Letting And Making Things Happen

What’s happening? That’s the question many ask. Then there are those who respond to the question or, as in certain cases, a question is not even necessary for comment. ‘Nothing’ is a common response/ comment. To elaborate, ‘nothing is happening.’

- Malinda Seneviratne

NOTHING

It is an interesting word. A nation, a people, a history and heritage even — all rolled into a void? Well, that might please some. The problem is that there is seldom avoid. There’s seldom ‘nothing’. There’s never ‘everything’ either. There’s always ‘something.’ So when people say ‘nothing’ or ‘nothing is happening’ it is usually a case of a condition that falls short of the expected. It’s relative, in other words. Maybe for some it’s about declining profits, diminishing assets, constraints in the commerce of take and take with little give. For others it is certainly dire. It is not about ‘my net worth diminished from Rs. 4.73 billion to 3.98 billion, alas, woe is me etc., etc.’ It is about food on the table. Never mind schools, never mind online classes because a data card is unaffordable; there needs to be food.

BASICS

Sure, we have heard about how important it is for the wheels of the economy to turn. We have heard corporate bosses and neoliberal economic gurus lament about workers losing incomes and facing starvation. Workers make a lovely and benign shield, but only in situations like this. At other times, they are generators of surplus labour which of course translates as profit for those on the sunny side of production relations.

The humbuggery aside, there is some worth in the argument about economic activity. Not a happy equation certainly when it’s about some people having to submit to slanted terms of exchange or, to put it bluntly, having to agree to the terms of exploitation; and yet, at least from the unhappy point of view, tight restrictions become increasingly untenable or rather intolerable.