Clear Bright Future

Once people subliminally bought the idea that neoliberalism was the final form of capitalism and that history had ‘ended’, popular culture entered a loop-cycle in which the idea of progress evaporated. Until around 1989 it had been normal to see new bands rejecting old styles and inventing new ones; cool kids suddenly appearing in clothes they’d improvised, making everyone else look old. Now everything became a montage of everything else. The cultural critic Mark Fisher summed up the feeling: ‘Everyday life has sped up but culture has slowed down.’

By contrast twenty-first-century capitalism is so complex that, even by taking individual or small-scale actions, we can have big effects

The force that will have to resist fascism this time around is simply the atomized mass of people around you.
It includes everybody with an interest in reversing the commercialization of daily life, everybody sick of being coerced and ‘nudged’ into artificially competitive behaviour, everybody with a material interest in saving the planet from climate change, every woman who does not want to become the target of violent misogyny, every member of an ethnic minority who does not want to be depicted as an alien threat in the tabloid media.

He described the Italian soldier as a semi-literate peasant, unable to read a map but perfectly capable of knowing which side of history he was on.

As a result, revolts that take the form of secession – by a city or a region – are more terrifying to authoritarians than outright attempts to take the entire state at once.

But the working class could not forget. Because this was the first revolution in history where one form of oppression did not replace another.

By nightfall they had begun the first experiment in working-class self-government in history.

The crisis of globalization means that we, too, will see revolutions – unless the twenty-first century defies every observable pattern in history. The mismatch between the technologies now available and the economic forms they are trapped within has become too great not to produce upheaval.

As late as the 1970s, my generation could believe that resisting capitalism was something you did by pulling on a big lever to make a big boulder – the labour movement – move. Today, the more efficient way to start the avalanche is to be a little stone and start rolling.

Second, as we continue to make tiny acts of rebellion, we will think: this could be solved much more easily by a combination of better technology and by passing different laws. Our micro-scale resistance will lead us towards a society-wide project.