Abstract
In an era which has seen musings about the end of history, the fragmentation of the left into the many shards of identity politics, and the rise of postmodern cynicism as a new cultural dominant, can we even speak of the radical? Official discourse certainly has not given up on the term, but within its fearful purview “radical” denotes violent extremism, typically of the Islamic fundamentalist variety, and radicalization is the brainwashing that renders someone capable of committing unspeakable atrocities.
To recover an authentic sense of the radical, we need to recognize its distinctive modalities, emergent in history, which have been incorporated into diverse practices that challenge hegemony.
1. Radical Modalities
Four radical modalities may be distinguished: the resistant, the analytical, the prefigurative, and the subversive.
To be radically resistant is to struggle against domination, and in the process develop counter-power, in concert with those who share common cause. Often the cause is one of social justice, but in our ecologically deteriorating situation issues involving humanity’s relation to the rest of nature gain salience. In practice, radical resistance means thoughtful, critically alert action, activated by a careful reading of the situation, which has the potential to lead to a just outcome (Bailey and Gayle 2003: 125). It is distinct from simply flailing at the system or burning down the house, although at times it involves the use of force. The counter-power that develops in resistance to power-over is a collective, agentic capacity. To develop it is to cultivate solidarity within counterpublics and movements. In resisting, in building counter-power, radicals take up the standpoint of subalterns: they view the dominant order “from below,” as a formation marked by injustice and irrationality.
A second radical modality is the analytical. Bertell Ollman has captured a key aspect of this in comparing liberals and radicals. Liberals believe
each problem has an independent existence and can be understood and even solved in a way that does not bring in other problems. … Radicals, on the other hand, recognize a pattern in these problems. For them, these problems are linked together as part of the necessary life processes of the capitalist system. (1978: 223)
Radical analysis not only links across; particularly in its Marxist variant it penetrates downward to unmask surface appearances of isolated problems, each with its own solution. 1 In revealing a deeper reality this second modality operates within a method of ideology-critique. The classic example is Marx’s analysis of how alienated labor and class exploitation are masked by the apparent truths of bourgeois freedom and equality; but the method has applicability to issues as diverse as climate-change denial and racialized thought. Such analysis provides strategic guidance to radical action. It clarifies, for instance, that the standpoint of subalterns does not arise directly from experience. Subaltern experience is characteristically fragmented, shaping what Gramsci called a contradictory consciousness that mixes oppositional impulses, opaque traditions, and bourgeois nostrums. Here feminist theorists have contributed important insights. Dorothy Smith (1999) insists that a veridical understanding of the relations of ruling requires a problematization of experience, exploring how our lives are shaped by relations of ruling that reach into them – regulating and calibrating human being to abstract value relations, bureaucratic rules, and professionalized metrics. In this setting, radicalism requires a mapping of social relations, including the “social relations of struggle” which take in both the ruling relations and “the sources of agency that can bring about social transformation” (Kinsman 2006: 136). Indeed, it is in the process of resisting power-over that people achieve a radical standpoint, an understanding of the generative mechanisms of domination and crisis that can point beyond surface-level reallocation, to transformative change (Fuller 1992; Fraser 2013). 2 Radical analysis operates within a theory/practice dialectic: it informs practices, from direct action to alliance building and popular education, as it is enriched by them.
In its prefigurative modality, radicalism also seeks connections, but these are of a temporal sort (Ollman 2003), reaching from a troubled present to an alternative future. If people make their own history, if the present is always history in-the-making, then the future, as potential, already inhabits the present. Radical prefiguration consciously strives to create from that present an alternative future of human thriving within a context of ecological health. This modality has multiple sources that include
Gramsci’s query, “How can the present be welded to the future, so that while satisfying the urgent necessities of the one we may work effectively to create and ‘anticipate’ the other?” (1977: 65);
Bloch’s assertion that “fermenting in the process of the real itself” is “the concrete forward dream: anticipating elements are a component of reality itself” (1986:197);
the Gandhian admonition to be the change we wish to see in the world;
Freire’s (1970) conception of critical pedagogy as a dialogical process of conscientization which transforms ourselves and our social relations.
