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Monday, February 01, 2010
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.. http://www.newrules.org/retail/article/new-deal-local-economies
A New Deal for Local Economies
Stacy Mitchell
This lecture was delivered on October 17, 2009, at the Bristol Schumacher Conference in Bristol, England. The conference was chaired by the New Economics Foundation and organized around the theme, "FROM THE ASHES OF THE CRASH: Rebuilding the new economics." More information and DVDs of the event are available from The Schumacher Society.
Let me begin by sharing some good news. Scattered here and there, in my country and in yours, the seeds of a new, more local and durable economy are taking root.
Locally grown food has soared in popularity. There are now 5,274 active farmers markets in the United States. Remarkably, almost one of every two of these markets was started within the last decade.(1) Food co-ops and neighborhood greengrocers are likewise on the rise.
Some 400 new independent bookstores have opened in the last four years.(2) Neighborhood hardware stores are making a comeback in some cities. More students graduating from pharmacy school report that they would rather open their own drugstore than work for chain. In April, even as Virgin Megastores prepared to shutter its last U.S. record emporium, more than a thousand independent music stores were mobbed for the second annual Record Store Day. This celebration of independent record stores drew hundreds of thousands of people into local stores, was one of the top search terms on Google, and triggered a 16-point upswing in album sales.(3)
Driving is down in U.S. over the last two years, while data from a dozen metropolitan regions show that houses located within walking distance of local businesses have held value better than those isolated in the suburbs where the nearest gallon of milk is a five-mile drive to a superstore.(4)
In city after city, independent businesses are organizing and building an increasingly powerful counterweight to the big business lobby on issues as varied as tax policy and global warming. Local business alliances have now formed in over 130 cities and collectively count some 30,000 businesses as members.(5) These alliances are calling on people to choose independent businesses and locally produced goods more often and making a compelling case that doing so is critical to rebuilding middle-class prosperity, averting environmental catastrophe, and ensuring that our daily lives are not smothered by corporate uniformity.
There is growing evidence that these initiatives are succeeding. Last winter, as the economy spiraled downward, many big retail chains reported double-digit sales declines. Some filed for bankruptcy. But a survey of 1,100 independent retailers found that revenue was down just 3 percent on average.(6) What accounted for this relative good fortune? Many of those surveyed said that more people are deliberately seeking out locally owned businesses.
But here's what is perhaps the strongest — and, undoubtedly, the most bizarre — evidence to date that people's priorities are changing: Many massive, globe-spanning corporations are now trying to figure out how they can be "local" too.
Hellmann's, the mayonnaise brand owned by the processed-food giant Unilever, is test-driving a new "Eat Real, Eat Local" marketing campaign. Frito-Lay is using farmers to pitch its potato chips as local food. Barnes & Noble, the world's top seller of books, has launched a new campaign under the tagline, "All bookselling is local." Winn-Dixie, one of the largest supermarket chains in the U.S., has a new slogan: "Local flavor since 1956." The International Council of Shopping Centers, a global consortium of mall developers, is pouring millions of dollars into television ads urging people to "Shop Local" - at their nearest mall.
Most astounding of all, Starbucks, a company that has spent untold millions developing one of the most recognizable brands on the planet, is now beginning to un-brand some of its outlets. The first of these just reopened as "15th Avenue Coffee and Tea" in Seattle and, unless you read the fine-print on the menu, you would quite easily assume it was an independent coffee house.
Corporations desperately want to turn the local economy movement into nothing more than a cheap marketing trick they can appropriate for their own ends. These attempts at imitation are unnerving. But in the end I think this new variation on corporate green-washing — let's call it local-washing — will backfire. In the meantime, I'm heartened by what it says about the current consciousness. After all, these companies spend enormous sums on market research and they would not be doing this unless they had detected a sizeable shift in public attitudes.
II.
While signs abound that people are rediscovering the benefits of an economy rooted in community and small-scale enterprise, all of this activity, though widespread, is still quite modest. It exists largely on the margins and is unlikely to coalesce into a wholesale reorganization of our economy unless we change the rules.
We tend to imagine that our economic system is the product of a kind of natural evolution, the inevitable result of forces as innate and inexorable as the weather. But in fact our economy is largely the consequence of public policy. We have made rules that privilege the global over the local, concentrate ownership, and undermine democracy.
The corporation itself is an invention of government, and the more you study its origins and structure, the more peculiar and artificial you realize it is. The first corporations were established in the 15th century by monarchs eager to maintain their power against a rising merchant class. These chartered corporations were endowed by their royal creators with monopoly rights to control trade and exploit various regions of the world, backed by the full legal and military power of the state.(7)
This unholy alliance between central governments and powerful corporations has continued right on down to the present day, but with a few noteworthy setbacks along the way. One was the American Revolution, which, you may recall, got underway in earnest when a group of colonists forced their way onto three ships docked in Boston Harbor and dumped more than 90,000 pounds of tea into the sea. The colonists' actions that night were as much a challenge to corporate power as they were a rebellion against King George III. Those ships were owned by the East India Company, which had been losing money in the colonies in part because of growing competition from local tea merchants. Parliament stepped in and passed the Tea Act, which exempted the East India Company from the taxes that its small rivals had to pay. The assumption was that the lure of cheaper tea would outweigh any loyalties the colonists had to their local merchants. But Parliament and the East India Company misjudged. The Boston Tea Part and the Revolution itself were thus acts of both civil disobedience and corporate sabotage.(8)
In the decades following the war, Americans remained highly suspect of economic concentration. Thomas Jefferson even proposed making "freedom from monopolies in commerce" part of the Bill of Rights. Although his proposal failed, the early republic still placed strict limits on the power and longevity of corporations.
But the corporate form waited in the wings and made a comeback after the Civil War, when a series of court rulings and new laws endowed the modern corporation with extraordinary power, including most of the rights of citizens plus several superhuman powers, notably limited liability and unlimited life. In the words of David Morris, co-founder of the Institute for Local Self-Reliance, "We gave business the tools to grow beyond our capacities to control it. And one hundred years later these creatures of the state have come to dominate states."
From bailouts for big banks to tax breaks for superstores, we have rigged the system with policies that underwrite corporate expansion and undermine local economies. A handful of companies now dominate every sector of our economy.
This is not the world of Adam Smith. It is not about people creating and exchanging real value. Corporations exist not to create value, but to extract it. Their roots in colonialism are very telling. When mega-retailers, like Wal-Mart or Tesco, move into a community, their aim is not to enrich the local inhabitants. Their aim is to eradicate local businesses and to sever the web of economic relationships that link the people of a community together - from the local banker making a loan to the shopkeeper, who sources goods from a local manufacturer or farmer, who in turn hires the local accountant, and so on. In place of this robust system of local trade and mutual benefit, the big superstores erect a single-track economy in which wealth flows in only one direction: out.
How is it that we have so willingly accepted such colonization? We acquiesce in large part because we long ago stopped conceiving of ourselves as citizens, with all of the authority and responsibility that role entails. Instead we adopted the highly circumscribed role of consumer. This is how we are referred to by corporations, the media, our elected officials, and even ourselves. We have internalized the logic of corporations.
This consumer identity is actually a relatively modern invention. It was created in California in the late 1930s by one of the first big chains, a company called A&P. At its height, A&P operated about 4,000 supermarkets. It is often referred to as the Wal-Mart of its day, although its market share was in fact much smaller. When A&P, and other early chains like Woolworth's, were first expanding in the 1920s and 30s, they were met with fierce resistance. People organized against them in hundreds of cities, half the states passed anti-chain store taxes that grew progressively larger the more outlets a chain had, the federal government launched several antitrust cases against A&P, and by 1939 Congress itself was debating a national chain store tax that was so steep that, had it been enacted, it would have dissolved A&P.(9)
It's fascinating to read this early debate because it's so different from the discussion we have today about chain stores. People at that time reacted to A&P as citizens, as independent economic actors, as stewards of their communities. And from all of these perspectives, they saw A&P as a threat, to both their livelihoods and democracy itself. A&P responded by hiring a very clever ad agency and launching a sweeping public relations campaign that reframed the terms of the debate and repositioned people not as citizens, but as consumers. It worked. People began to see a new supermarket not as a threat, but just another shopping option. The national chain store tax was defeated, antitrust took a back seat, and our consumer identity was born.(10)
When we became consumers, the pursuit of happiness — to use Thomas Jefferson's lovely phrase — ceased to be a collective, public endeavor. It was no longer about seeing friends at the pub, or strolling the high street on a warm evening, or joining with one's neighbors to address a community need. Instead the pursuit of happiness became confined to the narrow realm of individual consumption. People no longer relied on their neighbors so much as competed against them. "A life devoted primarily to the pursuit of material ends," Fritz Schumacher observed, "necessarily sets man against man … because man's needs are infinite and infinitude can be achieved only in the spiritual realm, never in the material." Consequently, today we find ourselves not only on the brink of environmental catastrophe, but increasingly alienated and unhappy.
Einstein was right that "no problem can be solved from the same level of consciousness that created it." And so we must begin by reclaiming our citizenship.
III.
About ten years ago, the Institute for Local Self-Reliance launched the New Rules Project to develop and advocate for policies that would democratize ownership, refashion the economy for long-term sustainability, and nurture strong self-conscious and self-governing communities. Today I would like to highlight three areas of policy reform that I think are especially critical.
The first is that we must resurrect and embrace a vigorous anti-monopoly policy.
If we were to boil the financial crisis down to its root cause, we could sum it up rather succinctly as the "curse of bigness," to use former Supreme Court Justice Louis Brandeis's phrase. The crisis was caused by massive industry consolidation, which invariably leads to destructive corporate behavior, because the decision-makers at these vast institutions are so far removed from the impacts of their decisions.
