“Without prior design, globalization will have contributed to reducing the inequalities between the majority of people living and working on a good part of the planet”, writes the Israeli historian Shlomo Sand in the conclusion which he describes as “melancholic” of his shock book A Brief Global History of the Left. He deplores that the wave is, by a tragic inconsistency, “almost entirely diverted from the social question”.
Born in 1946 in Austria, established from childhood in Israel, Sand is professor emeritus at the University of Tel-Aviv. His popular origins and his intellectual experience allow him neutrality with respect to Anglo-Saxon, French and German historiography. His essay is translated from Hebrew by Michel Bilis.
Very critical of Israel, Sand declares from the outset: “Not far from my home lives a people whose fundamental civil, political and social rights have been denied for 54 years. He admits: “It is from there, among other things, that my permanent and biased attention to social history and its political expressions comes from. The Palestinians show him that he must be wary.
For Sand, because of globalization and the industrial relocation it has brought about, the West suffers from growing social inequality. Emerging countries, on the other hand, are experiencing a momentum towards equality. But the historian observes that it is a question of equality resulting from rapid and flashy prosperity rather than the secular evolution of socio-political thought.
He specifies that, “during the last forty years, the incomes of millions of Chinese, Vietnamese, Thais, Indians or Indonesians have experienced a substantial increase”. The fact remains that the emerging countries have hardly suffered, unlike the West, the influence of nature on the economy.
Sand knows how to detect a serious flaw, on this subject, among the most progressive. He explains: “There is no serious awareness of the ecological consequences of industrialization in the thought of Marx and Engels. Rousseau, Fourier and Proudhon loved nature and feared the rise of industrial production and its possible damage to the environment, but the Marxist tradition has always praised productivism. »
In addition to environmentalism, the West’s contribution to the rest of the world remains feminism. Sand makes the often overlooked link between the essay The second sex (1949), by the French Simone de Beauvoir (1908-1986), and the books of the American Judith Butler (born in 1956), theoretician of the notion of “gender”. He rightly sees the “theoretical approach” of the second as “the most significant since the writings” of the first.
One thing is certain, without union with nature and without a definition of woman beyond biology, equality will quickly become an empty word.
Excerpt from “A Brief Global History of the Left”