Henriette & Matisse

“Henriette & Matisse”

Photo: Val Adamson

Read more for reviews by our student writers-in-residence

Opening Night Speech by Lliane Loots

29 August 2012

On the front line again

Karl Marx believed that revolutions push history forward. For each civil and social revolt, a society pushed closer and closer to his imagined socialist paradise. Neo-Marxist Antonio Gramsci, corrected Marx, and said revolutions are not always necessary, all we have to do, to shift our lived conditions, is to stop consenting to the dominant discourses of capital. We have to stop buying the lies packaged and sold to us by governments eager for votes and corporations eager for financial power. In short, to uses Noam Chomsky’s phrase, we have to fight the political and social ‘manufacturing of consent’ that allows us to put up with things as they are and accept dire situations as ‘normal’.