Post-Growth Living

For an Alternative Hedonism

Kate Soper

• Publisher: Verso
• Year: 2020
• ISBN:
  9781788738880
• Topic: Philosophy
• Subtopic: Humanism in Philosophy

The reality of runaway climate change is inextricably linked with the mass consumerist, capitalist society in which we live. And the cult of endless growth, and endless consumption of cheap disposable commodities isn't only destroying the world, it is damaging ourselves and our way of being. How do we stop the impending catastrophe, and how can we create a movement capable of confronting it head-on?In Alternative Prosperity, philosopher Kate Soper offers an urgent plea for a new vision of the good life, one that is capable of delinking prosperity from endless growth. Instead, she calls for a renewed emphasis on the joys of being, one that is capable of collective happiness not in consumption but by creating a future that allows not only for more free time, and less conventional and more creative ways of using it, but also for more fulfilling ways of working and existing. This is an urgent and necessary intervention into debates on climate change.

1

Society, Nature, Consumption

Stark warnings of the unprecedented horrors that will ensue if the world continues to heat at current rates are now being issued on an almost daily basis by researchers and those reporting their findings. Some of the more recent alarms have been sounded in the best-selling The Uninhabitable World, in which David Wallace-Wells catalogues the fires and floods, famines and plagues, ozone smogs and marine deaths that will afflict us, bringing social chaos and economic breakdown in their wake. Even at a warming of 2° Celsius (a best case scenario), he tells us,

The ice sheets will begin their collapse, 400 million more people will suffer from water scarcity, major cities in the equatorial band of the planet will become unliveable, and even in the northern latitudes heat waves will kill thousands each summer …. At three degrees, southern Europe would be in permanent drought, and the average drought in Central America would last nineteen months and in the Caribbean twenty-one months longer. In northern Africa, the figure is sixty months longer – five years. The areas burned each year by wildfires would double in the Mediterranean and sextuple, or more, in the United States. At four degrees, there would be eight million more cases of dengue fever each year in Latin America alone …. In certain places, six climate-driven natural disasters could strike simultaneously, and, globally, damages could pass $600 trillion – more than twice the wealth as exists in the world today.¹

The perils of global warming are, understandably, an overwhelmingly dominant concern of the now voluminous body of writings devoted to the natural environment and human relations with it. But there has also been significant growth in the less apocalyptic style of writing on nature: that which celebrates the beauty and importance of the countryside and wild nature, and calls upon us to recognise and re-establish our affinities with other animals. Both kinds of literature continue to offer essential and variously alarming and moving testimonies; and both have brought about a significant shift in public awareness of the issues and helped establish the environment as an unavoidable reference point for government and policy making. Yet both types of writing tend to hold back from any serious and sustained targeting of the everyday consumption practices that are mainly responsible for environmental crisis.² The more alarmist literature often assumes that current consumption and lifestyles will continue unchecked, or if and when they have to be checked, it will be undesirable and to our detriment. Wallace-Wells, for example, speaks of us having, at best, to live in a world ‘degraded by our own hands, and with the horizon of human possibility dramatically dimmed’.³ For this way of thinking, technology in the form of artificial geoengineering, carbon capture and revolutionary ways of providing for emission-free energy offer the only realistic route to avoiding calamity – and even if they secure our ongoing survival, life will have lost much of its delight.⁴ Advocates of more natural geoengineering schemes such as the ‘half-earth’ rewilding project put forward by E.O. Wilson or the ‘Two-Thousand Watt Society’ proposed by the Zürich Federal Institute of Technology both advise us of the austerity and sacrifice such projects would entail rather than noting any potential they may have to open the way to a more pleasurable way of living.⁵ In other cases, when direct guidance is given on consumption, it tends to be either too general (‘use energy more efficiently’, ‘reduce food waste’) or too limited in its reach (‘recycle’, ‘cut out plastic straws’). Nor is much proffered in the way of alternatives to affluent consumerist understandings of human need and pleasure. Recalling us to the beauty and value of nature can encourage greater appreciation of flora and fauna, pastoral landscape, wetlands and wilderness, but such appreciation is consistent with people continuing to consume in ways that threaten the natural environment and undermine its support systems. Think of the flight patterns of the eco-tourists, the globe-trotting of eco-critics moving from conference to conference, or simply the amount of car-driving that goes on to beauty spots and nature reserves. There is also a risk that the insistent attention to global warming and looming environmental disaster (whose concomitant institutional meetings, polar surveys of damage, academic seminars and the like also involve lots of flying around) encourages ecological despair rather than firing us to action. At any rate, my view – which underpins the general orientation of this book – is that green thought and writing, hitherto overly centred on the depletion of the natural world, now needs to focus less on the destruction of nature and its impact on a – supposedly unreformable – consumerist way of living, and more on human political culture and its reconstruction. The critical gaze should be centred on the activities of human beings in affluent societies, both as producers and as consumers; and it needs, too, to develop a more seductive vision of the very different forms of consumption and collective life we will need to adopt if we are serious about ecological sustainability. The main aim must be to challenge the supposedly natural (in the sense of inevitable and non-political) evolution of both the capitalist growth economy and the consumer culture it has created, to undermine the sense that this development has been essential to human well-being, and to argue that we will prosper better without it.

