This is a redoing of some earlier posts on this blog about the question of how do we define and specify ‘politics’. The aim is to replace the idea that politics is something done by others in Parliament, or in the State, and reclaim the idea that politics involves everyone who lives in society.
Defining politics in general
Politics involves the attempts by individuals or groups of people to decide upon, or achieve, an aim which involves (or affects) themselves and/or other people. Politics includes the ways people go about organising themselves and persuading others to go along with them. Politics can manifest between groups, and between individuals within groups.
Politics necessarily happens all the time because we live with other people, and people acting together can often be much more effective in achieving aims than can individuals acting alone. People also tend to get satisfaction from being in groups acting and being together. Politics (persuasion of others, building co-operation, fostering attacks, etc.) is usually involved whenever we try to solve problems, and social life frequently involves attempts towards solving problems.
Everyone engages in politics, in the family, in the village, in the city, in the company, in the University, in the State, and in World wide organisations. From children deciding what games to play, or who should be on what team, to ministers trying to persuade other countries to surrender, humans are constantly trying to work with others, organise work and celebration with others, organise conflict with others, trying to get the better of others, trying to persuade others, trying to threaten others, trying to flatter others, trying to help others, trying to discover the truth of a situation, trying to hide the truth, trying to frame the truth in a way which suits us, or trying to make the good life with others.
To live harmoniously with others, we have to learn how to negotiate, compromise and get those others onside as best we can. However, as well as being relatively peaceable, politics can be ruthless, involving the capacity for threat and violence, or of defering threat and violence. It involves exerting power and resisting power, negotiating consensus and allocating dissensus, asserting hierarchy and equalities. Certain people can be excluded from the political field, and can assert, and possibly force their inclusion in that field. Politics can be about meaning and understanding: about the struggle over the ‘correct’ meanings and consequences of words and concepts, because undersanding words in particular ways can guide behaviour.
The social field is political
The social field is inherently political and involves struggle. Ethical and moral struggles also tend to be political, and we tend to evaluate people on ‘our side,’ or in our social categories, differently from other people – usually (but not always) being more likely to excuse their failings.
While the politics of the State may look different, have different modes of enforcement, have different effects from the politics of the home or the workplace, all politics involve similar kinds of processes.
The same kind of skills are deployed in the family as are needed to be employed in the village, in the township and so on, to make decisions, to organise people, to work and celebrate or whatever. Political processes in daily life and political processes in the State are similar, even if the range of their effect is quite different.
Politics can be seen to involve idea generation, persuasion, co-operation, competition, decision making, allocating responsibility, allocating authority, overcoming entrenched and no longer useful authority, gaining ability, gaining virtue, rewarding virtue, rewarding beneficial aspiration, and so on. It does not necessarily involve harmony, and can spiral out into civil (or other) war.
Politics sets up a complex system as it inevitably involves people reacting to other people and to circumstances as they arise.
Aristotle and politics
That social life is inherently political and that people are rarely completely outside some form of politics, is a view with considerable antiquity. As is well known Aristotle wrote that
animals that live politically are those that have any kind of activity in common, which is not true of all gregarious animals,
Politics involves the building of activity in common, not just living together.
humans are by nature political animals [or ‘political life forms’, Zoon politikon]. And he who by nature and not by mere accident is without a Polity, is either above humanity, or below it.
The suggestion is that normal humans are political creatures, and Aristotle appears to argue, this arises because people cannot perform their natural functions apart from the polity, since they cannot be completely self-sufficient throughout their entire lives. Thus, the Polity (my way of translating polis, usually translated as ‘state’ or ‘city state’ or even ‘social organisation’) comes into existence to enable human life. He takes a more or less anthropological position that:
The polity is prior in nature to the household and to each of us individually.
We are born into a polity, or society. This is because we build our function, abilities and capacities through our relationships to others. Households and individuals do not exist by themselves.
For the whole must necessarily be prior to the part… [as] all things are defined by their function and capacity, so that when they are no longer able to perform their function [within the whole] they must not be said to be the same things.
