A social scientist from the University of New South Wales in Australia, calls for humanity to move to a sustainable society, and do so right now. He calls this path to sustainability The Simpler Way. This is the first of a three part series describing that path: 1) Our Global Situation 2) A Sustainable Alternative, and 3) The Transition.
Ted Trainer
Our industrial-affluent-consumer society is extremely unjust and ecologically unsustainable. Almost all social and economic problems are getting worse. The argument below is that these problems cannot be solved in a society that is driven by obsession with high rates of production and consumption, affluent living standards, market forces, the profit motive and economic growth. Problems of .ecological destruction, Third World poverty, resource depletion, conflict and social breakdown are caused by consumer-capitalist society and cannot be solved unless we move to the simpler lifestyles, more self-sufficient and cooperative ways, and a very different economy.
There is now a Global Alternative Society Movement in which many small groups are building settlements of the required kind. The final section argues that the top priority for people concerned about the fate of the planet should be starting to build these new lifestyles and systems within existing towns and suburbs.
Two Basic Mistakes
There are two major faults built into our society which are causing the main problems facing us. The first is allowing competition within the market to be the major determinant of what is done in our society. The second and even more important mistake is the obsession with affluent living standards and economic growth; i.e., the insistence on high and ever-increasing levels of production and consumption.
Mistake #1: The Market; Global Injustice
Markets do some things well and in a satisfactory and sustainable society there could be a considerable role for them, but only if carefully controlled. It is easily shown that the market system is responsible for most of the deprivation and suffering in the world. The basic mechanisms are most clearly seen when we consider what is happening in the Third World.
The enormous amount of poverty and suffering in the Third World is not due to lack of resources. There is for instance sufficient food and land to provide for all. The problem is that these resources are not distributed at all well. Why not? The answer is that this is the way the market economy inevitably works.
The global economy is a market system and in a market scarce things always go mostly to the rich, e.g. to those who can bid most for them. That’s why we in rich countries get most of the oil produced. It is also why more than 500 million tonnes of grain are fed to animals in rich countries every year, over one-third of total world grain production, while 1.2 billion people are malnourished.
Even more important is the fact that the market system inevitably brings about inappropriate development in the Third World, i.e., development of the wrong industries. It will lead to the development of the most profitable industries, as distinct from those that are most necessary or appropriate. As a result there has been much development of plantations and factories in the Third World that will produce things for local rich people or for export to rich countries. Their cities have freeways and international airports. But there is little or no development of the industries that are most needed by the poorest 80% of their people. The third World’s productive capacity, its land and labour, are drawn into producing for the benefit of others. This is most disturbing regarding export crops. In many poor and hungry countries most of the best land is growing crops to export to rich world supermarkets.
These are inevitable consequences of an economic system in which what it done is whatever is most profitable to the few who own capital, as distinct from what is most needed by people or their ecosystems. The Third World problem will never be solved as long as we allow these economic principles to determine development and to deliver most of the world’s wealth to the rich.
Conventional economics basically defines development as economic growth. Thus what is developed is little more than whatever promises to maximise the profits of those who have capital to invest, i.e., transnational corporations and banks. These never invest in the production of the things most needed in the Third World, such as cheap basic food .and clean water and housing. What their investment does is put Third World land and labour into supplying rich world supermarkets. The large amount of productive capacity a poor country has is therefore devoted to enriching others, or left idle.
In other words development has been extremely inappropriate. Obviously people in Bangladesh who are paid 15c an hour to make shirts would be far better off it they could put that time and energy into local farms and firms to produce basic necessities for themselves.
For these reasons, conventional Third World development can be seen as a form of legitimised plunder.
Our affluence and comfort are built on massive global injustice. Look at the labels on the goods you buy. How much would we pay if the workers who produced them received a viable wage? What would we pay for coffee if most of the land producing it was transferred to growing food for hungry people? Few people in rich countries seem to understand that they could not have their high “living standards” if the global economy was not enabling them to take far more than their fair share of world wealth and to deprive Third world people. We can go to supermarkets to buy the coffee from land that should have been producing food for Third World people. One billion people live in terrible conditions primarily because we are taking their wealth and gearing their land and labour to supplying our supermarkets. (This is not the only causal factor of course.)
