Eva von Redecker: Revolution in Everyday Lives

In this episode of SystemShift, Eva von Redecker applies the lens of critical theory and feminist philosophy to challenge the notion that the current economic system is inevitable and offers insights into how we can begin to change it and build something new in its place. Redecker calls for a reevaluation of our assumptions about work, value, and care, and advocates for prioritising the needs of the most vulnerable in society. She envisions a world where the current system, built on a foundation of patriarchy, is dismantled to make way for a more just and sustainable economic model. Redecker shares her ideas on how we can reorganise our daily habits to save life rather than destroy it, and how we can develop an ecological notion of freedom that is temporal and regenerative. She also explores the concept of time as a category for understanding and valuing nature, including biodiversity and soil health.

Carl Schlyter: 
Welcome to System Shift, a podcast that explores new ideas and thinking for a sustainable economic future that prioritize the health of the planet and the well-being of all people, not just a select few. Today, we’re excited to welcome Eva von Redecker, a critical theorist and feminist philosopher who is doing ground breaking work in the field of economic and political philosophy.

Eva is a researcher at the University of Verona, where she focuses on critical theory, political philosophy and feminist theory. Her work is concerned with fundamental questions of power and inequality and how they are perpetuated by the current economic system. She is also interested in exploring alternative economic systems that prioritize the ecological sustainability and social justice. Her work offers insights into how we can begin to change the current economic system and build something new in its place. She argues that the current economic system is built on the foundation of patriarchy, and we need to dismantle this system in order to build a more just and sustainable world. Her work on feminist economics challenges us to rethink our assumptions about work, value and care and prioritize the needs of the most vulnerable in our society.

Eva sees the world as being a process of developing planetary ecology with the question of life being paramount. She writes about the revolution of the purpose of life and how we can reorganize our daily habits to save life rather than continuing to destroy it. Her vision is for capitalism’s wheels of fortune, to be replaced by a round blue planet inhabited by people who can determine their own direction of travel within its boundaries. Her work challenges us to reimagine our view on property rights and economic system and how to build something that is truly sustainable and just. She reminds us that the current economic system is not inevitable and we have the power to create something better.

So without further ado, a warm welcome to you Eva.

Eva von Redecker:
Hello, thank you so much for having me.

Freedom 

Carl Schlyter: 
Yeah, I think we can have an interesting chat about different topics, but when we talk a little bit now, you mentioned you’re actually just yesterday delivered a book script. So tell us a little bit about this new thing you’re going to do.

Eva von Redecker:
Oh my god yes, it was quite a delivery. That’s going to be a small book about freedom because I just found it somehow totally unbearable that with our current concept of freedom, it seems you can build motorways, but you can’t preserve the world. And the fact that the loss of certain very narrow privileges cuts into freedom, but the loss of the world doesn’t. I found that, I found that can’t be true and I also don’t want to part with that term. It’s an attempt to develop an ecological notion of freedom, which I think has to be temporal. It’s freedom in time and freedom of having time and freedom, freedom of having time that regenerates you. That’s what nature does, right? You have time where something lives and it allows something else also to live. I call that freedom to stay, to oppose it, freedom of movement, and also, I guess to provoke a bit. So that’s what the book’s about. And now I have forgotten everything about it because it’s written down and I mustn’t think of it because I can’t change anything anymore.

Soil and the idea of property

Carl Schlyter: 
But that actually sounds interesting. And the same goes actually for biodiversity. It really needs space and time to develop and prosper.

Eva von Redecker:
Yeah, actually the last chapter is about biodiversity. Especially of soil, partly based on George Monbiot’s new book, and I have this idea about,that the best way, if you want to have a philosophical abstract term to talk about nature, actually time as a very good category because all of nature is certain regenerate cycles so that this sort of cyclical time by something reproduces itself over and over again, certain species and you have very different lengths of you know, some mountains that have been there for 4 million years and then you have trees that are there for 300 years. And all of that is time. And we need to learn to read and understand that time that we are often destroying and upending without even knowing what it is, you know, why it is so much inbuilt and the essence of those things.

Carl Schlyter: 
Soil is an interesting thing. It’s an under appreciated microcosms of life

Eva von Redecker:
It’s amazing. I mean, so I grew up on a, on an organic farm, right? I grew up working the soil and also my sister studied agriculture and she knows much more about this stuff than I do where I’m stealing some of it. But the best way to think about soil is not stuff like a heap of sand or something. It’s actually a structure that was built by living beings. Like, for instance, if you have a wasp’s nest, it’s kind of it’s a super complex structure built from the excrement of that insect and that’s just one insect. But soil and the one meter of soil, you have like thousands and thousands of species cooperating together to build that thing that then allows to pass the nutrients from indeed the sun and the rotted materials, to the roots of the plants and without that there would be like nothing we could ever eat.

Carl Schlyter: 
And that brings us actually to another interesting aspect of your work,and that’s kind of the view of property and value. So if we continue with the soil analogy, so today, if you value a farmer’s work on the world market, just like the kilograms of something produce per acre and if you put a lot of pesticides and kill all this soil life or much of it, you can see that, oh, this is a productive farm. I get a lot of kilogram outputs, but this destruction of property or the destruction of the soil is not considered in the equation.