Perhaps the best way to understand the problems inherent in an economy that separates actions from consequences is to look at its opposite. Last fall, not long after Lehman Brothers collapsed, I was speaking on a panel alongside a community banker. He said his bank did not offer mortgages that people could not afford or that would balloon in cost a few yeas out for two simple reasons. One was that the bank did not sell mortgages to Wall Street, but kept these loans on its own books. The bank's financial well-being, therefore, was directly tied to the well-being of its customers. The other reason was that he invariably knew or got to know the borrowers. "I don't relish the idea of foreclosing on a family I regularly see at the grocery store," he explained.
Arguably even more troubling than the financial crisis itself has been the government response. So far it has resulted in even greater concentration, as failing banks have been ushered into shotgun marriages with other banks, while massive injections of public money have enabled giants like Goldman Sachs to speculate their way into even bigger profits. In the U.S., just four banks now control half of all bank assets, issue half of all mortgages, and account for two of every three credit cards.
The only reasonable path forward is that banks that are Too Big to Fail must be deemed Too Big to Exist and broken up into smaller components more responsive to their communities and customers. We must place strict caps on the market share that any one bank can amass, and we must reinstate rules adopted during the Great Depression and foolishly discarded a decade ago that prevented banks from engaging in both ordinary retail banking and speculative investment.
The deference to bigness that has guided policymakers' response to the banking crisis has long infected our government. A generation ago, with Reagan and Thatcher telling us there was no alternative, we dismantled anti-monopoly laws on the grounds that bigger is more efficient. Competition policy became concerned solely with short-term impacts on prices and abandoned any consideration of the corrosive long-term consequences of concentrated power.
Regulators have been especially blind to the problems caused by firms that exercise their power not so much to raise prices, at least in the short-run, but to gut suppliers and destroy smaller competitors. Thus we have the unchecked growth of Tesco, which now has one-third of the British market, and Wal-Mart, which captures nearly one in four dollars Americans spend on groceries and is the largest seller of a staggering array of goods, from toys to clothing, books to home furnishings.
These power buyers now control so much of the market that suppliers have only two options. They can shun them and try to survive by selling to a shrinking number of other retailers. Or they can submit themselves to the chains, which will lead to more revenue but ever thinner margins to the point that there's not a dime left for product development and innovation, much less for taking care of their employees. Of Wal-Mart's top ten suppliers in the mid 1990s, four have sought bankruptcy protection, while others have merged in desperate bids to stay afloat.(11)
All of this has led to a profound loss of economic flexibility as the entire global system of production is refashioned to serve Wal-Mart and Tesco. The food, drugs, clothing, and other goods we rely on are now made in a relatively small number of places and transported over long and highly centralized supply lines. As Barry Lynn has written, we are "slowly freezing our economy into an ever more rigid crystal … that every day is more liable to collapse from some sudden shock."
Given the ecological challenges we face, we can ill afford an economy that is the biological equivalent of a monoculture. We need the inherent creativity and adaptability of a multitude of small-scale enterprises that can evolve quickly and better respond to the unique circumstances of their own regions. Competition policy must embrace diversity as its primary aim. It must return to the idea the measure of a competitive economy is not some abstract notion of efficiency, but rather a competitive economy is, by definition, one made up of many competitors.
IV.
My second proposal is that we need to adopt planning policies that support local economies.
I live in a 19th century neighborhood in a small New England city. My mother-in-law, who grew up in this same neighborhood, often talks about what it was like during her childhood in the 1940s. What I find most striking about her description is how many businesses our little section of town once had. There was a grocery store, hardware store, two drugstores, a tailor, and more.
All of those businesses disappeared in the following decades. Families acquired cars and shopping migrated out to supermarkets and, later, malls and big-box stores. When I moved to the neighborhood in 2003, there were no businesses left save one lone corner store. Meanwhile, scores of big-box stores and massive shopping centers had grown up on the edge of town.
This transformation was not natural or inevitable. It was engineered by government policy. After World War II, federal and state officials poured money into highway construction, dismantled public transit, guaranteed mortgages in the suburbs but not in the city, and enacted planning rules that insisted on a rigid separation of residential and commercial uses. All of this created a landscape ideal for chains and big-box stores, but inhospitable to local businesses. In recent decades, municipal governments have gone even further, doling out hundreds of millions of dollars a year in subsidies and tax breaks that directly underwrite the construction of shopping centers and superstores.
Most Americans, as well as a growing number of Europeans, now find themselves living in a built environment that is ill-suited to a post-carbon world, in part because it fails to support a local economy and in part because it demands an extraordinary amount of driving. Between 1987 and 2007, total miles driven in the U.S. rose 60 percent.(12)
And this problem is self-reinforcing, because the landscape that the car has created only entrenches us ever more firmly in our role as consumers and erodes the social capital that enables communities to innovate and solve complex problems like global warming.
To understand how planning policy affects civic life, all you need to do is spend time watching people in a neighborhood business district or on a high street. What you see is lots of interaction. Business owners know their customers. People run into neighbors on the sidewalk or while waiting in line at the bakery. This is an environment that slows the pace of life and encourages people to loiter and converse.
Then undertake the same observation in the car-park of a big out-of-town shopping center and watch how differently people behave in this setting. You see very little interaction. This is a landscape built for cars, not people. The stores are sized to serve regions, not neighborhoods, so there's much less chance that you'll bump into someone you know. And even if you do, the store itself is designed to facilitate speedy consumption and deter loitering. This is an environment that fosters separation and disengagement.
Indeed, studies show that, in places with many small, locally owned businesses, people are much more engaged in community life than those living in towns dominated by big businesses. Residents of communities with a vibrant local business district are more likely to know their neighbors and to join civic and social groups. They attend public meetings more often and even vote in greater numbers than their counterparts in towns overrun by superstores.(13)
This brings me to a theory I have about the growth of farmers markets. The conventional explanation is that people are rediscovering local food. That's certainly true. But I think people are as hungry for the community experience as they are for the fresh broccoli. Several years ago, a group of sociologists from the University of California-Davis followed people around as they shopped in a supermarket. They found that your chances of having a conversation with another shopper are about 1 in 10. They then tracked people at farmers markets and found that your odds of having a conversation in this setting are nearly 70 percent.(14)
It's this social pleasure that I think is driving the very modest, but noteworthy, regeneration of local businesses in some communities. In my neighborhood, things began to change last year. First a restaurant opened and then a teashop. And then, like a gift from heaven, a small food market opened. Stop by in the early evening and you'll find a row of bicycles parked out front and the store's narrow aisles packed with people pondering their dinner options and chatting with their neighbors.
This little store is not only a hub of social activity. It's also an economic engine of surprising proportions. Studies show that spending a dollar at an independent business generates about three times as much benefit for your local economy as spending a dollar at a chain. The reason is that, unlike chains, which siphon money out of a community, local businesses spend much of their revenue buying goods and services from other local businesses. They bank at a local bank, hire a local accountant, get their printing done at the local print shop.(15)
My local food market stocks an extraordinary amount of food produced nearby - not only vegetables, but also locally made cheeses, yogurt, sauces, jams, biscuits and breads. Because it's run by a local owner, this store can source from dozens of small producers much more efficiently than Tesco or Wal-Mart, saddled as they are with global distribution systems and a top-down command structure. Local ownership enables a face-to-face economy. It closes the distance between customer and owner, farmer and eater, manufacturer and user.
Lastly, this little store is quite significant from a climate standpoint. One study in Seattle found that families living in neighborhoods that integrate small businesses with homes drive 26 percent fewer miles on average than those living in areas that lack nearby stores.(16)
But this local store and the others like it that have managed to survive are like little green shoots growing up in the cracks of a sidewalk. They are defying the odds in a planning system rigged against them. If we want to grow a whole new crop of these kinds of businesses, we must rethink our planning policies. We need to stop favoring the automobile at the expense of other forms of transportation and stop green-lighting superstore development.
A growing number of cities in the U.S. are indeed prohibiting the construction of superstores, and some, like San Francisco, are restricting the proliferation of all types of chains. At the very least, we need to adopt a kind of precautionary principle that places the onus on big retailers to demonstrate that their stores will be a net benefit, both economically and environmentally. We have enacted a policy like this in my home state of Maine, where large stores no longer have the right to open, but may do so only after their economic impacts have been independently evaluated and the community has determined that the benefits outweigh the costs.(17)
V.
Third and last, we need new mechanisms for channeling our investment capital in directions that nurture community and rebuild local economies.
The financial crisis has provided us all with a crash course on how much of our economy is based not on the creation of real value, but on speculation. Over the last year, we have learned that the speculative economy — the one that trades in exotic derivatives like credit default swaps and makes short-term, bubble-inducing bets on assets like real estate and tech stocks — is vast and highly rewarded. We have learned that the speculative economy undermines and consumes the productive economy. And we have learned that money made by speculation is often treated much more favorably by tax systems than money earned through real work.
We have also learned how entangled we all are in the speculative economy. If you think about it, there are very few opportunities for you and I to invest our savings in ways that would strengthen our local economies. Most of us, whether we like it or not, have our retirement and other savings invested in funds composed of stocks, derivatives, and other speculative vehicles.
This de-linking of money from place and productive investment is not the inevitable result of economic evolution. Money is a human invention and the rules that control its dynamic are also a human invention. The rules in place today favor mobility over community, speculation over productive investment, volatility over permanence.
How can we reconnect capital with community needs? Global warming has created an urgent need to retool much of our infrastructure, develop regional food systems, retrofit buildings, reestablish neighborhood enterprises, and so on. And yet our system for pooling and deploying capital is completely ill-suited to this task, oriented as it is to maximizing short-term gains rather than building long-term community capacity.
One way we might begin to reorient the financial system is to establish a modest tax on all financial transactions, including international currency trades. This would lessen the appeal of high-frequency speculative trading. It would also generate a stream of revenue that could be used to establish a publicly owned wholesale bank or fund that would channel capital to Community Development Financial Institutions. These in turn would finance small businesses, cooperatives, and social enterprises.
