It was the year 2023. Of the world’s eight billion people, one and a half billion lived in countries we called “developed market economies”. We were part of that world. On average, we consumed over 250 litres of clean water per day per person—and over 3,000 litres of oil per year. We had 2.5 children. Our households were contributing to the production of hundreds of millions of tonnes of waste per year. We were supporting destructive mass consumption and contributing to the devastation of the world. We knew this.
But . . . we bought Fairphones, the fair trade phones. To salve our consciences. To take responsibility, we favoured wholegrain bread over white bread, free-range chicken over intensively farmed, healthy drinks over sugary sodas, and alternative snacks over industrial crisps. We shunned the standardized comfort of hotels, we sought out “unique stays”, spent nights on straw, in tepees or forest cabins, we took training and workshops of all kinds: yoga—it goes without saying—and the whole gamut of organics for gardens. We signed up our children for music, for writing, for age-appropriate dance, we wore them in slings till they weighed 15 kilos and went with them to exhibitions on gender issues for the seven to twelves. We signed up for organic food boxes, followed a zero-waste philosophy and frequented refill stores—even though, for consumables like light bulbs, ink cartridges or dishwasher salt, we caved in to the convenience of supermarkets. We marched against fossil fuels when we weren’t burning them up driving from home to work, from house to hobbies, from town to country.
We weren’t like other people in society, we didn’t wash our cars at weekends, we didn’t watch TV, we hardly wore make-up at all, we eschewed glittery accessories other than those worn with discreet irony.
We belonged to the so-called upper professional classes, and our superior purchasing power made us willing customers of niche products; bit by bit we made sure that no one came to birthday parties toting tat from Shanghai sweatshops.
In the past five years, twenty million jobs had vanished from our markets, a quarter of them in Europe. Unemployment was exploding exponentially. What we called the gig economy was exploding too, and we used platforms like Uber, Airbnb, Netflix, BlaBlaCar and eBay. We printed tickets at home, did transfers for bills, took on more and more of the burden of other services ourselves, we rejoiced in the cost rationalisation that shifted work from companies to customers. Wages were still the main means of income distribution. Worldwide, while thousands of wage slaves were at work, farmers were killing themselves. While currents of capital swirled past us, we couldn’t fund our welfare states and our communities. Paradoxically, a plethora of goods surrounded us, produced by ever fewer workers—fewer of our workers, anyway.
We had to enter our details, every day, all the time; name, address, credit card number. We voted. We voted left. We couldn’t think who to elect, and could see only a hazy future. We talked about valuing diversity. About promoting inclusion. We found it a strain to talk to our elderly parents, with their conversation littered with hints of casual racism. Our contact with them was confined to entrusting our children to them one day a week. When the time came, we put them in homes. We were working women. We worked all the time. We juggled part-time jobs. We managed multiple contracts. Every now and then we said we were “swamped” but we knew how to plan, and we rationalized absolutely everything. We got things done, we never stopped getting better at getting things done.
Twice a year we went to the dental hygienist.
We knew that some raw materials had already become scarce. Much of the world’s electricity came from increasingly poor quality coal. Sooner or later, extracting and transporting it would be done at a loss.
We knew that to keep on going, and to keep on borrowing, mining companies had to continually expand the territories they exploited. Despite oil prices fluctuating, credit was replenished as if by magic and—against the rising tide of debt—propelled the development of trade, air, sea and road traffic, technology and arms. Our ageing nuclear power plants were no longer safe, and our high hopes for green alternatives to these dangerous sources were confronted with new dilemmas: mining for rare metals, essential for the manufacture of both wind turbines and solar panels, was becoming energy-intensive in itself.
Soil, groundwater and air pollution were reaching critical levels. The greenhouse effect had increased, resulting in prolonged heat waves, floods and storms.
Insects, birds, earthworms were vanishing faster than we could keep track.
Now we knew that once we crossed a certain line, the tipping point was coming for our ecosystems and the biosphere would become hostile to us. When we looked at geophysics, the great cycles of nature, of water, carbon or nitrogen, everything was already out of balance. The problem was that we did not believe it. We did not believe what we knew. There was just the constant, irrepressible anxiety; our life expectancy was higher than ever and yet our anxiety was harder and harder to quell.
To preserve this life as we knew it, were inequalities essential? The people thrown to the wolves in society, who we only dimly perceived, had they been selected by some superior being, fingered by fate, or was it their fault? Did they get what they deserved, these under-producers, benefit scroungers, bone idlers, or, when it came to foreigners, those culturally or even genetically inferior beings?
In the end, how would our children live, and what would they live off? Did the presidents, engineers and senior managers know more than we did? What were the real goals of governance or science, apart from a perpetual postponement of the increasingly insane threats that hung over our heads?
What was our expiry date?
