______________ ___________________ Home Truths Noel Castree School of Environment and Development, University of Manchester, Manchester, M13 9PL UK; noel.castree@man.ac.uk Melissa W Wright Department of Geography and Women’s Studies, The Pennsylvania State University, PA 16802, USA; mww11@psu.edu Even normally sure-footed commentators lose their compass from time to time. ‘‘A radical’’, Terry Eagleton has observed, ‘‘is one who cannot overcome her astonishment that …, by and large, that this is it’’ (2001:101). But he’s surely got things back to front. For the true radicals are all those individuals and organisations that daily remain unastonished: if you think about it, only an extremist could sleep well at night knowing that famines in the South are as routine as they are preventable; that Bill Gates earns more each hour than all the work- ers in Liberia do in a week; that sexism is rampant, despite the advances made by feminism; or that murderous discrimination on the grounds of religion, ethnicity and sexual preference remains so common worldwide as to seem a natural part of the human condition. That the people to whom Eagleton refers are conventionally thought to be ‘‘radical’’ says much about the world’s topsy-turviness and the need to challenge what passes for normalcy. Walter Benjamin was right: that things ‘‘just go on’’ is the catastrophe. Power works best when it collapses the distance between the actual and the desirable. Opposition to any established order is most effectively stymied when that order is so naturalised that its arbitrariness comes to seem like ‘‘common-sense’’. Some, of course, have compared the current con- juncture to the now-romanticised late 1960s, seeing it as a time of dissent resurgent and resistance unbound. But effective opposition to power’s multifarious operations seems to us notable for its paucity rather than its profusion. Fredric Jameson’s famous quip that it is easier to imagine the end of the world than the end of capitalism could well apply to any number of those structured inequalities whose combined operations remain fundamentally unchanged, even if their effects have been ameliorated here and there. As Perry Anderson (2000) wisely observes, the Left cannot afford to entertain hopeful Ó 2005 Editorial Board of Antipode. Published by Blackwell Publishing, 9600 Garsington Road, Oxford OX4 2DQ, UK and 350 Main Street, Malden, MA 02148, USA