Robin Celikates

Wasserball und Kommunismus

Zuletzt recht medienwirksam verbreiten Philosophen wie Slavoj Žižek und Alain Badiou eine vage «kommunistische Hypothese» - wie sehen die Theoriealternativen zu dieser neokommunistischen Intervention aus, die zugleich eine Abkehr vom Marxismus ist?

Democratizing civil disobedience

The goal of this article is to show that mainstream liberal accounts of civil disobedience fail to fully capture the latter’s specific characteristics as a genuinely political and democratic practice of contestation that is not reducible to an ethical or legal understanding either in terms of individual conscience or of fidelity to the rule of law. In developing this account in more detail, I first define civil disobedience with an aim of spelling out why the standard liberal model, while providing a useful starting point, ultimately leads to an overly constrained, domesticated and sanitized understanding of this complex political practice. Second, I place the political practice of civil disobedience between two opposing poles: symbolic politics and real confrontation. I argue that the irreducible tension between these poles precisely accounts for its politicizing and democratizing potential. Finally, I briefly examine the role of civil disobedience in representative democracies, addressing a series of recent challenges made in response to this radically democratic understanding of disobedience.

Rethinking Civil Disobedience as a Practice of Contestation—Beyond the Liberal Paradigm

Across the political spectrum, many people— journalists, politicians, but also activists and theorists— seem to think there is something fundamentally wrong with civil disobedience. Some consider it too radical, as an attempt to procure political power under the mantel of moral principles, as a one-sided renunciation of the duty to obey the law and to uphold order that is not to be tolerated.1 Citizens in more or less functioning democracies, they say, must limit themselves to the legally sanctioned possibilities available to them for expressing dissenting views and influencing the political process. As Anne Applebaum put it, in characteristically simple terms, referring to the disobedience practiced by Occupy Wall Street: “Unlike the Egyptians in Tahrir Square, to whom both the London and New York protesters openly (and ridiculously) compare themselves, we have democratic institutions in the Western world.”2 From this point of view, civil disobedience is little more than political blackmail. On the other extreme we find those who consider it nothing more than the impotent expression of a reformist yearning for cosmetic changes within a given system, as a socially permissible and harmless protest of wellintentioned citizens, which remains purely symbolic and only contributes to the stabilization of the status quo.3 In this article I argue that both of these widespread views miss the specific characteristics of civil disobedience as a genuinely political and democratic practice of contestation. In order to present these specifics in detail, it is first necessary to examine how civil disobedience is understood—in what will turn out to be a very one-sided and sanitized way—in the mainstream liberal paradigm, not least because the definition elaborated in liberal political philosophy4 is either so successful that it has shaped public understandings of civil disobedience, or so uncritical that it more or less systematizes and reproduces these understandings. This first step of my argument will be developed in three short subsections on the definition, justification, and role of civil disobedience. In a second step I address the crucial and complex question of the relation between civil disobedience, a practice often regarded as essentially nonviolent, and violence. In the last part I briefly sketch why understanding civil disobedience as a specifically democratic political practice—one we might also call democratic or political disobedience in order to mark the difference with classical ways of understanding and of practicing civil disobedience—makes it necessary to conceive of the relation between its symbolic and its confrontational (maybe even violent) aspect in a different, more complicated way. This rethinking of civil disobedience seems especially called for today in a situation that poses a series of challenges to traditional understandings of political contestation. Amongst these challenges, the crises-ridden globalization of neoliberal political and economic power structures, the rise of the Internet both as a tool of political action and as a politically contested space, and the troubled resurgence of radical opposition to the status quo, for example, in the form of the Occupy movement,5 can be seen as the most pressing. They urge us to be aware of both the potential and the limits of a conception of civil disobedience that goes beyond its narrowly liberal understanding.6

Karl Marx: Critique as Emancipatory Practice

Critique of philosophy, critique of religion, critique of politics, critique of political economy — there is almost no sphere of modern society of which Karl Marx’s theory does not offer a critique. This makes it all the more necessary to investigate whether these different critiques possess any common traits, be it with respect to their aims or their methods.1 In what follows, I argue that Marx’s notion of critique is unified by three characteristics and that it is still relevant for contemporary critical theory if understood as practice rather than as science. First, Marx’s critique is always at the same time a critique of forms of knowledge and of the forms of practice that correspond to them. Second, it is practical and emancipatory in the sense that it aims not only to understand, but also to contribute to a transformation of the social world that is already under way. Third, Marx follows Hegel in rejecting the dichotomy between internal and external critique and in opting instead for what can be called immanent critique.2 His version of immanent critique focuses on the internal contradictions and crises of a specific social order (modern capitalist society) and its social imaginary. Accordingly, it cannot be reduced to a purely normative undertaking, but involves empirical analyses of both a historical and a sociological kind. In Marx’s theory, analysis and critique are thus inextricably linked.

