Who Practices Hegemony?: Class Division and the Subject of Politics

Today, on Left and in the domain of theory, a choice is being posed: politics or radical democracy? And yet, as with any allegedly exhaustive polarity, the choice as formulated is not an innocent one, for the terms of which it is comprised are only bound together by the force of a normative hierarchy. We are by all means free to but there is a right choice and a wrong, which is to say that, however we may choose, the very fact of the opposition will have already done the choosing for us. Within the range of this choice, politics was never a real alternative at all, but merely a nostalgic dream imagining the complexities of contemporary political antagonisms under the form of the harsh frontiers of an incipient capitalism. And if we who dream this dream, we who operate in the political imaginary of Marxism, were only to awaken, we would discover that we have cosed ourselves into a class ghetto, isolated from the terrain on which politics takes place today. A novel variation on this theme is the recent suggestion that the way out of this ghetto has already been given in the ghetto itself, that a careful examination of our inner-city