But, how can possibly getting a huge discount be bad? It’s not, if you actually need what you’re buying, and know what you’re buying into. Do you?

Do you know what you’re getting out of that Black Friday deal?

Have you carefully considered your needs and decided a 21″” Plasma TV for the bathroom is going to make your life better? Then by all means, do get it on Black Friday rather than any other day. Do your market research, compare prices and features, track your model of choice and wait for Black Friday to get it. And get it where you can get the best deal — quite likely, Amazon.

That may be a preposterous example, but there’s a reason for seemingly irrational compulsive buying behavior: shopping feels good. It releases dopamine in your brain, a chemical that triggers your reward centers. And if you buy things at discount, the chemical kick is even harder.

It’s just the way our brains our wired, tracing back to our hunter — gatherer history. You may not know or get it, but Amazon sure does. So let’s reframe that question: who would you say is more business-savvy — you or Amazon? At the risk of getting ahead of ourselves, we have to go with Amazon here. So why would Amazon give you this kind of deal then, and what do you really get out of it?

Amazing Amazon

You probably know the Amazon story already. What has enabled it to go from a fringe online bookstore in 1994 to one of the most important forces shaping the world in 2017 is a combination of foresight and execution, technology and business acumen.

Amazon has a demonstrated ability to see what the latest technology can do for its business and integrate it faster and better than the competition. Online shopping was just the beginning, after a certain point Amazon has not just been pioneering the fusion of existing technology and business models, but also developing new ones.

Amazon went from selling physical goods online to making goods such as books digital and giving out the medium on which to consume them, building an empire in the process. It also expanded the range of what is sold online and built a vast logistics network to support physical delivery. Today Amazon dominates retail to such an extent that its orders account for up to 15% of international shipping.

Amazon has a huge impact in the world, both digital and physical

All that is not even taking into account Amazon’s recent acquisition of Whole Foods, which combined with its -once more- pioneering use of digital technology in the physical realm could mean it will soon dominate not just what lands on your desk but also on your table.

Amazon has also been a force for digital transformation. The cloud, machine learning and product recommendations, voice-activated conversational interfaces — these are just some of the most visible ways in which Amazon and its ilk have pushed technology forward.

Amazon really is amazing. There’s just one problem: the one thing in Amazon’s agenda is Amazon.

That’s not to say that everyone at Amazon is rotten of course — far from it. There are extremely smart people working for Amazon, and some of them are trying to promote commendable causes too. And all this technology makes things better, faster, cheaper for everyone, right?

Black Friday

Do you know where the term Black Friday comes from? It started being used in a different way by employers and workers. As Thanksgiving on Thursdays is a holiday, the temptation to call in sick on Friday and have a 4-day long weekend was just too big. On the other hand, since stores are open on that day, people still go out and shop.

The combination of reduced manpower and increased demand is what made employers start calling this Black Friday, as black had a negative ring to it. Eventually marketing succeeded in making this an iconic day for shopping, so the connotation is not negative anymore. Not if you’re not a worker anyway, which brings us to an interesting point.

This Black Friday, Amazon workers across Europe were be on strike. Furthermore, grass-roots initiatives are calling for demonstrations and boycotts against Amazon., and there is a Greenpeace campaign in progress to make and repair things rather than buying more. Before you get all upset about your order possibly arriving late, it’s worth examining the reasons behind this.

Amazon has been known to push its workers to their limits. This means minimum wage, harsh working conditions and doing everything in its power to keep them from unionizing. That includes offshoring and hiring workers from agencies as temps, even though they may be in fact covering permanent positions. In that respect of course Amazon is not that different from other employers.

Not what most people would think of when talking about Black Friday workers, but there are more connections than you think

You could even argue Amazon sort of has to do this. If others do it and it’s legal, how else will they be able to compete, and why would they not do it? After all, keeping cost down and pushing people to get as many packets as quickly as possible means you can get your order for cheap and on the next day, which is great. It’s great if you’re a consumer and it’s great if you’re Amazon.

So why care about some workers doing low-paid, low-skill jobs? Their jobs will soon be automated anyway, and rightly so. Amazon is already automating its warehouses, meaning things will be done faster and smoother. Less manual effort, less accidents, less people needed, and no strikes too. And even the Mechanical Turks will not be needed soon, these tasks are better done by machines.

But what will the people whose jobs are made redundant do?

Brilliant machines

Of course, it’s not the first time we’re seeing something like this. Before the industrial revolution, most of the population used to work in agriculture, and now only 2% does. There are all sorts of jobs nobody could possibly think of at the time which are now made possible by technology. Technology creates jobs, is the adage.

