[iDC] activism now and
Brian Holmes
brian.holmes at wanadoo.fr
Thu Dec 8 20:09:33 EST 2005
saul ostrow wrote:
> What is really interesting about this thread is that spontaniety,
> resistance, activism, media, etc. are being fetishized, while no one has
> raised the question of political program and leadership. Are these
> unnecessary in our fragmented and decentered world, or is the type of
> essentialism that these decontextualized categories of reaction
> represent, along with the desire to relocate the political to the
> cultural sphere a sign that we have not moved beyond the reified
> modernist vision of the enlightenment project.
Now that's quite a declaration.
Leadership, in the contemporary media-populist electoral
democracies, has been so bad that I think even a little bit
of sympathy for the people writing here would excuse them
for not desiring it.
However, I personally am very sympathetic to the call for a
political program. The only ones I see being floated
basically involve going to war or sparking hostility among
different groups of citizens to avoid dealing with basic
economic and ecological contradictions.
Do you have a political program to propose? Seriously, I'm
interested and you're right that it's lacking, not just on
this thread. Only a real political program can produce
decent leaders and limit the scope of their arbitrary power too.
I tried with other members of the journal Multitudes here in
Paris to produce one for a while, centered around equality,
access to tools and rights to difference in the knowledge
economy. But now our generous visions look so distant from
the basic public disourse that clearly it's time to work on
something more simple and below the belt.
best, BH
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