Being a Socialist Today Requires Faith in the Face of Long Odds

Despite the many challenges confronting us, socialist organizers must keep the faith in our ability to win a better world. That may require commitment that goes beyond what’s rationally warranted.

(Photo by Andrew Neel on Unsplash)

For Christmas, I wrote up a personal reflection for Jacobin grappling with my doubts about the prospects for the success of socialism, and what kind of faith we might need to sustain our commitment to this political project. Here’s the gist:

I think there’s something to the idea that our commitments sometimes need to outstrip what’s rationally warranted. I think there’s something to the idea that caring about a project means remaining committed to it even when reason says it will probably fail.

To say more about where I’m coming from: I think we should reject the view, accepted by many Marxists of prior generations, that the triumph of socialism is inevitable. One of Marx’s core insights is that the global working class has a collective, long-run interest in overcoming capitalism and the ability to do so. But that doesn’t mean workers are likely to successfully organize and revolt against the capitalist order. 

In fact, in most contexts, it will be more rational for workers to promote their individual interests by keeping their heads down and playing by the rules rather than taking the risks associated with collective action. Resignation to the terms of the game and pursuing individual strategies within those limits are the rule, not the exception. 

Of course, workers can and do organize to challenge capitalist power. This depends on the efforts of ideologically minded militants who strive to build cultures of solidarity that create and mobilize feelings of mutual obligation. Union organizers convince their coworkers that uniting together to fight the boss is worth the risk; socialists and other radicals have built left-wing parties that serve as vehicles for collective political action. Such cultures of solidarity change workers’ rational calculus and can move them to swap individual strategies for joint action to advance their long-term interests as a class. 

But whether cultures of solidarity take root and lead to successful collective action is highly contingent. So, personally, I often find it difficult to believe that we will build the solidarity and the organization required to move beyond capitalism. That’s not to say I’m confident that achieving socialism is unlikely — but, a lot of the time, it feels like an incredible long shot. Those worries feel greater as we enter 2024 and fears mount that the genocide in Gaza won’t be stopped, Donald Trump will return to power, and nothing more will be done to avert the worst climate catastrophe scenarios. I gather a lot of other comrades feel this way too.

That’s why, in my recent piece, I bring up Søren Kierkegaard, a Danish philosopher and theologian, who put forward a radical conception of faith that I’ve found attractive in trying to make sense of how we can remain committed to our projects in the face of apparently overwhelming odds. Kierkegaard’s account of faith is explicitly Christian, but it is concerned with how we relate to worldly goals — meaning that it has implications for nonbelievers, as recognized for instance by later atheist philosophers like Jean-Paul Sartre. To draw out what’s distinctive in Kierkegaard’s account of faith, it might be worth explaining a distinction I didn’t make in the article.

In his works Fear and Trembling and Repetition, Kierkegaard distinguishes between faith on the one hand and “infinite resignation” on the other. Infinite resignation is an attitude that a person takes when they renounce some worldly possession or achievement that they had previously hoped for: the prospects of being with a person they love or the achievement of career success, for instance. The “knight of infinite resignation,” as Kierkegaard calls them, instead devotes themselves to living a life of meeting their individual ethical obligations, no longer expecting any kind of earthly pleasures or rewards in return. The monk, who retreats to a monastery to focus on service to God and their own spiritual perfection, might be the clearest embodiment of this attitude.

Faith, on the other hand, is the attitude of someone who has gone through infinite resignation — they have given up on the prospect of achieving their worldly goals — yet comes to believe they will somehow still achieve those goals anyway. The knight of faith regards their goals as a long shot and at the same time works just as hard to achieve them.

Kierkegaard gives Abraham and Mary as examples of this “knight of faith.” Both of them believe that hopes they themselves recognize as irrational will nevertheless come to fruition: Abraham believes Isaac will somehow survive despite the fact that he is slaying him, and Mary believes she will, as a virgin, give birth to the Son of God. 

With these sorts of examples, Kierkegaard suggests, faith involves believing in what we should rationally regard as impossible. I don’t know if we should find that extreme kind of faith attractive. Setting aside these religious exemplars, though, we can devise more prosaic examples of the knight of faith. We might think of a person who is committed to the dream of becoming a great artist or athlete despite overwhelming evidence they will fail. Maybe it’s a person who doesn’t let past heartbreaks prevent them from loving again. A knight of faith doesn’t let the long odds of their goal deter them from pursuing it confidently and wholeheartedly.¹

I wonder whether it’s possible to relate to the prospect of socialism in this way. When it comes to politics, the attitude of infinite resignation is entirely inappropriate — we are socialists because we want to change the world, and we think we have a shot at doing that. On the other hand, that shot often looks like a very, very long one. How do we maintain an equally fierce passion and willingness to fight even in the face of these long odds?

Perhaps we need to be something like the knight of faith: we are fully committed to realizing socialism, and even when victory seems extremely unlikely, we don’t take the prospect of defeat seriously, and we don’t let it phase us. In certain moods, I think this is the attitude I want to cultivate in myself.

1. Kierkegaard seems to have thought of faith as important in more mundane contexts like this, too. He broke off his engagement to his betrothed, Regine Olson, because he didn’t think he could be a good husband while also pursuing what he saw as his calling as a writer; he later wrote in his journals, “If had had faith I would have married Regine.” Faith, in this situation, would have meant wagering that he could combine his love for Regine with fulfilling his vocation as a writer, despite his sense that the two were incompatible.