We might also consider funding, as the New Economic Foundation has suggested, a Green Industrial Bank to provide long-term financing for green infrastructure and renewable energy development. At the local level, cities are already pioneering ways to finance the transition to renewable energy. The city of Berkeley, California, for example, is using its bonding authority to provide long-term, low-interest loans that enable homeowners to become electricity producers by installing solar cells on their rooftops. The debt, which stays with the house if the owner moves, is repaid over a 20-year period through a fee added to their biannual property tax bill.
Another useful model, which relies on a mix of public and private investment, is Pennsylvania's Fresh Food Financing Initiative. This $120 million fund has provided low-interest, long-term loans to finance over 60 locally owned food markets in neighborhoods and small towns that lacked places to buy fresh food. All but one of these stores has succeeded, demonstrating that the reason "food deserts" exist in so many low-income communities is not that grocery stores are not viable in these areas, but rather banks have been reluctant to finance these ventures. We ought to build on this model by establishing similar funds to capitalize a new generation of neighborhood stores, small-scale farms, and other enterprises that can expand the capacity of communities to meet more of their needs locally.
In the private sector, we should look to reform the banking industry by both breaking up big banks and adopting policies that favor independent banks and credit unions. These smaller institutions have generally been much more responsive to their local communities. And, while big banks have focused on the needs of big business, small banks operate at a scale better matched to the needs of local economies.
Financial institutions are not the only way to link local capital with community enterprise. A growing number of local businesses are being financed directly by their customers. In the U.S., Community-Supported Agriculture schemes, or CSAs, which enable people to fund the operations of a farm in exchange for a share of its harvest, have multiplied to well over 3,000. Hundreds of independent bookstores, restaurants, and other local businesses in both the U.S. and the U.K. have raised capital from their customers to sustain or expand their operations. Earlier this year, more than 100 customers of the Busy Bee Toyshop in Greater Manchester put up £32,000 to take over the store, which had recently closed, and operate it as a cooperative. In Brooklyn, a similar initiative made hundreds of customers investors in their local bookstore. People have come together not only to save or grow local businesses, but also to start them. Six years ago, in Powell, Wyoming, over 800 families invested $500 each to capitalize a new community-owned downtown department store.(18)
Many political and corporate leaders are eager to put the financial crisis in the rearview mirror and return to business-as-usual. But we should not let them. More than ever, we need a new economics fashioned from the wisdom of Schumacher. We need a bold new deal that reorients antitrust, planning, and financial policy to shrink the power of corporations, resurrect citizenship, nurture local enterprise, and build a sustainable future.
Thank you.
* Stacy Mitchell is a senior researcher with the New Rules Project, a program of the Institute for Local Self-Reliance that challenges the wisdom and inevitability of economic consolidation and works to advance policies that build strong local economies and communities. Her latest book, Big-Box Swindle: The True Cost of Mega-Retailers and the Fight for America's Independent Businesses (Beacon Press, 2006), was named one of the top ten business books of the year by Booklist.
Notes:
1. United States Department of Agriculture, Farmers Market Growth: 1994-2009.
2. "Indie Bookstores Open Across the Country in 2008," Bookselling This Week, Jan. 22, 2009.
3. Stacy Mitchell, "Death of the Category Killers," Hometown Advantage Bulletin, Jun. 23, 2009.
4. Nate Silver, "The End of Car Culture," Esquire, May 6, 2009; Joseph Cortright, "Walking the Walk: How Walkability Raises Housing Values in U.S. Cities," CEOs for Cities, August 2009.
5. See "Map of Local Business Alliances" at http://www.newrules.org
6. "Independent Retailers Outperform Chains Over Holidays, National Survey Finds," New Rules Project Press Release, January 15, 2009.
7. Douglas Rushkoff, Life Inc. (Random House, 2009).
8. Thom Hartmann, Unequal Protection: The Rise of Corporate Dominance and the Theft of Human Rights (Rodale, 2004).
9. Stacy Mitchell, Big-Box Swindle: The True Cost of Mega-Retailers and the Fight for America's Independent Businesses (Beacon Press, 2006) p. 205-210; Richard C. Schragger, "The Anti-Chain Store Movement, Localist Ideology, and the Remnants of the Progressive Constitution, 1920-1940," Iowa Law Review, 2005; Lizabeth Cohen, A Consumers' Republic: The Politics of Consumption in Postwar America, (Knopf, 2003).
10. Helen Woodward, "How to Swing an Election," The Nation, Dec. 11, 1937.
11. Barry C. Lynn, "Breaking the chain: The antitrust case against Wal-Mart," Harper's Magazine, July 2006.
12. United States Department of Transportation.
13. See the "Community Life" chapter in Big-Box Swindle, as well as: Charles M. Tolbert, "Minding Our Own Business: Local Retail Establishments and the Future of Southern Civic Community," Social Forces, June 2005, 1309-1328; T.A. Lyson, R. J. Torres and R. Welsh, "Scale of Agricultural Production, Civic Engagement and Community Welfare," Social Forces, 2001, 311-327; and Jane Jacobs, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, New York: Random House, 1961.
14. Robert Sommer, John Herrick, and Ted R. Sommer, "The Behavioral Ecology of Supermarkets and Farmers' Markets," Journal of Environmental Psychology, (1981) 1, 13-19.
15. See Civic Economics, "Thinking Outside the Box: A Report on Independent Merchants and the Local Economy," September 2009; Civic Economics, "The San Francisco Retail Diversity Study," May 2007; and Institute for Local Self-Reliance, "The Economic Impact of Locally Owned Businesses vs. Chains: A Case Study in Midcoast Maine," Sept. 2003. Additional studies can be found under "Key Studies" at www.newrules.org/retail.
16. Lawrence Frank in collaboration with the Center for Clean Air Policy, "A Study of Land Use, Transportation, Air Quality, and Health in King County, WA," commissioned by King County, Sept. 27, 2005. See also: Stacy Mitchell, "Neighborhood Stores: An Overlooked Strategy for Fighting Global Warming," Grist Magazine, Aug. 19, 2009.
17. For more information about these policies, including San Francisco's formula business ordinance and Maine's Informed Growth Act, go to http://www.newrules.org/retail and follow the policy links on the right.
18. James Alexander, "Communities saving cherished stores," BBC News, July 10, 2009; Stacy Mitchell, "Community-Owned Stores," National Trust Forum, May 2008.
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Saturday, January 23, 2010
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http://www.radicalphilosophy.com/default.asp?channel_id=2187&editorial_id=28817
The global moment
Seattle, ten years on
Rodrigo Nunes
What are we to make of an anniversary that no one celebrates? The year 2009 may be remembered for many things: the greatest capitalist crisis in over a century, the first year of the Obama presidency, the transformation of the G8 into a G20 (and the first massive geopolitical rearrangement since the fall of the Soviet bloc), the ecological crisis definitively establishing itself as a widespread concern (even if it means very different things to different groups). One thing, however, was conspicuously absent from the year’s calendar: the tenth anniversary of the protests against the World Trade Organization (WTO) in Seattle, which made of 1999 the year when the ‘anti-’ or ‘alter-globalization’ movement, or ‘movement of movements’, or ‘global movement’ became a visible phenomenon across the world.
In 2009, of course, ‘celebration’ was not very high on the agenda, even – or especially – if looked at from the point of view of those protests. If anything, the problems highlighted then seem more pressing now, the threats they pose more acute. More importantly, while the danger grows, the redeeming power seems to recede. It is tempting to say that time has proved those protesters ten years ago right, but the capacity for immediate action in the present seems ever more remote. Today, the liveliness of debate, the wealth of different experiences and – more importantly – the intensity of mobilization, the determination and the hope of those years seem far away. Surely this is sufficient reason to revisit the period, as a source of inspiration and a way of stoking whatever embers are left? in which case, should the silence be interpreted as yet another symptom of the present lethargy? Or could it also be a sign of a something else: an unspoken avoidance or implicit recognition of that period as a source of impasse, a dead end?
The failure of the 2003 anti-war mobilizations to stop the Iraq war opened the season of public questioning regarding the effectiveness of ‘the movement’. Thus, for instance, Paolo Virno:
The global movement, from Seattle forward, appears as a battery that only half works: it accumulates energy without pause, but it does not know how or where to discharge it. It is faced with an amazing accumulation, which has no correlate, at the moment, in adequate investments. It is like being in front of a new technological apparatus, potent and refined, but ignoring the instructions for its use.1
By 2007, a major player in the World Social Forum process wondered whether the time had not come for it, ‘having fulfilled its historic function of aggregating and linking the diverse counter-movements spawned by global capitalism… to give way to new modes of global organization of resistance and transformation’.2 It became common to hear that ‘the movement’ had failed to produce ‘proposals’ or ‘alternatives’, and hence squandered its accumulated energy and opportunities to deliver on the promise that the blue-sky lightning of Seattle had suggested. There were many alleged culprits: the incapacity to deal with diversity, or an absolute emphasis on diversity making political definitions impossible, depoliticized ‘movementism’ and ‘life-stylism’, the atavistic reformism of parties and unions (and of course NGOs).
Yet if one asks the seemingly straightforward question of what has been achieved since then, it is just as true to say ‘a lot’ as ‘not nearly enough’. The various blows to the WTO project, successful anti-privatization campaigns such as the ones around water and gas in Bolivia, the election of progressive governments across Latin America, the opposition to the neoliberal constitution in Europe, the defeat of the CPE in France… plus a huge number of local victories, small victories, partial victories, even defeats that resulted in the creation of new possibilities that might one day result in victories. One could certainly ask: what does any of this have to do with the ‘global movement’ as such? But this, precisely, takes us to the crucial difficulty in talking about a ‘global movement’: how are we to tell it apart from its constituent parts? How are we to isolate whatever these parts do as parts from what they do in conjunction with others, or the aggregate effect of what all of them do?
