Seven Ethics Against Capitalism. Oli Mould
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Название: Seven Ethics Against Capitalism

Автор: Oli Mould

Издательство: John Wiley & Sons Limited

Жанр: География

Серия:

isbn: 9781509545971

isbn:

СКАЧАТЬ (or may not) choose to enforce on its employees. People even talk about corporate ethics, which are a tacit ‘agreement’ of sorts that companies and costumers will enter into when transacting. None of these are the ethics that this book will focus on. In fact, these ‘ethics’ are the antithesis of the kind of ethics that will be explored.

      The ‘problem’ of capitalism is far from unique – it is global in its imposition – yet an ethics that aims to resist the myriad of injustices and inequalities can follow the same immanence outlined by Deleuze and Guattari. In other words, opening up spaces to allow recognition and indeed a celebration of the different forms of living justly in this world, beyond the totalizing hegemonic force of capitalism, is an ethical act.

      As discussed above, thinking the commons as planetary entails thinking them ethically, in that they are always immanent and unfolding; they are always in a state of becoming the commons in conjunction with a community; the act of commoning. Indeed, Gibson-Graham, with their articulation of commoning, invoke a Deleuzo-Guattarian reading of becoming, arguing that it aids in producing a ‘generative ontological centripetal force working against the pull of essence or identity’.28

      What is important to factor into this discussion, however, is that the actualization of this reading of ethics is always related to an event. The ethics are not predetermined or imposed; an event always happens first. In other words, for ethics to have a grounding or indeed something to be ethical towards (other than complete nihilism), they are tethered to, and unfold from, a pre-existing ‘event’. As Deleuze has argued, ‘ethics is concerned with the event; it consists of willing the event as such, that is, of willing that which occurs insofar as it does occur’.29 But just want do we mean when we say ‘an event’?

      An event is when something happens that is so extraordinary that it changes the entire way everything – society, politics, economics human and nonhuman behaviour – is. More than that, though, an event is creative. It brings into existence entire ways of being in the world that simply did not exist beforehand. Some of these exist only as possibilities, or possible possibilities. An event emerges unexpectedly as the ‘old’ world ruptures, bringing new subjects, new truths and radically different experiences into existence, and shifts how that world works in its entirety. Deleuze would argue that events are ‘eruptions’ within a collective that calls for its complete transformation; in his words, they ‘overthrow worlds’.30

      There are many revolutionary episodes throughout modern history that have been revered as exemplar events: the Paris Commune, the Russian Revolution, the Chinese Cultural Revolution, the 1968 uprisings in Paris and, more recently, the Arab Spring.31 Events are indeed revolutionary (rather than evolutionary) precisely because they change the whole makeup – governance, behaviour, attitudes and politics – of society. The ‘new’ things that an event creates, then, are new voices for those whose voices have been silenced, hope for those whose hope has been oppressed, and opportunities for those made destitute. Events therefore are radical acts that bring new forms of justice into what is an unjust world.