Ana Cecilia Dinerstein

Interstitial revolution: On the explosive fusion of negativity and hope

This article offers a comprehensive review of John Holloway’s Crack Capitalism by situating it within the wider body of his work spanning the last two decades. The article reflects on the significance of Holloway’s argument that revolution must be conceived as an interstitial process, suggesting that this latest volume offers both a more grounded analysis of capitalism and an exploration of the poetry of ‘cracks’ that rupture the capitalist ‘synthesis’. Holloway effectively articulates Adorno’s negative dialectics with Bloch’s principle of hope, pointing to the necessity of rejecting what-is and opening outwards to what-is-not-yet.

Sociological Imagination as Social Critique: Interrogating the Global Economic Crisis

Why talk about the global economic crisis today? The topic no longer seems as relevant or fresh as it did two years ago when we issued the call for papers. At that time, the events following the implosion of Lehman Brothers in 2008 seemed to be at the centre of everyday and media discourse: we heard it on the radio, saw it on television, read it in the printed media and thought about it in public and private places. Our imaginaries and experiences seemed to be saturated by the global economic crisis. The global economic crisis informed or structured discussions about political interventions, bailouts, quantitative easing, the nationalisation of financial institutions, and austerity programmes. The emergence of the Indignados in Spain, the public sector workers’ protests in Greece, the London Riots, the Occupy Movement, the Arab Spring and the mass demonstrations in Russia and Turkey were often read through the prism of, or shared a common destiny with, the unfolding crisis. Does the decentring of the global economic crisis from public and media attention imply that the crisis is over or should we understand both the existence and the effects of subsequent events and developments as ongoing expressions of the crisis? These events and developments have included a shift in the dominant discourse from ‘crisis’ to ‘recovery and growth’, heightened concerns around migration, the fiscal and legitimation problems of political institutions, the rise of right wing parties and movements and the return of geopolitics and violent conflicts. Is it now appropriate to reassign these events and developments to the discrete domains of economics, demography, politics and geography or do we need to rethink the concept and understanding of crisis in deeper sociological terms?

Denaturalising Society:Concrete Utopia and the prefigurative critique of political economy

Dinerstein argues that the form of utopia today is not abstract but ‘concrete’. Concrete utopias are ‘denaturalising’ capitalist-colonial society as they are negating the given and creating alternative practices at the grass roots. Dinerstein suggests that Marx’s critique of political economy constitutes the most unforgiving critique of capitalist society. Yet, in order to grasp concrete utopias, Marx’s critique should be read ‘in the key of hope’, that is through the lenses of Bloch’s principle of hope. Like this, Marx’s critique becomes a prefigurative critique of political economy that recognises the process of shaping concrete utopia as a critique of the value form from within the process of the self-expansion of value. In the final section, Dinerstein enquiries about the adequacy of the term concrete utopia to understand indigenous struggles for self-determination. She offers the notion of ‘subsumption by exclusion’ to argue for a particular form of subordination of indigenous peoples in capital. They ‘appear’ outside but in fact constitute a threat to the expansion of value. Both kinds of concrete utopia navigate the open veins of capital.

Corbynism’s conveyor belt of ideas: Postcapitalism and the politics of social reproduction

In this reflection, we assess the theoretical faultline running through the contested current of Corbynist thought and politics at present. On one hand, we find a techno-utopian strand preoccupied with automation and the end of work. On the other hand, a nascent politics of social reproduction with a foreshortened potential to realise the promise of a continental-style solidarity economics in the United Kingdom. Both represent the latest in a series of left attempts to confront the crisis of social democracy that rages across Europe, a crisis to which the British Labour Party has not been alone in succumbing despite recent appearances otherwise. Deindustrialisation collapsed labour’s role in everyday life, and a crisis in the society of work eventually passed over into its representative party’s electoral decline. Subsequent financial crisis and subsequent austerity have only made things worse. A poverty of ideas prevails that all sides of social democracy’s unsteady compromise seek desperately to solve. However, the recent UK General Election shows evidence that Corbynism has renewed Labour’s fortunes to some extent. Surveying the competing intellectual currents behind its rise, we suggest that the politics of social reproduction offer a better route forward for the Labour Party than the popular siren call of postcapitalism, and reflect on what the recent general election result suggests for their future development.

Co-construction or prefiguration?:The problem of the ‘translation’ of social and solidarity economy practices into policy

By engaging with the recent experience of Latin American SSE movements, this chapter discusses three ideas. First, that SSE practices by social movements can be seen as tools for the anticipation of alternative reality/ practices, relationships and horizons—in the present. Second, that the integration of SSE practices into state policy requires the institutionalisation of SSE which renders invisible everything that does not fit in the the ‘parameters of legibility’ of the state’s policy territory. As the state seeks to achieve order and stability, policy reforms are the crystallisation in time of ongoing conflicts. Third, an adequate ‘translation’ of SSE into policy begs for a type of co-construction of policy that engages with the emancipatory call of SSE movements, thus constituting a prefigurative translation. By escaping the contours of the given reality prefigurative translation allows to venture with the SSE movements, this ‘prefigurative translation’ is part of the process of ‘organising hope’ by SSSE movements.

