Living communism?A conversation with Paul Guillibert Development and sustainability: a new foreign policy for Italy

Paul Guillibert, land and capital.For a living communism, Paris, Editions Amsterdam, 2021, 260 pages, ISBN 9782354802332

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Clément Fontanarava

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You come back, in your work, to the very complex relationship between nature and culture.You first say you should not naturalize social phenomena.What are the risks of such an approach?

It is a question as difficult as it is interesting that animates a lot of contemporary debates in philosophy.Before answering your question, you have to make a very rapid inventory of environmental thought on the question of nature.On the one hand, political ecology is regularly called upon to abandon the use of a concept of nature, considered too metaphysical, European or virilist, to authorize more sustainable relationships with the earth.On the other hand, environmental movements and environmental ethics have claimed this term to defend the realities it designates against the aggressions of a predatory economic system.Nature had to be named to be defended.

In nature policies, Bruno Latour, for example, contributed to the development of an "without nature ecology".If it is necessary to be wary of the extension of the category of nature to non-Western contexts, it would also be necessary to be careful about the use of a concept which tends to classify things according to immutable orders and to justifyunequal social relationships by passing them as "natural".

In this context, we can say about a behavior that it is "natural" because "it has always been so" and that "it can never go otherwise"."Nature" then appears as a principle of legitimization of certain social relationships presented as necessary.

An obvious example is that of heterosexuality.To say of heterosexuality that it is natural, amounts to defending its normality as opposed to forms of "abnormal", "perverse" or "counter-natural" sexuality.Making human nature a rule amounts to erect in principle natural which is only a naturalized social norm.The alleged naturalness of a practice then makes it possible to legitimize certain behaviors and to prohibit others.

The inherent risk of the naturalization of social is to pass as legitimate relations of domination which are historical and which must be criticized for the social suffering that they provoke.

Another pitfall is that of the socialization of nature.This is just as problematic as the naturalization of the social.

The reverse pitfall is indeed to "socialize nature" fully.The thesis of a socialization of nature can take two distinct forms.Or it is affirmed that all our perceptions of reality are constructed by symbolic categories or "patterns" which shape the natural given, or else we defend that nature has been fully transformed, "anthropized", to the point that itNowhere are one of a wilderness.It is true that the accelerated effects of global warming from the invasions of grasshoppers in East Africa to Oregon fires during the winter of 2022 justified this idea.Insofar as we cannot establish a causal link of natural phenomena to social facts without naturalizing the social, on the contrary, it should be defended that nature is always socialized or by the intellectual categories which allow us toapprehend, either by the social relationships that have transformed it.

It is enough to look at a good part of the French campaigns, largely drawn by the policies of consolidation and the industrialization of agriculture: the plantations in mono-culture, the woods cut by the deforestations and the roads which crisscross them.The whole landscape is the effect of human production.We would therefore be tempted to say that everything has already been socialized, that there is nothing left that is external or autonomous vis-à-vis humanity.

But what is the risk of this position?It is to deny two important realities.First, the fact that there are still many wild spaces that it is important to preserve.Spaces which, certainly, are modified by human activities on a large scale, in particular by global warming, but which have nevertheless kept a fairly important form of autonomy vis-à-vis human transformations. Il existe une vie sauvage qui continue de résister aux effets de la socialisation capitaliste voire qui retourne à l’état sauvage, c’est la féralité¹ des mondes vivants qui échappent à la logique du capital.Wild natures have a value in itself, as they express the richness of biodiversity and a value for us insofar as they ensure ecosystem regulation functions necessary for our reproduction.

Including in the most anthropized spaces, the most transformed by human activities, there is always an activity, an agency of non -human beings.This is nature.It is a certain ability to self-generate or to use the terms of Aristotle's physics, an "internal principle of movement and rest".This ability to move, to grow by yourself, is a power of generation of natural beings which have a certain autonomy compared to humans.All natural beings, or in any case living things, have an ability to self-deploy thanks to interspecific relations.

Even in cities, biodiversity is more important than we can imagine.In urban wasteland for example, there is often a rich flora where protected species can coexist with colonizing species (ferns of marshes and Renouée de Japan in the wood of Romainville for example)).There is a power of emergence of natural beings including in the most anthropized spaces.

