Czy należy sakralizować liberalny konsens w centrum? Rozważania na temat radykalnej demokracji, liberalizmu, zasadności rewolucji i koncepcji demokracji agonistycznej…

Abstrakt

We live in a world ruled by liberal democracy. Moreover, it is becoming commonly launched that we have reached the end of politics, as we know it, and are experiencing the beginning of postpolitics. Political life is becoming deprived of its constituents in the name of the technical approach to political processes (postpolitical). Conflict as an immanent part of politics is also becoming a thing of the past, substituted with a win-win type of politics. In our postideological and postpolitical era everyone seems to accept this central consensus. Developing this thesis, the author deliberates on the resilience of a system based on an erroneous, in his opinion, presumption – the presumption of the end of politics and the beginning of the postpolitics, of which the project of deliberative democracy is a striking example. Relating to Mouffe, the author attempts to leverage the corner stone of deliberative democracy – faith in the possibility of disqualifying the essential correlate of democracy, which is inequality, or as Mouffe describes it herself “the element of indetermination”. Following the theories of Mouffe, Laclau, Chomsky, or Wallerstein, the author claims that what we really need is a contestation of the status quo, which instead of a radical change of the political system or creating a new system from scratch would consist in creating a deft sewerage system of social frustrations and the ability to manage conflicts. That is exactly what the project of agonistic democracy should serve, in which a Schmittonian oposition of friend/enemy is replaced with an opposition of friend/opponent. The inability to treat political opponents as adversaries, as I substantiate with the example of the military, following Bacevich’s terminology, foreign policy of the United States, leads on to the transformation of the language of politics into a language of morality and ethics. And from this point it is not far to the Manichaean visions and managing not politics but a crusade against the evil. The essay does not provide easy answers and the author is far from moralizing. His real aim is to provoke a discussion, an encouragement of critical thinking and search for truth, the truth – as Pinter put it – hidden somewhere in our life. According to the author it is critical, if democracy is to function.