What is the nature of art in a period of extreme ideological confusion and inverted political frustration?” That’s the question the iconic art critic John Berger struggled with in the aftermath of the defeats of 1968. Some four decades later the Left’s inability to take advantage of openings created by the great financial crash has placed Berger’s question on the agenda again. That he asked this of artists and not more generally was rooted in Berger’s special concern with the distinction between our desires and the world as it currently is.  “All art,”  he provocatively asserted, “is an attempt to define and make unnatural this distinction.”

Looking back, Berger credited the Cubists with grasping and confidently expressing the potentials for collapsing that distinction. For all the pain that accompanied technological development, “mass production promised eventually a world of plenty.” For all its oppressions, “imperialism had begun the process of unifying the world.” But the outbreak of World War I showed the limits of the Cubists’ artistic optimism. The problem, Berger concluded, was that “the Cubists imagined the world transformed but not the process of transformation.” It is that larger question — the process of actually getting to another world — that takes us beyond the artist and challenges the Left as a whole to cope with what can be done in this current moment of widespread disillusionment.

That disillusionment is itself now a major obstacle to social change. Our times are defined by a pervasive fatalism, particularly — but not only among working classes. Popular dissatisfactions live alongside the conviction that there is nothing substantive to be done about them. Capitalism is the only game in town. This fatalism helps neoliberalism reproduce itself; its material roots lie in the intersection of capitalism’s deeper penetration of social existence with the  limited political strength of those who oppose it.