By Simon Crhichley

“(…) is politics conceivable without religion? The answer is obviously affirmative as the evidence of various secular political theories testifies. But is politics practicable without religion? That is the question. And that is the question that Rousseau’s thinking of politics faces. Can politics become effective as a way of shaping, motivating and mobilizing a people or peoples without some sort of dimension—if not foundation—that is religious, that is without some sort of appeal to transcendence, however substantive or otherwise that appeal might be? I do not think so. Or rather, I no longer think so. Thus, the exemplarity of Rousseau to my mind consists in the fact that he gives us the definitive expression of the modern conception of politics: that is, politics is the break with any conception of nature and natural law and has to be based in the concepts of popular sovereignty, association, rigorous equality and collective autonomy understood as the self-determination of a people. And yet, in order for this modern conception of politics to become effective it has to have a religious dimension, a moment of what the Romans used to call theologia civilis, civil theology. That is, the secularization that seems to define modern politics has to acknowledge a moment of what Emilio Gentile calls sacralization, the transformation of a political entity like a state, nation, class or party into a sacred entity, which means that it becomes transcendent, unchallengeable and intangible. So, can a political collectivity maintain itself in existence, that is, maintain its unity and identity, without a moment of the sacred, that is, without religion, rituals and something that we can only call belief? Once again, I do not think so. Might we not at least conceive of the possibility of redefining the secularization that is believed to be definitive of modernity with the idea of modern politics as a metamorphosis of sacralization, where modern forms of politics, whether liberal democracy, fascism, soviet communism, national socialism and the rest have to be grasped as new articulations and, indeed, mutations of the sacred? Before continuing, it should be noted that I have come to this conclusion with no particular joy, as someone with little enthusiasm (in the literal sense of the term) for religion, whether organized or disorganized. And I say this not simply in response to the chronic re-theologization of politics through which we are living, which makes this time certainly the darkest period in my lifetime, and arguably for much longer. At the heart of the horror of the present is the intrication of politics and religion, an intrication defined by violence, and this is what I would like to begin to think through. I want to do this not in order to break the connection between politics and religion, but to acknowledge the limitations of any completely secular leftist politics. It seems to me that the left has all too easily ceded the religious ground to the right and it is this ground that needs to be regained in a coherent, long-term and tenacious political war of position. As Gramsci famously wrote, ‘socialism is the religion that is needed to kill off Christianity’. As we will see presently, the relation of politics to religion and their intrication raises for me the question of the necessity of fiction, of both the seeming necessity for a divine fiction at the basis of politics and the possibility of what Wallace Stevens would call a supreme fiction in politics.”

Read if full at Continental Philosophy Review

By Margaret Somers

“We have seen the enemy and it is us. No longer should we blame neoliberalism’s starvation of the public sector and its privatizing restructuring of the economy for escalating rates of poverty, skyrocketing inequality, or the constriction of democracy. No, it is the fault of your and my delinquency in our bowling league attendance, our neglect of neighborhood barbeques, and in our lapsed faith-based church activities. Along with the privatization of citizenship has come the privatization of responsibility – yours and mine, that is – and we are shamed by our loss of moral fortitude.

Clearly, the appeal of the social capital concept for the neoliberal imagination is its dismissal of the usual sociological and institutional suspects as responsible for the current problems of poverty and politics – the decline of the welfare state and its ancillary social supports on the one hand, and the privatizing restructuring of the economy on the other. But what makes the concept so resonant, timely, and appealing to a world-wide audience less interested in pointing fingers at America’s bowling leagues and church barbeques, and more in exploring the dramatic reorganization of global markets and politics, is its apparent convergence with that celebrated source of Eastern Europe’s democratic revolutions, namely civil society – that sphere of social organization made most famous by its pragmatic, explanatory and normative revival in Eastern Europe’s revolutionary era of the 1980s. In that context, civil society was idealized as a space of democratic participatory empowerment, horizontal social ties and rights-oriented social movements. Its most notable feature, indeed its constitutive meaning, was its identity as a ‘third sphere’, independent of both the power of the administrative and coercive state as well as the competitive individualism of capitalist market societies.

