Anticapitalism and culture: Radical theory and popular politics
Jeremy Gilbert2010, Continuum
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Abstract
No part of this publication may be reproduced in any form or by any means without the written permission of Berg. organisers, Alan Finlayson and Jim Martin, for inviting me. Some other elements of it were aired at the Democracy Beyond Democracy: Democratic Struggle in a Post-Democratic Age symposium in Vienna, and I'd like to thank Rupert Weinzierl for inviting me to that, as well as my co-participants, Oliver Marchart (who was later also encouraging about a fi rst draft of the fi rst two chapters of this book), Simon Tormey, Chantal Mouffe, and Miguel Abensour. I was supposed to write it up into an article for the excellent Social Movement Studies; it was in the process of doing so that it took something like its current shape, so I'd like to thank one of the journal's founding editors, Tim Jordan, for his encouragement and then his forbearance when the article never appeared. I have also realised at the very late stage of proofreading the book that all references to Tim's Activism! have somehow been edited out-an embarrassing oversight on my part given the high value I accord to that work. My colleagues and students at the University of East London are a never-ending source of inspiration and support. Ta for that. Finally, I'd like to thank my Dad, for teaching me that there is nothing so practical as a good theory, and my Mum, for similarly helping me to see from a very early age just how much politics matters. The book is a loving present for Jo Littler. Without her love and support it would have been very diffi cult. Without her inspiration, it could not have happened at all. 2 • Introduction Despite the intellectual richness of this moment, by the 1990s most of the organised Left-from the socialist and communist movements to the New Social Movements-had ceased to be viable as coherent, consistent projects for social transformation. The defeat of communism, the dispersal of the women's movement and the hegemony of neoliberalism all consolidated a situation in which there simply were no such radical movements for cultural studies to maintain such dialogues with. This has not prevented cultural studies from growing, proliferating and extending its project and its reach. Nor has it prevented the best work in the fi eld from continuing to offer incisive analyses of contemporary culture in its many aspects. But it does mean that cultural studies has not had the benefi t of that dynamic dialogue with radical political movements that was the source of some of its energy in the past. The second chapter therefore suggests that a dialogue between cultural studies and the anti-capitalist movement might be a good thing. Chapter 3 outlines and refl ects upon the emergence of this movement, which is sometimes called anti-capitalist or anti-globalisation or global-justice or altermondialiste. Since the early 1990s a range of projects and institutions have arisen around the world which try to challenge the global dominance of liberal capitalism, and which are informed by a set of libertarian and egalitarian values very similar to those which typifi ed the New Left. This anti-capitalism is different from the traditional labour and socialist movements in ways which were to some extent prefi gured and called for by the ideas of the New Left, and by the ideas of philosophers and theorists associated with the anti-essentialist turn. The chapter therefore argues that this movement can be said to be radical democratic in its aspirations, provided that we clear up some common confusions as to what the term radical democracy means. On the other hand, this movement is informed by, at best, some woefully simplistic ideas about culture and political strategy. It is precisely this poverty of thought which the best cultural studies work of the past has often tried to remedy in radical movements. As such, Chapter 3 contends that it is worth thinking through some issues about culture and political strategy from a position informed by the legacy of cultural studies and the concerns of anti-capitalism. Chapter 4 considers a range of different ways of conceptualising the relationship between capitalism and culture, and it considers reasons as to why one might or might not want to take up a political or analytical position which is explicitly anti-capitalist. Although it rejects a classically Marxist anti-capitalism, it fi nds good reasons for taking up a position which sees capitalism in general-and neoliberalism in particular-as inimical to any democratic culture, and worth opposing on those terms. It concludes, however, that the anti-capitalism of the movement of movements might have to be mobilised under names less abstract than anti-capitalism if it is to prove politically effective in concrete contexts. Chapter 5 tries to think about what would be involved in developing such a position, by comparing the theoretical ideas of a number of philosophers who have written in a spirit close to that of both New Left cultural studies and of the anti-capitalist 8 • Introduction organised groups. Indeed, some might say that, along with the other defi nitions offered above, cultural studies simply is the result of a radical expansion of the concept of politics within the humanities and social sciences. This expanded conception regards politics as involving all those processes whereby power relationships are implemented, maintained, challenged, or altered in any sphere of activity whatsoever. Given that important traditions in philosophy and social science-which have both infl uenced cultural studies and been infl uenced by it-regard power relationships as infusing all aspects of human existence, and in some cases all aspects of all existence whatsoever (Nietzsche 1968: 297-300; 332-47), it seems like it might be possible to describe almost any situation in so-called political terms. This, in fact, is one of the great sources of anxiety within recent debates over the nature and practice of cultural studies: if everything is political, then does that mean that nothing is specifi cally political, as some commentators seem to fear (Eagleton 2000)? Is there any difference between offering a political analysis of a situation and a non-political one? This, once again, is a highly controversial area to which several whole books could be devoted without exhausting the range of possible positions. However, it is also a debate within which this book will have to take a tentative position before it can proceed any further. For the sake of argument, then, I am going to propose a distinction between two levels of political engagement: the political and the micropolitical. With the phrase micropolitical, I am referring to that level of interaction at which all relationships (even those between non-human entities such as animals, plants or even, arguably, sub-atomic particles) might be described as political insofar as they can involve relative stabilisations, alterations, augmentations, diminutions or transfers of power. At the level of human culture, for example, even such a localised and historically insignifi cant incident as a university deciding not to offer a degree course in modern French might be understood as the outcome of micropolitical processes involving confl icts, disagreements and decisions over the allocation of resources, or the relative prestige attributed to different disciplines within the university, and so forth. In the next two chapters, I am going to use the term politics, on the other hand, in the more widely understood sense of the general fi eld of public contestation between identifi able and opposing sets of ideas about how social relationships should be ordered. Politics in this sense is the sphere in which social movements, political parties, large-scale ideologies and powerful institutions (such as governments and corporations) struggle to determine the outcomes of the big questions about what kind of societies we want to live in. In this sense, the struggle to keep open our university French department would only be political to the extent that it located itself in a wider context of struggles against public service cuts, 'dumbing down', xenophobia, or something beyond the immediate career concerns of its staff. I could use the term macropolitics for this level of engagement instead, and it might be more accurate, but it would sound clumsier and take up more space. Now, the relationship between these two levels is clearly unstable and at times conceptually problematic.
