To transform everyday life, it is necessary not only to undo class, sex and race relationships, but also to reconnect with matter and rurality. The contribution makes it possible to crack the capitalist and patriarchal system.
In Political dailyGeneviève Pruvost presents daily life as a space-time which gives matter to ecological, feminist, anarchist and anti-capitalist criticism. Starting from his ethnographic study of ten years on French rural alternatives, the sociologist (bronze medalist in the Cnrs) explores the links between feminism, ecology and subsistence through a dense and diverse theoretical corpus borrowing from the sociology of the daily life of Henri Lefebvre, from feminists of subsistence such as Maria Mies, Veronika Bennholdt-Thomsen, Françoise d’Eaubonne, Vandana Shiva, Silvia Federici and the anarchist prospects of Murray Bookchin and Henry David Thoreau.
Attention modes and ways of living
The book installs a cyclical rhythm, which instantly echoes the rhythm of the subsistence, by sowing tracks which end up becoming evidence to transform everyday life and “ switching from criticism of capitalism to act By identifying the available room for maneuver (p. 291).
The daily life thus politicized promotes the close-shop of ecological and feminist analysis, since it centers the factory of things-small hands-and materials that allow subsistence. If modern daily life is alienated because of the ignorance of the matters that populate it, the exploitation relationships it implies and the abstraction in the territory and in the vicinity it imposes, the inter-subsistence represents for pruvost an alternative allowing both to reconnect with matter, to defeat the reports of class, sex and race and to anchor in the earth. The criticism of everyday life then places at the heart of the analysis the production of the inter-subsistence and proposes the creation of breaches in the capitalist and patriarchal system.
By relying on the writings of sociologist Henri Lefebvre, Pruvost defines the daily life of peasant societies as “ A mode of attention to the world (P. 8). This world includes others, non-humans, ecosystems: to use the terms of the forestry Aldo Leopold, it involves the biotic community. This perspective is close to the concept of care Developed by Joan Tronto in 2009, which refers to the attention and the concern deployed historically by women for the care of the world, while distanting it through a frontally material approach aimed at the destruction of private/public separation from subsistence work. The daily life of peasant societies and rural alternatives is “ A world of presence In which the subsistence factory is visible and shared (p. 9).
The analysis of the transformation of the daily life of peasant society to the industrial-capitalist company then makes it possible to highlight the multiple losses-of the subjects, knowledge, households-which are played in the modification of modern social organization. This first implies the invisibilization of matter and its factory, not only in the domestic sphere, but also through the international division of labor and externalization of costs. The transformation of society also means a loss of anchoring in a given place (p. 7).
Modern households are above ground, interchangeable and are part of a society of anonymous representative democracy where expert knowledge and professionalization reign. What could prove to be as a release of interconnection relations which prevailing in peasant societies is, according to Pruvost, the hidden side of an organized dispossession of the vernacular knowledge which allowed to “ do things with it ». The dispossession of subsistence knowledge promotes the expansion of the market, the confinement of workers and the dispossession of land in common (p. 12). For Ivan Illich, to whom Pruvost refers, “ Capitalism waged a war against subsistence ».
Women between Amazons and Housewives
According to the feminists of subsistence and the Marxist feminist Silvia Federici, the enclosure of the land and the advent of capitalism are not only a war against subsistence, but also a war against women which will allow them to be confined to the domestic sphere. Paysan societies based on households allowed women an independence that will be confiscated from them, in particular through the witch hunt which locked them in the role of labor breeders for industry. “” Capitalism is based on the replacement of peasant communities and households with heterosexual conjugal couples (P. 143).
What subsistence feminists allow us to enlighten here is the process of housewification which starts by the destruction of peasant societies. Women then confined to the private sphere must provide the necessary workforce for capitalist production and create living spaces allowing workers to support deleterious working conditions. Women are not only there to do the reproduction work in the private sphere ; They are also the actresses all designated to feed the capitalist system as household consumers.
The feminists of the subsistence and the eco-feminists offer counter-recovery in which the advent of patriarchy and capitalism are dated. According to them, the first companies were matrilineal and organized around the common subsistence (p. 100). These counters are subversive in that they allow you to imagine new social organizations: “ If patriarchy has a specific beginning in history, it can also have an end (P. 101).
Direct democracy and breaches
What Geneviève Pruvost present is a feminist reading of the decrease which is anchored in the subsistence. This is one of the major contributions of this work, which develops a different perspective of decay while re-registering its main themes: the commons, the sharing of subsistence, autonomy in the face of the State, interdependence, direct democracy, good life, well-life, the decline chosen and the modification of social and political organization.
The perspective of subsistence allows Pruvost to offer tracks from anchored, experienced and located points of view, especially in the experience of women who reject the totalitarianism of capitalism and which invite you to reclaim subsistence practices outside the gender roles built in the domestic sphere. To get there, some tactics must be used – to distance fear of rape, put into action “ King Kong Theory From Virginie Despentes, reincarnate the strength of the Amazons that Françoise d’Eaubonne invokes. It therefore proposes to explore the power of women in the very creation of the conditions which allow life or which produce life itself.
Another contribution from Geneviève Pruvost is to have put forward an eco -feminist literature around the subsistence, which has largely passed under the radar in the French -speaking world and which makes it possible to weave together the confinement of women in the private sphere, in the role of breeders and consumers. This weaving makes it possible to formulate a criticism of consumption whose solution does not go through better management, but through total reorganization by replacing the work-consumption with subsistence work.
This reorganization offers concrete tracks and makes it possible to envisage the construction of breaches. A depends of the capitalist world. The room for maneuver are to be identified, in particular through a geopolitics of the loved one: “ Start where you are (P. 292). Thus, everyday life is the rocking space, the place of the emergence of contradictions and their resolution (p. 33).
The strength of the book is the refusal to prioritize acts of resistance. The rearrangement of a collective daily newspaper of the Subsistence of current rural alternatives has nothing to envy to urban political mobilization and militant meetings. This is the action of thoughtful political ideas and social criticism. Geneviève Pruvost rather identifies a continuum of struggles that benefit all those who dream of another world or the “ pluriot (Escobar), the urban activists who can occasionally join the alternatives and vice versa. For Pruvost, “ subsistence work is a direct action on living together and well-being “: It allows you to finally listen to the living (p. 330).