In other words, humans develop their capacities and virtues in relationship to other humans within already existing modes of organisation. We come into being amidst creative others (this is I think important to Aristotle’s idea of humanity as implied in the Rhetoric, the Poetics and On the Soul, and is in any case always important to recognise). To use terms which will be important later we live in systems (some of which are non-human) with histories or trajectories. The polity is, according to Aristotle, the way humans can come to craft a good and human life the best way they can. The Polity is necessary to make a better polity. The polity does not have to be a State, but usually a large scale polity has state-like structures.
We can fault Aristotle because he does not take his definition of politics seriously enough. He does not seem to object to the idea that political systems can work to exclude people (such as women, slaves and inevitably people below some arbitrary age). This can come to seem natural, but it is political.
Politics, complexity and uncertainty
Complexity means we cannot define politics so that it has to be successful, or result in any firm control over the world. The best we can hope for is to influence, or effect on the world – working with the world, perhaps – and then check events as they occur to see if we are getting the results we anticipated. This is the nature of the world. Life is further made complicated because people can agree over what they don’t want, but split over what they do want.
Many human activities do not achieve what people hope to gain. Most art will be forgotten or thrown out. Doctors do not heal everyone, and in some cases damage people even more. Many families will be unhappy despite the best efforts of those involved. Failure and unintended consequences are a normal part of engaging in life.
Success is never a measure of something occuring, and of course we live with moral uncertainty, and all other kinds of uncertainty, that still does not mean we don’t engage in politics with each other whether we object to those politics or not. Indeed, I would suggest that certainty of action and solution, is probably the hallmark of a politics which will fail to produce beneficial results for most people. The more certain or self-destructive the culture, the more deletarious unintended consequences are likely to arise. Climate change is a great example of what seems to be an unintended consequences of particular modes of social organisation and their politics.
However, politics nearly always attempts to create an order which it attempts to establish or defend.
Policing
There is also a form of politics which, following Jacques Ranciere, we can call policing. This is about continuing and defending established behaviours and categories. Ranciere sees this form of politics purely as a policing of established order. It does not involve much in the way of negotiation, or recognition of others as more than obedient, needing to move on from failure, or needing punishment.
Ranciere reduces politics to the politics between potential recognised equals or politics which is about gaining such equality, and the politics which is policing. However, as Davis points out, even succesful egalitarian politics may still involve policing, as people try to stop the system being commandeered by those who would destroy it, or prevent some recognition of some part of the polity. As is well known, this attempt is at best paradoxical, as stopping people from preventing others participating, may involve ceasing to recognise the ‘stoppers’ as being legitimate participants. That this is paradoxical does not mean it is not real part of politics, or that it can be eliminated.
Neoliberal policing
Neoliberalism aims to make ‘the market’ (or really corporate power) the dominant and non challengable power in human life and politics. The market is supposedly better than other parts of human life, because it is described as ‘non-political’. As a result, every human action and production becomes reduced to trade, and mutual decision making becomes an impingement on individual liberty, especially when it interferes with trade. For neoliberals, the ideal forms of evil organisation are the State or the Trade Union (and people must be encouraged to have no hope in the State or unions), and the truly good form is the company – where you get told what to do, unless you own and control the organisation. Apparently ordinary people are all individuals, and should never act together, and organisation should be reserved for the powerful and their economic/political activity. The State only exists to defend the exclusive rights of business people. Libertarians rarely seem to have the same strength of objection to the wealthy or business people acting together – perhaps because they realise this would affect the political effectiveness of these people, and the force of capitalism.
Because neoliberals only give importance to established business interests, they have no regard for ecology. Things which cannot be restricted in ownership and priced have no value. There is no common good, only private good and private profit.
Politics as protest
Neoliberals want to keep us ignorant, of the scale and success of peaceful popular movements against corporate power. For example, 20 million Americans joined protests for the first Earth Day. Who knows that nowadays? Who nowadays is allowed to think anything other than that environmentalism is a minor, non-mainstream, interest? So we cannot ask how it was that people in the US fought against flaming, poisonous rivers, and deadly work conditions, and temporarily succeeded?
