Hyperpolitics: Extreme Politicization Without Political Consequences is a book by Anton Jäger. In it, he charts the political landscape, describing eras he calls politics, post-politics, anti-politics, and into the current era, hyperpolitics.
People used to be part of social movements such as political parties, trade unions, sports clubs and churches. Now everything is ephemeral: movements rise and die, such as the Occupy Movement and Black Lives Matter protests on the left, and the Tea Party and Proud Boys on the right. People are highly politically engaged but not part of durable movements. This mirrors the attention span of social media and market trading.
Jäger doesn’t touch on this in the book, but it should be noted that one of the reasons Black Lives Matter doesn’t have clear leaders is to stop them all getting murdered, as happened in the civil rights movement.
Attempts have been made to change things: Corbyn and Momentum in Labour, and Bernie Sanders in the US. But, on the whole, the left has been poorly adapted to this new world. The right has been damaged, too, but has still been able to push policies that are more market friendly. Momentum did not rebuild the base into a coherent political movement and Sanders isn’t even a Democrat.
Jäger argues that the deinstitutionalisation of politics was done deliberately by neoliberalism, that wanted to hollow out social institutions so the market could be protected from democracy. Political parties became an oligarchy of power-sharing by parties basically running along the central line.
What is the answer? Political parties and trade unions may be the answer. But without factories and with suburbs, these may have been a product of their time. We do not have the same communities or shared workspaces we previously had. As Mark Fisher notes, factory strikes worked in a way that university lecturer strikes do not. It might be we need a new paradigm, such as social reproductive contact points (schools, daycares, etc). But work is where conflicting needs clash, so should not be written off.
Even political parties are ephemeral these days. We have seen UKIP come and go, then the Brexit Party come and go, and at time of writing we have Reform. Elsewhere in Europe, Pirate Parties have won elections before fading away. Any solution based on this not only has to build a political party with local engagement, but also has to rebuild class consciousness.
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Tags: Politics
This entry was posted on Friday, May 22nd, 2026 at 11:00 am and is filed under Books, Religion & Politics. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.