InventingtheFuturePostcapitalismandaWorldWithoutWorkNickSrnicekAlexWilliamsZLibrary

Perhaps most depressing, even when movements have some successes, they are in the context of overwhelming losses. Residents across the UK, for example, have successfully mobilised in particular cases to stop the closure of local hospitals. Yet these real successes are overwhelmed by larger plans to gut and privatise the National Health Service. Similarly, recent anti-fracking movements have been able to stop test drilling in various localities – but governments nevertheless continue to search for shale gas resources and provide support for companies to do so.⁷ In the United States, various movements to stop evictions in the wake of the housing crisis have made real gains in terms of keeping people in their homes.⁸ Yet the perpetrators of the subprime mortgage debacle continue to reap the profits, waves of foreclosures continue to sweep across the country, and rents continue to surge across the urban world. Small successes – useful, no doubt, for instilling a sense of hope – nevertheless wither in the face of overwhelming losses. Even the most optimistic activist falters in the face of struggles that continue to fail. In other cases, well-intentioned projects like Rolling Jubilee strive to escape the spell of neoliberal common sense.⁹ The ostensibly radical aim of crowdsourcing money to pay the debts of the underprivileged means buying into a system of voluntary charity and redistribution, as well as accepting the legitimacy of the debt in the first place. In this respect, the initiative is one among a larger group of projects that act simply as crisis responses to the faltering of state services. These are survival mechanisms, not a desirable vision for the future.

What can we conclude from all of this? The recent cycle of struggles has to be identified as one of overarching failure, despite a multitude of small-scale successes and moments of large-scale mobilisation. The question that any analysis of the left today must grapple with is simply: What has gone wrong? It is undeniable that heightened repression by states and the increased power of corporations have played a significant role in weakening the power of the left. Still, it remains debatable whether the repression faced by workers, the precarity of the masses and the power of capitalists is any greater than it was in the late nineteenth century. Workers then were still struggling for basic rights, often against states more than willing to use lethal violence against them.¹⁰ But whereas that period saw mass mobilisation, general strikes, militant labour and radical women’s organisations all achieving real and lasting successes, today is defined by their absence. The recent weakness of the left cannot simply be chalked up to increased state and capitalist repression: an honest reckoning must accept that problems also lie within the left. One key problem is a widespread and uncritical acceptance of what we call ‘folk-political’ thinking.

DEFINING FOLK POLITICS

What is folk politics? Folk politics names a constellation of ideas and intuitions within the contemporary left that informs the common-sense ways of organising, acting and thinking politics. It is a set of strategic assumptions that threatens to debilitate the left, rendering it unable to scale up, create lasting change or expand beyond particular interests. Leftist movements under the sway of folk politics are not only unlikely to be successful – they are in fact incapable of transforming capitalism. The term itself draws upon two senses of ‘folk’. First, it evokes critiques of folk psychology which argue that our intuitive conceptions of the world are both historically constructed and often mistaken.¹¹ Secondly, it refers to ‘folk’ as the locus of the small-scale, the authentic, the traditional and the natural. Both of these dimensions are implied in the idea of folk politics.

As a first approximation, we can therefore define folk politics as a collective and historically constructed political common sense that has become out ofjoint with the actual mechanisms of power. As our political, economic, social and technological world changes, tactics and strategies which were previously capable of transforming collective power into emancipatory gains have now become drained of their effectiveness. As the common sense of today’s left, folk politics often operates intuitively, uncritically and unconsciously. Yet common sense is also historical and mutable. It is worth recalling that today’s familiar forms of organisation and tactics, far from being natural or pregiven, have instead been developed over time in response to specific political problems. Petitions, occupations, strikes, vanguard parties, affinity groups, trade unions: all arose out of particular historical conditions.¹² Yet the fact that certain ways of organising and acting were once useful does not guarantee their continued relevance. Many of the tactics and organisational structures that dominate the contemporary left are responses to the experience of state communism, exclusionary trade unions, and the collapse of social democratic parties. Yet the ideas that made sense in the wake of those moments no longer present effective tools for political transformation. Our world has moved on, becoming more complex, abstract, nonlinear and global than ever before.

