1. Introduction
Following the era of hegemonic market-liberalism which many post- and neo-Marxist theorists had conceptualised as an era of depoliticisation, post-democracy and post-politics (Crouch, Citation2004; Rancière, Citation1995, Citation2006; Wilson & Swyngedouw, Citation2014; Žižek, Citation2008) a wealth of new social movements and forms of activism have been repoliticising social arrangements and beliefs which had come to be regarded as non-negotiable and immutable. These repoliticisations raise new hopes that the socio-ecological transformation of capitalist consumer societies for which emancipatory social movements and sustainability researchers have been campaigning for many decades might, after all, still be possible. Yet, they are also highly diverse and ambiguous, and political sociologists, social theorists and social movement researchers are hard pushed to understand their drivers and assess their transformative potential.
In the wake of the banking and financial crisis of 2008/9, these repoliticisations – such as Occupy Wall Street, the Five Star Movement in Italy or the Movements of the Squares in Athens, Madrid and elsewhere – first seemed to revive the egalitarian-participatory agenda of earlier waves of social movement mobilisation. They seemed to signal a reinvention of politics and a return of the political in the sense of Beck (Citation1997) and Mouffe (Citation1997). They were widely interpreted as pushing the democratisation of institutionalised democracy, as pioneers of a societal transformation to come and as prefigurative experiments for a socially and ecologically pacified society (Mason, Citation2015; Schlosberg, Citation2019; Schlosberg & Coles, Citation2016; WBGU, Citation2011) beyond the present order of unsustainability (Blühdorn, Citation2007, Citation2011, Citation2013; Blühdorn & Deflorian, Citation2019). Almost in parallel, quite different forms of repoliticisation were flourishing as well. They, too, are critically engaging with neoliberal globalisation but, ideologically, they are radically opposed to the progressive-emancipatory tradition and have been conceptualised as agents of a great regression (Geiselberger, Citation2017): In the wake of the refugee crisis of 2015 in Europe and the US presidential elections of 2016, right-wing populist mobilisation fundamentally reconfigured public political discourse and the political space in many polities, militating not only against the market liberal project of globalisation but also against the perceived hegemony of liberal, cosmopolitan values (Mondon & Winter, Citation2020) and the emerging consensus that a tightening climate and sustainability crisis render a profound socio-ecological transformation of capitalist consumer societies inevitable and urgent (Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, Citation2018; Wiedenhofer et al., Citation2020). And most recently, new climate movements as well as protests against government policies addressing the COVID-19 pandemic, yet again, have added to the complexity of the repoliticisation of the supposedly post-political constellation (Dean, Citation2020; Pleyers, Citation2020).
In their own particular ways, these diverse forms of activism all conceive of themselves as struggling against heteronomy and oppression and as defending citizen rights, political self-determination and authentic democracy. They all aim for the empowerment of subjects whose inalienable rights, they feel, are being denied. Yet, many of them can no longer be interpreted as pursuing a reinvention of politics in the sense of Beck or Mouffe. They are not the ‘massive escalation of truly disruptive action’ that, as Colin Crouch (Crouch, Citation2004, p. 123) and many others had believed, would revive the egalitarian-democratic project and launch a ‘counter-attack on the Anglo-American model’ (ibid.: p. 107). And they shed fundamental doubt on the claim that despite all temporary ‘retrogression’ and ‘authoritarian backlashes’ liberal values will eventually prevail (Inglehart, Citation2018, pp. 114–119; Inglehart & Norris, Citation2017). Not only are these repoliticisations very diverse in terms of their political values and ideological orientations, but rather than suspending the era of post-politics many of them also seem to be perpetuating the agenda of depoliticisation and post-democracy. This applies to right-wing populist movements which have lost all confidence in the established political institutions as much as to parts of the new climate movements which portray their demands as non-negotiable, scientifically objective imperatives. And it applies to many urban niche initiatives, too, which, rather than regarding themselves as the avantgarde of a great societal transformation, seem to be signalling a kind of retreat into everyday practices and personal lifeworlds.
Thus, the repoliticisation beyond post-politics calls for new conceptual tools and theoretical approaches. A range of assumptions which still underpin much of critical social movement research are becoming increasingly questionable; and eco-political commitments often condition academic perceptions of repoliticisations. Hence, analyses following the tradition of post-Marxist critical sociology need to be supplemented by analytical and interpretative approaches better suited to understand the complex patterns and logics of contemporary repoliticisations. Crucial in this is, not least, to bear in mind that core concepts of critical social movement research such as alienation, liberation, autonomy or democracy are not fixed and immutable norms of reference but are themselves political, that is dynamic constructs whose meaning is and remains socially contested.
The articles collated in this special issue Prefiguration – Co-optation – Simulation: Movements and Activism beyond Post-politics contribute to the endeavour to understand political activism in and beyond the post-political constellation. They were written before and hence do not reflect the very latest waves of political mobilisations. Focusing, first and foremost, on movements and forms of activism which emerged in the wake of the banking- and financial crisis of 2008/9, they explore to what extent these repoliticisations contribute to overcoming the post-political order. In particular, the authors ask for the prefigurative and transformative power of these movements as pioneers of a socially and ecologically pacified alternative society. In this introductory article we carefully situate the special issue by clarifying the notions of post-politics and repoliticisation (section two). Then we zoom in on academic debates about prefigurative and transformative politics (section 3), also reflecting on alternative or complementary ways of interpreting contemporary social movements and political activism. Section four provides a preview of the contributions to this special issue. In the final section we explore how the recent waves of repoliticisation have reconfigured public discourse and the political space, and we consider the implications of this for the further investigation of social movement activism beyond post-politics.
2. Post-politics and repoliticisation
What theorists such as Badiou, Rancière, Žižek or Swyngedouw are referring to as post-politics and the post-political constellation gradually evolved in the 1990s. In policy-making and policy studies it is closely related to the paradigms of new public management and public administration and to the confidence in government by experts and technocrats – which, in turn, gave rise to diagnoses of post-democracy (Crouch, Citation2004; Rancière, Citation1999). The notion of post-politics is based on, firstly, a distinction between politics as a more or less formalised, institutionalised process and the political as the irreducibly plural and irresolvably conflictual (Mouffe, Citation1997; Rancière, Citation1999; Schmitt, Citation1996). Secondly, the notion of post-politics presupposes an understanding of politicisation as the contestation on the ‘part of those that have no part’ (Rancière, Citation2010) of hegemonic beliefs, arrangements and practices combined with the demand that things could and should also be different – not only for them personally, but also for society at large. And thirdly, the post-political condition presumes the opposite process of depoliticisation as the discursive construction of a new consensus which annuls political conflict (Rancière, Citation1995). Thus, depoliticisation implies – positively and negatively – the pacification, denial and suppression of the political, the construction and maintenance of a new hegemonic constellation, and the closure of spaces for the articulation and celebration of dissensus.