Contemporary North American anarchism tends to restrict prefiguration to the practice of alternative lifestyles and radical democracy within movement subcultures (Dixon 2014: 84-5). Such movement-centered transformations of lifeworld are important to what Gramsci called intellectual and moral reformation, through which the subjective basis for a transformed world can begin to take root. But radical prefiguration needs to go beyond lifestyles and subcultures, to address system transformation, as in the creation of a solidarity economy. In such an alternative economy “self-management, collective ownership and bottom-up processes led by ordinary people” create foundations for a new way of life built around “an ethos of reciprocity, redistribution and engaged citizenship” (Williams 2014: 53-4). Concomitantly, radical prefiguration takes the form of cognitive praxis: the production and advocacy of alternative visions, policies, and practices, extending to the articulation of counterhegemonic projects. Such work ranges across genres. From William Morris forward, speculative fiction has played its own inspirational role. Significantly, in recent years, alternative policy groups, linked to left movements, have begun to articulate the policies that will be needed in any transition from neoliberal capitalism to a green and democratic future. 3
Power is not only organized vertically within social relations of domination, but diffused within and across the normative institutions and networks of civil society, which play an integral role in organizing consent. To the first three modalities we must add a fourth – the subversive: contesting, reversing, deconstructing, jamming dominant practices, norms, discourses, identities. Radical subversion problematizes the discourses that make us what we are, opening up a politics of self-overcoming and self-transformation, “to give new impetus, as far and as wide as possible, to the undefined work of freedom” (Foucault 1984: 46). In deconstructing binaries and politicizing themes that have been sedimented as self-evident “truth,” subversion de-reifies and contests normalizing powers, which are distinct from power-over – perhaps most effectively, in recent decades, in the critique of heteronormative sexuality. Radical subversion operates primarily on a discursive plane, raising questions, challenging received presumptions, and amplifying Marx’s (1843b) call for “a ruthless criticism of all that exists.”
In contemporary North America, actually-existing radicalism typically takes up one of these modalities, or combines resistance with subversion, perhaps adding in a prefigurative politics that begins and ends within movement subcultures. Yet on its own, each radical modality can be contained, repressed, or diverted. Resistance often begins and remains within single-issue identity politics, constructing solidarity and counter-power inside a community but not across a range of subaltern positions; or it gets reduced to “owning the streets” within fleeting moments of the radical act. Radical analysis may connect across issues and penetrate beneath appearances, but that counts for little if it is innocuously confined to the “theoretical practice” of a left intelligentsia encased within the ivory tower. The prefigurative can also become encased within sectarian counter-cultures and localisms singularly focused around infoshops and community gardens (Sharzer 2012), following from the defeatist premise that “the masses… have chosen quiescence, and nothing we can do will change their behavior for the better” (Day 2005: 126). Or, lacking an actual political base, the articulation of alternative policies can amount to no more than wishful thinking: “castles in the sky,” as Gramsci once put it. Subversion of dominant discourse can devolve to a counter-cultural “quest for cool” as a positional good within the larger logic of “competitive consumption” (Heath and Potter 2004: 188-200).
2. Robust Radicalism
What is needed is a robust radicalism that knits together all four modalities. It is in their reflexive, practical combination that these modalities gain real effectivity, not only objectively but subjectively: within a process “of producing new people, of transforming them into people with a new conception of themselves – as subjects capable of altering their world” (Lebowitz 2003: 140). In mounting coherent efforts to build capacity for transformative resistance, to connect the dots of kindred struggles and issues within penetrating analyses that inform effective strategy, to construct and proliferate practices that prefigure a radically democratic way of life, and to subvert the common sense of dominant discourses, radicalism becomes robust – sustainable across conjunctures, as more than a series of episodic campaigns that operate on the bourgeois-democratic terrain of passive revolution (as in Rorty 1995) – and capable of building on successes and weathering defeats. Robust radicalism is sensitized to the need, as I have put it elsewhere (Carroll 2006), to “walk on both legs,” neither privileging nor forsaking the state as a terrain of struggle, but recognizing that there is no exit from patriarchal capitalism and colonialism without a transformation of both state and society. Indeed, reclaiming the state – democratizing state practices in the wake of neoliberal globalization – is elemental to radical politics today (Wainwright 2013).
Robust radicalism, in short, invites us to follow Gramsci in viewing transformative politics within a dual perspective, as “the dialectical unity of the moments of force and consent in political action” (Hoare and Smith 1971: 169, note 70). Such a viewpoint recognizes that the state is much more than a repressive apparatus – that it extends into civil society – and correspondingly, that exiting from capitalism will mean both appropriating and transforming the coercive and persuasive powers of the integral state. The counterhegemonic war of position implicit in this perspective is distinct from incremental reformism, from vanguardism, from autonomism, from localism, and from micropolitics – although it incorporates elements of these into an ongoing struggle to democratize all aspects of state and civil society through popular participation.
