It’s not a coincidence, it’s a consequence
It’s not a coincidence that the global Black Lives Matter protests have reached their loudest during a pandemic.
It’s not a coincidence that the environmental, feminist and LGBTQ+ rights movements have reached a zenith.
It’s not a coincidence either, the rise in far-right populism, terrorism and white supremacy movements.
It’s a consequence.
It’s a consequence of a global economic system that commits structural violence against people and planet.
Call it the Matrix, call it the soup, call it the water in the goldfish bowl that the fish can’t see, but we are all in this together embedded in a system that is structurally violent and resistant to change.
The economy, which has brought many of us affordances our ancestors could only have dreamed of, is the foundation of society. It shapes our beliefs, values, culture and preferences in a way that is not easily reversible. It’s our operating system that we know as the status quo.
Left or right, the economy is the trump card of the political and media classes who wield it in the face of any argument for change. Yet, we seldom ask who the economy is designed to serve. Perhaps most importantly we, particularly those of us within the dominant culture, do not consider who the economy is designed to destroy. Our economy, born from European expansionism of the 15th century, is extractive. In competition it plays us against each other to extract and consume assets, only to throw them away.
Are we surprised then, that a society producing single-use plastics treats people as disposable, as if they too were without value and single-use?
Mass protests, hashtags and approval-winning platitudes are all well and good, they start the conversations and nudge people out of their slumber but we’ve been here before. Like Groundhog Day. The structures that support the status quo will send us back to sleep with the promise that it will soon be over.
At a time of turmoil in the early 20th century between the first and second world wars, after the Spanish Flu and before the Great Depression, social theorist Antonio Gramsci wrote,
‘The crisis consists precisely in the fact that the old is dying and the new cannot be born; in this interregnum a great variety of morbid symptoms appear.’
The old is the status quo, the new is what comes next and the interregnum is the time in between these two states.
Clearly Gramsci’s words can be applied to this moment of history we are all living through today so what is the “new” that comes next?
If we want to “build back better” from this multifaceted global crisis it’s not enough to simply demand a people and planet recovery, we have to participate in its design and execution. This will be the hardest thing we’ve ever done; our once in a lifetime moonshot to redesign and reimagine everything, to create a society that is no longer extractive but regenerative. Every single one of us has a part to play.
Our future depends on it.
