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(Nick and Alex, “Inventing the Future: Postcapitalism and a World Without Work,” Kindle Book)

From the standpoint of their philosophical critics, these notions of progress were disparaged precisely for their belief in preconceived destinations – whether in the liberal progression towards capitalist democracy or in the Marxist progression towards communism. The complex and often disastrous record of the twentieth century demonstrated conclusively that history could not be relied upon to follow any predetermined course. 22 Regression was as likely as progress, genocide as possible as democratisation. 23 In other words, there was nothing inherent in the nature of history, the development of economic systems, or sequences of political struggle that could guarantee any particular outcome. From a broadly left perspective, for example, even those limited but not insignificant political gains that have been achieved – such as welfare provision, women’s rights and worker protections – can be rolled back. Moreover, even in states where nominally communist governments took power, it proved far more difficult than expected to transition from a capitalist system of production to a fully communist one. 24 This series of historical experiences fuelled an internal critique of European modernity by way of psychoanalysis, critical theory and poststructuralism. For the thinkers of postmodernism, modernity came to be associated with a credulous naivety. 25 In Jean-François Lyotard’s epochal definition, postmodernity was identified as the era that has grown to be suspicious of the grand metanarrative. 26 On this account, postmodernity is a cultural condition of disillusionment with the kinds of grandiose narratives represented by capitalist, liberal and communist accounts of progress. To be sure, these critiques capture something important about the chronological texture of our time. And yet, the announcement of the end of grand narratives has often been viewed by those outside Europe as being absolutely of a piece with modernity. 27 Further, with the benefit of thirty years’ hindsight, the broader impact of the cultural condition diagnosed by Lyotard has not been the decline of belief in metanarratives per se, but rather a broad disenchantment with those offered by the left. The association between capitalism and modernization remains, while properly progressive notions of the future have wilted under postmodern critique and been quashed beneath the social wreckage of neoliberalism. Most significantly, with the collapse of the Soviet Union and the rise of globalisation, history does appear to have a grand narrative. 28 Throughout the world, markets, wage labour, commodities and productivity-enhancing technologies have all expanded under the systemic imperative to accumulate. Capitalism has become the destiny of contemporary societies, happily coexisting with national differences and paying little heed to clashes between civilisations. But we can draw a distinction here between the endpoint (capitalism) and the pathway towards it. Indeed, the mutual entanglement of countries means that the European pathway (heavily reliant on exploiting colonies and slavery) is barred for many of the newly developing countries. While there are broad paradigms of development, each country has had to find its own unique way to respond to the imperatives of global capitalism. The path of capitalist modernisation is therefore instantiated in different cultures, following different trajectories and with different rhythms of development. 29 Uneven and combined development is the order of the day. 30 Progress is therefore not bound to a single European path, but is instead filtered through a variety of political and cultural constellations, all directed towards instantiating capitalist relations. Today, modernisers simply fight over which variant of capitalism to install. Recuperating the idea of progress under such circumstances means, first and foremost, contesting the dogma of this inevitable endpoint. Capitalist modernity was never a necessary outcome, but instead a successful project driven by various classes and a systemic imperative towards accumulation and expansion. Various modernities are possible, and new visions of the future are essential for the left. Such images are a necessary supplement to any transformative political project. They give a direction to political struggles and generate a set of criteria to adjudicate which struggles to support, which movements to resist, what to invent, and so on. In the absence of images of progress, there can only be reactivity, defensive battles, local resistance and a bunker mentality – what we have characterised as folk politics. Visions of the future are therefore indispensable for elaborating a movement against capitalism. Contra the earlier thinkers of modernity, there is no necessity to progress, nor a singular pathway from which to adjudicate the extent of development. Instead, progress must be understood as hyperstitional: as a kind of fiction, but one that aims to transform itself into a truth. Hyperstitions operate by catalysing dispersed sentiment into a historical force that brings the future into existence. They have the temporal form of ‘will have been’. Such hyperstitions of progress form orienting narratives with which to navigate forward, rather than being an established or necessary property of the world. Progress is a matter of political struggle, following no pre-plotted trajectory or natural tendency, and with no guarantee of success. If the supplanting of capitalism is impossible from the standpoint of one or even many defensive stances, it is because any form of prospective politics must set out to construct the new. Pathways of progress must be cut and paved, not merely travelled along in some pre-ordained fashion; they are a matter of political achievement rather than divine or earthly providence.

(Joseph, “Radical Intellectuals and the Subversion of Progressive Politics,” p. 183-185)

Contrary to the fears of "difference theorists" that "universal" concepts such as citizenship suppress diversity, a politics of social solidarity con- tends that "difference" can only be empowering if the particular com- munities of a polity share a sufficient sense of common membership so as to sustain a strong complement of social rights. Public provision of basic human needs might, at times, be most effectively provided by decentral- ized voluntary associations within civil society (e.g., nonprofit day care centers, community-governed health clinics). But to ensure social equal- ity, the state would still play a central role in equitably financing such programs and in setting minimal standards of provision. In their hostil- ity to a bureaucratic, paternalistic welfare state, both post-structuralist feminists and communitarians forget that the power of the democratic state is the only means for rectifying the inegalitarian distribution of a market capitalist economy. Contemporary radical theory's hostility (or, at best, indifference) to the state perhaps derives from an unwillingness to consider strategies for influencing the state in an era when the center and right largely govern. But to cede state power to procorporate forces is to abandon the project of democratic equality. It is time for radical democratic and socialist theorists to ask "post- structuralist" and "difference" scholars to make clear their political— rather than solely ontological and metaphysical—commitments. While culturally sustaining identities of "difference" contribute to a pluralist democracy, so too does the solidarity derived from a common sense of citizenship. Citizenship need not be a "homogenizing" category that reduces all to the pursuit of the same needs and interests. If our public understanding of "citizenship" fails to embody a nonmarket conception of human worth then "difference" will not be built on a terrain of demo- cratic equality. "Difference" is not empowering if affluent suburbanites feel no common bonds with residents of the inner city, with the immi- grants who care for their children, or with deindustrialized workers expe- riencing economic and social dislocation. The extreme example of the breakdown of social solidarity in the United States is the absence of any coherent plan to rehabilitate and reintegrate into American society the 2.3 million citizens in jail and prison and another 4 million on parole or probation. Radical academics only have to interrogate the inegalitarian policies of the neoliberal university to comprehend the continuing relevance of the value of equality of standing to a democratic society. The value of equal- ity of standing often falls by the wayside under the self-interested logrc of neoliberal capitalism. Many tenure-track and tenured faculty refuse to express active solidarity with hyper-exploited lecturers, adjuncts, and graduate students who get paid infinitely less for the exact same teaching labor that tenurable labor performs. But unless tenured faculty use their limited leverage to fight for improved working conditions for exploited academic labor, their PhD students will face dismal futures, as tenure- track jobs will soon be as few and far between in America as are unionized industrial jobs. For several decades now the Right has taken seriously the role of higher education in generating public ideas. The corporate community and their think tanks fund and "discipline" business schools and economic depart- ments to prescribe "free market" ideology. Such market fundamentalism has had disastrous effects on economic policy both before and during the Great Recession. Progressive faculty in the humanities and soft social SCI- ences, in contrast, have done a fairly good job of popularizing among their students concepts of tolerance, diversity, and even transgression. But we have done a poorer job ofexplaining how rampant social inequality thwarts the lives of millions of our fellow human beings. Despite the Right's claim that Marxists abound in the academy, the concept of class is fairly alien to most college classrooms. Students know why corporate boardrooms should be more diverse; but few question the concept of corporate rule itself. Radical democratic theorists must subject to democratic critique insti- tutions that are created by interdependent human efforts, but which arc governed undemocratically, such as corporations and the neoliberal uni- versity. Otherwise, why should not the "different" or "agonal" interests of corporations be treated as persons with full rights to spend unlimited frnds on campaigns and lobbying? Democratic theorists also need to revisit arguments as to why labor rights are an essential part of the right to freedom of association, as well as a crucial means for redressing capitalist inequality. We should remind our students that skyrocketing tuition and their resulting indebtedness stem from neoliberal tax giveaways to the rich and corporations. Politicians of both mainstream parties have used the resulting revenue shortfalls to justify drastic cuts in public provision. How many of our students—or colleagues—know that per capital state fund- ing for higher education has declined by 40 percent over the past 30 years? Not that a simple revisiting of traditional radical democratic values will suffce. Social and political movements still fight largely on the terrain of the nation-state, but to regulate global capital these movements will have to build both transnational solidarity and new forms of democratic transnational regulatory institutions. That is, international social solidar- ity must go beyond a moral imperative and take on concrete institutional forms. Such new practices must enable working people to raise up, rather than level-down, global labor, environmental, and human rights stan- dards. This task will take both theoretical and political creativity beyond our existing political imaginary. The questions addressed in this essay are not purely normative or theo- retical. Theorists must reflect a pessimism of the intellect by rigorously analyzing present realities. But theorists must also have the optimism of the Will to search for the cracks in the dominant power structure. Iheir work should remind us of the historical reality that no social order is completely stable or devoid of possibilities for democratic transforma- rion. And it is precisely in times of social crisis that "epochal theory ' has contributed to democratic social transformation. Thus, work in demo- cratic political theory should not avoid analysis of contemporary politics, political economy, and policy debates. In short, political theorists who are committed to democratic critique must reengage with politics. A new majoritarian Left will not be reconstructed through anachro- niscic appeal to a never-realized golden age of leftist solidarity, which in reality excluded women, gays and lesbians, and people of color. But the defense of the rights of marginalized communities cannot succeed absent the revitalization of majoritarian democratic theory and practice. Whether the understanding of social solidarity and democratic equality explored in th1S essay is latent in our atomized and fragmented culture can only be answered through intellectual and political contestation over the meaning of democracy. The outcome of such contestation will influence the future of our common politics; if not, what is the purpose of political theory?

