Post-Growth Living. Kate Soper
to greener ways of travelling and, in general, to a less novelty-and fashion-driven way of meeting our material needs. For some, this will mean doing less work, and thus having more free time; for others it may entail working in differing ways and to different rhythms. It might mean resuscitating some earlier and slower ways of living even as we take advantage of the newest and smartest green technologies in the provision of our energy and such other key areas as medicine, transport, agriculture and construction. In this process, the monopoly of advertising over the hedonist imagination and the depiction of the good life will need to yield ground to a greened aesthetic of material culture in which polluting and wasteful commodities lose much of their appeal.
I am not confident that such changes will come about. But I am arguing that if the worst abuses of the environment are to be corrected, runaway global warming to be kept in check, and exploitation and inequality (both within the nation state and globally) to begin to be effectively addressed, then richer societies will need to accept a less expansionary, more reproductive material style of living. By this I mean that they will need to agree to a provision for the more basic material needs (for food, household goods and furnishings, clothing, toys, sporting and recreational equipment, and so on), that is less dependent on innovation and continuous replacement of goods. However, in exchange they can expect to have more leisure time along with the cultural and recreational provisions with which to enjoy it. And even though a more reproductive material culture would provide fewer and less glamourous goods, it would have the advantage of making them more durable and of cutting out built-in obsolescence, thus reducing waste. In advocating these developments I dissent from the hi-tech utopian vision of a post-capitalist, post-work future currently influential on the left, with its anti-humanist ethos, its trust in levels of automation that would dispense with workers and its rather orthodox views on consumption.6 Instead, I argue for a future that allows not only for more free time, and less conventional ways of using it, but also for more fulfilling ways of working.
In all this, the book reflects a sense, based in the recollection and endorsement of the eco-friendlier practices and pleasures that are being swept away by capitalist ‘progress’, that we need to resist the chronocentrism that refuses to look to resources in the past that could help us in the formation of a more viable and enjoyable future. I do not advocate unreflective nostalgia or elegiac escapism, but I recommend a cultural politics freed of the patrician and patriarchal relations of pre-modern societies which seeks nonetheless to restore, in transmuted form, some of the fulfilling and sustainable aspects of earlier ways of living. The aim is to open up the prospect of an eco-benign politics neither uncritically committed to technology, on the one hand, nor overly ‘back to nature’ in outlook on the other, but grounded in new ways of working and spending leisure time, and the sensual and spiritual pleasures they can provide.
These moves, of course, are diametrically opposed to those advocated by neo-liberal ideology. Indeed, they involve a break with capitalism as we now know it, and require at the very least a highly regulated version of it. They mean re-thinking the current commitment to growth and growth-driven conceptions of progress and prosperity. So entrenched is this commitment that a recent media study found that four out of every five articles on the economy felt able to use positive language about economic growth without specifying what its advantages might be.7 In affluent economies, such a perspective is peculiarly distorting. As one commentator has put it, the notion that growth equates with progress
seems to lead some people to think that the issue of whether the planet will be inhabitable a hundred years from now is subordinate to indications that an increasing share of the world’s population is modestly improving its health, education, and purchasing-power. In this view, in other words, it does not seem to matter so much if we are generating changes that will lead to the extinction of our species, if increasing numbers of people today live somewhat longer, spend more years in school, and are able to consume a bit more than their parents.8
Those who continue to equate progress with endless economic growth, expansion of consumer culture and full employment will find the views expressed in this book fanciful and dismiss its recommendations as utopian. But there are growing numbers, represented politically in the Green Parties and some parts of the left, who would argue that it is mainstream politicians and their supportive media who are today pursuing an ultimately unrealisable agenda. This book will have more appeal for them. But it is also offered as a source of argument and information for all those, wherever they may locate themselves on the political spectrum, who are beginning to feel that the old certainties and assumptions about the nature of progress are breaking down, and that these must cede to a politics of prosperity more suited to our times.
The book is also intended as a call to those on the Marxist left to rethink their disparagement of the political importance of consumption, and to overcome their general reluctance in recent times to imagine post-capitalist ways of living. In this context, alternative hedonism is presented as the impulse behind a new political imaginary or conception of well-being that connects with the arguments and outlook of left-wing parties and social movements, and also with various initiatives seeking to bypass mainstream market provision by means of networks of sharing, recycling and exchange of goods, services and expertise. At the same time, I insist that the demands posed by eco-crisis cannot be made supplementary to existing party programmes nor allowed to become subject to the usual jostling for political advantage. As Yann Moulier Boutang writes,
The autonomy of green demands – the fact that they cannot be reduced to an adjustable variable of the situation – is not a recipe for electoral advantage; it is an ethical and political necessity, which lays the basis for the identity of any left party wishing to address social transformation. What appears now … is a new imperative, capable of uniting the field of radicals and reformists, to make an immediate and major green transformation the driving motor of politics. … Immediate social change is necessary because it will be impossible to carry through even the smallest programme of green transformation unless the population gets mobilised by itself and on its own account. If we decide that this is not possible, then the only remaining option … will be ‘enlightened’ authoritarian regimes … [W]ithout radical democracy and immediate elements of social transformation, there is no mobilisation.9
The thought that has gone into the writing of this book has been evolving over many years and undergone significant shifts of outlook and emphasis in the light of a political and cultural context that has itself been subject to significant change and evolution. But the book itself has been composed quite rapidly, in view of the ever more urgent need for social change, and in the hope that it can contribute to the mobilisation essential to the realisation of that change.
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
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