Take the struggles against the WTO – the one example from those above that can be least problematically attributed to the ‘global movement’. Until the Seattle protests, negotiations soldiered on with the time’s distinctive sense of inevitability, and governments would hardly bother to inform, let alone consult, their citizens. That sudden crystallization managed to foreground a dissent that could have remained marginal and powerless if not for that instant when certain forces recognized themselves in a common struggle, and it certainly began to tilt the agenda. A series was opened that made it possible for opposition to neoliberal policies to grow, for different movements to communicate with and reinforce each other, for other moments of convergence to occur, in a chain of positive feedbacks that undoubtedly contributed to, for example, the election of progressive governments in Latin America. It may be that the effective cause of the WTO’s ‘derailing’ was, in the end, the stronger stance taken by the governments of some developing states around the negotiating table; this, however, would probably not have happened had it not been for the presence of movements outside the gates, or for the broader sequence at the turn of the century through which this series unfolded. Nevertheless, at the time when these ultimate effects were produced, the ‘global movement’ was already regarded by many of its participants as a spent force.
How are we to think through this paradox: that its greatest victory arrived after its wane? What if the reluctance to celebrate today comes from a difficulty in thinking of a ‘global movement’ in any meaningful way? What if this, rather than dichotomies such as ‘openness’ versus ‘decision-making’, is the impasse that is sensed? And what if – to advance a hypothesis in the bluntest possible way – the global movement never existed? What if it was a moment, rather than a movement?3
One world is possible
The most literal way of speaking of a ‘global movement’ would be as a reference to those groups posing only explicit global goals, or whose space of action was essentially transnational. In the face of the plethora of social forces mobilized around the world at the time, however, such a definition seems scandalously narrow. (The greater currency enjoyed among many by the phrase ‘global movement of movements’ was no doubt due precisely to its indefinite, near-infinite inclusivity.) To limit the frame of reference in such a way would turn ‘global movement’ into a very reductive synecdoche. Yet this is exactly the pars pro toto logic that was (and is) often used by media commentators, whereby the expression comes to refer to what, in the global North, was the period’s most visible manifestation: the cycle of summit protests (Seattle, Prague, Quebec City, Genoa and so on) and counter-summits (Social Fora and the like).
Avoiding this synecdoche is crucial, not only to stay close to the self-understanding of the actors concerned, but also to undo the confusion at the source of the present impasse. Thinking in terms of moment allows us to do so. This was a moment, first, because there was an intensification of activity on various fronts, including mobilizations against structural adjustment and privatization (Bolivia, South Korea, various African countries, Canada), against multinational corporations (oil companies, as in the Niger Delta; sweatshop-based brands, as in the USA), against migration policies (the sans papiers in France, various border camps in Europe, North America, Australia), against GMOs (several Via Campesina campaigns around the world), and many more. In most cases, these were not pitched as ‘global’ campaigns as such; they took place in the space of local or national politics, had national legislation and policies as their referents, and unfolded within a complex, multilayered field of relations and causal series where their ‘global’ dimension was always filtered by local, national and regional struggles, correlations of forces, institutional arrangements, conjunctures and contingent events. In this case, speaking of a ‘global movement’ appropriately would refer to nothing more than the sum total of these various forces’ activities, the outcome of their political interventions and the transformation of social relations they managed to produce. Except that ‘movement’ would still have a metaphorical sense, calling a whole what is really only a collection: something whose only criteria for membership would be existence on the same globe, something that could never be totalized or given any kind of unitary shape or direction – a ‘wild’ in-itself, never to be fully appropriated for-itself.
However, there is one characteristic of the moment that began in the mid-1990s that sets it apart from previous cycles of struggle that took place simultaneously in various parts of the globe, such as those of the 1840s, 1920s–30s and 1960s–70s. In the sense disclosed by it, the ‘global movement’ would in fact exist only for-itself, and this for-itselfness would be the very quality making its emergence unique: a for-itself whose in-itself is not given. What is the unique characteristic of that emergence? This was the first cycle of struggles that defined itself in terms of its global dimension. The material element determining this difference was, of course, capitalist globalization itself, which created and strengthened structures and flows of communication, movements of people and goods to such a scale that the potential for connections between different local realities became widely accessible not only to the actors instrumental in the advance of capital, but potentially also to those who wished to resist it. This expanded potential for exchange and the production of commonalities resulted in enhanced awareness of the different impacts of neoliberal globalization, their interconnectedness, the forms taken by resistance to them, and the ways in which these resistances could be placed in relation with each other. This, in turn, enabled concrete exchanges and mutual support between different local experiences, which, finally, conjured a potential: that of momentarily focusing this localized political activity into moments of shared relevance, whether at a global level (such as the mobilizations against the WTO or the Iraq war) or more locally.
These three factors – awareness, concrete exchanges and potential for convergence – constitute that moment’s global dimension; and there is no contradiction between affirming this dimension as its defining feature and the fact that most of the movements and campaigns then active had local or national politics as their space of action and main referents. As a matter of fact, these three factors are precisely what created the mirage of a movement, when in fact what one had was a moment of rapidly increased capacity for communication and coordination, and wide-eyed astonishment at a just-discovered potential for channelling much of that activity into determinate spatio-temporal coordinates, creating moments of convergence whose collective power was much greater than the sum of its parts. Thus, while most of the activity effectively occupied the national or local political space, the key characteristic of that period was the widened perception of global processes. The ‘global movement’, in this sense, was literally something that existed in people’s heads, and in the communication between them.
This is distinct from previous generations’ ‘internationalism’: it refers to a shared belonging to an interconnected, interdependent world, rather than an aggregate of nation-states to be revolutionized or reformed one by one.4 This means not only a heightened awareness of the commonality of natural commons, but a clearer grasp of the effects at a distance produced by a global market, and of the possibility of intervening in relation to these effects in ways that are necessarily restricted neither to national borders nor to the nation-state as the sole agency to be addressed. It is the increase in types of connection today – supranational (multilateral organisms, information networks), transnational (migrant networks) and infranational (among different regions affected by the same problem, for example, dams) – that opens up the possibility of interventions that need neither depart from the nation-state, nor retain it as their sole or immediate referent.
It has been argued that the famous ‘Earth rising’ photograph had an effect on the development of environmentalism; and indeed there is enormous power in the idea that ‘there is only one world’: once a physical limit is placed on the capacity to universalize, the rational operation of seeing one’s lot as necessarily tangled with others’ is given a concrete outline. That this ‘concrete universalism’ is coupled with the increase in the capacity to exchange and cooperate with ‘concrete others’ from all over the globe is one of the novelties of ‘globalism’. Under its light, every struggle appears as neither exclusively local nor exclusively global: all struggles communicate on different levels, while no struggle can in practice subsume all others. There are no partial, ‘local’ solutions that can stand in isolation, and there is no ‘global’ solution unless this is understood as a certain possible configuration of local ones. What ended up being labelled as a ‘movement’ (the cycle of summit protests and counter-summits) was therefore nothing but the tip of the iceberg: the convergences produced by a much wider and deeper weft of connections, both direct (as when groups engaged in communication and coordination with each other) and indirect (when struggles resonated and reinforced each other without any coordination), among initiatives that were sometimes very local, sometimes very different, sometimes even contradictory.
That there was no ‘movement’ as such does not mean that it did not produce concrete effects; every moment of convergence fed back into these initiatives, creating and reinforcing connections, and strengthening the globalism that defined the moment, nourishing the (subjectively effective) notion that all of this belonged in the same movement. This strength, however, would reveal itself as also being a weakness. The ‘we’ of that period became progressively stabilized as the ‘we’ of the summit protests and counter-summits – certainly a multitudinous, diverse ‘we’, but one which managed to sustain itself largely because of the short-lived nature of those convergences, their externally, negatively given object (where the ‘one no’ always had precedence over the ‘many yeses’), and the positive feedback produced by their own spectacular, mediatic strength. The more entrenched the synecdoche became, the more these convergences came to be treated as an end in themselves, rather than strategic tools and tactical moments in what should be the constitution of ‘another world’.5
Yes and no
That moment’s passing can be partially explained by the impossibility of inhabiting the global level as such. The technological and tactical innovations (‘swarming’, the ‘diversity of tactics’ principle) that enabled large-scale convergences can only function at such a scale when their objects are externally given and negatively defined: anti-WTO, anti-war, and so on. The much-lamented lack of ‘proposals’ was never actually that; there was a dizzying collection of proposals, and what was perceived as a lack was in fact the impossibility of having ‘the movement’ subscribe to any of them as global movement – that is, as a whole. Moreover, there is a serious difficulty in thinking of global ‘proposals’ by analogy with those that can be placed in national political space, given that at the global level there is no one to address directly. One cannot lobby or influence transnational structures in the same way as national governments, as the unaccountability and imperviousness of the latter to political process is structural rather than contingent; whatever accountability they may have is ultimately mediated by national structures.
This became evident in 2005 in the attempt by a group of intellectuals associated with the World Social Forum to elaborate what they saw as a distillation of that profusion of ideas into a minimal, consensual programme.6 Ultimately, the main problem with this document was not the way in which it was drafted, the lack of gender balance, or any of the other criticisms raised at the time, but that it is entirely unclear what its presumed target audience (the WSF, ‘the movement’) could actually do about proposals pitched at such a global level – apart from organizing demonstrations incorporating them as rallying points. They do not even function as demands, as there is no one to demand them from. At this level, antagonism remains purely representative: expressing a dissent that has no means of enforcement. This kind of dissent has some effectiveness in a parliamentary democracy, of course, provided it corresponds to a large enough constituency representing a relevant electoral variable. The problem is that, at the global level, this is impossible. However crucial it is to keep open the potential to focus political activity on singular global moments, such potential exists only as a consequence of capacity built at the local level, not as its substitute; it is only to the extent that local struggles enhance their capacity to act in their immediate environment that they can act globally in meaningful ways. In fact, privileging convergences can sap resources from local capacity-building, when the point should be precisely that the former reinforce the latter. If they do not, antagonism, rather than being the other half of building autonomy, comes to replace it; and, in doing so, it loses the grounds on which it can find support. It becomes the expression of political contents from which it is impossible to draw political consequences.