(Michael, “Radical Intellectuals and the Subversion of Progressive Politics,” p. 85-87)

But political power construed as Arendt does masks its true nature and its capacity for control and domination—again, concepts foreign to all of Arendt's musings. There is little point of emphasizing the ways that coun- cils or the wards could act as "disruptive" spaces—the reality of the matter is that without establishing some protective covering by the state, there is no way to guarantee the security and the protection of those within decentralized locales.

(John, “Radical Intellectuals and the Subversion of Progressive Politics,” p. 59-61)

All this said, it would be a mistake to hold that no post-structuralist has ever contributed anything valuable to the history Of ideas. Our think- ing has been improved by Foucault's insights into disciplinary appara- tuses and the epistemic preconditions for knowledge in the humanities, by Lyotard's prescient depiction of the postmodern condition of knowl- edge, and by the late Derrida critique of human violence against other animals. Yet such contributions, taken as a whole, have been quite modest. Moreover, they have come to us almost exclusively from "first wave" of post-structuralist thinkers, not their subsequent, mediocre epigones. The latter have for years "playfully" maligned truth, all the while sol- emnly discussing such weightless metaphysical conceits as the Multitude, phallologocentrism, diffrance, cyborgs, rhizomes, "the lack," etc.—the contemporary theorist's version of ectoplasm and ether. Undoubtedly, post-structuralist theorists have craved connection and a sense of rele- vance. They too have wanted to "make a difference" in a world where paths to effectual political and social struggle have been occluded or blocked. Alas, when it has come to helping the Left develop a more effectual praxis, their doctrine has been abysmally unhelpful—maddeningly vague where it ought to be most explicit—e.g., on the matter of ethical values and strategic goals 91—and exasperatingly proscriptive and confining where it should be most open-ended—e.g., on concrete matters of praxis, where perpetually warns us away from organizational and ideological unity in favor of dispersion and anti-strategicism—regardless of historical context of need. In the face of the vast social, ecological, and political problems of day, postmodernism has virtually nothing of interest to say. And here, our the doctrine truly does distinguish itself: for unlike every other political ideology of the modern era, post-structuralism offers a coherent theory neither of civil society nor of the state. The crisis of Marxist socialism after the end of the Cold War, coupled with the broad decline of left social movements in the same period, left a gaping hole in theories of praxis, one that post-structuralists were happy to fill. Confronted with the waning of the socialist tradition and work- ers' movements, on the one hand, and the rise of the political right and religious fundamentalism on the other, a generation of younger leftists understandably sought solace in theories that had at least the appearance of the new. In retrospect, though, post-structuralism may have been a form of collective psychic and affective flight from the despair and anxiety and denial generated by the loss of the dream of 1968. As Isaac Balbus observes: "Both the longing for (an idealized version of) what has been lost and the (seemingly) sober message that nothing valuable was ever really lost ward off the sorrow—and the guilt—that would inevitably accompany a fully embodied awareness Of the magnitude Of our loss. Both serve, in other words, to defend against the deeply difficult but absolutely indispensable task of mourning (what we used to call) the Movement." According to Balbus, then, "the atrophy of our imagination is a symptom of our political depression. "92 If Balbus is right, then postmodernism can perhaps be seen as a maladaptive response by critical intellectuals to their political obsolescence—an expression of what Herbert Marcuse termed "repressive desublimation," or the release of instincts that, in another con- text, would be life-affirming, but in a context of pervasive domination become socially destructive. If Marxists in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries were overly con- fident about the power of thought to arrive at mastery of the totality— and they often were—the present generation of theorists committed the opposite mistake, stripping critical thought of its ability to know the world. Postmodernism is a doctrine at war with intelligibility. Conceptual confusion is both its message and its method. Knowing and not-knowing, liberation and oppression, truth and untruth—such elementary and cru- cial distinctions are treated as naive constructs by the post-structuralist. In place of intelligibility, postmodernists celebrate cognitive confusion, "paralogy," and an aesthetics of fragmentation," seeking to muddy rather than clarify history.94 Like the cruder Marxism that post-structuralism in fact developed in reaction against—but also, in part, arose out of—its doctrines have reduced complex social and historical problems to a cat- echism of predigested formulas, mechanistic banalities, and unexamined and frequently tautological propositions concerning the nature of society, power, and the subject. But theory is on the contrary at its best when it serves as a paradigm of knowing, in the Kuhnian sense of a perceptual framework providing the scientist or observer with a means to discern patterns of meaning or order amid the chaos. As Kuhn argued, "Neither scientists nor laymen learn to see the world piece-meal or item by item ... Rather both scientists and laymen sort out whole areas together from the flux of experience."" What paradigmatic theories do, then, is to provide the engaged observer with a means for discriminating between useful and unuseful data. As Antonio Gramsci wrote in his prison notebooks: Reality is teeming with the most bizarre coincidences, and it is the theo- retician's task to find in this bizarreness new evidence for his theory, to "translate" the elements of historical life into theoretical language, but not vice versa, making reality conform to an abstract schema. (Leonardo knew how to discover number in all the manifestations of cosmic life, even when the eyes of the ignorant saw only change and disorder.)96 In Gramsci's view, then, the proper role of the "critical" intellectual, the revolutionary, is to discern patterns of significance in history and culture, to identifr more or less promising lines of action, and to build the basis for an alternative form of popular consent. Effective political knowl- edge must be rooted in perception of the totality or Gestalt of historical probabilities—in the complex interplay of economic and cultural factors, class interests, and human passion and will, through time. Only by inquir- ing closely into the empirical determinations of power, are we also able to perceive active historical possibilities—lines of force, strategic openings and opportunities, and areas of contradiction in the system. It is not a question o four being able to predict the future "scientifically," but ofcom- prehending as best we can the subtle combination of forces that structure the field of meaning and give rise to social phenomena. It is meanwhile the normative commitments of the critical intellectual—the subjective will to know the world in order to change it—that enable this way of seeing. It is this ability to see the world properly, in order to transform it, that post-structuralism has stripped us of. What we need, and urgently, is not merely a repudiation of the post-structuralist canon, but a bold new theoretical project—a paradigmatic theory of action that yokes materi- alist analysis to an unabashedly moral, utopian, ecological vision. Such a project, closely interwoven with practice, would both take up and go well beyond the lost thread of Marxist—humanist and socialist—feminist thought. 'The work of our combined intellects must be to map the totality of oppression and liberation—not by seeking the Holy Grail Of a sci- entific theory of everything, but by establishing an ethical horizon for liberatory practice as such. Only by returning, in this way, to holism in theory and practice might we begin to undo the terrible damage inflicted by nihilism on our praxis, and on truth.

