The
Struggle Against Dystopia
by Henry
A. Giroux
(Part IΙI)
Democracy is
not compatible with capitalism but is congruent with a version of
democratic socialism in which the wealth, resources, and benefits of
a social order are shared in an equitable and just manner. Democracy
as a promise means that society can never be just enough and that the
self-reflection and struggles that enable all members of the
community to participate in the decisions and institutions that shape
their lives must be continually debated, safeguarded, and preserved
at all costs. The rebuilding of a radical democracy must be
accompanied with placing a high priority on renewing the social
contract, embracing the demands of the commons, encouraging social
investments, and the regeneration of the social contract. These are
only a few of the issues that should be a central goal for the
development of a broad-based radical social movement. I want to
emphasize that I am not suggesting that developing a new
understanding of politics as a call to reclaim a radical democracy be
understood as simply a pragmatic adjustment of the institutions of
liberal democracy or a return to the social democracy of the New Deal
and Great Society.
On the
contrary, any rethinking of the political can only be comprehended as
part of a radical break from liberalism and formalistic politics if
there is to be any move towards a genuine democracy in which matters
of equality, power, and justice are central to what can be called a
radical democratic politics. Such a task necessitates a politics and
pedagogy that not only expands critical awareness and promotes
critical modes of inquiry but also sustains public spheres, builds
new modes of solidarity and connections and promotes strategies and
organizations that create not simply ruptures such as massive
demonstrations but real changes that are systemic and long standing.
If such a politics is to make any difference, it must be worldly;
that is, it must incorporate a critical public pedagogy and an
understanding of cultural politics that not only contemplates social
problems but also addresses the conditions for new forms of
democratic political exchange and enables new forms of agency, power,
and collective struggle. The collapse of the United States into
neoliberal authoritarianism signals not simply a crisis of politics
and democracy, but a crisis of ideas, values, and agency itself.
Hence, calling for a revival of the educative nature of politics and
the radical imagination is more than a simply call to find ways to
change consciousness; it is first and foremost an attempt to
understand that education is at the center of a struggle over what
kinds of agency will be created in the interest of legitimating the
present and producing a particular kind of future. This is an
imminently educative, moral, and political task and it is only
through such recognition that initial steps can be taken to challenge
the powerful ideological and affective spaces through which
neoliberalism produces the desires, identities, and values that bind
people to its forms of predatory governance.
The moral,
political, and economic violence of neoliberalism must be made
visible, its institutional structures dismantled, and the elite
interests it serves exposed. The fog of historical, social and
political amnesia must be eliminated through the development of
educational programs, pedagogical practices, ideological
interventions, and public narratives that provide the critical and
analytical tools to enable the public to analyze both underlying
ideologies and institutions of neoliberal capitalism as well as the
intellectual and economic resources needed to provide meaningful
alternatives to the corporate authoritarianism that passes itself off
as an updated mode of democracy. What is important here is that the
struggle against neoliberalism focus on those forms of domination
that pose a threat to those public spheres essential to developing
the critical formative cultures that nourish modes of thinking,
analysis, and social formations necessary for a radical democracy.
In addition,
the left has to do more than chart out the mechanisms through which
neoliberal authoritarianism sustains itself. And for too many on the
left this means simply understanding the economic forces that drive
neoliberal global capitalism. While this structural logic is
important, it does not go far enough. As Stuart Hall has insisted
“There’s no politics without identification. People have to
invest something of themselves, something that they recognize is
meaningful to them, or speaks to their condition and without that
moment of recognition” any effort to change the way people inhabit
social relations of domination will fail. Pierre Bourdieu takes this
logic further in arguing that left has often failed to recognize
“that the most important forms of domination are not only economic
but also intellectual and pedagogical, and lie on the side of belief
and persuasion.” He insists, rightly, that it is crucial for the
left and other progressives to recognize that intellectuals bear an
enormous responsibility for challenging this form of domination by
developing tactics “that lie on the side of the symbolic and
pedagogical dimensions of struggle.”
If
neoliberal authoritarianism is to be challenged and overcome, it is
crucial that intellectuals, unions, workers, young people, and
various social movements unite to reclaim democracy as a central
element in fashioning a radical imagination that foregrounds the
necessity for drastically altering the material and symbolic forces
that hide behind a counterfeit claim to participatory democracy. This
means imagining a radical democracy that can provide a living wage,
decent health care, public works, and massive investments in
education, child care, housing for the poor, along with a range of
other crucial social provisions that can make a difference between
living and dying for those who have been cast into the ranks of the
disposable.