There was another reason why the global became uninhabitable. The context in which the ‘global moment’ unfolded changed drastically with the onset of the ‘war on terror’. Not only was the main focus of conflict moved elsewhere (‘good’ versus ‘rogue’ states, ‘fundamentalism’ versus ‘democracy’, ‘Islam’ versus ‘the West’), it was displaced to a level of confrontation no movements were willing or able to occupy (state apparatus versus ‘terror’). Moreover, the combination of an atmosphere of constantly reiterated alarm, and the creep into spheres of legislative and policing measures that served to criminalize social movements, had the subjective impact of reinforcing feelings of isolation, fear and impotence. Many individuals abandoned political involvement altogether; individuals and groups disengaged from the global level, refocusing on the local. In other cases, investment in the global at the expense of the local led to a disconnection between politics and life, representation (or antagonism) and capacity-building, burn-out, or a replacement of slowly built consistency for the quicker, wider, but also less sustainable, effects of the media.
Is the ‘global moment’ over? Yes and no. The material conditions that enabled it remain, as do the elements of awareness of global processes and (the potential for) concrete exchanges. There is no going back on this, as there is no going back on ‘globalism’, or the political consciousness of belonging to a single world. Whatever movements appear in the future will in all likelihood share these features, and they will do well to look back to those years and draw some lessons from what went right and wrong. To say that the expectations then built around the use of information technology (as almost a substitute for other forms of political action) were exaggerated does not mean that their possibilities have been exhausted, the recent Iranian protests being a good example. If anything, one would expect to see much more made of their potential for diffuse initiative and rapid dissemination; yet the question will always be, once the ‘great nights’ they can produce have passed, how to give consistency to the excess they throw up.
On the other hand, these movements would do well to disarm some false dichotomies that were strong then, such as the supposedly definitive choices between autonomy-building and antagonism (the latter requires the former to exist, the former at various junctures requires the latter to expand), or between absolute openness and capacity to act (any movement, any decision always strikes a balance between the two), or even ‘taking’ or ‘not taking’ power (recognizing the limits of what the state can deliver does not diminish the need to always push beyond them). It is far more important to develop the collective capacity to choose what mediators to have, what mediation to accept, and when. Building on these, managing to move beyond them; now that would be cause for celebration.
Notes
1. Paolo Virno, ‘Facing a New 17th Century’, 2004, www.generation-online.org/p/fpvirno4.htm.
2. Walden Bello, ‘The Forum at the Crossroads’, 2007, www.forumsocialmundial.org.br/noticias_textos.php?cd_news=395.
3. This distinction is inspired by Renato Poggioli, The Theory of the Avant-Garde, Harvard University Press, Cambridge MA, 1968.
4. Even before the thesis of ‘socialism in only one country’ and the tactical retreat into nationalism, it was the case that proletarian universalism necessarily required the (national) communist party and trade-union movement as the initial supports and local agents of ‘world revolution’; solidarity and collaboration among revolutionary movements mirrored the bourgeois internationalism of solidarity among nation-states.
5. One example of this entrenchment is the proposal for a permanent International Day of Action every two years. Tellingly, one proponent says of this idea – where ‘one central subject, which touches everyone in the world, can be commonly put forward once every two years’ as the theme for simultaneous worldwide demonstrations – that the theme ‘could be global warming, trade, out-of-control finance, debt … I don’t even care what the theme is; it’s the principle of choosing it and of the unity that creates visibility that I think is important.’ Susan George, ‘Contribution to the Debate on the Future of the Social Forums and the Alter-globalization Movement’, 2008, www.tni.org/detail_page.phtml?&act_id=18081.
6. VV.AA, ‘Porto Alegre Manifesto’, 2005, at www.zmag.org/sustainers/content/2005–02/20group_of_nineteen.cfm.
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Tuesday, January 19, 2010
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http://thearchdruidreport.blogspot.com/2010/01/costs-of-community.html
The Costs of Community
by John Michael Greer
The point to be made in this week's post is a bit complex, and I hope
that my readers will have the patience to read through an apparently
unrelated story that leads to it. A few years back, I researched and
wrote a book on the UFO phenomenon, somewhat unimaginatively titled The
UFO Phenomenon. It was an intriguing project, not least because the
acronym "UFO" has all but lost its original meaning – something seen in
the sky that the witnesses don't happen to be able to identify – and
become a strange attractor for exotic belief systems that fuse the
modern myth of infinite progress with archaic religious visions of
immanent evil and apocalyptic renewal.
Behind the myths, though, I noted the intriguing fact that the "alien
spacecraft" of each decade had quite a bit in common with whatever
secret aerospace projects the US military was testing at that time.
From the round silver shapes of the late 1940s, when high-altitude
balloons were the last word in strategic reconnaissance, to the black
triangles of the early 1980s, when stealth planes were new and highly
secret, the parallels were remarkable, as was the involvement of the US
military in fostering the UFO furore. While plenty of things fed into
the emergence of the UFO mythology, it seems pretty clear that this
mythology was used repeatedly for the kind of strategic deception the
Allies used to bamboozle the Germans before D-Day, to provide cover for
secret aerospace projects in the US and elsewhere, not to mention
plenty of less exotic situations where it was inconvenient to talk
about who was flying what in whose airspace.
What interested me most about the project in retrospect was the
reaction it got. I ended up on – well, let's just say a very well known
radio talk show about the paranormal, and leave it at that. The host
asked the usual questions, and got to the one about what I found most
fascinating about the topic, so I sketched out the hypothesis I've just
mentioned.
He instantly changed the subject.
I was intrigued, and as soon as the conversation allowed, I brought up
the same point. He changed the subject again, so fast he must have left
skidmarks on the airwaves. So I brought it up again, and the same thing
happened. We had a commercial break, and after that he suddenly wanted
to talk about my other books; I humored him, chatted about my other
titles, worked the conversation back around to UFOs, and then brought
up my hypothesis again. He changed the subject again. As soon as the
next break arrived, I was off the air half an hour early, and he was
inviting listeners to call in to share their favorite paranormal
experiences. It's probably unnecessary to mention that I've never been
invited back.
That experience was typical of the book's reception by the UFO
community, and it taught me something worth knowing about that
community, which is that a significant number of people who insist they
believe in alien spaceships in Earth's skies don't actually believe in
anything of the kind. I did hear back from some UFO believers who
defended their faith in alien visitation in spirited terms. With them I
have no quarrel, though I disagree with their beliefs; but much more
often, the reaction I got was the one that used to be typical of
liberal clergymen who no longer believed in any sort of god, but got
uncomfortable, scuffed their feet, and looked out the nearest available
window when anyone openly avowed atheism.
Now the point of this story is not to rehash the issue of whether UFOs
are or are not alien spacecraft. It's to provide an example of a
particular kind of bad faith, as the existentialists used to call it,
that pervades discussions of the point I want to raise this week.
What, dear reader, if I were to propose a citizen's strategy for
carrying out constructive social change in the United States that has
worked in the past, not just once but repeatedly? A strategy that works
from the grassroots up, requires next to no money or media coverage to
set in motion, and uses off-the-shelf social technology? A strategy
that also has the proven side effect of building community on a grand
scale? Would you jump on it like a duck on a June bug, as my
grandfather used to say, and get it under way as soon as possible?
Let's make the experiment.
Glance back through American history from colonial times to the present
and you'll discover that the one consistently effective strategy for
citizens who seek to change the direction of their society is to
organize. When Alexis de Tocqueville wrote Democracy in America not
long after the Revolution, one of the things he found most remarkable
about the new republic was the way that ordinary citizens who wanted to
bring change to their society did it by organizing societies, lodges,
movements, political parties, or any other kind of citizen's group you
care to name. The same thing has been true ever since; glance back
along any wave of change in American life and you'll find an organized
group of citizens behind it.
It's popular to insist these days that such organizations can't
possibly muster the clout needed to overwhelm, say, the power of big
corporations. History says otherwise. In the 1880s, for example,
corporations had even more unrestricted power in the United States than
they do now, and the railroad corporations were the richest and most
powerful of the lot. The Grange, an organization of farmers, took on
the improbable task of breaking railroad monopolies that were forcing
farm families into poverty by keeping the cost of shipping farm produce
to urban markets artificially high. The short version? The Grange
achieved total victory, and the railroad corporations lost the monopoly
status that made their fortunes.
The key to understanding the power of citizens' organizations is that
representative democracy doesn't respond to the will of individuals; it
responds to pressure exerted by groups. Those who organize to put
pressure on the system generally get at least some of what they want,
and the longer and harder they push, the more of it they get. Those who
don't organize, by their lack of organization, make themselves
irrelevant to the political process.
You know this perfectly well, dear reader. Odds are you've grumbled
about the influence of pressure groups in Washington DC, or your
state's capitol, or city hall, or wherever. You may even support a
pressure group or two yourself with the occasional donation. The
obvious question, then, is why the torrent of vocal dissatisfaction
with the political status quo these days or so hasn't resulted in
another round of citizens' organizations rising from the grassroots, as
the Abolitionists and the Grange and the Progressives and the
Suffragettes and the Civil Rights movement and so many others did in
their time, to influence the political process by turning popular
dissatisfaction into a force for change. If it takes a pressure group
to have a voice in American politics, why not organize a pressure group
to give voice to those who consider themselves voiceless? For that
matter, instead of griping about the lack of a viable third party, why
not start one, instead of waiting for some political equivalent of
Wal-Mart to package one in plastic and display it enticingly on a
convenient shelf?