This is what makes American anthropologist Anna Tsing say that there is a "third nature", a nature that would develop on the ruins of capitalism, that is to say a nature that has the capacity, inThe spaces most transformed by human activity, to re -emerge in new forms.The first nature, wild, is threatened everywhere by second nature, capitalist, which is impoverished and weakened.When the latter retreats, a new wild life reaffirms its power by constituting new ecosystem relationships.

The two poles that must be held together are therefore these.On the one hand, it is a question of making reason of the strength of certain natural phenomena, their own autonomy, on the other hand, it is a question of not falling into a naturalistic reduction or a naturalization of the social withoutWhat do we risk legitimizing, in the name of nature, historical oppressions.

You therefore develop the idea of historical naturalism, a historicization of nature.What is this position?

We are therefore in the ontological and political situation that I have just described in large lines. C’est pour échapper à cette aporie que nous essayons de développer avec Frédéric Monferrand un « naturalisme historique »².In a very general way, it is a question of showing that "nature is historical" and "natural history", to use the terms of Marx and Engels in German ideology.Historical naturalism consists first of all in showing that nature has an autonomous history: there is a history of nature which exists independently of human history.Regarding the earth, this story started more than eight billion years ago, that is to say long before that of hominids.

There is also a social history, which could be described as heteronomous history of nature.This is the history of nature transformations through human activities.Anthropocene or global warming are illustrations: the increase in overall temperatures is the effect of the emission of greenhouse gases in the context of a fossil economy.

Finally, if the environments are always the historical results of the composition of social existence and a power of self-generation of natural beings, it must be concluded that there are "historical natures" to use the words of Jason W.Moore.Historical naturalism also seeks to think of this multiplicity of natures.

You show, from Marx, that nature, formerly a subjective element for the individual, who saw it as the extension of his own body, has become an objective element, to which the individual can no longer relate.

The whole work of Marx is crossed, to various degrees, by this important idea from the economic-philosophical manuscripts from 1844 to capital via the Grundrisse in 1857-1858.Until the early 1860s, he often mobilized the distinction between "organic body" and "inorganic body" to think about the relationship between the own body of the individual and the external nature, the environment.

With this bipolarity of the body, human and not human, Marx tries to think of continuity between individuals and their environment, the belonging of humans of a natural totality made up of objective relations, of relations between natural beings.In the Grundrisse, he presents ethnographic contexts where private property of the means of production does not only lead to the emergence of social classes but also leads to a separation of the human body and the body of nature.In class societies, individuals no longer belong to nature because nature is no longer collectively possessed.We can no longer relate to nature as to a part of oneself when one is no longer co-owner of the earth.

In societies without private property, the community knows itself belonging to the natural totality because nature appears as a condition of collective life as a whole.Resources and territory provide livelihoods to individuals (food, clothes, shelters, etc..)) but they also provide raw materials to reproduce the structures of social life (work tools, religious buildings, places of political assembly, etc..)).The earth appears as the "great laboratory" of human life.The individual, as he is a member of this community to which the land belongs collectively, sees in nature a constitutive part of his subjectivity, a set of elements which contributes to his biological, social and affective life.Collective property therefore ensures common control of land uses which guarantees each individual access to their livelihoods.Everyone relates to nature as to a part of itself and the community knows itself belonging to an objective totality of living beings in relation.

In the societies in which private property appears, one can no longer relate to the land as that of the community and even less as its own.We know that, because there is a fence, it is the land of someone else.We can no longer relate to the earth as on the condition of his own life but only as to the property of others.In this separation initiated by private property, two things appear.First, social classes since some grab the means of reproduction of all.And also appears a fundamental separation from the objective conditions of human life: the earth is no longer the soil from which subjectivities update their potential by relationships rich in their natural environment but a pure material object, an exteriority, the simple property of others.According to Marx, a collectivist peasant in a company not based on private property relates to the territory as in a part of himself.On the contrary, a worker or a worker dispossessed of her subsistence conditions relates to nature as to the object to which he only has access under the authority and command of another.With the emergence of classes, nature expresses the heteronomy of social relations.

Is it a new theory of alienation, which not only insists on the dispossession of production but also on that of its "inorganic body"?

