To term what we are going through a crisis is to not only opine on the self-evident, but to recognise it, as Italian philosopher Antonio Gramsci did, as a “process rather than an event”. The commonly understood economic notion of a crisis draws on biological and medical references that imply temporary imbalance or disequilibrium, that there is an impending remedy or return to the norm. Yet our crisis is far from temporary, nor is it an event. Nor is a return to any norm possible.

Ending load-shedding is not a terminal event but a process that will itself cause significant tensions, conflicts, trade-offs and contradictions. It will ultimately result in winners as well as losers and add to the growing legion of the indifferent and despondent. As Gramsci says, seeing a crisis as a process yields neither salvation nor death, as the suspension between life and death can be indefinite...

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