Eva von Redecker:
Yeah, no, not at all. I guess I want to say one thing about the farmer on the market. Of course, in Europe it’s also not even just that that kind of nicely capitalist evil where it’s just the price that determines how they treat the land. There is, we spend a lot of taxpayers money on the way that agriculture is done, otherwise it wouldn’t be profitable. Even though that’s the case, it’s not regulated to be really ecologically sustainable. So that’s spectacular. I think to get to the heart of modern and also capitalist treatment of the world, as long as we can actually stay with the soil, because in order to use something at maximum short term productivity capacity, you need to make it. So what philosophers, the Guillaume philosophers, sorry to bring up that old guy, called abstract means you take one thing and take it out of its context. So really in the original meaning of abstractions, you take something out, maybe a more normal part would be to say you extract it. You need to sort of extract, for instance, all the nutrients at a very fast pace out of the soil and just take the vegetables away on sidings and not return anything to the soil. But a lot of what my work is about is to say that that’s not something that can sort of automatically happen. It’s not like that the land lies there for you to just grab an extract. You need to make it usable or disposable in that way. The key driver in modernity for making things digestible to capitalism is property, because modern property has a very specific shape that no other society, also not pre-modern Western societies ever came up with. Not even Roman law. That is the rabbit hole that might not go into that is a debate about that. The idea about modern property is you can do whatever you want with it. So it’s an object that is like totally at your disposal, at your mercy. It’s something that you can treat at will and you don’t have to justify if it’s yours, you will not have to justify it to anyone. You can do it. It’s also great, right? There are some things with which we might want to have that freedom.

Soil is definitely not something that should be part of it. So and in order for you to have that total control, you of course need to know where it starts and ends, right? Because it’s clear you don’t have that over the whole lot. So I always explain the system we live in with kind of knives, are two cuts and property is the first knife. And that knife always cuts in a circle. It cuts out a thing from its surroundings so that that piece of land is yours and now you can do what you want with it and you can break through all those metabolisms, all the natural cycles, all the way that that piece of land is embedded in the entire ecosystem of the planet. You can just treat that as if it doesn’t exist. That’s the first cut like a cookie cutter, you just sort of get a piece out as if it was separate and then you start treating it, etc. Then it does get isolated, of course, how we treat ourselves, right? That’s an individual appears like you cut, you cut a circle around it and you belong to yourself. But everything else is kind of cut through. Then capitalism, of course, doesn’t just give people ownership.The whole thing is driven by seeking profit, and that’s, as it were now comes the knife and slashes the thing through in the middle because you want to sell something for profit. That’s a commodity. So that’s the one half that you then kind of try to get rid of for money. But there’s always a classic Marxist theory of capitalism I think don’t appreciate that enough. There’s always another half that you discard like you always kind of whatever you own, you split it and if you are a capitalist who wants to sell stuff, you always split it into that’s valuable and that that you treat as if it wasn’t there. For instance, emissions, right? Everything, every production process produces that waste. that are also in the last 200 years emissions so CO2, and that’s just treated as if it wasn’t there and that’s the other magic that property allows you to do. You can say, oh I try sell it or I dump it, it’s not mine anymore. That’s not something you can do, that’s not natural that you could do that with objects. So if you think you live in a shared flat or in a family and there’s a torn and rotten T-shirt that somebody left on the sofa, and then you’re like, Can you please, like, tidy your junk? Then your flatmate goes, Oh, no, I donated to you, it’s yours now. It’s not my junk anymore, you couldn’t do that. That would be absurd. That’s how our economy runs overall. It’s permitted by this function of property that you can control, but also discard it.

Waste, its value and ownership

Carl Schlyter: 
But also like this logic of even when you want to get rid of something in many jurisdictions, you’re actually not allowed to do dumpster diving to pick up something. Because even when you consider it as trash, it’s still yours.

Eva von Redecker:
Yes, exactly. And it mustn’t undermine this principle that you are cut off from any ways of sustaining yourself apart from the market. It’s part of keeping alive that dependency that you need to go to the supermarket and then rather buy some trash, some trash with the price tag on rather than just show in a way that there is so much affluence in our societies that could be used so that you could more effortlessly live without cash excesses. I think that’s one of the anxieties. And yes, of course, with the waste, because it’s still yours in the control sense, but it’s not yours often. I mean, obviously we now have some regulations, but the fact that they’re necessary shows that the default paradigm is total unaccountability. And then, you know, if you’re lucky and you have a government that sets some regulations, you also cannot dump everything into every river anymore. Of course not. But that needs to be specified. So you can always look for that you want to make money for the loophole that still exists so that you can in another way reduce your cost because that’s what capitalist companies have to do. They have to reduce their cost no matter how well wishing they are and how they would like to be careful and not dump things, they will then probably be outcompeted against somebody else who manages to produce the same stuff cheaper. So that’s this this kind of systemic character that drives the whole engine. And with the foodways, it is interesting that this is not ways that is just discarded into like oblivion, like the emissions, but that is still protected in some ways against theft. Eventually. I don’t even know the exact recycling or rather non recycling chain, but I mean a lot of that food, for starters, is plastic rot and that will and that somewhere was not doing good to the environment. Like this stuff doesn’t disappear. That’s the thing. If you look from the perspective of value, then the trash has no, it’s just kind of nonexistence discarded from the view of those cycles that we talked before, those I call them tides. So the metabolistic cycles of the biosphere, of all of life, then of course the plastic is there, the rotten food is there. And that is also not good for some animals that feed on it. Then there is the wrapping that is there. The micro plastic that gets washed around eventually everywhere. Very recent study that now is in all human milk and all rain. So it stays around and it has effects long after you can tell who the owner is, who you could hold accountable. And even that, what does it help? I mean, there’s nothing that one rich bastard could do to fix the problems that we now have a part of the tragedy when.