Ce n’est pas une nouvelle théorie de l’aliénation puisqu’elle reprend largement les idées de la philosophie sociale contemporaine et sa défense d’une ontologie naturaliste³.She simply adopts a slightly different starting point.I am leaving less from the criticism of social suffering as an expression of alienated social relationships than the experience of the destruction of the conditions of human life and not human as manifestation of a crisis in the forms of living in it.

There is a very beautiful sentence in the Grundrisse about the relationship to the land in classless societies.Marx says that in these collectives, "we relate to the earth as we relate to his own language".It's very interesting.What is a language?It is a set of practices that only exists because individuals appropriate it and exercise it.But the individual use of the language presupposes and produces both a community that speaks it (you must have learned it and be able to speak it)).A language are therefore practices that only exist by the multiplicity of individual uses which makes the community of speakers exist.For Marx, there is no private appropriation of the language that is possible.He has no reflection on the colonial uses of language for example.But he insists on individual, subjective property."His own language", because it is not simply an objective, external existence, but of practices by which one defines ourselves by exercising them.My language is what I am.The analogy with the land in classless societies is striking: for Marx, without private property, the land allows each individual to define himself as a member of a community and part of a totality.The fundamental idea of all this is that the classes first emerge by the separation of the natural conditions of the subsistence.

This relationship to nature in Marx would indeed be more important than what one might initially think, while communism is spontaneously associated with workers' movements.

In general, communism presented itself as the revolutionary movement of the working class, focused on the factory, the city and the production of industrial goods. Il faudrait distinguer cette « cosmologie ouvrière » (des lieux où l’on vit, des objets qui comptent, des choses auxquelles « on tient »)) d’une cosmologie écologiste plus attentive à la terre, aux formes collectivistes, aux luttes paysannes.To put it very quickly, an opposition between city and countryside.

This "cosmological opposition" has very often been discussed.Bruno Latour, for example, built, from the 2000s, a fairly strong opposition between, on the one hand, emancipation policies, what he sometimes calls the "religion of emancipation", that is to say-Dire policies in which it is a question of detaching yourself, to free oneself from a certain number of links or facts of dependence. Et, d’un autre côté, des politiques de l’attachement, comme l’attachement à la terre (qui est à la fois un attachement matériel et affectif, donc un lien sensible)), qui nous définirait en tant que « terrestres ».Politics aims less to emancipate itself from social dominations than to produce richer ties to the earth which obviously ensures our conditions of existence but which is also the fundamental soil of all our experiences.

What I tried to show in my work is that in Marx and some other Marxist thinkers, the opposition between emancipation with regard to work and attachment to the earth is sometimes misleading.There are a lot of moments in the history of communism where the emancipation of work has had renewed forms of attachment to earth.And by attachment to the earth, two things must be heard.Material attachment first, that is to say property relationships, another way of possessing, of appropriating the land.But also other more spiritual, more symbolic and more emotional relationships with the earth: another sensitivity in short.

What was very important to me was therefore to show that the historical forms of workers' emancipation are not incompatible with a renewed attachment to the earth.Some Marx texts in the Russian municipalities show this.What he discovers in his exchanges with the Russian populists and in the anthropological works of the time, is that, perhaps, these forms of collectivist attachment to the earth could be places of utopian invention ofA revolution, places of hope and emancipation for a socialist revolution, including a working -class revolution.

We therefore see that there is no longer an opposition so decided between the emancipation of workers' work and the peasant attachment to the earth, but the question is rather to know how these different moments will be able to articulate within'A revolutionary whole in motion.The position of Marx at the end of his life is that, in the case of Russia, it will undoubtedly have to be based on rural communes to imagine a communist revolution, provided that there is a great revolutionary worker movement inThe rest of Russia.So it's both that we will have to try to hold together.

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You also show that communism and Marxism have larger forms and definitions than those that have been given during the experience of real socialisms.For populists, with whom Marx maintains abundant correspondence, historical trajectories are not unilinear but multiple.Has the vision of Marx's communism been influenced, and how much, by its exchanges with populists?

These relationships and discussions with populists, the Narodniki are an important element on which few commentators had insisted, in any case in France, except perhaps Michael Löwy or Luis Martinez Andrade.Populism is a great revolutionary tradition of the 19th century, very heterogeneous, which Marx discovers just a little before the 1870s, at a time when workers' revolutions all failed in Europe, from the spring of peoples to the Paris Commune.Marx then has more and more the feeling that there will be no victorious workers' revolution in Western Europe, in any case not immediately.