These aren't rhetorical questions. Much of what's wrong with the
current American political system is the result of a vacuum at the
center of that system – a very large empty space where organized
pressure from the public used to go. Consider, for example, how
political parties used to work in the United States. The basic unit was
the precinct caucus, where neighbors would get together, debate issues
and candidates, and organize publicity and get-out-the-vote activities
for the next election. Each precinct elected representatives to the
county convention, where this process was repeated, and cascaded upward
through state and national conventions. These last weren't the
pointless media spectacles they've become; they were working sessions
where the candidates and proposals that rose up from the grassroots
finally got sorted out into the slate and platform the party would
offer the voters come election day.
These days precinct caucuses are moribund, and county and state
conventions are little more than exercises in going through the
motions; policy initiatives and candidacies begin, not with neighbors
meeting in living rooms, but with media campaigns orchestrated by
marketing firms and strategy sessions among highly paid party
officials. Yet it wasn't some conspiracy of corporate minions who
brought about that state of affairs; what happened, by and large, was
that most Americans dropped out of the party system, and the
professionals filled the resulting void.
It's interesting to speculate about why that took place. I suspect many
of my readers have encountered Robert Putnam's widely discussed book
Bowling Alone (2000), which traced the collapse of social networks and
institutions straight across American society. The implosion of the old
grassroots-based party system is simply one example of the trend Putnam
documented. Putnam's book sparked a great deal of discussion, some of
it in the peak oil community, but nearly all of that discussion fixated
on the benefits that might be gained by reinventing community, and left
out a crucial factor: the cost.
By this I don't mean money. Communities need regular inputs of time and
effort from their members, or they collapse into mass societies of
isolated individuals – roughly speaking, what we've got now.
Communities also need subtler inputs: a sense of commitment, of shared
purpose, of emotional connection, of trust. To gain the benefits of
living in community, it's necessary to sacrifice some part of the
autonomy that so many Americans nowadays guard so jealously. The same
thing is true of those subsets of community already discussed –
political parties, for example, or citizens' organizations, or any
other framework for collective action that's more than a place for
people to hang out and participate when they feel like it.
I know a fair number of people in activist circles who speak in glowing
terms about community; most of them don't belong to a single community
organization. I also know a fair number of people who've tried to
launch community projects of one kind or another; most of these
projects foundered due to a fatal shortage of people willing to commit
the time, effort, and emotional energy the project needed to survive.
Most, but not all; some believers in community have taken an active
role in trying to build or maintain it; some projects have managed to
find an audience and build a community, or at least the first rough
draft of one. One of the reasons I don't dismiss the Transition Town
movement, though I have serious doubts about some aspects of it, is
precisely that many of the people involved in it have committed
themselves to it in a meaningful sense, and the movement itself has
succeeded in some places in building a critical mass of commitment and
energy.
It's important, I think, to assess the ventures toward community that
are under way now or have been tried in the recent past, both the
successful ones and the ones that have failed, and try to get some
sense of the factors that tip the balance one way or the other. It's
also crucial, though, to recognize that there's a difference between
fantasies of community that provides all the benefits with none of the
costs, and the reality of community in which each benefit must be paid
for by a corresponding commitment. I suspect the common passion among
some peak oil activists for lifeboat communities that just happen to be
too expensive ever to get off the ground, which often goes hand in hand
with a distinct lack of enthusiasm for participation in real
communities of real people that exist right now, is simply one way of
evading the difference.
This is why I didn't spend this week's post advocating, say, the
founding of Citizens Unions to give ordinary people pressure groups to
exert influence on local, state and national governments, as so many
successful citizens' pressure groups have done in the past. I think
this would be an excellent idea, but if people were willing to invest
time, energy, and commitment into such organizations, we'd likely
already have them.
The problem we face now, though, is that uncomfortable looks, scuffing
feet, and abstracted gazes out the nearest convenient window are no
longer adequate responses to a situation that's rapidly spinning out of
control. The costs of community may not be something most of us want to
pay, but in the world that is taking shape around us, the alternative
for a great many of us may be much worse. I plan to talk about that in
next week's post.
Posted by John Michael Greer
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Saturday, January 16, 2010
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http://climateprogress.org/2008/12/01/carbon-is-forever-fossil-carbon-dioxide-co2-impacts-outlast-stonehenge-nuclear-waste/
Carbon is forever:
Fossil CO2 impacts will outlast Stonehenge and nuclear waste
Posted By Joe On December 1, 2008 @ 6:00 am In Science | 21 Comments
http://www.nature.com/climate/2008/0812/images/climate.2008.122-i1.jpg
Every few years, people need to be reminded that carbon dioxide released into the atmosphere from fossil fuel combustion lasts a long, long, long time. How long?
A 2005 study by Geophysicist David Archer, “Fate of fossil fuel CO2 in geologic time [1],” (subs. req’d.) concluded that a large fraction of the CO2 emitted by humans last well in excess of 1000 years:
The mean lifetime of anthropogenic CO2 is dominated by the long tail, resulting in a range of 30–35 kyr.
That’s why we need to stop and reverse the growth of fossil fuel emissions immediately (see “Dr. Hansen to Dr. Merkel: Carbon is forever — so ban new traditional coal plants now [2]“). That’s why we can’t have climate regulations that let companies keep burning coal while they buy rip-offsets [3].
In the interest of reminding people of this central fact of climate science, Nature online has published, “Carbon is forever [4].” Turns out Archer has a book out, The Long Thaw: How Humans Are Changing the Next 100,000 Years of Earth’s Climate [5], which has this useful figure:
Unfortunately we are unable to provide accessible alternative text for this. If you require assistance to access this image, or to obtain a text description, please contact npg@nature.com
Figure: Model simulation of atmospheric CO2 concentration for 40,000 years following after a large CO2 release from combustion of fossil fuels. Different fractions of the released gas recover on different timescales.
So we’re in the process of changing the climate (for the much, much worse) for 100,000 years. Hmm. I’ve been saying that if we don’t act now we’re going to ruin the climate for the next 50 generations to walk the planet. I guess I was being way too conservative (again).
“The climatic impacts of releasing fossil fuel CO2 to the atmosphere will last longer than Stonehenge,” Archer writes. “Longer than time capsules, longer than nuclear waste, far longer than the age of human civilization so far.”
It’s not just the carbon that could last forever:
The warming from our CO2 emissions would last effectively forever, too. A recent study by Caldeira [6] and Damon Matthews of Concordia University in Montreal found that regardless of how much fossil fuel we burn, once we stop, within a few decades the planet will settle at a new, higher temperature. As Caldeira explains, “It just increases for a few decades and then stays there” for at least 500 years — the length of time they ran their model. “That was not at all the result I was expecting,” he says.
Bottom line: It’s great that one form of solid carbon is forever, as Shirley Bassey sings in the classic Bond movie [7], but not that the gaseous form is.
In other words, a few decades of prevention is worth 30,000 years of cure.
“The science is beyond dispute… Delay is no longer an option. Denial is no longer an acceptable response.” [8]
Article printed from Climate Progress: http://climateprogress.org
URL to article: http://climateprogress.org/2008/12/01/carbon-is-forever-fossil-carbon-dioxide-co2-impacts-outlast-stonehenge-nuclear-waste/
URLs in this post:
[1] Fate of fossil fuel CO2 in geologic time: http://www.agu.org/pubs/crossref/2005/2004JC002625.shtml
[2] Dr. Hansen to Dr. Merkel: Carbon is forever — so ban new traditional coal plants now: http://climateprogress.org/2008/01/23/dr-hansen-to-dr-merkel-carbon-is-forever-so-ban-new-traditional-coal-plants-now/
[3] rip-offsets: http://climateprogress.org/2008/10/06/is-the-chicago-climate-exchange-selling-rip-offsets/
[4] Carbon is forever: http://www.nature.com/climate/2008/0812/full/climate.2008.122.html
[5] The Long Thaw: How Humans Are Changing the Next 100,000 Years of Earth’s Climate: http://www.amazon.com/Long-Thaw-Changing-Climate-Essentials/dp/0691136548
[6] Caldeira: http://climateprogress.org/2008/04/28/human-driven-co2-rise-14000-times-faster-than-nature-overwhelming-the-slow-negative-feedbacks/
[7] Shirley Bassey sings in the classic Bond movie: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ToA018gPzvU
[8] “The science is beyond dispute… Delay is no longer an option. Denial is no longer an acceptable response.”: http://climateprogress.org/2008/11/18/obama-the-science-is-beyond-dispute-delay-is-no-longer-an-option-denial-is-no-longer-an-acceptable-response/
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Saturday, January 16, 2010
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http://climateprogress.org/2008/12/01/carbon-is-forever-fossil-carbon-dioxide-co2-impacts-outlast-stonehenge-nuclear-waste/
Carbon is forever:
Fossil CO2 impacts will outlast Stonehenge and nuclear waste
Posted By Joe On December 1, 2008 @ 6:00 am In Science | 21 Comments
http://www.nature.com/climate/2008/0812/images/climate.2008.122-i1.jpg
Every few years, people need to be reminded that carbon dioxide released into the atmosphere from fossil fuel combustion lasts a long, long, long time. How long?
A 2005 study by Geophysicist David Archer, “Fate of fossil fuel CO2 in geologic time [1],” (subs. req’d.) concluded that a large fraction of the CO2 emitted by humans last well in excess of 1000 years:
The mean lifetime of anthropogenic CO2 is dominated by the long tail, resulting in a range of 30–35 kyr.
That’s why we need to stop and reverse the growth of fossil fuel emissions immediately (see “Dr. Hansen to Dr. Merkel: Carbon is forever — so ban new traditional coal plants now [2]“). That’s why we can’t have climate regulations that let companies keep burning coal while they buy rip-offsets [3].
In the interest of reminding people of this central fact of climate science, Nature online has published, “Carbon is forever [4].” Turns out Archer has a book out, The Long Thaw: How Humans Are Changing the Next 100,000 Years of Earth’s Climate [5], which has this useful figure:
Unfortunately we are unable to provide accessible alternative text for this. If you require assistance to access this image, or to obtain a text description, please contact npg@nature.com
Figure: Model simulation of atmospheric CO2 concentration for 40,000 years following after a large CO2 release from combustion of fossil fuels. Different fractions of the released gas recover on different timescales.
