Slowdown in growth, climate crisis, geopolitical tensions, deepening inequalities: the imbalances of contemporary capitalism are accumulating. Should we seek to correct these imbalances from within, or consider deeper transformations? Political scientist Laurent Jeanpierre, who leads the collective work “Postcapitalist Worlds” (La Découverte) and economic journalist Romaric Godin, author of “The Three-Body Problem of Capitalism: On the Authoritarian Management of Disaster” (La Découverte) are guests of Guillaume Erner.
Capitalism: A Historical Formation
Laurent Jeanpierre explains: “Capitalism is not natural, it is a historical formation that had a beginning and may eventually have an end. Fernand Braudel said that, until the 19th century, material life dominated. That is, the link between production and consumption was not mercantile. Mercantile exchange was only a very thin layer. Capitalism, in essence, is the thickening of this layer, the imposition of the mercantile link between production and consumption. The corollary of this historical process is the formation of a new type of men who invest for profit.”
The birth of this new type of men, explains Laurent Jeanpierre, “gradually leads to the empowerment of this preoccupation for profit and this connection between economic activity and the immediate satisfaction of needs.” Post-capitalism therefore consists of bringing production and consumption closer together, indexing production to the satisfaction of needs. Laurent Jeanpierre thus emphasizes that “the question of capitalism is not simply an economic issue but concerns a set of existential dimensions: family, environment, health, etc.”
Moving Beyond the Unsustainability
Romaric Godin makes a similar observation in his book: according to him, there are three fundamental crises in contemporary capitalism, which are the economic crisis, the ecological crisis, and the anthropological crisis. The anthropological crisis is produced by the way capitalism constantly creates new needs and imposes these needs on the lives of men. This results in a falsification of social life by making people’s lives solely dictated by the needs of capital, i.e., what capital imposes on individuals in order to create profitability. This causes a whole host of disasters in human, individual, and social terms, in the world of work, etc.
For Laurent Jeanpierre, these crises indeed reveal “the unsustainability of capitalism.” According to him, to move beyond this realization, one must “begin to envision what a different mode of organization could be,” with one of the central challenges being “attention to needs,” and more precisely “to real needs, which are not produced by the imperative of profitability, but are those of daily life: housing, health, quality of life.” This implies “relocalizing some productive activities and collectively deciding on productions that best meet our actual needs.”
Crisis of Legitimacy
Asked about the link between ecological crisis and capitalism, Laurent Jeanpierre recalls that “the works of ecological economics show that green capitalism, which China is probably at the forefront of currently, will absolutely not solve the environmental crisis, nor improve living conditions.” Romaric Godin also claims that, in his view, “capitalism today is in a phase where its own survival requires the destruction of the environment.”
For Laurent Jeanpierre, “there remains today a liberal culture in decomposition, extremely powerful conservative cultures on a global scale,” we are witnessing “a crisis of the legitimacy of capitalism: most people know that capitalism is in crisis, but do not know how to get out of it.” Romaric Godin points out that liberalism is “also attacked by itself” since in many countries, “criticisms of the rule of law come from people who claim to be liberal”: “to defend accumulation, they are forced to deny their own liberal conviction.”
However, Laurent Jeanpierre reminds us that there are pockets of post-capitalism “experimenting already with forms of life detached from these capitalist social relations.”
