Folk Politics
All italics quoted from: https://www.designing-history.world/en/theorie/folk-politics/
Nick Srnicek and Alex Williams define folk politics as a politics of immediacy: a way of political action and thinking that privileges the immediate over the mediated.
Folk Politics remains reactive. Its political mode is resistance: the initiative always comes from the political opponent. We see this clearly with the example of the surge of right-wing parties: they gradually shift the Overton Window, i.e. the framework of what can be thought and said, to the right, while the remaining “progressive” parties remain in defensive mode, unable to set their own issues.
- this is why the Labour 2017 manifesto felt so exciting! & Corbyn. It set the agenda. it was visionary. it didn’t just react to the opposition
- this is why imagination & visioning is so important! It’s the vision, the ideology, the thought leadership that goes with activism and demanding change.
Folk Politics does not develop long-term goals and strategies. It has no real hope that the future could be substantially different. Folk Politics reproduces the political visions of the past instead of developing new visions.
The world has become increasingly complex in recent decades. It is becoming increasingly difficult to control our present. Simple solutions are no longer valid and the belief in the so-called grand narratives has been lost under postmodernity. There is a lack of narratives that make it possible to find our place in the world and to act in it. We no longer feel in a position to understand the world in all its complexity and to act within it.
Folk-political thinking is a reaction to this powerlessness. Folk politics reacts to the increasing complexity of the world by declaring this complexity to be its opponent. She says: “We must break down the complexity of the world to a level that allows us to understand it again and act effectively within it.
We must vehemently oppose the Folk-Political mindset — the challenges of our time demand that we act globally and in a coordinated manner.
another future is possible. And that is precisely why we have to change our tactics and strategies.
This requires confrontation with complexity. So we need to find new ways to navigate our complex world. Our project must not be a project of retreat. Instead, we have to fight to do justice to the situation in which we find ourselves. To break with Folk Politics, we need a Promethean Politics of the Future.
We need a politics of the Future, a discourse of complexity, an in-depth and entirely pragmatic structural and systemic critique, and a powerful, shared, achievable vision.
My practice must be about furthering these aims, about priming the space for a discourse of complexity, about normalising future visioning, about making people feel empowered and welcomed in that endeavour. My practice must supersede reactionism – it cannot exist only in opposition, but must create an independent culture.