But who creates technology then? People do, workers do. You would then assume the benefits of technology should all come back to them in a virtuous circle of shorts. Unfortunately that’s not really the case. Even though productivity is rising, which should mean reduced working hours and increased income, this is not happening.

[There] is [a] growing gap between productivity and wages. And you can see this in the gap between productivity, a measure of the bounty of brilliant machines, and how it’s being distributed in terms of wages. If we had an inflation-adjusted, productivity-adjusted minimum wage today, it would be something like $25 [an hour]. We would not be arguing about $10.

Laura Tyson, former Chair of the US President’s Council of Economic Advisers

You may argue that there’s the people making these “brilliant machines”, the people doing the low-end jobs, and consumers. We don’t need the low-end jobs, so let’s just retrain these people. Let us all become engineers and data scientists and AI experts, problem solved then, and we can consume happily ever after, right?

Building machines that build machines

Not really. Despite what you may think, engineers and scientists are workers too. Their work may require intellectual rather than physical labor, but at the end of the day, one thing is common: what they produce does not belong to them. It matters not whether you are a cog in a machine or build the machine, as long as you don’t own it. So if we build machines that can do and build more for less, where does that surplus value go?

The best deal ever

If anything, this is the best deal the Amazons of the world, much like the Fords before it, have managed to sell. They have succeeded in riding and pushing the wave of consumerism to disassociate people with the nature of their work to the point where they come to identify themselves as consumers rather than workers.

While it may not be true that Henry Ford started paying workers $5 wages so they could afford his cars, it is true that Amazon pays its workers in part with Amazon vouchers. This is taking an already brilliant scheme to new heights. Workers not only identify as consumers, often turning against other workers, but also keep feeding the machine they build.

So you have raw materials and infrastructure, labor that transforms that into goods and services, and their estimated value. Without labor, there is no value: extracting material and creating infrastructure also takes labor. Yet, the ones putting in the labor get a fraction of that value and zero decision making power in the companies they work for.

But, what about the entrepreneurial spirit of the creators or the Amazons of the world? Surely, their hard work and foresight deserves to be rewarded? As technology and automation progress, menial jobs are becoming obsolete and workers are asked to work not just hard, but smart. To take initiatives, be creative, bold, and entrepreneurial. And workers do that, but in the end that does not make much of a positive difference in their lives.

If data is the new oil, what are the oil rigs?

And what about the brave new world of big data automation? Surely, in this new digital era of innovation there are so many opportunities. All it would take to bring down these monopolies would be disruptive competition, so if we just let the market play its part it will work out in the end — or will it?

If data is the new oil, then the oil rigs for the new data monopolies that are the Amazons of the world are their data-driven products. They have come to dominate and nearly monopolize the web and digital economy to such an extent that if this is not realized and acted upon soon, it may be too late.

Wake up or scramble up

But, sure companies must understand this, right? They must care about their workers, they must have a plan to prevent social unrest, right? How does someone who automates the world’s top organizations answer that question?

“Time flies and technology waits for nobody. I have not met a single CEO, from Deutsche Bank to JP Morgan, who said to me: ‘ok, this will increase our productivity by a huge amount, but it’s going to have social impact — wait, let’s think about it’.

The most important thing right now, what our top minds should be starting to say, is how to move mankind to a higher ground. If people don’t wake up, they’ll have to scramble up — that’s my 2 cents”.

Cetan Dube, IPSoft CEO

Tyson on the other hand concludes that:

“We’re talking about machines displacing people, machines changing the ways in which people work. Who owns the machines? Who should own the machines? Perhaps what we need to think about is the way in which the workers who are working with the machines are part owners of the machines”.

So, what’s your take? How do you identify? Are you a consumer, or a worker?

Article originally published on Medium

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This is appealing to the liberal mind — it provides an apparent middle ground and removes the need to question the logic of the global economy. We can continue on our current trajectory if we make the “right” reforms and get the “right” kind of technology.

The hope of green growth is embedded everywhere, from the majority of domestic economic plans to major international policy schemes like the Paris Climate Agreement and the UN’s Sustainable Development Goals. By uncritically supporting these policies, we are unwittingly perpetuating the neoliberal fantasy of infinite growth on a finite planet.

The Logic of “Green Growth”

In some ways, the math is quite simple. We know that the Earth can only safely sustain our consumption at or below 50 billion tons of stuff each year. This includes everything from raw materials to livestock, minerals to metals: everything humans consume. Right now, we’re using about 80 billion tons each year — roughly 60 percent more than the safe limit. In order for growth to be “green,” or at least not life-destroying, we need to get back down to 50 billion tons while continuing to grow GDP.

