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Ethical politics at ground zero: an ethical politics concerned with redistributive justice and the struggle for recognition offers an alternative to the poverty of instrumental politics.

Article Excerpt
The dominant form of radical subjectivity today is alliance politics. However, internal contradictions within alliance politics point to the emergence of a new form of radical subjectivity, ethical politics. Whether or not this prognosis is confirmed, the question of ethical politics creates a space in which a wide range of oppositional currents may find both new common ground and new insights into their mutual differences.

To say that radical politics today is alliance politics is not to deny that 'secret societies', mutual aid associations, parties, fronts, social movements and identity politics do not continue to be active in radical politics; rather that it is only in and through alliances that these other forms of radical subjectivity can become effective.

Identity politics arose from the process of particularisation of social movements, as the claims of successive strata of those excluded from the post-World War II compromise each put forward their claim to recognition. This process gradually turned the social movements into their opposite, from vast cross-class popular movements with sweeping agendas for social change to relatively narrow, albeit legitimate, expressions of sectional interest.

Social movements formed themselves around a shared ideal. A shared ideal is not just a widely shared common aim--it also provides forms of organisation and the necessary basis for conflict resolution within the movement. Another name for this is its ethos. Social movements secured their objectives through a process of incorporating measures realising the shared ideal in legislation, language, political policies and practices and so on. Likewise with identity politics, but the basis of unity became narrower and narrower through the process of particularisation of the great unifying principles which existed at the birth of the social movements.

The Left has generally taken the period of identity politics as a downturn rather than a change in the political terrain, and the rise of alliance politics as an upturn. Alliance politics is perceived as a return of the social movements. This is a mistake.

Alliance politics arose as a negation of identity politics, out of the practical requirements for mobilisation and mustering political pressure. No-one can achieve anything today without aligning themselves with others who do not share the same ideal: 'I'm against globalisation because I'm a farmer', 'I'm against globalisation because I'm a woman', 'I'm against globalisation because I'm a textile worker', and so on. Mobilisation takes place, not around shared ideals, but around finite, transitory objectives which maximise the numbers and the political impact with the least possible real measure of agreement.

Alliance politics is thus characterised by the fact that no-one really agrees on anything beyond the question of being at a certain place at a certain time on a certain day.

So the following questions must be asked: in the absence of any shared ideal, what kind of Reason operates within alliance politics, and what manner of decision-making procedure is appropriate for alliance politics?

These questions are not only of urgent...

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