The housing-price collapse of 2008, the credit crunch, the bank failures, the downswing of the world economy, the fiscal crisis of the sovereign states, all have been expressed as wild gyrations in the global circulation of information, attention, emotion. Everything undergoes tremendous acceleration at the crucial moments, before the wave recedes into a blur. We are sure that beneath the surface agitation, something has really changed. Yet people find their surrounding environments exactly the same; while world leaders call for just one thing, a return to normal.

Amid the bewildering complexity of the predatory knowledge economy, what’s missing is an active egalitarian and ecological critique of the owning and managing classes, a critique that does not remain locked away in the university but reaches out to the rest of society. That’s what we can build in the wake of the budgetary crisis, now that the new lines of inclusion and exclusion have been drawn and the writing on the wall is legible to practically everyone.

It was June 22 in the hot afternoon and there were thousands of people in the streets, people singing, people joyful, people angry, people with signs, with banners, with costumes, people giving you fliers and newspapers and petitions, people who cared enough to go out and let everyone know that we still have the right to assemble in public. But where, I kept wondering, were the usual wall-to-wall cops with their truncheons and tear gas and sound guns and dozens of less-lethal weapons?