NM's blog

By Richard Seymour Disasters are supposed to pull us together. They are supposed to produce a wave of euphoria among survivors once the worst has passed, forging in the ruins a ‘city of comrades’. Rebecca Solnit shows us how disasters can spawn ‘disaster communities’ and even, by disrupting the ordinary misery and alienation of daily life, inflame utopian desires.  It isn’t necessarily so. A ‘city of comrades’ is only likely to appear in special circumstances, where the disaster doesn’t disperse the community, where the community was not already split along multiple faultlines (class, race, religion), where there were already traditions of self-help, mutualism and solidarity, and – in some instances – where the disaster is not inflicted by other human beings. What happens when the misery is ‘anthropogenic’, the resources for self-help are negligible, social trust is in the gutter, and the expected reflexes of decency and charity fail to materialise? In his work on disasters over se...

The new socialism of fools

Britain and beyond "There is a conspiracy at work here, though it is not of the kind lampooned by critics: a small cabal of the rich secretly pulling the strings of our societies. The conspiracy operates at an institutional level, one that has evolved over time to create structures and refine and entrench values that keep power and wealth in the hands of the few. In that sense we are all part of the conspiracy. It is a conspiracy that embraces us every time we unquestioningly accept the “consensual” narratives laid out for us by our education systems, politicians and media. Our minds have been occupied with myths, fears and narratives that turned us into the turkeys that keep voting for Christmas." I disagree though with Cook in describing Corbyn's election as the Labour Party leader an "accident". Cook should know that even in the most conservative situations, cumulative processes and contradictions create cracks, fissures, and openings, sometimes big, som...