“The broadest and most unlimited democracy”, demanded in 1917 by the militant Rosa Luxemburg within socialism, would remain the remedy for the inertia so widespread on the present international left. This is what emerges from the testimony of his admirer, the American geographer Julie Graham (1945-2010), who died prematurely, but esteemed by the most progressive intellectuals. Audrey Laurin-Lamothe sees the feminist flash there.
In Building the Post-Capitalist Economy, sociologist Laurin-Lamothe, trained at Laval University and now attached to York University in Toronto, shakes us up, along with her colleagues Frédéric Legault and Simon Tremblay-Pepin. The three researchers claim that Julie Graham and another feminist geographer, Katherine Gibson, have redefined, under the common pseudonym of JK Gibson-Graham, “the task of the left” so that it “goes beyond the simple change of the economic system”. .
“We must transform the whole of society”, insist the authors, explaining the “revolutionary requirements”. They point out that “not only have the most theoretical and general models been developed by men, but they are also the ones that have been the most debated”. They specify that “on the contrary, the women’s proposals are mainly based on concrete experiences”.
Perhaps the time has come, as André Gorz enjoins us, to think backwards and to try to define, from the outset, what we are fighting for and not just what
According to Audrey Laurin-Lamothe and her collaborators, JK Gibson-Graham, this pseudonym, aims to correct “capitalist, patriarchal and colonial domination” by “our interdependence with regard to others and the planet” threatened by global warming . For the sociologist Laurin-Lamothe, in particular, capitalism has relied too much for 30 years “on the financialization of economic relations”, on their “transformation into securities likely to be the subject of speculation”.
In addition to the model given under the pseudonym of JK Gibson-Graham, the authors discuss, deciding between the pros and cons, no less than six laborious and unconvincing models. But the memory of Rosa Luxemburg, crippled and isolated in a male environment of phrasemongers rather than thinkers, alone rehabilitates the weakened socialism against which the militant stood up.
She defended peace instead of the First World War, opposed the authoritarianism of Lenin and the machismo that gnawed at the left. This earned her to die assassinated in 1919 by outraged warmongers and even to have an uncertain burial. The tragic defines Rosa Luxemburg who, as early as 1913, announced financialization as the ultimate phase of capitalism.
Audrey Laurin-Lamothe and her collaborators have been following in her footsteps, alerted by the horror since the global financial crisis of 2008. Global warming is aggravating the evil which, over the years, has gone from abstract to physical and burns us.