Against the abstraction and inhumanity of capitalism, folk politics aims to bring politics down to the ‘human scale’ by emphasising temporal, spatial and conceptual immediacy. At its heart, folk politics is the guiding intuition that immediacy is always better and often more authentic, with the corollary being a deep suspicion of abstraction and mediation. In terms of temporal immediacy, contemporary folk politics typically remains reactive (responding to actions initiated by corporations and governments, rather than initiating actions);¹³ ignores long-term strategic goals in favour of tactics (mobilising around single-issue politics or emphasising process);¹⁴ prefers practices that are often inherently fleeting (such as occupations and temporary autonomous zones);¹⁵ chooses the familiarities of the past over the unknowns of the future (for instance, the repeated dreams of a return to ‘good’ Keynesian capitalism);¹⁶ and expresses itself as a predilection for the voluntarist and spontaneous over the institutional (as in the romanticisation of rioting and insurrection).¹⁷

In terms of spatial immediacy, folk politics privileges the local as the site of authenticity (as in the 100-miles diet or local currencies);¹⁸ habitually chooses the small over the large (as in the veneration of small-scale communities or local businesses);¹⁹ favours projects that are un-scalable beyond a small community (for instance, general assemblies and direct democracy);²⁰ and often rejects the project of hegemony, valuing withdrawal or exit rather than building a broad counter-hegemony.²¹ Likewise, folk politics prefers that actions be taken by participants themselves – in its emphasis on direct action, for example – and sees decision-making as something to be carried out by each individual rather than by any representative. The problems of scale and extension are either ignored or smoothed over in folk-political thinking.

Finally, in terms of conceptual immediacy, there is a preference for the everyday over the structural, valorising personal experience over systematic thinking; for feeling over thinking, emphasising individual suffering, or the sensations of enthusiasm and anger experienced during political actions; for the particular over the universal, seeing the latter as intrinsically totalitarian; and for the ethical over the political – as in ethical consumerism, or moralising critiques of greedy bankers.²² Organisations and communities are to be transparent, rejecting in advance any conceptual mediation, or even modest amounts of complexity. The classic images of universal emancipation and global change have been transformed into a prioritisation of the suffering of the particular and the authenticity of the local. As a result, any process of constructing a universal politics is rejected from the outset.

Understood in these ways, we can detect traces of folk politics in organisations and movements like Occupy, Spain’s 15M, student occupations, left communist insurrectionists like Tiqqun and the Invisible Committee, most forms of horizontalism, the Zapatistas, and contemporary anarchist-tinged politics, as well as a variety of other trends like political localism, the slow-food movement, and ethical consumerism, among many others. But no single position embodies all of these dispositions, which leads us to a first qualification: as an uncritical and often unconscious common sense, folk politics comes to be instantiated to varying degrees in concrete political positions. That is to say, folk politics does not name an explicit position, but only an implicit tendency. The ideas that characterise this tendency are widely dispersed throughout the contemporary left, but some positions are more folk-political than others. This brings us to a second important qualification: the problem with folk politics is not that it starts from the local; all politics begins from the local. The problem is rather that folk-political thinking is content to remain at (and even privileges) that level – of the transient, the small-scale, the unmediated and the particular. It takes these to be sufficient rather than simply necessary moments. Therefore, the point is not simply to reject folk politics. Folk politics is a necessary component of any successful political project, but it can only be a starting point. A third qualification is that folk politics is only a problem for particular types of projects: those that seek to move beyond capitalism. Folk-political thinking can be perfectly well adapted to other political projects: projects aimed solely at resistance, movements organised around local issues, and smallscale projects. Political movements based around keeping a hospital open or preventing evictions are all admirable, but they are importantly different from movements trying to challenge neoliberal capitalism. The idea that one organisation, tactic or strategy applies equally well to any sort of struggle is one of the most pervasive and damaging beliefs among today’s left. Strategic reflection – on means and ends, enemies and allies – is necessary before approaching any political project. Given the nature of global capitalism, any postcapitalist project will require an ambitious, abstract, mediated, complex and global approach – one that folk-political approaches are incapable of providing.

