Tactics and Practices for Un-Making Capitalist Modernity

Source

• Table 1. Theories and concepts and their significance for the disentanglement of processes of unmaking of capitalist modernity and the making of post-capitalist realities

• Source: * (Un)making in sustainability transformation beyond capitalism. By Giuseppe Feola , Olga Vincent, and Danika Moore. Global Environmental Change. Volume 69, July 2021, 102290 [1]

Typology

By Giuseppe Feola , Olga Vincent, and Danika Moore

Destabilization

(Sustainability transitions)

The ‘process of weakening reproduction of core [socio-technical] regime elements’ such as routines, technical capabilities, strategic orientation, and mindsets (Turnheim and Geels, 2012, p. 35)

Weakens the reproduction of core elements of capitalist socio-technical regimes (e.g. technical capabilities for the increasing exploitation of human and non-human life, strategic orientation towards efficiency). Allows cultural, technical and strategic diversification and experimentation (e.g. as related to modes of exchange outside of the market, responsible technologies or strategic orientation towards sufficiency).

Exnovation

(Sustainability transitions)

A ‘conscious decision to phase out technology or practice, to decommission it, and to withdraw the corresponding resources and use them for other purposes’ (Kimberly 1981, p. 91)

Abandons, purposively terminates, de-funds, de-routinizes and/or de-institutionalizes socially and environmentally destructive/exploitative technologies, and the production and consumption practices with which they are bound.

Allows political and financial capital to be invested in alternative technologies (e.g. low-tech, frugal technologies) and related practices, value systems (e.g. oriented towards care), and more horizontal power structures.

Unlearning

(Organization studies)

Consciously not thinking or acting in ‘old’ ways (Stenvall et al., 2018)

Abandons, rejects, discards from use, gives up, abstains from retrieving, questions taken-for-granted values, norms, beliefs (e.g. the idea of progress as endless accumulation and expansion), and operations and behaviour (e.g. over-production and -consumption).

Enables learning new cultural significations and routines (e.g. voluntary simplicity) and emotional re-attachment (e.g. with nature).

Sacrifice

(Political ecology)

Giving up something (now) for something of higher value (to be obtained now or in the future).

Entails voluntary reduction of consumption (voluntary simplicity).

Enables time and space for developing new cultural significations and practices, e.g. as related to non-utilitarian, non–market-based engagements with the self, others, and the biophysical environment.

Crack capitalism

(Social movement studies and atonomous geographies)

A refusal to perpetuate capitalist practices and organizational structures through its commitment to value, money, profit.

Entails the refusal to reproduce capitalist relations (e.g. labour, value).Rejects rigid classifications and totalizing abstractions (value, labour) as expressions of modern rationalism and capitalist form of domination.

Enables autonomy to enact forms of doing and organizing based on non-monetary values, self-determination, horizontal relations, and principles of cooperation and recognition.

Everyday resistance

(Peasant and development studies)

Everyday resistance refers to quiet, dispersed, disguised, or otherwise seemingly invisible acts of opposition, struggle or refusal to cooperate with abusive powers.

Questions, opposes and objects to abusive or oppressive power relations. Refuses to cooperate with or submit to oppressive behaviour and control (e.g. as it relates to the appropriation and exploitation of cheap nature and labour).

Enables autonomy and sense of dignity.

Resistance

(Social movement and political studies)

Resistance refers to varying forms of overt (visible) intentional actions of opposition, which are recognized by the targets of such opposition.

Questions, opposes and objects to abusive or oppressive power relations. Actively dismantles material and symbolic infrastructures of capitalist exploitation of human or non-human life; contests and prevents the physical or symbolic presence of organizations imposing capitalist institutions and relations.

Defends spaces of diversity and autonomy.Reinforces alternative subjectivities through collective action.

Refusal

(Decolonial/indigenous and cultural studies)

Refusal is the rejection or negation of an imposed and taken-for-granted definition of a situation, subjectivity and/or social relation. Micro (individual), meso (collectives) Abstains from, stops, and/or breaks exploitative and/or alienating relations (e.g. labour relations). Rejects (taken for granted) consent to, e.g. definitions of progress as endless accumulation or consumption as only political space.

Affirms freedom to redefine subjectivities, problem definitions, histories; thereby provides alternative basis for social recognition, empowerment and reconfiguration of social relations on the ground of, e.g., principles of care, democracy, autonomy.

Delinking

(Decolonial and cultural studies)

De-linking from the colonial rhetoric of modernity, which must be conceived as simultaneously capitalist, and denouncing the pretended universality of a Western and European episteme in which capital accumulated as a consequence of colonialism.

Uncovers hidden assumptions, rejects/resists claims to epistemic privilege and universality of Western thought.Disengages from the logic and rhetoric of modernity and capitalism.

Allows claiming and relinking with diverse (e.g. relational) logics and types of knowledge (e.g. non-scientific) and a redefinition of subjectivities, citizenship, democracy, human rights, human and non-human nature, economic relations.

Decolonization of the imaginary

(Degrowth)

A radical and profound cultural change of the foundational imaginary significations of modern capitalist societies. Micro (individual),

Refuses complicity and collaboration with the ideology of development, e.g. as in the abstention from the use of environmentally destructive technologies, or the limitation of space allotted for advertisement.Cognitively subverts and critiques economicism and the imperative of endless economic growth.

Enables the autonomous determination of new imaginaries (e.g. alternatives to development).

Defamiliarization

(Decolonial and cultural studies)

The ‘removal of an object from the sphere of automized perception’ (Shklovsky, 1925, p.6).

Ruptures, de-automatizes, dis-habituates automized perception, e.g. as related to cultural constructions of value and worth. Emotional detachment and critical reflection. Disrupts common sense, e.g. as related to taken-for-granted production-consumption routines and utilitarian value systems.

Allows critical awareness, emotional re-attachment, and establishment of new cultural meanings."

(https://sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0959378021000698)

More information

See: Un-Making