The morning after a Central Devon Constituency Labour Party meeting

The morning after A Central Devon Constituency Labour Party meeting is a time for reflection, so have a read of this:

Simon Critchley on the Future

What will be the defining issues of the coming decade? Consider the following three trends. First, ever-growing environmental devastation. Second, continuing growth of the already cavernous social inequalities between the rich and the poor that lead the rich to fear the poor and live in seclusion from them. Third, the further erosion of any remaining faith in liberal democracy and the precipitous slide away from "democratic capitalism".
If one has an interest in confronting and even reversing these three trends, then what is to be done? The first step is a systematic avoidance of the question of the future. That is, we have to resist the idea and ideology of the future, which is always the ultimate trump card of capitalist narratives of progress.
But in the name of what? How about in the name of the radical potentiality of the past and the way the past impacts on what we find possible in the present.
Revolution, as Walter Benjamin writes, "is a tiger's leap into the past". I suggest we make such a leap.
All we have to oppose these three trends is a radical understanding of history, a clear-sightedness about the structural injustices of the present and their causes, and a willingness to take action. We need to confront the drift, disappointment and slackening of this age with the urgency of commitment if we are to avoid disaster.
Simon Critchley is author of The Book of Dead Philosophers (Granta, £15.99) and How to Start Worrying and Stop Living (Polity, £12.99).