a handful of oppressors in control

A year after the ecologists’ primary which saw her emerge, Sandrine Rousseau continues to trace her ecofeminist furrow. With the authors Adélaïde Bon and Sandrine Roudaut, she publishes a manifesto at Le Seuil, Beyond the Androcene. Sixty pages, plenty to delight its conservative detractors. Something to reinforce, too, an increasingly promising story with a new generation of activists.

It is therefore a history of the “Androcene”, a neologism which replaces the Anthropocene to link the patriarchal system, capitalism and climate change. Assuming that men, more than women and the dominated classes, bear the responsibility for the disaster. The reader adept at an old-fashioned universalism, that of the man with a capital “H” creator of progress, will stop reading there, the curious will continue his trip to ecofeminism.

In this era, write the authors, “a handful of oppressors, different according to place or time, have exploited and enslaved the multitude for their own interests”. Exploitation of nature, of women, of slaves and then of the proletariat, this is the trio that underlies this definition of patriarchal capitalism. A story rich in shortcuts but which has the advantage of opposing a clear dismissal of the idea that technology could, on its own, represent a solution to climate change.

“No more question of enjoying at the expense of others”

Reading the economist Karl Polanyi (1886-1964) in support, the authors are not afraid to attack the sacrosanct Enlightenment, to hold a critical discourse on science: “Linné, Buffon, Lamarck or Darwin theorized and put nature into boxes. This research has contributed to seeing it no longer as a whole, coherent and balanced, but as a sum, an assembly of parts. By classifying, we have lost sight of the essential: the links, the interactions, the balances. »

The rapid demonstration highlights examples drawn from feminist research. Inspired by a reading by academic and feminist activist Silvia Federici, the book presents the witch trials at the end of the Middle Ages as a symptom of this capitalism in preparation which alienated land and women.

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Aware that they will alienate “boomers”the authors oppose the “let’s enjoy without hindrance” of May 68 a new “cardinal rule” : “No more question of enjoying today at the expense of others. » without ever saying “degrowth”they offer “to transform the illusion of purchasing power into a right to live in dignity, to have access to basic goods and services”.

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