“Environment, social justice, racial justice are closely linked” – Liberation

American philosopher Nancy Fraser invites ecologists, feminists and anti-racists to join forces to fight capitalism, an oppressive system at the root of the injustices that everyone is currently fighting in their corner.

From our love preferences monetized by Tinder to political beliefs, to the financial fortunes of the big platforms, the innermost spheres of our lives have become markets like any other. The feminist philosopher Nancy Fraser sees the manifestation of a “Cannibal capitalism” that she decrypts Cannibal capitalism (Verso edition, not translated). The various protest movements, be they environmentalists, anti-racists or feminists, must, according to her, realize that they are all opposed to the same oppressive system and join forces. Because to defend the causes “in silo”risk being worn only by a privileged few – what Nancy Fraser called, in a previous book, the “1% feminism”.

Ask environmental movements to become “trans-environmental”. What does it mean ?

Many movements focus on a single theme: defending a protected natural area in your city for environmentalists, defending women’s rights for feminists, fighting police violence for anti-racist movements. In my opinion, there is a danger in carrying out these battles in silos: who can join a movement that defends only ecology, without worrying about other forms of domination such as racism or sexism, is who does not suffer from these others. forms of domination. The ecological struggle would therefore be carried out only by a privileged minority – we could call it an “ecology of the rich”, as opposed to the “ecology of the poor” theorized by Juan Martinez-Alier (2014). Martinez-Alier shows that, in many countries, the defense of nature has always been linked to the defense of communities, of social reproduction, of the material conditions of existence.

The current ecological crisis is overflowing with all these silos: it is a general crisis. Let’s take the example of the water crisis that is currently affecting the city of Jackson, Mississippi: it is a city with a predominantly black population, precarious, where infrastructure has been abandoned to the private sector, which has preferred to invest in cities with a predominantly white population. … We can see from this example that the environment, social justice and racial justice are closely linked. However, none of these elements can be solved independently of the others. It is not about telling ecologists that they are in the wrong fight, but about convincing them to create coalitions with other communities, which are basically fighting the same thing: capitalism.

But how to create coalitions between these movements with apparently different objectives?

To begin with, a clear diagnosis of the structural roots of the problem must be offered, so that all groups can understand that the injustices they suffer are inherent in the capitalist model. Then you have to ask yourself: how to forge alliances? Take the example of teachers and nurses, who recently waged long strikes in the United States. As long as they asked for better working conditions, higher wages, their demands remained quite unnoticeable. But as soon as teachers paired parents by asking instead to limit the number of children per class, and nurses included patients by asking not to supervise more than a certain number of patients, their requests found a much wider echo. .

There is also an ambitious idea: why not go back to the notion of “working class”, but broaden it beyond the actors of production who were the workers in the factories? The working class today includes both those who perform care work (social reproduction work) and those who protect their habitat (environmental reproduction work). We see, for example, that the first victims of these cross-domination mechanisms are the hotel maids, who are poorly paid, have precarious working conditions and, as the DSK affair has unfortunately highlighted, are also victims of sexual violence. . It is therefore important that the different protests recognize themselves as different manifestations of this same enlarged working class.

You also affirm that paradoxically alternative places are necessary for it, sometimes presented as laboratories of modalities other than capitalism.

The question is whether these alternatives are a form of support for capitalism or have real critical potential. The social and solidarity economy, for example, is precious in that it benefits marginalized populations; but in the same movement it supports governments by allowing them to delegate the problems of unemployment, and it supports capitalist companies that rely on employees who pay less.

The idea developed by André Gorz di “non-reformist reforms” it seems essential to me here: some reforms end up being crutches to the problem we wanted to tackle, while others have the potential to question the system as a whole.

When some of my students tell me they want to desert to create an alternative community, I can’t help but see reform in it. These alternatives can exist without challenging other oppressions. Because there is no way to bring about change without confronting the powers that be on a large scale.

If the crises multiply, will the ranks of this “enlarged working class” grow?

I think there will indeed be more and more losers from the current economic and social order. But beware: there is no guarantee that these new oppressed will move towards an anticapitalist critique of the left. We have seen it in the last century with the emergence of fascism and Nazism, we see it today with Hungary, Italy and the rise of the far right almost everywhere. Social movements go from defeat to defeat and I believe that to remain convinced that there is a reason to fight, it is time for them to achieve victories and gain new allies. And to rally these “losers” and avoid strengthening the far right, I think we need to ask what the forces of the left have to offer: we have a clear narrative to explain that the real source of the problem is not migrants, Jews, blacks, but capitalism?