"Rethinking Dissent"
From Jodi Dean @iCite
Perhaps the most pathetic attribute of the Left today is its vigorous defense of the Right’s most special treasure, liberal democracy. Even as the ‘coalition of the willing’ (a name whose multilateral pretense failed to disguise US militarism) wages aggressive, preemptive war in Iraq in the name of liberty, democracy, and human rights, so does the Left invoke precisely the same ideals in its attempted opposition. Likewise, key values in Left politics at the millennium—flexibility, multiplicity, diversity, participation, interconnectivity, and a creative, aesthetic relation to identity—are urged by globalized communicative capitalism as its fundamental prerequisites. It’s no wonder, then, that there is no coherent opposition to capitalism or to liberal democracy as its political form—nothing is opposed. One can therefore say without exaggeration that the Left today names precisely this nothing that opposes. It occupies the place of an absence, an absence of alternatives, an absence of vision, and, ultimately, an absence of opposition.
Read Entire Piece
