“后政治”是国外激进左翼学者提出的一个学术概念。它的本质是国际共产主义运动陷入历史性低潮的状况下，在西方社会形成的一种掩盖政治性的政治统治。在苏东剧变后，伴随着西方左翼政党的蜕变和转向，西方主流政党在意识形态、纲领和政策主张等方面日益趋同化，形成了一种新自由主义“共识政治”。西方主流政党逐渐丧失了政治性职能，与国家之间的关系日益紧密而与社会越来越疏远。政党轮替被纳入了社会治理的技术性分歧话语之中，它的政治意义被消解了。这种去政治化的政党政治，成为了“后政治”的政治支柱。在“后政治”时代，西方社会形成了一种普遍的去政治化的趋势，其内部的异质性因素被完全排除了。在社会治理层面，不受干预的自由市场成为了一种被排除在政治辩论之外的不言而喻的“真理”，一切社会公共问题也都被归结为技术性的治理问题；在公共领域层面，大众媒体被资本深度同化而成为了“伪公共领域”，无法发挥其应有的政治批判功能，民众也日益去政治化和犬儒主义化；在社会运动层面，西方左翼主导下的社会运动抛弃了马克思主义的阶级范畴，而走向了以身份认同和多元文化主义为核心的身份政治，因而无法形成对资本主义的根本性政治挑战，沦为了新自由主义的同谋。在排除了一切异质性因素之后，失去了制约力量的资本进行了无节制的扩张，激化了西方社会的阶级、种族和宗教矛盾，激起了西方民众的普遍不满。但是在“后政治”所造成的政治空场之下，西方民众的利益诉求和不满情绪无法在政党政治和代议民主的框架内得到承认和表达，因而逐渐被右翼民粹主义政治势力所俘获。右翼民粹主义是“后政治”时代所积累和压抑的社会矛盾及政治情绪的暴露和表达，反映了人民群众在主流政治空间之外寻找新的政治代表性的希望。但是它遮蔽了资本主义本质性问题，把结构性的、纵向的阶级矛盾转化为横向的民族矛盾和种族矛盾，从而掩盖和保护了全球资本主义剥削体制。它无力解决资本主义的系统性危机，反而会把人类带向更灾难的境地。对于当下的西方左翼来说，只有告别沉迷于“话语”或“微观政治”的后现代理论范式，回归总体性的政治经济学批判，回归以工人阶级为主体的革命政治，才能突破“后政治”的历史困境，抵御右翼民粹主义所带来的威胁，并探索出一条超越资本主义的历史路径。
"Post-politics" is an academic concept put forward by foreign radical left-wing scholars. It is a kind of political domination formed in Western society under the circumstance that the international communist movement has fallen into a historic low ebb. After the drastic changes in the Soviet Union and Eastern Europe, along with the transformation and transformation of Western left-wing political parties, mainstream Western political parties have increasingly converged in terms of ideology, program and policy propositions, forming a neoliberal "consensus politics". Under such circumstances, the mainstream political parties in the West gradually lost their political functions, and their relationship with the state became closer and further away from society. Party rotation is incorporated into the technically divergent discourses of social governance, and its political significance is dispelled. Representative democracy supported by party politics has increasingly become a "ritual democracy" that has lost its substantive content. This depoliticized party politics has become the political pillar of "post-politics".In the "post-political" era, a general trend of depoliticization has developed in Western society, and its internal heterogeneity has been completely eliminated. At the level of social governance, an uninterrupted free market has become a self-evident "truth" that is excluded from political debate, and all social and public issues are also reduced to technical governance issues; at the level of the public sphere , mass media has been deeply assimilated by capital and has become a "pseudo-public sphere", unable to play its due political criticism function, and the public is increasingly depoliticized and cynic; Instead of the class category of Marxism, it has moved towards identity politics centered on identity and multiculturalism, thus failing to form a fundamental political challenge to capitalism and becoming an accomplice of neoliberalism.After eliminating all heterogeneity factors, capital that has lost its restraining power has carried out uncontrolled expansion, intensifying the class, ethnic and religious contradictions in Western society, and arousing the general dissatisfaction of the Western people. However, under the political void created by "post-politics", the interests and dissatisfaction of the Western people cannot be recognized and expressed within the framework of party politics and representative democracy, and thus are gradually captured by right-wing populist political forces. Right-wing populism is the exposure and expression of social contradictions and political sentiments accumulated and suppressed in the "post-political" era, and it reflects the hope of the masses to seek new political representation outside the mainstream political space. But it obscures the essential problems of capitalism, transforming structural and vertical class contradictions into horizontal national and racial contradictions, thereby covering up and protecting the global capitalist system of exploitation. It is incapable of resolving the systemic crisis of capitalism and will instead lead humanity to an even more catastrophic situation.For the current western leftists, only by saying goodbye to the postmodern theoretical paradigms that are obsessed with "discourse" or "micropolitics", returning to the overall criticism of political economy, and returning to the revolutionary politics with the working class as the main body, can we break through the "post-political" ”, resist the threat posed by right-wing populism, and explore a historical path beyond capitalism.