De-naturalising capitalism

Thinkers such as Andreas Malm, Alf Hornborg and Jason Moore, have helped in this task of late by re-directing our attention to industrial history, and especially to the exceptional features of capitalism as a mode of production and their precipitating role in anthropogenic global warming.⁶ In doing so they have, from differing perspectives and with differing emphases, renewed one of the most important themes of Marx’s own argument on capitalism, namely, his insistence on its specificity. All forms of production, Marx argues, involve interaction between humanity and nature, and in this sense all epochs of production have certain common traits. Yet, ‘just those things which determine their development, i.e. the elements which are not general and common, must be separated out from the determinations valid for production as such’. Capital (investment in labour-power for the realisation of profit) can be viewed as a ‘general, eternal relation of nature’ only if we ‘leave out just the specific quality’ which alone makes ‘instrument of production’ and ‘stored up labour’ into capital.⁷ Yet a century and a half on from this, the naturalisation of the capitalist economy is as strongly embedded in current discourse as it ever was – perhaps even more strongly now that, after the demise of Soviet communism, the adherents of neo-liberalism feel free to present globalised capitalism as the only game in town, the option that human nature is hard-wired to choose (a position made easier to project thanks to the widespread misapplication of neuroscience in accounts of human behaviour).⁸

Neo-liberalism’s apologists project the productivist dynamic associated with capitalist accumulation – the outcome of a specific history – onto human productive activity in general. However, as Marx saw, the production of material wealth need not and should not be seen as the main purpose of life. As Luis Andueza writes,

The fact that within capitalism people and their social relations are rendered means for the production of objects is precisely what Marx considers perverse about the whole system, and the way in which these social relations come to be obfuscated and severed by the commodity-form is at the core of his critique of fetishism. The apparent autonomy and primacy of economic forms over their dynamic human content is what constitutes the topsy-turvyness of capitalist civilization.⁹

This naturalisation of capitalist priorities also, by implication, presents the ecological calamities now facing the planet as an almost inevitable by-product of human economic activity, ignoring the specific influences of a particular mode of production.

Similar evasions and occlusions arise when the concept of the Anthropocene is deployed. Those who use the concept do not always acknowledge the extent to which the development of the fossil fuel economy has obeyed capitalist priorities, or admit that other modes of production have been and might be less damaging. They are often silent about the long history of environmental controversy and about the warnings of ecological disaster that were being made many decades ago. The Anthropos which has supposedly now become a geologically shaping force is troublingly unspecific: the term says nothing about the vastly different ecological footprints of different nations, classes and individuals. As Christophe Bonneuil and Jean-Baptiste Fressoz put it in their helpful historical survey of these issues, ‘whole books can now be written on the ecological crisis, on the politics of nature, on the Anthropocene and the situation of Gaia without so much as mentioning capitalism, war or the United States, even the name of one big corporation ….’¹⁰ They caution us against a ‘grand narrative of the Anthropocene’ whose grandiose focus on interactions between the human species and the Earth system gives comfort to a minority of the planet’s population, overlooks the environmental knowledge and activism of civil society both past and present, and favours the technocratic managerialism of the experts in climate science.¹¹ In their view:

When we consider the multiform and general character of [environmentalist] oppositions and the intensity of environmental reflexivity through time, the major historical problem seems to be not that of explaining the emergence of a new ‘environmental awareness’ but rather to understand how those struggles and warnings could have been kept to the margins by industrialist and ‘progressive’ elites, before being largely forgotten … so that it can be claimed that the discovery that we are living in the Anthropocene is only very recent.¹²