Our leaders issued soothing speeches to the masses. We had our heroes, our icons too. We gave birth at home or in birthing centres, and we did without epidurals. We found essential oils essential, and we used Mooncups. We made memories. We said live in the moment. Talked about letting go. Mindfulness. We bought vegan cookbooks and particularly enjoyed hosting brunches.
Every three months or so, we would hear from one of our friends that she had cancer. Research blamed pesticides, pollution and pressure at work. No multinational company paid the price, with the burdens shifting to states with declining revenues. As for products deemed dangerous, our governments were gradually losing the ability to ban them.
The social security systems that had existed were no longer working. Everywhere, private insurance was introduced. The premiums drove households beyond precarity. At the same time, expensive add-ons guaranteed artificial organs, unlimited prostheses, cells cultivated in animal organisms, while around the world, millions of displaced persons fled dictatorships, famines or wars, forced onto the roads, parked in camps, stuck along borders.
As far as we were concerned, we wanted to show how charitable we were, and to demonstrate our good will. All the same, we worried about the number of new arrivals and took it for granted that our immigrants were unaware of the realities of the societies they had sought to join, idealizing access to security, freedom and above all comfort and purchasing power—ultimately dreaming only of consuming over 250 litres of clean water per day per person, and three thousand litres of petrol per year, just like us.
In any case, those whose lives were not directly threatened would be refused hospitality. In reality, we knew that such a situation was untenable without violence. And deep inside we still understood common sense: between us and any other inhabitant of the Earth, no matter the minor divergences of culture or the power of marketing, the difference was minimal.
When we tried to cobble all this together into political opinions, we just kept repeating our mantras: it was our duty to dismantle the structures of poisonous populism which appealed to the disenchanted millions, the unemployed, the working class and overextended middle classes by offering groups to exclude, groups to hate, somewhere to vent their anger. It was quite simple: we condemned the extreme right. And we condemned the walls erected at the borders. We also condemned the arms trade, restrictions on press freedom, the ivory trade and, while we were at it, the over-vaccination of Western populations.
It was urgent, we declared, to seriously question the capitalist system, the belief in unchecked growth, our lifestyles of hefty carbon footprints. But, hell, every time we tried to address the issue of power, we ended up down the same dead ends: nothing to be had from our two-faced governments, who pushed green values with the one hand while encouraging unrestricted consumer freedoms with the other. If an elected official had ever tried to turn to an acceptable transition, to push for prosperity without growth or to defend our commonwealth, the lobbies would have stripped her leverage bare.
As for citizen protest, though we belonged to international cyber-activist organizations and signed eight to twelve petitions a week, we had long doubted that there was ever any possibility of a large-scale revolution.
What had become of our faith?
Soaked in Christian culture, we were actually more attached to tradition than we thought, and celebrated several annual rites. Some of us had been baptized, but we did not baptize our children. We were saddened by the decline of the churches and the deterioration of their heritage, but we did not believe in God.
Sometimes one of us would state her beliefs: I believe that after death there is something else. We loved graphic novels. Directors’ cuts. Visual and performing arts. We went to festivals and some of us worked in cultural management. Others painted, were professional photographers or supported “people excluded from cultural capital”.
We passionately discussed the growing influence of video games. We talked about artificial intelligence, data connection, virtual realities, trying to imagine when our bodies would become superfluous and what the rise of the machines would really mean.
It was a great relief to think, that in a world that was destroying itself, our creative impulses could safeguard our integrity.
In retrospect, we would think that nothing (not artistic creation, not philosophy, not entertainment, not signing online petitions) should have seemed as important to us as the fight against giant, resource-guzzling Big Business. And that the first thing should have been to identify the foundations of this system which, by severing the ties between our actions and our moral conscience, prevented every one of us from assuming her responsibilities.
When we thought back to our lives in those days, one of the only things that made sense to us would be the brunches.
After the devastation that was to come, we would understand how much being together counted. Being together, and being the comfort of other women.
Barbara
“We will therefore tell our tale in the feminine plural. Including where there was only one woman present, and the feminine shall include the masculine.”
Christelle and Barbara were on the floor, hunched over this resolution written in one of their very first texts. Barbara was troubled by the idea that this stance would end up sounding artificial; language is not only our means of expression, we are its products; so it followed that it was impossible to abolish its inherited rules without renouncing what she and Christelle, and all the others, were hewn from; even out of a spirit of equality you could not do so without running the risk that, in the end, their epic verses would not actually touch anyone emotionally.
“Okay: Olivier has come round to this feminine plural. And it’s true: he’s not the only one. Still, it creates a distance. It holds some people back from being completely emotionally involved, I can feel it, and I’m not just talking about men.”
Christelle retorted that, since their return to French-speaking territory, everyone had seemed, if not to identify with, at least to be interested in what they had read aloud. But Barbara wasn’t paying attention, she read on:
“This is to assert our collective beliefs, and to dismantle any patriarchal domination.”
