@e_flux wrote:
At his blog Cartographies of the Absolute, theorist and sociologist Alberto Toscano has posted the English version of a fascinating interview he did with the Greek newspaper Efimerida ton Syntakton (The Editors’ Newspaper). He touches on the fall of Syriza in Greece, the specious distinction between identity politics and class politics, and the geopolitical conditions that have enabled the right to gain electoral power in recent years. Check out an excerpt from the interview below.
We see that large parts of the population are dominated by the feelings of despair and nostalgia for a “golden” era that has gone unabated. Can the Left today offer hope and vision for the future?
I think ‘hope’ is rather spent as a watchword. What is lacking right now is not the idea that another world is possible, as much as the notion that social power can be organised in order to block, and then reverse, decades of political disenfranchisement and economic dispossession of the majority of the world’s population. I would say that what we need then is less a vision or a faith, and more a kind of ‘utopia of means’, a way of threading together those moments of mass action in which the powers that be have been put on the back foot. It also seems evident that radical climate justice movements – necessarily entangled as they are with contesting the politics of (neo-)colonialism, class exploitation, racism and patriarchy – completely upend left imaginaries of ‘hope’ predicated on ideologies of industrial progress and material abundance.
Image of Alberto Toscano via Efimerida ton Syntakton.
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