Comparable criticism has been voiced by Jason Moore, who argues that to name the Anthropos as a collective author is mistakenly to endorse a concept of scarcity abstracted from capital, class and colonialism; a neo-Malthusian view of population; and a technical-fix approach to historical change. For Moore, it would be more apt to speak of a Capitalocene era rather than accept the reductive account encouraged by Anthropocene ideology.¹³ Alf Hornborg is less ready to make that direct substitution, pointing out that socialism (at least of the Soviet era) also zealously promoted the fossil fuel economy. But he makes the point that to designate our present time as the Anthropocene risks ignoring the inequalities of capitalism, and might suggest that climate change is the inevitable consequence of how our species is constituted. ‘Although the potential for capitalism is inherent in our species,’ he writes, ‘it is not an inevitable product of our biology, nor something for which we all have a common responsibility.’¹⁴ He also argues that the impasse of the Anthropocene forces us to accept that aspects of our modern thought systems are very poor reflections of the bio-physical world in which we are immersed: a view developed in his powerful critique of the non-naturality of capitalist-inaugurated technology and its central role, alongside money, in concealing the injustice of the hugely asymmetrical bio-physical resource flows in the global economy.¹⁵ Modern, globalised technologies, argues Hornborg, ‘represent not simply politically neutral revelations of possibilities inherent in nature, they are also products of unequal societal relations’.¹⁶ Technological ‘progress’ has to be seen not simply as an index of ingenuity but as a social strategy of appropriation. And within that schema, it is of course always those at the neo-colonised periphery rather than the neo-imperialising centres who suffer most from the consequences of environmental depletion. Genuine progress would be to recognise that ‘since the Industrial Revolution, economic growth and technological progress have served as supremely efficacious strategies for displacing workloads and environmental burdens onto other people and other landscapes. Viewed as strategies to achieve such displacement, they belong to a category of societal arrangements that includes slavery and imperialism.’¹⁷ A more probing analysis would also forego the idea that the ecological ‘debt’ incurred through ongoing unequal exchange, can be understood in monetary terms: ‘money cannot neutralize ecological damage in a physical sense. Monetary compensation for environmental damage can reduce contemporary grievances, but it is illusory to believe that “correct” reparations could be calculated, or that they would somehow set things straight … the ecological debt of Britain, for instance, is as incalculable as its debt to the descendants of West African slaves.’¹⁸

Very relevant to these arguments is Andreas Malm’s counter-intuitive critique of technical-determinist accounts of the ascendancy of capitalism and its pursuit of fossil fuel (a pursuit in which Britain, the generator of 80 per cent of CO2 global emissions in 1825 and 60 per cent a quarter of a century later, led the field).¹⁹ Against what might be called the Promethean myth of the Anthropocene (the view of Mark Lynas and others that it has been the inevitable outcome of the discovery of fire),²⁰ Malm (echoing Marx) insists that a necessary condition for something is not necessarily its cause. The ability to manipulate fire is necessary for a fossil fuel economy but the cause lies elsewhere, most notably in the decisions of those capitalists who owned the means of production and chose to replace water power with steam power. Although the option for steam power was more expensive, it won out, Malm argues, because it better suited capitalist relations of production, not least the capitalists’ preference for private property and for the independence of individual owners and managers, which led them to resist arrangements requiring cooperation among the cotton magnates. Moreover, the steam engine, which required and took advantage of growing urban-isation, was better suited to the de-skilling of workers and the imposition of greater discipline and control.

Malm also shows that the fossil fuel economy has been pursued despite strong opposition. In the nineteenth century, British workers resisted the labour processes imposed by the steam engine; under the Empire, Indian labourers were forced into coal mining. Today, workers continue to resist being dragooned into the extraction and use of fossil fuel. There is, for example, intense and widespread resistance to neo-extractivist pressures in Ecuador, Bolivia and elsewhere in Latin America – where this resistance is often based in an indigenous politics deeply tied to a history of resistance to colonialism and neo-imperialism, initially by Europeans and later by the United States (and now increasingly China). These are communities that have been on the sharpest end of a relentless process of colonisation that has sought to establish a globalised and racialised fossil fuel economy and suppressed attempts to stand against it through the harshest means: murder, militarisation, land grabs, displacement and ecological destruction which causes impoverishment and forces local communities into working cheaply for the industry.²¹

There can, then, be no disputing that greed for profit and power has imposed – and continues to impose – a fossil fuel economy to the exclusion of more eco-friendly alternatives. In the process, lives have been wrecked, the environment has been damaged, and Earth’s climate has been altered. We have recently learned that both Exxon and Shell were informed by their researchers in the early 1980s that carbon emissions from fossil fuels would cause calamitous global warming by the middle decades of the present century, but they concealed the evidence from consumers and governments.²² Little has changed since: North America is currently funding 51 per cent of the 302 pipelines in various stages of development around the world (in the US alone the output from these could increase carbon emissions by 559 million tonnes by 2040).²³ The author of a 2018 UN progress report on changes implemented since the Paris Agreement speaks of ‘a huge fight by the fossil fuel industry against cheap renewables. The old economy is well organised and they have put huge lobbying pressure on governments to spend tax money to subsidise the old world.’²⁴ The G20 countries have obliged by increasing subsidies for fossil fuels from $75 billion (£58 billion) to $147 billion (£114 billion) between 2007 and 2016 to allow companies to compete with cheap renewables.²⁵ Consumers have also obliged, by continuing their love affair with the combustion engine and resisting efforts to increase tax on fossil fuels.

Against posthumanist advice on ecological politics

To insist that economic forms and categories have a history and that capitalism is but one possible mode of production is also to ...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Halftitle Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• Acknowledgements
• Introduction
• 1. Society, Nature, Consumption
• 2. Why ‘Alternative Hedonism’? Why Now?
• 3. Consumption, Consumerism and Pleasure
• 4. Work and Beyond
• 5. Cultural Politics and the Alternative Hedonist Imaginary: Transport, Leisure, Stuff
• 6. Reconceiving Prosperity
• 7. Towards a Green Renaissance: Cultural Revolution and Political Representation
• Notes
• Index