Archive for December 2017
Dried out political public arenas
Considering the matter of elections in a state (Gujarat) against the experiences of India over the last 15-16 years, of price rise, the crushing banalities of urbanisation, the control that the telecom, banking and automobile industries have over ordinary lives, the manner in which media (television and newspapers earlier, social media too now) work in concert at obscuring that control, the signing away of the public sector, the vanishing of labour, the replacing of an already rickety ‘democracy’ with a techno-capital placebo.
From an interview with Jürgen Habermas, professor emeritus of philosophy at the University of Frankfurt Main, co-publisher of ‘Blätter für deutsche und internationale Politik’, who has for years advanced a critical social theory that supports the cause of human emancipation. Interview by Michaël Foessel, published in Eurozine.
“… in our increasingly interdependent but still nationally fragmented world society, global financial capitalism, which has taken on a life of its own, still largely escapes the grip of politics. Behind democratic façades the political elites technocratically implement the imperatives of the markets almost without resistance. Trapped in their national perspectives, they have no other choice. Thus, they prefer to uncouple the political decision-making processes from the political public arenas, which are in any case dried out and whose infrastructure is crumbling. This colonialisation of societies, which disintegrate from within and take up right-wing populist positions against each other, will not change as long as no political power can be found with the courage to take up the cause of achieving the political aim of universalising interests beyond national frontiers.”
“Today, however, the increasingly high-pitched appeal by politicians to ‘our values’ sounds ever emptier – alone the confusion of ‘principles’, which require some kind of justification, with ‘values’, which are more or less attractive, irritates me beyond all measure. We can see our political institutions being robbed more and more of their democratic substance during the course of the technocratic adjustment to global market imperatives. Our capitalist democracies are about to shrink to mere façade democracies. These developments call for a scientifically informed enlightenment. But none of the pertinent scientific disciplines – neither economics nor political science or sociology – can, in and of themselves, provide this enlightenment. The diverse contributions of these disciplines have to be processed in the light of a critical self-understanding.”
Written by makanaka
December 10, 2017 at 19:18
Posted in Economics and globalisation
Tagged with BJP, Congress, critical social theory, democracy, Gujarat, India, Jürgen Habermas, Modi, philosophy, politics