(Gregory, “Radical Intellectuals and the Subversion of Progressive Politics,” p. 134-137)

For the neo-anarchist, the object of critique is not an opposing political ideology. Neo-anarchists try to "supersede" ideology in the name of alternatives. Rather, their enemy is institutions: the economy, the state, representative government, etc. Aside from references to neoliberalism, little is actually said about political ideologies and their influence in shap- ing institutions. The rhetoric is mainly that of a populist and "inclusive middle." New anarchism focuses on the creation of some authentic form of democracy. True democracy, according to the new anarchist, relies on direct participation. State and representative democracy stand in the way of its realization. Political actions—whether Occupy Wall Street, the Zapatistas in Mexico, or the assemblies in Argentina—are supposed to be expressions of this true form of democracy: "The organization of these actions was meant to be a living illustration of what a truly democratic world might be like, from the festive puppets to the careful organization of affnity groups and spokescouncils, all operating without a leadership structure, always based on principles of consensus-based direct democ- racy." 42 The emphasis on consensus building is seen as a way of over- coming ideological differences and, hence, rendering them irrelevant.43 Consensus building "requires the ability to listen well enough to under- stand perspectives that are fundamentally different from one's own, and then try to find pragmatic common ground without attempting to con- vert one's interlocutors completely to one's own perspective. "44 Despite the mainly left-leaning orientation of the new anarchism, its point is that political differences do not really matter. Much as the social scientific and analytic work of the intellectual is, by its nature, elitist and complicit with power, political ideologies are manufactured by divisive elites. The new anarchists, in effect, present themselves as beyond political differences. "This point is crucial because it is an essential complement of the other three characteristics I have discussed. It is the emotions and feelings of the individuals that matter. As such, each has to be given an equal hearing and their views are equally important. If the true nature of individuals is to cooperate, then political distinctions do not matter. If political distinctions are categories created by academics, utilizing them is a form of subjugation. It is taken for granted that all individuals have a shared and common commitment to some form of direct democracy. Political distinctions, as much as the state, the economy, representative democracy, and the academy, only serve to distort this purported fundamental commitment to direct, cooperative democracy. The Left— running the spectrum from welfare liberals to Communists—participates in the stifling of this democracy by participating in the creation of a hier- archical and bureaucratic society. "The reformist, cerebral Progressives in early twentieth-century American and, oddly enough, Lenin as well believed that objective scientific knowledge would allow the 'administra- don Of things' to largely replace politics." 45 While there is truth to the critique of technocratic society, this view becomes overly simplistic when it divorces technocratic politics from the more nuanced question of who is governing. There is a difference between a right-wing technocracy and a left-wing one. They set different agendas and policies that affect the lives of citizens. These differences are glossed over. Given that the new anarchists pit themselves against all forms of politi- cal institutions regardless of the political ideologies that govern, they can present themselves as beyond Left or Right. They are, to adopt a phrase from the historian of fascism Zeev Sternhell, "neither right nor left." 46 The influential Italian political theorist Noberto Bobbio asserted that such distinctions matter precisely because of their real-world implications. But the new anarchists write as though such distinctions are the creation of elites. Graeber asserts as much when he states, "The church of liberals is the university, where philosophers and 'radical' social theorists take the place of theologians." 47 Political ideologies are the creation of elites. These elites are disconnected from reality and serve their own interests. In this vein, the anonymous French radical group, the Invisible Committee, has stated, "The sphere of political representation has come to a close. From left to right, it's the same nothingness striking the pose of an emperor or a savior, the same sales assistants adjusting their discourse according to the findings of the latest surveys."" Parties are sectarian and close off the possibility of creating a new form of cooperative society. Speaking of different strains of Marxism, Graeber claims, "We see all the same sectar- ian habits: of reducing other positions into hostile caricatures so as to be able to plug them into some prefab set of categories, each representing a type of ideological error; of treating minor differences as if they were moral chasms." 49 Political theoretical positions are the enemy of the kind of democracy the new anarchists envision because democracy is about unity through consensus and not about the conflict between contending ideologies. New anarchists write as though ideologies are irrelevant to the lives of those who are not in the university or in positions of political or economic power. Whatever differences exist can be overcome through consensus-building. Part of why ideological differences cease to matter is because the new anarchists insist that a political and social rupture has occurred. "The very presence of the movements that Graeber and Sitrin continually reference is meant to emphasize that a new form of politics that forms a new kind of individual is on the rise. Certainly, they have an old pedigree insofar as Graeber identifies communities in Madagas- car and Sitrin and Dario Azzelini write, "Many of the 'new' practices wc describe . . . in fact have long histories, especially in Latin America."" Rather, what marks the "new" is the fact that such practices are purport- edly spreading across the globe. The "new" is now a global phenomenon. The "new" kind of politics that the neo-anarchists write about is entirely about conduct and not content. This is why Occupy did not have to make any political demands on the state. Purely by virtue of the fact that tents were set up in Zuccotti Park and elsewhere in the United States, Occupy had its political legitimacy. "new" was a "new togetherness."51 Legitimacy came entirely from the practice and not from any kind of con- crete political motivations. Emphasis on practice and conduct is, in part, what shields neo- anarchism from having to articulate political positions. Establishing political positions poses the threat of alienating supporters, but, for the neo-anarchist, what is worse is that it seems to bestowoOne set of politi- cal positions, desires, or aims with greater authority than others. This means buying into the traditional way of doing politics in which distinc- tions between ideologies matter. Writing of Occupy's slogan, "We are the 99%," Jodi Dean argues that it "erases the multiplicity of individuated, partial, and divided interests that fragment and weaken the people as the rest of us."52 Neo-anarchism is beyond the divisions fomented by politi- cal interests. The conflict of interests is manufactured by representative democracy. For the neo-anarchists, the enemy is structure. Structure creates divi- siveness. state and capital are not opposed because they are expres- sions Of political interests, whether based on ideology or class, but because they are structures in themselves. Something beyond structure has to be established and this is what the neo-anarchists mean when they rely on vague conceptions of "newness." The "new" is a rupture with the past way of doing politics as the representative democracy of elites. It promises to do away with political difference. At the same time, neo-anarchists, like Scott, talk about the way the state homogenizes individuals. So, the "new" has the dual task of abolishing sectarian differences as well as individ- ual and cultural homogenization. Both are the consequence of political structure. Both are the consequences of representative democracy. Neo- anarchism, therefore, cannot reconcile its tendencies to look forward to some postideological future as well as look backward to forms of political organization that evade the modern institution of the state and represen- tative democracy. It simultaneously promises freedom through consensus and through uncompromising individualism. The purported solution to resolving this contradiction is a new society that does away with conten- tious democracy. In place of the old contentious democracy, there is the utopian promise of democracy through consensus, reconciliation, and unity, which, at the same time, affirms a role for unsullied self-expression and emotion in political discourse.

