2.2 Breaking down logic, building a narrative

Contemporary productivist logic is tightly interwoven with a series of domination-based relationships and representations of the world that must be redrawn and rebuilt : domination of nature, domination of women, colonialism, racism, exploitation of labour. In order to build a new world, we must question all of these domination-based relationships. The social and ecological transition toward a new civilizational order demands that we articulate these inquiries on a global scale.

2.2.1 Rethinking our relationship with nature

Civilizational advancements that followed feudalism and the rise of capitalism, whether commercial, industrial or financial, glorified the principle that humans dominate over nature. This predatory view of the world, which itself was born of rationalism, is still widespread and has left its mark on most human activity and behaviour.

It is thanks to our implementation of a divide between nature and culture that science has become so efficient and so dominating, but it is because of this same divide that nature, which was ultimately treated as though it belonged only to us, was slowly but surely damaged. Shamelessly, we stamped it with an irreversible mark, forgetting that it was porous, reactive, finite, fragile. (Étienne Klein¹.)

Rationalism — which rose in opposition to scholasticism in the 15th century by positing that it was reason, not a relationship with the sacred, that gave access to knowledge — built a “progressive” way of thinking of historic proportions, in that it liberated human activity from religion. Rationalism assumed the existence of dualism : between soul and body, reality and thought, the latter of which was considered to be a reflection of an external reality. It also posited a duality between human beings and Nature. Descartes considered Nature to be a passive substance and animals to be soulless automatons. The exteriority of Nature, legitimate by organized religion, considered to be at humanity’s service, justified our domination of it.

Yet, Descola² remarks that it is important

… to convey the fact that the Modern West’s way of representing nature is by no means widely shared. In many regions of the planet, humans and non-humans are not conceived as developing in incommunicable worlds or according to quite separate principles. The environment is not regarded objectively as an autonomous sphere. Plants and animals, rivers and rocks, meteors and the seasons do not exist all together in an ontological niche defined by the absence of human beings.

Of course, debates over the course of the following centuries allowed this initial rationalism to be put into perspective and to be contested. But the dualist nature still predominates. This inability of human beings to view themselves as stakeholders in their own environment and to integrate their actions with it, has led them to perceive the Earth as a garden to be harvested without restraint, with no regard for the consequences.

There is need for philosophical debate regarding our vision for the world. But also regarding which collective behaviours we must prioritize, and which public policies – social, cultural, and political — should be implemented.

2.2.2 A civilization that stands on the subjugation of women

If our civilization, which followed feudalism and saw the expansion of capitalism and the commodification of all spheres of society, has grown through the subjugation of Nature and colonialism in all shapes and forms, then it has also facilitated this expansion, as is historically well-documented, by dominating half of humanity : women. Feminist works of the past fifty years have widely documented the issue of the oppression of women and the patriarchy. Certain works have gone even further. Federici (2004, p. 12)³ for example, writes :

My description of primitive accumulation includes a set of historical phenomena that are absent in Marx, and yet have been extremely important for capitalist accumulation. They include (i) the development of a new sexual division of labor subjugating women’s labor and women’s reproductive function to the reproduction of the workforce ; (ii) the construction of a new patriarchal order, based on the exclusion of women from waged-work and their subordination to men ; (iii) the mechanization of the proletarian body and its transformation, in the case of women, into a machine for the production of new workers. Most important, I have placed at the center of my analysis of primitive accumulation the witch-hunts of the 16th and 17th centuries, arguing that the persecution of witches, in Europe as in the New World, was as important as colonization and the expropriation of the European peasantry from its land were for the development of capitalism.

She continues (2004, p. 63):

The expropriation of European workers from their means of subsistence and the enslavement of Native Americans and Africans to the mines and plantations of the “New World” were not the only means by which a world proletariat was formed and “accumulated.” This process required the transformation of a body into a work-machine and the subjugation of women to the reproduction of the work-force. Most of all, it required the destruction of the power of women which, in Europe as in America, was achieved through the extermination of the “witches.” Primitive accumulation, then, was not simply an accumulation and concentration of exploitable workers and capital. It was also an accumulation of differences and divisions within the working class, whereby hierarchies built upon gender, as well as “race” and age, became constitutive of class rule and the formation of the modern proletariat.

This excerpt reminds us of a key point. The same logic leads us to ignore evidence of ecological damage, widening inequalities, oppression of women, colonialism… These are not different issues, rather different facets of the same desire to dominate and enslave⁴.

