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Capitalism rules the world today. International societies defy states and international institutions, trample on the common good, move their production wherever they want in order to to maximize their profits, without hesitating to involve children from Third World countries in slave labor. As a result, under the influence of this globalized capitalism, the lives of more than a billion people are destroyed by poverty, inequalities are growing like never before, the resources of the planet are depleted, and people are becoming depressed. It is with this system and the cannibal order it imposes on the world that Jean Ziegler, after subtle and devoted dialogue with his granddaughter, proposes a breakup.
I do not want to live on a planet where every five seconds one child under the age of ten dies of starvation or starvation-related illnesses, while the Earth could easily feed twice the current population if food distribution were just. I am disgusted by the murderous inequality of wealth and the long-lasting war of the rich against the poor. I find that obscurity, stupidity of neoliberal ideology, adaptation to market forces, and consumer manipulation offend my common sense. Destroying the environment, overexploiting natural resources, and planet's slow demise are terrible things.
Remember the words of the unusual Pope Francis: „Exclusion strikes, at its very root, belonging to the society we live in, because those who are excluded become not only second-class citizens, the lower class, the people on the periphery, disenfranchised, they are no longer even its part. The excluded are not only ‘used’ but waste, a ‘surplus’.“
There are more than a billion human beings in humanity today who are „waste“. I don't want that kind of society. I'm sure of that.
Jean Ziegler
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Jean Ziegler (1934) is a french writer, former professor of sociology at the University of Geneva and the Sorbonne, Paris.
Currently vice-president of the Advisory Committee to the United Nations Human Rights Council. He was a Member of Parliament for the Social Democrats in the Federal Assembly of Switzerland from 1981 to 1999. He has also held several positions with the United Nations, especially as Special Rapporteur on the Right to Food from 2000 to 2008, and as a member of the Advisory Committee of the UN Human Rights Council from 2008 to 2012. Jean Ziegler has authored numerous works, is a lecturer, and is well known for this sentence: A child who dies from hunger is a murdered child. He studied at the universities of Bern and Geneva and has doctorates in Law and Sociology. Jean Ziegler was made knight (chevalier) of the French Ordre des Arts et des Lettres in 1994. He has an honorary degree at the University of Mons in Belgium and was awarded the Medal of the Presidency of the Italian Republic. The Republic of Cape Verde awarded him the National Order of Amílcar Cabral, first degree and in 2002 he received the Gaddafi Human Rights Prize.
Some of his most famous works include Sociologie de la nouvelle Afrique (1964), Le pouvoir africain (1973), La victoire des vaincus, oppression et résistance culturelle (1988), Le droit à l’alimentation (2003), Chemins d'espérance. Ces combats gagnés, parfois perdus mais que nous remporterons ensemble (2016).
- ISBN: 978-953-8075-71-1
- Dimensions: 128x190 mm
- Number of pages: 120
- Cover: paperback
- Year of the edition: 2020
- Original title: Le capitalisme explique a ma petite-fille (en espérant qu’elle en verra la fin)
- Original language: French
- Translation: Jelena Butković
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