Critique De La Destruction Creatrice

This work addresses the relevant issue of the increasingly urgent need – given current ecological constraints – for a productive system revolution, despite our lack of the necessary tools to engineer this type of change. Twentieth-century wars created the illusion that destruction could give rise to creation. Today, human beings are at war with everything: their biosphere, their fellow creatures, and themselves. We are seeing more and more destruction and less and less creation. There is no longer any automaticity or logic in the transition from one to the other. Growth is translated by numbers, not by durable goods. Creative destruction has become a death wish.A critique of this must be made, while acknowledging that criticising the productive system no longer involves looking into production intensification, but rather its sustainability, or even its “generativity”; i.e., its capacity to pass on its positive results to posterity. To date, critiques of the productive system, whether Marxist or liberal, have remained confined to production: the point was to free the latter from its shackles without substantively questioning the very act of production. Production was a whole without alterity. Nonetheless, this book demonstrates that every productive system necessarily relies on its “other,” namely on production’s non-productive conditions – which I call “improduction” – and on the technical means to maintain and expand them, inasmuch as they alone can ensure sustainable development.