(Nick and Alex, “Inventing the Future: Postcapitalism and a World Without Work,” Kindle Book)

Other movements argue for an approach of withdrawal, whereby individuals exit from existing social institutions. Horizontalism is closely linked to this approach, being predicated on the rejection of existing institutions and the creation of autonomous forms of community. Indeed, the recent history of activism has tended towards such approaches. 95 Often these approaches are explicitly opposed to complex societies, meaning that the ultimate implied destination is some form of communitarianism or anarcho-primitivism. 96 Others suggest making oneself invisible in order to evade detection and repression by the state. 97 At the extreme, some argue for what amounts to a left-wing survivalism: civilisation is in catastrophe, 98 and we should therefore become invisible, 99 retreat to small communes, 100 and learn how to grow food, hunt, heal and defend ourselves. 101 If left at the level of survivalism, these kinds of positions, while perhaps unappealing, would at least have some consistency. They at least have the virtue of being open about their implications. However, arguments for withdrawal and exit too easily confuse the idea of a social logic separate from capitalism with a social logic that is antagonistic to capitalism – or, in an even stronger claim, that poses a threat to capitalist logics. 102 Yet capitalism has been and will continue to be compatible with a wide range of different practices and autonomous spaces. The Spanish town of Marinaleda offers a useful example of this. Over the course of three decades, this small community (pop. 2,700) has built up a ‘communist utopia’ that has expropriated land, built its own housing and co-operatives, kept living costs low, and provided work for everyone. Yet the limits of such an approach for transforming capitalism are quickly revealed: housing materials are provided by the regional government, agricultural subsidies come from the European Union, jobs are sustained by the rejection of labour-saving devices, income still comes from selling goods on wider capitalist markets, and businesses remain subjected to capitalist competition and the global financial crisis. 103 Marinaleda is but one example of how the project of withdrawing, escaping or exiting from capitalism is still contained within a folk-political horizon, within which defending small bunkers of autonomy against the onslaught of capitalism is the best that can be hoped for. Yet we would argue not only that more can be hoped for (and achieved), but that, in the absence of broad and systematic contention, even those small pockets of resistance are likely to be swiftly eradicated.

(Kaspar and Mitchell, “State-Phobia, Civil Society, and a Certain Vitalism”, Constellations 19.3)

Governmentality, in short, is an analysis of the state and not something that lies beyond it. It shows the conditions of experience of the “state” as that which confronts an external domain – civil society – to which it must grant a measure of free action in order for government to function. It grows out of a diagnosis of the present as one in which the state has come to be regarded as essentially despotic, the source of evil in the world, and as a repressive force that deforms our subjectivity, from the inside as much as the outside, limiting our potentiality in the world. For Foucault, this is a view shared not only by the ultra-left that seeks a violent overthrow of the state, but also by variants of neoliberalism in the twentieth century. This view is rooted in the anti-state eschatology of the nineteenth century, which has the notion of civil society at its core.¶ In Foucault’s context, to reject a theory of the state was to reject a Marxist theory of the state and to take note of anti-institutional movements in both liberal democracies and those opposed to state socialism. Today, any rejection of analyses conducted in statist terms takes place in a changed context: in the context of the repeated mantra of “governance” theorists who speak of a shift from government to governance and of a “hollowing out the state”; against the backdrop of conceptions of globalization that claim that global flows of trade, finance, information, and culture have undone the “container” of the national state39; and in the presence of political analyses that claim that struggles directed toward the state have been displaced by grassroots movements conducting sub-, micro-, and transversal politics underneath, across, and above the territorial state. In short, to reject a theory of the state in favor of an analysis of local struggles in the 1970s marked a break with a prevailing left intellectual problematic and an attempt to open up the discussion of government and state. In our own time, to dissolve the concept of the state has the opposite effect: it merely reinforces what has become a kind of anti-political orthodoxy that has rendered the left a meaningless term. This dissolution easily makes an accession to political agendas fatally shaped by the militant intellectual and political “thought collective” of which Foucault was an early analyst – to neoliberalism.40

(Gregory, “Radical Intellectuals and the Subversion of Progressive Politics,” p. 139-141)

It is in the notion of the immanence of freedom through the expres- sion of subjectivity that neo-anarchism is fundamentally antipolitical. If one engages the neo-anarchist in debate over the necessity of political institutions, the viability of the alternatives they propose, or the content of their politics, they have ready answers by drawing the debate into either the extreme Of highly specific evidence of unique cases or entirely unsubstantiated abstract categories. The interlocutor's questions are manifestations of the thought processes that have already bought into the categories produced by ideologies of domination. The mystical and evasive language of neo-anarchism itself becomes a defense of its bona fide revo- lutionary radicalism. However, the question that must be posed against the neo-anarchist is whether or not people are already free and what the substance of that freedom is. Neo-anarchism relies entirely on a concep- tion of political means, but not political ends. Establishing ends requires implementing a program, setting goals, evaluating the desirability and efficacy of these goals. But neo-anarchism is entirely based on a subjective attitude toward the world. It is concerned with the means by which one leads a free life, but not the ends that such means seek to achieve. Political institutions serve the function of realizing political ends. These ends can either be conservative or progressive, repressive or emancipatory. Neo-anarchists deny this. They assert a politics of radical rejection. Such a politics, however, is not a solution to the problems of economic inequality or political domination. It does not reinvigorate a Left that has become increasingly politically powerless. Rather, it is symptomatic of the very malaise of neoliberalism that it pretends to fight against. There is nothing emancipatory about the retreat inward into the self or an insulated com- munity. The neo-anarchists try to valorize a politics of helplessness. In a society that has become increasingly unequal because the economic imper- atives of unconstrained capital have co-opted politics, neo-anarchists urge people to ignore these realities. Neo-anarchism is no less pernicious than the rampant irrationalism and mysticism that pervades our culture. It is the political equivalent of the abundance of self-help manuals. The works of the neo-anarchists endlessly invoke the bogeyman of neoliberalism, but they offer no analysis of what neoliberalism actually is or how it operates to lead to oppression. Political structures and economic systems do not need to be understood so long as one can reject them and live outside their influence. Neo-anarchism's antipolitics tells us that institutions do not matter; that the influence they exert in Our everyday lives is exaggerated. Tra- ditional politics "attributes to the State an autonomy of action that it just does not have. In reality, what the state does is limited and shaped by the fact that it exists as just one node in a web of social relations." 57 Such assertions are left unsubstantiated. They also render critique point- less because they are presented more as observations and musings than as concrete theoretical claims.58 Neo-anarchism is more revealed religion than politics. Only those who recognize that political institutions do not matter are admitted. This is the politics of illusions. So long as individuals conduct themselves as if institutions do not matter, neo-anarchism can claim victories for itself. The neo-anarchist can never fail in her political aims because she has already achieved them by virtue of the kind of life she leads. If power does not affect her because she has chosen to conduct herself as though it is an illusion, then she has no real way to measure the extent to which she is actually oppressed. Denying the power of institu- tions means rejecting any rubric for evaluating her freedom because She can never acknowledge that She is oppressed. If the existence of power is denied, then all the tools for combating injustice are equally irrelevant. "The emancipatory promise of political engagement loses all legitimacy because emancipation comes from disengagement. The antipolitics of the neo-anarchists runs far deeper than the charge that they ignore the reality of institutions. Rather, they believe that power can cease to exert influence on us in the present. Rejecting the existence of power relations leads to the rejection of politics. One need only take the leap: "To begin to think about power and changing the world without taking power (or indeed anything else), we need to start from doing."" Triumphalism, Insurrection, and Apolitical Reactionaries60 Neo-anarchism would not warrant analysis or critique if it were not for the fact that elements of its doctrines were becoming more prevalent in the ways the Left practices politics. Increasingly, the Left has been mea- Suring its relevance and success on the incidence of political action instead of the realization of goals. Protest for its own sake has been taken as a testament to the resurgence of the Left. These protests need not make specific demands, articulate policies, or lead to any reforms. Their suc- cess is evaluated through their bare occurrence. Even obviously failed political actions become cause for celebration. It remains unclear what, if anything, Occupy Wall Street actually achieved. The labor movement Suffered a dramatic setback in its failure to oppose the program of Gov- ernor Scott Walker in Wisconsin. Though the Chicago Teachers Union was more successful in its confrontation with Mayor Rahm Emmanuel, it was still forced to make concessions. Much of the enthusiasm for the CTU strike focused more on its ability to mobilize people than on the realization of their demands. These actions sought to defend rights that the unions already had. At the same time, the number of "right to work" States continues to grow. Such attacks on labor are a mark that the Left is weakening, not strengthening. These are opportunities for the Left to engage in self-evaluation. Such actions show the necessity of confronting political realities, but the Left's new infituation with action regardless of efficacy displays the ways neo-anarchist understandings of politics have infected the Left's ability to assess its gains and losses.

