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.
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