Introduction
This book opens a space to consider the present captivating moment in radical politics. While the horrors of our time expand dramatically as war, death, violence, rape and hunger, ‘utopia’ has returned in subtler forms. We are not in Kansas any more. There has been a major shift in grass-roots movements’ politics, demonstrating that the struggles against the ineffectuality of policy, the failure of representative democracy, the brutality of power and the alienating character of the economy are now mainly struggles for a breathing space from where to conceive and organise social life alternatively. A myriad of knowledges and practices towards this end is developing in urban and rural territories today. Enriched by multiple traditions of resistance, new mobilisations have been articulating concrete forms of cooperative production and consumption, developing many forms of self-management and communal property, non-representational politics and anti-oppressive education; proposing radical ecologies and pedagogies, exploring economic possibilities. Prefiguration is the word I am looking for: concrete processes of anticipating a better future in the present, in heterotopic spaces created to that end. This is not an idea but the reality of many movements today. Carlos Marentes, the co-coordinator of the North America Region of La Via Campesina recently put it like this: ‘We not only believe that another world is necessary, the members of La Vía Campesina are already building a better world’ (Declaration of LVC’s Delegation to the 2016 World Social Forum, Montreal, Quebec, 14 August 2016).
Despite the clear failure of politics as usual, intellectual efforts are not being channelled into exploring and developing these alternatives further as one would expect, provided the world’s state of affairs. Rather, they have been met with violence or appropriation policy from the state, disdain from orthodox left politics and sympathy from depoliticised citizens. Ignoring this dimension of collective action is no longer an option.
A new radical plural subject that is unrecognisable with old analytical tools is in the making. Gross highlights that ‘what makes one radical’ is not something that can be decided abstractly, but ‘a question that has as many answers as there are conditions necessitating extreme solutions’ (1972, p. 107). The chapters of this collection argue that the conditions of today have fostered ‘an other politics’ that speaks the language of possibility. This new language is not utopian in the traditional and/or distorted sense of the word, but is being fashioned in concrete praxis.
The chapters are the result of multidirectional conversations and interactions that are encrypted in the words and ideas explored here. The main aim of the book is to offer epistemological, theoretical and empirical openings that reflect an ongoing experiential critique of the hegemonic project. Experiential critique means a critique that, far from being ideological, is rooted in everyday life, in the body, in social relations, in communal practices. Following Boaventura de Sousa Santos, it is the political prefiguration of better worlds that equips us with the ‘intellectual instruments to unmask the institutionalised, harmful lies that sustain and legitimate social injustice and the political impulse to struggle against them’ (Santos 2014, p. viii).
Of central concern to the book is the resistance of social scientists, many of them critical theorists, to learn about this plural subject and to interrogate concepts, methodologies and epistemologies used to grasp radical change. While several traditions of radical thinking have nurtured and inform the critiques offered in the book, the book questions some assumptions that either close theoretical possibilities or restrict new theorisations, thus colonising the new and naturalising the given. Following Psychopedis, ‘today, it is necessary to reflect on the changes taking place in thought itself in the context of a changing world [so] the claim for a new theoretical thinking, that could critically counter the new state of humanity, is presented as both utopian and necessary’ (2000, p. 72).
The book is a collective act of theoretical prefiguration that is beyond academia’s obsession with both factuality and policy. On the one hand, scientificism ignores that, paraphrasing Milan Kundera, ‘life is elsewhere’. Social science, writes John Holloway, ‘defines itself as scientific precisely by virtue of its exclusion of the scream’, the latter being the scream of experience, of hunger, ‘that does not accept that mass starvation can exist with plenty’ (Holloway 1995, p. 155). Levitas (2013) also points to the unfortunate (perverted) destiny of sociology: while the creation of utopias, as expressions of the desire for a better way of being or living, is the proper and distinctive method of sociology, the discipline has suppressed this task in order to become a respectable social science. The problem is that scientificism naturalises capitalist society as ‘our society’, as ‘the world we live in’. In this naturalisation of capitalist colonial and patriarchal society as the only viable model of human society (the best albeit imperfect), the sociological critique can only exist as criticism for improvement, and social change can only occur within the contours of the reality demarcated by the theories about such society and its possibilities. Like this, social science concedes and reproduces the violence entailed in the routinisation of a fiction: that reality is what exists in front of us.
On the other hand, the book’s theoretical prefiguration is uncomfortable with the fascination to find policy solutions to established ‘social problems’. This transforms social science – paraphrasing Alfred Jarry, into a ‘science of imaginary solutions’. That is, a science that is pedaling in the air, unable to confront the root of the problem, and therefore perpetuating it. The science of imaginary solutions brings up what Ernst Bloch refers to as the danger ‘that the edifice of hope, occupied by thought of improvement, will totally collapse’ (Bloch 1959/1986, p. 619). Consider these examples. While at the grass roots, people do not self-refer as ‘poor’, sociologists worship and help ‘the poor’ in order to ‘make poverty history’. While people are producing alternative economies that include new forms of communal property, economists insist that ‘fairness’ can be attained without addressing existing property relations. While indigenous movements are repeatedly arguing against the oppressive nature of ‘multiculturalism’, the latter is still presented by development scholars as a policy solution for the ‘integration’ of indigenous communities into the world. While Via Campesina and the Movement of Rural Landless Workers have created a new human right, that is, food sovereignty, academic consultants of international development organisations insist on food security, favouring transnational agribusiness at the expense of rural workers’ alternatives. Should not we first try to ‘grasp the question about us, as question, and not as the confused indication of an available solution’ (Bloch 1918/2000, p. 197).
The book does not provide any solutions. The collection addresses various dimensions of today’s plural radical subject. It makes two assumptions. First, the radical subject of today is at once prefigurative, decolonial, ethical, plural, communal and democratic. Second, a critical theory should demonstrate those qualities, too. Holloway argues that there should be a ‘we’: ‘to start from the third person is to exclude ourselves, generally with the idea of attributing to ourselves some privileged site of understanding, an illusion (2014, p. 1073). But, more than that, “we” is always a question, an exploration.’ Amador Fernández Savater (2015) suggests that such exploration is, in fact, a search for ‘ethical truths’. That is,
not mere descriptions of the world, but assertions based on the ways in which we inhabit the world and conduct ourselves in it. They are not external and objective truths, but truths that connect us to others who perceive the same thing…They are not truths that illuminate, but truths that burn.
‘Politics’, he argues, consists of constructing – based on what we feel is truth – desirable forms of life, capable of lasting and materially sustaining themselves.
The chapters of this book argue that politics is eminently prefigurative. The book theorises alternative ways of looking at the present struggles for ‘desirable forms of life’ (Fernández Savater 2015). To venture around the struggle for desirable forms of life does not mean to voice ‘positive’ thinking as opposed to negativity, or as Holloway put is, positive versus negative autonomism (Holloway 2009). It is not what Benjamin Noys names ‘affirmationism’ (Noys 2010). To Noys, ‘the rehabilitation of negativity is crucial to negotiating the inhospitable climate for radical theory. A first step is the negation of capitalism as the untranscendable horizon of our time’ (Noys 2010, p. 174). Indeed, negation is an important step in the struggle to shape desirable forms of life. But there is a fundamental difference between the need to negate what it is as ...