(Gregory, “The Treason of Intellectual Radicalism and the Collapse of Leftist Politics,” LOGOS, Winter edition)

What we are calling here a “treason of intellectual radicalism” can be seen to consist of several impulses that have had a deep and debilitating effect on progressive politics. First has been a shift toward a radical “non-foundational” or even “anti-foundational” thought. According to this philosophical view, in its more radical forms, the social world (and even the natural world) is constructed by subjects no longer possessing any kind of foundations for knowledge. The “myth of the given,” or the proposition that the social world is essentially constructed by subjects and discourse, is a basic starting point. There is no longer a need to rely on foundations for knowledge nor need we possess universal or rational justifications for political or ethical propositions and ideas. Political reality is the product not of concrete mechanisms of resource control and the organization of social structure, but instead the product of discourse. On this view, the site of politics becomes the struggle between and over the discursive narratives of the political and social. Now, political subjectivity is to be created, indeed, even “invented” and pushed against the state. The constructivist epistemology adopted by these thinkers is seen as liberating politics from the “realities” of class and social structure. As one advocate of this thesis argues, political subject-formation “cannot be articulated in relation to a pre-given socio-economic identity like that of the proletarian, but has to be invented or aggregated from the various social struggles of the present.”[4] These discourses and subjectivities are particularist in nature, even as they assert themselves as universals. This kind of thinking “is bound to discourse, literally narratives about the world that are admittedly partial.”[5] The politics that follows from this necessarily eschews formal political institutions, even as it becomes an increasingly abstract affair for academics only. Even more, it no longer sees exploitation and domination in concrete, material terms. As Robert Meister has insightfully argued, “As soon as the paradigm of language supplants the model of production, exploitation appears as merely another way of being misunderstood.”[6] The result is not political resistance in any meaningful sense of the term, but the “spectacle” of a political demonstration or some puerile display of public “art.”[7] In the meantime, more politically mature and reactionary forces have been able to roll back the welfare state, consolidate economic and political power, and help craft a neoliberal social order.[8] A second feature of alienated theory is its emphasis on anti-rational, anti-Enlightenment and anti-science as an epistemological and political stance. Knowledge, now seen as inherently braided with power, is recast as an interpretive activity; impartiality is a myth of scientific rationality, one premised on the power of exclusion. The perspective of the marginalized now becomes the central focus of how knowledge ought to be constructed. Dispensing with objectivity, theorists are now able to transform theory, properly understood as the search for the explanation of facts, into a kind of aesthetic enterprise where the boundaries between politics and culture blur.[9] New theoretical languages and vocabularies have been invented where the aim is not the explanation of reality or the construction of rational argument, but the exploration of some alternative perspective that has been repressed. Universalist principles and categories are anathema, on this view, to radical politics because of their tendency to crush difference and privilege exclusion. Now, we are told to privilege experience, the phenomenological dimensions of power over its structural causes. This results in a collapse of politics into culture. It displaces politics in its “dirty hands” manifestation where realizable ends are sought and fought for and instead insists on the “utopian” as an impossible goal. As Stanley Aronowitz argues, “utopian thought seeks to transform the present by articulating an alternative future, its power lies in its lack of respect for politics as the art of the possible, in its insistence that realism consists in the demand for the impossible.”[10] Power is now to be grasped through the elusive terrain of culture, the non-empirical sources of which can no longer be located and are hence “overdetermined.”[11] No longer can we look to class, to the power of privilege, but rather to the ways that power and knowledge are entwined. All objective points of reference have been abandoned. With the academic victory privileging the discourse of identity, the “unreal” has taken precedence over the real.[12] A third salient feature of this nouveau radicalism is its emphasis on spontaneous, disruptive and localized struggle as the means of politics. Taking their cues from the legacy of anarchism and third-world indigenous struggles such as the Zapatistas, these tactics are seen as the essence of a democratic politics of resistance. The basis for new movements is now seen to be the emergence of new identities, themselves created from the exaggerated subjectivity of the modern, narcissistic self.[13] Rejecting the state and conceiving of a post-state politics is now a central dogma of the new “radical” theorists. Since the state is seen to be inherently despotic, only the spontaneous, autonomous collection of groups who act against the state and outside of it are viewed as vehicles of political change. The absence of domination is now cast as the freedom to explore narcissistic lifestyles as well as expand an already exaggerated subjectivity where participatory and direct democracy become the political ideal. In the end, they valorize the individual’s resistance to the state and the power of localism. Here left and right touch in their extremes: it is precisely a libertarian ethos of freedom that dominates their vision, as David Harvey has insightfully pointed out: “This is the world that libertarian Republicans construct. It is also the view of individual liberty and freedom embraced by much of the anarchist and autonomist left, even as the capitalist version of the free market is roundly condemned.”[14] Now, it is a “multitude,” a disruptive demos, that commands the political imaginary of the new radicals. Instead of a rational radical position which seeks to democratize the state and its powers and to transform it in order to enhance and protect public goods, the new interpretation of radical democracy “is only intelligible once it is thought as being against the state – and once the term ‘democratic State,’ which appeared so naturally from Tocqueville’s pen, is by the same stroke rejected.”[15] In turn, claims like these have been used to legitimize the use of violence; to pit the violence of the state against “emancipatory violence.”[16] Further, it has been used as a pretext for reviving left-wing totalitarian traditions, such as Jacobinism, Leninism, and Maoism, and reconsidering their significance for the modern left.[17] Of course, these claims are made cautiously and a modern Maoist like Alain Badiou easily slips into patent misapplication of mathematics to obscure his politics.[18] Finally, in opposition to the universal and the concrete, the new radical politics and its advocates in the academy have come to celebrate the uncertain and unstable as a principle both for conducting politics and pursuing research. Hence, for example, the history of feminist thought has “only paradoxes to offer.”[19] The effort to understand mechanisms of domination and oppression is itself a manifestation of ideology.[20] Any recourse to normative judgments or empirical claims is hopeless. “In vain do we try to break out of the ideological dream by ‘opening our eyes and trying to see reality as it is,’ by throwing away the ideological spectacles: as the subjects of such a post-ideological, objective, sober look, free of so-called ideological prejudices, as the subjects of a look which views the facts as they are, we remain throughout ‘the consciousness of our ideological dream.’”[21] Ultimately, for the new radical intellectual, everything is a form of ideology. This does not mean that critique should become more rigorous, but, rather, that we should celebrate indeterminacy. Au courant theories of emancipation start with the premise that there is no “real.” We become free when we are disabused of the notion that critique can reveal truths that are obfuscated by social relations. We are liberated from definitions and categorizations. Such thinking has had its strongest effect among radical theorists discussing race and gender. Racial and gendered oppression is supposedly combatted when we recognize these categories as ideological constructions. However, the consequence of such thinking leaves the systemic and institutionalized forces that perpetuate oppression unaddressed. Both society and individual are constructed by incommensurables. This means that any political struggle that would seek to establish a freer, more just society would fall prey to merely creating new ideologies.