In its glorious heydays of the Gdansk-based Solidarity movement, civil society was the nurturing ground for democratic associations of rightsclaiming citizens. More than a decade after the fact, however, and in the larger context of global privatizations, the civil society concept has come to represent less rights-oriented democratic politics than merely an anti-statist appendage for the ‘compassionate’ side of market society. And piggybacking on much-heralded shoulders, the social capital concept has taken the same path. Militant anti-statism, appropriate for Eastern Europe’s repressed trade unions and social movements fighting heroically against Communist Party tyranny, cannot be justified in the case of social capital. The exclusion of power and rights from the social capital agenda should alarm us. Like the golden glitter of the Trojan horse, we have been dazzled by the social in social capital to collude with a tragicomedy of social science: Neoliberalism has turned Gdansk into a Bowling Alley.”

Read it full at Thesis Eleven

By Francis Cody

“But for the women who had come to the office that day from Katrampatti, my sense is that they would only have been satisfied that they had performed the act of petitioning at grievance day if they had been able to see the collector and plead with him orally using generic conventions compelling superiors to act on behalf of the weak, not unlike those found in the praise language that had been erased from their petition. Their ambivalence is a product of having been denied the chance to make an affective claim through eye contact, ensuring that the collector would feel with their suffering. Karuppiah and I had tried to make it up to the petitioners by taking them all out to lunch after submitting the petition, but the bus ride home was certainly marked by disappointment and uncertainty about what had just taken place at the collector’s office. They all knew that it would be very difficult to collectively take yet another day off of work and come back to town.

Any governmental claims to rationalized and disenchanted Weberian bureaucracy remain particularly vexed in this context, because the collector does in fact sit in the erstwhile king’s seat, in his palace. In fact, he collects petitions in the old darbar hall where the king of Pudukkottai would have met with the court and those who had come to plead before royalty. Such a dense semiotic environment does not lend itself easily to a bureaucratic ideology of directness, or “reduced,” “logical” communication in the eyes of petitioners or even petition writers. The collector does appear to act like a king. It took so much pedagogical work just to get the group from Katrampatti to come to the collector’s office and it seemed somehow incomplete, in part because after such effort they simply turned in the sheet of paper at a small office without being able to see and talk to the collector at grievance day. The petitioners’ idea of seeing the collector directly (neratiyaka), a face-to-face encounter with a powerful patron, conflicts with the ideals of directness as the simple transmission of a communication in written form in which a petitioner has no face. Beyond this sense disappointment at not connecting visually or orally with their addressee, these petitioners have repeatedly been deceived or disappointed by the state, as by other higher powers. They know they are dealing with a realm of power that is in some sense beyond their control. This was, after all, an act of faith (oru nampikkaitan) as much as it was an exercise in citizenship.”

Read it at Cutural Anthropology

By Ellen Meiksins Wood

“In fact, we could just as easily say that the history of rights has
been a contraction, not an expansion, of political rights — not an
expansion from one set of rights to another but a contraction of
political rights to exclude the social and the economic. Political
rights have certainly expanded in the sense that they’ve become more
universal. More and more people have achieved the right to vote. But at
the same time, political rights have contracted in the sense that they
now exclude so many aspects of life.

There was a time when fewer people had political rights, but the
rights they did have were economic and social powers at the same time.
Today that isn’t true. People with political rights may not have any
social or economic power; and that’s one reason we’ve had to invent new
kinds of economic and social rights.

Let me explain what I mean. I’ll give you the punch line first: we
live today in a capitalist world, and capitalism has completely
transformed the meaning of political rights and their relation to
economic and social rights. The distinctive relation between political
and economic power in capitalism is fundamentally different from
anything that existed in the world before the system came into being.
Capitalism has created a separate economic sphere with its own rules
and its own forms of power; and political rights have been emptied of
economic and social content.

At the same time, the system has produced a whole new set of social
problems. In fact, I think you could say that the very idea of a
distinct sphere of social problems belongs specifically to capitalism.
The idea of “the social question,” as it came to be called in the 19th
century, is very specifically related to the development of capitalism,
with its propertyless laboring class. And it’s specifically in the
conditions of capitalism that we’ve had to start thinking about social
rights, social justice, social citizenship, the social economy, and,
yes, social work.

In other words, just when political rights have been emptied of
social content, there’s a whole new range of social problems, and one
of the great debates of our time is how, or even whether, the political
power of the state should intervene to solve them.”

Read full article at Against the Current

By Michael Hardt

Social Text, No. 45 (Winter, 1995), pp. 27-44.