He is increasingly interested in the Russian question, learns to read and speak Russian very quickly, and he maintained from 1870 and until his death a daily correspondence with the Narodniki.Some come to him, in London, and will be present at his burial, like Piotr Lavrov.What does he discover?That there is no unilinear history, that most societies follow different historical trajectories depending on the social relationships that develop there.

The second thing he realizes is that Europe may not be the center of the world.And we must hear this in two directions.First, Europe should no longer be seen as the place in which the main events take place.But she is not the indicator of the future of the world either.Its present is not the future of non -European companies.All societies have clean temporalities, both all contemporary since they are in the same world market but all singular because they do not have the same property relationships.

From the 1850s, he quickly abandoned the idea that capitalism was a necessary moment to lead to a socialist revolution, he also abandoned his fatalistic positions on colonization.There are, of course, technically more developed countries, Marx will remain convinced until the end of his life: this is the case, in his time, of Germany, England or France.But this technical development is not a sign of the legitimacy of a political domination of Europe over the world.On the contrary, from the 1870s thanks to his exchanges with the populists, he was more and more convinced that if a communist revolution was to arrive, this would take place in Russia, the country in which the revolutionary groups are organized and determined.

In contexts where there are still forms of collectivist organization, it will not be necessary to go through capitalism.It will be possible to skip this great stage in European history and to go directly from a form of feudalism characteristic of Russia to communism.It is therefore not necessary to wait for European development or a colonial conquest.Europe is no longer the center of the world, neither from a historical point of view, nor from a political point of view.

And yet, if this turning point is fundamental in Marx's thought, it is something that has passed over in silence during the period of Stalinism.

These exchanges with populists did not pass over in silence in the 1920s.On the contrary, many philosophical, scientific, political and environmentalists of these years in Russia testify to the discussions between Marxists and Narodists.

Populism is a very student movement but turned towards countryside and often towards revolutionary terrorist action as in the Terre et Freedom groups or the will of the people.They defend the sharing of the earth with accents that could be described as proto-ecologists.At the time of the Russian Revolution, the ideas of populists particularly influenced the socialist-revolutionaries, but also most of the Marxist currents of the time, in particular through the Share Black group.During the first months of the Revolution, the socialist-revolutionaries on the left are allies of the Bolsheviks and they are favorable to the first collectivization measures.Their class composition, however, leads them more to support the peasantry than workers and their opposition to Bolshevism quickly leads to conflicts with the majority party.

From 1927 and in the early 1930s, the establishment of Stalinism involved a rewriting of the history of populism.Although some 19th century thinkers are reassessed to support the idea of a Russian development way, the movement as a whole is devalued and presented as the main enemy of communism.

It is very clear in certain interventions by Iemelian Iaroslavski, one of the spokesperson for Stalinism, for example.When he was addressed in 1937 to young people from the Communist Party, he presented populists as "the main enemy of Marxism and the whole cause of the proletariat".However in the correspondence of Marx of the years 1870-1880, they are its main interlocutors.He even considers that terrorist populists, those who pose bombs against the Tsar, embody a serious revolutionary path in Russia.

It is Stalinism that will therefore rewrite the historiography of Russian revolutionary movements since the 19th century in the light of recent conflicts between Bolsheviks and Revolutionary Socialists by strengthening the idea that there would be a communism movement on the one handand on the other a peasant populist movement, the two having heterogeneous logics.What we inherit today is a post-Stalinian vision of Marxism where the question of attachment to the land of the peasantry has been evacuated as a retrograde and conservative force.

All this is nevertheless linked to the Bolshevik strategy as a party of the proletariat which defends an alliance of classes between workers and peasants, under workers' direction.This idea of a political hierarchy within the class indicates the potential erasure of the peasantry of the history of Marxism.

Always about the lexicon, you use terms such as "communism" or "Soviets", strongly marked by the experience of "real socialism", drawn up as a scarecrow.Do you consider that the radical left must reclaim these terms to give them a positive meaning, that these terms must have their place in the thought of a non-capitalist political organization?And are these real socialisms only scarecrows?