There are
new signs indicating that the search for a new understanding of
politics and the refashioning of a radical imagination are emerging,
especially in Greece, Germany, Spain, and Denmark, where expressions
of new political formations can be found in political groups such as
Podemos, Die Linke, Syriza, and the Red-Green Alliance. While these
political formations have differences, what they share is a rejection
of stale reformism that has marked liberal politics for the last 40
years. These new political formations are offering alternatives to a
new kind of social order in which capitalism does not equal
democracy. But more importantly, they are not tied merely to unions
and older political factions and are uniting with social movements
under a broad and comprehensive vision of politics and change that
goes beyond identity politics and organizes for the long haul.
Moreover, as Juan Pablo Ferrero points out, these parties not only
take seriously the need for economic change but also the need for new
cultural formations and modes of change. The struggle against
neoliberal common sense is as important as the struggle against those
institutions and material modes of capital that are the foundation of
traditional politics of resistance. Language, communication, and
pedagogy are crucial to these movements as part of their attempt to
construct a new kind of informed and critical political agent, one
freed from the orbits of neoliberal privatization and the
all-embracing reach of a commodified and militarized society.
What
Podemos, Syriza, and other new political movements on the left make
clear is that the fight against neoliberalism and the related
anti-democratic tendencies that inform it must not settle for simply
reforming the existing parameters of the social order. Neoliberalism
has created an economic, cultural, and social system and social order
that is not only as broken as it is dangerous, but also pathological
in the violence and misery it produces. Any viable struggle must
acknowledge that if the current modes of domination are to change, a
newly developed emphasis must be placed on creating the formative
culture that inspires and energizes young people, educators, artists,
and others to organize and struggle for the promise of a substantive
democracy.
At the same
time, particular injustices must be understood through the
specificity of the conditions in which they develop and take hold and
also in relation to the whole of the social order. This means
developing modes of analyses capable of connecting isolated and
individualized issues to more generalized notions of freedom, and
developing theoretical frameworks in which it becomes possible to
translate private troubles into broader more systemic conditions. At
the very least, a new political imaginary suggests developing modes
of analyses that connects the dots. This is a particularly important
goal given that the fragmentation of the left has been partly
responsible for its inability to develop a wide political and
ideological umbrella to address a range of problems extending from
extreme poverty, the assault on the environment, the emergence of the
permanent warfare state, the abolition of voting rights, the assault
on public servants, women’s rights, and social provisions, and a
range of other issues that erode the possibilities for a radical
democracy. Neoliberalism stands for the death of democracy and the
commodification and repression of any movement that is going to
successfully challenge it.
One of the
most serious challenges facing progressives is the task of developing
a discourse of both critique and possibility. This means insisting
that democracy begins to fail and political life becomes impoverished
in the absence of those vital public spheres such as higher education
in which civic values, public scholarship, and social engagement
allow for a more imaginative grasp of a future that takes seriously
the demands of justice, equity, and civic courage. Such a challenge
demands not only confronting symptoms as a way of decreasing the
misery and human suffering that people experience on a daily basis,
but most importantly addressing the root causes that produce the
despotism and culture of cruelty that marks the current period. The
time has come to develop a political language in which civic values,
social responsibility, and the institutions that support them become
central to invigorating and fortifying a new era of civic
imagination, and a renewed sense of social agency. A revitalized
politics for imagining a radical democracy must promote an
impassioned international social movement with a vision,
organization, and set of strategies to challenge the neoliberal
nightmare engulfing the planet. The dystopian worlds of Orwell and
Huxley are sutured in fear, atomization, and a paralyzing anxiety.
Unfortunately, these dystopian visions are no longer works of
fiction. The task ahead is to relegate them to the realm of dystopian
fiction so they can remind us that a radical democracy is not simply
a political project, but a way of life that has to be struggled over
endlessly.
Source:
Read
also:
|
The Left, was not able to find
the suitable material inside the ongoing apolitical generations. A
material, with which could rebuild and create a totally autonomous
political language. A language, totally independent from
capitalistic terms.
|
Comments
Post a Comment