Pluriversalism: Towards a European and Global Politics of Conviviality

Over its history, capitalism has appeared in many guises: as Manchesterism, as postwar welfare statism, as authoritarianism in some post-communist countries, and as our current globalized neoliberal financial capitalism. What all these historical varieties of capitalism have in common is that they were dependent on utilizing resources that are almost for free. This was possible through exploitation on a grand scale: of the colonies in the Global South, of the labor-power of women for the purpose of social reproduction, and of nature. Ostensibly, capitalism is based on economic exchanges between equals, but the liberal ideas of equal property rights and equal chances of participation in the economy obscure that the parties involved in most of these exchanges are in fact very unequally endowed with power. We are currently experiencing a fundamental crisis of the Western world order: 500 years of European and 100 years of American dominance are coming to an end. Western colonialism is giving way to a growing influence of other powers, especially China. For many Europeans, the logical consequence of this development is that we must do our utmost to save our privileges and our wealth. But this will neither be possible, nor is it really desirable, for ecological reasons as well as reasons of social justice. We need a completely new societal vision, one that leaves behind economism and the externalization of social and ecological problems and aims for convivialism instead. So which ideas could we resort to in this endeavor? As we have seen with Mauss, it is possible to draw on old European practices of giving in order to create a solidarity economy. Beyond that, Western political thinkers seem curiously unimaginative— perhaps because, as the Canadian author and activist Naomi Klein writes: [i] n the West, there is little popular memory of any other kind of economic system. There are specific cultures and communities— most notably Indigenous communities— that have vigilantly kept alive memories and models of other ways to live, not based on ownership of the land and endless extraction of profit. (2017: 220) So if we want to counter “capitalism’s matrix” (2017: 220), we have to look elsewhere and learn from the Global South.

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