While he observes the disorders of the world from the small village of Bas-Armagnac where he settled a few years ago, after a career in teaching in Montpellier, Jean-Claude Michéa continues to attack the “flight in before suicidal” of financialized capitalism.
Denouncing the cult of growth and the economic “logic of limitlessness” which is at work today, he judges that it would be urgent and imperative to understand that the field of action of capitalism, for a long time, has not been limit more to the economy: it must be considered as a “total social fact” (according to the expression of Marcel Mauss), at the same time economic, political and cultural.
Jean-Claude Michéa thus becomes the tireless critic of the contemporary left, which seems to him more incapable than ever of taking into account the failures of the capitalist system. A left which seems to him to be subject, in France, to a “cultural liberalism” imported from North America. Better: almost all left-wing movements have, according to him, renounced any real criticism of capitalism.
In his eyes – and he is not the only one to think so – the driving forces of this “new extreme left Netflix” with a “woke” flavor are now devoting most of their militant energy to “societal” or identity, rather than implementing a coherent critique of the overall dynamics of the capitalist system. In doing so, they leave the way open to all the “Dr Strangelove of Silicon Valley” and to supporters of a growing far right.
After in particular The Orpheus complex. The Left, Ordinary People and the Religion of Progress And The mysteries of the left. From the ideal of the Enlightenment to the triumph of absolute capitalism (Climats, 2011 and 2013), the essayist and philosopher, who draws inspiration from Marx, Proudhon, Orwell and Pasolini as well as from Guy Debord, renews and deepens his thinking in Extension of the domain of capital. Notes on cultural neoliberalism and the misfortunes of the left.
The heart of the book consists of the transcription of an interview given by the author in 2020 to a small radical Gascon magazine, Landemainsto which he added notes, and sometimes even “notes of notes”, in order to clarify, contextualize or update his remarks.
Born in Paris in 1950, this somewhat unclassifiable thinker with an assumed populism heard the hour of putting it into practice. And it is from the heart of the Landes, where he cultivates his garden, that he alerts us against the dehumanization of the most essential human relationships (teleworking, distance learning), calls for preserving “a minimum of social cohesion and common life worthy of the name” or condemns “the current process of accelerated destruction of the environment”.
It should not be surprising that the criticisms addressed to him in France, which often come from a certain left that has difficulty accepting being pointed at, make him a reactionary and accuse him of playing into the hands of the extreme right — where we do not hesitate, moreover, to recover some of his ideas.