Social criticism as political praxis: critical social theory, political participation and social-institutional transformation

Abstract

the paper links social criticism and political praxis, social criticism as political-normative praxis of the excluded-marginalized and by them, with an anti-systemic and anti-institutionalist role which puts down three fundamental theoretical-political points of the contemporary Realpolitik assumed by conservatism and indirectly used by liberal and social-democratic social theories and political philosophies, namely: a technical-logical, non-political and non-normative notion of social system or institution which individualizes, technicizes and depoliticizes spheres of social life, making them autonomous and overlapped in relation to political praxis grounded on social normativity; an understanding of the process of Western modernization as self-differentiation, self-referentiality and self-subsistence of those technical-logical social systems which puts down both the notion of society as political-normative totality and the centrality of the political praxis as basis-instrument which streamlines and orientates the institutional structuration and the societal evolution; an institutional proceduralism which is neutral, impartial, impersonal and formal regarding social classes and their struggles, separating strongly institutions and civil society, institutionalized epistemological-political subjects and non-institutionalized epistemological-political subjects, making political institutionalism, and from the impersonal and apolitical proceduralism, the paradigmatic basis both to the functioning of the institutions themselves and to the own actuation of the social movements and citizen initiatives in relation to institutions. From here, it will be argued that only an anti-systemic and anti-institutionalist political-normative praxis of the excluded-marginalized ones and by them, in a permanent, inclusive and participative sense which politicizes all, can allow that the social criticism as political praxis acquire a critical-emancipatory sense, as voice-praxis of victims. In this sense, social criticism as political-normative praxis of the victims by themselves is always anti-institutionalist and anti-systemic, politicizing all, requiring the participation, the inclusion, the voice-praxis of the excluded-marginalized as paradigmatic condition for institutional structuration and the orientation of social evolution, breaking up with the strong and apolitical institutionalism.