2.2.3 Redefining wealth

Since the late 19th century, economic growth has been exponential. It has been stimulated by rapid technological advancements and high levels of energy consumption, and has been sustained by a continuous, albeit uneven, rise in profits and in consumption. Since the mid-twentieth century, there has been one central indicator for measuring growth : gross domestic product (GDP). Growth has thus become the target of public policy, gaining its own narrative : it simultaneously finances development while improving living conditions and social services, all while supporting innovation that serves actors of dominance. There is both a virtuous circle and a vicious cycle within this mode of operation ; it is justified and legitimized by a “fairy tale” about growth that has become dominant throughout the 20th century. “Growth above all else” has become the slogan of dominance. By this logic, if we’ve agreed on the importance of redistributing a minimum amount of wealth, then we must do all we can to ensure its production and reproduction, at any cost !

There are several problems with this liberal narrative. Though it is becoming less and less attractive, it is no less dominant and still represents the basis upon which our public policies are conceived. Until now, all governments, of all allegiances, have subscribed to its premises and proposals where supporting and stimulating growth is essential for financing public services and securing the common good. But this ignores several key problems.

First, growth generates externalities. The “damage of progress” is never taken into account, unless it incurs other expenses. This is especially true regarding environmental degradation.

Second, growth is spread unevenly between countries, territories, genders, classes and social groups. It is therefore not an indicator of progress for everyone.

Third, GDP measures everything that can be paid but it overlooks many volunteer, citizen-led and family activities that improve the lives of hundreds of millions of people.

Forth, the facts should be corrected. It is not growth that enables education and health, but rather the inverse. Spending on education, health, and infrastructure enabled and supported various phases of economic expansion, particularly in the last 150 years. It was extending social rights and universal suffrage that allowed the will of the people to be heard, demanding more equitable distribution of profits, notably through social programs and fairer work compensation.

Therefore, recognizing the processes that are the source of socially produced and privately held wealth production is essential, just as it is urgent to develop indicators capable of correctly guiding and evaluating our decisions, and to force various criteria in political and economic choices, both past and future, to be taken into account. Much work done in the past decades has taken this direction⁵. However, there remains lots of work to be done. There are a number of issues to consider. Progress indicators cannot only be technical tools ; they must be representative of the operational measures dictated by the collective vision of a society’s population. If such a vision considers that society should not be an enormous market to which all societal institutions answer, we must then emphasize the whole of human activity and interactions deemed to be essential to the making of a society where living well together supersedes unhappiness.

If we opt for this alternative vision of social development, must we not choose degrowth, convivialism or other alternatives to neoliberal hegemony to achieve it ? This is an ongoing debate. One thing is certain, we must dispel the myth of growth and work collectively to construct a narrative of redemption⁶.

However, we must not underestimate the hold that the “religion of growth” has on large swathes of the population, equally in terms of ideological choices as learned behaviours and the will to maintain or achieve a certain kind of lifestyle that largely depends on extractivism and capturing wealth by those with privilege. Conservative currents throughout the world are tapping into the feeling that prosperity has been lost and must be regained. The difficulty in countering these trends comes in large part from the complexity involved in constructing a new narrative that is at once coherent while offering a promising future.

Such an upheaval with the aim of a redemptive narrative, which cannot settle for just a green economy, cannot be the work solely of enlightened leaders working for the common good. It requires large numbers to adhere to it, which entails multiplying debate forums, diversifying experiments, all while respecting justice. In this instance, democracy is an essential condition.

Notes

1
Klein, É. (2020). Le goût du vrai, Paris, Gallimard., p. 54 – 55
2
Descola, P. (2013). Beyond Nature and Culture, London, University of Chicago Press. (2013, p. 30)
3
Federici, S. (2004), Caliban and the Witch : Women, the body and primitive accumulation, New York, Autonomedia.
4
Racial capitalism scholars (e.g., Melamed, Robinson, Pulido, etc.) make a related argument to Federici and other Marxist Feminists : that capitalism demands hierarchies in value in order to justify labour exploitation, land dispossession, etc. And that « race » functions as the logic behind these hierarchies in value. In other words, the concept of « race » and racial inequality is necessary to the historical development of capitalism (like sexism is essential to the social reproduction of the labourer).
5
See, for example, Jean Gadrey, and Florence Jany-Catrice : Les nouveaux indicateurs de richesse, La découverte, 2016 ; Stiglitz, Fitoussi and Sen, op. cit.,. See also the UN’s Sustainable Development Goals (SDG), or the Human Development Index (HDI).
6
Gilbert Rist (2007). Le développement. Histoire d’une croyance occidentale, Paris, Les Presses de Sciences Po, coll. “Monde et sociétés.”