The Dialectic of Defeat: An Interview with Rupert Lewis

Each generation must out of relative obscurity discover its mission, fulfill it, or betray it. . . . We must rid ourselves of the habit, now that we are in the thick of the fight, of minimizing the action of our fathers or of feigning incomprehension when considering their silence and passivity. They fought as well as they could, with the arms that they possessed then; and if the echoes of their struggle have not resounded in the international arena, we must realize that the reason for this silence lies less in their lack of heroism than in the fundamentally different international situation of our time.

--Frantz Fanon

Men fight and lose the battle, and the thing they fought for comes about in spite of their defeat, and when it comes turns out not to be what they meant, and other men have to fight for what they meant under another name.

--William Morris

Preface

S uch, it would seem, is the dialectic of defeat. From one generation to the next we inhabit the paradoxical drifts and nondiachronic relays between success and failure. Neither, when they come, as they are bound to do, comes whole and seamless, untouched by ambiguity. And therefore, in honoring our obligation to the present, it is important to consider how one generation looks back through the debris of what its antecedent had looked forward to as its horizon of hope.

But there is another sense of this paradox of success and failure that I want to attend to. For I borrow my title neither from that English utopian, William Morris, nor from that Martinican revolutionary, Frantz Fanon, but from Russell Jacoby, a radical American social critic. Roughly twenty years ago he wrote an important book called Dialectic of Defeat in which he explored, along the terrain of Western Marxism, the paradoxical relation between the political success of the Bolsheviks and the failure of their rivals. As he says: "The final argument flung by the Leninists at the non-Leninists was that Lenin succeeded. The non-Leninists were not only wrong, they failed." ¹ The contemporary irony, of course, is that the Leninists (long disabused of any special claim to political truth) have themselves now failed, and that failure is no doubt connected (via the revenge of the dialectic?) to their initial fetishism of success.

Between the upheaval in Jamaica in October 1968 and the ruin of the Grenada Revolution almost exactly a decade and a half later, in October 1983, there stretches a shallow grave in which are buried the radical postcolonial hopes of a whole generation: the Caribbean generation of 1968. Born for the most part in the aftermath of the labor struggles of the late 1930s, they are too young to have any actual memory of those pitched battles with the colonial state, but old enough perhaps to bleakly remember the fleeting agony of Federation and the pathetic anticlimax of Independence. These young men and women walked gloomily into New Nationhood as citizens of a False Dawn. It had been for them that the new symbols of sovereignty had been crafted, but few of them were impressed. So during the next decade and more, they fashioned a discontent out of several intersecting strands of cultural, economic and political criticism (among them Fanonian liberationism, Black Nationalism, Marxism, Rastafarianism and Catholicism) and they inspired a range of oppositional groups, movements and parties (New World, the Caribbean Artists Movement, Abeng, NJAC, the New Jewel Movement, the Workers Party of Jamaica and the Working People's Alliance), which sought to reconstruct the Caribbean in their own image.

But the 1960s and 1970s have come and gone with an utter finality that is somewhat startling to behold and perhaps somewhat bitter to consider. And in the trough of despondent years that have followed, a whole generation has grown up in the Caribbean, a generation unfazed by the graying narrative of revolutionary heroism. This generation is not formed...