Why did you become an anthropologist?
Because I asked myself questions about the human being and I still ask them.
What is it to be human?
Human beings are human beings because they have ambitions. Homo sapiens is an invasive species. Since it exists, it has expanded throughout the planet. And, within the species, Rousseau said that since the first impostor surrounded a piece of land with a fence and proclaimed “it is mine” the problem began.
What is the problem?
I was talking about private property, which was not absolutely consubstantial to the species, but on the contrary: the natives of America, whom I know well, had no notion of property…
Why does this property seem inherent to the fact of being human today?
Because the elites of the species make us see it that way and turn ownership into their way of accumulating power over others and over the planet and transmitting it. But the planet has its limits and can no longer satisfy that drive for infinite accumulation, which is why it now endangers all humans.
Were private property, the family, the State… replacing the tribe?
And empires were born: we anthropologists try to explain this chain of meanings from micro to macro power. And now we are witnessing a change in the contemporary imperial system.
In what sense?
I think the American empire is in decline…
It may decline, but it doesn’t just fall…
Paul Kennedy explains it with a simple proportion: when maintaining an empire costs more than what you extract from it, it goes into decline. And the US is in decline for that very reason: it spends more than it earns.
Its debt is gigantic, but there are also many willing to finance it.
That American decline has given way to the emergence of China, and Russia is still there…
Russia is in terms of GDP and population, in comparison, much more decadent.
But it is decadent with a large nuclear arsenal and precisely the empires in decline are the most aggressive and dangerous for world stability.
Does the imperial transition define this era?
I would say that above all we live in a utopian crisis that defines our way of being on the planet.
Aren’t we better at being more pragmatic?
I subscribe to Paul Ricoeur’s definition of utopia: it is the struggle in the present for the meaning of the future.
Why do you identify with her?
Because it means that if you don’t have your own utopia, you will end up living to realize someone else’s, even if you don’t realize it.
And are we realizing the utopia of Musk and the technobillionaires right now?
The utopia of some, in effect, is the dystopia of others. And their billion-dollar fortunes at the cost of ruining everyone’s planet is their dream and our nightmare.
If it is so disastrous, why don’t we rebel?
Gramsci explains it by defining “the reason for acceptance.” On the one hand, the repressive apparatus of the states and, on the other, propaganda: the publicity of the ideology that makes us accept as normal what is not and we settle for giving up something better.
But environmentalism against the exploitation of the planet exists on the right and on the left.
It is an example of what Gramsci said: those in power manage to turn a proposal for the common benefit and to stop the degradation of everyone’s planet into propaganda to increase their money and power…
In what sense?
Faced with the unlimited exploitation of the planet and the resources of all for the benefit of the monopolistic capitalism of a few, we proposed sustainable development for shared prosperity that would preserve the resources and life on Earth for all and for our children and their children.
How have they been stopped?
They have partly appropriated the environmentalist discourse, which we already defended in the Porto Alegre Forums, but leaving it in marketing, in mere advertising that does not question anything: we call it greenwashing, greenwashing, but that does not question the greatest danger that threatens to our species…
Wars, the depletion of resources…?
Because the elites do not give up accumulating resources without limits. That is what greenwashing does not question: they say that they do everything very sustainable, but they continue to exploit everything themselves without giving up an iota in their greed until leaving us all without resources.
Should we look for degrowth?
It is another error of environmentalism: we cannot excite people by offering regression, but rather progress, but shared and sustainable. It is our utopia, and if we do not fight for it we will live so that a few can realize theirs, which is everyone’s dystopia.
