La Révolution démocratique verte

by Chantal Mouffe, Christophe Beslon (Translator)

Les promesses du moment populiste ont vacillé, comme en témoignent les défaites de Jeremy Corbyn, Bernie Sanders et Jean-Luc Mélenchon, tandis que la pandémie de Covid-19 a fait naître un fort besoin de protection, créant un terrain favorable aux dérives autoritaires de la politique. Cette nouvelle situation représente un défi pour la gauche, qui doit se réinventer, mais quelle stratégie adopter?

Rappelant les mots de «Les idées n'ont de force qu'à partir du moment où elles rencontrent des affects», Chantal Mouffe montre qu'il est urgent pour la gauche, si elle veut faire face à une crise à la fois économique, sociale et écologique, de fédérer les citoyens autour d'un projet politique animé non par la peur, mais par la perspective d'un monde différent, qui associe lutte contre les inégalités et défense de l'environnement. Elle invite ainsi à la création d'une large coalition autour de valeurs démocratiques partagées et d'affects communs, sous la bannière d'une « révolution démocratique verte».



Philosophe politique belge, s'inscrivant dans le courant de pensée post-marxiste, Chantal Mouffe est la principale représentante de ce que l'on a appelé «la démocratie radicale». Ses travaux ont notamment inspiré le mouvement Podemos en Espagne et influencé La France insoumise de Jean-Luc Mélenchon. Elle est l'auteure, chez Albin Michel, de L'Illusion du consensus (2016) et de Pour un populisme de gauche (2018).

Genres: Politics, Theory, Philosophy, Nonfiction

75 pages, Kindle Edition

Published March 1, 2023

About the author

Chantal Mouffe is a Belgian political theorist. She holds a professorship at the University of Westminster in the United Kingdom. She is best known as co-author of Hegemony and Socialist Strategy with Ernesto Laclau. Their thoughts are usually described as post-Marxism as they were both politically active in the social and student movements of the 1960s including working class and new social movements (notably second-wave feminism in Mouffe's case). They rejected Marxist economic determinism and the notion of class struggle being the single crucial antagonism in society. Instead they urged for radical democracy of agonistic pluralism where all antagonisms could be expressed. In their opinion, ‘...there is no possibility of society without antagonism’; indeed, without the forces that articulate a vision of society, it could not exist.

Reviews

[Uroš Đurković · Rating 2 out of 5]

Ovaj knjižuljak je, nažalost, nedovoljan. Tema fantastična, teze provokativne i podsticajne, ali sve je okrznuto i, čak ako nije na površini, predočeno je zaobilaznim mislima akademski nedopadljivo. Otpor može da potiče i od podrazumevanog znanja: Šantal Muf često upućuje na ono što je prethodno objavila i pisala, te deluje da ovakva knjiga nije dobro polazište za susret sa njenim delom. Ipak, iza svih složenosti – polemisanja sa Spinozom i Habermasom – krije se vrlo jednostavan i, sasvim moguće, teorijski opravdan koncept: demokratizacija nije samo racionalan, već i afektivan proces. Shodno tome, afekti se nipošto ne smeju zanemariti u političkom delovanju. To je prepoznala desnica i zato ima uspon koji, nažalost, ne deluje da će se uskoro zaustaviti. Nije reč, dakle, o programu, još manje o raciju, nego o tome koliko ubedljivo možemo emocionalno pridobiti glasače. Da bi se promena dogodila, smatra Muf, neophodna je ne intelektualna, nego populistička borba, borba koja će uvažiti to da nismo samo bića razuma. Odnosno, dodao bih ja – da većina nije uopšte. Međutim, koliko god nipodaštavali kolektivne identifikacije – različite zamišljene i izmišljene zajednice (neka se neko tu seti Benedikta Andersona) – one su daleko žilavije nego što bi to neko mislio i kao takve su nezaobilazne za politički život. Zato, kako sam ja shvatio Šantal Muf, a možda je nisam dobro shvatio – da bismo načinili prave korake, one koje bi, na primer, mogli da spasu planetu, moramo da mobilišemo emocionalne kapacitete građana, jer desnica to već ionako radi. Što se politike životne sredine tiče, desnica to radi kroz protekcionizam. Neka istraživanja beogradskih antropologa pokazala su, na primer, da ekološke inicijative u Srbiji, poput onih za zaštitu doline Jadra, u narodu uopšte nisu povezana ni za kakve leve politike, već za nacionalizam i tradicionalizam. Drugim rečima, ne branimo mi nešto zbog argumenata stručnjaka, branimo nešto od tuđina, od cokule koja će da dođe i zatruje ono naše, predačko ili kakvo god još. Taj splet je zanimljiv i, verujem, za mnoge teoretičare politike neočekivan, ali on samo pokazuje kako termini XX veka danas ne funkcionišu; a Šantal Muf se zalaže, na primer, za odbacivanje famoznog „trećeg putaˮ, koji se nalazi između desnice i levice, jer upravo on pokazuje nedostatak prave alternative. U smutnim vremenima živimo, to je jedino izvesno. 