Carl Schlyter: 
Maybe not even a kind rich person would be able to do it. But I wonder.

Eva von Redecker:
I think some kind people, rich people, even what like one would like to try and it’s beyond the power. I want to just jump in there because I think it’s such an important difference to the classical outlook of a Marxist promise of revolution where what you have to redistribute is riches and using that means of production. So factories or platforms should be owned collectively so that they can begin with practically controlled. But that’s, that’s wealth, right? But we now live in a world where there’s so much waste and even toxic substances that also need to be well redistributed or rather kind of dealt with in a responsible manner that need to be, we need to somehow readapt that stuff as well. 

Property Rights

Carl Schlyter: 
I’m wondering when you talk about like the negative aspects of the freedom of property rights, is it enough? Would it be enough to regulate and control and set demands on owners of property? Or do we need a different conceptual logic to our view of what property means and is?

Eva von Redecker:
I definitely think we need a different paradigm of property that prioritizes the stewardship and the care for something over the sort of this project volition to do whatever. This old total Dominion is the juridical term. But, I have no kind of triumphant pride of a critical theorist who wants to say everything else that you try  is not good. You know, I prove to you how it’s all bound to. I mean, I think it’s that situation where at the moment, for instance, emissions are still rising every year. I would love to have a couple that at least pretend to be green. Then I will have a critique of how I think it will never managed to. But you know, we’re not even in that situation, it hasn’t even been appropriated our critique. I do think about property rights. We do need also drastic redistribution like the inequality of wealth in the world at the moment is staggering, like it’s far exceeding any feudal disparities. But we also, I think could with sort of intermediate steps, get used to a more caring attitude to objects you could regulate properties so that like, you know, slowly certain things become seen as absurd and illegal and other things are encouraged. The trouble is, if you make those small changes, they usually seem to people as if you just lose freedom. I mean, already, you know, you cannot cut your way into law, you cannot cut the tree in your garden if it’s bigger than 10 cm. But, you know, for a motorway, then a whole forests gets cut down. So there such an absurdity of who can do what. Still, if you make a kind of those small reforms, you often breed a lot of resentment. I sometimes think if you, if we did more drastic and courageous changes that really said, nobody can use their property in a way that harms the common foundations of life. Nobody can kind of even have property on things that are global commons. I think it would actually be easier to democratically decide on that then piecemeal, sort of, Oh, you must do this and you must do that.

Carl Schlyter: 
But what have been developing the last 400 years? And it’s a little bit this concept of, as you mentioned, the beginning, like property is mine to do what I wish with and the current clearcut forestry, for example, the general outset is of course I have the right to clear cut the whole forest and replanted with a monoculture that destroys biodiversity. That’s my right and any limitation to that right is a negative change to my freedom. How do you help this person to see that in the interest of general increased freedom, this is an illogical choice?

Eva von Redecker:
I think there are many other people who you should maybe help before that person, but I  would start by pointing out that this notion of property came up in the world. Over 300 years ago that had completely different assumptions about how our world was made up, right. That the concept of property that we have still enshrined in law and that I think also is indispensable capitalism was built under the assumption that there’s infinite space on like uncultivated space. That was, of course wrong then already. All that already presuppose was the possession of indigenous people. But there was this idea there’s lots of unused land. It’s not true at all anymore. The second idea cultivated land. The more intensively cultivated, the more productive. There was no idea that this the kind of clear cutting in order to grow something or have a monoculture forest that grows faster.There was no understanding that that could, over a longer time period, lead to the degradation. And this is I mean, Locke did know,and if you read him, he’s very concerned about things going to waste and rotting. He just thought it’s only perishable fruits that rot. He didn’t think that land could collapse. This just not in the signs of the day, right? Unless he thought the world was 6000 years old and given to us by God, right? We now know it’s over four and a half billion years old. Like that’s the evidence.

Carl Schlyter: 
The majority knows that.