A team of scientists ran a model showing that, under the current business-as-usual conditions, growth will drive global resource use to a staggering 180 billion tons per year by 2050. That’s more than three times the safe limit. This type of economic growth threatens all life on this planet.

In the hopes of finding more optimistic results, the UN Environment Program conducted its own research last year. The team introduced various optimistic assumptions, including a carbon price of $573 per ton and a material extraction tax, and assumed rapid technological innovation. They found that even with these policies, we will still hit 132 billion tons of consumption per a year by 2050.

In a recent article in Fast Company, Jason Hickel, a leading economic anthropologist, argues that there is no evidence to support green growth hopes. He concludes that although we will need all the strong policies we can get — carbon taxes, resources extraction taxes, more efficient technology, etc. — the only way to bring our economy back in line with our planet’s ecology is to reduce our consumption and production.

This is the core problem that no one wants to address. This is the taboo of Western civilization — the ground zero of values. It is the reason we make up fictions like green growth.

In order to start imagining and achieving real alternatives, we first have to dispose of the false solutions and distractions that pervade the discourse on social change. Right now, it is incumbent on the progressive movement to challenge green growth or any other prophylactic logic that keeps us bound within the ideological concrete of growth as our only option.

Growth as Distributed Fascism

Our global economy is a Ponzi scheme. We have a debt-based economic system that requires growth to exceed interest rates in order for money to be valuable. The World Bank and others tell us that we have to grow the global economy at a minimum of 3 percent per year in order to avoid recession. That means we will double the size of the global economy every 20 years.

For capital holders — rich countries and the rich within countries — this makes complete sense. They disproportionately benefit from the growth system. Growth is the source of their power. It is what keeps them not just rich, but ever-richer — which means ever-more powerful. They are where they are in this system because their interests align with the “Prime Directive” of the system: more capital for its own sake. The reason the people currently in power are in power is because they believe in growth, and because they are good at delivering it. That is the sole qualification for their jobs. Of course, they are not going to be able to see the problems growth causes; they are, by job-definition and personal identity, growth-fanatics.

As for the rest of us, we are tied into this system because growth is the basis for our livelihood, it is the source of our jobs, and our jobs are what allow us to survive in the debt regime.

It’s a tightly woven system that requires our collective complicity. Although we may know that every dollar of wealth created heats up the planet and creates more inequality, we are tied into the system through necessity and a set of values that tells us that selfishness is rational, and indeed, the innately and rightly dominant human behavior we must orient around. We’re coerced into a form of distributed fascism where we as individuals extract more, consume more, destroy more and accumulate more, without ever being able to step back to see the totality of a more holistic worldview.

Post-Growth as Localism

So, what must be done? The first place to start is to challenge the growth dependency of the current operating system. Then we start looking for the antidote logic. Capitalism is characterized by its imposition of monolithic values — the final outcome of the “American Dream” is for everyone to live as consumers in pre-fabricated houses; leveraged by Wells Fargo mortgages; living off Citibank credit cards; wearing Nike shoes; distracted by Facebook, Google and Apple products; drinking Nestle bottled water; and eating Monsanto laboratory foods, while bobbing our heads to Miley Cyrus or Jay-Z.

The antigen to monoculture is polyculture — many ways of being and living. This requires a transition to localism, which is another way of saying ways of life in which we are connected to our environment, so we see and understand the impacts of our consumption. Localism creates contexts in which we can look into the eyes of the people who make our clothes and grow our food, so that our choices can be informed by their impact on human relationships and well-being, not just convenience and a price tag.

This means working to strengthen local communities and create far more self-sufficient economies. Luckily, we have on hand ready guides and knowledge in the Indigenous cultures that have survived longest on this planet, and whose way of organizing and being are in greatest harmony with the biosphere. It means actively opting out of globalized industrialism as much as we can, by creating interdependence through sharing and cooperation, rather than dependence on economic trade and extraction.

At a national level, we could start by ditching GDP as an indicator of success in favor of more holistic measures, like the Genuine Progress Indicator or a Bhutanese style Gross National Happiness, which are built around life-centric, intrinsic values and take account of negative externalities like pollution and resource degradation. We could roll out a new money system that doesn’t necessitate endless growth and debt. And we could put caps on material use, so that we never extract more than the planet can regenerate.

This type of post-growth thinking must become the central organizing principle of society the way “self-determination” was the operating principle of post-World War I society (at least in rhetoric). Localization should be the rallying cry of both nation-states and communities alike who are nimble and brave enough to transcend the shadows of scarcity and self-interest. Localism requires a sensitivity and attunement to local contexts, geographies, histories and cultures. It requires us to contract new types of relationships with each other, with ourselves, with the state, and with Nature itself.

