An Ex Post Facto View of 2011
When we reflect upon the year 2011, especially the situations surrounding 3/11 and the global uprisings, everything that happened before appears to have been in preparation for these two extreme moments. All events in the recent past seem to have been proceeding toward or engulfed into these currents: radiation and revolution. This is mainly due to our habit of thinking itself that always thinks things ex post facto rather than ex ante facto. But at the same time this most deadly disaster and the insurrections across the globe, the extreme poles of despair and hope, are framing our present as the accumulation of all temporalities past and present and what they portend for possibilities we are confronting now. The impossible mix of the two currents is, as many of us are forced to experience, now causing a global turbulence whose dynamics and orientation are unpredictable.
For one thing there are unprecedented crises in the lives of the majority on the globe. All key components of the apparatus that capitalism and state power have been building up are now on the verge of collapse and are turning against and attacking the people with sheer violence, as a last resort for the maintenance of financial capitalism, industrial/military conglomeration and the governance: precarious labor conditions approaching either servitude or disposal (expendability), debt of various scales imposed upon entire populaces, genetically modified or poisoned food products widely distributed for daily consumption, environmental contamination by various production and mining affecting the locals everywhere, escalading joblessness and homelessness, budget cuts in every corner of public services, recurring racial and gender discrimination, police brutality or war against civilians in all nation-states, and the radiation-spread instigated by a government itself… Jobs, money, housing, energy, food, medicine and environment – everything we rely on as our lifeline turns into a weapon against us. This is a total war of those in power waged against the commoners.
