1st Edition

A Political Ecology of Common People

By Jacques Bidet Copyright 2024
192 Pages
by Routledge

192 Pages
by Routledge

192 Pages
by Routledge

This book advances a counter-intuitive thesis: modern attacks on the global ecological balance are exclusively the result of processes of social domination, whether they are based on class, gender or nation. If this is the case, then it follows that ecological struggle and social struggle are one and the same thing. The approach is inspired by Marx’s theory, as revisited through Bourdieu and... Read more

Introduction: What is to be done in the age of disaster?

Preamble: the "metastructural turn"

 

Part I: Capitalism and the State, the World-System and the Class World-State

1. The Modern Ecological Class Structure

1.1. Capital as a social-ecological fact

1.2. Competence as a social-ecological fact

1.3. The "fundamental" or "popular" class: the class of the "common people"

 

2. Class Violence and National Violence

2.1. The nation-state and its regimes of hegemony

2.2. From the Nation to the System of Nations

2.3. The political intertwining of class-colony/gender

3. World-System, World-State, World-Nation

3.1. The Nation-State within the World-System

3.2. Beyond the World-System: the World-State

3.3. Towards the World-Nation?

Part II: Citizens of a World-Nation, Residents of the Planet

4. Social Domination Alone Is Destroying the Planet

4.1. The order of battle

4.2. Unthought aspects of productivism and consumerism

4.3. On the right and proper use of the planet

5. Only Struggles for Liberation Can Protect the Planet

5.1. Class struggles as ecological struggles

5.2. Gender and Global-South struggles as ecological struggles

6. The World-Nation, the Ultimate Ecological Community

6.1. The nation as the ultimate figure of the common

6.2. Humanity, the ultimate nation

6.3. A national politics for humanity

6.4. Epilogue: a community of the living?

Biography

Jacques Bidet is a former professor at the University of Paris-Nanterre, France, and the founder of the journal Actuel Marx. Throughout his research since the 1980s, he has been developing a theory of modern society and history known as a “metastructural theory of modernity”, mainly inspired by Marx, in the light of both Althusser and Habermas.