How Capitalism Killed Our Imagination | Deep Dive

It can be easy to miss but there have been a lot of protests around the world lately:

• Massive anti-corruption protests have been going on in Serbia after a railway station collapsed. Serbians have staged massive strikes and blocked key infrastructure, and are even inspiring students in nearby Bosnia.
• There have been protests for weeks all over the United States against Trump’s mass deportation policies, including hundreds of students in Los Angeles walking out of school for an entire week straight.
• Nearly 100,000 Belgians have protested proposed plans to cut social services by the new center-right government.
• Panamanian workers are clashing with police as they try to protect their social security and prevent the privatization of their healthcare.
• Thousands in Germany have protested the rise of the far-right ahead of their elections next week.
• Residents in central India are protesting the government’s mishandling and disposal of toxic waste in their villages.

There are many more examples (too many for one newsletter) and many that weren’t even covered by any news outlet. It may not seem like it, but there is global mass resistance to the rise in authoritarianism across the world happening now. It’s no surprise that these acts of resistance often go underreported, if reported at all; it could inspire larger uprisings. In past articles, we’ve talked at length about the ways the ruling class can shape our perception of reality by controlling the mainstream media. What we want to dig into in this issue is how the ruling capitalist class limits not just our reality, but our imagination too.

Philosopher Frederic Jameson has once said that it is easier to imagine the end of the world than it is to imagine the end of capitalism, which definitely feels true at times. It’s often pretty clear what we are rallying against, but what’s not quite as clear to many is what we’re building instead. Whether we like it or not, right-wing authoritarians and tech-oligarchs have a clear, if twisted, vision for what they want that has managed to inspire many people. If the left (or more accurately, the global working class) ever hope to prevail, we’ll need to come up with something just as compelling.