ON REVOLUTIONARY OPTIMISM

OF THE INTELLECT
LEO PANITCH

[A] man ought to be so deeply convinced that the source of his own moral forces
is in himself … that he never despairs and never falls into those vulgar, banal
moods, pessimism and optimism. My own state of mind synthesizes these two
feelings and transcends them: my mind is pessimistic, but my will is optimistic.
Since I never build up illusions, I am seldom disappointed. I’ve always been armed
with unlimited patience – not a passive, inert kind, but a patience allied with
perseverance.1

A ntonio Gramsci’s words here, written in a letter from prison to his

brother Carlo in December 1929, provide useful perspective on the
famous slogan, ‘pessimism of the intellect, optimism of the will’ so often
wrongly attributed to Gramsci himself. In fact, he borrowed it from Romain
Rolland to describe (in an article in L’Ordine Novo during the Turin general
strike of April 1920) the traits of ‘the socialist conception of the revolutionary
process’ in contrast with those anarchists who presented themselves as ‘the
repository of revealed revolutionary truth … letting off steam with the
satisfied observation: “We have said it all along. We were right!”’
Gramsci specifically invoked Rolland’s motto in the context of
responding to one Italian anarchist who, in a classic misinterpretation of
the debate between Marx and Bakunin over the state in the transition to
socialism, had repudiated ‘Marx’s pessimism of the intellect … “inasmuch
as a revolution occurring through extremes of misery or oppression would
require the institution of an authoritarian dictatorship”’. While calling
for the collaboration between anarchists and socialists in order ‘to work
systematically to organise a great army of disciplined and conscious militants
… ready to take upon itself effective responsibility for the revolution’,
Gramsci’s defence of the Marxist case for a revolutionary party aiming at
creating a revolutionary state was classic:
 ON REVOLUTIONARY OPTIMISM OF THE INTELLECT 357

The proletarian class is at present scattered at random through the cities and
the countryside, around machines, or bent over the soil: it works without
knowing why it works, forced into servile labour by the ever-pressing
threat of death by starvation and cold. It does group together in the unions
and the cooperatives, but through the necessity of economic resistance,
not through spontaneous choice, not following impulses freely born in
its spirit. All the actions of the proletariat mass necessarily move in forms
established by the capitalist mode of production, established by the State
power of the bourgeoisie. To expect that a mass that is reduced to such
conditions of spiritual and bodily slavery should express an autonomous
historical development, to expect that it should spontaneously initiate
and sustain the creation of a revolution, is pure illusion on the part of
ideologues.2

It is indeed impossible to read Gramsci’s Prison Notebooks without

appreciating how far he actually transcended the dichotomy between
pessimism of the intellect and optimism of the will. He did so precisely by
applying his stunningly creative intelligence to what really would need to be
involved in the creation of a new type of political party, which in homage to
another great Italian political theorist who could also be described as a realist
with imagination, he called the ‘modern prince’.3 In trying to articulate
the form of a party capable of navigating a revolutionary transformation
in conditions where the state was deeply rooted in society, Gramsci was
doing the very opposite of entrusting it to revolutionary will to usher in
the spontaneous transformative ‘event’ that is rather in fashion among some
radical intellectuals today.4
Terry Eagleton’s recent book, Hope Without Optimism, acknowledges
the ‘voluntarist and even adventurist’ dangers in optimism of the will, but
for him optimists are usually conservative ‘because their faith in a benign
future is rooted in their trust of the essential soundness of the present’.5 He
therefore sees optimism as primarily a ruling-class ideology. Eagleton’s hero
is Walter Benjamin who builds ‘his revolutionary vision on a distrust of
historical progress, as well as on a profound melancholia’.6 Although Eagleton
disinters an obscure essay by Benjamin that expresses the need to ‘organize
pessimism for political ends’ this does not in fact go beyond the negativity
of countering facile optimism. It leaves us bereft of the optimism we need,
intellectually tempered by a sober recognition of the great barriers to positive
transformative change, to make whatever positive contribution we can to
overcoming those barriers, including in ourselves and our institutions.
In fact, when Eagleton tells us it is ‘irrational to hope for the impossible’
358 SOCIALIST REGISTER 2017