Combining these qualifications, we can therefore say that folk politics is necessary but insufficient for a postcapitalist political project. By emphasising and remaining at the level of the immediate, folk politics lacks the tools to transform neoliberalism into something else. While folk politics can undoubtedly make important interventions in local struggles, we deceive ourselves when we think these are turning the tide against global capitalism. They represent, at best, temporary respite against its onslaught. The project of this book is to begin outlining an alternative – a way for the left to navigate from the local to the global, and synthesise the particular with the universal. Such an alternative cannot simply be a conservative reversion to the working-class politics of the last century. It must instead combine an updated way of thinking politics (a shift from immediacy to structural analysis) with an upgraded means of doing politics (which directs action towards building platforms and expanding scales).

OVERWHELMED

Why did folk politics arise in the first place? Why is it that folk political tendencies, for all their manifest flaws, are so seductive and appealing to the movements of today? At least three answers present themselves. The first explanation is to see folk politics as a response to the problem of how to interpret and act within an ever more complex world. The second, related explanation involves situating folk politics as a reaction to the historical experiences of the communist and social democratic left. Finally, folk politics is a more immediate response to the empty spectacle of contemporary party politics.

Increasingly, multipolar global politics, economic instability, and anthropogenic climate change outpace the narratives we use to structure and make sense of our lives. Each of these is an example of what is termed a complex system, which features nonlinear dynamics, where marginally different inputs can cause dramatically divergent outputs, intricate sets of causes feedback on one another in unexpected ways, and which characteristically operates on scales of space and time that go far beyond any individual’s unaided perception.²³ Globalisation, international politics, and climate change: each of these systems shapes our world, but their effects are so extensive and complicated that it is difficult to place our own experience within them. The global economy is a good example of this. In simple terms, the economy is not an object amenable to direct perception; it is distributed across time and space (you will never meet ‘the economy’ in person); it incorporates a wide array of elements, from property laws to biological needs, natural resources to technological infrastructures, market stalls and supercomputers; and it involves an enormous and intricately interacting set of feedback loops, all of which produce emergent effects that are irreducible to its individual components.²⁴ In other words, the interaction of an economy’s parts produces effects that cannot be understood just by knowing how those parts work in isolation – it is only in grasping the relations between them that the economy can be made sense of. While we might have an idea of what an economy consists of, we will never be able to experience it directly in the same way as other phenomena. It can only be observed symptomatically through key statistical indexes (charting changes in inflation or interest rates, stock indexes, GDP, and so on), but can never be seen, heard or touched in its totality.

As a result, despite everything that has been written about capitalism, we still struggle to understand its dynamics and its mechanisms. Most importantly, we lack a ‘cognitive map’ of our socioeconomic system: a mental picture of how individual and collective human action can be situated within the unimaginable vastness of the global economy .²⁵ Recent decades have seen an increasing complexity in the dynamics that impinge upon politics. We might consider the imminent threat of anthropogenic climate change as a new kind of problem – one that is unamenable to any simple solution and that involves such intricately woven effects that it is hard to even know where to intervene. Equally, the global economy today appears significantly more complex in terms of the mobility of capital, the intricacies of global finance and the multiplicity of actors involved. How well do our traditional political images of the world map onto these changes? For the left at least, an analysis premised on the industrial working class was a powerful way to interpret the totality of social and economic relations in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, thereby articulating clear strategic objectives. Yet the history of the global left over the course of the twentieth century attests to the ways in which this analysis failed to attend to both the range of possible liberating struggles (based in gender, race or sexuality) and the ability of capitalism to restructure itself – through the creation of the welfare state, or the neoliberal transformations of the global economy.

Today, the old models often falter in the face of new problems; we lose the capacity to understand our position in history and in the world at large.

This separation between everyday experience and the system we live within results in increased alienation: we feel adrift in a world we do not understand. The cultural theorist Fredric Jameson notes that the proliferation of conspiracy theories is partly a response to this situation.²⁶ Conspiracy theories act by narrowing the agency behind our world to a single figure of power (the Bilderberg Group, the Freemasons or some other convenient scapegoat). Despite the extraordinary complexity of some of these theories, they nevertheless provide a reassuringly simple answer to ‘who is behind it all’, and what our own role is in the situation. In other words, they act precisely as a (faulty) cognitive map.

