Some versions of Marxism emphasize the withering away of the state. For example, Lenin writes of communist society as a post-political, technocratic, managerial society. This description is oddly similar to Ranciere's description of post-political society. Yet for Ranciere contemporary post-politics is a kind of capture that results in an even more severe exclusion than under previous 'political' arrangements.
For the most part, I've been critical of 'post-political' as an analytical category. I've found that it obscures more than it illuminates. Less generously, I've complained that it's a form of left-wing whining over our own lack of good ideas. Rather inconsistently, I've also associated the idea with Schmitt's critique of liberalism as lacking a politics, as simply a combination of 'ethics and economics.'
But what if there is something more to the idea of post-politics? What if it in fact it highlights a crucial aspect of contemporary interconnectedness, the way that complexity and interlinkages of risk produce not clear fronts of haves and have nots but circuits of interdependency resistant to politicization?
The weakness of this line of thinking could well be that ignores the reality already grasped by movements of organized workers: strikes are and were risky. Organized workers bite the hands that feed them (and that attempt to leash and control them), so to speak. Thus, the truth of industrial labor as always been its awareness of interconnection and its willingness to break the links, to display the dependence of capital by shooting itself in the foot.
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