The Radical Subject and Its Critical Theory: An Introduction

Dinerstein argues that a new radical subject that is unrecognisable with old analytical tools is in the making. This radical subject is plural, prefigurative, decolonial, ethical, ecological, communal and democratic. A critical theory should demonstrate those qualities, too. She reflects on the shortcomings of theory in understanding these changes by arguing against the resistance of social scientists, most of them critical theorists, to learn about this radical subject and to interrogate concepts, methodologies and epistemologies used to grasp radical change. Unlike both a social science obsessed with facticity and policy, and a critical theory obsessed with negative praxis, the new radical theory explored in this book seeks to critique capital-coloniality by means of the affirmation of life. Affirmation is not positive thinking or affirmationism. It is a form of theorising that, driven by ‘hope’, ventures beyond the given offering epistemological, theoretical and empirical openings that reflect a prefigurative and ‘experiential critique’ that is already taking place at the grass roots. The chapter also presents the work of the contributors to the book and the process of theorising without parachutes.

Meanings of Autonomy : Trajectories, Modes, Differences

What is ‘autonomy’? The concept of autonomy has been historically the subject of enquiry by both scholar and activists alike but it has recently come under acute examination, generating worldwide debates about new social movements, power, politics, the state, policy and radical change. The reason is that for the past two decades the claim and practice of collective autonomy – in pursuit of self-determination, self-management, self-representation and self-government – independently from the state and institutionalised form of labour and party politics, have served new rural and urban movements to revitalised and push forward those legacies of other radical moments of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. The principle of autonomy has also become a new ‘paradigm of resistance’ for indigenous movements (Burguete Cal y Mayor, 2010) relatively recently, and has been applied to the defence of self-government, indigenous legality and territoriality against new paradigms domination such as ‘multiculturalism’ (Burguete Cal y Mayor, 2010: 67). Multiculturalism emerged as a counter-paradigm to control indigenous resistance since the demand from the indigenous for the right to self-affirmation and self-determination together with the right to communal property of the land became part of the international agenda of the UN and other organisations, and new policy frameworks informed by the idea of diversity emerged to integrate this demand into the nation-state policies.

Autonomy in the Key of Hope: Understanding Prefiguration

The aim of this chapter is to produce an alternative understanding of autonomy that engages with the movements’ processes of prefiguration. I offer a definition of autonomy as the art of organising hope. I examine the previously mentioned four modes of autonomy through the prism of Ernst Bloch’s philosophy. By paraphrasing the language of music, I put autonomy in the key of hope. This means that, as a ‘composer’, I use hope as my basic material. If I make use of other concepts, notions and ideas, I will point to the way they are modified by the category of hope. A reading of autonomy in the key of hope repositions the debate about autonomy in three ways. First, it moves away from the dichotomy ‘autonomy vs the state’ by revealing the prefigurative nature of autonomy without avoiding the problem of the state and capital; second, it overcomes the fragmented understanding of autonomy; third, it bridges indigenous and non-indigenous autonomous practices.

Contesting Translation: Indigenous-Popular Movements (Bolivia)

In this chapter, I discuss the third mode of autonomous organising (i.e., contradiction) by looking at the struggles of indigenous-popular movements in present Bolivia. Autonomy (self-determination and self-government) is an ancestral practice among indigenous people in Latin America, but it became a new ‘paradigm of resistance’ (Burguete Cal y Mayor, 2010) relatively recently. As a ‘discourse, a practice and a legality’, autonomy became a ‘new political paradigm’ (Patzi Paco, 2004: 187) that positioned them vis-a-vis other paradigms (Burguete Cal y Mayor, 2010: 66).

Confronting Value with Hope: Towards a Prefigurative Critique of Political Economy

In my review of the four modes of autonomy and their conversion into the key of hope (Chapters 2 and 3), I posed the question of whether autonomous organising is a praxis that fluctuates eternally between rebellion and integration or whether there is anything else to autonomy that can informs its political virtues to produce radical change? I suggested that when the Zapatistas, the QSVT movements, the Network for the Defence of Water and Life and the MST cross boundaries and venture beyond ‘the wire’, they create a surplus possibility or excess that escapes translation. By excess I mean an untranslatable aspect of the autonomous praxis that constitutes both a threat to capital and a source of inspiration for the movements. In this chapter, I discuss the nature of excess and offer a prefigurative critique of political economy. This method reads Marx’s critique of political economy in the key of hope. This does not mean that I will engage directly with Marx’s views on alternatives to capitalism (see Hudis, 2012) but emphasise Marx’s critique of political economy as a prefigurative method and epistemology. As argued in Chapter 3, Bloch reads Marx as a not yet theory, as a philosophy of the future, as a method that takes us in the right direction, puts us in motion, in contact with our inner self and with hope, the expectant emotion that strives for radical thinking and equips us with the capacity to organise hope collectively.