There is no traditional blueprint for these types of economic models. This may seem daunting. But our current trajectory is even more daunting. Unless a politically significant mass of people actively rejects the false god of growth and chooses a different path, our current economic system will crash under its own weight and take most life as we know it with it. As the late British economist David Fleming reminds us, “Localisation stands, at best, at the limits of practical possibility, but it has the decisive argument in its favour that there will be no alternative.”

Alnoor Ladha is a co-founder and executive director of The Rules, a global collective of activists, writers, researchers, coders and others focused on addressing the root causes of inequality, poverty and climate change.

Photo by Aimée Wheaton

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The process by which capitalist investment seeks to reengineer and privatize nature, government, social life and even genes and physical matter is at once breathtakingly ambitious, subtle and insidious. The great contribution of Dr Peter Doran’s A Political Economy of Attention, Mindfulness and Consumerism is to show how this process is also aimed, with systemic zeal, at human consciousness itself. Whether we realize it or not, our minds and culture are being colonized by markets – through advertising and data-mining, entertainment media and social networking. The hidden political and economic struggle of our times is focused on shaping our inner lives.

This is a large, complicated story based on neoliberal capitalism’s impact on everyday life: frantic work schedules, declining wages, wealth inequality, and austerity politics, all of which have led to a degradation of public services, social amenities and neighbourliness. It turns out that consumerism and market growth, diligently supported by the state, are not in fact ‘maximizing utility,’ as economists would have it. They are breeding personal despair, precarity, alienation and social dysfunction.

The good news is that people are discovering paths of escape from the capitalist phantasmagoria. More: They are creating new zones of self-organized commoning that meet needs and produce things in more socially constructive ways, independent of the state and market.

This trend can be seen in the growing interest in ‘care of the self’ and mindfulness, and in the surge in civic engagement and social mutualism. A robust and expanding digital culture, especially among the younger generation, is discovering the virtues of social collaboration. People are waking up to the huge costs and limitations of the ‘free market’ system – and convivial, life-enhancing dimensions of open-source, commons-based approaches.

A neglected problem, however, is how to build new enabling structures of law and governance to protect such spacious ideals of human life from marketization. One hopeful sign are the dozens of one-off ‘legal hacks’ that attempt to carve out protected zones for commoning, such as Creative Commons licenses to enable legal sharing, multi-stakeholdler co-operatives for social services, and land trusts to protect the interests of future generations.

Important as these innovations are, what we really need are systemic legal strategies for moving beyond homo economicus. Law and policy need to honour the ‘nested I,’ in which the individual is seen as integrated within larger ecological and social systems. In Doran’s words, the ‘symbolic architecture of social power’ must change so that we can shift from a world based on transactions to one based on relationships. In effect, we must reinvent the political economy of attention.

The mindfulness revolution offers great hope for imagining new ways of being and knowing, as this book so beautifully explains. But it also remains clear-eyed about the dangers of ‘McMindfulness,’ the mainstream effort to neutralize the emancipatory potential of reintegrating mind, body and ecology. In this sense, Peter Doran opens up new vistas of transformation.

Excerpt:

Towards a mindful commons

Peter Doran: Activist and academic champions of the commons… have begun to respond to neoliberal capitalism and consumerism with a series of critical counter-practices, piloting a radical alternative to the prevailing hyper-individualist and consumerist ethos that recycles ‘biological necessity into commercial capital’ (Bauman 2010: 67).

A commons has a number of important characteristics:

• It is a social (sometimes legal) system with some self-organizing capacity and a commitment to preserving and sharing a local resource and working together with shared values and identity.

• Access to the protected resource is organized on an inclusive and equitable basis.

• A commons is often identified with the particular resource that it has evolved to safeguard, use and preserve. In fact, a commons is always morethan-a-resource. It is a resource plus a defined community and the protocols, values and norms devised by the community to manage its resources.

• Finally, there is no commons without commoning or the practices that embody the social practices and norms for managing a resource for collective benefit.

As Ugo Mattei, one of the premiere theorists of the law of the commons, explains:

– phenomenological understanding of the commons forces us to move beyond the reductionist opposition of ‘subject–object,’ which produces the commodification of both. It helps us understand that, unlike private and public goods, commons are not commodities and cannot be reduced to the language of ownership … It would be reductive to say that we have a common good. We should rather see to what extent we are the commons. (Mattei 2012: 5)

Silke Helfrich (2012) has identified a number of core beliefs that seem to be intrinsic to the practice of commoning and the organization of the commons, including: for rivalrous resources there is enough for all through sharing; while for non-rivalrous resources, there is abundance; humans are primarily cooperative; knowledge is produced through peer-to-peer networking or collaboration; and the vision of society foregrounds a conviction that one’s personal unfolding is a condition for the development of others.

