What that requires from us, in turn, is to transform this new understanding into a collective subject with specific demands.
In this respect, electoral politics serves a vital purpose. The majority of people are only able to be politically active for brief periods of time. To an extent this is regrettable, the outgrowth of a culture that intentionally cultivates apathy and constrains a wider sense of popular power. Yet it is also a natural response for many who, exhausted by the pace, demands and monotony of work, not to mention family commitments and the sensory overload of the modern world, fail to establish a permanent space for political engagement in their lives. The problem is not, therefore, that most people do not care about politics but rather they cannot aford to care in the face of so many competing demands. While in the last decade, as the status quo has oscillated between inertia and collapse, that has changed slightly, it should not be overstated. At least not yet.
Which is all the more reason why FALC, embedded within a luxury populism, must engage in mainstream, electoral politics. After all, it is often only around elections when large sections of society – particularly the most exploited – are open to new possibilities regarding how society works and able to perceive how previously distinct issues share both common cause and prospective solutions. What is more, the act of voting – even if viewed as devoid of much power in itself – can catalyse a shift to deeper forms of participation and activism. In isolation electoral politics will not give us the world we want, but allied with a constant movement to make the potential of the Third Disruption apparent to everyone – along with the necessity for a collective political response – it shapes the parameters of what is possible.
In addition it must be recognised that the flow of history goes beyond politics, electoral or otherwise. In the shift to FALC we will need new ideas, social relations, forms of daily life and relationships to nature. The political ideologies of the past have often, to their detriment, focused on only one of these at the expense of others: many contemporary anarchists tend to hold social relations as pre-eminent – as if they were distinct from ideas, daily life and work. Leninism, meanwhile, views production, and by extension working-class subjectivity, as critical while ignoring a world whose ideas and technologies are hugely changed from those of the early twentieth century. Elsewhere technological utopians, such as the Californian ideologues of Silicon Valley, view technology as the principal means by which to carve a better future, almost detached from politics, society and history. Finally, certain environmentalists have favoured relations to nature and how we view ourselves in the cosmos, particularly regarding other forms of life, as the primary force that guides their politics. Too often this has come at the expense of a class analysis in understanding exploitation and production under capitalism, and how that system inherently opposes what they want.
Popular Support
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