This is a very difficult question.First of all, it is absolutely necessary today that the radical ecological left is claiming communism.A renewed communism, certainly, but a communism nevertheless.The definition proposed in the communist manifesto is unsurpassable for emancipation struggles.The idea that communism is the movement of abolition of the material conditions of suffering, starting with the exploitation of work, seems to me still very current.

Today, the fundamental experience of social misery, even if it is not necessarily thought in these terms, is an experience produced by working conditions and the dispossession of means of living.Either by degraded working conditions, or by a certain form of exploitation of work, or by a lack of work (unemployment, precariousness)).Communism is therefore the process by which obstacles to the free development of individuals are gradually lifted.According to the philosopher Ernst Bloch, communism testifies to "familiarity with the oldest of dreams", the fight against misery and alienation.For almost two centuries, most emancipation movements have taken the name of communism, I think it is important to claim it.

Should we think through the experiences of really existing socialism, especially through the Soviet experience?Absolutely, for two reasons.

The first is that they leave us a difficult heritage.It is a heritage of totalitarianism, of authoritarianism, which one cannot save by saying that it was only an accident on the road.We also have to take care of this past so as not to tell stories.Especially because it is not unrelated to the question of relationships between ecology and communism.

Since Aristotle, Western political thought has been marked by a major distinction between poieis, production, which designates all the activities by which an object external to the agent and praxis are produced, the activity where the agent istakes itself as an object of its transformation.Morality and politics traditionally fall under praxis as they are based on the rational deliberation of individuals who determine the standards of the just and the unjust.

The great philosophical idea of communism is that production is political and that politics is a matter of organizing ways of producing.When this politicization of social relationships is done solely through the state, one is threatened by forms of fascization, even if the term is very imprecise here.In any case, by an an absolutist becoming of the State who interferes at the heart of all social relations.It is an inherent risk of communism but it is not its only possible future, on the contrary.His fundamental idea is rather that politics should no longer exist as a separate institution of the economy.Communism is not total control of the economy by the State, but emancipation from work and autonomy at the places of production and subsistence.

And what about the term "Soviet", is it not the concept of a very specific era and place?

C’est dans les expériences passées du communisme (y compris dans ce qu’elles ont de plus dramatiques)) que se trouvent les leçons historiques pour les victoires politiques à venir.1917 For example embodies one of the most important victorious experiences of modernity thanks to the resumption of control over the means of production and the institutions of power.Russia of the 1920s is a space of social, political, artistic and feminist emancipation as there have been little in recent history, especially in terms of "direct democracy" or "popular sovereignty".This is why I take up the concept of Soviet.

The concept of Soviet is undoubtedly the most scary because, behind "Soviet", we hear "Soviet", USSR, and therefore, immediately "totalitarianism".In Russian, the Soviet simply designated, since 1905, the form of advice.And what is a advice?The most democratic form that was since it was, in military regiments, in factories, in districts and in rural communes, places in which soldiers, workers and workers, inhabitants and inhabitants and peasants sentdelegates who made decisions for the local organization.Soviets are therefore the institutions where we reclaim the political and economic means of daily life.In the councils, the inhabitants and the inhabitants decide the organization of the districts, the soldiers choose their leaders but also the political groups to which they will rally themselves.It’s important to have that in mind.In the first months of 1917, it is often an unspeakable chaos, where each regiment decides which group or what a policy it will support: in the service of the Bolsheviks, revolutionary socialists or the Menchevik opposition, etc..

In factories, the Soviets are also the workers who organize themselves to find out what they are going to do with their means of production, how they will produce.It is therefore a moment of democratic and political innovation at the heart of the productive system.

Capitalocene and anthropocene are interchangeable concepts?You use one sometimes, sometimes the other. Certains auteurs, notamment Andreas Malm⁴, affirment pourtant que l’anthropocène cache la centralité des inégalités des émissions de CO2, qui proviennent de la mobilisation des classes dirigeantes et des pays les plus développés, notamment via le processus de colonisation.Shouldn't Anthropocene be abandoned in favor of this new term?

It is a very important debate that has given rise to a lot of different discussions. Un exemple marquant est le débat qui a eu lieu en avril 2019 entre Anna Tsing, anthropologue, auteure de Le champignon de la fin du monde : Sur la possibilité de vivre dans les ruines du capitalisme et la philosophe des sciences Donna Haraway⁵.

