Preface to Political Participation Today

Meaningful political involvement demands that actors are able to make sense of their engagement and situate their actions within fields of contending social forces, interests and beliefs. This is especially imperative in politics where one’s intentions are inscribed in bids for power and domination in a context of uncertainty and unpredictability. In today’s paradigm of progressive politics, the urge to act and solve social problems is so pervasive that many political agents, rather than opening up spaces for political engagement and challenging what is given as the natural and only approach to a socio-political issue, are instead caught up in webs that reify and reproduce existing relations of power, and therefore foreclose the possibility of a space through which more plural struggles can be engendered.

There are of course many new opportunities for today’s citizenry to engage in political and public affairs, and indeed, many concrete and creative endeavors already underway. The recent stage of capitalist development facilitated by globalizing forces has surely opened up spaces through which political struggles can be waged. The declining capacity of the formal apparatuses of governance, mediated largely by an increasingly hollowing out nation-state has been marking new frontiers and heightening social and cultural conflicts which test and reveal the limits of conventional practices and ethos of progressive engagement. Yet, these ongoing re-articulations of socio-political involvement are also in danger of being too celebratory and cheerful. A peculiar strength (which, in my opinion, is also the greatest weakness and failure) of today’s renewed citizen involvement is the tendency to avoid directly confronting questions of power and domination by reframing political problems as social and cultural, and proposing responses that target policy and governance measures rather than highlighting the distinctly political responses needed to address inclusively and critically contemporary issues. This is markedly visible in the ability of certain progressive sectors to successfully mobilize and organize effectively around re-distributive social issues, output-driven activities and forms of solidarity that privilege suppressing political tensions and de-emphasizing the social antagonisms that arise from structures of injustice and patterns of oppression. In doing so, much of today’s progressive politics is unable to reflect upon itself and recognize its complicity in perpetuating first-order sources of disempowerment because of its compulsion to transcend political polarizations. Thus there seems to be a need to reveal the ideational, theoretical (even, ideological) persuasions that underpin much of today’s political organizing.

On the other hand, more radical interventions, including those that focus on postmodern critiques of progressivism and emphasize identity and self-constitution struggles, seem to be too privatizing and detached from relevant political activities. Because postmodern politics is theorized primarily as a personal activity, many have misinterpreted this as a private, individualistic and atomized endeavor, which leaves limited room for organizing and developing collectivities and forms of political solidarity. Postmodern political activism seem to be too scared of rendering metanarratives legitimate that it becomes frustratingly difficult for it to weave practices of identity-formation and self-care with stories and horizons that make communal life possible. It is of course true that these movements directly confront the issue of power by shifting the terrain of politics to a deeply visceral and bodily level, but it is also possible that by avoiding the public manifestations of political power they also foreclose the promise of ongoing and present preoccupations of extant progressive movements and institutional struggles.

The present terrain of political involvement is very fertile and holds great promise. One simply needs to raise the rising degree of political consciousness of most citizens today to one that is not only politically conscious but one that is more importantly conscious of its politics. The objective of our endeavors must then be very modest and quite simple, to ask the questions: “what are we doing?” and “to what direction are our actions leading us?” so that we can map out our political options in way they confront the question of power (and disempowerment) in a more critical and inclusive ethic. The present task then, seems to be to make present our present and in doing so, open it radically.