A lot of us are radicalized first by learning about the present injustices of capitalism/colonialism, then learning about the past roots and trajectories of these injustices. But the possibility of a radical future comes from recognizing that the struggle to elucidate and narrate History is an ongoing dialectic. Our inability to know the whole, “objective” width or breadth of History is daunting but also the root of radical possibilities; for if even Humanity’s past is not set in stone, then surely it can reject the Historical finale that the bourgeoisie have written for us, and write a better one.
tl;dr: positivism + causalism = determinism, and determinism --> either accelerationism or defeatism.
(positivism = the belief that a complete, objective understanding of all social facts is possible; causalism = the belief that the past causes the future).
A lot of us are radicalized first by learning about the present injustices of capitalism/colonialism, then learning about the past roots and trajectories of these injustices. But the possibility of a radical future comes from recognizing that the struggle to elucidate and narrate History is an ongoing dialectic. Our inability to know the whole, “objective” width or breadth of History is daunting but also the root of radical possibilities; for if even Humanity’s past is not set in stone, then surely it can reject the Historical finale that the bourgeoisie have written for us, and write a better one.
tl;dr: positivism + causalism = determinism, and determinism --> either accelerationism or defeatism.
(positivism = the belief that a complete, objective understanding of all social facts is possible; causalism = the belief that the past causes the future).