The debate is as follows: Anna Tsing considers that the term anthropocene must be maintained while Donna Haraway considers that it must be abandoned and multiply the competing terms: capitalocene, plantacionocene to speak of the colonial history of the crisisclimate, we could also add Anglocene or Western Casual to the way of historians Christophe Bonneuil and Jean-Baptiste Fressoz, and many other terms have been proposed.

This debate poses two main problems.Should we use a single term or more?And if you have to use only one term, which one?I fully agree with you that the term anthropocene is generally bad.It is not humanity in general that has transformed nature, but a tiny part.Since 1800 for example, we know that the United States has been responsible for 20 % of global global warming, Germany 4 %, China 2 % and Mozambique, particularly affected by climatic disasters of less than 0.2 %.A small part of humanity, the richest, is responsible.

The term "capitalocene" is therefore much more suitable for talking about the time we are going through.But at the same time, Anna Tsing's argument is interesting.The term anthropocene has been proposed by researchers in natural sciences.A chemist first, and now geologists, ecologists, etc..Scientists have therefore done a political theory.It is still not very common to be noticed: at the heart of their most technical debates, scientists use terms with a strong political charge.In this case, there is a politicization of science which is completely desirable.We must therefore continue to build common and discussion land with people who are not going to talk about Plantacionocene or Capitalocene immediately.

She advances a second argument.Anthropos is not such a universal category that it.The idea that human beings would be an individual with personal law is very modern and linked to the emergence of capitalism.If the anthropos is embodied in a figure of the universal man, bourgeois, male, white citizen of a modern state invented by Europe of Enlightenment, it may not be so false to consider that this humanity- -The way is responsible for the ecological crisis.

We could finally add a final argument in favor of the concept of anthropocene.If all humans are not responsible for the ecological disaster, only humans can be, on this scale of disturbance of the system.They are the only species to be aware of their global transformation power.

For the moment, therefore, there are a large number of people with whom to speak of anthropocene is much simpler.I think that the right method would be to say that capitalocene or plantationocene are fairer terms provided that they do not close science politicization spaces that the concept of anthropocene has opened up.The development of a radical political ecology supposes to be able to multiply the terms and to translate our scientific and political vocabularies.

You speak, after Marx, of the decline of the state.Is life communism devoid of state?Or does the state remain necessary but reduced to its strict minimum?You talked about Notre Dame des Landes, which represents a very specific organizational model. Frédéric Lordon⁶, notamment, affirme qu’aussi louable que soit ce modèle, il ne permet pas de fournir un modèle viable à grande échelle.What do you think ?

I think that the state, as a separate institution of social relations, as a score of a policy disconnected from life is something that will have to be rid of.

Mais au vu de la complexité des systèmes techniques et sociaux qu’il faut gérer (d’irrigation, de gestion de déchets, d’approvisionnement énergétique)), au regard des pouvoirs géopolitiques qui dominent les vivants à l’échelle mondiale, il faudra en passer, provisoirement, par des États ou des institutions similaires.This means that we will have to do with the state, to use the words of Frédéric Lordon, but always in the horizon of his overtaking.Marxism has been built on the desire to put an end to the political domination exercised by the bourgeoisie through a set of civil institutions which, although autonomous, reproduce class reports.Even Lenin is very aware of that.For example when he wrote in 1917 in the state and the revolution that "all the previous machines perfected the machine of the State;However, it must be broken, demolish it ”.But above all this carries a strong risk, that of statist authoritarianism which we already talked about earlier about the USSR.

This means that political organization must be at the heart of the places of production and reproduction of daily life.Politics cannot remain eternally a "capture apparatus" of social power, as Deleuze and Guattari would say.Without this perspective, even very distant, of a disappearance of the bourgeois state, that is to say a set of autonomous and almost automated, bureaucratic institutions, which ensure the conditions of social reproduction, wegives too much place to hope to emancipate political dominations.

You are talking about a trajectory that ecological discourse could take, that of green nationalism.What is this doctrine?