Robust radicalism implies the need for a party, which is the organizational form through which radical modalities are knit together. Without such a form, “existing social movements have little reality for the majority of human beings” (Sanbonmatsu 2004: 11). Robust activism ultimately requires a synergy of movement/party organizing, and a moving ideological convergence, enabling sustained collective action and the articulation of a counter-hegemonic project within widening circles of participation. In parts of Latin America and Europe and in South Africa, actual processes of radical party formation are in play. Elsewhere, radicals need to be mindful of how interventions today might foster enabling conditions for such processes. A radical party is neither an electoral machine nor a self-appointed vanguard, but promotes coherent processes of thinking and acting otherwise (McKay 2005), helping to build an “infrastructure of dissent” as “the means through which activists develop political communities capable of learning, communicating and mobilizing together” (Sears 2014: 2). It does not absorb movements and counterpublics into itself, but provides a center of gravity, in dialogue with practitioners and publics. Within those processes, counterhegemonic possibilities can take shape, as the manifold forces of dissent, “combining their unique perspectives[,] … come to see what confronts each and all” (Sanbonmatsu 2004: 202). A condition for this, and a permanent task for radicals, is the advancement of communicative democracy in the Habermasian sense, undoing the exclusionary practices that relegate some voices to the margins and that concomitantly replicate, within the left, the logic of hierarchy. A long-term process, indispensable in the formation of a counterhegemonic collective will, democratization in this deep sense means nurturing “those normative practices and moral relationships within which reasoned agreement as a way of life can flourish” (Benhabib 1990: 346).
Robust radicalism differs from contemporary anarchism on several counts. As Barbara Epstein argues,
Anarchism’s absolute hostility to the state, and its tendency to adopt a stance of moral purity, limit its usefulness as a basis for a broad movement for egalitarian social change, let alone for a transition to socialism. Telling the truth to power is or should be a part of radical politics but it is not a substitute for strategy and planning. (2001:2)
Strategy and planning imply leadership, an anathema to anarchists, yet there is no getting around it if radicalism is to be robust. Problems often attributed to “leadership” are actually rooted in authoritarian forms which identify leadership with power-over. The prefigurative moment of radicalism demands that these be transcended. What is needed is leadership of a radical kind: dialogical, diagonal, collaborative, participatory, distributive; indeed “leaderless leadership”: (Sutherland et al. 2014) is a vision to strive for in social and political action. Radical leadership follows Gramsci’s adage: its trajectory is pitched toward corroding and eliminating the very distinction between leaders and followers. 4
Finally, in thinking through what it means to be radical today, we can return to the young Marx, who began from the word’s classical etymology: “To be radical is to grasp the root of the matter. But, for man, the root is man himself” (1843a). Humans, however, are natural beings – sensuous, suffering, and immersed within a natural world – and so the root to be grasped is at once social and natural. This insight informed the dialectical, ecological vision of communism that Marx developed in the same period.
This communism, as fully developed naturalism, equals humanism, and as fully developed humanism equals naturalism; it is the genuine resolution of the conflict between man and nature, and between man and man…. (1844)
The contemporary world – a chaotic assemblage of globalizing capitalism intent on enclosing more and more aspects of life, of failed neoliberalism and unrelenting austerity, of all manner of reactionary ethno-religious politics, and of urgent ecological maladies – raises unprecedented challenges for Marx’s vision. Yet the same world contains many radical strands, and in some places these strands already are being pragmatically braided. Everywhere, the very depth and breadth of the organic crisis create openings for a just transition to a post-capitalist future that places human thriving and ecological health at its center; a future that can only be actualized through efforts that span the local and the global, creating multilevel “virtuous circles” that strengthen movements, parties, and initiatives by progressive governments (Evans 2008; Carroll 2010). This requires robust radicalism.
Footnotes
Declaration of Conflicting Interests
The author declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.
Funding
The author received no financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.
1
2
In principle, anyone is capable of achieving such struggle-based insight; in practice it is subalterns that are more likely to struggle against the conditions that unjustly diminish their possibilities.
3
For instance, Focus on the Global South (http://focusweb.org/), the Institute for Critical Social Analysis, (http://www.rosalux.de/english/foundation/research-projects.html) and the Transnational Institute (http://www.tni.org/). See 
.