Second, however, it is also true that the series of shifts from the old vocabulary to the new one has entailed certain losses. In particular, the relative de-emphasizing of system-level causation, in favour of a new emphasis on the importance of individual action or inaction, tends to weaken the integration of everyday Left discourse with the theoretical analysis of systems like capitalism and colonialism. It is true that, in exchange, we have a vocabulary that better enables us to focus on class privilege and settler privilege. But if we are to defeat colonialism and capitalism, we cannot do so one person at a time, or one interaction or relationship at a time. The systems themselves have to be named, understood, attacked and overthrown. This issue is, obviously, closely connected to the loss of a focus on liberation. A liberation focus and a systems focus share a common understanding: that the purpose of the Left is to defeat systems of exploitation and oppression. Challenging immediate impacts is important, but not enough. It is necessary, but by no means sufficient. Moreover, the way we challenge everyday impacts should be informed by our understanding that they are not produced simply by individual actions, but by the operation of large-scale systems. The Left needs a vocabulary, and a self-understanding, that highlights and foregrounds the importance of constructing and expanding anti-systemic movements that aim to defeat systems of oppressive and exploitative power. It is hard not to think that the older vocabulary better expresses this insight, even as it obstructs our access to other critical insights that are also indispensable.

(Interview by Devon Douglas-Bowers, “Questioning the Left: An Interview with Gregory Smulewicz-Zucker and Michael J. Thompson,” The Hampton Institution, http://www.hamptoninstitution.org/questioning-the-left.html#.VmTzZN8rJE4)

Do you think that there is any way to reverse this trend of the Left falling further and further into the abyss of political irrelevancy?

(Nick and Alex, “Inventing the Future: Postcapitalism and a World Without Work,” Kindle Book)

NAVIGATING NEOLIBERALISM While utopias seek to transform the cultural hegemony of neoliberalism, education forms a key institution for transforming intellectual hegemony. It is the educational apparatus that indoctrinates new generations in the dominant values of a particular society, reproducing its ideology through the decades. In the education system, children learn the basic ideas of a society, respect for (in fact, submission to) the existing order, and the skills necessary to distribute them along different segments of the labour market. 58 Transforming the educational system of intellectuals is therefore a key task in building a new hegemony. 59 It is not for nothing that the Nobel Prize– winning economist Paul Samuelson wrote that: ‘I don’t care who writes a nation’s laws, or crafts its advanced treatises, if I can write its economics textbooks.’ Projects focused on changing this institutional element of society could focus on three broad goals: pluralising the teaching of economics, reinvigorating the study of leftist economics and expanding popular economic literacy. It is often forgotten, so deeply are we embedded in neoliberalism, that economics was once a relatively pluralist discipline. The interwar period was a time of healthy competition between a variety of formalist and non-formalist approaches. 60 In academic journals, it was not unusual to see discussions of economic planning, the tendency for the rate of profit to fall, and other standard categories of Marxist economics. In the 1960s, the Cambridge capital controversy brought together heterodox and mainstream thinkers in a seminal debate about the foundations of the discipline – one that everyone admits the heterodox thinkers won. 61 As late as the 1970s, one of the founders of modern economics was discussing exploitation, the labour theory of value and the transformation problem in a leading economics journal. 62 Such an event is difficult to imagine today. While neoclassical economics is a large tent that contains a variety of approaches, it is nevertheless a fundamentally limited perspective on what counts as real economic knowledge. This problem is compounded by the particular methodological demands of the most preeminent journals, with formal modelling taking precedence over more sociological analyses and qualitative understandings. If the broad cultural and academic ideas of how to run economies are to change, at a minimum it will require more pluralism in the education of students. Here, there are glimmers of hope for a pluralist revival. Work is being done across the world to bring alternative economics to mainstream universities, and groups of students and professionals alike are beginning to mobilise around this issue. Since 2000, numerous universities have seen students vocally demand pluralism in their economics education. 63 More recent years have seen students openly protesting the defenders of mainstream economics, and the emergence of groups like the Post-Crash Economic Society and Rethinking Economics that are making concerted efforts to change the curriculum. 64 Essential to a project of pluralising economics, however, is the development of a research programme and textbooks. Part of the reason for the rise of formalist approaches is precisely their fit with programme and textbooks. Part of the reason for the rise of formalist approaches is precisely their fit with institutional requirements of higher education: they provided theories for researchers to spend time testing, textbooks and PhDs to continue a lineage of thought, and clear and transmissible 65 principles. Today, the field has come to be dominated by neoclassical textbooks, and the result is that, even if professors want to pluralise the discipline, they do not have many accessible resources to hand. Indications that this might be changing include the creation of a heterodox textbook by two proponents of modem monetary theory.67 But more work needs to be done on this front in order to broaden the parochial horizons of mainstream economics.

(James, The Uses of Neoliberalism, Antipode, Vol. 41, No. S1, pp 166–184)

If we are seeking, as this special issue of Antipode aspires to do, to link our critical analyses to the world of grounded political struggle—not only to interpret the world in various ways, but also to change it—then there is much to be said for focusing, as I have here, on mundane, real- world debates around policy and politics, even if doing so inevitably puts us on the compromised and reformist terrain of the possible, rather than the seductive high ground of revolutionary ideals and utopian desires. But I would also insist that there is more at stake in the examples I have discussed here than simply a slightly better way to ameliorate the miseries of the chronically poor, or a technically superior method for relieving the suffering of famine victims.¶ My point in discussing the South African BIG campaign, for instance, is not really to argue for its implementation. There is much in the campaign that is appealing, to be sure. But one can just as easily identify a series of worries that would bring the whole proposal into doubt. Does not, for instance, the decoupling of the question of assistance from the issue of labor, and the associated valorization of the “informal”, help provide a kind of alibi for the failures of the South African regime to pursue policies that would do more to create jobs? Would not the creation of a basic income benefit tied to national citizenship simply exacerbate the vicious xenophobia that already divides the South African poor,¶ in a context where many of the poorest are not citizens, and would thus not be eligible for the BIG? Perhaps even more fundamentally, is the idea of basic income really capable of commanding the mass support that alone could make it a central pillar of a new approach to distribution? The record to date gives powerful reasons to doubt it. So far, the technocrats’ dreams of relieving poverty through efficient cash transfers have attracted little support from actual poor people, who seem to find that vision a bit pale and washed out, compared with the vivid (if vague) populist promises of jobs and personalistic social inclusion long offered by the ANC patronage machine, and lately personified by Jacob Zuma (Ferguson forthcoming).¶ My real interest in the policy proposals discussed here, in fact, has little to do with the narrow policy questions to which they seek to provide answers. For what is most significant, for my purposes, is not whether or not these are good policies, but the way that they illustrate a process through which specific governmental devices and modes of reasoning that we have become used to associating with a very particular (and conservative) political agenda (“neoliberalism”) may be in the process of being peeled away from that agenda, and put to very different uses. Any progressive who takes seriously the challenge I pointed to at the start of this essay, the challenge of developing new progressive arts of government, ought to find this turn of events of considerable interest.¶ As Steven Collier (2005) has recently pointed out, it is important to question the assumption that there is, or must be, a neat or automatic fit between a hegemonic “neoliberal” political-economic project (however that might be characterized), on the one hand, and specific “neoliberal” techniques, on the other. Close attention to particular techniques (such as the use of quantitative calculation, free choice, and price driven by supply and demand) in particular settings (in Collier’s case, fiscal and budgetary reform in post-Soviet Russia) shows that the relationship between the technical and the political-economic “is much more polymorphous and unstable than is assumed in much critical geographical work”, and that neoliberal technical mechanisms are in fact “deployed in relation to diverse political projects and social norms” (2005:2).¶ As I suggested in referencing the role of statistics and techniques for pooling risk in the creation of social democratic welfare states, social technologies need not have any essential or eternal loyalty to the political formations within which they were first developed. Insurance rationality at the end of the nineteenth century had no essential vocation to provide security and solidarity to the working class; it was turned to that purpose (in some substantial measure) because it was available, in the right place at the right time, to be appropriated for that use. Specific ways of solving or posing governmental problems, specific institutional and intellectual mechanisms, can be combined in an almost infinite variety of ways, to accomplish different social ends. With social, as with any other sort of technology, it is not the machines or the mechanisms that decide what they will be used to do.¶ Foucault (2008:94) concluded his discussion of socialist government- ality by insisting that the answers to the Left’s governmental problems require not yet another search through our sacred texts, but a process of conceptual and institutional innovation. “[I]f there is a really socialist governmentality, then it is not hidden within socialism and its texts. It cannot be deduced from them. It must be invented”. But invention in the domain of governmental technique is rarely something worked up out of whole cloth. More often, it involves a kind of bricolage (Le ́vi- Strauss 1966), a piecing together of something new out of scavenged parts originally intended for some other purpose. As we pursue such a process of improvisatory invention, we might begin by making an inventory of the parts available for such tinkering, keeping all the while an open mind about how different mechanisms might be put to work, and what kinds of purposes they might serve. If we can go beyond seeing in “neoliberalism” an evil essence or an automatic unity, and instead learn to see a field of specific governmental techniques, we may be surprised to find that some of them can be repurposed, and put to work in the service of political projects very different from those usually associated with that word. If so, we may find that the cabinet of governmental arts available to us is a bit less bare than first appeared, and that some rather useful little mechanisms may be nearer to hand than we thought.

