Over recent years, it seems ‘radical’ has become a dirty word. In the wake of the anniversary of 1968, and with books and films galore about the romance and failures of revolutionary life and thought, it seems we’re comfortable with radicalism as an object of nostalgia, but less willing to understand its contemporary legacy – and its trivialisation.

Culture Wars is exploring radicalism – past, present and future – in an attempt to understand a lived tradition as well as how certain ideas filter through the culture. Having focused on past ‘Radical Thinkers’ and the legacy of 1968, touring from Iran to Haiti, investigating the role of ideology and demise of the traditional Left, we turn towards two contemporary variants: ‘political Islam’ and the environmentalist movement. These reviews and essays constitute a critical investigation of what shapes contemporary attitudes towards the future.

Political Descartes

Reason, Ideology and the Bourgeois Project, Antonio Negri

Negri points to how his dualism retains an implicit awareness of the hegemony of the bourgeois form of social existence, and how this can be translated into an imposition on the state’s mode of producing and existing. The seeds of the revolution are sown.

What is a radical reader?

Theory in a pre-political age

Rather than addressing a movement, they addressed other radical thinkers who were perplexed and disoriented by the demise of movements of the left in particular – the organised working class, and anti-imperialist movements. If ‘being radical’ had once been shorthand for supporting these things, this meaning was now all but redundant, and the term was up for grabs. It still is.

What is a radical thinker?

Pulling up the roots

How should thinkers balance intellectual integrity with the need to be understood; how should radicalism express itself in order to be received positively; and if the ultimate aim is doing something, how can theories become manifestos?

Liberalism is dead

Jesus Camp (2006), directed by Heidi Ewing & Rachel Grady

Evangelicals care more passionately about politics, and in greater numbers than their liberal counterparts. Their enormous fundraising power makes them a force to be reckoned with. Are they wrong to subject their children to brainwashing? Most certainly – but what alternative are kids being offered?

The truth is not enough

The Threat to Reason: How the Enlightenment was hijacked and how we can reclaim it, by Dan Hind

Hind’s argument is made with admirable clarity, but I’m not sure how many of the ‘clowns and anarchists’ he invokes see themselves as champions of Enlightenment as he suggests. Hind claims a clash between two ideas of Enlightenment, rather than the phoney war between faith and reason, is the ‘great divide’ in contemporary politics, but he makes rash assumptions about the people he thinks are on his side, who include many avowed antagonists of Enlightenment.

Politics and History: Montesquieu, Rousseau, Marx

Louis Althusser

Whether one subscribes to the now-deceased Althusser’s now-deceased project or not, his attempt to identify what makes a thinker radical deserves serious consideration; and the book is indeed ultimately worthy of inclusion in this Verso series.

Late Marxism

Adorno or the persistence of the dialectic, Fredric Jameson

The problem with using Adorno to reveal the alienating praxes at work within capitalist social relations, is that it’s not really capitalism that’s the problem for Adorno. The ‘reification’ discerned under capitalism – the commodification of social life – is ultimately absorbed back into what Adorno perceives as a far longer history of reification per se.

The erosion of civil liberties under New Labour

Taking Liberties (2007), directed by Chris Atkins

This is an entertaining film that highlights a number of important issues and worthy campaigns, but it does not get under the skin of New Labour-style authoritarianism in the way that authoritarianism is getting under the skin of British society.

How to lose the war of ideas

La battaglia di Algeri [The Battle of Algiers] (1966), directed by Gillo Pontecorvo

Although it portrays a different era, the film has a timeless and universal quality: not in its depiction of the brutalities of war in some distant Eastern country, but in its portrayal of what is entailed in a genuine struggle for freedom.

What’s left of Christianity?

The politics of belief in the 21st century

Just as the demise of the political left forces us to rethink what is at stake in politics, and how we might seek to shape the future, the transformation of religious thinking raises important questions about the meaning of truth and morality, the nature of authority, and indeed what it means to be human.

Politics of Modernism: Against the New Conformists

Raymond Williams

Williams’ critique of cultural pessimism (from Culture & Technology, written in 1983) remains relevant given the still current trend to disavow the future and its alternative potential, and to categorise new technologies alternately as both determinants of social change and threats to established artistic, now ‘classicalised’, forms.

Emancipation(s)

Ernesto Laclau

The real disappointment for this reader is not the language, but the fact that Laclau rejects the possibility of formulating the Enlightenment notion of a totalising universal identity, and with it washes down the drain any project of uniting the world under a single banner of rationality.

Fragments

Jean Baudrillard

It is always tempting to imagine Jean Baudrillard preparing to write a book by sharpening an axe, swinging it into his computer monitor, then gluing the shattered pieces to a celluloid film reel, projecting it to a crowded room full of admirers and absolutely forbidding them to take it seriously.

Strategy of Deception

Paul Virilio

There is no consistent argument in any article, let alone any broader theme developed across the collection as a whole. Instead, it is a jumble of categories and neologisms (‘globalitarian’) with no analytical heft, mixed in with portentous quasi-mystical rambling about technology, and embarrassingly absurd predictions about the outcome of the war and its impact on international politics.

On the Shores of Politics

Jacques Rancière

Jacques Rancière, one of the post-Althusserian generation of French philosophers, wrote the four essays that make up this collection at the end of the Cold War (1988-1990). They are: ‘The End of Politics or The Realist Utopia’, ‘The Uses of Democracy’, ‘The Community of Equals’ and ‘Democracy Corrected’. Although each of the essays stands alone, many of the themes and arguments overlap.