ABSTRACT
Jeremy Seabrook stands within the tradition of English ethical socialism. The domination of nature and the accumulation of wealth through the exploitation of human labour has led to the replacement of material scarcity by social scarcity and to the domination of money instead of nature. Seabrook’s project is a search for a substantive rationality which will ‘prise apart those processes which simultaneously gut human beings and eviscerate the planet itself’. The politics of hope, for Seabrook, then, is a moral necessity which makes possible cultural resistance to the logic of capitalism as world economic and cultural system on the one hand, and constructs alternative social imaginaries and practices that sustain self-reliant, materially sufficient communities on the other. The fundamental task of the social critic, therefore, is to unmask the central logic and myths of capitalism so that its spiritual roots may be unveiled, named and overcome. Seabrook intertwines novelistic and social documentary conventions with polemical commentary, participant-observer ethnography and autobiography.