but not irrational to hope even for ‘the vastly improbable’, he is actually
appealing to the kind of optimism of the intellect that believes we can
contribute to making the vastly improbable a little less so. Defining hope as
‘rational desire’, which Eagleton derives from Aristotle, is in fact optimism of
the intellect.7 The intellect is not all abstract reason and positivist empirical
calculation. Ethics and imagination are also embedded in the intellect.
Optimism of the intellect involves bringing reason, ethics, imagination to
bear on how to realize optimism of the will.
What many intellectuals today may find troubling about optimism of
the intellect is the credit they fear it may lend to all that has emanated from
the ‘age of reason’, with its universalist claims to truth and its evolutionist
proclamations of progress. The abdication of so many left intellectuals from
the vocation of telling the truth on these grounds was no doubt partly the
result of political and intellectual shortcomings on the traditional left. But
they have sometimes only generalized what was wrong with the narrow
class struggle perspective that crudely labelled truth either bourgeois or
proletarian, applying the same type of dichotomy to race and gender, and
indeed to any and all asymmetric relations of power.
To insist that knowledge production and claims to justice, whether in
the physical or social sciences, or in philosophy and law, are socially situated
is one thing; yet to deny all objective validity to the best principles and
practices that have emanated from the physical and social sciences, from
philosophy and law, is a form of intellectual practice that throws out the
proverbial baby with the bathwater.8 As Meera Nanda put it so well in
concluding her essay on ‘Restoring the Real’ in the 1997 Socialist Register,
epistemological relativism, even when rooted in a proper sense of injustice,
can even be ‘antithetical to the cause of justice for “without truth there is no
injustice”, only so many different stories’.9 It is the exploited, marginalized
and oppressed who most need to go beyond the segmentation of truth, to
de-relativize knowledge, science and ethics to secure equality, to realize
democracy, to achieve social and ecological justice.
Thomas Dewey published an essay in 1916 simply entitled ‘Progress’
which presented an argument which captured so well, right in the midst of
the slaughterhouse of the First World War, what I mean by optimism of the
intellect that it deserves to be quoted it at some length:

Some persons will see only irony in a discussion of progress at the present
time. Never was pessimism easier … [Yet] never was there a time when
it was more necessary to search for the conditions upon which progress
depends … The economic situation, the problem of poverty by the side
 ON REVOLUTIONARY OPTIMISM OF THE INTELLECT 359

of great wealth, of ignorance and absence of a fair chance in life by the

side of culture and unlimited opportunity, have, indeed, always served
to remind us that after all we were dealing with an opportunity for
progress rather than with an accomplished fact …
Progress is not automatic; it depends upon human intent and aim
and upon acceptance of responsibility for its production … In dwelling
upon the need of conceiving progress as a responsibility and not as an
endowment, I put primary emphasis upon responsibility for intelligence,
for the power which foresees, plans and constructs in advance. We
are so overweighted by nature with impulse, sentiment and emotion,
that we are always tempted to rely unduly upon the efficacy of these
things… [But] since the variable factor, the factor which may be altered
indefinitely, is the social conditions which call out and direct the impulses
and sentiments, the positive means of progress lie in the application of
intelligence to the construction of proper social devices… Practically,
this is a matter of the persistent use of reflection in the study of social
conditions and the devising of social contrivances.10

Dewey very tellingly concluded that what stood most in the way of
progress were not the forces of conservatism and reaction but rather
the much more common disbelief in the possibility of what he termed
‘constructive social engineering’. Today, this common disbelief is once
again the greatest barrier that optimism of the intellect faces. Of course
the very term social engineering is liable to send chills down the spines
of even most leftist intellectuals today. But should we be so afraid of
it? ‘Institutional engineering’ was the term Karl Polanyi used when he
insisted against Friederich Hayek at the end of The Great Transformation that
democratic planning was not only possible but was actually the necessary
condition for realizing genuine individual freedom by connecting it to
collective sociability.11
Those who invoke Polanyi’s ‘double movement’ to make a case for law-
like alternations within capitalism between eras of market deregulation
and reregulation, and thus hope to promote a return from neoliberalism
to the guiding principles of the Keynesian welfare state, fail to register
Polanyi’s central contribution to optimism of the intellect, which was to
make the case for democratic socialist economic planning not only against
neoliberalism but also as a way of transcending the contradictions of the
Keynesian welfare state.12 Polanyi was a socialist, albeit more an Owenite
than a Marxist, and the understanding of capitalist contradiction played
a central role in his thought. Polanyi saw the imposition of barriers to
360 SOCIALIST REGISTER 2017