A kad smo već kod izvesnih stvari, deo o antropocenu mogao je zaista da bude malo temeljnije napisan, ovde je sve to samo dotaknuto, kao i sam dodatak na kraju koji upućuje na to da je knjiga pisana uoči rata u Ukrajini i koje bi on mogao da ima posledice na zaštitu životne sredine. 

[Donald · Rating 3 out of 5]

Mouffe's essay updates her views given the rise and fall of the left-populist wave that she championed and recent events like the pandemic. What I liked about it was the careful stating of her core argument at a high level of generality for people unfamiliar with her take. She helps explain the more compelling moments of things like the Popular Union (NUPES) in France.

I think there are two main problems with this. The first is that, as a political theorist, she understands that most of the ideological work needs to be pencilled in by local activists and is only interested in offering an overarching framework for operating a radical democratic politics. She is interested in the style of politics that needs to be taken up and emphasized and the main lines of advance. This means she offers almost nothing to critics who want her to get deeper into discussions of how to survive the overwhelming (and often violent) resistance of the capitalist state. The "virtual senate" of international capital is framed more as an adversarial force of the right that can be campaigned against using more passionate slogans rather than a material force that is willing to kill. A coalition operating at level of abstraction higher than committed anticapitalism blurs the particular roadblocks that a radical-reformist movement might face. This leads populist formations to disarm themselves and face paralysis when confronted with obstacles that can't be neatly defeated with rhetoric.

[Kai · Rating 1 out of 5]

probably the worst Mouffe book yet. 4 short chapters in a scant 67 pages. 3 of these chapters are just rehashing the same arguments in her past work while shadowboxing with some "rationalist left" (i.e. Habermas) that simply doesn't exist. no lessons are learned from the failures of actual left populist parties; indeed, taking a page out of the playbook of neoliberal argumentation, these campaigns failed because they didn't do left populism hard enough. only the last 10 pages concern ecological crisis, and they do so only at the most banal, abstract level while arguing against a strawman position that "exclusively critiques capitalism." to be quite honest, I was hoping there was more substance here so it would actually be worth writing something in response, but there's really no value in doing that...particularly when events have rendered these ideas so completely marginal.

[flo🌀 · Rating 3 out of 5]

3/5

Unbefriedigend, aber erkenntnisreich.
Die Schrift bildet vor allem einen Überblick über Mouffe‘s zentrale Gedanken, wie den „antagonistischen Widerspruch“, die Notwendigkeit eines linken Populismus, die Kritik am (linken) Rationalismus und an der neoliberalen Ordnung allgemein.
Erst im letzten Kapitel wird dann die versprochene Prämisse des Titels aufgegriffen. Neben einer dann sehr kurz geratenen Analyse der aktuellen polit-ökologischen Verhältnisse wird der Leser allerdings mit einer halbherzig wirkenden Lösungsoption allein gelassen.

[Julia]

Jedes Buch mit einer Zusammenfassung der Kernthesen von Hegemonie und radikale Demokratie zu beginnen, um dann auf weiteren 20 Seiten nochmal zu wiederholen, wie wichtig Affekte auch in diesem neuen politischen Kampf sind, scheint etwas einfallslos. Als Mouffe-Stan hoffe ich auf einen Essay, in dem sie erklärt, weshalb linkspopulistische Bewegungen denn immer wieder ins Leere laufen.