Introduction: Global Cultures of Contestation

From the popular uprisings in North Africa and the Middle East in early 2011, via the Spanish indignados and Occupy Wall Street to the Umbrella movement in Hong Kong, recent years have seen major instances of popular contestation across the world. Moving beyond positions that present a singularly celebratory or dismissive account of this global protest “wave,” we advocate approaching each protest in terms of both its specificity and its tendency, in a context of advanced globalization and digitization, to connect to, learn from, or influence protests elsewhere. Outlining the volume’s focus on mobility, sustainability, aesthetics, and connectivity in this chapter, we ask: (1) How do the protests use mobility and immobility as part of their action repertoires and what forms of mobility are implied in the spread of protest waves? (2) How are issues of sustainability addressed in the various protests, and to what extent are the protests themselves sustainable? (3) What are the aesthetics of contemporary protest movements? (4) How do connective platforms facilitate today’s protests and shape their focus and dynamics?

Politik und Demokratie

Der Zusammenhang von Gerechtigkeit, Politik und Demokratie beschaftigt die westliche politische Philosophie seit ihren Anfangen in der griechischen Antike und steht auch heute noch im Fokus zahlreicher Debatten. Hier kann nur ein kurzer Abriss uber einflussreiche Verstandnisse des Verhaltnisses von Politik und Gerechtigkeit, die dominante Gerechtigkeitstheorie des politischen Liberalismus und die Kritik an den entpolitisierenden Effekten dieser Theorie gegeben werden, bevor das Spannungsverhaltnis zwischen Gerechtigkeit und Demokratie adressiert wird.

Demokratie und Selbstbestimmung

Demokratie wird heute sowohl in der politischen Praxis als auch in der Theorie fast ausnahmslos als die einzig rechtfertigbare Organisationsform politischer Gemeinschaften erachtet. Jedoch herrscht keineswegs Ubereinstimmung in Bezug darauf, was Demokratie genau bedeutet, wie sie zu rechtfertigen ist, wie sie in der politischen Wirklichkeit zu institutionalisieren ist und in welchem Verhaltnis sie zur Gerechtigkeit steht (s. Kap. IV.50; Celikates/Gosepath 2013, 4.3).

Migration: Normative und sozialtheoretische Perspektiven

Migrationsbewegungen uber Staatsgrenzen hinweg hat es gegeben seit es Staaten mit Grenzen gibt. Im Unterschied zur Bewegung von Menschen uber reale oder imaginierte Grenzen hinweg kann es Emigration und Immigration im heutigen Sinn allerdings nur geben, wenn es staatlich kontrollierte Grenzen gibt. Wann Mobilitat als Migration zu klassifizieren ist und in welchen Hinsichten Migration dann als ›Problem‹ erscheint, ist stets auch eine politisch umkampfte (und durch politische und sozio-okonomische Ordnungsbestrebungen mitbestimmte) Frage und keine blose Tatsachenfeststellung. Das lasst sich auch an den Verschiebungen im politischen Diskurs nachvollziehen, der — etwa in Deutschland — von der Figur des ›Gastarbeiters‹ uber die des ›Auslanders‹ und ›Asylanten‹ zu der des ›Migranten‹ ubergegangen ist (Karakayali 2008), wobei diese Klassifikationen nicht nur homogenisierend, sondern auch negativ und stigmatisierend sind, weil es naturlich immer nur bestimmte Menschen sind, die unter sie fallen (wahrend andere als ›Expats‹ etc. gelten).

The Foundations of the Social: Between Critical Theory and Reflexive Sociology

tionship obscured, it seems to me, by O’Brien’s determination to deny – quite justifiably – that retrospective remarks such as that above demand construal as expressive of ‘a turn away’ from a subjectivist metaphysics supposedly at work in Being and Time (p. 132). This worry may, in part, reflect the audience that O’Brien has in mind: I suspect he is writing principally for the disjunctively-inclined; but those who are not so inclined will want to hear more about the detail of the continuity that O’Brien sees and about the forces that drive the ‘shifts’ that he acknowledges. Can O’Brien flesh out his reading? I see no reason to think he can’t. He has set out a very interesting research project and a significant challenge to those who would read Heidegger’s work disjunctively. His attempt to combat the ‘caricature’ of the early Heidegger as espousing an ‘extreme existentialist self-determination’ (p. 91) by identifying continuities with the later texts is novel and intriguing, and the reservations I express above concern the extent to which he delivers on his aims here; it is more than possible – and a very interesting possibility – that he may yet flesh out his readings of these very difficult texts in future work.