1. What Happened to Critical Theory?

JOÃO M. PARASKEVA

1. WHAT HAPPENED TO CRITICAL THEORY?

Aquino de Bragança: creator of futures, master of heterodoxies, pioneer of the epistemologies of the South. Sousa Santos (2012)

ON CHAOS: ‘THE’ CANVAS

Between 1900 and 1999, the US used 4,500 million tons of cement. Between 2011 and 2013, China consumed 6,500 million tons of cement. That is, in just three years China consumed 50% more cement than US had consumed in the preceding century (Harvey, 2016). As I am finalizing this volume, August 2017, Common Dreams stated that ‘humans have already consumed the planet’s annual resources’. Our ‘planet is exhausted’. That is, ‘with several months left until the end of 2017, [we] have already used up more natural resources than the planet can regenerate in a year’; for the rest of the year, ‘humanity is living on credit’ In the US, the top 0.1% has accumulated more wealth than the entire bottom 90%. With the advent of globalization, inequality has become a global nightmare. Global inequality is much greater than inequality within any individual country. The global top 1% consists of more than 60 million people, the US top 1% of only 3 million. Thus, among the global top percent, we find the richest 12 percent of Americans (more than 30 million people) and between 3% and 6% of the richest Britons, Japanese, Germans, and French (Milanovic, 2013). Globalization, Bauman (1998) argues, globalized the few and localized the rest. Globalization and its attendant rising inequality have caused political and social turmoil at both international and national levels. For example, in Brazil the impeachment of President and Brazilian Workers’ Party leader Dilma Rousseff created a political crisis, deepening old political rivalries, and putting into question the very idea of democracy as the best possible social framework. In this instance, to quote Wolf (2007), ‘democracy was used to kill democracy.’ The post-Rousseff moment, led by the neoliberal conservative Michel Temer, has been paved by a full- blast radical-conservative philosophy of practice. After more than a decade of being ably led by Lula da Silva (despite many controversies), even the Workers’ Party’s legacy was not capable of ‘avoiding’ such political carnage. In Venezuela, Chavez’ mythical leadership and victories are on the verge of collapse, with Maduro under constant internal and external attack.

At the end of the second decade of the twentieth century, we are still struggling to come to grip with such grim/disturbing realities as increasing North Korean contentiousness, the expansion of West Bank settlements under every Israeli government, and the fact that Israel is probably the only nation in the world without fixed borders, not to mention the shameful complacency of world powers, such as the US and EU, in neglecting to interrupt such coloniality approach. In South Coast Massachusetts, the issue is opioids. A pandemic condition exists. In fiscal year 2014, the Bureau for Substance Abuse Services, stated that “the total number of people served was 85,823, while the total number of admissions during fiscal year 2015 was 107,358” (Drisko, 2017). More shockingly, “based on the National Survey on Drug Use and Health, in 2010 nationally, there were 140,000 persons aged 12 or older who had used heroin for the first time, within the past 12 months” (see http://www.samhsa.gov). In the US, a kid drops out of school every 41 seconds. Images arriving from the Syrian city of Aleppo reflect a global civilization in a self-destructive mode. News of Aleppo, Baghdad, Benghazi and certain other African cities, the so-called war on drugs in Mexico, just to mention a few examples, reinforces a ‘subjectivity’ that should never have been constructed: one of immigrants and refugees. Massive waves of human beings bearing the inherent right to freedom and to escape war and hunger are feared as forces which will crumble the ‘welfare’ of the West. As Rachman (2016) claims, “in the 18th and 19th centuries, Europeans populated the world. Now the world is populating Europe” (p. 1). The Russian Ambassador to Turkey Andrei Karlov, faced an assassination attempt in Ankara. New York, Washington, DC, Paris, London, Manchester, Madrid, Brussels, Frankfurt, Istanbul, Cairo…Bit by bit, the spectrum of ‘abnormality’ becomes domesticated. With September 11 came also the normalization of tragedy. Today, a terrorist attack may still make the headlines of major newspapers but, sadly, barely constitutes a surprise. As the attacks multiply, so grows the uncontrolled resurgence of extreme fascistic right wing movements in countries such as the US, France, Germany, Austria, Belgium, the Netherlands, and Finland. In a way, democracy is being killed ‘democratically.’ We have witnessed a political short-circuit. That is, the idea of defeating terrorism by not giving up the noblest humanistic values of freedom, solidarity, and equality is in question. A less humanistic response to terrorism is reinforced by the deterioration of democratic values through the empowerment of a new extreme right. Terrorism and the far right are two sides of the same coin. We have been weak in identifying and criticizing the ways terrorism and the extreme right share some of the same motives. In the West, the second decade of the 21st century is opening the path for a far-right agenda to succeed. In France, the xenophobic impulses propelled by the followers of Marine Le Pen are gaining traction and placing Le Penism with strong possibilities to lead the nation. The US voted for and elected a president who promised a eugenic and belligerent future for the country. Furthermore, not so shockingly, the US chose a president who insulted