Folk politics presents itself as another possible response to the problems of overwhelming complexity. If we do not understand how the world operates, the folk-political injunction is to reduce complexity down to a human scale. Indeed, folk-political writing is saturated with calls for a return to authenticity, to immediacy, to a world that is ‘transparent’, ‘human-scaled’, ‘tangible’, ‘slow’, ‘harmonious’, ‘simple’, and ‘everyday’.²⁷ Such thinking rejects the complexity of the contemporary world, and thereby rejects the possibility of a truly postcapitalist world. It attempts to give a human face to power; whereas what is truly terrifying is the generally asubjective nature of the system. The faces are interchangeable; the power remains the same. The turn towards localism, temporary moments of resistance, and the intuitive practices of direct action all effectively attempt to condense the problems of global capitalism into concrete figures and moments.

In this process, folk politics often reduces politics to an ethical and individual struggle. There is a tendency sometimes to imagine that we simply need ‘good’ capitalists, or a ‘responsible’ capitalism. At the same time, the imperative to ‘make it local’ leads folk politics to fetishise immediate results and the concrete appearance of action. Delaying a corporate attack on the environment, for instance, is lauded as a success – even if the company simply waits out public attention before returning once again. Moreover, as Rosa Luxemburg pointed out long ago, the fetishisation of ‘immediate results’ leads to an empty pragmatism that struggles to maintain the present balance of power, rather than seeking to change structural conditions.²⁸ Without the necessary abstraction of strategic thought, tactics are ultimately fleeting gestures. Finally, the abjuring of complexity dovetails with the neoliberal case for markets. One of the primary arguments made against planning has been that the economy is simply too complex to be guided.²⁹ The only alternative is therefore to leave the distribution of resources to the market and reject any attempt to guide it rationally.³⁰ Considered in all these ways, folk politics appears as an attempt to make global capitalism small enough to be thinkable – and at the same time, to articulate how to act upon this restricted image of capitalism. By contrast, the argument of this book is that folk-political tendencies are mistaken. If complexity presently outstrips humanity’s capacities to think and control, there are two options: one is to reduce complexity down to a human scale; the other is to expand humanity’s capacities. We endorse the latter position. Any postcapitalist project will necessarily require the creation of new cognitive maps, political narratives, technological interfaces, economic models, and mechanisms of collective control to be able to marshal complex phenomena for the betterment of humanity.

OUTDATED

While the response to increasing complexity goes some way towards explaining the rise of folkpolitical thinking, it must also be situated in terms of the particular history of left politics in the twentieth century. In many respects, folk-political tendencies are understandable (if inadequate) responses to the challenges faced in the last fifty years – challenges that have emerged both within the left and in competition with conservative and capitalist forces.³¹ In particular, folk politics emerged as a response to the collapse of the postwar social democratic complex that knitted together working class institutions, social democratic parties, and the hegemony of embedded liberalism.³² The breakdown of this social democratic bloc occurred across multiple lines of conflict and in various spheres: in the emergence of new forms of work, associated with the affective and cognitive; in the emergence of energy crises that disrupted geopolitical certainties; in the increasing difficulties capitalist enterprises faced in achieving profitability; in the proliferation of neoliberal ideology through the institutional networks of think tanks and university departments; in the explosion of new forms of political subjectivities, projects and demands; and in the widespread discrediting of nominally communist states. Each of these factors served to disrupt the foundation of the postwar social system in Europe and America. In this process, there was both an outdating of old left paradigms and an outmanoeuvring of the new ones.

Perhaps the most significant point in this destabilisation of the postwar settlement was in the late 1960s and early 1970s. The global revolts of 1968 gave both new prominence and new inspiration to a series of left movements that rejected the coordinates of struggle articulated by labour unions and political parties. These movements were driven partly by the emerging history of Stalinist repression, and when combined with the Soviet regime’s suppression of democratising currents in Eastern Europe, this meant that communist parties were increasingly discredited in the eyes of young European leftists. This called into question the strategic validity of the Leninist programme of statetakeover by a revolutionary party leading a coalition of forces centred on the industrial working class.³³ If even ‘successful’ revolutions led to sclerotic technocracy and political repression in the long term, what then was to be the properly emancipatory course of action? Hierarchy and vanguardism in the communist party increasingly appeared opposed to the aims of the emerging social movements.

