Agonism anyone?

Sep 16, 2012 Features / Columnists, Ravi Dev

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I’ve always been a bit leery of the liberal premise that lions and lambs can sit around a table and through rational discussion, arrive at a consensus on which they can all act and live happily ever after.
Maybe lions and lions, but never lions and lambs. Politics is always about lambs struggling to become lions and the lions fending them off: in liberal polities the opposition are the lambs with the party in power the lions.
This proclivity to struggle is ineradicable because humans, pace the liberal view, do not only act out of cold, rational calculus.
There’s always the messy business of prejudices, predispositions, feelings, and emotions that coalesce in group solidarities, exclusions and antagonisms.
All societies are therefore “plural” to a lesser or greater degree. In our plural society, our divisions are not just around economic class issues, but include ethnicity and religion – going to the very heart of ascriptive identities.
The emotional affects are immanent in spades because of incommensurable values and institutions of our several groups. Consequently there’s always the tendency for our political struggles – and all the other struggles are ultimately over questions of power and so political – to get out of hand.
This view of politics that places conflict at the centre goes beyond the old, familiar school of “conflict theorists” such as the Marxists.
The latter, for instance, propose while class conflict is immanent in the present capitalist conjuncture.
But once the working class assume power, the conflict will disappear. Utopia would have arrived. I believe this to be a fairy tale. Humans will always find reasons to divide themselves and deal with the “other” aggressively.
There is, however, a school of thought that accepts this tendency of humans: agonism. But crucially, the “other” is not treated as enemies to be obliterated.
They are rather adversaries with positions on which agreement cannot be reached but yet respected.
Instead of pretending, as liberalism does, that we can always rationally discuss away the inchoate hostility between deeply divided groups, agonistic politics aim to challenge and channel it in non-destructive, institutionalised ways. If this is not done, then violence will erupt periodically, or large sections of some subaltern groups will have to be locked away, as in the US. The goal is not to find consensus at any cost but to manage dissensus.
Each polity has its unique blend of incommensurable pluralism generating its own volatile melange of conflicts and consequently there is no one silver bullet to confront them all. However we can observe the trends in polities that have exposed the hollowness of both Marxist and liberal utopian thinking to deal with deep pluralism.
Britain has devolved. India continues to do so. Sudan has fissioned as did Czechoslovakia earlier; not to mention Bosnia a tad more violently. Kenya went into a government of national unity – but that has not stopped the corruption and tensions among the groups. It was a coalition of the elites that just broadened the pillage.
However they devised a new constitution that institutes deep devolution to the regions while aiming for disciplined forces that are more representative of the country’s population. We will have to see whether the Kenyan elites have the political will to implement their own recommendations.
ACDA has grasped the inadequacy of our specific political model to deal with our pluralism, but their solution is still firmly positioned within the failed liberal premises.
I’ve asked on several occasions as to why they invoke the advice of Sir Arthur Lewis on plural societies re coalitions, but never about Federalism. In our case I have advocated we carry the federalised devolution all the way down to the village level.
The extensive deep, institutionalised devolution should facilitate agonistic politics at the grassroots level and hopefully spare build-up of hostilities that can tear the country apart.
Thus far from saying that we should have a love fest going, I am suggesting the ever present simmering hostility ought not to be fanned, but given expression institutionally.
Worse, it ought not to be moralised as a struggle between “good” and “evil”.
This reinforces the feeling that the “other” is the “enemy” to be eliminated. No one gains when there are explosions.
I am further saying that the present political arrangements will ensure that whichever side wins the election, unless a system is introduced that equitably distributes power among the various groups; we are ensuring that the inevitable resentment in the “remainders” will erupt sooner or later.
A distributed system, best exemplified by Federalism, also encourages some of the more mature present lions not to fight to the death. There will be “something” for everybody, without the need for the beneficence of future lions.

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