The question of green nationalism, in France in particular, oscillates a lot and you have to be quite cautious about these uses.It is present in a certain way in certain groups and think tanks which revolve around the new right since the 1970s, for example in Greece, in magazines as elements or Krisis.But green nationalism corresponds less to a set of dogmas or a corpus than to a possible political scenario in ethno-nationalist societies crossed by a crisis in migration policies in the context of a global ecological disaster.It designates a policy of defense of the ethnic purity of the nation by the preservation of natural environments which ensure the community its livelihoods and by the transmission of an ecological heritage, the "eternal landscapes of the nation".

The national rally provides some examples, even if its ecologism is less obvious during this presidential campaign than in the last European elections of 2019 for example.The right arm of Marine Le Pen, European deputy for the RN, Hervé Juvin, for example wrote works that are said to be called political ecology in the broad sense.In the great separation.For an ecology of civilizations, we see that it is an ethno-nationalist coupled with an "sincere" ecologist.The concern for the preservation of the environment is not just an electoral tactic at Juvin.This tendency of green nationalism has been hidden in the current presidential campaign by even more Islamophobic, racist, xenophobic themes carried out in particular by Eric Zemmour, which completely neutralizes the question of ecology where the RN had started to launch amore localist and territorial dynamics.

Cette pensée ethnonationaliste verte est très liée à une forme de malthusianisme écologique, c’est-à-dire à l’idée développée par le grand économiste Thomas Malthus (1766-1834)), selon laquelle une augmentation trop forte de la population amène nécessairement à une diminution des ressources naturelles et donc à un appauvrissement de la population, à des phénomènes de rareté qui aboutissent à l’effondrement de la population jusqu’à ce que les ressources naturelles se renouvellent, permettant une nouvelle augmentation de la population.In the idea of Malthus, it is therefore necessary to maintain a population level sufficiently low to allow the renewal of resources.

There is a fairly similar idea in green ethno nationalism, namely that the population should be checked, control the body of women and immigration to control the birth rate.This then goes through very racist natalist policies, that is to say mainly turned towards migrant and non-banish populations and border control policies because, otherwise, our beautiful ecosystems that we have taken care of duringfive centuries may be destroyed.

All this can give rise to a form of ethno-nationalism in which to preserve the climate, the landscapes of the nation, would be linked to the defense of a purity of the nation, the only one capable of defending its circles.There are also examples in Xi Jiping China where advertisements for ecological transition to a low carbon economy combine with ethno-nationalist policies of constitution of a racially homogeneous political community.

What are the arguments to counter this ethno-nationalism?

There are two main ones.The first is that "we" have not been, for five centuries, as "racially homogeneous community" - so well treated metropolitan ecosystems.The West not only polluted "its" soils and "its" groundwater, led by massive deforestations, led to the extinction of a large part of the wildlife wildlife but colonial conquests have also exceeded the ecological limits encountered inEurope and exported the environmental crisis far beyond the borders of the nation.It is not "the migratory invasion" which is the cause of the destruction of environments on a global scale but the colonial conquest.The West has produced a world of plantations in which black slaves were exploited and humiliated, and standardized, depleted and disciplined ecosystems.

The second argument is that no community is ethnically or racially homogeneous, we cannot therefore deduce from any character inherited from predispositions to more concerned behaviors of the environment.The use of a territory is determined by the ways of which it has it, that is to say, in particular of which we control access to its resources.The ecological legitimacy of a community does not come from its "rooting" but from its ability to guarantee sustainable uses of the earth.

Three scenarios seem according to you, emerging from the current situation, you study them in conclusion: the collapse, the social democratic response and its Green New Deal and the technological technology flight.You show that green deals are insufficient and in reality difficult to achieve.Is ecological action therefore necessarily subject to a radical change in political organization model?

Yes, for sure, in the medium term.But in the short term, we cannot expect a radical change in the political structure, in Western Europe anyway.What is therefore necessary are new organizations capable of putting pressure on states, businesses and international organizations.We see today that even the most radical climate defense organizations, or which appear to be the most radical, such as Rébellion extinction, Youth for Climate or Friday for Future, which are however massive and determined, do not arrive atweigh on government decisions.They have already imposed a climate agenda but they do not yet manage to impose measures that meet what the situation requires.

