Locality and Power

What is the power that people have today? Do we still have any power to change our society? Terry Eagleton claims we don't. This is due to the fact that capital dominates our political and social world. He argues that the big theories initiated by thinkers like Karl Marx, Jurgen Habermas, Jaques Derrida, Michael Foucault used to be the very motivation for people to start a revolution and change societies. However, today, we do not have an up to date theory, no "fresh thinking", there is nothing to rebel against, nothing that creates a mass of people with the power to make a change. According to Eagleton, this is because of capitalism and globalization. You would think that through technology and new way of communicating, it is easier to organize something meaningful and to spread theories. But essentially, capitalism / money has become the norm which brings with it the decentralization of the world. People do not belong to a place anymore, they easily migrate, create new connections, always forced by the market to constantly reorientate:

"For a socialist, the true scandal of the present world is that almost everyone in it is banished to the margins. As far as the transnational corporations go, great masses of men and women are really neither here nor there. Whole nations are thrust to the periphery. Entire classes of people are deemed to be dysfunctional. Communities are uprooted and forced into migration." (Terry Eagleton, The Politics of Amnesia from the book After Theory)

In the past centuries, there used to be strict norms that one could rebel against. It was the fact that such a norm existed and that people were local to a place, meaning they don't move around so much. That locality easily creates a mass of people who relate to each other. The very trouble of today is the change in this concept. As we suddenly do move we lose that connection and therefore, whole communities are losing in power.

Essentially, Eagleton asks for "new forms of belonging". Since there is no one society we belong to but rather multiple, there can be no coming back to old ideas of collectivity. However, people do need locality and tradition, a sense of belonging to a place. What he is proposing is that we have to seek "to sketch out new relations between globally and locality, diversity and solidarity."