Johny Potsmoker Takes To The Streets

international | miscellaneous | news report Sunday May 06, 2007 17:06 by Libertarian Infusion

Legalise Cannabis March

400- 500 people march through the city center to demand the anti prohibition of cannabis.

Anti Prohibition March

400- 500 people march through the city center to demand the anti prohibition of cannabis.

It was an unusual occasion for those of us all too familiar with lefty gatherings in Dublin city center.

Unusual because it was not your typical lefty gathering.

It was an eclectic mix of color and people moving to some funky, chunky rhythm and sound beats.

There were no banners or flags of the established left, no anarchy, hammer and sickle flags , no in-your face paper sellers or distributors trying to convince you of their ideological position.

It was the first time since the Rossport 5 march (that i can remember) that people stopped and joined the march. It was the first time people smiled as they walked past or signaled their support through a handshake, wink or a clapping of the hands.

I would argue that the reason for this passive support was due to the absence of the usual political ideologies- groups that tend to dominate public demonstrations.

It was a rare and wonderful moment when people gathered against the tide of the established left and gathered on the basis of what is essentially a libertarian position (yet not within the class-left-libertarian framework)

Libertarian in that those present demanded that the state or anyone else for that matter ought not to have the right to prohibit something they all do in their private lives. It was not a naive celebration of a recreational drug as many on the left may have thought but a reflection on the ethos of most people living in Ireland in 2007 and this ethos is a desire to decide independently what they do with their bodies and mind.

The march was successful and enjoyable because it defied the political perspective of most groups on the left (both authoritarian and libertarian) .

In the fields of philosophy and political theory there are multiple criticisms of the current political and economic moment, which have identified the present as neo-liberalism, Empire, society of control, or spectacle, and so on. When it comes to discussions of how to transform the present, the field of philosophical positions narrows, considerably.

This is in part because change demands an agent, a subject, which appears to be increasingly absent. It is relatively easy to draw up a list of the problems of the current world order. It is more difficult, however, to identify how, and who, will change it. Historically and theoretically the place of the subject of radical politics is absent. Historically, the place of the working class, as “gravediggers” of an old order and architects of a new order, as the embodiment of the universal and “subject of history,” has been vacated.

In its place are numerous political identities: racial, ethnic, and sexual, which cannot or will not claim the space of the universal. Theoretically, the subject is seen as a product of power, of apparatuses of normalization, and thus of a subjection “deeper than himself.” The only possible liberation is through a process of desubjectification, to arrive at the anonymous flows of “bodies and pleasures.”

The need to rethink the relationship between “politics” and “the subject of politics” in the work of such thinkers as Jacques Rancière, Alain Badiou, and Antonio Negri has centered upon this frustration with who will be the agent for change. Most established left groups in Dublin still cling to a confused and lethargic notion of 'working class' as anyone who sells their labour, hence as soon as we all develop a recognition of ourselves as working class all we have to do is unite across our cultural/gender/racial/cultural/social differences and take on the 'ruling class'. Academically this argument is rarely taken seriously but usually for the wrong reasons.

The problem today as i see it, is that we need to formulate a new constitution of the subject that does not ignore the reality of class difference but equally does not naively cling to a constitution of class as outlined by Marx and Engels in the 18th century.

Thus, we have to ask ourselves; what activity today in 2007 will generically produce a new agent for social change.

It is against this shared problem of the “production” or constitution of subjectivity that the differences of libertarian politics of the left emerge. Differences that I think center on the role that “work” or “the figure of the worker” plays in articulating a theory of the production of subjectivity.

What is at stake in such an analysis, I think, is not a matter of finding “the next big thing from the left” or of settling the latest debate between contemporary philosophers, but of confronting a problem that is as unavoidable as it is apparently unsolvable.

We are living in an age in which the subject of politics is increasingly absent, the old names and markers of this process of subjectification, the “people,” “citizens,” or “the proletariat” have become empty names, devoid of meaning or content. Politics has become a process without a subject, in that it is carried out by polls and focus groups that only reflect back what has already declared the issue of the day by the various media outlets.

We need to make it possible to rethink the connections between politics and subjectivity by examining the way in which politics is always a matter of the constitution of new subjectivities capable of collectively carrying out a shared project.

The march today was indicative of this tension and perhaps an indication of things to come.