Shit, she thought, this is a load of hot air, what’s the point. She fell sullenly silent. Would her silence push Christelle to have a go at her?
Would she start asking her if, while she was at it, she might not actually think that only a man could pass on their work, read it so that it would be heard, and really understood?
But Christelle had just breathed out a long yoga breath, and, by tacit agreement, they had returned to the question of how they were going to transmit their work.
Testimony Song V
. . . But we fought back. Against our attackers, and against a fellow comrade if she held views we disagreed with.
We believed we had to negotiate with the militias. We believed that those who wanted to negotiate with the militias were fucking collaborators, treacherous whores. We argued, yelled at each other in meetings, called each other airheads, illiterate bitches, stuck-up intellectuals with our heads in the sand, Care Bear do-gooders. Yes, some days we created a pretty bad atmosphere, bad vibes, and felt that we couldn’t stand the sight of ourselves any more.
But we apologized to each other, managed our conflicts, found compromises. We always debated, and we sometimes expelled those whose ideas became incompatible with the spirit of our communities. We started philosophy workshops. At the same time, we had to hoe. Had to dig with the broadfork. Chop wood. Peel potatoes, wash our clothes as best we could and try to patch them up. Pluck ducks, gut turkeys. Treat fevers. Pore over our encyclopaedias of medicinal plants, the classifications of local edible lichens, put the snails we had collected to ooze in buckets, or try to tenderize slug flesh by beating it, while explaining to our teenagers why there were no more factories making smartphones or stores where we could find them, and how the situation required them to get up right now and pick the beans.
Some still found time to wax their legs.
Gradually, our methods led to better yields than on farms where forced labour prevailed. Even fragile and poorly armed as we were at the beginning, we continued to expand our networks. All the time, new communities were being formed; every time the militias crushed us, we grew back, free and tenacious as weeds.
The citizens under the regime noticed that there were independent units, producing better than in the camps. When we ventured into controlled areas, we never missed an opportunity to talk to people, reminding them that they were born free, with the right to organize themselves in their own way. Our ideas circulated, we were proving ourselves: it was possible to link groups together in a spirit of equality, to guarantee them sustainable prosperity within an equitable framework. Our backpacks were full of handwritten or letterpress-printed tracts, which earned those who were caught whippings, imprisonment, torture—but we kept the faith.
Among the militias themselves, doubt was growing. Men who, in pledging allegiance, had felt welcome and fraternity among their ranks, realized that they would never own anything. Everything they were given was a debt, payable in discipline and submission, and any booty that passed through their hands went up the ranks. Realizing the advantages they would find in joining an egalitarian community, they deserted.
Here and there, others preferred to let us carry on, getting their supplies from our yield, by buying or extorting tributes. In the end, we negotiated: we would be left alone, and in exchange we would hand over contributions taxed on our products.
When the agreement worked, we could begin to invest the energy we had needed for our defence in other things: building up reserves, collecting seeds, trading our surpluses—with the militia turning a blind eye—across regional, increasingly less clandestine circuits.
In other places the agreement didn’t work. We were attacked again and again in spite of everything; we had to retaliate, we had to organize ourselves into patrols as well.
Refugees were always knocking on our door.
We took them in, we turned them away.
Some of us were among those being pursued, asking for shelter, begging for someone to take pity on them and hide and feed them, being refused, narrowly escaping deportation—or not escaping deportation at all.
Taken by force to the borders, or fleeing there ourselves out of fear of persecution, we sometimes had no choice but to migrate. Far from home, we became those foreigners who understand nothing of the languages spoken around them. We wandered through territories as ravaged as our homelands. We were mistreated at customs posts, interned, ruled over by new militias.
The regimes seemed the same everywhere: totalitarian and paramilitary.
Some were put to work by well-off peasants and subjected to a shameless system of debt and obligation: once they had provided us with lodging or a bowl of soup, we had to work for them, to wear ourselves out without earning anything in their piggeries, to suck their cocks.
When we escaped from them, it was to encounter war and famine elsewhere. Hoping to find some refuge, we found no welcome. The natives did not understand why we did not wear veils. Why we weren’t wearing make-up or earrings. Or a wedding ring when a man accompanied us, or on the contrary: why were we travelling without a husband when we had these children with us who seemed to be our own?
Did those babies we were nursing have fathers? And why did we continue to speak our own languages, instead of adapting?
We were frowned on. Looked down on. Excluded. We were shocking. We were mocked. They made us sleep with the animals, they threw rocks at us. We got sick. Some died, far from home.
Winters followed autumns. The trees lost their leaves, the ground froze, there was no fuel anywhere.
We lit fires. We shivered. We huddled together; children were born.
Winters were followed by springs.