laissez-faire within capitalism, whether in the form of tariffs or in the

form of social welfare measures, and whether coming from above, as with
Bismarck, or from the pressure of the newly organized working classes
below, as producing contradictions for capitalism’s reproduction. And it
was the contradictions this double movement actually did produce within
late nineteenth-century capitalism which gave rise to what he called ‘the
great catastrophe’ of World War and Great Depression in the first half of
the twentieth century.
Polanyi initially had hoped that Roosevelt’s New Deal and the state
planning in capitalist democracies that underwrote their victory against fascism
in the Second World War, and above all the large majority government
the British Labour Party secured in 1945, would lay the foundations for
democratic socialist economic planning. But he very quickly recognized
that the compromises they made with the powerful forces of capitalism,
both domestic and international, were reinforcing capital accumulation and
commodification even through the construction of the Keynesian welfare
state. Here was the problematic double movement again, with regulation
and social reform producing the contradictions that would once again lead
to crisis, as indeed proved to be so with the Keynesian welfare state by the
1970s. It was amidst the playing out of these contradictions, and the inability
of the left to offer a way beyond them via democratic socialist planning, that
neoliberalism took root.
Optimism of the intellect does not involve embracing any teleological
laws of historical progress. Optimism of the intellect in fact involves being
sensitive to contingency in human history, with contradictions and crises not
the only variable factors in determining the scope and possibilities of such
contingency, but also the capacities of collective human agency as especially
crucial variable factors in developing transformative institutional forms. To
get to where Dewey and Polanyi, no less than Marx or Gramsci, wanted us
to get involves probing the limits of economic and political institutions. And
to do this it is also important to pay close attention to such great pessimists
of the intelligence as Max Weber on state bureaucracy and Roberto Michels
on party oligarchy. This is precisely because we need to identify the actual
institutional barriers that lie in the way of replacing the capitalist rationality
of market competition with the socialist rationality of collective planning, so
we can at least minimize those barriers through articulating the institutional
forms that can develop popular capacities for genuinely democratic
participation as well as complex representation and administration. The
political purpose for this kind of institutionalism is exactly the opposite of
validating path dependency, insisting rather on institutional contingency to
 ON REVOLUTIONARY OPTIMISM OF THE INTELLECT 361

the end of discovering how to transform institutions in socialist ways.

The need for creating new political parties oriented to developing the
agencies capable of this has increasingly become recognized in recent
years. The protest movements against global neoliberalism which have
punctuated the past two decades, however remarkable and impressive they
have been, have also reconfirmed that you can protest until hell freezes
over, but without taking and transforming political power you will never
change the world. Jodi Dean’s recent book Crowds and Party makes this
case very well. But her image of the new communist party as an ‘affective
community’ is not enough.13 It needs also to be an ‘intellectual community’
oriented to developing capacities for complex democratic representation and
administration.
We need to learn from our failures in this respect. Watching the Netflix
five-part series, Rebellion – produced to coincide with the centenary
of Easter 1916 in Ireland – brought to mind the famous line written by
that quintessential Irish postmodernist, Samuel Beckett: ‘Ever tried. Ever
failed. No matter. Try again. Fail again. Fail better.’14 Indeed, Rebellion’s
compelling dramatization of the uprising – and its defeat – ends by pointing
ahead to the spark it provided for the achievement of Irish independence
six years later, while also reminding us of the compromised nature of that
national liberation victory insofar as it failed – like so many others later in the
twentieth century – to realize the socialist goals of the 1916 revolutionaries.
Learning from failures is not just a matter of retrospect. It is a matter of how
we go about examining and drawing lessons from contemporary events. Just
like the reformist Fabian Society stalwarts, Sydney and Beatrice Webb, who
came back from Moscow in the mid-1930s saying ‘we have seen the future
and it works’, so did too many socialist intellectuals of our time go to Brazil,
Venezuela and Bolivia in the first decade of the new millennium and come
back with the same message. This lack of critical inquiry is characteristic of
optimism of the will. What is needed is a careful, sympathetic probing of
the barriers which attempts at transformative change are running up against,
and the limits and problems being confronted or evaded, the better to learn
from them when we come back and have to face the contingencies of trying
to develop the capacities to effect political change in our own countries.
Had this been the more common approach abroad to the rise of Syriza in
Greece, the euphoria which greeted its election as the first and only new
government of the radical left since the global economic crisis began almost
a decade ago would have been more tempered – and the emotional screams
of betrayal, so characteristic of a frustrated optimism of the will, would have
been less common.
362 SOCIALIST REGISTER 2017

