Radical Politics

Abstract

Abstract Radical Politics argues for the renewal of a politics of self-emancipation. The last 20 years has witnessed a proliferation of radical social and political movements around the world in wave after wave of struggles against intersecting forms of exploitation, domination, and subalternization. From the Alternative Globalization Movement, anti-war protests, Occupy, the International Women’s Strike, BlackLivesMatter, and direct action against the climate emergency, a series of common questions have continually re-emerged as practical challenges. How should radical political movements relate to the state? What makes emancipatory politics fundamentally different from both technocratic and populist models of “politics as usual”? Are there distinctive ways of doing politics that can help to increase the capacity for self-emancipation? Which forms of organization are most likely to deepen and extend the dynamics that led to the emergence of these movements of resistance and rebellion in the first place? Radical Politics argues that our responses to these recurrent questions should be considered in terms of a theory of the “causes” of contemporary emancipation; or an investigation into the goal, nature, method, and organizational forms of radical political engagement against the neoliberal consensus. It also proposes a dialogue with Antonio Gramsci’s political theory—reading a classic thinker of the contradictions of political modernity in new ways in the light of the concerns of the present—while also rethinking the central problems, concepts, and structures of feeling of contemporary emancipatory movements in relation to Gramsci’s distinctive notion of hegemony as a strategic method of self-emancipation.