So we’re in the process of changing the climate (for the much, much worse) for 100,000 years. Hmm. I’ve been saying that if we don’t act now we’re going to ruin the climate for the next 50 generations to walk the planet. I guess I was being way too conservative (again).
“The climatic impacts of releasing fossil fuel CO2 to the atmosphere will last longer than Stonehenge,” Archer writes. “Longer than time capsules, longer than nuclear waste, far longer than the age of human civilization so far.”
It’s not just the carbon that could last forever:
The warming from our CO2 emissions would last effectively forever, too. A recent study by Caldeira [6] and Damon Matthews of Concordia University in Montreal found that regardless of how much fossil fuel we burn, once we stop, within a few decades the planet will settle at a new, higher temperature. As Caldeira explains, “It just increases for a few decades and then stays there” for at least 500 years — the length of time they ran their model. “That was not at all the result I was expecting,” he says.
Bottom line: It’s great that one form of solid carbon is forever, as Shirley Bassey sings in the classic Bond movie [7], but not that the gaseous form is.
In other words, a few decades of prevention is worth 30,000 years of cure.
“The science is beyond dispute… Delay is no longer an option. Denial is no longer an acceptable response.” [8]
Article printed from Climate Progress: http://climateprogress.org
URL to article: http://climateprogress.org/2008/12/01/carbon-is-forever-fossil-carbon-dioxide-co2-impacts-outlast-stonehenge-nuclear-waste/
URLs in this post:
[1] Fate of fossil fuel CO2 in geologic time: http://www.agu.org/pubs/crossref/2005/2004JC002625.shtml
[2] Dr. Hansen to Dr. Merkel: Carbon is forever — so ban new traditional coal plants now: http://climateprogress.org/2008/01/23/dr-hansen-to-dr-merkel-carbon-is-forever-so-ban-new-traditional-coal-plants-now/
[3] rip-offsets: http://climateprogress.org/2008/10/06/is-the-chicago-climate-exchange-selling-rip-offsets/
[4] Carbon is forever: http://www.nature.com/climate/2008/0812/full/climate.2008.122.html
[5] The Long Thaw: How Humans Are Changing the Next 100,000 Years of Earth’s Climate: http://www.amazon.com/Long-Thaw-Changing-Climate-Essentials/dp/0691136548
[6] Caldeira: http://climateprogress.org/2008/04/28/human-driven-co2-rise-14000-times-faster-than-nature-overwhelming-the-slow-negative-feedbacks/
[7] Shirley Bassey sings in the classic Bond movie: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ToA018gPzvU
[8] “The science is beyond dispute… Delay is no longer an option. Denial is no longer an acceptable response.”: http://climateprogress.org/2008/11/18/obama-the-science-is-beyond-dispute-delay-is-no-longer-an-option-denial-is-no-longer-an-acceptable-response/
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Tuesday, January 12, 2010
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http://www.theoildrum.com/node/6094
Dennis Meadows - Economics and Limits to Growth: What's Sustainable?
Posted by Gail the Actuary on January 4, 2010 - 10:27am
Dr. Dennis Meadows is one of the authors of the well-known 1972 book "Limits to Growth," plus two updates of the book. He has received a number of awards for his work, most recently the prestigious Japan Prize from the Science and Technology Foundation of Japan.
Dr. Meadows recently gave a talk for the Population Institute. Both the presentation and a podcast of Dr. Meadows giving his talk can be downloaded from the Population Institute site. In this post, I summarize what I understand Dr. Meadows to be saying in that talk. Readers with time are encouraged to listen to the Podcast and look at the presentation themselves. Dr. Meadows did not cover all of his slides in his talk. This post relates only to those that he did cover.
The number one take-away for me from this talk is The end of growth does not come from depletion, but from rising capital costs. In some ways, this is intuitive. When you put this statement together with the work I have been doing that shows that debt cannot continue rising in the face of peak oil, it makes this issue even more important.
A second major take-away for me (besides the importance of population in the equation) is Changes in technology may delay the end of growth by a few years, but they do not avoid it, and do not avoid the decline. A third observation I found interesting is that the biggest stresses are likely to occur at the time when growth ceases--that is now--not, as is popularly believed, as the result of the decline itself.
The reason I [Dr. Meadows] am giving this talk is because I think that there is the possibility of positive change.
Much of the way that we conduct ourselves is based on habit. For
example, we get into the habit of crossing our arms with our right hand
(or left hand) on top. It is not that putting the right hand or left
hand on top is better or worse. We have just developed a habit of
crossing our arms in a particular way.
If we are going to solve the population problem, we need to learn
new habits. I am hopeful that like learning to cross our arms in a
different way, we can inspire people to learn new habits that will
limit population growth--something that is needed with finite resources.
My [Dr. Meadows'] views regarding what is sustainable are different
now than they were 40 years ago. At that time, I worked with others at
Massachusetts Institute of Technology to build a simple computer model
that might offer some insight into the impact of limits to growth. We
did not expect the model to be predictive--only that the scenarios
might provide a rough boundaries regarding what might happen in the
future.
In our reference scenario in 1972, we expected growth to continue
for 40 to 80 more years. The major difference I see in looking at the
situation now is that things seem to be developing more rapidly than we
expected then.
Slide 2
Let's start by looking at our reference scenario. The red line shows
where we were when the model was first developed. I have blocked out
the fourth quadrant of the chart, because the world situation is likely
to be so different from the situation we modeled that the model is
likely to be totally irrelevant. The area shaded in light blue
represents the time period that might possibility be changed by the
policies we implement today.
Slide 3
In 1972, we expected another 40 to 80 years of growth in the various
scenarios. While some of the scenarios we looked at ended in orderly
decline, most of the scenarios we modeled ended in collapse. This
likely outcome was later confirmed by William Catton in his book Overshoot.
You will note I say that technology may delay the end of growth a
few years, but it does not avoid the end of growth or the decline. I
have worked in science and technology, and I have a scientific degree,
so I am not saying this because I am unaware of what technology can do.
When we put together models using phenomenally optimistic assumptions,
it just moved the decline date back a few years.
Social changes are essential for a better outcome. Take population for example. There are two ways population can decreased:
1. The birth rate can go down, or
2. The death rate can go up.
A key factor to understand is that what are normally considered
problems today--for example, climate change, energy shortages, and
erosion, aren't really problems. Instead, they are symptoms of
attempted infinite growth in a finite world.
In some ways, the situation is like if you have a friend who has
cancer, and because of the cancer he has a headache. It is not nice to
have a headache, so you give your friend pain relievers, but you don't
imagine you have cured the problem. The problem is cancer, and until
you deal with the problem, there will be one or another manifestation,
such as a head ache.
We talk a lot about climate change today. I predict that in three or
four years, we won't be talking about climate change. We will be
talking about energy scarcity or food shortages or declining water
supplies. This will occur not because we have dealt with climate, but
because it is one of a large family of pressures which are going to
mount until finally physical growth stops.
Slide 4
[I do not believe that Dr. Meadows spoke directly about this slide, but I thought it was important for completeness.]
Slide 5
World population has been rising rapidly, and in our models, continues to rise.
Slide 7
World metal use is also rapidly increasing.
Slide 9
We have now reached overshoot. According to Wackernagel's analysis,
we passed global capacity in 1980, eight years after our book was
published. We are now about 40% above carrying capacity, according to
his analysis.
In the early days, we had only models to tell us we were beyond
carrying capacity. Now, we can look at the newspapers and get
confirmation of the fact.
Slide 10
Kevin Noone published this image in Nature
showing various areas where overshoot may manifest itself. Except for
ozone, we are not making much progress in keeping physical stresses in
limits. Some sectors appear not to have problems, but that is only
because we do not have the situations quantified.
Slide 11
It was astonishing to me in 1972 that people could start from the
assumption that there are no limits. It has been even more amazing to
see the evolution to this thinking. Initially, the assumption was that
people were just uninformed. The assumption was that if we can manage
to give them the facts, they will change their opinion, and fall into
line. Nothing I have seen in 40 years gives me support for that
opinion. If you marshall enough facts to disprove an objection, then
the critics will just find another objection. There are an infinite
number of objections, so you are never going to come to the end of the
process.
The above slide shows the sequence of objections. Now that it is
clear that markets will not fix the situation, the belief is that
technology will be the solution. Technology doesn't deal well with
limits either. There are thermodynamic proofs of this.
Let me discuss some key assumptions in our model. William Catton
mentions that there are three different ways we use space--one for
extraction; one for activity; and one for basically dumping stuff. The
first and third of these have costs associated with them.
Slide 12
This is a generic curve, but I could show you empirically based
versions of this curve for particular reserves. When you have 100% of a
given resource, you can start to use it up, and you don't perceive any
particular cost increase. It is only when you get past maybe 50%, 60%
depletion that you start to see a radical rises in cost of extraction.
We don't have time here, but I could explain why it behaves that way,
and the reasons are not ones that can be changed by technology.
Technology can shift the curve a little bit, but it can't alter the
fact that well before you get to zero resource, the cost will become
infinite.
Slide 13 - (Above slide has been revised from that used in the original presentation, at the request of Dr. Meadows.)
And there is an analogous curve for dumps, where we try to put
stuff. As the fraction of the sink is slowly occupied to a greater and
greater extent, the cost of dealing with the consequences of production
goes up rapidly.
Slide 14
Here is one particular example of the effect of these curves. It is
the declining return on investment of energy. We built this country
with energy that gave 70:1 to 100:1 energy payback. With domestic
resources, we are now down to 10:1, 15:1 or 20:1 energy paybacks. You
can see the trends are moving in a way which mean that well before the
middle of the century, we will be dealing with energy resources that
hardly break even. What you can do with 100:1 payback is enormously
different than what you can do with a system that is generating only
2:1 or 3:1 payback. It is just that in the case of fossil fuels, we
have used up many of the resources.
