Social Quality – Sustainability

I took the opportunity to emphasise in today’s presentation at the All-Russian-Centre of Living Standard the dimension of sustainability as an important aspect that has to be increasingly looked at in the work on Social Quality.

The  third book of the European Foundation on Social Quality which is now near to be send for publication to Macmillan elaborates also on this topic. But it is most important to take an approach that goes fundamentally beyond “adding an environmental perspective”. The real challenge is to bring people back into a true relationality, being part of nature.

Still, this is by no means a really a new approach. It can draw very much from the original work by Karl Marx. According to recent works – part of it will be further elaborated during the upcoming Globalistics-conference middle/end of the week – there are two issues requiring more attention:

1. the fundamental separation between human beings and nature, which emerged from utilitarianism and classical economic thinking. Although nature and human beings cannot be separated from each other – and are developing an increasingly closer dependency – the classical and utilitarian ideology, as wrong consciousness, is suggesting and enforcing such split
2. the dislocation of management, which is reduced on a technical dimension rather than being seen as integral part of a complex process of production, encompassing manufacturing, distribution, consumption and exchange as dimensions of production as developed in Marx’ Grundrisse, in particular in the introduction which looks at Production in General.

The visit at the Centre can be seen as first step of a close future cooperation.