Eva von Redecker:
Yes. That is also a problem. It depends on if the forest owner is also an evangelical Christian, then I would have a very different strategy than I would try to say, well, what incredible suffering to children and the future. At this moment I’m saying that there is no proper forest anymore. But also that often doesn’t help because if people care about I mean, there are lots of children suffering now, if it doesn’t move people to live a more like accept justice, then I don’t think why future generations should make them accept that unless they only think of their own grandchildren. And that already presupposes a division of the world to savor your own kind. Anyway yes, that’s that’s what I would say, that we have to try to justify property rights with regard to what we know about our current world. And I would also talk I mean, you know, a lot of the people that do damage I mean, I know farmers better than foresters, I guess they’re not like plowing the land because they they think it’s great that they exert their power over it. They know that they’re dependent on certain subsidies that also require that you till the land that you’re dependent on, as you  said, the very little price they get. So if you could kind of also restore some of their pride and their knowledge about the land and be like, okay, you’re relieved of all this. You don’t need to sell anymore. What would be the best thing you do in your land? I think some people would actually make surprising turns. So those systemic pressures of competition that I spoke about earlier, you need to lift them before you hold people accountable for what they doing.

Freedom, Power and Phantom Possessions

Carl Schlyter: 
What would you say about the knowledge about like the understanding that; if we give life more freedom, if we give biodiversity more space, if we give human interactions rather than transactions more space in our life, how would you talk about this as a freedom increasing force? Or is this intuitively understood, or do we need people help to guide this intellectual route?

Eva von Redecker:
Yeah, I think sometimes people intuitively understand if you are surrounded by kind of kindness and helpfulness, you feel freer because you can trust that this might go on. Then if you’re surrounded by resentful servants, where if you stop paying attention, I like to keep them dominated, they might rise against you. Right? So there is that. And also with nature. If you are in a garden where things grow kind of somewhat also by themselves and where you don’t have to all the time, like fight off the next catastrophic whatever insect or weather event there is a there is a certain sense of peace that I think has to do with freedom. But and that’s, of course, why in socialist tradition we always say no one is free until all are. If you show why that really is the case and not just a kind of moral law, then you have to say, well, that’s because even those who dominate are not free, because dominating is just one thing, and just being forced to keep doing the one thing isn’t being free. My specific turn would always be to say, look, think about it over a longer term. Think that you don’t want to just now be free and do whatever you can with your will. Like that’s as if you look geometrically from a bird’s eye view and that moment. What can I do now? Okay. Can I cut it down? No, I can’t get it down. Well, that’s less freedom. But if you think, well, what would it take for you to stay free? How? You can cut it down once, Then it’s gone, you know, How couldn’t you think that every species of that forest, that every every kind of tree that grows is something you can interact with? There’s so many more possibilities, feelings about possibility, right? So if you let other things live and let them live freely you can continue to interact and all sorts of freeways with them. That seems to me to be a massive increase of freedom. But I do think we have to on the critical side, when I talk about poverty and I talked about this individual that owns themselves, that’s of course, a fiction. Nobody can survive by themselves, but the trouble is that modernity has not just made the natural world ownable. It has also made some people ownable or partly ownable, some of that time ownable to others. Often then also those people were associated with nature, not because they were that was sort of more natural than any other human animal, but because they were propertied. So was nature. The drastic case of slavery where black people were really seen as proto property and as ownable by people in chattel slavery. Also, patriarchy has this effect that she’s not enslaved not the woman as a whole, but her reproductive capacities. So her the time that she puts into nurture also actually under classical marriage law, her labor power in her own right to own property, that’s like a parcel that you get ownership over. It’s really phrased in those terms at least in both the English common law and the Code Napoleon and as a husband you own parts. It means women are partly ownable and this kind of allows people to hide the dependency that they have on the outer world in this sovereignty. So I just own the woman she’s mine so she cares for me. But I don’t even need to admit that I’m dependent because it’s almost like it’s happening naturally. Or it’s an aspect of that object that I own that I get looked after, that makes none of the ends of this relation happy. But it’s kind of toxic and addictive and also maybe gives you that kind of fear that if that woman was free, she might not look after you anymore. And then who will? So and the same of that piece of land. If you couldn’t press all the productivity out of it any more, maybe you might go bankrupt because nobody will help you then. It’s capitalism. You know, somebody else takes over. So you have to, It’s really deeply ingrained, this kind of possessiveness. In my work I call it, when it’s not actual dominion anymore, where the law gives you the right to own somebody else’s time or even body, then there’s still this kind of sense of entitlement. They call it phantom possession. It’s almost like a phantom limb, it’s not there, but you feel the pain. So it’s phantom domination. You’re not actually entitled anymore to rule in that way over another person. But you still feel this urge to control. And a lot of what we see like the #MeToo movement, with the kind of pervasive racism and in white societies also in Europe, especially then anti-immigrant racism as well, where you have this idea as of some people were allowed to decide where other people should be, it’s like like an object that you put on this shelf or camp or that shelf. Like there is just this very ingrained urge to dominate like a phantom possession. And that’s mistaken as freedom. And I mean, that’s actually unfreedom because it ties you to a kind of hollow usurpation of other people’s lives. It makes you totally dependent. Also, fortunately then it is very shaky now because there is lots of counter organization. But that’s also a force one has to reckoned with. And so if you want to go back to this guy who wants to cut down, or it might be a woman, her for forest it depends on whether she’s really only seeking profit then ease the competition and she’ll probably treat the land much better. But if she also has a kind of fantasy of sovereign control and thinks of freedom as only proven, if she can really treat this forest as if it were a bed. Then it’s difficult and you just need to build a lot of counter power.