A feature of this contemporary commoning movement is the shift from a view of the commons as a ‘thing’ or even as a set of arrangements to a phenomenological emphasis on the active promotion of commoning as a way of being, doing and seeing the world (Bollier 2014). Commoning has been described (Weber 2013: 44) as an attempt to redefine our very understanding of ‘the economy’, to challenge a dominant understanding that valorizes rationality over subjectivity, material wealth over human fulfilment, and the system’s abstract necessities (growth, capital accumulation) over human needs.

Commoning shatters these dualisms and reconfigures the role of participants so that we are not simply reduced to the roles of producers or consumers but come to be regarded as participants in a physical and meaningful exchange with multiple material, social and sense-making needs. Commoners realize that their household needs and livelihoods are entangled with the specific place and habitat where they live, and with the earth as a living entity. The recovery of the commons is a collective act of restorative memory and remembering (Bollier 2014), practice, and a rendering visible of new possibilities for economic and legal forms in the face of a failed attempt by champions of capitalist power to impose a false arrest on the historical evolution of economic ideas: to revive and re-embed slow practices in an ethos that is local or situated, entangled in relationships that are human and non-human, and that command an ethics of care, reciprocity and interbeing (Weber 2013).

Rowe describes the commons as the ‘hidden economy, everywhere present but rarely noticed. It provides the basic support systems of life – both ecological and social’ (Rowe 2001a). He notes that the ‘destruction of the commons has been the leitmotif in much that passes for “development”. It is the threat that connects many of the problems that beset the world’, from pollution of the water and sky, to the breakdown of community, the toxic entertainment industry, and attempts to engineer and patent the genetic substrate of life itself. Bresnihan (2015) sums up one perspective of the commons, one that refuses to fix the idea to that of a ‘resource’, for the commons is not merely land or knowledge but the way these, and more, are combined, used and cared for by and through a collective that is not only human but also non-human.

Commoning, then, denotes the continuous making and remaking of the commons through shared practice. Bresnihan (ibid.: 4) adds that at the heart of this relational, situated interdependence of humans and non-humans is not an impoverished world of ‘niggardly nature’, nor an infinitely malleable world of ‘techno-culture’, but a more-than-human commons that navigates between limits and possibilities as they arise.”

Photo by jakepjohnson

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In Extraenvironmentalist #95 we first speak with Professor Frank Trentmann about his new book Empire of Things: How We Became a World of Consumers, from the Fifteenth Century to the Twenty-First. We hear from Frank about how we’ve come to live with so much stuff. Then, we talk to Professor Laurence Malone about his work and teaching on Adam Smith and in editing the Essential Adam Smith. Dr. Malone helps us understand the real meaning of the invisible hand.

Photo by cthoyes

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The creation of the consumer economy—a complex, interconnected system of institutions, goals, rewards, and punishments—was one of the great social projects of the twentieth century, when energy was cheaply abundant and two of our chief economic problems were overproduction and unemployment. . For instance:

• What are the prospects of the consumer economy in this century, when we are changing our energy sources and also dealing with climate change, water scarcity, resource depletion, and overpopulation?
• How will we create jobs if we’re not constantly expanding consumption?
• What’s the future of advertising?
• What are some of the best practices related to reducing consumption and waste that can serve as models as we move forward?

Live Discussion: Consumerism After Fossil Fuels

On June 30, 2016, Asher Miller and Richard Heinberg from Post Carbon Institute were joined by Annie Leonard (Greenpeace and Story of Stuff) and John de Graaf (Take Back Your Time, The Happiness Alliance) for a lively, free-flowing conversation about what the future of consumerism might look like in a 100% renewable energy future. The recording can be viewed below.

Click here to view the Live Chat transcript.
Click here to view the chat transcript.

Over the coming weeks, we’ll be hosting discussions with experts in various sectors to explore what the post fossil-fuel future. You can sign up for upcoming discussions by visiting OurRenewableFuture.org.

Photo by lyzadanger

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The disappearance of the “consumer” in the new productive models drives a growing social space of productive networks and egalitarian oriented to abundance.

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The Church of England has spoken out in trenchant terms about the extreme inequality that defines modern Britain, arguing today that moral principles and sharing should underpin the foundations of society.

In a new book of essays to be published next week, the archbishops of Canterbury and York warn that the poor are being left behind in a country that is increasingly dominated by “rampant consumerism and individualism” since the Thatcher era. The church leaders caution politicians that they are selling a “lie” that economic growth is the answer to Britain’s social problems, contending that the fruits of growth should be distributed in a way that reduces inequality between the rich and poor.

