Suchergebnisse

"Left melodrama" is a form of contemporary political critique that combines thematic elements and narrative structures of the melodramatic genre with a political perspective grounded in a left theoretical tradition, fusing them to dramatically interrogate oppressive social structures and unequal relations of power. It is also a new form of what Walter Benjamin called "left melancholy", a critique that deadens what it examines by employing outdated and insufficient analyses to current exploitations. Left melodrama is melancholic insofar as its use of older leftist critical methods disavows its attachments to the failed promises of left political-theoretical critique: that it could provide direct means to freedom and moral Tightness. Left melodrama is melodramatic insofar as it incorporates the specific melodramatic narrative, style and promise of the text that stands in for its disavowed attachments: the Manifesto of the Communist Party. Whereas the Manifesto's critical power promised radical political transformation, left melodrama incorporates the Manifesto's melodramatic style in an effort to revivify that promise. It thus inhibits the creation of new critical methods appropriate to our current historical moment and occludes Marx and Engels' warning that the possibility of radical transformation is diminished when the past furnishes the vision for the future. Left melodrama can be found in the texts of Giorgio Agamben, Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri; their reincorporation of the Manifesto's melodrama both contributes to their widespread success and undercuts their critical capacities to examine and challenge the inequalities, injustices and unfreedom that shape the present moment. Adapted from the source document.

A series of presidential elections in Latin America has brought to power new political leaders with a left-of-centre political orientation &, in some cases, strong anti-market & anti-Washington rhetoric. Many commentators have viewed this as a sort of regional left turn. When countries are embracing market friendly policies, competitiveness & globalisation virtually all over the world, is there a risk that the region is going back to the future, embarking on old fashioned economic measures? Adapted from the source document.

Re : generations -- Generation left (behind) -- Generation explosion -- The electoral turn -- Reinventing adulthood.

A key terrain of political controversy remains the concept of multiculturalism. Here, Eriksen and Stjernfelt critically examine its impact, both in Malaysia and in Europe, in The Democratic Contradictions of Multiculturalism, published by Telos Press in 2012. Part of their argument involved an examination of a specifically leftist variant. Their rebuttal, challenging the left to face up to its own Jacobin legacies: given the checkered history of more than two centuries of leftism, there is no reason not to see multicultis on the left as the current heirs of a strong and immanent tradition within the left, going all the way back to Robespierre's populism and anti-individualism. The tendency on the left to identify, if not reduce, individuals to simplistic collective categories, such as class, economic position, culture, and ethnicity, has simply been there all the time, and it has been able to merge seamlessly, in different combinations, with other classical leftist ideas such as substantial equality, paternalism, anti-capitalism, anti-Americanism, anti-bourgeois lifestyle recommendations, etc. In other words, multiculturalism is definitively a left-wing phenomenon, when it inherits the worst of the left tradition. The current return to politics will therefore have to address a legacy of repressive behavior, or else it will repeat it. Adapted from the source document.

As Mexico approaches the 2006 elections, the candidate for president closest to the left is Andrés Manuel López Obrador, supported by the Partido de la Revolución Democrática and other left and center organizations. All the polls place him well ahead of the candidates of the other two parties, presenting a unique possibility of a pendulum swing of Mexican politics to the left of center.

Since the fall of communism far-left parties have begun a long process of change, which has transformed their position in the European political systems. Indeed, far-left parties are now important actors in most of the E.U. However, they present different characteristics than in the past. Communist parties have almost disappeared from parliamentary arenas, and, in many countries, new forms of far-left parties have emerged (i.e. social-populist and populist-socialist parties). The aim of this article is to describe the ideological framework of far-left parties in Europe. More specifically, it aims to examine both the demand-side and supply-side factors on which scholars focused in the attempt to explain the birth of these parties and the interactions that led to the development of specific forms of far-left parties. This article concludes with an analysis of three national cases, namely Spain, Portugal and Italy. The three countries belong to a similar context characterised by a profound economic crisis. However, despite many common features, in the three cases different forms of far-left parties have developed.

The United States is home to a newer Left. Its political hopes repose not in a man able to muster less than 40 percent of the vote nationwide, but in the convincingly reelected president of the United States, Barack Obama. This newer Left is confident in itself, united both in its description of the problems the country faces and in how to go about addressing them. This Left is conscious of itself as a movement, and believes it is on the rise. It has already managed to reshape American politics, and its successes so far have hardly exhausted its promise. Policies are changing under its influence. And its opponents do not seem to have found an effective way to counter it politically. Adapted from the source document.

This article places the Labour Party's present post-Corbyn renewal in the context of previous periods of renewal in the party's recent history, associating with the new leadership of Keir Starmer a potential to rediscover the strategic project of the pluralist 'soft' left as an alternative to the 'programmatic' character of the hard left. After assessing the Corbynist hegemony established in the Labour Party between 2015 and 2019, it considers the current absence of any clearly defined set of principles or values underpinning 'Starmerism'. It then looks back to the Kinnockite ascendency in the 1980s, and the Blairite ascendency in the 1990s, as possible templates for how the party reassesses its positioning with reference to changing electoral, social and economic circumstances. A critique of Corbynism's left populism culminates in a consideration of the possible grounds for a new pluralist agenda attuned to the policy and electoral challenges Labour faces today.

Abstract
Are the limits of psychoanalytic politics the limits of the politics of psychoanalysis's founding father, Sigmund Freud? This article offers an answer to this question by discussing Freud's political affinities and then recounting a short history of the "Left Freudians," psychoanalytic thinkers who broke with Freud's old-style liberalism. Freud was neither a communist nor a political radical, but he was the figurehead of a tradition of inquiry and body of knowledge that lent itself to radical political thought and practice. How does psychoanalytic thinking justify this ideological break? Beginning with anarchist Otto Gross, this article traces a genealogy of radical psychoanalytic thinkers through the historical depoliticization and repression of political psychoanalysis, unearthing its more radical proponents and critiques and substantiating Gross's assertion that psychoanalysis is preparatory work for the revolution. At the end of the genealogy, the article turns to psychoanalyst Jacques Lacan's infamous and emblematic encounter with provocateurs from the radical student movement. Neither as domineering nor paternalistic as he seemed, Lacan's diagnosis of the revolutionaries as hysterical helots should be read as his own provocation for them to clarify their desire, because the purpose of political psychoanalysis is to understand the unconscious desire involved in political acts.