Letter to My Children and the Children of the World to Come

Raoul Vaneigem, Donald Nicholson-Smith

• Publisher: PM Press
• Year: 2019
• ISBN:
  9781629635279
• Topic: Philosophy
• Subtopic: Political Philosophy

Readers of Vaneigem's now-classic work The Revolution of Everyday Life, which as one of the main contributions of the Situationist International was a herald of the May 1968 uprisings in France, will find much to challenge them in these pages written in the highest idiom of subversive utopianism.

Written some thirty-five years after the May "events, " this short book poses the question of what kind of world we are going to leave to our children. "How could I address my daughters, my sons, my grandchildren and great-grandchildren, " wonders Vaneigem, "without including all the others who, once precipitated into the sordid universe of money and power, are in danger, even tomorrow, of being deprived of the promise of a life that is undeniably offered at birth as a gift with nothing expected in return?"

A Letter to My Children provides a clear-eyed survey of the critical predicament into which the capitalist system has now plunged the world, but at the same time, in true dialectical fashion, and "far from the media whose job it is to ignore them, " Vaneigem discerns all the signs of "a new burgeoning of life forces among the younger generations, a new drive to reinstate true human values, to proceed with the clandestine construction of a living society beneath the barbarity of the present and the ruins of the Old World."

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• Preface to the English-Language Edition
• Preamble
• A Change in Civilization Is Taking Place before Your Eyes
• The Old Nightmares Still Disturb Our Dreams of Renewal
• The Earthquake of the French Revolution
• The False Promise of Free Trade
• From Productivism to Consumerism
• The Illusion of Consumable Well-Being
• Consumerism Has Reduced All Values to Market Value
• The Revolution of Everyday Life
• Finance Capital: Money as Mains Sewerage
• For and Against Culture
• After Master Thinkers, Unthinking Slaves
• Populist Regression, the Culture of Nothing, and the Dumbing Down of the Masses
• Consciousness and Emotion
• The Intellectual Bloodstain
• Ideology: An Illness of Being
• The Man of Ressentiment: The Revenge of the Body Frustrated in Its Desires
• The Last Struggle: An Endemic War between the Party of Death and Commitment to Life
• A New Con Game: Ecological Neocapitalism
• What Is Most Lacking Is Awareness of the Self and the World
• Bidding Farewell to an Inhuman Past
• Disentangling the Thread of Life from the Past That Has Hidden It
• Love of Life Needs No Ethic
• Transcendence of Survival Implies the Birth of a New Kind of Life
• You Are the Children of an Endless Spring
• Fighting for Life Is Not Fighting against Death
• For a Festive Society
• Afterword by John Holloway
• Index
• About the Authors