Infinitely Demanding

…we are entering into a period of increasingly massive social dislocations and disorder which harbors within it countless risks, defeats, dangers, false dawns and fake defeats. But…we are all coming to the powerful and simple realization that human beings acting peacefully together in concert can do anything–and nothing can stop them.

Something is happening. Something is shifting in the relations between politics and power. We don’t know where it will lead, but the four-decade ideological consensus that has simply allowed the creation of grotesque inequality has broken down, and anything and everything is suddenly possible.

Simon Critchley asks: What is Normal?

Tags:

Comments (0)

Join the Discussion

Your email address will not be published.

  1. Donald Adamson says:

    What an uplifting article from Simon Critchley and well done to Bella for reproducing it here..

    After the public sector strikes on November 30th, the more pernicious elements of the MSM regressed back to their default position of the 1970s and 1980s – trade unions were ‘holding the country to ransom’ etc. But surely, when it comes to ‘holding countries to ransom’, trade unions are harmless amateurs compared to capitalists and capitalist markets.

    This works on so many levels that it has become naturalised. Marginal shifts in bond yields can add tens of millions of dollars to the burden of a nation’s debt because the ‘markets’ are jittery or because they don’t like the look of a country’s economic ‘fundamentals’. Or, closer to home, anonymous companies can use their mouthpieces in the British Labour and Tory parties to disseminate the apocalyptic argument that Scottish independence will precipitate capital flight.

    We’ve even allowed this perverse logic – of elevating the accumulators of wealth above the creators of wealth – to contaminate our perspective on ‘philanthropy’. The real philanthropists among us are not the Bill Gates’ or the Warren Buffets or the Richard Bransons of this world. The genuine philanthropists among us are those billions of low paid workers, including many public sector workers, who give their time and labour power to producing the goods and services without which the Gates’, Buffets and Bransons of our world would be and would have nothing. And not only do these genuine philanthropists receive no honours from society, on the contrary, they are condemned by the wealth accumulators and their apologists and they don’t even receive the minor compensation of a liveable wage for their efforts.

Help keep our journalism independent

We don’t take any advertising, we don’t hide behind a pay wall and we don’t keep harassing you for crowd-funding. We’re entirely dependent on our readers to support us.

Subscribe to regular bella in your inbox

Don’t miss a single article. Enter your email address on our subscribe page by clicking the button below. It is completely free and you can easily unsubscribe at any time.