Since the early 1980s the most powerful mechanism gearing the Third World to the interests of the rich have been the Structural Adjustment Packages of the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund. When Third World countries get into impossible debt problems these agencies agree to grant new loans etc, but only on condition that they accept fundamental changes. These are conventional economic strategies designed to cut costs and increase income and therefore “get the economy going again and become more able to pay off the debt.”
The changes enforced are delightful for the corporations and banks of the rich countries. They involve deregulating the economy thereby removing many state controls and therefore increasing the role of market forces, devaluing the currency and therefore reducing export prices and increasing import prices, cutting state subsidies to the poor, and settling more favourable conditions for foreign investors, especially enabling them to buy up the country’s bankrupt firms. State-owned firms and assets must be sold off. Foreign corporations can therefore buy up the most profitable parts of the economy at fire-sale prices. Freedom of access for rich world corporations to the country’s resources and labour are greatly increased, but the consequences for most people are devastating. Most are pushed into much worse conditions than they had before. The economy is literally dismantled, and reassembled largely in the hands of foreign corporations. It is likely that the Third World will accelerate into squalor and chaos from here on.
It is not just that the global economy is massively unjust, delivering to the rich far more than their fair share of the available resources such as oil. It is not just that much of the productive capacity of poor countries is geared to the interests of the rich countries. We must recognise that the rich countries have and control an empire. The global economy functions as an empire with the rich countries run mostly for their own benefit, resorting to the use of power and repression to keep Third World countries to the sorts of policies the rich want.
The most disturbing aspect of the situation is that the rich countries support many dictatorial and brutal regimes, they enable and actually engage in terrorism, they invade and attack and kill thousands of innocent people, in order to ensure that regimes and regions keep to the sorts of policies that suit the rich countries. This intervention used to be described as countering “communist subversion” but is now more likely to be masked as “humanitarian intervention” and as countering terrorism.
Consider also the hypocrisy of the rich countries. For instance rich countries insist that Third World countries should eliminate subsidies to exporters, yet the rich countries pay hundreds of billions of dollars to rich world agricultural exporters. Rich countries insist on freedom for capital to go where it wishes to invest in the Third World, but there is no question of labour from the Third World being free to work wherever it likes in the rich countries. They inflict SAPs on indebted poor countries but there is no question of one being applied to the most highly indebted of all countries, the USA.
The development progress made between 1950 and 1980 is now being reversed, especially for the poorest people. Conventional theorists stress that Third World GEDP per person is growing. This does not mean that conditions for most people are improving. In fact for the poorest 2-3 billion they are likely to be deteriorating fast under globalisation and the neo-liberal agenda. A few years ago the United Nations concluded that 1.6 billion people, one third of all the world’s people, are getting poorer. (U.N., 1996.) The market system is now giving the corporations and banks much more freedom and power than ever before to develop in the Third World only those industries that will maximise their profits. Poor countries will have to compete more fiercely against each other to sell their commodities or labour, and many countries will simply be ignored and dumped. (For example most of Africa and the Pacific countries have no possibility of competing against the rest to win any export markets.)
Thus reflecting on the Third World problem makes clear how grossly unsatisfactory and unjust the world market system is. It allows investment, jobs, incomes etc to flow to where the most profit can be made, while it ignores the rest, and it allocates the Third World’s scarce resources to the rich few while depriving the majority of a fair share. It draws the productive capacity the poor once had into producing for the rich, it uses up Third World forests etc at negligible benefit to Third World people, and it devastates the environment.
There is no possibility of satisfactory Third World development until the rich countries stop hogging far more than their fair share of the world’s resources, until development and distribution begin to be determined by need and not by market forces and profit, and therefore until we develop a very different global economic system.
The same mechanisms are the basic causes of the main social problems of the richest countries, although the effects are less glaring than in the Third World. An economy driven by profit within the market is greatly enriching the few and depriving increasing numbers.
Market relations destroy social relations
The top priority of governments is to stimulate more production for sale; i.e., to do to whatever will enable businesses to sell more. This means that relatively few resources are devoted to goals like building supportive communities, and providing well for less skilled or able people. Many who can’t compete well are dumped into poverty and despair, which has damaging effects on social cohesion.
