Defiant Optimism
Times are tough for everyone these days, it seems. Well, not everyone. Life keeps getting harder and more difficult for the vast majority of humanity struggling against war, inflation, food shortages, lack of affordable housing, a worsening global climate emergency, and an ongoing pandemic with no end in sight. But a tiny elite, the richest people in the history of humanity, are laughing all the way to the bank after doubling their wealth during this deadly pandemic.
Paradoxically, as the crisis of society deepens, as workers and the poor become ever more desperate for a solution to their problems and an alternative to the status quo, the status quo becomes more entrenched. In Canada, the Liberal-NDP deal is the perfect embodiment of this trend. At a time when a growing number of people are open to radical ideas, leaders of the left parties and trade unions grow ever more timid. Instead of serving as the voice of widespread disgust with the establishment, the NDP bureaucracy led by Jagmeet Singh props up that same establishment. In Ontario, the NDP is unable to provide real opposition against Doug Ford who—after four years of attacks on workers, the poor and marginalized groups and two years of criminally mishandling the pandemic—is looking at another majority government.
Yesterday evening, I went out for a walk and listened to the latest episode of the Fightback podcast This Week in the Canadian Revolution. Much of the episode focused on the Liberal-NDP budget, which is as bad as one would expect a Liberal budget to be. The Liberals are masters of presenting terrible regressive policies as progressive, and the new budget finds them showing off that talent once again. True to Liberal form, it offers a massive heaping of corporate welfare to real estate speculators, mining companies, fossil fuel giants, and war profiteers.
Today is Earth Day. The climate crisis is the greatest threat humanity has ever faced, unless one counts the spectre of nuclear armageddon that has loomed over our species since 1945. What is in this new federal budget when it comes to climate? Why, $2.6 billion for “carbon capture and storage” technology. Translation: more subsidies for oil and gas companies to continue polluting while they look at a technology that does not work. Where is the opposition to this budget? In the parliamentary arena, there is no opposition from the left. The lack of real opposition to capitalist governments is a problem in countries around the world. It’s an old problem, one that has historically had the most horrific consequences.
But it’s not all doom and gloom these days. The second part of the podcast concerned the inspiring wave of unionization in the United States. Workers in the U.S. have been winning impressive victories recently in a wave of strikes. For revolutionaries, it’s important to take a long view of history. The betrayal of the Second International in 1914, the wave of national chauvinism that saw millions of workers across Europe slaughter each other to guarantee the profits of a few, transformed after years of war into its opposite: a wave of revolutions that swept the world starting in 1917. Life teaches.
Being a revolutionary requires a sense of optimism even—no, especially—when things appear most bleak. I take inspiration from one of history’s greatest revolutionaries, Leon Trotsky. Think of struggling all your life to achieve a revolution; leading the first victorious socialist revolution in history; then watching its degeneration, being expelled from your country, having the regime target you and your family and eventually becoming a target of assassination. Until his last days, Trotsky managed to maintain his hope and optimism. He took the long view of history. From his Diaries in Exile in 1935:
Life is not an easy matter…. You cannot live through it without falling into frustration and cynicism unless you have before you a great idea which raises you above personal misery, above weakness, above all kinds of perfidy and baseness.
Giving into pessimism and despair is an understandable reaction to great defeats; it can happen to the best of us. But what does it accomplish? The only people it benefits are those who benefit from the status quo. We have to maintain a realistic view of the situation. We have to acknowledge defeats when they happen. But there is no defeat of the working class in recent history that compares to, say, the victory of Hitler in 1933 and the physical destruction of the German labour movement, the strongest in Europe at the time. (Incidentally, how did Trotsky react to the victory of fascism in Germany and the demise of the Third International as a revolutionary force? He organized the Fourth International. To put it another way: he kept fighting.)
The number of strikes today is rising all the time as workers fight back against inflation. But this is nothing compared to the great labour struggles to come. When the workers are conscious of their own power, when they are organized and united, no force on earth can stop them. I refuse to adopt the useless pessimism that afflicts so many left and labour leaders—the lack of faith in the working class to transform society and take their destiny into their own hands. What we’re seeing in the United States today shows the exact opposite. Workers and youth are fighting back everywhere. Interest in socialism is growing all the time. There’s a massive desire for the ideas and methods capable of solving society’s problems.
To be optimistic is to answer the call of history. It’s an act of defiance and rebellion against society’s rulers who would prefer that we fall into despair and accept the injustice of the current world today as natural, eternal and unchangeable. To quote the popular slogan: “A better world is possible.” I believe that with all my heart.