If you follow the rise of populism and conflicts emerging in post-industrial societies, you see the same picture emerging everywhere: a society lost in the thin air of our moral economy, struggling with very tangible problems that people are reluctant to confront. Brad Evans' perspective can be highly informative when analyzing this landscape, which exhibits some features of what Hans Magnus Enzensberger called the ›molecular civil war‹. Born in Rhondda, Wales, at a time when the striking miners were the victims of Thatcherite neoliberalism, his perspective is shaped by that conflict, which plunged the people living there first into unemployment—then into a crisis of meaning even more terrible than exploitation: that of no longer being considered worthy of exploitation, in this sense: being completely invisible. Strangely enough, the young political scientist had to travel to Mexico and experience the Zapatista uprising before he could describe his own homeland with such an alien perspective in his beautifully titled book, „How Black Was My Valley.“ Here, the uninitiated reader isn’t only confronted with the insight that the Welsh are a kind of Indigenous minority confronted with the dark side of colonization through mining – but that Wales was already confronting the effects of globalization even before the great financial crisis in 1929. After the Treaty of Versailles, which obliged the Germans to supply coal in restitution, unemployment in Wales soared to alarming heights. In this sense, the personal alienation of having risen into the world of Academia from the working class gives him an unusual historical perspective of the lived experience while simultaneously allowing him to reach the heights of contemporary thought, the Philosophy of a René Girard or a Giorgio Agamben as he looks back.
Brad Evans is Professor of Political Violence at the University of Bath. He's the author of several highly creative books that transcend the narrow confines of academia. He has also founded the Centre for the Study of Violence.
Talking to ... Brad Evans