We don’t need to win that voting neg starts the revolution or inaugurates a socialist utopia—critiquing the legitimating ideals behind their policy proposal is necessary and sufficient to guide emancipatory struggle.

The problem goes even further. Successful struggles against inequality and exclusion and the structures that enable them do not simply obscure systemic domination: they often enhance it. This happens because such struggles confer value on the system (and the attendant notions of a successful life and an accom- plished person) within which we seek equality and inclusion. In this way, struggles against relational and structural domination risk deepening systemic domination. While feminists struggled against the oppressive structure of patriarchy and fought for equality with men in the labor market, women in fact increased the desirability and, ergo, the legitimacy of the competitive pro- duction of profit as a systemic dynamic of capitalism. Struggles against global capitalism such as “America First” and Brexit valo- rize capitalism at home. The welfare state consensus on inclusive growth and redistribution has elevated the value of prosperity into a right to be middle-class, with expectations for ever-improving living standards. This formula of prosperity-for-all remedied the relational injustice of inequality, but did so to a great extent by deepening the systemic injustice of environmental destruction.

The protests of the Indignados against austerity policy expressed the paradox of emancipation perfectly in their famous slogan “We are not against the system; the system is against us.” They render the system more valuable through calls for being included in it. This is how the validation of the system often penetrates the language of protest and disables the radicalization of social protest: that is, it prevents the transition from fighting relational forms of injustice to fighting systemic ones. That is why it is imperative that when addressing inequality and exclusion, intellectual critique and political mobilization make sure to also target the very constitutive logic of the social order within which inclusion and equality are being pursued.

This leads me to the final element of the theoretical model that guides my analysis: the notions of emancipatory and radical practices. I noted in tenet 4 that social practice is the main unit of analysis, referring to intersubjective action through which people both create their social reality and make sense of it. As Marx observed, herein lies the potential for radical emancipatory transformation, for “revolutionary” or “practical-critical” activity (Marx [1845] 1969, theses I and III). In light of the three forms of domination delineated above, I propose to define emancipatory social practices as ones that target these forms of domination. The term radical practice, however, I reserve for practices that aim to eradicate systemic domination. Successful radical change would therefore not necessitate a political revolution, a terminal crisis of capitalism, or a utopia to steer us toward transformation. Radical change would be a matter of mobilizing a broad coalition of social forces to engage in radical practices meant to eliminate injustices rooted in the systemic dynamics of capitalism, namely the competitive production of profit.

As to the vocation of intellectual critique, I have averred that the purpose of critique is not to spell out principles of justice or features of the good life, but to bring to light the sociostructural origin of experiences of injustice in order to articulate a path for emancipation by reducing oppression (Azmanova 2011c, 117; 2012b, 50–52, 228–36; 2012c). However, only by targeting systemic domination can there be radical change. To be truly radical, therefore, a critical theorist needs at minimum to identify and signal the danger of deepening systemic domination while fighting successfully other forms of domination—to alert against the “paradox of emancipation.” The ultimate goal of the critical enterprise is to illuminate possible alliances (beyond animosities over the unfair distribution of resources and opportunities) that are capable of delivering such radical change.

It is time to attempt to put the above elements of analysis into a formula of critique and ask what it would mean to conduct a normative and diagnostic analysis of our contemporary social and political order from the perspective of critical social theory. Such analysis would proceed from a specific grievance, preferably one perceived largely as a social pathology, and use it as an empirical entry point. It would then trace the manner in which grievances of injustice, expressed by civil society, affect the framework of political reference by making these concerns politically salient in a particular way, namely, having to do with the fair distribu- tion of life-chances as specified by the dominant legitimation matrix. It would scrutinize the terms in which grievances are politicized—that is, how they obtain political significance as claims to justice and appeals for policy action— and how they eventually alter the legitimacy deal between citizens and pub- lic authority.

Further, the inquiry would direct attention to the structural and systemic dynamics of the social order: the three forms of domination and patterns of injustice related to them. It would seek to identify those antinomies (contradictions) of contemporary capitalism that foster historically particular, but structurally general experiences of injustice from which normatively general- izable notions of justice can be derived.

Such an analysis should be guided by the following questions: What are the key dynamics at work within the political econ- omy of contemporary capitalism? In other words, what are the drivers in the formation and distribution of life-chances in the globally integrated capitalism of the early twenty-first century? How do these dynamics trigger structural antinomies that in turn translate into historical patterns of social injustice within the trajectories of relational, structural, and systemic domina- tion? What is the common denominator behind the various, often conflicting grievances? What places them in an agonistic dialogue of a meaningful disagreement about injustice? This will eventually allow us to derive normatively generalizable notions of justice that can guide progressive politics as strategies of emancipation befitting the historical circumstances of our times. These strategies will take shape as emancipatory practices that target relational, structural, and systemic forms of domination.