Towards a politics of the totality

There is no virtue politically in economic determinism or the notion that one issue can explain every other form of oppression ranging from the attempt to eliminate voting rights to defining feminism solely from the perspective of white middle class women. Racism, among other forms of oppression, is both intertwined with economic issues and also has it own distinct register. The crisis of economics does not explain a range of other crises and often becomes a blind overarching narrative that subsumes issues it can no longer explain. But then again Gramsci, Raymond Williams, Stanley Aronowtiz among others have all addressed this issue convincingly.

One problem is that politics in North America is once again mired in single issues and refuses a more comprehensive understanding of the totality of the problems being faced and the need to develop a unified and transnational movement for political, economic, and social justice. The call for broader social movements and a more comprehensive understanding of politics is necessary in order to connect the dots between, for instance, police brutality and mass incarceration, on the one hand, and the diverse crises producing massive poverty, the destruction of the welfare state, and the assaults on the environment, workers, young people and women.

Radical politics cannot allow itself to become fractured, mimicking the isolated and atomized ideology of neoliberalism. The left needs a new political conversation that encompasses memories of freedom and resistance. Such a dialogue would build on the militancy of the labor strikes of the 1930s, the civil rights movements of the 1950s and the struggle for participatory democracy by the New Left in the 1960s. At the same time, there is a need to reclaim the radical imagination and to infuse it with a spirited battle for an independent politics that regards a radical democracy as part of a never-ending struggle.

Needless to day, movements require time to mature and come into fruition. They necessitate educated agents able to connect structural conditions of oppression to the oppressive cultural apparatuses that legitimate, persuade, and shape individual and collective attitudes in the service of oppressive ideas and values. Under such conditions, radical ideas can be connected to action once diverse groups recognize the need to take control of the political, economic, and cultural conditions which shape their world views, exploit their labor, control their communities, appropriate their resources, and undermine their dignity and lives.

We need not only a radical critique of capitalism, racism, and other forms of oppression but a critical formative culture and cultural politics that inspires, energizes, and provides elements of a transformative radical education in the service of a broad-based democratic liberation movement.

Ilustración Nathaly Bonilla