On Uncompromising Pessimism: Response to my Critics

Abstract

Antonio Gramsci is famously associated with the phrase, 'pessimism of the intellect, optimism of the will'. Pessimism of the intellect refers to the structural determination of social processes, setting limits on the possible. Politics, on the other hand, requires optimism, concerned as it is with collective will formation, dissolving limits and striving for the impossible. This distinction threads through Gramsci's prison writings as he reflected on his early voluntarism. Recall that for the young Gramsci the appeal of Marxism lay in its power as political ideology, understood as a 'concrete phantasy, which acts on a dispersed and shattered people to arouse and organize its collective will'. As he wrote in the 'Revolution against " Capital " ' (1917), the Bolshevik Revolution was one such concrete phantasy that suspended Marxist science and its iron laws of history, in favor of the human capacity to collectively make history, replacing Marxism's 'positivist encrustations' with its idealist essence. Thus, inspired by the Bolshevik Revolution, or at least Lenin's rendering of it, Gramsci saw the factory occupations of Turin (1919-1920) as Italy's counterpart to the Russian Soviets. This was the early Gramsci, dominated by optimism of the will. The later prison writings reflect back on the failure of the factory occupations, the failure of the socialist revolution in Italy and, more broadly in the West. It was in the fascist prison, protected from Stalinism, that Gramsci elaborated the most original thinking within Western Marxism, the now familiar framework of hegemony in which the growth of civil society, the expansion of the state, and the power of ideology set limits on the possibility of revolutionary struggle. The youthful Marxism as ideology now calls forth its complement, the mature Marxism as science. Optimism of the will calls for pessimism of the intellect, and vice versa. They are Siamese twins. From prison he undertook the painful task of coming to terms with the misguided politics of 'frontal assault' and transformed the very meaning of revolution in the West as 'war of position'. Tracing Eddie Webster's life as a sociologist – his adroit movement among public, professional, critical and policy sociologies – I have shown how attentive he has always been to the distinction between science and politics (Burawoy 2010). The organization he founded in 1983 and then headed for 25 years at the University of Witwatersrand – SWOP (Sociology of Work Program) – has long negotiated the connection between sociological imagination, which investigates micro-processes in their wider context, and political imagination, which turns personal troubles into public issues. Whether it was the study of the degradation of the craftworker, mine accidents, industrial violence, Eddie Webster was able to maintain the integrity of his sociological research, even as it 74 became the basis of public engagement. Thus, for example, time and again he would turn the sociological investigation of the institutionalization of conflict into a political weapon against the apartheid repression of trade unions. His participation in the registration debate – to register trade unions with the state or not – was informed by his research into the history of South African trade unions. His analysis of the post-apartheid dispensation and the class compromise it entailed gave rise to critical engagement with both unions and capital. His sociological writings show a rare sense of the limits of the possible just as he would push those boundaries in his political engagement. In Grounding Globalization, however, Eddie Webster and his colleagues Rob Lambert and Andries Bezuidenhout, deliver a very different genre of sociology. The first two parts of the book show the way multi-national capital localizes the experience of working class communities in the white goods sectors of South Africa, Australia and South Korea. To be sure the experience is different in each case but there is a radical disconnect between these sociological analyses and the utopias projected in the third part of the book – international working class solidarity and new forms of participatory democracy. If we are going to wade into utopias then they should somehow be connected to the lived experience of those who are to enact them.