(CAPITALIST) WAY OF LIFE
Santiago Álvarez Cantalapiedra
We often declare that we strive for a fair and safe space to live in that accommodates a way of life that fulfils human needs without overstepping the planet’s limits. A space that not only allows us to live, but to live a good life. However, it seems impossible to balance prosperity with respect for nature unless we change our “way of life”. The concept of “way of life” helps us to understand the extent to which this holds within global capitalism.
Overstepping the limits of a safe, environmentally sustainable human space was driven in the past by socioeconomic factors that shaped the processes and structures leading to the underlying ecosocial crisis. Behind this is the capitalist industrial civilisation, with its structures, institutions, actors and power relations responsible for driving material and energy flows in constant expansion, necessary to their operation and social reproduction, defining the type of exchanges -the social metabolism- we engage in with nature. Thus, as we refer to “way of life” we need to remember that this is characteristic of the capitalist industrial civilisation, which has radically redefined social and gender relations, as well as the trading system between society and ecosystems (Álvarez Cantalapiedra, 2019 & 2023).
While shaping society, defining social relations and exchanges with nature, the members of this civilisation participate -albeit asymmetrically- of these same dynamics. In other words, there is but one way of living shared by all participants in this capitalist industrial civilisation. But we are also aware of the broad variety of levels and styles of consumption shared within any given social group or class. This range of lifestyles is infused with inequalities of class, gender, ethnia, or the cultural and identity preference of individuals and social groups. Nevertheless, these differences and inequalities should not distract us from remembering that -at least in western societies- they all stem from a single lifestyle structure (Álvarez Cantalapiedra & Di Donato, 2020).
As a consequence, the “way of life” concept must not be confused with any given social group’s “lifestyle”, but invokes patterns of production, distribution and consumption, and to the cultural imaginary and subjectivities firmly rooted in the everyday occupation of a majority of the population. This may be understood as a hegemonic way of life, that is to say, broadly accepted and politically and institutionally established, and with an overwhelming influence on people’s ordinary daily business. These practices and behaviours are generalised throughout society and form part of everyday life (in how one dresses, moves, and settles throughout the territory), but are materialised unevenly according to the position occupied by each group within the social hierarchy and the available opportunities. This overall structure -and not only the specific social (collective and individual) differences that arise within the group- allows us to assess the unsustainability and the high price in terms of quality of life exacted by the current forms of ruling social existence (FUHEM, 2023).
We might add, as do Brand and Wissen (2021), that such a way of life is not only hegemonic, but also imperial, thus underscoring the bond that exists among these hegemonic everyday practices, state and business strategies, international geopolitics and the ecological crisis, insofar as it involves access to resources, space, job skills and the planet’s sinks through the economic rules assured by certain policies, laws and exercises of power (both in the violent form of coercive force and in a merely persuasive form). Colonies’ emancipation from the metropolis opened the door to new geopolitical practices in which direct control over a territory through military force and colonial rule was replaced by new forms of domination based, this time, on economic rules and relations -commercial, productive and financial- among formally independent and sovereign countries. The use of force, however, was never dismissed, and has maintained its intimidatory function and become a last resort to fall back on in the event of serious opposition to hegemonic interests. The definition of a new post-colonial international order, successive waves of globalisation, the transnationalisation of business corporations, and cultural imperialism have contrived, by other means, to salvage certain aspects of the old colonial relations under a new guise, favouring alliances among internal and foreign élites that allow the appropriation and incorporation of local wealth and resources –both natural and cultural– to transnational circuits (Álvarez Cantalapiedra, 2019).
In sum, “way of life” does not reflect a uniform social reality, but a highly contradictory dynamic among social groups, whose structure and functioning are still characterised according to categories such as class, metabolism and social reproduction. This holds true because it none other than the capitalist way of life (or, if preferred, the capitalist industrial civilisation), and it redefines the social relations and exchanges with nature on a global scale. Departing from this idea of a contradictory social structure resting on certain social and natural conditions, we perceive how capitalist social groupings reproduce when they take root in everyday practices and reasoning. Antagonisms between classes and social groups thus become structurally integrated (and, occasionally, partially deactivated) in a single way of life by means of the reproduction mechanisms at play in everyday living (each time we eat, travel, populate a city or occupy a territory). Lastly, the adjective imperial is used to emphasize the global, ecological and gender dimensions of this way of life. Imperial living is inseparable from its colonies, with which it forms a single reality, like the two faces of a coin. It is, therefore, a reality marked by hierarchies, domination and subalternities and, in the current context of extralimitation, also by expulsions and exclusions. In the logic of multiple centres/peripheries that encases the imperial way of life, Brand and Wissen uphold that “key to life in capitalist centres is the decisive manner in which societies are organised somewhere else, especially in the global South, and how they establish their relationship with nature. This, in turn, is the basis for guaranteeing the transfer of labour and nature from the global South necessary for the economies in the global North. And in turn again, the imperial way of life in the global North contributes decisively to the hierarchical structuring of societies somewhere else. We have deliberately chosen the expression ‘somewhere else’ for its vagueness”. (Brand & Wissen, 2019. p. 28). This clears the path to understanding that ‘somewhere else’ may not be limited to geographical locations, but biopolitical situations in which everyday living is subjected to a state of dependence for structural reasons imposed by global capitalism. That the notion of ‘colony’ goes beyond a territory administered by a foreign power is addressed in the paper by María Mies and Vandana Shiva (2015), in which they speak of women and nature (not only of neighbouring countries) as the present-day colonies of global capitalism’s way of life.
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