Post-Growth Living. Kate Soper
since growth remains the favoured measure of economic success. However, while green technologies, in combination with more locally based and democratic institutions for their development and use, will certainly play a critical role in weaning us from our dependence on fossil fuel and its by-products, there are no technical means for keeping an economy based on continuous growth permanently on course. In the current economic order, of course, technology is developed and harnessed primarily to enhance growth and thereby profit. It is, indeed, a key factor in the expansion of consumer culture – as is perhaps most clearly evidenced in the constant innovation of mobile phones, personal computers, and other individualised IT equipment (whose slimmer, smarter versions are reputed to be harder to repair than earlier models and therefore jettisoned sooner). Even if this changed, and genuinely sustainable technologies were widely adopted, it would remain the case that ‘growth can’t be green’, to quote the title of a recent article by Jason Hickel. Hickel cites three extensive studies (dating from 2012, 2016 and 2017) which concluded that whatever efforts are made to optimise the efficiency of resource use and to limit carbon emissions, continued economic growth cannot be made sustainable. ‘Ultimately,’ Hickel concludes, ‘bringing our civilization back within planetary boundaries is going to require that we liberate ourselves from our dependence on economic growth—starting with rich nations.’18
This negative verdict on the capacity of green energy to provide for indefinitely sustainable production is backed by figures over several years showing that more efficient technologies have hitherto always gone together with an overall expansion in resource use and production of more commodities.19 Since 1975, American energy consumption per dollar of GDP has been cut by half, but energy demand has increased by 40 per cent. In aviation, fuel efficiency has increased by 40 per cent, but total fuel use increased by 150 per cent.20 In the EU, emissions were indeed decoupled from growth between 1990 and 2012, but only at a rate of 1 per cent, which is only a quarter of that needed to reach the European Commission’s roadmap aim to reduce emissions to 80 per cent below 1990 levels by 2050.21 And such decoupling as has been achieved in affluent nations is in part due to reliance on emission-intensive imports from China and elsewhere. Meanwhile, it remains the richest who emit the most. If the top 10 per cent of the wealthiest reduced their emissions to only the EU average, total global emissions would fall by 35 per cent.22
The trouble with consumption
Injustice and inequality, impending environmental collapse, the crisis of work: the coincidence of these factors, all integral to the economies of affluent nations, is beginning to unsettle our relationship to a consumer culture that has long been taken more or less for granted. Consumption is emerging as an area of contention, a site where new forms of democratic concern, political engagement, economic activity and cultural representation might begin to have significant impact. Even commentators who are doubtful whether the necessary level of resistance can be mounted view the cultural politics of consumption as critical to any possible turn around. Wolfgang Streeck writes that in an era of crisis and systemic disruption of the kind we are now entering, capitalism will
depend on individuals-as-consumers adhering to a culture of competitive hedonism, one that makes a virtue out of the necessity of having to struggle with adversity and uncertainty on one’s own … That culture must make hoping and dreaming obligatory, mobilizing hopes and dreams to sustain production and fuel consumption in spite of low growth, rising inequality and growing indebtedness. [This will require] … a labour market and labour process capable of sustaining a neo-Protestant work ethic alongside socially obligatory hedonistic consumerism. … For hedonism not to undermine productive discipline … the attractions of consumerism must be complemented with fear of social descent, while non-consumerist gratifications available outside of the money economy must be discounted and discredited.23
As Streeck implies, this is an increasingly fragile political consensus to keep intact. The various signs of its fracturing will preoccupy a good part of this book.
One of the earliest (and more benign) of these signs has been the establishment and growth of the market for organic, fair trade, and locally and ethically produced goods. This is to be welcomed in that it reflects and encourages concern about the pollutants, food miles and exploited labour that go into articles of daily consumption. The motivations of ethical shoppers also overlap in some respects with those of a more radical anti-consumerism. One may assume that at least some of those committed to more responsible buying and investment are resistant to the shopping-mall culture and are seeking to move beyond a society of over-consumption.
Ethical shopping, it is true, is not an affordable option for everyone, and it can readily figure as ‘greenwash’ for producers and retailers. Being associated with dutiful buying rather than pleasure or self-interest it may not greatly alter our conceptions of our own well-being and the role of consumption in securing it. Nonetheless ethical purchase and investment reflect a more globally accountable way of thinking about one’s supposedly private interests, and therefore challenge the conventional (rational choice) view of the consumer as obedient only to the most limited conceptions of self-interest and hedonism, and hence incapable of acting in the sphere of consumption on the basis of the reflexivity and democratic concern they bring to their lives as citizens.24 In fact, political theorists and sociologists of consumption have for some time acknowledged the significance of the more reflexive and self-consciously political constituencies behind the growth of ‘virtuous shopping’.25 The influential thinker Daniel Miller wrote more than twenty years ago:
On the one hand, consumption appears as the key contemporary ‘problem’ responsible for massive suffering and inequality. At the same time it is the locus of any future ‘solution’ as a progressive movement in the world, by making the alimentary institutions of trade and government finally responsible to humanity for the consequences of their actions. … From the legacy of Ralph Nader in the United States, through consumer movements in Malaysia, to the consumer cooperatives of Japan, to the green movements of Western Europe, the politicized form of consumption concern has become increasingly fundamental to the formation of many branches of alternative politics.26
He goes on to suggest that the green movement has now tempered its mystical relationship to a reified notion of nature with a more rationalistic concern with the defetishisation of goods, and is showing increasing awareness of the real price of commodities for people as well as for the planet’s natural resources.27 These arguments chime with those voiced in Michele Micheletti’s study of consumer campaigns, which show, she argues,
that there is a political connection between our daily consumer choices and important global issues of environmentalism, labour rights, human rights, and sustainable development. There is, in other words, a politics of consumer products which for growing numbers of people implies the need to think politically privately.28
Ethical shopping, then, is one aspect of the more ‘citizenly’ approach to consumption in our time. Another is associated with disenchantment with the consumer lifestyle itself: other conceptions of the ‘good life’ are gaining more of a hold, and affluence is now commonly seen as compromised by the stress, time-scarcity, air pollution, traffic congestion, obesity and general ill health that go together with it.29 In other words, consumerism is today being questioned not only because of its ethical and environmental consequences, but because of its negative impact on affluent consumers themselves, and the ways it distrains on both sensual pleasure and more spiritual forms of well-being. This questioning lies behind the many laments for what has gone missing from our lives under the pressure of neo-liberal economic policies, and the frequent expressions of interest in less tangible goods such as more free time, better personal relationships and a slower pace of life. Whether in nostalgia for a nationalised rail service (for a time, as a fellow traveller said to me the other day, ‘when we were passengers, not customers’), or in dejection over an educational system tailored to the needs of industry rather than the intrinsic rewards of learning, or in alarm over the commercialisation of childhood and the evidence of depression among the young, what is voiced is a sense of sadness that only monetary values can make headway in our culture, and that public goods cannot be expected to survive unless they make a profit. These voicings of discontent are not particularly class-based and remain low-key, diffuse and politically