Class Struggle and People Struggle

The editor is Geminello Preterossi (University of Salerno)

Soft Power invites submissions of articles of 6,000 to 6,500 words, including footnotes, concerning:

Might this be the new class struggle?

There is no further time for class struggle. This was one of the many assumptions at the basis of the neoliberal official discourse which was dominant after the fall of the Berlin Wall. Is it so? A look back on the last decades, and specifically on political and financial establishment response to the crisis, suggests not just the persistence of the class struggle but even its efficient functioning from above. Its ideological denial underlies the succeeding of neoliberal offense that drives a devaluing of work and a systematic extraction of surplus value, with neither political restrictions nor redistribution of wealth. The symbolic field has been functional to remove or otherwise opacify the “class” interest field (how once it would be called), crediting the ideology of the end of the conflict, in attempt to neutralize the global market and competition as a universal and not partisan form of life. Analytically that implies the necessity to avoid the distinction between the symbolic level and the practical processes level because it might render to us a partial, thus unharmed, comprehension of the new political reality we are facing.

From an objective point of view, if we consider differences in interests and the social contradictions, there would certainly be reasons for class struggle as well as economic discrepancies concerning the ideologies of left and right. Rather, the actual background around the new social concern on the (economic) crisis and austerity measures is of an opposite stand: the language, applied by the left party, does not look exhaustive enough to seize and reproduce this reality and even less prepared to arrange it in a cohesive conflict. Besides, out of some rare cases, the left party looks involved with the social inferiorization, the cheap jobs, and the unemployment, all of which are implied in globalization. While the economic right side has a clear vision of the goals and the power relationships, the left side is living in a credibility crisis. As a matter of fact, the reformist left is subordinated to the economic right side which led it to shelter behind an unspecified rhetoric of hospitality that, unsupported by social policies, allow ghettos and wars among the poor; in addition to that, the subordination is the motivation behind the acknowledgement of civil rights as a way to compensate for the demolition of the welfare state. What is more, the “radical” left side cherishes dreams of a palingenesis of meta-policies, which are extremely unfeasible and ultimately with no cultural antibodies against a globalism whose dominance has been empowered by the neoliberalism.

The Laclau’s theory of populism in addition to the political use of it (including European countries too) is perceived as a way to re-arrange the conflict and political subjectivity grounded on the mentioned eclipse of the “left” and on the rising of new unresponsiveness and of lines of social fracture (places against flows, downwards against upwards, identity against standardization).

The main question of this call for papers is whether or not nowadays the class struggle that is played from above is structurally forbidden and on what ideological assumptions could it be upheld.

A further investigation should consider redefining the shift from inside itself to for itself that is indeed the principal factor in the subjectification of conflict. Might it be the case that the assessment of the conflict in the shape of post-essentialism is only realizable populistically? Might it be a trade of class struggle paradigm for a populistic one (that which is undoubtedly a source of political strength although ambivalent), or rather a more strategic trade?

Is the Laclau’s approach really a critical and polemical interpretation towards the hard core of the capitalistic domain and of devices it uses? Or is it just a rhetorical-linguistic instrument?

Ultimately how could it be answered efficiently but not abstractly regulatory to the shift from class struggle to identity struggle that is the result of a malfunctioning among the anomic effects of the globalization and the socially disempowering effects of neoliberalism?

Soft Power invites submissions of articles not exceeding 6,000 words, including footnotes.

All articles are peer-reviewed using a double-blind peer-review process. Articles must be written in English or in Spanish. Abstracts and keywords must be in English as well as in Spanish in order to facilitate the inclusion in international databases and indexing services.

Papers (with Name, Title, little Abstract – max 20 lines – and Keywords) should be sent to info@softpowerjournal.com.

DEADLINES: Full Article must be received by December 10th, 2018 (acceptance shall be communicated by January 15th, 2019 )

For author guidelines and for any further information: info@softpowerjournal.com