Fugitive Politics: The Struggle For Ecological Sanity

During a very long academic career, Carl Boggs has tracked the evolution of American capitalism at home and overseas, particularly its vectors of legitimation, force and opposition. Well into his ninth decade, he remains an energetic critic. Fugitive Politics takes stock of the present conjuncture, looking for ways and means to address the systemic roots of various current crises. The massive global alteration and degradation of the physical world is chief among them. Given the scale of his analytical ambitions, Boggs’ book is relatively short. It’s also accessible, being written in an essayistic style for general readers, university students and other academics alike. While Boggs is ostensibly a political theorist and critic, Fugitive Politics refrains from in-depth engagements with key thinkers in the field (such as the late Sheldon Wolin, to whom Boggs pays personal tribute at the end of the book). Instead, the author ranges confidently hither and thither, marshalling insights from various analytical quarters but with an emphasis on ‘classic’ Left thinkers such as Marx, Lenin, Gramsci and C. Wright Mills. The result is a colourful picture painted on a broad canvas, though one that’s more Bob Ross in appearance than anything else.

The book’s core theme is how present-day forms of power, rooted in capitalist political economy, generate manifest problems that cry-out to be addressed. Historically and today, the Left has sought to tame the capitalist beast, and even to slay it. But, as many commentators have shown, the contemporary Left can mount no serious attack on the capitalist way of life. In this context, a ‘fugitive politics’ is one that’s flexible and transgressive, unconstrained by canards and shibboleths from a previous period (e.g. the 1960s). For the Left, the task – as always – is to pitch winning ideas and arguments so that they intersect with ordinary peoples’ lived experience and aspirations. Inspired by Antonio Gramsci’s thought, Boggs calls for a new Jacobinism. This emphasises the primacy of political discourse and action, seeing capture of the state from elites as a sine qua non. Jacobinism grows from the grass roots but requires coordination from above via a vanguard force willing and able to seize the reins of power.

Boggs’ diagnosis of the many challenges faced by the broad Left dominates the book. There are disquisitions about the way that things like consumerism, social media, surveillance technologies, a compromised fourth estate, electoral democracy, militarism, a growth-oriented economy and a global oligarchy stymie the sort of systematic changes we arguably need. ‘Never in history’, declares Boggs (p. 2), ‘have ruling elites been able to exercise such overwhelming power … ’. As if to confirm the limited room this leaves for a Left ‘fugitive politics’, there’s but one Chapter devoted to political strategy in the book (Ch. 8). Called ‘The road to ecosocialism?’, it paints a bleak picture of the political present and future. One is offered no glimpses of strategic openings or the sort of political manifestos that might create a mass movement united in a desire for serious change.

In turn, this raises two questions. One: why write the book? If there’s no real prospect for a Left Jacobinism in the USA or other key capitalist states, why add to the pile of (admittedly often insightful) doom-and-gloom literature about the global triumph of neoliberalism? In addressing this first question we may in turn answer the second, namely: has Boggs used the right analytical toolkit to arrive at his sombre diagnosis of our times? While not uncritical of any of them, it is ‘old’ thinkers like Marx who are his touchstones. Where are the contemporary Left analysts of our world, such as Nancy Fraser, William Robinson, Wolfgang Streeck or Goran Therborn? Where are the references to research about new social movements, about the labour movement or about insurgent Left political movements (such as they exist)? Where are the proposals for a new international of ideas and institutions, perhaps focussed around galvanising concepts such as ‘degrowth’ or ‘nature’s services for people’?

As an older academic familiar with the literatures Boggs draws upon, I didn’t find much that’s new or terribly convincing in this book. Boggs also has a slight tendency to repeat the same things in different places without developing his key points as the book proceeds. Younger readers may well be morbidly fascinated by the negativity of Boggs’ diagnosis of the times, but will doubtless be looking for some (small) signs of political hope as they contemplate their futures. Sadly, Boggs’ hoped for fugitive politics is itself a fugitive in this book. I don’t doubt that the scale and scope of social power today confronts ordinary people as something close to overwhelming. The current electoral democracies and autocracies that exercise political power are probably not up to the job of delivering social and ecological justice for people and planet. Many political leaders are hemmed-in by circumstances or simply not up to the job of using their power for the greater good. Well over a century ago, the ideas of one person (Karl Marx) changed the world via a network of activists, trade unions and party organisations. Whatever crimes were later committed in the name of ‘communism’, Left politics mattered on the world stage for over 50 years. In our very different times, we need again to find a global language, and practical means, to confront power so as to make the world a liveable place for the many, not the few. Boggs is dead right that this will be no easy task, even as the signs of discontent with the present order of things are evident everywhere. But Fugitive Politics makes it a little bit harder by succumbing, despite itself, to the sort of doleful thinking we typically associate with the Frankfurt School rather than the hopeful ideas of Marx, Lenin, Gramsci or, in our own times, someone like Naomi Klein. The future we want needs to be ‘red’, ‘green’ and ethno-culturally plural in equal measure. We have plenty of analyses of why the broad Left faces formidable challenges. We really need more analysis of how the challenges can be overcome.