[DEBATE] : Re: Peter and politics

[Andrej Grubacic]

Dear Peter,

I still do not get the importance you attach to this project of
un-politicization. If we follow the same logic we should reject democracy,
emancipation, solidarity or other notions that are being used, misused and
abused by the elite. I think that we should, rather, reclaim these notions.
Politics is an autonomous activity of the people in a self-governed polity.
Politics belongs to the people. Leaders are allergic to politics,as much as
they are to democracy. Jeniffer Roberts wrote this wonderful book, Athens on
Trial, about the anti democratic tradition in the "west" that was
democratophobic and apolitical at least until Jefferson.  Elites are
agoraphobic. Why would we indulge their political agoraphobia? Why do we
have to invent new semantics? I think it would be a strategic mistake. Why
not use something like "statecraft" to denote  the politics from above, or
rather distortions of politics (anti-politics) that you rightly abhorre, and
reclaim the politics that always was the project of peoples'
self-organization?

Love,

   Andrej



> ---------- Forwarded message ----------
> From: "Peter Waterman" <p.waterman at inter.nl.net>
> To: "debate: SA discussion list " <debate at lists.kabissa.org>
> Date: Wed, 27 Sep 2006 13:06:42 +0200
> Subject: [DEBATE] : Is the Political the Person(ality)?
> Bearing in mind the domination of both ANC and British Labour Party
> politics
> by personalities, the question arises in my mind of the extent to which
> the
> former is being reduced to the latter...worldwide.
>
> I recall the slogan, or button, from the UK two decades ago: 'Take the
> Politics out of Politics: Vote Liberal Democrat'. It occurs to me,
> however,
> that the disempowerment of people and peoples here suggested is not simply
> a
> recent trend but in the nature of 'politics' as such.
>
> I won't repeat the quotation from Paul Valery....
>
> Oh, OK then, if you twist my arm:
>
> 'Politics is the art of preventing people from taking part in affairs that
> properly concern them'.
>
> Rather than seeking for 'New Politics', which shortly after become Old
> Politicking, I think those concerned with global social emancipation
> should
> rather talk of 'Power(s)', Disempowerment(s) and Empowerment(s).
>
> Can someone theorise this for me please? They would need to start - as I
> have surely said before - with a Critique of Politics, in the spirit of
> Marx's Critique of Political Economy, i.e. a critique of both a social
> practice and a social theory. Unfortunately, I think, Marx promoted
> politics
> (Working-Class, Revolutionary, Internationalist) as the highest or most
> crucial social practice, and as the key to global social emancipation.
>
> My inclination is to see global social emancipation as implying at least a
> relativisation of politics (relative, that is to productive,
> communicative/cultural, playful, sexual, familial practices).
> Unfortunately,
> it seems to have been the hegemons who have invented or discovered 'media
> politics' and 'cultural wars'. Yet the terrains of community, culture,
> ideas
> and ethics are surely those on which emancipatory forces have tended to
> first appear and to have been effective - only to later subordinate these
> to
> politics.
>
> Ideas, anyone?
>
> Peter W
>
>
>
>
>
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-- 

Ciao,
      Andrej

-----
Then come the false saviors
With false heavens and false deities
With their commissars' sun
That never shines for us.
Every master wants power
To enjoy glory and riches
For the people they forge new chains
And to boot with the hoax of relieving their pains.

But we're free anarchists,
We want no more masters
To forge our slavery anew.
It is for freedom we struggle.