In a chapter in People’s History and Socialist Theory(edited by Raphael Samuel) E P Thompson discusses how people’s ideas change.
He draws a distinction between people’s direct experience of events- Experience 1 and the view of the world that the media and politicians bring forward-Experience 2. Where the two don’t match people’s understanding is challenged and the possibility of a different future starts to arise.
Think what millions see every day about what is happening in Gaza and what the media and politicians say. The two are often in direct contradiction and in that gap things like the Rochdale By-Election happen
..experience walks in without knocking at the door, and announces deaths, crisis of subsistence, trench warfare, unemployment, inflation, genocide. People starve, their survivors think in new ways about the market. People are imprisoned: in prison they meditate in new ways about the law
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