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Report 1. the Political National meeting of spokespeople of 15M squares, retrieved from https://madrid.tomalaplaza.net, accessed 20/11/2020. ERC-COG-2016-724692 HETEROPOLITICS Refiguring the Common and the Political D3.1 Author: Dr. Alexandros Kioupkiolis Host Institution: Aristotle University of Thessaloniki Principal Investigator: Dr. A. Kioupkiolis ERC COG 2016 (implementation 2017-2020) July 2020 1 TABLE OF CONTENTS Introduction ............................................................................................................ 4 1. The political .......................................................................................................17 1.1. Theorizing the political today .........................................................................17 1.2. On the political (i): state/non-state in political science and theory ..................20 1.3. On the political (i): state/non-state beyond political theory, from ‘personal’ politics to infra-, alter- and micro-politics .............................................................25 1.4. On the political (ii): war or peace? .................................................................38 1.5. Another agonistic politics via Arendt and Rawls ............................................50 1.6. Opening up the political .................................................................................64 1.7. Mapping out another politics, alter-politics or heteropolitics in contemporary political theory and practice ..................................................................................66 1.8. Alter-political vision, logics, ethics and affectivity .........................................78 1.9. Situating heteropolitics in the present: post-democracy ..................................85 1.10. Situating heteropolitics in the present: the neoliberal way of the world .........93 1.11. The sociological underpinnings of heteropolitics in the present: contingency, creativity and complexity .................................................................................... 104 1.11.1. Contingency....................................................................................... 104 1.11.2. Contingency, the creation of the new and constituent power .............. 108 1.11.3. Social complexity .............................................................................. 112 1.12. Political strategies for expansive heteropolitics: a) the three-faced Dionysus to govern the common ............................................................................................ 118 1.13. Political strategies for expansive heteropolitics and new commons: b) eroding the hegemonic system ......................................................................................... 130 1.14. Gramsci on hegemony and counter-hegemony ........................................... 140 1.15. Revisiting post-Marxist hegemony for democratic other politics ................ 152 1.16. Hegemony at the turn of the 21st century ................................................... 161 1.17. Clearing the way for a heteropolitical hegemony ........................................ 170 1.18. Movements towards ‘common’ hegemony and populism 2.0: reconfiguring hegemonic politics for another horizontalist democracy and self-government in common ............................................................................................................. 178 1.19. Movements towards ‘common’ hegemony and populism 2.0: (a) another leadership ........................................................................................................... 180 2 1.19.1. Another leadership through the assembly form .................................. 181 1.19.2. Another leadership through technopolitics ......................................... 183 1.19.3. Another leadership through a) institutional rules, b) reflexivity, c) another ethos ................................................................................................. 186 1.20. Movements towards ‘common’ hegemony and populism 2.0: (b) another popular unity ...................................................................................................... 192 1.21. Movements towards ‘common’ hegemony and populism 2.0: (c) another representation and common democracy .............................................................. 198 1.22. Movements towards ‘common’ hegemony and populism 2.0: (d) post- hegemony ........................................................................................................... 208 1.23. Movements towards ‘common’ hegemony and populism 2.0: (e) why populism? ........................................................................................................... 215 1.24. New movements towards populism 2.0 ...................................................... 217 1.24.1. The political logic of populism........................................................... 219 1.24.2. People 2.0 .......................................................................................... 222 1.24.3. The populist soul of 15M ................................................................... 227 1.24.4. Populism 2.0 and the queer common: the paradigmatic case of 15M .. 230 1.24.5. Populism 2.0: what difference does it make? ...................................... 241 1.25. Notes on political organization for a populist 2.0 hegemony....................... 243 1.26. The alternative tradition of council democracy and municipalism .............. 247 1.27. The alter-political municipalist movement in action today .......................... 252 1.27.1. Municipal confluences in Spain ......................................................... 252 1.27.2. The example of Barcelona en Comú ................................................... 260 1.27.3. Drawing a first balance ...................................................................... 264 1.28. In lieu of a conclusion ................................................................................ 271 References .......................................................................................................... 276 3 REPORT 1 THE POLITICAL The political, alternative politics and political strategies for the commons Introduction The present essay is a report on the ways in which the political is conceptualized in contemporary political thought, on how alternative democratic politics is imagined, and on which political strategies are worked out with a view to fostering freedom, equality, justice and care for the environment in our times. This account accompanies a report on the ‘common’ or the ‘commons’ (see the Report 2. The Common), which probes more specifically how present-day theories and practices of the commons (collective goods which are shared and democratically co-managed) can further the same objectives of democratic empowerment and renewal. The following report on the political advances the inquiry into the commons by broaching the political in ways which can bring out and critically ponder the political dimensions of contemporary commons; by positioning the commons in a broader paradigm of alternative democratic politics in our era; and by grappling with questions of political strategy, through which the commons could become the focus and the engine of historical transformation. Any rigorous engagement with the commons in political terms, any endeavor to refigure politics through the lenses of the commons and any attempt at addressing the ‘lack of the political’ in the commons, that is, the relatively scant concern with antagonisms, power and strategy in the various theories and practices of the commons (see Report 2. The Common), need to come to grips with the concept of the political itself. An explicit construal of the political helps to navigate critical studies of the politics of the commons: What is the ‘politics’ of the commons? What is political about/in the commons? What does it mean to claim that the commons enact ‘alternative ways of doing politics,’ and how can the commons nurture other, more emancipatory, fair and sustainable patterns of political action and organization? How can we remedy the political deficits of the commons, their frailty of strategic thought and action, in order to help the commons thrive as an alternative socio-political paradigm? A rethinking of the concept of the political can endow such investigations with analytic clarity, rigor and sound grounds for critical argument. Crucially, it is necessary in order to flesh out the meaning of heteropolitics (signifying ‘alternative politics’ in Greek) and to meet the main objective of our research project, Heteropolitics: to illuminate and to envision another politics, more democratic, 4 egalitarian, autonomous, caring, open and plural, by taking our bearings from theories and practices of the commons which further openness, diversity, inclusiveness and horizontal, non-hierarchical self-government. By thinking through the notion of the political we can stretch and displace our conceptual grids. We can contest and disrupt hegemonic ideas about politics. We can open up, thus, the possibility of envisaging and disseminating other, freer and more equal patterns of political action, thought and organization. Hence, this report on the political, situated alongside an exploration of the alternative politics of the commons, starts off with an extended reflection on the political. This theorization is intended to sharpen our sense of politics, to guide our research into pertinent, but perhaps less
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