Post-Growth Living. Kate Soper
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 insist on sustaining an analytic distinction between nature conceived as an independent entity and permanent ground of all human activity and the social dimension with its political and cultural conditioning of the forms which that human activity takes. Nature on this understanding refers us to the ever-present forces and causal powers that are the condition of, and constraint upon, any human practice, however ambitious.
Despite claims to the contrary, the independent ontological reality of nature in this sense is not contestable. As I argued in my book What is Nature? Culture, Politics and the Non-Human, recognition of the reality of nature so conceived, and its distinction from what is socially and culturally instituted, is indispensable to the coherence of both ecological discourses about the perceptible environment and to claims about the genetically-engineered or cultural ‘construction’ or conditioning of humans, whether physical or psychological.26 It is also, as Malm and Hornborg insist, essential to avoiding fetishised conceptions of the global economy that mislocate the real sources of injustice and environmental damage. We need to contest mainstream presumptions that technology is ‘natural’ and economics purely ‘social’, but to do so we must maintain an analytic divide between the natural and the social in the first place. This requires resistance to some of the more irrational and neo-animist tendencies of contemporary cultural theory.
Despite claims to the contrary, the absorption of nature in culture or culture in nature as advocated by much recent posthumanist thinking should also be resisted as unhelpful to environmental argument. According to the posthumanists, sympathetic responses to ecological issues require us to dispense with the nature–culture binary and the anthropocentric attitudes it has underpinned. Emphasising the relationality and continuity of all being, posthumanists call for a blurring or collapse of what they see as misguided or arrogantly humanist distinctions between ourselves and other animals. Posthumanism in its ‘new materialist’ formulation has also invited us to think of inanimate objects as exercising agency no less extensively and effectively than human beings.27
Philosophical support for this kind of ontological destabilisation and ethical revision has derived from the anti-foundationalist shift associated with post-structuralist theory and philosophy especially from the arguments of Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari and their followers.28 The actor–network theory of Bruno Latour with its resistance to recognising significant differences between the agency of human beings and that of non-human beings and objects has also been very influential.29 The impact of neuroscience on social and cultural theory has likewise played a part, promulgating the idea (which lay people seem increasingly