To be fair to him, apart from the miserable misanthropic pessimism, he isn't exactly wrong in his diagnosis of where we are.
However, unlike him, I still think there is hope for a way forward. It requires genuine internationalism though, which means shedding a lot of old 20th Century dogmas and seeing things as they are. Perhaps we are a long way from it, but the possibility of building a new international political movement has never been more real. It just requires work, serious thought, and an ability to reduce goals down to a culturally non-specific universality.
If we learned nothing from the last century of Actual Existing Socialism, it is that institutions matter. Liberal Democratic revolutions have succeeded where they put thought into effective institutions and checks on power. Marxist Leninist parties thought in mechanistic terms that when the party of the working class gains power, a working class state will develop organically. It didn't, and any progressive content from 1917 was undermined by the lack of any institutional safeguards against unlimited central power.
I think focusing on political revolution which can create more space for popular participation and working class representation can create the conditions for a social revolution in the relations of production, and can also create the conditions for common cause between social movements in liberal democracies and those in authoritarian states (which are steadily converging anyway IMO and will likely continue to). This isn't happening because what remains of the radical left is either focused on "anti-imperialism" fantasies, looking for saviours abroad in the absence of any signs of salvation at home, OR they are focused on repeating the 19th and 20th Century mode of labour organisation, but globalisation and the atomisation of communal life has fundamentally weakened the conditions that made this possible. It has, however, opened up the possibilities of a more universal and global movement, which is, to me, the main ray of hope.
Perhaps I am more optimistic than R2D2 becuase I am younger than he is, but jaded old men aren't exactly renowned for their role in forging a new zeitgeist, yet new zeitgeists are forged all the same throughout history.
thewallwillfall.org
