The Regrettable Century
The old forms of the Left are moribund and the new forms are stupid. We're making a podcast that discusses the need to organize a Dialectical Pessimism and develop a salvage project capable of sparking a new workers' movement for socialism. A clean, honest, and unsentimental melancholy is required; we are cultivating one and would like to share it with you.
“The challenge of modernity is to live without illusions and without becoming disillusioned. I’m a pessimist because of intelligence, but an optimist because of will.”
-- Antonio Gramsci
The Regrettable Century
The Role of the Individual in the End of the End of History
For all of our claims to be historical materialists, there is nothing that the left loves more than a great leader to guide us to victory. If we are to make history, but not in circumstances of our own choosing, what role do we actually have to play as individuals? What role does the extraordinary person play in making history?
“History is made in such a way that the final result always arises from conflicts between many individual wills, of which each in turn has been made what it is by a host of particular conditions of life. Thus there are innumerable intersecting forces, an infinite series of parallelograms of forces which give rise to one resultant — the historical event.”
Thomas Carlyle, On Heroes, Hero-Worship, and the Heroic in History (1840)
http://history.furman.edu/benson/fywbio/carlyle_great_man.htm
On the Role of the Individual in History
https://www.marxists.org/archive/plekhanov/1898/xx/individual.html
Karl Marx and his conception of history
https://mronline.org/2018/05/11/karl-marx-and-his-conception-of-history/
The individual and the Marxist view of history
https://www.marxist.com/the-individual-and-the-marxist-view-of-history.htm
Music- Armageddon Blues by Power Trip