3.5 Ensuring relevant and viable transition management

To mark the arrival of the Awakening’s civilizational order, it will be advantageous for actors promoting a new social order to come together to create social blocs that promote ambidextrous transition strategies.

On the one hand, they must support the mitigated forms of development promoted by energy transition, green economy or circular economy proposals, all while heeding attempts at recovery generated by conservative resistance that promote the status quo of the present modernity.
On the other hand, it will be important to simultaneously institute a societal framework that promotes a social and ecological transition and proposes a disconnect with the driving principles of the current civilizational order, strongly reliant on the great modernizing European dream of Enlightenment.

It seems clear that healthy transition management that aims to instill a new civilizational landscape will require working from objective conditions proper to the current period, and thus from the landscape of the current global reality. It will be a question of drawing from heritage and subversive social and ecological experiments in order to set the stage in parallel to the original one without being completely disconnected, while still aiming to replace it.

To overcome the base contradictions inherent to the current civilizational model and institute a new civilizational order, strategic management of the disruption process should be closely monitored. We must identify and invest in potential action sites, along with their host territory. From the Polanyian perspective of ‘double movement’, initiatives that develop a dependency on the emancipatory path could very well be born. The path to emancipation will require that we rethink our relationship to land use in order to get away from isolation and dependency on fossil fuels. We must even rethink mobility, access to food, habitat, health, education and the use of digital technologies, just to name a few kinds of innovations. The transition will also need to be considered for the respectful retraining of workers and the scope of economic activities by sector. Modes of attaining common property must be supported economically and politically.

Simply put, we will need to make a qualitative leap, just like a trapeze artist leaping into the void to reach a distant goal by using the momentum of their jumping off point.

But we must be cautious. Though this transition is depicted as an acrobatic leap, it is not simply a question of jumping higher, as in the case of a “socio-democratic” transition (dark green capitalism), or of jumping less high, as in the case of superficial reformism (pale green capitalism).

On the contrary, we must create momentum, and spark a metamorphosis to enable a change of trajectory toward emancipatory progressivism. Such an option would be the alternative subversive path incarnated in the Awakening (radical revolution).

We must pay attention not to be caught by the recuperation counter movement (described well by Luc Boltanski and Ève Chiapello in The New Spirit of Capitalism), which would strip the transformation of its critical and subversive spirit and simply project humanity toward more authoritarianism and discrimination. Here, there would certainly be a change in level to embody the intentionality of “hyper-capitalism”.

Generating an alternative regime will require us to :

innovate at the level of the real world, its everyday issues, through concrete initiatives, both individual and collective (Pruvost, 2021¹);
implement systemic modalities capable of supporting alternative institutionalization processes, which are essential for managing advances and installing guardrails to prevent the backlash of predatory, speculative or alienating aspirations.

as well as to conceptualize :

a multidimensional ‘juridicity’ based on the collective as a function of the aestheticism of the ‘legal personification of the Real’;
a non speculative financial order, that is also, consequently, non capitalist ;
a relationship with politics that re-establishes filial connections ;
the valorization of economies that recognize value in sharing and prioritization of use value and ecological value.

There are four possible avenues before us that would awaken us to a new civilizational order and a new societal horizon.

The first avenue

Defining the large-scale cultural orientation and the guiding principles to be embedded in a new social contract : the ‘Codex of the Collective’.

The second avenue

Working toward disconnecting progressive initiatives from the modern liberal judicial order, all while ensuring convertibility that would act as a bridge. This means keeping an organization’s deed of incorporation active within the dominant judicial system while giving it a second, more central mission that revolves around an identity and structure under a separate judicial order, that of the Collective.

The third avenue

Structuring financial order on new foundations. This path requires developing a social financialization process – based around local exchange systems, demurrage-charged currencies, socio-environmental responsibilities – guaranteeing a non speculative environment that prioritizes collectives and natural ecosystems over wealth-creating processes.

The fourth avenue

Reconnecting with the principle of a fundamental territorial governance where contract and filiation are used as a function of their relevance with regards to the new episteme. Local, in the form of ‘Local Project’, is the key to an inversion where globalization could be set back on its feet and conceptualized on different scales : from local to global in an iterative and ‘fractal’ process.

Notes

1
Pruvost, Geneviève (2021), Quotidien politique. Féminisme, écologie, subsistance. Paris : La Découverte.