Is anything moving forward? by Oliver Schott, 9/4/2025

Is anything moving forward?

Left-wing criticism – Annette Schlemm attempts a salvific critique of progress

The left has given up on the future, criticizes physicist and philosopher Annette Schlemm. In her book “Progress as a Misstep?”, she argues for emancipatory optimism. Can good old dialectics help?

By Oliver Schott

[This article posted on 9/4/2025 is translated from the German on the Internet, https://jungle.world/artikel/2025/36/linke-kritik-annette-schlemm-fortschritt-als-fehlschritt-geht-was-voran.]

The decommissioning of history. Progress is still needed.

Everything used to be better – with the possible exception of medicine and video game graphics. That’s what common sense tells us, and as we know, the right wing and reactionaries have a monopoly on common sense. The left, on the other hand, has long seen itself as a champion of progress, as evidenced by the widespread self-designation as “progressive” that still exists today.

But that was then: it has long been considered essential for any serious social criticism to deconstruct progress (and, ideally, the entire Enlightenment) to its very foundations. Didn’t colonialists and imperialists pursue their policies in the name of progress, as did Stalinists, Maoists, and even fascists? Those who are certain that they are on the right side of history, the winning side, invoke progress—and must then fight all those who oppose this progress, even if, unfortunately, certain human hardships cannot be avoided in the process.

> Schlemm reacts with understandable dismay to the anti-Enlightenment and fundamentally reactionary tendencies that have been spreading among the left since the heyday of postmodernism.

It is a commonplace that the catastrophes of the 20th century put an end to optimism about progress. Instead of prosperity and freedom for all, or at least for most, it brought unimaginable destruction of human life and totalitarian regimes the likes of which the world had never seen before. Soon after, environmental destruction and the looming threat of global warming made it clear that increasing productivity does not automatically solve more problems than it creates. And finally, recent criticism of racism, sexism, and anti-Semitism has cast many once-revered heroes of progress and champions of the good cause in an unfavorable light.

Leftists who did not want to join either the real socialist regimes or social democracy, which was now only concerned with reforming capitalism, found themselves in a hopeless situation after the Second World War. There was no longer any realistic hope of achieving a better society in the foreseeable future – and even the unrealistic hope was lost in the defeats of the 1968 movement and its offshoots.

Since then, radical leftism has ceased to function as a potentially society-changing force, but merely provides a melting minority milieu with a sense of moral and intellectual superiority because it recognizes the existing “total shit” (Marx) for what it is.

### Helpless know-it-all attitude

However, such self-assurance, which hardly ever has to prove itself in practice, is not conducive to overly thorough theoretical effort or self-criticism. Those who are helpless anyway might as well make themselves comfortable in helpless know-it-allism and be “against” things to their heart’s content without seriously applying rational standards of criticism.

The memory of the once cherished belief in progress turned into narcissistic resentment. It almost seems as if the left has not gotten over finding itself on the losing side of history and has committed a kind of intellectual murder out of jealousy: if progress cannot be mine, then no one else should have it either! Those on the left who could not triumph to death (even if only “in one country”) like the Bolsheviks and liberation nationalists thus failed into a perhaps temporary, but in any case provisionally inescapable, undead state.

But even for such a zombified left, time does not stand still. Their helplessness in the face of global conditions makes the contradictions of hostility to progress increasingly apparent: How can one regain political effectiveness, especially on behalf of the losers of the existing order, if one can only see the hope for a better future and a better society as an ideological tool designed to conceal claims to power? If, on the other hand, one writes off the hope for political effectiveness, the main content of radical left-wing debates is reduced to the question of who can best explain why everything is going to hell, and who will therefore be able to shout the loudest after the catastrophe has occurred: “I knew it!”

### A society without hardship, oppression, and violence

In this depressing situation, the concept of progress takes on a new appeal. Wouldn’t a society without hardship, oppression, and violence be progress in a concise sense? Aren’t science and technology constantly advancing, even if their social use under current conditions mainly results in devastation? In the end, is the most radical criticism perhaps not the one that pulls the rug out from under our feet, sinking into relativism and irrationalism, but rather the one that dares to hold fast to reason and universalism?

Following Rahel Jaeggi’s 2023 publication of her monograph “Progress and Regression,” Annette Schlemm has now presented her “salvific critique” (as the subtitle puts it) of the concept of progress in a work entitled “Progress as a Misstep?” It appears in the “Theorie.org” series published by Schmetterling-Verlag, which for over 20 years has been striving to open up “access to left-wing theory and history without too many hurdles and prerequisites” and, since “left-wing traditions have been broken off,” to preserve “once widespread knowledge” from being forgotten. The volume comes at the right time, because, as Schlemm notes with reference to the early Enlightenment, “like many of these early thinkers of progress, we are stuck in dark times and looking for a way out.”

Schlemm, a physicist and philosopher, opens the book with a brief recollection of her childhood and youth in the GDR. “Scientific socialism” still believed that unstoppable progress was on its side; capitalism must now be reminded of the caution with which such certainties should be enjoyed.

### Collection of reading notes

Schlemm reacts with understandable dismay to the anti-Enlightenment and fundamentally reactionary tendencies that have been spreading among the left since the heyday of postmodernism. In response, she falls back on good old dialectics. Of course, the left must refute the justifications that colonialism, for example, has received in the name of progress; however, those who reject the concept of progress itself can no longer regard the overcoming of colonialism as progress. “The worse the balance sheet, the more we see that we can imagine and desire something better and therefore want to realize it—this would then be progress.”

However, Schlemm only succeeds to a limited extent in making the positions and arguments she seeks to summarize tangible. Many passages read more like a collection of reading notes than a coherent introduction, especially in the first chapters. There, she rattles off the big names in Western intellectual history, but devotes such brief descriptions to them that one would too often have to consult the sources cited in order to understand what is meant.

This improves somewhat once the book reaches modern times and Marx in particular, but even then the strictly topic-oriented structure of the text clashes with its content, which is always focused on individual sources.

Even the positions of the most frequently mentioned authors are hardly presented in a coherent manner; instead, they are scattered across various sections, reciting individual sentences on the respective topic. As a result, the thinkers discussed hardly gain any profile, and the intellectual context in which the actual meaning of the quotations would become apparent is mostly missing.

### Down-to-earth reference to reality

Schlemm’s strong focus on the German-language tradition in his selection of modern sources is a legitimate decision in a slim introductory volume, but at least a brief reflection on the associated limitations would have been desirable. At least the critique of Eurocentrism is significant for the topic and is also discussed; the book could serve as evidence of how challenging it is to do justice to even a Germanocentric perspective.

It is positive to note that Schlemm does not tend to get lost in jargon-laden gibberish—anything but a given for left-wing theory, especially German-language theory—and that she remains faithful to Enlightenment, historical-materialist thinking with her down-to-earth approach to reality. Schlemm clearly highlights the irrationality of capitalism when she points out, for example, that it is driving us at full speed into an ecological catastrophe of planetary proportions – while the economic growth it generates no longer even promises to improve the lives of most people.

It also becomes clear how misguided the left’s hostility to progress has become, ignoring the history of left-wing, critical, and enlightened thinking: “We cannot get rid of the contradictions of progress by disposing of progress itself on the scrap heap of history. (…) If there is no reasonable, emancipatory alternative to the bad that is given, the longing for it will be absorbed by reactionary forces.”