‘Is this pessimism?”, TJ Clark asks in his 2012 essay For a Left with No Future. “Well, yes.” How else, he wonders, “are we meant to understand the arrival of real ruin in the order of global finance… and the almost complete failure of left responses to it to resonate beyond the ranks of the faithful?”
Published originally in the New Left Review, the essay is part of Those Passions, a new collection of Clark’s work. Clark is not a political theorist but a historian of art. A Marxist, much of his work explores the interface of art and politics with considerable nuance and depth, illuminating artists from Bosch to Pollock, Rembrandt to Lowry.
The final section of the collection includes more straightforwardly political writing. For a Left with No Future is the weakest of the essays, whether on art or politics. It is nevertheless perhaps also the most significant, for not only does it provide a new perspective to much of Clark’s other work, it also addresses a particularly keen question for our time – how should the left deal with its failure? In its pessimism and world-weariness, it seems to speak to many today.
The title, Those Passions, is taken from Shelley’s sonnet Ozymandias, an exploration of the inevitability of oblivion, a description of a half-buried statue of a once-great pharaoh of a once-great empire: “Round the decay / Of that colossal wreck, boundless and bare / The lone and level sands stretch far away.” That desolate landscape is, for Clark, a metaphor for modern civilisation, made barren by consumerism and the reduction of all to a “spectacle”. Even more, it is a poetic description of the terrain in which the left finds itself. “If the past decade or so is not proof that there are no circumstances capable of reviving the left in its 20th-century form,” he asks, “then what would proof be like?”
It is a pessimism both exaggerated and understated. It is exaggerated because Clark finds the roots of the left’s defeat in human nature, in “the human propensity to violence” and an inevitable “hankering after evil” woven into our very being. He finds it also in modernity itself, which has created such atomised, unthinking, obedient individuals that they are “no longer material for a society”, a phrase borrowed from Nietzsche. These are not new ideas; but to root the left’s demise in human nature and the nature of modernity is to deny the possibility of any resurrection.
Indeed, Clark urges the left to abandon utopian ideas and embrace in its stead a “tragic sense of life”. The tragic vision, which sustains a conservative view of the world, sees in the flawed and limited character of humans a warning against grand social change, insisting that faith, tradition and hierarchy are necessary guardrails against barbarism, a way of acknowledging, in the words of Leszek Kołakowski, the Polish Marxist turned Christian philosopher, “life as inevitable defeat”.
Yet, for all this, Clark’s despair is also understated, because today’s political malaise is more profound than he envisions – or is commonly acknowledged. It is not just the left that has imploded. Liberal and conservative traditions, too, have become drained of much of their life-force.
These three main ideologies of modernity have clearly been antagonistic to each other. Yet they have also possessed a symbiotic relationship, one most clearly seen in the link between liberalism and radicalism.
What we call liberal norms – democracy, equality, freedom of speech and association, the right of nations to self-determination and so on – became social realities largely through the efforts of radical movements and working-class organisations, and often in the face of ferocious opposition from liberal elites that sought to limit the scope of these norms, denying the majority of society, indeed the majority of the world, basic democratic rights.
It was through the struggles of the dispossessed – of slaves to emancipate themselves, of colonial subjects confronting imperial rule, of the working class organising to improve their lives, of women claiming the right to vote – that liberal norms were made universal rather than remaining the exclusive property of a privileged few.
The erosion of that radical universalist tradition has befuddled the left, detaching it from liberal traditions, and from class politics, and leaving the remnants more authoritarian and identitarian. It has also discombobulated liberalism.
Without the buttress of radicalism, liberals themselves have become more illiberal, whether on free speech or democracy, and less willing to address issues of social inequality or working-class needs.
Conservatism emerged initially as voicing hostility to modernity, and yet adapted to the new world so efficiently that it become a dominant governing force in a world painted largely in liberal tones. Over time, not liberalism but working-class and socialist movements became conservatism’s principal enemy, an antagonistic relationship that helped define what conservatives wished to conserve.
The erosion of the radical tradition has brought confusion to conservatism, too. Conservatives today seem to understand how to rip up the existing order, but have little conception about what should replace it, or what they wish to conserve. And so, we arrive in an age in which it is not just that the left has lost but that the main political traditions of modernity have all become exhausted.
The book we need to make sense of these darkening times, Clark suggests, is Christopher Hill’s The Experience of Defeat. First published in 1984, it is an exploration by the pre-eminent historian of 17th-century radicalism of the writings of English radicals after the crushing defeat that came with the restoration of the monarchy in 1660, barely a decade after the execution of Charles I.
The story that Hill tells cuts against the grain, though, of Clark’s anti-utopianism. Hill depicts a generation of radicals defeated and subdued; but one that also sustained many who never abandoned their aspirations of renovating that radical tradition. John Milton was their “prophet-poet” who, in his last great epic poems, Paradise Regained and Samson Agonistes, most eloquently expressed the possibilities of hope and redemption.
Apart from the Quakers, none of the radical groups that throng the English revolution – the Levellers, the Diggers, the Ranters, the Muggletonians and others – endured. But their ideas did. The belief in equality, democracy and universal suffrage, the challenge to impoverishment and class distinctions, all became woven into new radical movements in the 18th century.
And then, Hill observes, the poets of the new radicalism, from Blake to Shelley, “turned back to Milton… and the vision of the poet-prophet”.
• Kenan Malik is an Observer columnist