We are in a very curious situation where leaders and capitalists understood that, if they did nothing, they would have more and more complicated situations to manage with a sharp drop in profits generated by "negative externalities".We will quickly have to invest much more in climatic, hydraulic infrastructure, etc..To continue to produce goods for profit. Si nous laissons faire, les sécheresses et les inondations vont se multiplier (Afrique de l’Est 2019-2020, Allemagne 2021)), provoquant des méga-feux en été (Russie 2019, Australie 2020)) comme en hiver (États-Unis 2022)) .In the countries of the South, social structures weakened by centuries of colonialism and imperialism will very badly protect the peoples of climatic disasters in front of which rich countries will be able to protect themselves better, although very unequal way.Capitalists have become aware of the situation but they prefer the administration of disaster to ambitious climatic policies which suppose to massively reduce greenhouse gas emissions and the production of goods.It will therefore be necessary to constitute organizations capable of putting pressure, in a slightly more radical way, on the structures which already exist before being able to transform them.

To do this, you must be attentive to alliances in the process of establishing yourself, for example between climate movements and workers and workers.I think this is the only solution.It appeared for example during COP 26.There were, in parallel with demonstrations of the Climate Movement, a strike of workers of waste in Glasgow. La collecte a été interrompue pendant huit jours afin de demander des hausses de salaire, des meilleures conditions de travail (notamment sanitaires)) et une meilleure gestion des déchets dont la quantité a très fortement augmenté depuis le début de la pandémie.Some delegations of the climate movement, Greta Thunberg included, have supported the strike.This is important because if we do not attack the economy, traffic and production of goods and therefore profits, there will be no improvement in working conditions or the climate situation.Which also means that in the context of an ecological crisis, the weapons of the workers' movement still have their effectiveness.Strikes, blockages or even sabotage of production chains must limit the exploitation of work and the destruction of the earth.It is not trivial that youth organizations for the climate Youth for Climate, or Fridays for future, have resumed the term "climate strike".This expresses the need to stop production to reconquer spaces of political autonomy and to put pressure on the rulers.

This is the reason why one must be attentive to the alliances between environmentalists and workers and workers, as in the great -pits refinery a few weeks ago, threatened with closure.We see here another type of possible alliances.If certain sectors of the economy, especially fossil, must stop, we will have to find ways to ensure the social protection of workers in these sectors.One of the main demands of the climate movement should thus be the defense of a highly developed unemployment insurance system, guaranteed income or lifetime salary.A minimum, a "super background for workers" of polluting sectors, as the American trade unionists of Oil, Chemical and Atomic World International Union around Tony Mazzochi, the Leopold and Brian Kohler.If many companies, even branches of the economy, are condemned by the climate crisis, we must find the means to guarantee decent standard of living for workers in these sectors who may not findemployment until their retirement.Otherwise, the support of workers and workers in the climate movement is a pure illusion and the hopes of a victorious climate movement a fable.

Sources

1. L’état de ce qui retourne à l’état sauvage après avoir été domestiqué.
2. Voir par exemple Immanuel Wallerstein, Frédéric Monferrand, Paul Guillibert, Olivier Surel, “Dynamics of an (Unresolved)) Global Crisis” in Actuel Marx n°53 / 1, 2013, pp. 11-27
3. Voir par exemple l’introduction de F. Fischbach et la définition de l’aliénation comme perte d’objectivité dans Karl Marx, Manuscrits économico-philosophiques de 1844, Paris, Librairie philosophique J. Vrin, 2007. Voir également Stéphane Haber, Critique de l’antinaturalisme : études sur Foucault, Butler, Habermas, Paris, Presses universitaires de France, 2006. On consultera aussi Emmanuel Renault (éd.)), Lire les « Manuscrits de 1844 », Paris, Presses universitaires de France, 2008.
4. Andreas Malm, L’anthropocène contre l’histoire. Le réchauffement climatique à l’ère du capital, La Fabrique, 2017, 250p.
5. https://edgeeffects.net/haraway-tsing-plantationocene/ Cette conversation fait suite à une discussion qui avait eu lieu en 2015 entre plusieurs chercheuses et chercheurs de différentes disciplines : “Anthropologists are Talking – About the Anthropocene” https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/00141844.2015.1105838
6. Frédéric Lordon, Figures du communisme, La Fabrique, 2021, 282p.