Revolutionary Anticipation and Tradition

88 THE MINNESOTA REVIEW STEPHEN ERIC BRONNER REVOLUTIONARY ANTICIPATION AND TRADITION In Honor of Ernst Bloch's 90th Birthday Es bricht die neue Welt herein Und verdunkelt den hellsten Sonnenschein, Man sieht nun aus bemoosten Trümmern Eine wunderseltsame Zukunft schimmern. . Novalis For well over a half a century now, Ernst Bloch has pursued his inquiry into utopia, the ideal content and goal of mankind's striving to realize its "dream of the better life."1 From Geist der Utopie through Bloch's magnum opus, the three volume Das Prinzip Hoffnung, to collections of stories, essays, and aphorisms, like Spuren or Verfremdungen, to those works which are still to appear, the concern with this single notion is all-encompassing. It was also his continuous inquiry into this idea which turned Bloch into a maverick. In spite of the fact diat he was a supporter of Stalin and the USSR, among orthodox Marxists Bloch was always an outsider, an "idealist " and a "dreamer," whose works might bring him honor, but who stUl could not be taken seriously. Even within the Institute for Social Researchwith which he was associated—Bloch's thought never quite jibed with the dominant pessimistic tendency of Adorno and Horkheimer. Probably it is fair to say that Bloch has been criticized from virtually every corner and, in fact, much of the criticism is valid. In truth, Bloch's thought has become ever more estranged from praxis so that now his utopia seems anything but "concrete." Then too, there certainly is a religious chiliastic-messianic strain which permeates his work from the very first. Furthermore, his position-following that of the early Lukács-is based upon a rather discredited subject-object identity which is theoretically to result in the creation of an abstract "We" instead of a concrete notion of inter-subjectivity based on labor and determinate production relationships. Nevertheless, what makes Bloch such a vital thinker for us is his attempt to simultaneously re-introduce a telos into Marxism while creating a selfconscious perspective in which the vision of a new society may concretely take root. It is clear by now that, by the middle of the 1930's, with the Stalinist positivization of Marxism and the creation of the "apparatchik" BRONNER 89 mentality, the vision of what could be-how socialism is to be the qualitative Other to all previous historical forms—had already been lost. In the consolidation of the revolution, ultimate goals were displaced into a future which, though it was separated from the praxis of the present, was nevertheless guaranteed. Moreover, with the rise of a totalitarian regime on the left which seemingly mirrored the fascism of the right, a fundamental philosophical pessimism emerged in the thought of many left-leaning intellectuals. Thus, "guaranteed" on the one hand, dismissed on the other-save for some indeterminate visions of the apocalypse—the possibUity and even die need for utopia disappeared from view; either "objective" or "subjective," the analysis of a future society, a true "realm of freedom," lost its dialectical grounding. Precisely this dialectical grounding is what Bloch's thought retrieves. Where the need for a new vision manifests itself with added importance, particularly given the concern with alienation and reification in the present, with Bloch there arises a mode of thought which structures the perspective toward what would become a qualitatively different world. Ideals and possibUities , however, do not simply appear in immediate praxis; thus in Bloch's thought there is an openness to the unrecognized and unactualized potential of the past in terms of that future which is to be created. But this future is not the product of an organic evolution of the past. Only through the creation of a classless society, through the revolutionary abolition of capitalism, does the space for utopia emerge wherein the ideals of the past may be sublated (aufgehoben). The very sublation of the past makes the novum more than some mechanistic opposition to the old: "To die Novum there belongs, in order that it reaUy exist as a Novum, not only an abstract opposition to a mechanical renewal, but rather in fact a specific type of renewal: namely, the not-yet-realized total content of...