Post-Growth Living. Kate Soper
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