The essay in the book by the Archbishop of Canterbury, Justin Welby, reportedly argues that conventional market assumptions such as ‘trickle down’ economics have failed, and rejects the idea that Adam Smith’s ‘invisible hand’ of the market will ultimately right social wrongs.

An interview with the Daily Telegraph newspaper broadly outlines the leading churchmen’s views on the need for a more equal and sharing society. The Archbishop of York, Dr John Sentamu, said that the book draws heavily on the writings of William Temple, the Archbishop of York and then Canterbury in the 1940s, which are credited with laying the foundations for a just post-war society and the welfare state. Sentamu quoted one passage of the book to the paper, in which Temple argued that the art of government was in finding ways to bring together the interests of individuals with those of society at large, such as through universal access to healthcare or education.

As Sentamus explains in the Telegraph interview: “Temple was right; you judge the well-being of any society by how it cares for those who are vulnerable. If it is the survival of the fittest that’s what I call living in the jungle and I don’t want to live in the jungle – this is supposed to be a civilised society. It seems to me if it is to do with the health of the nation and the well-being of the nation every citizen really ought to be at the same table and not some taking more.”

Arguing for a new and more equitable distribution of wealth in Britain, Sentamu adds that this has got “nothing to do with being socialist” or adhering to a prescribed economic ideology. “What it has got to with is: ‘Is this how God has created us?’ Has he created us to be people who go to Black Friday to fight with each other because they want the biggest bargain? No – that’s the rule of the jungle, we left that behind.”

In a short video accompanying the book, Sentamu likens the UK economy to a household and claims that no one member should have “too much” when another has “too little”. He says “it will be quite a pity if the powerful, the richest, are the ones that are thriving in our household and some are left behind. For me, therefore, one of the greatest challenges that faces our nation has to do with income inequality.”

He adds that as a household we need to “deliberate on how we must ensure that this income inequality is addressed properly so that everybody flourishes, everybody shares…” Hence the title of the book – On rock or sand – is intended to help us discover the firm foundations and principles on which Britain needs to be built.

This is not the first time that the Church of England has spoken out in defence of a society that shares its wealth and resources more fairly and equitably. In the short video, Sentamu begins by defending the Church’s involvement in politics which he sees as an essential part of public deliberations on how to create a society based on Christian and moral principles, although he stresses that the book doesn’t take a party political position. Sentamu also defends the Faith in the City report published 30 years ago that harshly criticised the Thatcher government’s policies, and explicitly argued for redistributive policies to reduce inequality.

Pope Francis has, of course, also strongly attacked inequality in recent years on a global as well as a national basis. In April, he tweeted that inequality is the root of social evil, and he has called on world leaders – together with United Nations’ agencies – to legitimately redistribute wealth to the poor in a new spirit of generosity to help curb the “economy of exclusion” that is taking place today.

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American Progress, painted by John Gast 1872

There are many problems I could talk about, but I’m going to stick to the ones that are most relevant to the topic of Place-based practice:

1. The version of prosperity that Daniel Altman, the author of that article, is talking about is not good for the planet and is killing us all.
2. We need to stop creating greenhouse gasses. We need to drive fewer cars, eat less meat, create less waste, own fewer things. The economy that Altman is talking about is exactly the thing that got us into this mess to begin with. Why would we want to bring people who are living much more lightly on the Earth up to the level of Earth-abuse that Western societies need to learn to live without?
3. Factory jobs are not flexible and create more problems for families — especially mothers with small children — than the paltry wages they bring can solve.
   Anyone who has lived on a poverty wage in a developed country knows the problems that having a job can create. You lose control of your time. If you are a parent, as if it weren’t enough that you lose time with your children, on top of that you usually have to pay someone else to watch your children while you work. If you are very lucky, you might have a parent or a friend who helps for free, but who is providing for their living expenses? Even if you don’t have children, factory jobs create suffering that comes from being treated like an interchangeable part in the machine of industry.
4. Expecting people to give up the socially rich, connected community life in their villages to move to the city and get a factory job is just an extension of the colonization process.
   Colonization involves more than just taking over land. It involves telling the people who were in a place already that they have to change the way that they think, live, and act. Colonization starts with the idea in the minds of the colonizers that they have the one true, right and best way to live and that everyone else has to adapt to “progress”.

All of these things touch on the One Gazillion Dollar Question:

How can we live in a way that doesn’t destroy our planet?

I decided some time ago that the first step is to realize that the idea of progress, the key notion that got us into this mess, has got to go. I may sound like a neo-Luddite. I guess I am.

