The Radical Imagination by Max Haiven

Author:Max Haiven
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi
Publisher: Zed Books
Published: 2014-07-14T16:00:00+00:00

Conclusion: beyond the middle-class imaginary

In this section, we have sought to demonstrate that the question of movement success and failure is fundamentally fraught, situated as it is at the intersection of socio-economic forces, personal biography, group structure and dynamics, and power relations. We have attempted to locate the problems our research participants and activists more widely face as part of struggles within and against a much broader crisis of social reproduction germane to neoliberal capitalism. And we have attempted to show how social movement researchers can reimagine their own responsibilities and potentialities in ways that take into account these challenges.

The radical imagination is, as we have argued, not an individual possession but a collective process, but this does not deny its personal, affective and biographical dimension. While the radical imagination may be a collective process, it is one activated and lived by individuals who come to that process with their own backgrounds and baggage, their own privilege, and their own cocktail of oppression.

Through our research and reflections, we would propose that the single most pressing challenge for the radical imagination, its single most powerful opponent now, is the potent and pernicious myth of middle-class success to which we have returned throughout this chapter. While there is of course nothing inherently wrong with the desire for material security and the safe and pleasurable reproduction of social life, striving for what is, by now, a practically non-existent ideal of middle-class security represents a massive barrier to the radical imagination and social movements in general. Further, once its hollowness and impossibility are revealed, it can become fertile ground for the cultivation of bitterness, cynicism and betrayal that feed fascist movements promising security and a return to ‘greatness’ through authoritarian terror directed at the most vulnerable and visibly different. This is not to say that those working in jobs that offer some modicum of security or that pay a living wage are inherently enemies of or immune to the radical imagination. But it is to say that the seduction of an individualistic middle-class escape from the crisis of social reproduction is fundamentally at odds with the ability to imagine and reproduce the world otherwise.

This is because the middle-class promise is one fundamentally predicated on the individualistic pursuit of social equilibrium, peace and security. While liberal thinkers might believe that the middle-class lifestyle is feasible for everyone, and that all that is required is a slightly more equal system of opportunities, we believe that this promise is impossible and undesirable. Not only has middle-class security always been bought with the displacement of the crisis of social reproduction onto others (women, the ‘third world’, racialized people, migrants, queer folk), it has never truly worked even for those within the so-called middle class. Middle-class belonging was the prize offered by capital for our obedience, docility and complicity, and as it turns out it has always been a ruse.

The radical imagination atrophies when politics is imagined as merely the extension of middle-class belonging to wider constituencies of people, whether they are local marginalized populations or globalized workers or women or refugees.

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