Beyond the difficulties of transitioning to postcapitalism under a communist administration, the prospects for state-takeover in the developed nations in the 1960s and 1970s seemed slight, especially given the divisions emerging on the left. The uprisings in France in May 1968, in which the French Communist Party notably failed to back the unionists and student groups, seemingly brought to an end any prospect of a political revolution. In addition, social democracy and its Keynesiancorporatist solutions to social inequity appeared increasingly content with the existing order, and unable or unwilling to move towards an emancipatory socialism. Though social democracy was capable of offering significant gains to certain groups, it retained an authoritarian establishment and a paternalistic cast, generally exclusive of women and ethnic minorities, and was dependent upon a mode of capitalist organisation (Fordism) that generated unusual levels of social cohesion. It was this social cohesion that was eroded in the late 1960s and early 1970s by the emergence of new mass desires (for increased flexibility in work, for example) and newly insistent demands (for racial and gender equality, for nuclear disarmament, for sexual freedoms, and against Western imperialism). By the late 1960s, these new problems could no longer be resolved with the existing set of leftist political agents, and electoral pressures were beginning to transform the social democratic party from a mass party of the working class into an increasingly coalition-based party of the middle class.³⁴ The remaining radical elements of social democratic parties were being slowly hollowed out.

The ongoing decline of the party form can be traced partly to the disastrous realities of rule in the nominally communist states and the disappointment of social democracy. At the same time, a series of well-founded critiques were marshalled from within the new left, prompted partly by the experiences of women in activist groups, who found their voices continued to be marginalised even in allegedly radical organisations. More hierarchical organisational forms, such as parties or traditional union organisations, continued to entrench the predominant patriarchal and sexist social relations prevalent in broader society. Considerable experimentation was therefore conducted to produce new organisational forms that could work against this social repression. This included the use of consensus decision-making and horizontal debating structures that would later come to worldwide fame with the Occupy Wall Street movement.³⁵ Outside of feminist groups, the new student left of the university campuses, while diverse in its manifestations, was often explicitly anti-authoritarian, antibureaucratic, and even anti-organisational.³⁶ Many of the tactics espoused by these groups emphasised the benefits of direct action and drew their influences from African-American civil rights movements and earlier student movements, as well as from the ideas of European Situationism, anarchist political currents, and the incipient environmental movement.³⁷ Here we can see the emergence of folk politics’ basic strategic orientation and the modes of action that characterise it: from the occupation, sit-in, or squatted commune through to carnivalesque street protests and ‘happenings’. Each of these tactics emerged in this period as a way to disrupt the functioning of everyday power, suspend the ‘normal’ forms of social regulation and promote egalitarian spaces for discussion. Beyond trying to change society, these interventions aimed at transforming the participants themselves and embodying the new forms of sociality to come.

The movements that crystallised in the period were therefore diverse in their makeup and outlook, operating across various subjectivities, territorial locations, and tactical and strategic forms. But each of them, in its own way, articulated new desires that could not readily be accommodated within the old forms of left-wing politics. One way to consider these movements is as part of a generalised ‘antisystemic’ political phenomenon of the time.³⁸ Across the globe, there was a tendency towards challenging and taking apart the power of bureaucratic hierarchies in favour of new modes of direct action, extending from the student, feminist and black power movements of the United States, through to the Situationist movement, student and allied labour movements of Europe, Prague’s anti-Stalinists, the student revolts of Mexico and Tokyo, and China’s Cultural Revolution.³⁹ At its most extreme, however, this antisystemic politics led towards the identification of political power as inherently tainted by oppressive, patriarchal and domineering tendencies.⁴⁰ This leaves something of a paradox. On the one hand, it could choose some form of negotiation or accommodation with existing power structures, which would tend towards the corruption or co-optation of the new left. But on the other hand, it could choose to remain marginal, and thereby unable to transform those elements of society not already convinced of its agenda.⁴¹ The critiques many of these antisystemic movements made of established forms of state, capitalist and old-left bureaucratic power were largely accurate. Yet antisystemic politics offered few resources to build a new movement capable of contending against capitalist hegemony.

