Throughout the millennia of human history, there have been a multitude of cultures with their own customs and traditions, giving life on Earth its extraordinary palette of colors, encounters, and potential adventures. The world offered a true diversity of possibilities, and with a little courage and determination, it was entirely possible to move from one to another and stay there as long as one wished, thereby greatly enriching one’s experience of different ways of life.
Then came capitalism, with all the pettiness of its conception of a world determined primarily by market logic; an ideology which, like an octopus and its tentacles, in other words its active categories, ended up enclosing almost all of the planet’s territories and their populations, human and non-human, within its power and mode of operation. This drastic shrinking of the world and its imagination, in order to bend it to the unlimited constraints of the pursuit of financial profit and “growth”, has had, among other effects, the disappearance, the almost systematic destruction, of all original cultures, leaving at best a folkloric representation for the use of tourists seeking a form of exoticism to distract them from their dreary existences. Naturally, this wipeout of real diversity was done in the name of so-called progress, while carefully obscuring the fact that this progress was nothing more than the unilateral advancement of the market system driven by Capital. It is only fairly recently that the concept of “diversity” has undergone a curious reversal of meaning, from a cultural expression to an affirmation of purely individual choice. Belonging to the cultural forms of a territory or to the particular history of a human group has been replaced by the predominance of the self. At first glance, it would be possible to see this change as a new gain in freedom—provided that one does not perceive that this apparent freedom is entirely in line with the views of market liberalism and its conception of the world. This individualism effectively leaves you alone to face the rigors of a system that is competitive by nature and survives only through competition. Your particular diversity is thus opposed by all the diversities that everyone claims for themselves, resulting in a dizzying increase in divisions throughout the world. This freedom of some, opposed to the freedoms of others, quickly demonstrates that it can take on totally totalitarian forms and practices in seeking to impose itself—which will ultimately trigger equally brutal counter-reactions in the name of their own diversity.
As we can see, this is a dead end, the very dead end to which the organizational form of capitalism is leading us at an accelerated pace. This is obviously not to deny the necessity of individual freedom, but rather to question the context in which it can take place in order to make sense. If, in the name of pseudo-freedom, we were to embrace the logic of the law of the strongest or the loudest, there is no doubt that this would result in a large number of losers and, ultimately, an increasingly unliveable form of society. In the capitalist world, no one is really unaware that it is the power of money that ultimately determines the extent of your personal freedom, your ability to live comfortably in the diversity that suits you; and too bad for the others. Let us therefore return to the fundamental question of the context in which individual freedom is supposed to be exercised, by going back to basics, namely the type of social organization in which it is to take place. Capitalism couldn’t care less about the wishes of this person or that person; what it wants is to continue to reign and for its societal form, based on widespread separation and blind growth, to continue to prevail. This is why the underlying individualism of contemporary proliferating “diversities” does not bother it in the least and can only serve its interests. What it does not want at any price is the emergence of a common opposition in which broad sections of the population become aware of everything that unites them in their desire to get rid of this society and in their urgent need to build a completely different one.
The struggle for any kind of freedom can therefore only make sense and be recognized as such if it is able to integrate into a dynamic of the Common where this freedom or its equivalent is recognized for all and not just for a privileged few who, as they say, have the means.
There is no point in being unique if you are unable to take your place among others.