living. Our master’s voice tells us – from within our own colonised minds – that all this is quite normal, commendable, necessary, that it is simply “real life” to which we have to adapt and succumb.
This lack of consciousness is one of the veils that prevent us from understanding our society – the others include any inadequate critiques of our contemporary society which do not embrace this fundamental problem of a mercantile mindset. One of these is Marxism, says Lapierre. He points out that Marx’s analysis of capitalism came very much from within the capitalist system itself and thus remains trapped inside the mercantile cosmovision: “In fact, Marx never challenged the form of exchange with which he and his contemporaries were already familiar. He grasped its workings, and criticised them, but he didn’t criticise its spirit, or barely so”.
Lapierre concludes that the class theory of society simply does not explain the depths into which our contemporary civilization has sunk. He insists that authentic opposition to capitalism can never arise from within a broadly capitalist mindset and can never merely amount to attempts to reform capitalism, to make it nicer and more liberal or to place it under the control of a different group of people.
“It’s not about winning power and taking over the state, but about fighting power, opposing any project coming from above or elsewhere. It’s on the terrain of resistance to a capitalist project – mines, dams, wind turbines, monoculture, factories making consumer goods, high-voltage power lines, motorways, high-speed rail lines, etc – that you can judge the reality and validity of a struggle, its authenticity. All other forms of action – fights against poverty, for decent wages, for jobs, for access to goods, for shelter, for culture, for fuel, for education, for citizenship, for democracy etc – hand victory to the mercantile world.”
Although Lapierre’s book both inspired and informed me, I have to say that I do have some significant differences with more theoretical aspects of his analysis. Notably, he takes great exception to the concept of “nature”, which he regards as the outcome of humanity’s separation from the world around it: on one hand there is humanity, the subject, and on the other hand there is an external object called “nature”.
While this is indeed one way in which the word is currently deployed, it does not have to be interpreted in this way – take, for instance, the slogan much loved by French eco-activists which declares that they are not defending nature but are, instead, “nature defending itself”.
Do we have to invent an alternative “acceptable” word to describe life on the planet, of which humankind is a part? For me, it makes sense to reclaim the use of the word “nature” in its fullest sense rather than throw it away because it has become somehow contaminated by misuse.
Lapierre extends his antipathy to the word “nature” by rejecting the concept of human nature, which he says is used to “enslave man”. For him, the human being is characterised by “a brain practically empty of all content at birth” and he adds: “The human being is a concept”. For Lapierre, society is everything, it seems, and the cosmovision of the mercantile society of today completely shapes human beings living within it, in the same way that the cosmovisions of other cultures past and present shape those living in them.
This does not ring true to me. If absolutely all our thinking comes from the society in which we are raised, how can we ever come to think outside of that society’s mindset? How did Georges Lapierre, for instance, ever manage to find himself on the outside of the mercantile cosmovision, criticising it so effectively?
If I was born as pretty much a blank piece of paper and mercantile culture’s assumptions were subsequently written all over me, how was it that at a certain point when I was young I realised that something was badly wrong with that same mercantile culture? Even if my initial response was unfocused, what exactly was there inside me which had remained distinct from the 