More importantly, the more attention that is given to economic goals the more that the values and concerns that are crucial for a good society are driven out. There cannot be a satisfactory society unless people put considerable value on things like the public good, the welfare of all, social justice and the situation of less fortunate people. However in a market situation you have to be concerned only with your own advantage; i.e., with self interest. There is no incentive to think and behave cooperatively or to focus on what is good for society. The more we commercialise all aspects of life, the more space buying and selling take up in our lives, the more we have to deal in a market place to get what we want, then the less attention we give to social values, such as concern for the welfare of others or for the public good.
The economic historian Polanyi stressed how misguided it is for a society to allow the market to be as dominant as it is in our society. (Dalton, 1968) No society previous to ours has done this. Polanyi insisted that unless market forces are under tight social control they will destroy society and its ecosystems; everything will be open to sale for maximum profit.
Globalisation
We have entered a period in which all these problems will rapidly accelerate, because of the globalisation of the economy. Since 1970 the world economic system has run into crisis. It has become much more difficult for corporations and banks to invest their constantly accumulating volumes of capital profitably.
Thus the big corporations and banks are now pushing through a massive restructuring of the global economy, the development of a unified and de-regulated system in which they are sweeping away all the controls which previously hindered their access to increased business opportunities, markets, resources and cheap labour. The supreme, sacred principle now is to “free market forces”. Consequently the pressure is on governments to remove the protection, tariffs and controls which they once used to manage, regulate, stimulate and protect their economies and to guide development. Government enterprises are being sold to the corporations. Government services are being cut as are taxes on corporations. These changes are enabling the transnational corporations to come in and take more of the businesses, resources and markets local people once had, and to gear “development’ to whatever suits them rather than to what is needed by most people.
These changes have gone furthest with respect to trade. The effort now is to bring in new rules to guarantee freedom of investment, and to force governments to allow corporations to take over provision of services such as education, health, water and electricity supply.
Globalisation can improve “efficiency” (by moving production to low wage countries), and it can therefore reduce the price of goods sold in rich world supermarkets, but a huge critical literature now explains how these changes are devastating the lives of millions of people, especially in the Third World. Globalisation is eliminating the arrangements which used to ensure that many little people could sell and work and trade, and that local resources such as land would produce things they need. Now the corporations are able to take over all those opportunities to increase their sales. Globalisation is basically a gigantic takeover of economic wealth by the big corporations and banks.
Globalisation will oblige Australian workers to compete against the lowest paid workers in the world. Because the freedom of trade is now of supreme importance, governments will not be able to ban imports of goods produced in environmentally unacceptable ways or unsafe conditions, or goods containing pesticides. Nor will they be able to make woodchip companies pay for replanting the forests they cut. Cases have been decided in which such steps have been judged as infringements on the sacred freedom of trade, and governments have been forced to back down and allow the corporations to sell, and to pay them hundreds of millions of dollars in compensation.
Governments are increasingly unable to govern, because the real control over economic affairs and conditions is in the hands of transnational corporations and banks and World Trade Organisation officials.
One of the corporations’ most powerful weapons is their mobility. If a country tries to tax or control them or get them to pay higher wages they will leave and invest somewhere else. Thus countries must compete against each other in a “race to the bottom” to attract corporate foreign investment.
Corporations are able to minimise their tax payments, especially through the “transfer payments” they put on shipments between their subsidiaries. Governments must lower taxes on corporations or the corporations will locate their plants in some other country. (Half the transnational corporations with branches in Australia pay no tax at all!) Therefore governments have drastically cut state spending. Tax burdens are being shifted from corporations to workers, and state spending on welfare, education, health etc., is being dramatically reduced.
Globalisation constitutes a crushing triumph for the corporations, the banks and the rich. Inequality is rapidly worsening; a few are becoming much richer, the poor are becoming more numerous and even the middle classes of the rich countries are being hollowed out. It has been a sudden and stunningly arrogant grab that has delivered greatly increased wealth to the corporations and banks and the few high skilled professionals and technocrats the corporations want. The prospect is quite alarming; we are rapidly heading towards a world run by a few corporations, doing only whatever suits their shareholders while rapidly destroying social cohesion and the ecosystems of the planet.
Hence we have the absurd situation where Australia could be running its own economy at a relaxed pace to give all people a high quality of life, importing only a few necessities and securely in control of our own fate, but instead we must work harder, become more dependent on distant forces and markets, accept reduced wages and the takeover of our economy by foreign firms, and complete more furiously to export … while all other countries are locked into the same frantic struggle.
