What is Radical Politics Today? – two authors comment
Author: Counterpoint
In the run-up to the launch of What is Radical Politics Today?, edited by Jonathan Pugh, Alastair Bonnet and Terrell Carver, two of the contributors, concisely sum-up the argument and train of thought of their chapters.
Terrell Carver: “Moving Targets and Political Judgements”
The primary aim in my contribution to the book ‘What is Radical Politics Today?’ is to dissociate ‘radical politics’ from the Left – Right political axis. This division has been commonplace since the French Revolution. Yet it is very unsteady and prone to ambiguity. I will argue that it is unhelpful to align one moving target, such as ‘radical’, with another, such as ‘Left – Right’. This is illustrated by the fact that radical politics today is dominated by neo-conservativism….
Alastair Bonnett: “Radicalism is Nostalgia”
In the aftermath of the collapse of socialism and communism, radicalism has come to resemble a form of nostalgia. This disorientating moment also provides an opportunity for the reappraisal of the contempt and suspicion so often directed by radicals towards the past. We can begin to see that themes of yearning and loss are part of the repressed inheritance of the left: they were never simply conservative forces but an unadmitted component of the left’s own political imagination. This is a difficult encounter. The gleaming prospect of ‘new communities’ in ‘new societies’ is still being recycled across the left. Today this vision is sometimes allied to the celebration of a permanently unstable metropolitan multiculture. But, as the left has become an object of historical reminiscence, the plausibility of such shining spectacles of liberation has faded. Radicals need a different and more honest relationship with the sense of loss that we all feel in the maelstrom of modernity.
