Mutual Aid. Pablo Servigne

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СКАЧАТЬ all more simplistic Darwinisms (which Darwin himself did not share), is that in terms of evolution the key to success is not the struggle for life, but rather mutual aid.

      Or, to put it more precisely, in the words of two theoretical biologists of evolution, David S. and Edward O. Wilson (oh yes! Edward Wilson, the inventor of sociobiology, who, as we shall see, has radically reversed his initial position, to the dismay of his followers and disciples): ‘Selfishness beats altruism within groups. Altruistic groups beat selfish groups. Everything else is commentary.’¹ And, in the order of living beings, from bacterial societies to human societies, cooperation is hierarchically superior to competition.

This discovery, here meticulously argued and documented, constitutes an essential contribution, one that is simultaneously theoretical, ethical and political, as these levels are always closely intertwined. Where have we got to, actually? In the social sciences – in economics, of course, but also in sociology and in moral and political philosophy – the dogma that has dominated since the 1970s and 1980s is that, in social life, everything (actions, norms, institutions, beliefs, etc.) is explained by the interplay of conflicting interests, conscious or unconscious. This is the same belief that has dominated in biology – in sociobiology in its earliest guise, and in the theory of the selfish gene. This is what I call the axiomatics of interest, or utilitarianism.²

      This hegemonic belief lies at the heart of neoliberalism. It was established even before rentier and speculative capitalism began to triumph on a planetary scale, and it has allowed this capitalism to flourish. In fact, the two things are inseparable. If we are to affirm that the only effective and therefore desirable mode of cooperation between humans is the market, we have to convince ourselves and as many other people as possible that we are nothing more than Homo œconomicus, ‘mutually disinterested’, as the star philosopher of the late twentieth century, John Rawls, put it.³ It then becomes easy to take the next step: if the only thing that drives us is our personal interest, and if the first or ultimate form of this self-interest is the lure of monetary gain, everyone is free to try to enrich themselves by all possible means, as fast as possible. There must be no more barriers to check the continued expansion of financial speculation, even at the risk of an inexorable rise in corruption and even crime.

After the work of Matthieu Ricard and Jacques Lecomte, which had opened a first breach in this dogma, Mutual Aid comes at just the right time to help us deconstruct this hegemonic belief. In the field of social sciences, there were only a few of us, in MAUSS,⁴ who opposed it over the past thirty years or so, and pleaded for a general social science not based on the utilitarian axiomatics of interest but on the discovery of the anthropologist Marcel Mauss in his famous work The Gift:⁵ the discovery that, at the heart of the social relationship, we do not find markets, contracts or exchange, but what he calls the triple obligation to give, to receive and to give back – or, if you prefer, the law of reciprocity. What a breakthrough it is to discover with Servigne and Chapelle that, mutatis mutandis, this law does not only concern the human world, but all living beings! Everything they tell us fits perfectly into the ‘gift paradigm’ that has gradually been developed within the framework of La Revue du MAUSS.

      It is not difficult to deduce the ethical and political implications of this. Nothing is more urgent now than to fight excess, hubris, the thirst for omnipotence fuelled by neoliberalism that is leading humankind to its demise. So far, one of the main reasons for our inability to emerge from planetary neoliberalism has been a certain lack of theoretical resources. But it is also the lack of a political philosophy in the broad sense, one that would allow us to transcend the great ideologies of modernity: liberalism, socialism, anarchism and communism. It is this doctrine that is being developed by those world-famous authors who recognize themselves under the banner of convivialism.⁶ Servigne (who is one of these authors) and Chapelle have made a decisive contribution to this. A great example of mutual aid.

      Alain Caillé

      Emeritus Professor of Sociology, University of Paris

      Ouest Nanterre-La Défense, editor of the Revue du MAUSS and founder of the convivialist movement

Notes

      1 1. D. S. Wilson and E. O. Wilson, ‘Rethinking the theoretical foundation of sociobiology’, The Quarterly Review of Biology, 82, 2007, pp. 327–48 (p. 345).

      2 2. This is the matrix of economism: that is, the belief that only economics matters. Since the 2000s, in social science, the fashion has swung towards a general deconstructionism. This involves showing that all existing norms and institutions have been constructed historically, and are thus not in the least natural, but arbitrary. Hence it is tempting to conclude that we could, or even should, deconstruct them. It would not be difficult to prove that this theoretical posture represents the ultimate avatar of a general economism.

      3 3. In A Theory of Justice (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1971), Rawls did indeed write ‘mutually disinterested’, but this is not the same as ‘interested only in themselves’; the French translation cited by Caillé reads ‘mutuellement indifférents’, which has a slightly more selfish feel, explaining why Rawls is here being seen as more of a neoliberal than he actually was. (Translator’s note.)

      4 4. For MAUSS, see below, Introduction, p. 6 and n. 3. See also www.revuedumauss.com and www.journaldumauss.net.

      5 5. M. Mauss, The Gift: Forms and Functions of Exchange in Archaic Societies, trans. I. Cunnison (London: Routledge, 1990).

      6 6. The Convivialist Manifesto (www.gcr21.org/publications/gcr/global-dialogues/convivialist-manifesto-a-declaration-of-interdependence), signed by sixty-four independent and committed authors, soon joined by dozens of others around the world, was published in 2013 by Éditions Le Bord de l’eau. It has been translated, abridged or in full, into over ten languages (including Japanese, Chinese, Turkish and Hebrew). Its first merit is to state common values which can be universalized, and on which intellectuals from very diverse ideological tendencies have been able to agree, ranging from the far left to the centre-left, or centreright, or with sympathies lying even somewhat further to the right. This convergence is essential, since we will only emerge from the hegemony of neoliberalism if a broad global consensus can be achieved. One of the central theses of the Manifeste (inspired by Marcel Mauss) is that the main political problem is to allow humans to ‘cooperate by opposing each other without killing each other’. Reading Servigne and Chapelle, we discover that this is exactly the problem to which living beings in general have found an answer.

IntroductionThe age of mutual aid

      Do you know this story? It’s a myth from the 1980s, but it’s said to come from a much more distant era. Once upon a time, there was life – a ruthless arena where millions of gladiators fought and killed each other. No favours, no quarter, no pity. Aggression had become an essential asset; it was a matter of survival. In this world, intelligence – sorry, cunning – was used for getting ahead of others, or, better, for thrashing them. You had to watch your back. ‘May the best person win!’ was the constant cry. The large ate the small, the fast ate the slow, the strong ate the weak. This was how it had been since the dawn of time; so said the sages. If you weren’t one of the winners, tough luck. Besides, you were probably a little bit to blame … ‘Damn it! Get up and fight! You need to win! To succeed! Don’t you get it?’

This myth dies hard. They say it’s still being told today, all over the world. Told to employees, to encourage them to climb СКАЧАТЬ