lThe term “consumption”, taken from the Martinican economist Michel Louis, evokes the internal destruction of a society by a global economic model that, without apparent restrictions, often through consumption, erodes its cultural, political and social foundations. The play of sounds, mixing “material consumption” and “existential consumption”, summarizes one of the capitalist dynamics of contemporary societies. The French “overseas system”, to which Martinique belongs, is no exception to this rule. It is the home of mercantile capitalism that adds to a residual colonial matrix that our decades of resistance have failed to undermine.
The overseas system generates an uninhabitability that, despite frequent convulsions, continues to persist. This mixture of capitalism and colonialism feeds on itself and on the corrections made to it within its sole logic. Its inevitability is internalized by everyone: from the French leaders (from the most reactionary to the best “rebels”), through our most exasperated decolonial activists, to those who, now, raise the “expensive cost of living” to the sun. square of this matter.
Traditional forces of resistance (political thought, union virtue, cultural action, etc.) have been frozen in corporate pragmatism or the positions of obsolete brown blacks. The independence reason clings to a Manichaeism of the 1950s: its decolonial slogans are nothing more than incantations whose proven ineffectiveness suggests a secret renunciation of any real change. Internal political reflection (assimilationist, autonomist, independence) no longer allows us to understand the mysteries of globalized capitalism, its dominance of our imagination or the inclusion of the foreign system in this regrettable clockwork mechanism.
Amplified precariousness
The residual colonial matrix is still there, mummified in a neoliberal predation that imposes the preeminence of the economy over human existence, blocks lucrative sectors and rewards the lobbies that frequent European ministries and corridors. He completes the picture with a reification of life, ranging from the poisoning of soils to the erosion of agricultural spaces.
Under the rule of capitalist religion, material, cultural, intellectual, spiritual and ethical precariousness has only increased. In the overseas system, they are exacerbated by the residual colonial matrix: economic preeminence of the same, racial ghettos, institutional disempowerment, forced isolation in our cordial geography and, above all, denial of any existence to our composite people-nations, emerging of the disasters of colonization.
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