(Gregory, “Radical Intellectuals and the Subversion of Progressive Politics,” p. 141-143)

Neo-anarchism may not be the primary idiom through which the Left practices politics, but its emphasis on conduct as expressive of freedom is already showing its broader detrimental implications. If the broader Left continues to embrace this stance, it will abandon any practical means for establishing goals and, consequently, debilitate its politics. Without goals, the Left cannot assess its strength or success. The only measure becomes how free one subjectively feels. Freedom ceases to be something objective. Only the subject can determine whether or not she is free. Neo-anarchism is not only problematic in theory. It is fatal for political praxis. The historic means by which political change has been achieved, specifically the mobilization of movements and the formation of parties, are foreclosed because Of their hierarchical Structures. Measurable gains—whether in terms of policy or legislative change—lose their historic significance as exemplifying antiradical reformism. Utility of parties is denigrated because they are held to entirely subjective standards. This conception of politics only allows the policies that the Left has battled against to flourish. Ultimately, neo-anarchism upholds the very politics it claims to oppose. Its emphasis on subjectivity and community are contemporary manifestations of the reactionary antimodernism that has perennially plagued politics on both the Left and the Right for over a century and a half. The emphasis on subjectivity breeds irrationalism, outbursts of anguished populism, mysticism, and vitalism. The retreat from politics into subjectivity leads to its antipode. Neo-anarchism's talk about consensus-building leads to either political inaction or, worse, an antiliberal conception of political participation that fails to defend differing views. Its refusal to distinguish between the illegitimate and legitimate exercise of authority is prone to a conspiratorial mind-set. Its rejection of intermediary political bodies abolishes the institutions that mediate political control. Against all this, the neo-anarchist and other extremist elements on the Left can rightly cite myriad cases in which institutions have acted as instruments of oppression and domination. But this is to willfully confuse the issues at stake. The point is not that the problems they identify do not exist, but that their solutions pose serious dangers. In a critique of Simone Weil, Daniel Bensaid provided a prescient warning about the kind of disengage- ment from politics that has been advocated by the neo-anarchists: The refusal of profane politics, with its impurities, uncertainties, and wobbly conventions, leads ineluctably back to theology and its jumble of graces, miracles, revelations, repentances, and pardons. Illusory flights from the sordidness of politics actually perpetuate impotence. Instead Of pretending to write out of the contradictions between unconditional principles and the conditionality of practical living, politics means taking a stand there and working to surmount it without ever suppressing it. Get rid of mediation by political parties and you will have the single party— even the single State—of the "partyless."63 Neo-anarchism's rejection of "profane politics" carries reactionary impli- cations. The insistence on the immanence of freedom is an expression of political impotence, which becomes all the more disconcerting as defenses of left-wing violence abound. 64 As the Left copes with a worsening political terrain, it would not only be ill advised, but also potentially seriously detrimental to the Left's capac- icy to reassert its relevance, for it to continue on its current trajectory. The solution does not lie in more abstract principles, but more concrete ones. It does not lie in political disengagement, but a more active role in real politics. This means organizing movements with clear demands. It means building think tanks to inform policies, which, consequently, means more intellectuals not fewer. It also means building constituencies for political parties and cultivating political candidates who can be held accountable to their constituents. These are the kinds of measures that would allow the Left to work progressively within the framework Of mod- ern politics instead of engaging in the kind of illusory triumphalism that neo-anarchism endorses. The work of radical politics is to realize political programs and not to retreat into fantastical worlds of the imagination and exaggerated subjectivity.

(Kaspar and Mitchell, “State-Phobia, Civil Society, and a Certain Vitalism”, Constellations 19.3)

Governmentality, in short, is an analysis of the state and not something that lies beyond it. It shows the conditions of experience of the “state” as that which confronts an external domain – civil society – to which it must grant a measure of free action in order for government to function. It grows out of a diagnosis of the present as one in which the state has come to be regarded as essentially despotic, the source of evil in the world, and as a repressive force that deforms our subjectivity, from the inside as much as the outside, limiting our potentiality in the world. For Foucault, this is a view shared not only by the ultra-left that seeks a violent overthrow of the state, but also by variants of neoliberalism in the twentieth century. This view is rooted in the anti-state eschatology of the nineteenth century, which has the notion of civil society at its core.¶ In Foucault’s context, to reject a theory of the state was to reject a Marxist theory of the state and to take note of anti-institutional movements in both liberal democracies and those opposed to state socialism. Today, any rejection of analyses conducted in statist terms takes place in a changed context: in the context of the repeated mantra of “governance” theorists who speak of a shift from government to governance and of a “hollowing out the state”; against the backdrop of conceptions of globalization that claim that global flows of trade, finance, information, and culture have undone the “container” of the national state39; and in the presence of political analyses that claim that struggles directed toward the state have been displaced by grassroots movements conducting sub-, micro-, and transversal politics underneath, across, and above the territorial state. In short, to reject a theory of the state in favor of an analysis of local struggles in the 1970s marked a break with a prevailing left intellectual problematic and an attempt to open up the discussion of government and state. In our own time, to dissolve the concept of the state has the opposite effect: it merely reinforces what has become a kind of anti-political orthodoxy that has rendered the left a meaningless term. This dissolution easily makes an accession to political agendas fatally shaped by the militant intellectual and political “thought collective” of which Foucault was an early analyst – to neoliberalism.40

(Interview by Devon Douglas-Bowers, “Questioning the Left: An Interview with Gregory Smulewicz-Zucker and Michael J. Thompson,” The Hampton Institution, http://www.hamptoninstitution.org/questioning-the-left.html#.VmTzZN8rJE4)

