ABSTRACT
The twin operations of critique and transformation that dialectics undertakes are intended to contribute to a project of radical political and social change. While it is counterproductive to try to draw a complete blueprint of such change before it has come to pass, it is even more stunting to shut off our imaginations and avoid the positive component that critique and transformation demands. Struggle must occupy a prominent place in any persuasive version of dialectics. The logic of transformative dialectics that I elaborate in this final chapter is concerned with two different versions of critique and transformation. The first version involves the critique of democracy by what I call ‘democratic oligarchy’, and the accompanying transformation of society into one of postdemocratic capitalism. The existence of a democratic oligarchy is not meant to invoke visions of a seizure of democratic power or of its centralized control. The situation is less obvious and more insidious than that. Oligarchy, of course, is the rule by the few. It is also, as Aristotle insisted, the rule of a particular class. Today oligarchy refers to the association of the state, capital, media, along with those people who deliberately promote bourgeois logic economically (the profit motive) and politically (rule by experts). I call this oligarchy democratic because its parts function according to the (ideological) logic of just participation. Government is chosen by an equally empowered electorate (one person, one vote); capital celebrates all good entrepreneurial ideas; the media trumpets how anyone can participate in a ‘conversation’; the triumph of meritocracy legitimates both the rule of experts and the ‘input’ of the people. Despite the considerable numbers of people and organizations that compose the oligarchy, it is dwarfed by the vast totality of those who stand outside it. The division, as we will see, determines the role of common political power in society.