Why do governments willingly go along with these “neo-liberal” policies? Even if a government did not believe the neo-liberal world view, it would have no choice but to go along with it if its country is to survive in a globalised world. In the competitive global economy we have now governments must seek to cut production costs, free corporations to do more business, make national exports cheaper and more competitive, and attract more foreign investment. If a government doesn’t do these things its economy will not survive in the increasingly open and competitive global economy. It will not attract foreign investment, its credit rating will be dropped so the cost of borrowing capital will rise, and its exports will not be able to compete in the global market.
Some aspects of globalisation, such as the internet, are desirable, but the limits to growth analysis (below)shows that a sustainable world order cannot be highly globalised economically; there will not be sufficient energy and resources or all that transport and trade. A sustainable world order must be mostly made up of small and localised economies, with relatively little long distance trade.
Conclusions on the Market
It is a very serious mistake to assume that if we leave things to market forces, i.e., to competition between individuals, corporations and nations trying to maximise their self-interest, then we will end up with a satisfactory society. A free market will inevitably result in the strongest and richest winning, taking even more and becoming even richer while the poor majority become more deprived. The environment and social cohesion cannot be protected if the rules permit individuals to grab as much as possible for themselves. Billions of people are unable to produce and sell the small quantities that would yield satisfactory incomes because a few giant corporations have been able to sell things more cheaply. Thus the market system enables a few to take everything of value and dump most of the world’s people into deprivation, unemployment and poverty.
It is not possible to have a good society unless we make sure that considerations of morality and justice and the good of society are the primary determinants of what happens. In other words there must be much social control and regulation of the economy. (There could still be a place for private firms and markets; see below.)
Mistake #2: The Limits to Growth
There is an even more important and alarming mistake built into the foundations of our society. This is the commitment to an affluent-industrial-consumer lifestyle and to an economy that must have constant and limitless growth in output. Our levels of production and consumption are far too high to be kept up for very long and could never be extended to all people. We are rapidly depleting resources and damaging the environment. We can only achieve present “living standards” because we few in rich countries are grabbing most of the resources produced and therefore depriving most of the world’s people of a fair share. Because we consume so much we cause huge ecological damage. Our present way of life is grossly unsustainable. Yet we are obsessed with economic growth, i.e., with increasing production and consumption, as much as possible and without limit!
Following are some of the main points that support limits to growth conclusions.
- Rich countries, with about one-fifth of the world’s people, are consuming about three quarters of the world’s resource production. Our per capita consumption is about 15-20 times that of the poorest half of the world’s people. World population will probably stabilise around 9 billion, somewhere after 2060. If all those people were to have Australian per capita resource consumption, then world production of all resources would have to be 8 to 10 times as great as it is now. If we tried to raise present world production to that level by 2060 we would by then have completely exhausted all probably recoverable resources of one third of the basic mineral items we use. All probably recoverable resources of coal, oil, gas, tar sand and shale oil, and uranium (via burner reactors) would have been exhausted by 2045.
- Petroleum appears to be especially limited. A number of geologists have concluded that world oil supply will probably peak by 2010 and be down to half that level by 2025-30, with big price increases soon after the peak. (See especially Campbell, 1997.) The US Geological Survey disagrees, estimating that reserves discovered by 2030 could be twice as great as Campbell et al believe. However if all the 9 billion people we will have on earth by 2070 were to have Australia’s present per capita oil consumption even the USGS’s estimated reserves would be totally exhausted in only 18 years.
- – If all 9 billion people were to use timber at the rich world per capita rate we would need 3.5 times the world’s present forest area. If all 9 billion were to have a rich world diet, which takes about 1 ha of land to produce, we would need 9 billion ha of food producing land. But there is only 1.4 billion ha of cropland in use today and this is not likely to increase.
- Recent “Footprint” analysis (Wachernagel and Rees, 1995.) estimates that it probably takes 8.5 ha of productive land to provide water, energy settlement area and food for one person living in Sydney. So if 9 billion people were to live as we do in Sydney we would need about 76 billion ha of productive land. But that is about 11 times all the available productive land on the planet.
These are some of the main limits to growth arguments which lead to the conclusion that there is no possibility of all people rising to the living standards we take for granted today in rich countries like Australia. We can only live like this because we are taking and using up most of the scarce resources, and preventing most of the world’s people from having anything like a fair share. Therefore we can’t morally endorse our way of life. We must accept the need to move to far simpler and less resource-expensive ways.