The legacy of these social movements was therefore two-sided. The ideas, values and new desires articulated by them had a significant impact on a global level; the dissemination of feminist, anti-racist, gay-rights and anti-bureaucratic demands remains their strongest achievement. In this, they represented an absolutely necessary moment of self-critique by the left, and the legacy of folkpolitical tactics finds its appropriate historical conditions here. Simultaneously, however, an inability or lack of desire to turn the more radical sides of these projects into hegemonic ones also had important consequences for the period of destabilisation that followed.⁴² While capable of generating an array of new and powerful ideas of human freedom, the new social movements were generally unable to replace the faltering social democratic order.

OUTMANOEUVRED

Just as the new social movements were on the rise, the economic basis of the social democratic consensus was beginning to fall apart. The 1970s saw surging energy prices, the collapse of the Bretton Woods system, the growth of global capital flows, persistent stagflation and falling capitalist profits.⁴³ This effectively ended the basic political settlement that had supported the postwar era: that unique nexus of Keynesian economic policy, Fordist–corporatist industrial production and the broadly social democratic consensus that returned a part of the social surplus back to workers. Across the world, the structural crisis presented an opportunity for the forces of both the broad left and the broad right to generate a new hegemony that could resolve it.

For the right, the challenge was to restore capital accumulation and profitability. This challenge was eventually answered by the emergence of neoliberal thought on the global stage; but even before that, right-wing forces in the UK and the United States were experimenting with new ways to outmanoeuvre both the old and new left. One particularly important approach was a politicaleconomic strategy to link the crisis of capitalism to union power. The subsequent defeat of organised labour throughout the core capitalist nations has perhaps been neoliberalism’s most important achievement, significantly changing the balance of power between labour and capital. The means by which this was achieved were diverse, from physical confrontation and combat,⁴⁴ to using legislation to undermine solidarity and industrial action, to embracing shifts in production and distribution that compromised union power (such as disaggregating supply chains), to re-engineering public opinion and consent around a broadly neoliberal agenda of individual freedom and ‘negative solidarity’. The latter denotes more than mere indifference to worker agitations – it is the fostering of an aggressively enraged sense of injustice, committed to the idea that, because I must endure increasingly austere working conditions (wage freezes, loss of benefits, a declining pension pot), then everyone else must as well. The result of these combined shifts was a hollowing-out of unions and the defeat of the working class in the developed world.⁴⁵

While the right successfully faced the structural crisis by consolidating its political and economic power, the movements of the old and new left were unable to confront this new configuration of forces. In the 1970s, socialist and even communist political parties were gradually able to gain increasing ground in elections in Western Europe; but the old left simply tried to resolve the crisis by doubling down on the traditional corporatist agenda.⁴⁶ But the old Keynesian policy formulations were unable to kick-start growth, restrain unemployment or reduce inflation under these new economic conditions. As a result, left-wing governments coming to power in the 1970s, such as the British Labour Party, often ended up having to implement proto-neoliberal policies in frustrated attempts to foster a recovery.⁴⁷ The traditional labour movement, decrepit and stagnant, was by now being bested and co-opted by the forces of the right. In this context, the new left was a necessary critique that was essential to the left’s revitalisation and progress. Yet, as we saw in the previous section, if the old labour organisations were in many senses bereft of ideas, the new left was unable to institutionalise itself and articulate a counter-hegemony. The result was a left that became

As neoliberalism expanded and consolidated its common sense, the remaining social democratic parties increasingly came to accept neoliberalism’s terms. With most major parties effectively signed up to its political and economic programme, and increasing numbers of public services being taken into private hands, the ability to achieve significant change at the ballot box was dramatically reduced. Widespread cynicism began to accompany a hollowed-out party politics that came to resemble the public relations industry, with politicians being reduced to the role of shopkeepers hawking undesirable wares.⁴⁸ Mass participation in electoral politics declined in tandem with the gradual acceptance of the neoliberal coordinates, and the age of post-politics was upon us. Mass voter disaffection is the result today, with voter turnout routinely at historic lows. Under these circumstances, the folk-political insistence on immediate results and small-scale participatory democracy has an obvious allure.

