In general, positive utopias tend to talk about the future. The opposite tendency is to draw a lost paradise ( Genesis ) or a process of human degradation (Plato). Today dystopias predominate. Interestingly, the pandemic has regained the divide between supporters of a better future and the apocalyptic.
Already on the plane of thought, all postmodernism (with the exception of the last Gianni Vattimo) ignores the better future. In a different way, John Gray reasons in Black Mass : "Faith in utopia is dead, it may resurface, but it is not likely to do so in the coming decades." After the crisis of universalist ideologies (Marxism and liberalism), which thought in terms of improvement for all humanity, there has also been, he says, the collapse of the last faith: that of the world in general becoming a democracy capitalist in the manner of the United States. Idea underlying Francis Fukuyama's The End of History .
From the left, Josep Fontana ( The future is a strange country ) has also reflected on the prospects for organizing a hypothetical improvement: “I do not know if socialism is rethinking the future. What is lacking is the ability to present itself as an alternative to a corrupt and predatory system. This alternative can be neither a social democracy that has become comfortable and rotten nor the identified socialism to the Soviet world, which also failed. The proof is that when the Soviet Union collapses, it leaves nothing behind. ” But his conclusion was not followed by negative paths. Returning to the Gramscian proposal, of optimism of the will against pessimism of intelligence, he added: "We must recover the idea that there is hope." Gray would tell him that this is not possible, that progress exists, but that faith in progress is only a myth, a story destined to give meaning to the lives of men. And, perhaps from the past it is possible to remember the Mary Hopkin song: “What a happy time, that I will never forget; We had faith and a desire to win. " An updated version of the angel of history, drawn by Klee and described by Walter Benjamin: “Her face is turned towards the past. Where we perceive a chain of events, she sees a unique catastrophe that piles ruin upon ruin and throws it at her feet. I would like to stop, awaken the dead and recompose what has been torn apart, but from Paradise a hurricane blows, entangling itself in its wings, and which is so strong that the angel can no longer close them. This hurricane irresistibly pushes him towards the future, to which he turns his back, while the rubble rises before him to the sky. That hurricane is what we call progress".
Readings
The city of God . San Agustin. Translation by José Morán. Library of Christian Authors, 1958.
Black mass . John Gray. Translation by Albino Santos. Paidos, 2008.
Communist manifesto . Karl Marx. Foreword by Francisco Fernández-Buey. Editorial El Viejo Topo.
Thesis on history . Walter Benjamin. Translation by Bolívar Echeverría. Editorial Itaca, 2008.
The end of the story . Francis Fukuyama. Translation by P. Elías. Editorial Planeta, 1992.
Perpetual peace . Immanuel Kant. Translation by Joaquín Abellán García. Tecnos Editorial, 2013.
Diderot and the art of free thinking. Andrew S. Curran. Translation by Vicente Campos. Ariel, 2020.
The future is a strange country . Josep Fontana. Past and Present Editions, 2013.