But what about nuclear energy?If you think we can solve these problems using nuclear energy then you are assuming about 800 times the world’s present reactor capacity (before fusion power can be developed, assuming that’s possible.) They would mostly have to be breeder reactors, with about 1 million tonnes of Plutonium in circulation, and more than 25 worn out reactors to be buried every day. In any case reactors only produce electricity and that only makes up 17% of rich world energy use.
What about solar and wind energy?
We must eventually move from fossil fuels to the use of renewable energy, but it is not likely that we can all live in energy-affluent ways on renewable energy forms. (For the detail see Trainer, 1995c, or the more recent discussion, Note 9.) This is because there are large energy losses in converting sunlight into electricity and then into a storable form, such as hydrogen, in transporting the energy to cold northern American or European countries, and then converting it back to electricity. At present efficiencies less than 5% of the solar energy collected in Sahara desert solar plants would be delivered as electricity in northern Europe in winter. The cost of a solar plant would probably be more than 50 times as much as a coal fired plant in Europe that would deliver the same amount of electricity (and twice that when interest charges on the money borrowed to build the plant are taken into account).
There are similar problems with wind energy, especially the fact that there is always a probability that at some point in time all mills will be idle. This limits this source even in high wind areas to providing only about one-quarter of the electricity needed. (Grubb and Meyer, 1993.)
There is far too little available biomass to provide liquid fuel for the world’s present car fleet. If 10 billion people were to have cars at the American per capita rate, 10 times as much fuel would be needed. To produce fuel for one car would take as much land as would feed 9 people. (Pimentel, et al., 1984.)
Certainly we should be developing renewable energy sources as fast as we can, but more important is developing ways of living well on per capita levels of energy use that are a small fraction of those we have now.
The environment problem
The reason why we have an environment problem is simply because there is far too much producing and consuming going on.
Our way of life involves the consumption of huge amounts of materials. More than 20 tonnes of new materials are used by each American every year. To produce one tonne of materials can involve processing 15 tonnes of water, earth or air. (For gold the multiple is 350,000 to 1!). All this must be taken from nature and most of it is immediately dumped back as waste and pollution.
The Inter-governmental Panel on Climate Change has concluded that in order to stop the carbon content of the atmosphere from rising any further we must reduce the use of fossil fuels by 60-80%. If we did cut it by 60% and shared the remaining energy among 9 billion people, each of us would get only 1/15 of the amount we now use in Australia per capita. Most people have no idea of how far beyond sustainable levels we are, and how big the reductions will have to be.
One of the most serious environmental problems is the extinction of plants and animal species. This is due to the destruction of habitats. Now remember the footprint concept mentioned above; if all 9 billion people soon to live on earth were to have rich world “living standards” humans would have to use eleven times all the productive land on the planet. Clearly our resource intensive lifestyles, which require so much land or so many resources, are the basic cause of the loss of habitats and the extinction of species.
Conflict
If all nations go on trying to increase their wealth, production, consumption and “living standards” without limit in a world of limited resources, then we must expect increasing conflict. Rich world affluent lifestyles require us to be heavily armed and aggressive, in order to guard the empires from which we draw more than our fair share of resources. We cannot expect to achieve a peaceful world until we achieve a just world, and we cannot do that until rich countries change to much less extravagant living standards.
The absurdly impossible implications of economic growth.
The foregoing argument has been that the present levels of production and consumption are quite unsustainable. They are too high to be kept going for long or to be extended to all people. But we are determined to increase present living standards and levels of output and consumption, as much as possible and without any end in sight. Our supreme national goal is economic growth. Few people seem to recognise the absurdly impossible consequences of pursing economic growth.
If we have a 3% p.a. increase in output, by 2070 we will be producing 8 times as much every year. (For 4% growth the multiple is 16.) If by then all 9 billion people expected had risen to the living standards we would have then, the total world economic output would be more than 60 times as great as it is today! Yet the present level is unsustainable. (For a 4% p.a. growth rate the multiple is 120.)
Social Breakdown.
We are seeing increasing social breakdown, stress and depression, drug abuse, suicide, litigation, decay of communities, rural decline and loss of social cohesion. Attitudes to the poor, homeless and unemployed are hardening. Each of us must focus on competing to succeed as a self-interested aggressive entrepreneur, and we must not expect much assistance from the state, for instance in old age. Public institutions like museums and even universities are expected to operate like corporations that must sell to customers and make a profit.