The position of the new social movements in this context was more ambiguous. By the 1990s, the positioning of the working class as privileged political subject had been fully broken down, and a much wider array of social identities, desires and oppressions had gained recognition.⁴⁹ Increasingly sophisticated attempts were made to develop the analysis of interacting power structures, giving rise to ideas of intersectional oppressions.⁵⁰ As a result of cultural dissemination and mainstream political endorsement, large parts of the programmes of feminist, anti-racist and queer political movements had become enshrined in law and embraced on a social level. But despite these successes, there had been a rollback from the kind of radical demands outlined in the 1970s, which envisaged a much more thorough transformation of society. Feminists, for example, have made significant gains in terms of pay equality, abortion rights and childcare policies, but these pale in comparison to projects for the total abolition of gender.⁵¹ Similarly, for many black liberation movements, while anti-racist employment policies and antidiscrimination laws were widely enacted, they had not been accompanied by other radical programmes espoused by earlier movements.⁵² Much of the success seen by the new social movements today is confined within the hegemonic terms established by neoliberalism – articulated around market-centred claims, liberal rights and a rhetoric of choice. What have been sidelined in the process are the more radical and anti-capitalist elements of these projects.

Looking back, we have the collapse of the traditional organisations of the left, and the simultaneous rise of an alternative new left predicated upon critiques of bureaucracy, verticality, exclusion and institutionalisation, combined with an incorporation of some of the new desires into the apparatus of neoliberalism. It was against this backdrop that folk-political intuitions increasingly sedimented as a new common sense and came to be expressed in the alter-globalisation movements.⁵³ These movements emerged in two phases. The first, appearing from the mid 1990s through to the early 2000s, consisted of groups such as the Zapatistas, anti-capitalists, alter-globalisers, and participants in the World Social Forum and global anti-war protests. A second phase began immediately after the 2007–09 financial crisis and featured various groups united by their similar organisational forms and ideological positions, including the Occupy movement, Spain’s 15M and various national-level student movements. Both phases of the newest social movements sought to counter neoliberalism and its national and corporate avatars, with the first phase targeting global trade and governance organizations, and the latter focusing more on financialisation, inequality and debt.⁵⁴ Drawing influence from the earlier social movements, this latest cycle of struggles comprises groups that tend to privilege the local and the spontaneous, the horizontal and the anti-state. The apparent plausibility of folk politics rests on the collapse of traditional modes of organisation on the left, of the co-optation of social democratic parties into a choice-less neoliberal hegemony, and the broad sense of disempowerment engendered by the insipidness of contemporary party politics. In a world where the most serious problems we face seem intractably complex, folk politics presents an alluring way to prefigure egalitarian futures in the present. On its own, however, this kind of politics is unable to give rise to long-lasting forces that might supersede, rather than merely resist, global capitalism.

LOOKING FORWARD

The critique of folk politics advanced in this book is as much a warning as it is a diagnosis.⁵⁵ The existing tendencies in the mainstream and radical left are moving towards the folk-political pole, and we seek to reverse this trend. The aim of the first half of the book is therefore to disrupt an increasingly dogmatic set of principles about how to strategise and do politics today. Beginning with a critical take on existing politics, Chapter 2 seeks to diagnose and outline the limits of contemporary folk-political thinking. While the left has rejected the project of hegemony and expansion, Chapter 3 shows how neoliberalism successfully took the opposite path. In the place of folk politics, the second half will suggest an alternative leftist project organised around global and universal emancipation. Chapter 4 argues that a future-orientated left needs to reclaim the initiative for modernisation and its emphasis on progress and universal emancipation. Chapter 5 sets out an analysis of the tendencies of contemporary capitalism, emphasising the crisis of work and social reproduction. These tendencies demand a response, and our argument is that the left should begin mobilising a political project to direct these forces in a progressive manner. In contrast to today’s dominant focus on debt and inequality, Chapter 6 envisions a post-work world. Chapters 7 and 8 examine some of the steps that will need to be taken to achieve this vision, which include building a counter-hegemonic movement and rebuilding the capacities of the left. Finally, the Conclusion takes a step back to examine the project of modernity from the perspective of a future-orientated left guided by the goal of universal emancipation. This book is predicated on a simple belief – that a modern left can neither continue with the current system nor return to an idealised past, but must instead face up to the task of building a new future.

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