Optimism of the intellect is perhaps most needed today to temper the

catastrophist pessimism that accompanies the all too credible scientific
calculations of approaching ecological disaster. When people try to galvanize
us into action on this by saying we have only five or ten years left, they are
really asserting their pessimism of the intellect in such a way that suggests
that optimism of the will is all we need. In fact we need to confront,
and think very hard about how to bridge, the very troubling disjuncture
between ecological time and political time. This especially applies to the
time it will take to develop the institutional capacities, and above all the
democratic socialist economic planning capacity, to fully address the full
scale of ecological problems.
Ernst Bloch’s magnum opus, The Principle of Hope, was right to identify
the potential for socialism in what he called the ‘utopian intention’ of the
human intellect. As in Gramsci’s insistence that ‘everyone is a philosopher’
since in ‘any intellectual activity whatever, in “language”, there is contained
a specific conception of the world’,15 this intention could be located in the
craftsman’s eye for perfection, in the worker’s experience of alienation when
this is denied her, in the glimpses afforded to it by theatre, architecture,
painting, literature, and even in a well-crafted essay. ‘In contrast to pessimism,
a tested optimism, when the scales fall from the eyes, does not deny the goal-
belief in general; on the contrary, what matters now is to find the right one and to
prove it.’16

NOTES

This essay draws on my York University Inaugural Politics Emeritus Lecture, 25 April
2016.
1 Antonio Gramsci, Letters from Prison, selected and translated by Lynn Lawner, New
York: Harper and Row, 1973, p. 159.
2 The full text in English of Gramsci’s ‘Address to the Anarchists’ (which appeared
L’Ordine Novo on April 30, 1920) is available at https://libcom.org.
3 See Glen Newey, ‘The Getaway Car’, London Review of Books, 38:2, 21 January 2016,
pp. 39-42, quoting Muarizio Viroli, Redeeming ‘The Prince’: The Meaning of Machiavelli’s
Masterpiece, Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2013.
4 E.g., Alain Badiou, Being and Event, New York: Continuum, 2005.
5 Terry Eagleton, Hope Without Optimism, Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, p.
13.
6 Eagleton, Hope, p. 14. This is indeed what Benjamin’s most famous metaphor coveys:
‘the angel of history, his face turned to the past and his wings caught up in a storm
blowing from paradise and seeing not a chain of previous events but rather ‘one single
catastrophe, which unceasingly piles rubble on top of rubble … The storm drives him
irresistibly into the future, to which his back is turned, while the rubble-heap before
him grows sky-high. That which we call progress, is this storm.’
7 Eagleton, Hope, pp. 50-51.
 ON REVOLUTIONARY OPTIMISM OF THE INTELLECT 363

8 This was precisely what Gramsci warned against when he wrote that ‘… it is wrong to
conceive of scientific discussion as a process at law in which there is an accused and a
public prosecutor whose professional duty it is to demonstrate that the accused is guilty
and has to be put out of circulation … [rather than] that his adversary may well be
expressing a need which should be incorporated, if only as a subordinate aspect, in his
own construction. To understand and to evaluate realistically one’s adversary’s position
and his reasons (and sometimes one’s adversary is the whole of past thought) means
precisely to be liberated from the prison of ideologies in the bad sense of the word –
that of blind ideological fanaticism. It means taking up a point of view that is “critical”,
which for the purpose of scientific research is the only fertile one.’ Selections from the
Prison Notebooks, London: Lawrence and Wishart, 1971, pp. 343-4.
9 Meera Nanda, ‘Restoring the Real’, in Leo Panitch, ed., Socialist Register 1997: Ruthless
Criticism of All That Exists, London: Merlin Press, 1996, pp. 344-5.
10 Thomas Dewey, ‘Progress’, The International Journal of Ethics, April 2016, pp. 311-13,
315-17.
11 Karl Polanyi, The Great Transformation, Boston: Beacon Press, 1944.
12 See, for instance Fred Block and Margaret Somers, The Power of Market Fundamentalism:
Karl Polanyi’s Critique, Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2014.
13 Jodi Dean, Crowds and Party, London: Verso, 2016, pp. 218-19.
14 Samuel Beckett, Worstward Ho, http://www.samuel-beckett.net/w_ho.htm
15 Gramsci, Selections, p. 323.
16 Ernst Bloch, The Principle of Hope, Vol. One, Cambridge: MIT Press, 1986, pp. 445-6.