Because of this corporate pressure to reduce the power and activity of government, and the power of the corporations to avoid paying tax, governments are drastically cutting their spending on public institutions and welfare, which is increasing the deprivation and suffering of large numbers of poorer people. Governments no longer have full employment as an important goal. The main role of government now is to provide the conditions for business prosperity.
It has become a divided, winner-take-all society, with many now classified as “excluded”. The rich, including the upper-middle class which does the top managerial and legal work for the corporations, and the professionals, are rapidly increasing their wealth and have no interest in calling for change. Inequality and polarisation are accelerating. The state has ceased to be very concerned with redistribution of wealth. The greed evident in bank fees, corporate executive salaries, legal and professional fees, cheap sell-offs of public assets, etc does not evoke significant resistance.
All this is sociologically appalling. Damage is being done to social cohesion, public spirit, trust, good will and concern for the public interest. You cannot have a satisfactory society made up of competitive, self-interested individuals all trying to get as rich as possible! In a satisfactory society there must be considerable concern for the public good and the welfare of all, and there must be considerable collective social control and regulation and service provision, to make sure all are looked after, to maintain public institutions and standards, and to reinforce the sense of social solidarity whereby all are willing to contribute to the good of all.
“But can’t technical advance solve the problems?”
Most people assume that the development of better technology will enable us to go on enjoying affluent lifestyles and pursuing limitless economic growth, e.g., by reducing the energy and resource inputs needed to produce things. However the magnitude of our over-consumption makes this impossible.
Perhaps the best known “technical fix” optimist, Amory Lovins, claims that we could at least double global output while halving the resource and environmental impacts, i.e., a “factor 4” reduction.
Let us assume that present global resource and ecological impacts must be halved. Now if all 9 billion people expected on earth by 2070 were to rise to present rich world “living standards” world economic output would be 10 times as great as it is at present. If we in rich countries average 3% growth, and 9 billion rose to the living standards we would then have by 2070, total world output would be 60 times as great as it is today.
Do you think technical advance will make it possible to multiply total world economic output by 60 while halving impacts, i.e., a factor 120 reduction?
Clearly we can’t possibly get resource consumption and environmental impact down to sustainable levels without dramatically reducing present volumes of production and consumption, economic turnover, and present rich world “living standards”. The “technical fix” optimists seriously mislead people into thinking that we can achieve a sustainable world without any reduction on consumer ways, and indeed that growth can go on.
Greed and history
History can largely be put in terms of people struggling to grab more than their fair share of the available wealth and power. Consider the behaviour of states over recent centuries, constantly jockeying diplomatically and fighting each other. Why? Simply because they are never content to live with what they have and to organise satisfactory lifestyles for themselves within their own borders. There are always classes of energetic “entrepreneurs” who are not content with being wealthy; they want more, so they go out looking for more resources and markets, and try to outmanoeuvre and bully their rivals. States constantly strive to increase their wealth, territory, status and power. Meanwhile “ordinary” people would have mansions and luxurious lifestyles if they could.
Yet there are many people living in what we refer to as “primitive tribes” who maintain stable social systems within stable boundaries and are not constantly seeking to outsmart or steal from their neighbours. This is not true of all tribes, but it is true of many, and it is totally foreign to Western culture with its restless urge to go out and acquire, conquer, build empires and take over markets or one way or another to get more and more.
Most people fail to grasp these connections between greed and conflict. They wonder why there are poor nations, conflict, and poverty. Every now and then their leaders tell them their children must go to war and slaughter the children of other people just like themselves. They don’t like this much but it never occurs to them that they have brought it on their own heads, by being keen supporters and beneficiaries of the grabbing that has led to the conflict. They have been enthusiastic about the empire building, the quest for more markets, the pursuit of national prestige, the promise to raise “living standards”, and they want to be members of “a great and powerful nation”. Why can’t they be content to be members of a noble and admirable nation, or a caring nation, or an ecologically sustainable nation? Above all they want the high “living standards” they can’t have without taking more than their fair share.