Ideological Control

Carl Schlyter: 
And I mean, sometimes maybe people feel that I have lost control, have lost power in the society, and at least this I control. So this will to dominate this remaining part is kind of illogical compensation for loss of a perceived power. Is that also a factor?

Eva von Redecker:
Yes,I mean, you know I come from the Frankfurt School tradition partly in my thinking and then one of the key theoretical ingredients is ideology. So what we have to explain is why a lot of people don’t even fully benefit from the societies we live in and still uphold them. And I think the property regime, a lot of people buy into it because it at least offers them this consoling fantasy that there might be something that they get that they can hold onto. And it’s it’s often very dark, like it’s often more so then it shifts. For instance, in South Africa at the end of apartheid, the rate of femicides and domestic violence in white families extremely increased. And you can sort of see that a certain entitlement, it wasn’t like an actual process, but it’s kind of worked through thatnyou go beyond domination. That’s kind of just shifted to another site then, because there wasn’t that kind of hyper exploited black community to absorb that violence. It kind of went somewhere else. And I think in neoliberalism there is, of course, a general sense of dispossession and also it’s very real. So and there I would say like in the South African example, it’s one kind of phantom possession gets alighted by another phantom possession It’s kind of broken all the way down. But in our current world, if you think about material property, like if people have a house, they can’t be sure anymore that it won’t be hit by natural so-called, now we know it’s not entirely nature produced disaster. So there is an ever kind of faster global competition, you also don’t know and inflation you don’t know whether your wage will pay for your a life in a few years. So there is a also acute justified pain of dispossession and uncontrolled ability that then makes certain ideological domains of sort of fantasy control so attractive. And I think that’s why we have to give each other real security. We need to actually fix the world. We need to kind of stop that competition. We need to promise each other that if one house gets flooded, you share the other house and that would be the antidote and and not that kind of hollow what I often call it, a kind of compensation of the property less by the powerless so that you get to have hollow control over another group that is designated as inferior and as kind of honorable by you. Capitalism, of course, always has used this ideological control over certain devalued groups to keep its people kind of on its site. That’s ideology.

Carl Schlyter: 
But also you mentioned before, the feeling and sense of security in the neoliberal and capitalist logic it’s more like a transaction between objects and people rather than actually interdependence and relations and for real security to happen. As you mention, we are interdependent, of both each other and nature. How is that possible to ingrain in the current economic agenda, so to speak?

Eva von Redecker:
Well, the current economic agenda, it’s not possible, I guess.I mean, I think it’s possible to ingrain or to see it sprouting in the resistance or in certain instances of the current economical agenda. So one thing that especially feminist Marxists often point out is that, of course, this whole world, this whole system, what kind of fly apart instantaneously if there wasn’t certain forms of unpaid care labor, and also just like little bits of human kindness, and also bits of maintenance and sort of looking after infrastructures that isn’t fully enforced that people don’t all dump their rubbish everywhere as soon as somebody doesn’t look. There’s certain things that we might not even think of that come from human decency that make this life livable. But what we see is that more and more time is properties so that it can be kind of absorbed by the market and and used that becomes a paid transaction. That you can buy your wellness and not rely on some free time that you actually spend in a good environment with nice people that also have free time. But there is always that kind of substance of society that is caring and reproducing. Otherwise nothing would live. My argument in the new Freedom book is that when we talk about nature, I think we should call it regeneration rather than reproduction, because it’s not intentional like the tree doesn’t Oh, I want to make oxygen to allow humans to breathe. That is life. It just lives and then we can live. That’s because we have a kind of long history of evolution that we share and this beautiful 12,000 years of Holocene where all this kind of richness and abundance of many, many different ecosystems develop. So I think that’s something we see and that capitalism also depends on that as a whole. And some forms of resistance these days are very much, I think, centered around an awareness of exhaustion.So this whole wave, of course, we also see and that’s great, more unionized struggles, but there’s also this whole wave of quitting and quite quitting and people just walking out of their jobs. And I also see it with younger people in sort of very privileged context in academia that suddenly this whole promise that, yes, you burn yourself out now, but then you get the status later, people don’t buy it anymore.You know, there is a kind of fleeing to regeneration or a feeling like, if I don’t get enough sleep now, I’ll never get up. And then extreme forward, that is the “lying flat” movement in China where young people really opt out of this whole kind of promise. And it’s really the promise, you know, to get a family home, to have a family and have a car to work your way up, to have a job, to stay with that. No, I just I don’t get up anymore. I sleep and that I’ll stay on a friend’s sofa and that also is a protest, not just what we do screaming in the street.

