Wow, Mel Reeves has a nice response to the recent NYT Magazine bit on an Obama victory somehow signifying the end of black politics on BlackAgendaReport. There's also a related, cool BAR editorial here.
This "post-racial, post-partisan, post-political" wishful thinking of neoliberal organs like the NYT is as much an example of "how many angels can dance on the head of a pin?" pedantry as the mudslinging and handwringing betwen six-comrade Trot factions. We can't get there, and we shouldn't, because ultimately there is no reason to believe a "post-racial" political culture would be any less racist than this one. But as a guiding light and utopian precept, this "post-everything" outlook needs to be interrogated.
Who among us desires a post-political social organization? Wouldn't it be necessarily post-democratic? Is their a capitalist myth-dream out there in which the market's foreclosure upon the social (i.e., infrastructure, civil society, welfare) is a mere prelude to foreclosure upon the political? Not a lessening of elections, but a lessening of electoral impact - less distinction between parties, lessened state authority vis a vis the market - and a subsequent, fundamentalist reduction of legitimate democratic activity from free association AND the right to organize to simply voting as such (think about the EFCA 'secret ballot' debates.) At what point does voting become indistinguishable from consumer "choice"? How much of this has already happened?
Wednesday, August 13, 2008
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