[iDC] activism now and

[Brian Holmes]

saul ostrow wrote:
> What is really interesting about this thread is that spontaniety, 
> resistance, activism, media, etc. are being fetishized, while no one has 
> raised the question of political program and leadership.  Are these 
> unnecessary in our fragmented and decentered world, or is the type of 
> essentialism that these decontextualized categories of reaction 
> represent,  along with the desire to relocate the political to the 
> cultural sphere a sign that we have not moved beyond the reified 
> modernist vision of the enlightenment project.

Now that's quite a declaration.

Leadership, in the contemporary media-populist electoral 
democracies, has been so bad that I think even a little bit 
of sympathy for the people writing here would excuse them 
for not desiring it.

However, I personally am very sympathetic to the call for a 
political program. The only ones I see being floated 
basically involve going to war or sparking hostility among 
different groups of citizens to avoid dealing with basic 
economic and ecological contradictions.

Do you have a political program to propose? Seriously, I'm 
interested and you're right that it's lacking, not just on 
this thread. Only a real political program can produce 
decent leaders and limit the scope of their arbitrary power too.

I tried with other members of the journal Multitudes here in 
Paris to produce one for a while, centered around equality, 
access to tools and rights to difference in the knowledge 
economy. But now our generous visions look so distant from 
the basic public disourse that clearly it's time to work on 
something more simple and below the belt.

best, BH