At the end of Kurt Vonnegut's first novel, Player Piano, the residents of the world's first fully automated utopia—in which machines perform humanity's every service, making work redundant and liberating their time—organise a national riot and trash the machines. But the book does not end there. As the organisers of the riot wander the streets in the aftermath, having decided to turn themselves in, they notice that on every corner people have gathered to repair those very machines. What begins as a triumphant scene resisting the material conditions of what turns out to be a dystopia ends in a quiet defeatism with humanity scrambling around in the dust to piece themselves back together.

Discussing this book over lunch last week, I was reminded of Frantz Fanon's theory of the politics of recognition. An Algerian revolutionary and psychiatrist, who ended up advocating for violence as a mode of cleansing the colonised subject of the self-worthlessness mandated by the settler state, Fanon argued that this psychological dimension of oppression was as important as the material conditions of oppression, and that both had to be attacked and dismantled in order for a colonised people to fully emancipate themselves and achieve self-determination. He insisted the psychological element of this battle could only be done through turning away from relations with the settler-state, and back towards their cultural roots and practices, rather than integrating with it, for integration, he argued, inherently legitimised the very thing which dispossessed entire cultures and peoples of their right to exist as they are. Looking to that very vehicle of violence for emancipation only reproduced the conditions of oppression, if through a more subtle and insidious manner. Ultimately, Fanon did not believe that any colonised people could achieve their self-determination through recognition, through becoming subjects of the state.

Vonnegut's characters are not a colonised people. But they are the descendants of colonised people, even if that violation is mostly lost to history. Their lives of luxury are built upon the loss of a culture that can never be recovered. This becomes more evident with every passing day, as the horizon of freedom greets them with each dawn, a horizon they can neither reach nor escape. The citizens of this utopia have no idea how to fill their time now that it is unlimited and they are freed from the pressures and constraints of modernity. Rather than create a society of pure luxury and creativity, they begin to disintegrate under their unbearable lightness of being; there are no anchors in this new life for the very relationship which dominated their existence, their ancestors' existence, and erased their culture from the face of the earth—their social contract with the state—has ceased to exist.

So why does Vonnegut have them repair the machines? Why not destroy the automated society and return to what was? I believe the great tragedy Vonnegut reveals in these final few pages is that there is no going back, whether we like it or not. There is no return to what was before because what was no longer exists. There is only what is, and what can be. Even Fanon does not advocate for a great return, but a turning away, a turning inwards. We cannot undo the violence of colonialism but Fanon suggests we can free ourselves from continued oppression by discovering a subjectivity that exists outside of settler-state, one a colonised people create together, through sharing and remembering and discovering what it is their ancestors decided to be, and what it is they decide to be.

But Vonnegut's characters have no memories or practices to turn to. Whether enslaved or indentured or "liberated", their sense of identity is rooted in their relationship with the state. They are its subjects, and nothing else, and, because of this, any attack on the material conditions of their alienation cannot result in revolution; they are dependent on the very machines they despise for furnishing them with lives they fail to imagine could be otherwise. They repair them because it gives them something to do; they repair them because nothing else can be done. They have already become subjects of the automated state and, without any other cultural imaginary to hold onto, there is quite literally nothing they can do to be anything else.

I think reading Vonnegut's novel like this helps explain the revolutionary impotence that afflicts the Minority World: we don't know what we want because we don't imagine who we could be. Most of us are the descendants of a culture long lost to history and our cultural identity is intimately wrapped up in our relationship with the state and the economy. Life is a series of individual achievements: graduating, working, earning, home ownership, marrying, parenting, vacationing, winning, retiring. We climb and we climb but there is nowhere to go. Those at the very top of our capitalist culture—the billionaires—break things down just to repair them because, like us, they are desperate for something to do. There is no emancipation from the treadmill because without it we would have to dictate our own direction and desires. Freedom would snap at our heels demanding so much more of us than the grind we submit to. If we reject the subjectivity of the culture we are born into—if we reject the state and the capitalist economy and all of the markers of success they validate us with—then we have to do the hard work of discovering who we want to be in the world.

Turning away, without a culture, does not guarantee success. On the contrary, most turn away and towards another culture, costuming themselves as those who have rejected that they were born into but still have yet to find where they belong. They "reject the system" by picking and choosing spiritual practices and foreign pitstops and indigenous medicines, becoming caricatures of the very exploitative culture they seek to escape. They devote themselves to particular practices—like practising yoga for eight hours a day—but struggle to create the material conditions to live their lives because their single-minded devotion leaves little room for the culture into which that practice is woven, a culture which exists to sustain a collective.

Sometimes people do turn inwards—but the buck stops with them. This is the "liberal feminism" that Natasha Walter discusses on the show in a few week's time, a politics of progress that hinges on self actualisation rather than collective liberation. It is the culture of self-care and self-protectionism that is particularly widespread among the youth. In my generation, it often appears as fitness culture, and the adamant insistence that you can change your entire world simply by changing yourself. These micro-cultures promote a delusional self belief that insists that the only world that can truly affect you is your internal one, effectively legitimising the material conditions of our existence by rendering them altogether invisible.

We are suffering from revolutionary impotence because the continuity of the state is assumed. We are suffering from revolutionary impotence because we cannot reproduce ourselves without the state. We are suffering from revolutionary impotence because don't know the way forwards. We are suffering from revolutionary impotence because we cannot go back. We are suffering from revolutionary impotence because there is nothing left to turn towards.

So what can we do?

Fanon's dual-pronged theory for creating the successful conditions of revolution should give us pause. Rather than provoke anxiety about the dire state of our impotence, I think it offers an exhilarating avenue to imagine and deploy a localised activism which seeks to regenerate cultures and inter-subjectivity which do not depend on the state or capitalist development for validation. This work is already happening around the UK. Sometimes it takes the form of reawakening the Pagan ceremonies which banned by the Church hundreds of years ago. But it need not be as esoteric as this. The very creation of mutual aid networks and community gardens and collective home-schooling and numerous other initiatives up and down the country are a turning towards each other and the revival of a lost culture. Such a culture cannot be built on practices alone, but the more we deepen our ties to one another—the more we fortify our relationships—the more possibilities will emerge as to how we can organise our lives differently and, from there, culture springs forth. For culture does not come into being through mandates. It emerges, winking, between us.

Yet perhaps the most important thing we can do is return to the source of all culture: the land. We must recover and reclaim and rewild, for it is the particularities of where we are which must always define the limits of who we can be, and thus what we can achieve together. Learning the rains and the winds and the movements of the moon, and the bird song and the flower names and the way the grasses ripple like water, this great turning towards the land is actually a turning towards humanity everywhere, for this is what we all shared for the vast majority of human existence: a knowing how to be where we are. We cannot know what to do with ourselves if we do not know how to be where we are, for culture is nothing more and nothing less than a great cycling of information between where we are, what we do because of where we are, and who we become in doing so. The wheel of history is that cycle in motion, blurring until its progress looks unbroken; until today.

If we do not lay the groundwork then revolutionary impulses slip away, leaving us repair what we smashed up and rebuild what we tore down. There must be something to turn towards before we turn away. That work begins today, and continues every day; when we reach out, we reach beyond the limits of what is and graze the surface of what may yet be, who we may yet become.