Death and new life in ecosystems

Carl Schlyter: 
You mentioned about the tree that was growing and then weakening. I think that’s kind of an interesting aspect because even if the tree’s life force is weakening, it becomes home for hundreds of new species. That increases life and strength. So maybe we could see each other a little bit like the tree. Like my life is not only my life, it’s part of a bigger context

Eva von Redecker:
It’s very important you bring it up because people often accuse me of being too romantic about nature. Like, as if everything just beautifully goes together and there wasn’t any death. Of course there is death. That’s the whole thing. Like humans need to accept, finally accept their own finitude. And of course this also finitude in nature, tree eventually dies. But unlike the systems that we have set up that produce destructive toxic waste that lots of things, will also outlive me, that will destroy other life. The way that a tree dies, it produces lots of things that allows and enables other lives and that feed into other life cycles. I think having an awareness of something with such integrity survives you, is the best consolation we can get. I also think we shouldn’t be too quick with it. I sometimes see people like, Oh well, yeah, everything compost and eventually we compost, isn’t that great? I mean, death is hard, human deaths. We have an idea, a notion of time and project and planning that I would think a tree has not. And that doesn’t make the tree. I mean, she was not that great and I don’t think it’s an insult to the tree. I think rather it’s insulting if you want to make everything in the natural world like us, like the tree has a this kind of very dignified way of being involved in lots of cycles of life. But still, the death of the human has another tragedy to it than the death of a tree. But yet find consolation in the way which our creaturely life is, like the tree, that it can rot in a good way also. And then, yeah, life goes on.

Policies to implement to enhance freedom

Carl Schlyter: 
So let’s say now our listeners follow your thoughts here too, I think. Yeah, that’s a good idea. We should redefine what freedom is,what kind of policy steps would the EU need to take? What could be the first little steps on this route to redefine the concept of freedom?

Eva von Redecker:
This must very counterintuitive. I said it’s about freedom to stay in temporary freedom. But I think the first policies that the EU has to take is to say, we open the borders unconditionally. Everybody who wants to live here and believes in our societies is welcome. That’s actually the strength. That’s amazing. I mean, that people still believe in any political promise. But then of course, we have to share resources very justly. We have to make everyone safe. We also need to think what to do with areas where there are suddenly less people live, and even in Europe we need to make sure to reforest lots of things. So I think the second or simultaneous step would be to fix the global food system. So Europe will have to abandon this absurd biofuel, have more wind and offshore energy, but also save energy overall drastically. Then use some of that land or kind of very local food sovereignty allowing farming and community supported agriculture, but also reforest some bits to make sure that habitats stay healthy over a long time. Rewild bits, see how the global food chain is balanced, how we obviously immediately stop importing anything that partakes in the destruction, not just of the rainforest, Amazon and also mangrove forests. And obviously forbid any farming that isn’t ecological farming. Yeah, and I mean, I think that’s easy for me to say. I don’t think it will work because people have, for instance, the phantom possession that makes them think their countries shouldn’t be, it’s their country, it’s a property, it shouldn’t be allow people to come in.

Egalitarian distribution of resources

Carl Schlyter: 
There was a nice case of mind reading because; I actually wanted to go back to the phantom possession logic. How would you then deal with people’s conception of phantom possession and not only about the people feeling entitled by it, but also the people, some victim of us, because some people accept or at least subjugates to their role in the phantom possession structure. How can we liberate both sides from this logic?

Eva von Redecker:
Well, I do think people are very struck by both kindness and justice. What we haven’t tried in the whole energy crisis now, for instance, is to ration energy in an egalitarian way. So we have all those kind of tinkering with caps and or lowering the overall price. But then if you are a millionaire with a big house, then you get also that reduction. But if you just said everybody gets the same. And by the way, those people who arrived here newly they also get to say that everybody gets the same and you can trust that nobody has more. And actually then, I love this example with energy, I actually live in a very big old house shared with friends. I would freeze, I actually freeze now. That’s great, that’s my choice. Like I wanna have a palace so it’s so and so many kilowatt hours of heating. I can decide to freeze a bit more. I’m actually super happy with that. Somebody who lives with a big family in a small flat, they will have it warm and cozy, at least it would have been possible. We didn’t do that. And that’s actually another, The German economist, Ulrike Herrmann who wrote about that postwar British economy of rationing and how that is actually an example. I think that could be an important intermediate step that makes people aware that there is a finite set of resources. But if it’s shared really like all the things that you need for basic life, if that’s said evenly, it does give you a certain kind of relax from all that competition. And if you trust, that is how we’ll go on. Then also you don’t have this anxiety that you might be the one who because you did something wrong and you lose your house or you can’t pay your heating bill and somebody else can. I mean, some of the racism is also fueled anyway in a competitive society where the more people there are, you feel like the more you can lose because they’re the same. The same also for integrating women in the workforce. If all it means is that there’s more competition, you kind of give no one a break. So you have to create areas, and I would say living, eating, housing and heating are areas where there just shouldn’t be dependent on how you stand in competition. You’re human, you gotta have a shelter. 

Carl Schlyter: 
Many people talk about basic income, but when you talk about the duration of electricity, that would be like the basic electricity income to everybody has the right.