At a deeper level there is the problem of lack of meaning and purpose in consumer-capitalist society. Many suffer unsatisfying work, lack of community, dreary dormitory suburbs, and little purpose in life other than shopping, sport and mindless entertainment. They can have little pride in their society and are at best cynical about politics. They have little sense of power over their circumstances or of making a valued contribution. This is mostly because corporations have taken from us the provision of almost all the things we used to make and do; they want us to buy all entertainment, products and services from them.
These people would angrily reject the claim that they are greedy; they only want “normal” and “nice” things and “good” standards. They do not realise that what is regarded as normal in rich countries involves levels of resource consumption that are grossly unsustainable and condemn most of the world’s people to deprivation. Essential to The Simpler Way is the understanding that affluence is an enormous moral problem, and a serious mistake because it is a basic cause of global problems.
“When corporations rule the world”
This heading, the title of a recent book by David Korten, sums up the situation that has arisen over the last 20 years. A tiny corporate super-rich class has risen to extraordinary wealth and power and are now able to more or less run the world in the ways that suit it. (About 1% of the world’s people now control more than half the capital.) They run the transnational corporations, the media and especially the World Bank, IMF and World Trade Organisation. Their wealth funds the think tanks, foundations, universities, journals etc which pump out the message that the neo-liberal way is the best and the only way. Governments eagerly comply with this agenda. Rich world military power is liable to be used ruthlessly against nations which interfere with this agenda of free access for corporations and integration of all regions into the one global market (e.g., Yugoslavia, Iraq.) Much of the literature on globalisation is alarmed at this situation of corporate rule; (see especially Chussudowsky, 1996, Fotopolous, 2002, and the many works by Chomsky.) There are good reasons for thinking that it is now too late to do anything about this rapid surge to world domination by the super-rich, especially since the “war on terrorism” has provided a perfect pretext for crushing dissent.
The ideological problem.
Yet there is very little dissent! It is an era in which corporate power and wealth is surging, yet capitalism has never been more secure from threat. There is little or no opposition to what is happening from any sector of society. The working class and the middle class have been seduced into docility and willing compliance by the promise of ever-rising “living standards”. There is some discontent, there is grumbling, but there is no focused resistance let alone outraged disgust at the great injustice and brutality underlying rich world affluence and no demand for fundamental system change. The media’s obsession with trivia, spectacles, celebrities and sport distract attention from important issues. Governments are blindly in favour of market forces and refuse to give any attention to the possibility of limits to growth. “Educational” institutions are preoccupied with preparing the workers, competitors and consumers the system needs and give little attention to critical social issues. Even university graduates have usually never encountered the themes this document is about.
The academic and “intellectual” ranks fail to focus on the massive global injustice that underwrites their privileges, or on the limits to growth that will soon terminate them. Universities have become corporations churning out product innovations and diligent technocrats, eager for affluent lifestyles and convinced that they deserve them.
Overall, consumer society shows a stunning inability to respond to the alarming challenges now facing it. All people seem to be totally unaware of and indifferent to the fact that their high “living standards” are delivered by a massively unjust global economy which so severely deprives the majority that tens of thousands of people die every day, and to the fact that their “living standards are grossly unsustainable.
What we have seen in the last 20 years is an unbelievably brazen and successful grab by the rich. Their share of national income is rapidly increasing. They have routed the working class. The Left has been eliminated as a political force. Above all the rich have crushingly won the ideological battle establishing neo-liberalism as the only way. The collapse of communism has been taken to have established that there can be no sensible alternative to free market capitalism, and that the fundamental, indeed sole considerations are now “efficiency”, individualism and competition, getting richer, and freedom for market forces.
Conclusions on our situation.
It should be obvious from the foregoing discussion that the present socio-economic system is extremely unsatisfactory and cannot solve our problems. There is no possibility of having a just, morally satisfactory and ecologically sustainable society if we allow the economy to be driven by market forces, the profit motive, the quest for higher “living standards” and economic growth. In a satisfactory economy the needs of people, society and the environment would determine what is done, not profit. (We could have markets and private enterprise in a good society; see below.) These economic faults cannot be remedied without radical change in values and world views, which are presently obsessed with individualistic competition, selfishness and greed.
Above all it must be stressed how far beyond sustainable levels of production and consumption we are. The foregoing figures show that we must develop ways of living in which we can have a good quality of life on per capita resource rates that are a small fraction of today’s rates.
Copyright 2003 Ted Trainer
Visit Ted Trainer’s website: The Simpler Way