Félix Guattari: Thought, Friendship, and Visionary Cartography

age of capitalist insurrection, and thus it officially became the age of

civilization, freedom and progress.

The politics of the Western neo-liberal elites was founded on the

creation of a new bourgeois non-productivity, on an accelerated

destruction of resources aimed at financing the illusion of well-being,

on the accumulation of public and private debt, on the displacement

of economic energy from the production of goods to financial specula-

tion, and on an absurd militarization of production in order to bring

the economies of Eastern-bloc totalitarian countries to their knees and

to reintroduce artificially industrial production.

At the end of the decade, the results were evident: we witnessed the

collapse of Soviet social-imperialism, but also the collapse of all polit-

ical and economic balance in the entire Euro-Asiatic territory, from

Berlin to Vladivostok. The generalized return of nationalisms, trib-

alisms and aggression followed the rapid collapse of the illusions pro-

duced by neo-liberalism and the destruction of any form of identity.

The mixture of generalized competition and planetary militarization

has brought about an ungovernable multiplicity of archaic, tribal,

mafia-like and religious conflicts fought with ultramodern weapons. To

judge the 1980s, one has to situate oneself in the perspective of the con-

sequences that this period produced in the living body of the planetary

society, of the human mind, and of the possibility of survival on the

earth.

*******

Rio de Janeiro, June 1992, the Conference of United Nations on develop-

ment and environment, also called the Earth Summit.^2 Confronted with

the alternative of ecology or economy, the Western political leaders,

especially the American ones, stated the truth: between the danger of a

slowdown in economic growth and the destruction of the planetary

environment, we choose without any doubt the second perspective.

The alternative between returning to a livable dimension of the envi-

ronment and maintaining the rhythm of development and consump-

tion to which Western public opinion has become accustomed is a

chokehold that the political class is absolutely unable to loosen.

Third world debt and the destruction of the natural environment

are closely intertwined phenomena, even if the nature of their rela-

tions has changed in the course of the last decades. During the

1970s, the developing countries went heavily into debt in order to

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