Working politics requires coordinating local struggles with a global totalizing dimension

Evidence

An older politics sought to coordinate local and global struggles, so to speak, and to endow the immediate local occasion for struggle with an allegorical value, namely that of representing the overall struggle itself and incarnating it in a here-and-now thereby transfigured. Politics works only when these two levels can be coordinated; they otherwise drift apart into a disembodied and easily bureaucratized abstract struggle for and around the state, on the one hand, and a properly interminable series of neighborhood issues on the other, whose “bad infinity” comes, in Postmodernism, where it is the only form of politics left, to be invested with something of Nietzsche’s social Darwinism and with the willed euphoria of some metaphysical permanent revolution. — Fredric Jameson, Postmodernism, or, The Cultural Logic…, 713

Categorization

• DEFINE: Explains what ‘totalization’ means as a political requirement rather than a mere theoretical preference.
• XREF: The two-level split maps onto Jameson’s general claim that the postmodern condition severs local experience from global structure — connects to the broader cultural-dominant argument. — connects to: The 1848 revolutions forced workers to reconcile local place with international space — David Harvey, The Condition of Postmodernity: An…, 1657; Environmental politics needs a third path between local experiments and macro-association — Yves Citton, The Ecology of Attention, 349; Seeing local oppression as global colonization enables political reframing (+1 more)