Activity

Our novelty is perhaps in tracing these problems back to a preference for immediacy – namely, the kernel of contemporary ‘folk politics’. (In fact, a better name for ‘folk politics’ might be ‘the politics of immediacy’.) It is this valorisation of immediacy – and the way in which it has become a common sense – that we see played out in various ways across the left, both in the explicit statement of political theorists and in the implicit assumptions of various practices.

Without tabulae rasase or miraculous events, it is within the tendencies and affordances of our world today that we must locate the resources from which to build a new hegemony.

The boot-strapping expansionary process of technology, once liberated from capitalist fetters, can potentiate both positive and negative freedoms. It can form the basis for a fully postcapitalist economy, enabling a shift away from scarcity, work and exploitation, and towards the full development of humanity.

On strong readings, the precautionary principle aims to convert epistemic uncertainty into a guardianship of the status quo, gently turning away those who would seek to build a better future with the imperative to ‘do more research’. We might also consider here that the precautionary principle contains an almost inherent lacuna: it ignores the risks of its own application. In seeking to err always on the side of caution, and hence of eliminating risk, it contains a blindness to the dangers of inaction and omission.

Universalism always undoes itself, possessing its own resources for an immanent critique that insists and expands upon its ideals.