Read it at http://makeworlds.org

“Claiming the decline of civil sociey, of course, does not mean that all the mechanisms of rule and organization which characterized civil society no longer exist or function. Similarly, recognizing a passage from disciplinary societies to societies of control does not mean that disciplinary deployments and the attendant potentialities of resistance have completely disappeared. Disciplinary deployments remain, as do elements of sovereignty in the regimes of control. … What is primarily at issue, though, is not simply the existence of certain apparatuses, mechanisms, or deployments, but rather their predominance within a specific paradigm of rule. Our task is to discern the salient characteristics of the social formation that succeeds civil society; the smooth spaces of the societies of control constitute our first attempt. We can formulate a second, complementary approach to this problematic by casting the passage not in Foucauldian but rather in Marxian terminology, which will highlight the contemporary change in the social organization of labor. … Marx recognized the passage from the formal to the real subsumption in nineteenth-century society as a tendency, but it seems to me that this passage has only come to be generalized in the most completely capitalist countries in our times. According to Marx, in the first of these two phases, the formal subsumption, social labor processes are subsumed under capital; that is, they are enveloped within the capitalist relations of production in such a manner that capital intervenes as the director or manager. In this arrangement, capital subsumes labor the way it finds it; capital takes over existing labor processes that were developed in previous modes of production or at any rate outside of capitalist production. …. Actually, as Hegel clearly recognized in his writings … capital cannot directly integrate concrete labor but must first abstract it from its concrete forms. The various processes of abstraction, the resistances these give rise to, and the potential lines of social conflict between concrete labor and abstract labor are thus principle characteristics of the phase of the formal subsumption. Capital tends, however, through the socialization of production and through scientific and technological innovation, to create new labor processes and to destroy old ones, transforming the situations of the various agents of production. Capital thus sets in motion a specifically capitalist mode of production. Marx calls the subsumption of labor _real_, then, when the labor processes themselves are born within capital and therefore when labor is incorporated not as an external, but an internal force, proper to capital itself. As we move to the phase of the real subsumption, Marx explains, labor processes evolve so that, first of all, production is no longer a direct and individual activitv but an immediately social activity. … In the _specifically_ capitalist mode of production, that is, in the phase of the real subsumption, productive labor – or even production in general – no longer appears as the pillar that defines and sustains capitalist social organization. Production is given an objective quality, as if the capitalist system were a machine that marched forward on its own accord, without labor, a capitalist automaton. … This is how we should understand the passage from the formal to the real subsumption. The society of the formal subsumption was characterized by the dialectic between capital and labor: as a foreign force subsumed within capital, labor had to be abstracted, recuperated, disciplined, and tamed within the productive processes. But labor nonetheless was continually recognized as the source of all social wealth. … In the society of the real subsumption this dialectic no longer holds the central role, and capital no longer needs to engage labor or represent labor at the heart of production. What is subsumed, what is accepted into the process, is no longer a potentially conflictive force but a product of the system itself; the real subsumption does not extend vertically throughout the various strata of society but rather constructs a separate plane, a simulacrum of society that excludes or marginalizes social forces foreign to the system. Social capital thus appears to reproduce itself autonomously, as if it were emancipated from the working class, and labor becomes invisible in the system.”

by Bryan S. Turner

British Journal of Sociology Vol. No. 52 Issue No. 2 ( June 2001) pp. 189–209.

Read it at Educating the Global Citizen

“The Marshallian paradigm of social citizenship has been eroded because the social and economic conditions that supported postwar British welfare consensus have been transformed by economic and technological change. This article argues that effective entitlement was based on participation in work, war and reproduction, resulting in three types of social identity: worker-citizens, warriorcitizens and parent-citizens. The casualization of labour and the technological development of war have eroded work and war as routes to active citizenship. Social participation through reproduction remains important, despite massive changes to marriage and family as institutions. In fact the growth of new reproductive technologies have reinforced the normative dominance of marriage as a social relation. These rights of reproduction are described as ‘reproductive citizenship’. The article also considers the role of voluntary associations in Third-Way strategies as sources of social cohesion in societies where social capital is in decline, and argues that the volunteer y sector is increasingly driven by an economic logic of accumulation. With the erosion of national citizenship, Marshall’s three forms of rights (legal, political and social) have been augmented by rights that are global, namely environmental, aboriginal and cultural rights. These are driven by global concerns about the relationship between environment, community and body such that the quest for social security has been replaced by concerns for ontological security.”

By Alain C.

El impasse ciudadanista. Contribución a la crítica del ciudadanismo.
Folletos Etcétera, nº 23, 2001, 48p.

Translated from French version of 2001, by NOTBORED,
Info@notbored.org – ISSN 1084-7340.
Snail mail: POB 1115,
Stuyvesant Station, New York City 10009-9998

Read it at NotBored