This may have happened because in that pre-neoliberal period people knew that politics was part of daily life. “The personal is political.” Any ethical decision making that involves others, involves politics. It is now pretty much orthodoxy to leave the State to the wealthy, and assume nothing can be done to make things better.
While politics is essential for joint-human activity, it need not mean “power over others,” or constant dishonesty. Politics does not have to be ruthless. It is possible that the more ruthless the politics (especially official politics), the less ‘ordinary people’ may feel inclined to participate, if they morally disapprove of ruthlessness or are frightened of the consequences of participation. Indeed presenting politics as ruthless or corrupt, may be one way to foster lesser participation by people in general (other than as providing a backdrop of support). Ruthless politics may well be less about ideas and ethics, than about victory.
An anarchist, communitarian, politics is possible, even if it is precarious. Indeed we might well define a politics which only requires power over and dishonesty as defining a bad polity, which is headed for disaster and requires reformation.
Activists (such as Greta Thunberg) may not be playing power and dominance games but trying to reform the current polity, craft the best possible polity, and to continue survival for everyone. However, because of this, she is involved in politics, and being made part of power and dominance struggles, by those who are attempting to preserve a disastrous polity, or their place within it. This currently involves lots of abuse. Some of those engaged in this kind of abuse politics, are pretending that they are not political, because, in their politics, doing nothing to challenge the processes of destruction is supposed to seem normal. Challenging the establishment may always seem more political than leaving it alone. The established have more capacity for distributing abuse than their challengers. This is one way of promoting exclusion and limiting the political field. The end result is probably totalitarianism.
Polity with Nature
Just as we can hope for a politics which allows maximal human participation, we can hope that those capacities and virtues crafted within the crafting of the Polity (especially a healthy polity), can extend outwards to the land, and to other life forms. We have to live with our land, other life forms and within the boundaries of the planet. Destroying land, other life forms and planetary boundaries, forms a highway to disaster. Having a politics with beings that cannot use language is difficult, but I would suggest not impossible. Partly it involves recognition and formal incorporation, just as we can recognise children, and domesticated animals, and place their treatment within the concerns of the polity. It is a request that we extend our empathy found within our own identity categories, to the world as a whole. Even if the process is ultimately impossible, and people have to speak for other beings, then we still have to do it, if we wish to survive.
I suggest that one way of getting there is through practices of listening – or Dadirri. Many indigenous peoples have traditions of incorporating land and other creatures into their decision making processes. People who live in States could possibly attempt to learn from them.
Because ecologies change and relationships between different groups or different polities change, the work of making the good polity is never ending. It never reaches permanent stability or perfection. The polity is likely to face new challenges and new problems, which it has to face creatively.
Summary
People organise themselves together with others as part of normal social life, because they can achieve more as organised groups, and get enjoyment from that, if it is self-motivated. People also have to live together, and interact with each other, and solve the problems that all or some of them face. This all involves politics. We can call call this activity a polity. Polities can exist within polities, and include polities. Politics can be creative, maintaining, or repressive.
Politics can also involve force and exclusion, both at the local level and the level of the State. Social life and political life are rarely separable. We are born into a polity, and political relationships and interactions, exist before we can participate, even if our participation changes them.
Politics generates a complex system, and takes place within complex systems. It is inherently uncertain. Ideas we campaign for, may not be accurate. A healthy politics should probably remember this, so that it can change, and create new ideas which are more accurate and helpful for the polity.
In the English speaking world, the dominant form of politics for the last 40 years has been neoliberal politics. This centralises the importance of business, minimalises the importance of any other form of human activity, supports other activities to the extent they support business, and suppresses recognition of corporate power and decisions, through the idea of the impersonal market which, magically, always generates the best result. In this framework, attacks on business dominance, are attacks on the market and therefore bad.
Because neoliberalism centralises established business dominance, it also defends the right of business to destroy ecology, pollute, disperse materials and poison people, as if ‘the market’ demands this destruction for profit, then this is the best that can occur.
It is however possible to conceive the idea of expanding politics, so that it involves the land, other beings and planetary boundaries, and we need to start on the road towards that kind of politics, and put aside the politics that says only business, the market and the State really count.
Climate, technology and chaos Blog 