[Tanzil Chowdhury · Rating 2 out of 5]

While I generally agree with much of Mouffe’s argument here, there’s actually very little here that is novel, interesting, or containing any depth. Political organization must have an affective dimension, no doubt, but the far more relevant and interesting question here is not *if* we need to access affect for effective politics, but rather *why* our attempts to do so thus far have failed. Mouffe discusses the Green New Deal in the US, the the Green Industrial Revolution in the UK, and other attempts to tie the many policy solutions to the climate crisis and its downstream/related social effects but doesn’t give any real account of why these articulations of a radically transformed, green, democratic sociopolitical sphere have thus far failed to capture the public imagination in the same way that the right-wing populists have managed to do with their program. It was especially striking that she spent a huge amount of time in Chapter 3 discussing the failure of the 2019 Labour Party campaign in the UK only to then laud the Green Industrial Revolution, sans critique, as an example of her green democratic revolution in Chapter 4 (minus a brief mention of it not being “enough” on its own).

I wouldn’t say that it’s not worth reading, given that it’ll take about an hour to finish, but I wouldn’t expect anything particularly insightful, especially if you already agree with much of the premise.

[parmis khojaste bakht · Rating 5 out of 5]

انقلاب دموکراتیک سبز
پوپولیسم چپ و قدرت عواطف
شانتال موف
ترجمه عرفان آقایی

میان عواطفی که چپ جهان‌گرا خوارشان می‌شمارد، غواطف بیان‌گر مطالبات حاکمیت، امنیت و حفاظت مهم‌ترین‌اند و واگذاری آن‌ها به راست‌گرایان اشتباه سیاسی مهلکی است.

[Don · Rating 4 out of 5]

Mouffe returns to her familiar themes: the centrality of the agonistic divide to the construction of political life, the limits of rationalism and the power of emotional affects, the chains of equivalence that lead from discontent to identification, etc, etc.

There are two reasons why she has returned to this restatement of a position she has been pressing on the left since the 1980s - namely the need to counter the view that the defeat of the left populist tide in the years before the Covid pandemic have put an final end to that idea; and the possibility that the Green Democratic Revolution might provide the floating signifier that will allow the left to gain the hegemonic upper hand.

It is a welcome intervention. Mouffe is to the forefront of leftist thinkers for whom the business of getting inside the heads of the people she wants to live alongside in a democratic community is the central task of politics. Why doesn't discontent with life lead so often in the direction of protectivism, nationalism and racism rather than social justice and equality? What were the missteps taken by the left along the way which have meant a rejection of emancipation by so many, in favour of getting whatever they can out of the system that oppresses them? If these seem like important questions that need urgent answers than this book is a great place to start.

[Lucas]

Meow meow meow to all the jokers who are writing a review of this book as a way to prove to themselves they are brainy little girls and boys. True left discourse has been co-opted by academia and NPOs. If you were really smart you would use some of this information to turn your angry trump uncle into a full fledged Trotskyist.

[Rudy Herrera · Rating 4 out of 5]

This is probably one of the most pragmatic political books I’ve read in years. As a leftist, we often thing the solution is in our precious theory of the past, but here a pragmatic, simple and non-violent solution to the murky waters of todays politics is shown. Definitely worth a read.

[Gabriel Rojas Hruška · Rating 4 out of 5]

A well thought argument supporting the emotive, and centrally mass survivalist eco-centric drive of the majority, in left political campaigning. Compelling but not revolutionary. A pragmatic political manifesto.

[John Mihelic · Rating 3 out of 5]

Chantal Mouffe: Towards a Green Democratic Revolution

Verso has been putting out some of these thin books that are essays, and they are nice because they are a quick read in the afternoon. The problem is that they have to really grab you to be memorable, and Mouffe’s text did not do that for me.

[Sander Dumas · Rating 2 out of 5]

Chantal, you are breaking my heart

[Laura Gebhardt · Rating 3 out of 5]

3 1/2