The Future of Liberation: Sheltering in Plato’s cave in an age of apocalypse Philip Goodchild November 2010 – paper presented at Durham University
An apocalyptic age The future of liberation must respond to three distinctive features of our era. First there is the collision between economy and ecology: the immense global transformation of human life and production in the twentieth century, under the ideals of capitalist, social democratic, and socialist models, has reached fundamental limits set by ecological, economic and energy crises that are only just beginning to manifest themselves.1 Once overall growth is no longer possible, wealth is only to be obtained at the expense of others. The predatory nature of our collective quest for material wealth starts to manifest itself once economic contraction is met with the transfer of wealth to the elite few alongside expulsion from productive society of the many. Disaster capitalism extends dispossession just as it intensifies the opportunity for neo-liberal market reform in the name of recovery.2 The problem for the global underclass is no longer colonial conquest, class power, or institutional normalisation, but the felt absence of money, modernity, society, security, and the means of production and nutrition. This dispossession is nihilism as a political condition, not as a belief system. It consists in existing outside the social production of value and recognition: one counts for nothing. Previous models of liberation have been able to appeal to the ‘power of the poor in history’:3 the poor have been attributed the potential for economic power, since, as labourers, they have constructed all the wealth upon which the modern world is built; the poor have been attributed the potential for political power, since, through their large numbers, they are capable of joining together to overthrow oppressive regimes; the poor have also been attributed an epistemic privilege: they are those who can declare the truth about power out of their experience of oppression, or they are those who are free from ideology insofar as their own class interests coincide with the interests of justice, or they are 1