Eva von Redecker:
Yeah, and it’s a basic income. I think there’s a huge problem if you keep that kind of global division of labor that we have. Our cheap consumer goods depend on terrible exploitative conditions both economically and ecologically elsewhere. Then somehow your cheating, you know, I mean, it’s still great to allow as long as you have nation states, then sure. But also that’s the kind of population whose data traces that they leave on the Internet are also valuable. Then you have free time, you just surf around and get targeted advertisement and you buy this stuff that is produced under terrible conditions elsewhere. Like somehow this isn’t scalable in the way that egalitarian distribution is. However, I do think rationing is always a kind of crisis and emergency measure. What we really need is to restructure the core bits of economy and the fact that it’s undercovered, we haven’t even started anywhere of doing with the health system. I think it gives us very dire prospects of how little political will there is to democratize and socialize those life sustaining areas and then run them not for profit, but run them needs-oriented and in a kind of caring way. And you’re saying mental health crisis so there’s so much need for repair and help, even in so-called very privileged societies. There’s so much despair also of people who have kind of, in some sense, good prospects on life comparatively, but only comparatively and still there is terrible waiting lists for therapy places in the U.K. now. There is very hard to even get into the hospitals because you have 4 hours average if you call an ambulance.

Capitalism and the Neo-Liberal Economy

Carl Schlyter: 
In which way does neoliberal economy and capitalist economy affect this sentiment?

Eva von Redecker:
Well, I think that this is a kind of quibbling, as in the dialectical upset so neoliberalism is the ideology that ever more things should be run on market principles and that individual responsibility and competition are good ways to order a society. It’s kind of hiding all the dependencies that we have. So we stop hiding them, say the individual isn’t responsible, then the political collective is and has to take democratic decisions of how for instance we want to run a health system. How are we going to run an elderly care system so that everyone can feel that they’re essential and essential to everyone, not just sort of lonely self-owning cut out bits of person. 

Carl Schlyter: 
So in the neoliberal system, like you slashed the funding for health care and at the same time you put the individual responsible for the lack of health care because you gave them an opportunity to have a choice that wasn’t real but fake. Then you start to have this process, you put the blame on yourself for your ailments rather than the poor organization of society.

Eva von Redecker:
Yeah, and saying you should have gone running more or something. And also you feel terrible with whatever your family faces, some unliveable choice between either if your’e an old person for instance, either looking after you besides the work or letting you abandoning you in a badly funded care home. It’s kind of no surprise that people are nervous and afraid because so many of the social democratic gains of security, of social welfare have been cut or undermined. The official promise of security is one that by security comes after property, like part of the promises of property is like it’s yours. And then, you know, you got to be secured for the future. You have it and then you say, but it’s I think we need to think about what the properties security would be, what security would be that doesn’t go through that channel, individual ownership, but that goes through the channel of collective solidarity.

Carl Schlyter: 
How do we help people to feel secure in the transition?

Eva von Redecker:
Yeah, so a, I would always again, stress for how few people that is the case, right? It’s I mean, it’s mostly only working anymore if you actually inherit the problems like the whole, like the whole meritocracy of working hard and then you can afford a house and it’s over. I think a lot of people who inherit also have uneasy feelings about it because they know it’s weird they haven’t earned it in a way. Also and they get attacked all the time. People criticize them for it. But one of the ways that I think about social change is I call it interstitial change. So that sometimes every even radical shift starts with things that at first seem like anomalies, like something weird, something that doesn’t fit something that you might not even like. It’s just kind of a disturbing factor and it’s kind of small context in which something new gets tried out and I think if social movements manage to open a space for the start of actually preserving life and regenerating life rather than owning and destroying it, that’s not nothing. I do think that can reach and convince people and if it doesn’t, then sometimes that’s not a weakness, it’s a theory. It’s a problem with the world. That does mean that I should stop trying.

Revolution as a path to Freedom

Carl Schlyter: 
I mean, people have tried to make change before and sometimes successful and some times not. Your book talks about kind of revolutionary change. And then actually, I think I should ask you to define what revolution is then, because so many people have a misconception or at least a different conception of it.

