Every political party of the Left that hopes to become the government faces a key problem: how to shape a nourishing relationship with civil society and engage with grassroots political activism from a position of power. Feeling very close and grateful to those who campaigned and worked hard to get them into power, the leaders of the Party will promise to keep encouraging social mobilisation and to become humble servants of the people, the citizens, expecting to be held to account by them. Nevertheless, collective initiatives, ideas and demands that once were central to the political campaign must straightaway be decoded into the institutional language of the law and policy, for any government – left or right – needs to maintain order and stability. I call this the problem of translation.
The problem of translation is inextricably connected to representational politics and democracy. Representation is necessary because of the separation between the political and the social/economic spheres that characterises capitalist societies. This separation shapes our citizenry and our political lives. It brings about the need for ‘political’ representation, while every change that occurs in the realm of civil society is labelled ‘social’ or ‘economic’ by default. Such separation enables the state to appear as a deus ex machina, that is, as above us. But this separation also authorises the idea of ‘freedom’ in two ways that are central to capitalism. On the one hand, we are ‘free’ citizens, who freely sell our labour power in the labour market. On the other hand, capitalists are freed from the necessity to coerce workers into labour; delegating this coercion to the state. The state appears above us as the realm of freedom and order.
Why do I see this as a problem for the Left? This separation between the political and the economic is experienced by citizens as a contradiction on a daily basis: the contradiction of being both a part of the dispossessed – exploited – proletariat (regardless of how much money we earn) and a quasi-free citizen in the political realm (with our rights secured by the law or custom). Thus, questions such as ‘why, if I am a UK citizen, am I sleeping rough?’ cannot be answered straightforwardly but require elaborating a response to justify this perverse fact of pseudo democratic life: ‘You are a citizen of this country but political life is mediated by abstractions such as economy, policy, ideology, culture, and these are preventing you from having a roof above your head’. This is when policy comes into play.
