A-Infos (en) France, OCL CA #337 - "Understanding capitalism to get out of it" - Review of the book by Jean-Luc Dupriez (L'Harmattan, April 2023) (ca, de, fr, it, pt, tr)[machine translation]

Jean-Luc Dupriez (aka Jacques Dubart) is a libertarian Communist. He was 
an activist at UTCL from 1979, then a member of Alternative Libertaire. 
He participated in the creation of the UCL which he left after the 1st 
Congress because in opposition to the new line which broke with 
platformism and the centrality of the class struggle. He is now active 
within the Libertarian Communist Platform. ---- This book is intended to 
be an activist tool for understanding the current world, contemporary 
capitalism, in order to better combat it. The author seeks, from a 
materialist point of view, to position "humans relative to the 
fundamentals of homo sapiens" in order to understand the sources of 
oppression and overcome them. In this, he joins the ambition of B. 
Lahire in his work "The Fundamental Structures of Human Societies" which 
we will review in a future issue of Courant Alternatif. These two books, 
however, have very different objectives. J.L. Dupriez's book is written 
in a didactic and accessible way, intended for people who do not master 
all the political concepts specific to revolutionary currents. This 
makes it a work that can easily be recommended to people who are not 
very political... but with some reservations.
The book is made up of six thematic parts. The first part is a good 
summary of what capitalism is, its dynamics and its current form. In the 
following part the author draws on recent research in ethology, 
anthropology and archeology to denounce racism, sexism, etc. The author 
explains how racism is largely a social construction resulting from 
political choices of the ruling classes . Likewise, on sexism, it 
reports in a simple and clear way how the current oppression of women is 
inscribed in the social framework of capitalism and shows how the fight 
against patriarchy existed at all times and in all places at the time. 
modern. The third part on social classes is intended to be educational. 
Drawing on sociological work, he characterizes in an illustrated manner 
the materiality and violence of class relations in today's world, 
convincingly contradicting all the discourses which assert that social 
classes and class struggle have disappeared. The penultimate part, on 
the ecological crisis, is very interesting because it gives different 
arguments to counter two ideas: 1/ everyone would be responsible for 
global warming on their individual scale; 2/ capitalism can adapt to 
avoid ecological catastrophe... with a relevant political critique of 
veganism. It shows that the ecological crisis is well inscribed in the 
development of capitalism and that we must therefore combine social 
struggles and ecological struggles. A final, very short part discusses 
religions from a revolutionary atheist perspective.
However, all these developments involve Science and we may have some 
reservations on this subject. In the introduction to this work, the 
author has a scientific approach which is intended to be opposed to 
scientism (which considers that science holds the truth), it only gives 
"a representation of reality... as coherent as possible with the facts 
known at a given time. If these precautions are thus taken in the 
introduction, it nevertheless emerges a form of adhesion sometimes 
without retreat to certain contemporary scientific theories on subjects 
where consensus does not exist. The lack of a bibliography at the end of 
the book does not facilitate access to the sources cited.
The work thus relies, in the long section on sexism and racism, on 
primates (bonobos, chimpanzees) to understand humans; there are 
therefore shortcuts that can be criticized (see the counterpoint to the 
book by B. Lahire). He also takes up, on the oppression of women, the 
thesis that it only appeared with the emergence of social classes 
(Neolithic). However, it seems increasingly consensual that man 
dominated women even in the Paleolithic, which does not mean that this 
fact is genetically or biologically determined[1]. Furthermore, if the 
author is right not to separate the biological from the cultural, he 
tends to give an overly biological reading of human behavior in the 
first chapters (sociability, hostility and violence towards strangers, 
etc.) and therefore emerge from contradictions between certain parties. 
The author affirms that "culture will modulate this behavior, to the 
point of being able to almost annihilate it" but the associated 
developments do not allow us to understand how culture could modify what 
seems biologically inevitable. Indeed, in the first chapters, the 
general impression emerges that biology dominates humans. However, 
things are much more complex as shown for example by B. Lahire.
These reservations having been made, ultimately, the work clearly 
positions itself in a libertarian communist perspective. It shows that 
class, sexist, racist oppressions and the Capitalocene are not 
insurmountable. He positions himself against the dominant 
postmodernist/intersectional current which leads to a multitude of 
separate struggles: class relations are central and they cut across all 
other systems of domination. He clearly advocates for universalism in a 
political way and therefore criticizes its use by the ruling class. To 
overcome capitalism, this requires a political fight... the subject of a 
second work to be published which will seek to provide answers to the 
question: "how to organize the fight to transform the world". We are 
therefore impatiently awaiting this second work because in substance, 
very occasionally in this first book, a focus on trade unionism emerges 
which could be open to criticism.

VR

Note
[1]See among others "The oppression of women, yesterday and today: to 
end it tomorrow!"» accessible on the blog "La hutte des classes" by C. 
Darmangeat

http://oclibertaire.lautre.net/spip.php?article4083
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