Unity and consolidation of different leftist initiatives are crucially important worldwide as a chance to create true political globalization. Vasyl Cherepanyn appeals for a New International.
Today, in the world of dominant cynical relativism that makes social and political antagonisms unessential and where, as Ulrich Beck pointed out, systemic contradictions are solved biographically, there is a necessity to invent new communicative connections, which could provide the ground for possible common actions. The Roman notion sensus communis, which meant the feeling of commonality, civic consciousness or public spirit, is cleared out in the atomized and individualized contemporary capitalistic society. During the previous decades intellectuals and the active public got used to not take some side – everything is ideology, we can only analyze, politics is for professionals and we should not be the part of it – sharing the illusion that we can bring ourselves out of the ideological brackets. Present critical theory and political practice look disintegrated and discrete because of this anti-political common sense. The question of social glue, which is now very powerful on the right and pretty rare on the left, appears to be decisive.
We found ourselves in the context with a lack of social alternatives and other types of politics. In this situation the challenge facing us is to turn the existing public sphere into the field of collective reflection as the basis for social transformations. Such field of common thinking and acting could sharpen the lexicon of analysis we use, denominate the most actual problems and draft the ways to possible solutions. It is important now to bring something new not only on metapolitical level, but also into political practice. The leftist cultural milieu “Krytyka Polityczna” (“Political Critique”) is a significant example that today’s effective politics is impossible without anti-discriminative project that fights against political, economic and cultural exclusion in the public sphere. The key question for that is the formation of social resources or social capital – groups, circles, communities, which can articulate their message with their own ethos not like a NGO or a party. Creation of the cooperative of politically engaged groups, which act together on the basis of common ideas – that is the art piece we really need most. It is also one of the assignments of the art theory, which is based on political practice. Such social network should work as a political movement that conducts and represents transnational politics in spite of existing borders and new walls at the age of globalization.
There is a great need in solidarity today, on the left spectrum in particular – it appears to be an urgent point for emancipation and an unavoidable value for egaliberte. The reinvention of socially engaged critique in a new form, which overflows the academic cabinets into political praxis, shows the importance to gather intellectuals, artists and activists together on the principle of shared coherence fighting for the common goal. We should take in such constellation not only the theorists’ position, but keep much more our experience and activity’s point of view: to speak about local problems in universal language from the place we are in and in which we are deeply rooted. Activation and practical implementation of left ideas as a weapon against commercialization of political space and criminalization and moralization of social problems is the most important task in the times of right-religious reaction. Such type of engagement is very much needed in today’s “post-political” world. That is why we should combine the means of art, knowledge and politics aimed at the transformation of reality to form a new collective political subject as a coalition of struggles against exploitation and exclusion in the context of emptying out of the civil society.
Unity and consolidation of different leftist initiatives are crucially important worldwide as a chance to create true political, not only economical globalization, which we are all experiencing nowadays. In the European context “Krytyka Polityczna” is called to function as a platform for all those left and liberal groups and movements, which are trying to introduce liberation discourses and change the status quo – but not only inside the cultural institutions, gallery spaces, universities or narrow radical circles, where leftism has already become a safe fashion, but also in the media, on the streets, in the toxic zone of Realpolitik. It is time to leave the Deleuzian strategy of klein werden – the absence of a big project, anti-institutional orientation – such politics of “resistance” only nourishes the machine of power, helps the system to reproduce itself. We are adult enough for groß werden – to propose a new international Left, which is based on strong organizations and could gain political hegemony. We should move, as Slavoj Žižek put it, from the politics of protest, which parasites on what it denies, to the politics, which opens new space.
In order to get the leftist domination on political scene, the process of the subjectification or political interpellation of multitudes should be definitively accomplished. The ruling power today conducts a global offensive, while the resistance is isolated within national boundaries. That is why the most needful ideological request is actually to assemble a new International that means to build a massive bloc of diverse movements and projects each of which retains its own agenda. But the International is more than the sum of all its parts it is their political overdetermination for the sake of mutual aid and collective benefit linked to the real struggle as it takes place around us. The Fifth International means a rational utopia in action, the imagination of alternatives based on concrete realities. And it is genuine politics – the possibility of impossible.
