In ‘For a Left with No Future’, published above, T. J. Clark sets out a series of challenges for a new radical opposition. His starting-point is the existing left’s failure to produce a programmatic alternative to the ruling order in the West, despite the onset of a deep financial crisis. The re-emergence of street protest across the stricken regions, he argues, has not generated the fundamental re-thinking that this point in history requires: a perspective that will fathom, morally and socially, the depths of humanity’s impasse, given that the 20th century’s attempts at socialist revolution led to a dead-end, with many of the worst defeats self-inflicted. Clark’s contribution to the necessary renewal draws upon the image-world of Bruegel, the private correspondence of 17th-century English revolutionaries, the passionate disaffection of Hazlitt, the tragic theory of the Edwardian age and the mythicized prophecies of late Nietzsche—not to speak of the proud punk nihilism of ‘No Future’s’ title. The lessons the left needs to learn from the 1914–89 century of catastrophe, Clark thinks, concern the innate human propensity to violence and the corrosive effects of modernity upon social relations. They demand a politics of ‘small steps’, to promote sustainable economic development and curb the scourge of war, within a perspective fixed firmly on the present, banishing all thoughts of a future non-capitalist order.

Clark’s world outlook, as an art historian and a revolutionary, was forged in the furnace of the Situationist International, concurrent with deep research into the 1848 Revolution and its art in Paris, in the 1960s. His loyalty to the principles of Situationism was admirably unshaken by excommunication in 1966 from Debord’s si. If there were differences of emphasis between them—Debord’s loftier view of the Soviet bureaucracy, compared to Clark’s fierce hatred of Bolshevism, for example—both would continue to affirm that, as Clark summarized, ‘the realm of the image was increasingly the social location in which and against which a possible future “politics” would have to be framed’.footnote¹ Clark’s art writings have been proof in themselves of Situationism’s explanatory power and intellectual vitality. Historically, the culture of the left, from Marx to Trotsky, Lukács to Sartre, focused overwhelmingly on literature, with far less to say about the visual arts, let alone painting. Clark has brought to it a body of work to match anything in the literary tradition.

The Absolute Bourgeois and Image of the People, both published in 1973, are superlative historical interpretations, reconstructing the patterns of experience that informed the artistic strategies of Delacroix, Daumier, Millet, Meissonier and Courbet, in face of the popular upheavals of their time. The Painting of Modern Life (1985) extended the enquiry into the Second Empire, analysing representations of Haussmann’s Paris in the work of Manet and his followers. Farewell to an Idea (1999) examined the practices of a strategically selected set of artists—Pissarro, Cézanne, the Cubists, El Lissitzky, Pollock—as they tested the limits of what painting could do. Integral to these investigations is the act of writing itself, as a process of articulated thought. The mode is generally interrogative, pressing painted marks to yield their social or—especially in the more recent work, The Sight of Death (2006) and lrb essays—their formal meanings. The characteristic tense is the present continuous, with its rhetorical insistency; the conjugation is first person: ‘I’ or ‘we’. The drive—the polemical energy—is ethical and political as much as aesthetic: ‘it matters’, Clark repeatedly writes.

Side by side with these works of art history, Clark has authored or co-authored a series of fiery political statements, part polemic, part manifesto, which have appeared every seven years or so. In 1990, a pamphlet put out with Iain Boal and others addressed the meaning of the West’s Cold War victory under the title, ‘All Quiet on the Eastern Front’. In 1997, ‘Why Art Can’t Kill the Situationist International’, published in October, was an impassioned defence of the theoretical practice of the late si as a basis for art, largely framed as an anathematization of the non-Situationist left. In 2004, ‘Afflicted Powers’ ran in nlr 27, and was expanded into a Verso book the following year. Co-written with the Retort collective, the text mobilized Debordian concepts—the society of the spectacle, the colonization of everyday life—to grapple with the meaning of the Twin Towers attack, the better to equip the anti-war movement.

It is in the context of these political writings that ‘No Future’ needs to be set. Any response will firstly have to register the originality of its form: a multi-layered counter-manifesto that mobilizes ideas and images across cultures and centuries, to stage an intricate interplay of themes—ferocity, tragedy, moderacy, temporality. ‘No Future’ opens with the Mussolini-era Mezzogiorno, an English Pre-Raphaelite, the wry metaphor of a discordant orchestra; it ends with police action on our city streets. Pre-modern worlds are strikingly present here: the rituals of the Arrernte and Warumungu peoples, Bruegel’s dreamers, the Puritan Kingdom of the Saints. Ned Ludd and Platonov, Rimbaud, Morris and Jean Charles de Menezes are among the many who people its pages. Rather than retrace Clark’s vaulting arguments step by step, however, what follows will explore ‘No Future’s’ explanations for the current impasse of the left; discuss the resources it would draw upon and the rhetorical strategies it deploys, before suggesting some alternatives. This is a preliminary and personal reply; no doubt there will be many others.

‘This is the past that our politics has as its matrix’, Clark notes, rightly insisting that an understanding of socialism’s fortunes in the 20th century should be fundamental for its perspectives in the 21st. ‘No Future’ offers three overlapping interpretations of what went wrong. In the first, the years from 1914 to 1989 are seen as an inexplicable catastrophe, without shape or logic, ‘unfolding pell-mell from Sarajevo on’. In the second, they are the outcome of an innate human propensity to violence, to ‘blood-soaked conformity’. In the third, ‘modernity’ has produced a new kind of isolate, obedient individual, no longer fit material for a society. The causal or structuring relations between the three explanations are not spelled out in ‘No Future’, so it may be simplest to discuss each in turn.

To begin, then, with the notion of the ‘century of catastrophe’ as ‘come suddenly from nowhere’, an ‘unstoppable, unmappable’ chaos. In this reading, Clark would seem to be installing irrationalism tout court as his presiding epistemological system and perhaps recommending it for a left to come. Irrationalism is a bad starting-point for any political perspective; for one that aims to leave catastrophe and salvation behind, it would be perverse. Not only are the origins of the First World War amenable to rational investigation and analysis, but these are imposed as an intellectual duty by the history that followed. The Great War and its settlement provided the preconditions for the Nazi ascendancy, the Second World War and the Hitlerian extermination programme, as well as setting the stage for the Bolshevik Revolution and helping to shape its course. Patently, the conflict that erupted in 1914 did not ‘come out of nowhere’. It was inscribed in the disparity between the existing allocation of empires, favouring first-comers Britain and France, and the greater economic and military dynamism of the late-comers, Germany, Japan, the us, once the world had been fully partitioned between a handful of great powers. From the late 1890s, clashes between the rival imperialisms over monopoly access to raw materials, markets and capital-investment projects in the semi-sovereign states—China, Turkey, Persia—and re-apportioning of colonial possessions started to overspill the bounds of 19th-century diplomacy. Imperialist coalitions began to destabilize the European alliance system; international crises were increasingly settled by brinkmanship; military and naval expansion kept step with economic growth; Berlin’s decision to back Vienna against Serbia in June 1914 was taken with an eye to St Petersburg’s re-armament programme. The only force that could have stopped the conflagration at that point was determined anti-war action from below.