Expand upon the statement: "This new radicalism has made itself so irrelevant with respect to real politics that it ends up serving as a kind of cathartic space for the justifiable anxieties wrought by late capitalism further stabilizing its systemic and integrative power rather than disrupting it." What exactly do you mean by this? Also, couldn't some push back and argue that in many ways, this new radicalism is disruptive, as can be seen by the Black Bloc, activists fighting against the Keystone XL pipeline, and those who engage in direct action? This was not meant as a critique of those who participate in direct action. Direct action becomes the only means for combatting injustices when concrete political programs fade away. What is worrying is the way direct action has supplanted political strategy much in the same way that so-called theory has become fetishized in and of itself. Our critique questions the political salience of these actions as a general political program. Neo-anarchism has become a model for political activity on the left. It has claimed for itself the mantle of engaged politics. We think this is a grave error. When demonstrations occur, they are more often than not spaces for moral rage, not for political programs. Take the Civil Rights movement. Yes, there were symbolic acts of direct action, but these were integrated into a more general movement that included a political strategy to influence political elites, crafting ideas for legislation to be enacted, as well as a new cultural understanding of civic rights. To isolate ourselves to direct action without a larger movement, without a more radical program for action, for what you want to implement in a positive way through institutions, is simply not radical politics. This is the "cathartic space" we refer to: it grants a moral self-righteousness to the individual who has genuine anger against society. But we should not confuse this with the hard work of political action that has in view the transformation of society through the shaping of law, winning elections, and so on. Look at modern conservatives as an example. During the 1960s, they were a political, cultural and intellectual minority. Their ideas for destroying public schools (Milton Friedman championed the school voucher idea, considered insane at the time), for constitutional interpretation, for economic liberalization and privatization, and so on were policy non-starters. Now they have reframed American political life. Look at the last two vice presidential Republican candidates. As patently imbecilic as Sarah Palin and Paul Ryan are, the fact that such people are able to run in national elections and advocate political policies evidences how fringe ideas gained some degree of public approval because there is no rational radical left to oppose them. Radicals have no ideas about how to combat these policy imperatives, and this is simply absurd. How can we talk about radical politics that has any efficacy if we oppose the state, taking law, political parties, and so on seriously as mechanisms for change? Not to do so is to suffer from a kind of infantile disorder. This makes Leftists surrender their place in politics to the right. The dangers are real.

(Alex, and Nick, http://criticallegalthinking.com/2013/05/14/accelerate-manifesto-for-an-accelerationist-politics/)

1. We believe the most important division in today’s left is between those that hold to a folk politics of localism, direct action, and relentless horizontalism, and those that outline what must become called an accelerationist politics at ease with a modernity of abstraction, complexity, globality, and technology. The former remains content with establishing small and temporary spaces of non-​capitalist social relations, eschewing the real problems entailed in facing foes which are intrinsically non-​local, abstract, and rooted deep in our everyday infrastructure. The failure of such politics has been built-​in from the very beginning. By contrast, an accelerationist politics seeks to preserve the gains of late capitalism while going further than its value system, governance structures, and mass pathologies will allow.

(Gregory, “The Treason of Intellectual Radicalism and the Collapse of Leftist Politics,” LOGOS, Winter edition)

In many ways this is the very product of the system they shallowly critique. The class basis of the new radicalism no longer sounds in key with working people; no longer is it the expression of organic intellectuals. With no movement to attach to, no working class politics to inform their political sensibilities, theory becomes a fetish. Exploitation and domination are real problems, but the words lose their meaning if they are not attached to concrete referents. This is a disservice to the exploited and dominated. It is to place them – as Bertolt Brecht wrote at the conclusion of the film version of his Threepenny Opera – back in the dark. They retain their ignominious invisibility. Radical theory should illuminate present social relations. Sadly, millennial Marxists only fetishize it. This purported revival of Marxian politics is not a revolt by the generations raised during the conservative Reagan revolution and economic complacency of the Clinton-era’s credit economy. Their Marxism is the product of the sensibilities cultivated by late capitalism. It’s facile and unreflective cant a mere sound-byte radicalism ready-made for and by a cultural consciousness mauled by Facebook and Twitter.

(Interview by Devon Douglas-Bowers, “Questioning the Left: An Interview with Gregory Smulewicz-Zucker and Michael J. Thompson,” The Hampton Institution, http://www.hamptoninstitution.org/questioning-the-left.html#.VmTzZN8rJE4)

You write early in the article that "Today, leftist political theory in the academy has fallen under the spell of ideas so far removed from actual political issues[.]" Do you think that this is a failing that is solely in the academy? It seems that it is a widespread failure by the left as a whole, that they are more focused on the theoretical than anything that is truly concrete. We agree that the problem is not solely with the academy. It is important to look at the academy because the kind of work that is done in the academy is, in part, often a reflection of what people think they can achieve on the ground. The main issue seems to be that moral revulsion has supplanted the critique of social mechanisms that produce the problems that outrage people. It is also important to stress that moral revulsion is not a substitute for, nor an equivalent of, political action and political strategy. The key, as we see it, is to understand that politics is about shaping not only the mentality of citizens and the norms of culture, but more crucially about organizing the legitimate power of the state to enforce laws that prevent social injustice and expand the horizon of social justice. This requires understanding the mechanisms of politics, of elections, of the law, of constitutional interpretation, and so on. The contemporary left has abandoned these concerns and has instead decided to view them as attributes of a system that needs to be rejected. This is simply absurd and, in our view, anti-political. We also think that there is a problem with what theory has become. The only reason that a cleavage has developed between theory and practice is because the function of theory has been abandoned. It is important to recognize that what is now touted as theory is not actually theory. Theory plays a vital role in diagnosing and critiquing concrete political problems. People like Zizek and Badiou do not have theories. Their work is so convoluted and self-referential that there is no link to the concrete. It masquerades as theory. They are able to create their own fan clubs and say whatever they want because they purposefully construct so-called theories that allow them to evade critical evaluation. Esotericism has become a virtue unto itself. From this standpoint, the aversion to theory is understandable. So-called theory has become a world for the initiated. This is a distortion of theory. It is merely the flipside of a society that can dismiss evolution as "only a theory."

(Nick and Alex, “Inventing the Future: Postcapitalism and a World Without Work,” Kindle Book)

Less politically radical than horizontalism, though no less ubiquitous, is localism. As an ideology, localism extends far beyond the left, inflecting the politics of pro-capitalists, anti-capitalists, radicals and mainstream culture alike, as a new kind of political common sense. Shared between all of these is a belief that the abstraction and sheer scale of the modern world is at the root of our present political, ecological and economic problems, and that the solution therefore lies in adopting a ‘small is beautiful’ approach to the world. 69 Small-scale actions, local economies, immediate communities, face-to-face interaction – all of these responses characterise the localist worldview. In a time when most of the political strategies and tactics developed in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries appear blunted and ineffectual, localism has a seductive logic to it. In all its diverse variants, from centre-right communitarianism70 to ethical consumerism, 71 developmental microloans, and contemporary anarchist practice, 72 the promise it offers to do something concrete, enabling political action with immediately noticeable effects, is empowering on an individual level. But this sense of empowerment can be misleading. The problem with localism is that, in attempting to reduce large-scale systemic problems to the more manageable sphere of the local community, it effectively denies the systemically interconnected nature of today’s world. Problems such as global exploitation, planetary climate change, rising surplus populations, and the repeated crises of capitalism are abstract in appearance, complex in structure, and non-localised. Though they touch upon every locality, they are never fully manifested in any particular region. Fundamentally, these are systemic and abstract problems, requiring systemic and abstract responses. While much of the populist localism on the right can easily be dismissed as regressive macho fantasy (for example, secessionist libertarianism), sinister ideological cover for austerity economics (the UK Conservative Party’s ‘Big Society’) or downright racist (the nationalist or fascist blaming of immigrants for structural economic problems), the localism of the left has been less thoroughly scrutinised. Though undoubtedly well-meaning, both the radical and mainstream left partake in localist politics and economics to their detriment. In what follows we will critically examine two of the more popular variants – local food and economic localism – which in very different areas exemplify the problematic dynamics of localism in general.