Tranquilliser use was higher in Northern Ireland than anywhere else in the United Kingdom. In some later era, the condition would probably be described as post traumatic stress, but one contemporary book called it ‚the Belfast syndrome‘, a malady that was said to result from ‚living with constant terror, where the enemy is not easily identifiable and the violence is indiscriminate and arbitrary‘. Doctors found, paradoxically, that the people most prone to this type of anxiety were not the active combatants, who were out on the street and had a sense of agency, but the women and children stuck sheltering behind closed doors.

—Patrick Radden Keefe, Say Nothing, (London: William Collins, 2018), 58.

SZ:

In the conjuncture of ‚Antinomies’—this was as true of Hobsbawm or Gerratana as of myself—we were writing of a different era: a time when there had recently been the largest mass strike in history in France, the overthrow of a government by workers in Britain, continuous outbreaks of revolt in Italy, the defeat of the United States in Vietnam, and a revolution in Portugal, where hopes and fears of a social upheaval, galvanizing Washington and Bonn to vigilance, were still fresh. It was the last hour of what Lukács, in his tribute to Lenin in 1923, had called the actuality of the revolution. Portugal features both in ‚Antinomies‘ and in Hobsbawm’s rejoinders to it.

—Perry Anderson, The Antinomies of Antonio Gramsci, October 2016 preface, (London: Verso, 2020), 25.

Ein Blick in die Berufsstatistik eines konfessionell gemischten Landes pflegt mit auffallender Häufigkeit eine Erscheinung zu zeigen, welche mehrfach in der katholischen Presse und Literatur und auf den Katholikentagen Deutschlands lebhaft erörtert worden ist: den ganz vorwiegend protestantischen Charakter des Kapitalbesitzes und Unternehmertums sowohl, wie der oberen gelernten Schichten der Arbeiterschaft, namentlich aber des höheren technisch oder kaufmännisch vorgebildeten Personals der modernen Unternehmungen. Nicht nur da, wo die Differenz der Konfession mit einem Unterschied der Nationalität und damit des Grades der Kultur­entwicklung zusammenfällt, wie im deutschen Osten zwischen Deutschen und Polen, sondern fast überall da, wo überhaupt die kapitalistische Entwicklung in der Zeit ihres Aufblühens freie Hand hatte, die Bevölkerung nach ihren Bedürfnissen sozial umzuschichten und beruflich zu gliedern, — und je mehr dies der Fall war, desto deutlicher, — finden wir jene Erscheinung in den Zahlen der Konfessionsstatistik ausgeprägt.

—Max Weber, »Die protestantische Ethik und der Geist des Kapitalismus«, (München: Verlag C.H. Beck, 2004), 65.

Spiegel:

Absent some new realignment, we face an unsettled terrain with no broadly legitimate hegemonic ruling bloc—nor any clear and credible counterhegemonic challenger. In this situation, the most likely near-term scenario is a series of pendulum swings, with governments oscillating back and forth between the frankly neoliberal (progressive or regressive, diversity-friendly or exclusionary, liberal-democratic or proto-fascist) and the professedly anti-neoliberal (left- or right-populist or social-democratic or communitarian), the precise mix to be determined in every case by national specificities.

Such political oscillations mark the present as an interregnum: a time when, in the words of Antonio Gramsci, „the old is dying and the new cannot be born.“ The duration of this interregnum is anyone’s guess, as is the likelihood of its devolution into full-bore authoritarianism, major war, or catastrophic meltdown—as opposed to „mere“ slow unraveling. One way or another, the system’s impasses will continue to grind away at our ways of life, until such time as a credible counterhegemonic bloc can be assembled. Until then, we will live (and die) amid the vast array of „morbid symptoms“ that mark the death throes of financialized capitalism, and the general crisis it has wrought.

Whatever happens, this much is clear: crises like this one do not come along every day.

—Nancy Fraser, Cannibal Capitalism, (London: Verso, 2022), 136-137.