Critique of the Power of Prophecy

Abstract

During the winter of 2022/23 the wave of protests in the public and private sectors in Britain intensified: Workers across the NHS, Royal Mail, civil service, and the transport network were already on strike in the ongoing row over conditions and pay, the London Underground had ratified a directive for an additional half a year of industrial action, whereas teachers, firefighters, and junior doctors were scheduled to vote on taking action. Regardless of how the conflict’s impact on the rights and welfare of the British workers will play out, the labor strike is a salient example of the (im)possibility of society’s alteration. On the one hand, it represents the legitimization of the wage-labor system; by aiming for improved conditions within the governing economic order, it also works as its reinforcement. From this perspective, industrial action on the labor market simply displays our lost capacity to imagine radically other futures. On the other hand, a critical understanding of this loss can itself have a powerful effect on our capacity to imagine another future. It is also from such a standpoint that the wide-ranging acts of solidarity we saw on the streets of London and in other cities come to symbolize precisely that collective action to—on the level of experience—pursue an alternative to what late philosopher Mark Fisher termed “capitalist realism”. A strategy that instead of seeking to overcome capital, focuses “on what capital must always obstruct: the collective capacity to produce, care and enjoy.”1 For Fisher, the practice of collective imagination can incite thoughts of a different world and strike action, among other forms, can be understood as the materialization of such practice. Prophetic Culture, by London based Italian philosopher and former anarchist gone theologian Federico Campagna (1984), performatively places itself at this very hinge moment of pressure and confusion where the demanding ecological, political, spiritual and psychic conditions calls for new narratives of worlding. At a