Eva von Redecker:
Yeah, that’s a bit more of my older work that for me, I think we can’t just drop the notion of revolution because it’s too bloody or because we don’t like some of the militant fantasy attached to it because it just is the word we have for the maximal range of change. It’s just the most far-reaching concept that we have for transformation. And also it’s a concept that since the French Revolution at least, designates that change can be human, man-made. It’s not something that happens by fate. It’s something that we make and you need it. I think we don’t even understand what the politics is if we don’t have that concept, everything that we value now, human rights, democracy came about it’s born, it’s made by revolution. That’s how it came about. It’s not something that slowly emerged by consensus and convincing. Even the last feudal lord thought that it would be a nice idea to have human rights. But at the same time, I think it’s a real misconception. And that’s when we say revolution, we always think of the Bastille and of one big event a singular you storm something, especially for the problems that we have now, where it feels as though getting state power, which is what those imaginaries of storming the Winter Palace, storming the Bastille is about would even not do very much because there’s all the kind of international network of the economy. That’s all the global reach of markets. There’s the ecological destruction. What do you storm? So I think even for something like the French Revolution, a very classical model of revolution, a better way to understand it is to see how it’s actually a very long process were new practices in the case of French Revolution was a popular sovereignty. So founding clubs, founding societies, discussing village matters, having those complaint lists before the French Revolution, lots of little practices that sort of add up to suddenly a new paradigm. If you ask me how I define revolution, I would say that’s something that was unthinkable before becomes the new matter, of course, like the thing that you don’t even notice because it’s so like ubiquitous. So for instance, something like the idea that, that we have human rights is something that, you know, and a feudal system, it would just be is unintelligible. Then now that’s politics like that’s even hard to think about politics as something else. What rights should something have? At the moment, we’re now at that framework of politics. It’s reaching a real limit because the natural world and the regenerative capacity of both ecosystems and humans, it’s not something that you can easily put into the right. I would of course say rights themselves are derived from property. It’s an analogy to you can own something and and then kind of progressive liberal politics say, well, but you also own your freedom, you have rights and then freedom of opinion and religion and certain things that nobody can mess with. You can’t interfere. And yeah, that of course is great compared to a situation where you had religious civil wars and all that. Not that it went away entirely at all, but this will not help you transition into a kind of sharing of time with the forest where your time, your life, freedom is enhanced. So yeah, that’s why I think we need to look what current social movements that kind of laboratories for far reaching new ideas. And then once you’ve discerned them, you will also see that they’ve been around for a long time. It’s not news something, not something that Ulrike came up with. The idea that you could de-propertice social relations, you know, a lot of anti-colonial struggle for hundred years has tried that. But I think the fact that so many social movements at present actually talk about life and it’s interesting, like there is a shift. It’s not civil rights, it’s also not primarily for redistribution, but there is a rich understanding of and tangled precarious lives, sort of with a deep understanding of which lives are affected more by those two cuts. You know, of capitalism smashing in half and encircling the BlackLivesMatter as a Latin American feminism, where that always starts from a particular type of death dealings versus femicides. But then it has this positive notion of we want ourselves to live a life free and debt free. And now this breathtakingly courageous and oppressive. It’s really humbling to watch the Iranian revolution unfold. Right. And they they have that Kurdish feminist slogan, Woman life freedom, which also has life in there. The freedom is not that we can deal with death. The freedoms as we live in from that life. You open it to other lives in the right way. It can become free.

Carl Schlyter: 
Maybe it’s a relief to some people that the revolution is not necessarily picking up a pitchfork and storming the Bastille, but actually, like, it’s a process that starts early with cooperation, with understanding of the oppressive systems and so on. But what makes a revolution successful? We saw a lot of the revolutions in 1848 that started with, you know, the potato pests and rye failure and then people got starvation and then suddenly groups with different interests helped each other out. So like the economically poor fought together with the liberal rights focused people in the cities and they managed to overturn it, but they lost the old monarchy powers came back and in Germany and Italy and in France and so on, they had a counter power. Not only in Europe like the the East Indian company who really owned and run India at the time, they had a revolution there too, but it also failed. And the same at a Taiping revolution in China. You had all these revolutions that groups of people, you had nationalists, you had economically poor, you had liberals, everybody like knew this system is wrong and we have the common enemy. But how do you make it successful afterwards? Like the transition doesn’t benefit the new oppressive regime or group.

Eva von Redecker:
I have several things to say about that. It’s interesting you bring up 1848 because one of the ways in which revolutions failed there was already something that I think you could call right-wing populism, for instance, appealing to a kind of nationalist phantom possession and the kind of common very undifferentiated but kind of entitlement that then was used to squash the more far reaching radical hopes and the Democratic votes and that brings me to the second thing. I feel there is sometimes a misconception. You know, social change or revolution is not horse betting. So it might be that the concept of revolution you have still is not very likely to win. Like you don’t choose the transformation project. If I was going to bet my money, are you going to bet it on fascism at the moment?

Carl Schlyter: 
Let’s hope you lose your money then.

Eva von Redecker:
So make me lose money, right? That’s what I want anyway. Anyway, I want to lose my money because I want to have a socialist revolution. But you need to decide what you do with your life and the one of the scarcest resources in neoliberalism and on a dying planet is living a meaningful life. I mean, people crave meaning and sense and you know, the more you realize that also you will die and those you love will also die, what you do that time something meaningful? And so I do think that’s maybe a better way to say why one should live a life of care and solidarity rather than one of property and entitlement because. It’s meaningful and you will also feel it even if you lose. 

Finding meaning in the journey

Carl Schlyter: 
We always in Western society kind of tend to look at the end result and not the journey. And if the purpose is a meaningful life, doing meaningful things gives you kind of sentiment of well-being. Even if the ultimate struggle fails during your generation, it’s still giving you a good life.

Eva von Redecker:
Yeah, it’s also giving you a hard life. But it’s giving you the right life. Yeah, a meaningful life. A life that you would want to live again or that you think could be an example for somebody else to live. That’s the big race. Yeah. Circumstances allow that to you. Yeah. That is also the way in which the model of solidarity is the right model also in catastrophe or in losing. So best idea is to cooperate and share and try to regenerate, try to see and help ecosystems rebalance and see what can stabilize and in what ways what can be protected. what can be transformed.

Carl Schlyter: 
Well, thank you so much.

Eva von Redecker:
Yeah, Thank you.

Eva von Redecker is an author and philosopher who focuses on critical theory, political philosophy, and feminist theory. She is the author of Praxis and Revolution: A Theory of Social Transformation in which she revisits the French Revolution to show how change arises from struggles in everyday social practice.