Philosophers Have Interpreted The World, The Point is To Change it

A call for revolution

Valentin Salja via Unsplash

These days, philosophers are two a penny.

Everywhere you look there’s one to be found. On this platform, there are several who have done nothing but preach doom and gloom; day in day out, month in, month out and year in, year out. It would seem that these players have made vast amounts of money, writing about the problems of the world without presenting any clear and decisive call to action.

And there are some of these twenty-first century philosophers, who are naive enough to think that going to the ballot box is enough to bring about the change, while watching the next series of breaking bad or what ever catches their fancy on Netflix and Amazon Prime.

I’m old enough to remember the 1980s, when civil disturbance was a thing; there is no denying that life was very tough in those days, when Conservative governments in the United States and the United Kingdom were seriously intent on destroying the trade union movements.

Here in Britain, there were major movements against the state, when young Black Brits went head to head with the police, first in Brixton, south of the river Thames and then much later in Tottenham, North London. In other parts of the country, which had Black communities, people made sure that their voices were heard: Toxteth, Handsworth and Moss Side in Liverpool, Birmingham and Manchester, respectively saw some of the worst riots in mainland Britain.

We also can’t forget trade unions versus the state: footage of the battle of Orgreave, when the striking miners went head to head with the police, remains one of the enduring images of the age of polarization from the 1980s.

And what’s quite ironic is that, despite the worsening inequality between the haves and have nots, soaring food and energy costs, with no hope for change in anyway shape or form, far too many people seem very happy and content with their lot in life.

Even though we have seen trade union movements pop up across the Atlantic, with the Amazon labour union winning the right to unionize, it is nothing compared to what existed in the last century.