Post-Growth Living. Kate Soper
and the cosmopolitan lifestyles enjoyed by those who have gained from neo-liberalism – a disaffection expressed in the Brexit vote, the election of President Trump, and the rise of the extreme Right and its new media, movements and parties. Almost equally disturbing has been the impercipience or complacency of the political elites who over decades either failed to see this coming or chose to ignore it. Perhaps it is unsurprising that mainstream right-of-centre parties (although they have been among the electoral losers) have done little to check the rise of the new right. Particular blame should probably fall on the parties of the centre-left who, until recently at any rate, have seemed more eager to embrace than to resist neo-liberalism.
In the UK, although the 1997 election victory of New Labour was welcomed as ending almost two decades of divisive Conservative rule, the Blair government showed little concern for the widening on its watch of the gap between richest and poorest. ‘We are intensely relaxed about people getting filthy rich as long as they pay their taxes,’ famously remarked New Labour business secretary Peter Mandelson.2 The gap has continued to widen. Nothing has been done to curb the greed and conspicuous consumption of the very wealthy. According to Andy Haldane, the chief economist at the Bank of England, workers’ share of national income has fallen from 70 per cent to 55 per cent since the 1970s. Employees now get proportionately less today than they did at the outset of the Industrial Revolution in the 1770s.3 Those dependent on state benefits – the unemployed, the long-term sick and disabled, the old – have fared miserably: after a decade of austerity, despite rising prices and living costs, spending on welfare will have shrunk by nearly a quarter.4
Rising inequalities of income and opportunity have been experienced across the world. During the years of sustained economic growth between 1990 and 2005 in the major economies of China, India and the US, the rich became relatively richer and the poor relatively poorer. In the seventeen years between 1990 and 2007, the bottom billion increased their share of global income by just 0.18 percentage points (at which rate of progress it would take 855 years for them to receive 10 per cent of global income). In the estimate of a leading economist at the World Bank, both relative and absolute global inequality are now higher than at any point in human history.5 And inequality is increasing: in January 2019, Oxfam reported that the wealth of the world’s 2,200 billionaires had increased by $900 billion or £687 billion ($2.5 billion a day or £1.9 billion) in the previous year. This 12 per cent increase in the wealth of the very richest contrasted with a fall of 11 per cent in the wealth of the poorest half of the world’s population. At the end of 2018, just twenty-six people owned as much wealth as that poorest half (in 2016, the number was sixty-one).6 The wealth of the very rich now comes mainly from dividends, interest and rents derived from accumulated assets (such as shares, property and cash deposits) – all means that extract wealth from the goods and services produced by others. Less than 20 per cent is earned in salaries.7
These developments have been accompanied by dramatic changes in the conditions and experience of those who still do the producing – changes that are creating a looming crisis in the work-world and that must challenge the existing economic status quo.8 Automation continues to undermine job security and displace labour even as the work ethic maintains its grip on commercial thinking and social policy. More and more workers are exposed to the insecurities and abuses of the gig economy and zero-hours contracts, while intense dependency on work coincides with increasing scepticism about the value of many of its productions and its centrality in life. As work becomes more precarious, and the quest for work more desperate, the sense of purpose it provides diminishes. Even those in regular salaried posts are finding that work can frustrate rather than enhance self-expression and individual fulfilment. ‘In contemporary capitalist societies,’ as one commentator has put it,
work manages to be one of the most sought-after, and one of the most complained-about activities: sought after because of the income that it provides to meet material needs, and because it is the most socially approved route to carving out an identity and becoming part of the pattern of other people’s lives. But whether due to the monotony of the industrial production line, the emotional and performative demands of today’s high-commitment organisations, the ‘electronic panopticon’ of the modern call centre, or the stress of long working hours, it is often as grievous as it is necessary.9
The environmental cost of growth
Alongside the divisions of monetary wealth seen in developed and growing economies with their current levels of worker insecurity and disaffection, there also exists a global division between richer and poorer nations resulting from the ongoing and unjust transfer of bio-physical resources from peripheral to core economies. Less than one-fifth of the earth’s population currently consumes around four-fifths of its resources, with the United States representing 5 per cent of the global population but using about a quarter of the world’s fossil fuel resources.10 This ecological inequality is represented, under neo-liberalism, as a benefit of the ‘progressive’ openness to trade, which has replaced economic protectionism. ‘Imperialism’, Alf Hornborg writes, has been redefined as ‘globalization’:
To open world trade to increasingly asymmetric (but unacknowledged) resource flows benefitting capital accumulation in core nations is thus currently represented as global emancipation. In terms of net transfers of resources, neo-liberalism can be viewed as a convoluted argument for the aggrandizement of core nations through neo-colonialism. It has become more evident than ever, however, that this means the aggrandizement of their elites, leaving most of the national population far behind.11
Hornborg’s attention to ‘resource flows’ rightly emphasises the bio-physical basis of all wealth and thus its dependency on the natural environment. Inequalities, it may be said, have been with us since the advent of capitalism, and have hitherto not proven to be much of an obstacle to its continued advance. Today’s extreme inequality, however, coincides with the recent – if belated – recognition even by mainstream politicians that capitalism’s continued expansion is coming up against unprecedented ecological barriers, including climate change, biodiversity loss, soil erosion, air and water pollution and unmanageable waste.
This is hardly surprising when we look at current figures on production and consumption. Despite the digital economy and greener technologies, more raw materials are being consumed currently than ever before in human history – and, as we have seen, in a very unequal distribution. According to a recent calculation, there are 1.2 billion motor vehicles, 2 billion personal computers, and more mobile phones on the planet than its 7.5 billion inhabitants.12 Each year, the world consumes more than 92 billion tonnes of materials – biomass (mainly in the form of food), metals, fossil fuels and minerals – and this figure is growing at the rate of 3.2 per cent every year. Since 1970, extraction of fossil fuels (coal, oil and gas) has increased from 6 billion tonnes to 15 billion tonnes, metals have risen by 2.7 per cent a year, other minerals (particularly sand and gravel for concrete) have surged nearly fivefold from 9 billion to 44 billion tonnes, and biomass harvests have gone up from 9 billion to 24 billion tonnes.13
As already noted, the environmental limits to growth had been identified and emphasised before 1980, and have been meticulously charted in many recent writings. The evidence leaves little doubt that the current business-as-usual approach to growth is unsustainable. If the American model of the ‘good life’ were to be made available to all, at least three more planets would be needed to provide the necessary resources. To measure success in terms of market expansion in consumer goods is thus, as Andrew Simms has suggested, to measure success by failure.14
The imminence of ecological calamity is acknowledged by some of Silicon Valley’s richest inhabitants, who are desperately seeking personalised technological escape routes from what they call the ‘Event’ (the rising waters, social chaos and anarchy of future environmental breakdown).15 Naomi Klein reports that suppliers of weapons and private security services are getting ready to profit from disaster.16 On the other hand, the advocates of geoengineering pursue their fantasies of solar radiation management17 while eco-modernising economists persist in arguing that greener technologies will allow expansion to continue indefinitely and that we can have unending environmentally benign growth with little alteration to lifestyle.
Governments