I believe that humans are not just tool-using apes, we are technology-developing apes. Technological development is part of the creativity that makes us tick. But not all technology is progress, nor is it all needed, nor is uniform “progress” necessary across the globe. In fact, one of the things that has saved us up till now, and may save some of our species in the future, is that there is still a diversity of ways that humans live on this planet that ranges from grass huts and hammocks to glass skyscrapers and memory-foam beds.

It’s time for us to stop thinking that improving the lives of others means making them live more like us. It’s time to start asking what technologies people in “less developed countries” can teach us about. It’s time to start asking what people who don’t have 9-5 jobs think of as the most important goals in their lives. It’s time to start asking what kind of improvements they want to see in their homes, in their villages and the wider world. And then its time to figure out how we can learn from the best parts of their lives.

The US uses more energy per capita than any other nation on Earth. US households use more electricity, more gas and more water than households in other countries. Even more than the most wealthy European countries! Why?! Look around and start asking how you can live a better life right where you are. How can you spend less of the earth’s resources? How can you spend more time with your children? How can you get to know your neighbors better?

Once you’ve figured out how to be a little bit less harsh on the planet and nicer to your kids, the next big step is to look around and see if you can stop supporting the industrial economy that’s destroying the world — entirely.

Oof! There, I said it.

I don’t even know if it’s possible. Can we, people who live in North America, Europe, or the more developed nations of the East actually find a way to disconnect ourselves from the machines of industry that have destroyed our planet and our lives? We’re going to have to find a way if we are to survive, because, frankly, it’s the factories that are using far more resources than the homes and cars are. It’s the stuff we buy. It’s the places we work. It’s the way we build for war and then go to war and feed other people’s war. It’s the way we strip minerals from the ground. It’s the way we frack the ground to get the last drops of natural gas.

We are destroying the world and telling other people that they are “poor” unless they are destroying the planet with us. That’s completely nuts. It’s time for us to forget the idea that the life we live represents “progress” and find new ways of thinking.

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History books usually study social movements of the second half of the nineteenth century from the point of view of the split between anarchists and Marxists. Both theories played an important role in debates of the great workers’ movements of the following century, and for a long time, no one seemed to question the root they shared: the idea that the origin of the “social problem” was in the way in which the production of things was organized.

It’s normal for that powerful idea to occupy, almost without question, the center of historical stories: from the First International to the fall of the Communist regimes of Eastern Europe, the story of European reforms and revolutions was written in terms of work stoppages, general strikes, “wildcat” strikes and factory occupations. In the world of alternatives in the same days, not much was different. For two centuries, to say “cooperative” in continental Europe or in South America automatically meant “worker cooperative,” and it was the most powerful community movement of the time. Israeli “kibbutzim” (communities) were founded to create a productive base in the wastelands of Jewish migration in Asia. Even when the Catholic Church started to develop its “social doctrine” with the encyclical Rerum Novarum, its focus was on the same starting point as the theoreticians of the IWA: the drama of proletarianization of the artisan and the peasant, the transition from the workshop and its culture to the factory and alienation.

Social Anglicanism

But the Anglo-Saxon world was going the other direction. In Great Britain, a strong philanthropical tradition existed, linking both liberals and conservative social Christianity, which was afraid that unions would be “contaminated” by the radical ideas of the continent. At the end of the nineteenth century, this tendency had little influence on unions, but had a strong relationship with different experiments of workers’ stores and little mutuals, often linked to the social outreach of Anglican parishes. Little by little, from this effort there emerged a “friendly cooperativism.” The worker cooperative showed the possibility of a world where capitalists were not the owners of the businesses; however, a consumer cooperative can put in question the need for a shopkeeper-owner, but not owners as a group, so it didn’t question the social order.

These are the cooperatives that met in the “First British Co-operative Congress” in 1869. Wanting to create an “alternative” to the dominant workers’ movements, they will rewrite the history of cooperativism as it was then commonly understood, placing its origins in Robert Owens, a liberal philanthropist–rather than in Fourier–and will date the birth of cooperativism to “the Rochdale Pioneers,” an English consumer cooperative, ignoring the fishing, agrarian and artisan commons that had been modernizing and becoming modern [worker] cooperatives for at least sixty years prior.

For a long time, this reductionist interpretation was almost exclusively Anglo-Saxon. In 1895, when the first assembly of the “International Cooperative Alliance” took place, the delegates belonged almost exclusively to the British Empire: England, Australia, India, and Ireland. The Anglo-Saxon homogeneity was only broken by the participation of German Christian cooperativism, born of the Lutheran Church, a minority in an environment of overwhelming development of social democracy.

