Trons betydelse för socialismen

Historikern Lars Lih, ställer i en intressant intervju, själv en bra fråga om varför "syntesen" mellan arbetarrörelsen och socialismen bröts:

I’ll ask you a question. When I look back at this period—when you could say that there was a mass movement, a Marxist mass movement that was genuinely alive—what was it that was alive? It was a sense of a world-historical mission, that the proletariat was “the Chosen People”—this metaphor was made many a time, that this group of people was going to bring the world to a final goal. 

So that’s what I’m wondering: Is this sense of a world-historic mission alive today, even among the left? This is what I’m asking you: is there a genuine sense of this group having a mission and a real sense that it is going to happen? That was the baby that the left has thrown out, keeping the bathwater, which is very useful—Marx’s analysis of this, class analysis of all this stuff. The bathwater is great! But the baby seems dead or gone. Does this sense of world-historical mission exist and must it exist in order for the left to be anything like what it was? And is there a way of making it happen if it doesn’t exist? You can’t artificially insist that people believe in a mission like this—or even make yourself do it, if the belief isn’t really there.

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So that’s what I see with the communists in the Soviet Union, it’s just that one day they woke up and realised that even the last little shreds of belief were going. Nowadays, of course, there’s still plenty of enthusiasm, plenty of imaginative thinking, so—can that synthesis be brought back? That’s the challenge. Where these people were strong is that they didn’t just say “I want to believe in this”—they really did believe it, because they could see facts on the ground that led them to think it was happening.