United States

After the Second World War, “consumerism” took off in the United States. US unions spread consumer and housing cooperativism across the country as a way to protect their members from the economic crisis following the Japanese recovery. The idea that “conscious consumption” can not only relieve crises but transform the very international economic structure is made manifest in 1946, when the Committee Central Mennonite creates “Ten Thousand Villages,” the first “fair trade” association.

Meanwhile, society is stunned to discover the proportions of the Jewish genocide, and the media have to explain how “Hitler’s madness” could have led to electoral success and social consensus in enlightened Germany.

The attention of academics and creators of opinion turns to techniques of mass manipulation. There is a growing distrust of the power of the media and the effects of the then nascent television. The publicists of Madison Avenue (“Mad Men”) will soon become the epitome of the new industrialist fascism, which is able to use Goebbels’ mass techniques in a new way, to make us consume what we don’t need. Alternative consumption and what soon will be called the “counterculture” are then defined as a new form of resistance. And in ’59, when the Cuban Revolution demands an ideological response from the Kennedy administration, the model to export will be the consumer cooperativism of conservative unions, so that in the ’60s, the ground was already prepared in all possible places for the idea that “the system” would be renewed not by politics or the redefinition of forms of work, but by organized consumers.

Europe

In Europe, during the ’70s, a good number of college kids–then much less numerous than today–discovered the radical Left. After failing again and again to convince the workers that they needed a revolutionary party, they wonder the same thing that, years before, Bordieu and Castoriadis had asked in the magazine Socialism or Barbarism: “Why is the proletariat no longer revolutionary?” Castoriadis’ answer, and above all, Bordieu’s, later followed by his Situationist disciple Guy Debord, will be very well developed intellectually. According to these authors, capitalism had entered a new phase, where the determining factor of the social order, including the control and the generation of identities, was carried out not in the direct relationship between capital and labor, in production, but rather in the system of reproduction of the labor force, consumption, where the new contradictions of the system were concentrated. More than capitalism, we would have to call the new mode of social production/reproduction “consumerism.”

The discourse is soon taken up by the non-parliamentarian German and Dutch Left: the fundamental contradiction of capitalism is no longer between capital and labor, as Marx described, but between capital, culture and natural resources. The enemy was no longer capitalism, but consumerism and industrialism. The discourse recovers the priority and urgency of an alternative: the dream of a world revolution–something that the people make, and would have to make–will gradually be substituted with a global ecological catastrophe, something that would be beyond people’s control if they don’t change their lifestyles and consumption habits. In that ideological framework, die Grünen, the Greens, are born, the first European political party to systematically organize campaigns of alternative consumption.

The fall of the Communist regimes of eastern Europe, with the consequent loss of influence of the parties of Marxist inspiration, gave even more relevance to anti-consumerism–and therefore to “consumerism”–in alternative discourse in a wide variety of forms and topical associations: from catastrophism and radical ecologism to the discourse of movements against climate change and a good part of the “sharing economy.”

Today

And in fact, it has been the development of a whole series of movements born in the English-speaking world over the two latest decades that has ended up establishing the argument of the “centrality of consumption” among new social sectors in Europe and Latin America. Alternative discourse has gone from the productive kibbutz, still a major point of reference in the ’70s, to “ecovillages” that only share ownership of common services, from cooperatives with houses to “co-living,” and even from consumer co-ops themselves to “collaborative consumption” platforms listed on the stock market. And if there is no belief that production is the center of social organization, it is difficult to understand the nature and distribution of property as the determinant institution of an era.

The “consumerist” discourse, the idea that consumption patterns can modify the social structure through the market, has gained extraordinary strength. Paradoxically, it has fed and given legitimacy to a certain sense of “guilt” about consuming and enjoying doing so, a certain ascetic and degrowthist ideal, closer to Christian millenarianism than to the dream of abundance of the utopian and revolutionary movements of the nineteenth century. A new social consensus about how to change the world seems to have formed.

And yet, we realize that something substantial is diluted when we ignore production. Maybe it’s because our empowerment as consumers, by definition, has a ceiling. Perhaps because we realize that unemployment and poverty can’t be addressed by changing only our purchases, or only distributing production another way. Perhaps because consuming “less,” or “even less,” is the immediate result of the crisis (economic “degrowth”), and we see that it means nothing but poverty. Or simply because, inside, we know that, for as valuable and important as sharing culture is, our sovereignty and that of our communities continues to depend on our ability to satisfy the needs of our loved ones, and that that, beyond cultural change, in the end has to do with capacity and the mode of production of goods, both material and cultural, that satisfy them.

Translation by Steve Herrick from the original (in Spanish)

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