In our book, we describe the consequences of declining energy
return. I won't get into great detail here, except to point out a
couple of important features of our model.
Slide 15
Industrial growth occurs because of the positive feedback loop that
occurs, depicted on the above chart. More capital gives you more
output; more output permits more investment; and more investment lets
you build up your capital stock. As long as investment exceeds
depreciation, you have growth--exponential growth, and rapid rates of
increase. Depending on how equitable society is, people, at least some
people, get richer.
However, as we start to draw down our resources and fill up our
sinks, more and more of the capital has to be drawn off to provide for
the other needs. Eventually, you get to the point where you can't
sustain production around the industrial capital loop sufficiently to
sustain growth.
In our world model, it is the failure of model to produce enough
output for capital reinvestment that tips you over into decline. We are
moving now into that period.
Slide 16
Some people now looking at our curves would imagine that the periods
of greatest stress would be after the peak--once the declines have set
in. I don't think that is true. Right now, around the globe, we (that
is corporate, political, and religious leaders) are working as hard as
we can to sustain growth. For growth to stop, negative pressure have to
mount until they are strong enough to offset our positive pressures.
That's the period that we are in now. So I anticipate the big stresses
are the ones we are going to encounter over the next couple of decades.
Slide 17
Let me give one very quick example in the two minutes that remain.
Take CO2 concentration. Here again, we published this in 1972. You can
see the red line and notice how quickly things accelerated after our
book came out. No causal relationship there, but, on the other hand, it
is pretty clear that no one paid any attention either. [Note by Gail: I
wonder if the shift to debt based financing in this period helped
"goose" growth.]
Why is it doing this? Everyone in the world wants greenhouse gasses
to go down, but, by and large, they keep going up. Not only in the
United States, which didn't sign the Kyoto Accord, but in all of the
countries that did sign the Kyoto Accord.
Slide 18
Well, here we see the crucial role of population. The chart shows CO2 emissions as a function of four factors:
1. Number of people.
2. Number of units of capital per person, which is a surrogate for living standards.
3. The amount of energy required to build and operate that capital.
4. The fraction of that energy that comes from non-fossil sources.
So far, our concern about climate change had manifested itself
through efforts to improve efficiency and to implement alternative
energy sources--the so-called technology options. I will just close by
pointing out that as long as we ignore demographic and cultural issues,
the growth in the first two factors will continue to offset all of the
improvement we make in factors 3 and 4. And so until we can understand
how to begin reducing the growth in the first two factors, climate
change is a foregone conclusion.
[Dr. Meadows finished with a little clapping game to show that
actions speak louder than words with respect to reducing population
growth. He did not finish all of his slides--which is why I have
omitted some.]
[Postscript by Gail. Dr. Meadows clearly sees capital
somewhat differently than I have been looking at it. His model does not
seem to incorporate debt. To me, it seems like debt allows resource
developers effectively to obtain capital temporarily for nothing, by
promising some of the future output of the positive feedback loop shown
in Slide 15, including interest, back to lenders. When returns start
slipping (because of the two forces Dr. Meadows mentions--higher
resource extraction costs and higher costs of handling pollution
sinks)--there is not enough money to pay back money lenders, and the
system starts unraveling quickly, as we have recently been witnessing.
I think that inequity in the sharing of the outputs of the resource
loop shown in Slide 15 is helping the system to continue to provide the
level of capital investment that is now being provided. If the outputs
were being shared equally, we would find that workers would be
benefiting proportionately with bankers, and rich countries would be
benefiting proportionately with poor countries. Our children would have
an equal chance at getting high-paying jobs that we who are parents of
young adults have had. This inequity in sharing seems to me to play a
big part in what funds for re-investment remain.
The recent emphasis on renewables is in the direction of causing
even higher capital needs. To the extent that this takes needed capital
away from unglamorous parts of the system that are necessary for the
system to survive, it could lead the system to fail earlier than it
otherwise would.]
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Monday, January 11, 2010
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http://www.stratfor.com/weekly/20090602_geography_recession
The Geography of Recession
June 2, 2009 | 1844 GMT
The global recession is the biggest development in the global system
in the year to date. In the United States, it has become almost dogma
that the recession is the worst since the Great Depression. But this is
only one of a wealth of misperceptions about whom the downturn is
hurting most, and why.
Let’s begin with some simple numbers.
As one can see in the chart, the U.S. recession at this point is
only the worst since 1982, not the 1930s, and it pales in comparison to
what is occurring in the rest of the world. (Figures for China have not
been included, in part because of the unreliability of Chinese
statistics, but also because the country’s financial system is so
radically different from the rest of the world as to make such
comparisons misleading. For more, read the China section below.)
But didn’t the recession begin in the United States? That it did, but the American system
is far more stable, durable and flexible than most of the other global
economies, in large part thanks to the country’s geography. To
understand how place shapes economics, we need to take a giant step
back from the gloom and doom of the current moment and examine the
long-term picture of why different regions follow different economic
paths.
The United States and the Free Market
The most important aspect of the United States is not simply its
sheer size, but the size of its usable land. Russia and China may both
be similar-sized in absolute terms, but the vast majority of Russian
and Chinese land is useless for agriculture, habitation or development.
In contrast, courtesy of the Midwest, the United States boasts the
world’s largest contiguous mass of arable land — and that mass does not
include the hardly inconsequential chunks of usable territory on both
the West and East coasts.
Second is the American maritime transport system. The Mississippi
River, linked as it is to the Red, Missouri, Ohio and Tennessee rivers,
comprises the largest interconnected network of navigable rivers in the
world. In the San Francisco Bay, Chesapeake Bay and Long Island
Sound/New York Bay, the United States has three of the world’s largest
and best natural harbors. The series of barrier islands a few miles off
the shores of Texas and the East Coast form a water-based highway — an
Intracoastal Waterway — that shields American coastal shipping from all
but the worst that the elements can throw at ships and ports.
The real beauty is that the two overlap with near perfect symmetry.
The Intracoastal Waterway and most of the bays link up with
agricultural regions and their own local river systems (such as the
series of rivers that descend from the Appalachians to the East Coast),
while the Greater Mississippi river network is the circulatory system
of the Midwest. Even without the addition of canals, it is possible for
ships to reach nearly any part of the Midwest from nearly any part of
the Gulf or East coasts. The result is not just a massive ability to
grow a massive amount of crops — and not just the ability to easily and
cheaply move the crops to local, regional and global markets — but also
the ability to use that same transport network for any other economic
purpose without having to worry about food supplies.
The implications of such a confluence are deep and sustained. Where
most countries need to scrape together capital to build roads and rail
to establish the very foundation of an economy — transport capability —
geography granted the United States a near-perfect system at no cost.
That frees up U.S. capital for other pursuits and almost condemns the
United States to be capital-rich. Any additional infrastructure the
United States constructs is icing on the cake. (The cake itself is free
— and, incidentally, the United States had so much free capital that it
was able to go on to build one of the best road-and-rail networks
anyway, resulting in even greater economic advantages over competitors.)
Third, geography has also ensured that the United States has very
little local competition. To the north, Canada is both much colder and
much more mountainous than the United States. Canada’s only navigable
maritime network — the Great Lakes-St. Lawrence Seaway —is shared with
the United States, and most of its usable land is hard by the American
border. Often this makes it more economically advantageous for Canadian
provinces to integrate with their neighbor to the south than with their
co-nationals to the east and west.
Similarly, Mexico has only small chunks of land, separated by
deserts and mountains, that are useful for much more than subsistence
agriculture; most of Mexican territory is either too dry, too tropical
or too mountainous. And Mexico completely lacks any meaningful river
system for maritime transport. Add in a largely desert border, and
Mexico as a country is not a meaningful threat to American
security (which hardly means that there are not serious and ongoing
concerns in the American-Mexican relationship).
With geography empowering the United States and hindering Canada and
Mexico, the United States does not need to maintain a large standing
military force to counter either. The Canadian border is almost
completely unguarded, and the Mexican border is no more than a fence in
most locations — a far cry from the sort of military standoffs that
have marked more adversarial borders in human history. Not only are
Canada and Mexico not major threats, but the U.S. transport network
allows the United States the luxury of being able to quickly move a
smaller force to deal with occasional problems rather than requiring it
to station large static forces on its borders.
Like the transport network, this also helps the U.S. focus its resources on other things.
Taken together, the integrated transport network, large tracts of
usable land and lack of a need for a standing military have one
critical implication: The U.S. government tends to take a hands-off
approach to economic management, because geography has not cursed the
United States with any endemic problems. This may mean that the United
States — and especially its government — comes across as disorganized,
but it shifts massive amounts of labor and capital to the private
sector, which for the most part allows resources to flow to wherever
they will achieve the most efficient and productive results.
Laissez-faire capitalism has its flaws. Inequality and social stress
are just two of many less-than-desirable side effects. The side effects
most relevant to the current situation are, of course, the speculative
bubbles that cause recessions when they pop. But in terms of long-term
economic efficiency and growth, a free capital system is unrivaled. For
the United States, the end result has proved clear: The United States
has exited each decade since post-Civil War Reconstruction more
powerful than it was when it entered it. While there are many forces in
the modern world that threaten various aspects of U.S. economic
standing, there is not one that actually threatens the U.S. base
geographic advantages.
Is the United States in recession? Of course. Will it be forever? Of
course not. So long as U.S. geographic advantages remain intact, it
takes no small amount of paranoia and pessimism to envision anything
but long-term economic expansion for such a chunk of territory. In
fact, there are a number of factors hinting that the United States may even be on the cusp of recovery.
Russia and the State
If in economic terms the United States has everything going for it geographically, then Russia
is just the opposite. The Russian steppe lies deep in the interior of
the Eurasian landmass, and as such is subject to climatic conditions
much more hostile to human habitation and agriculture than is the
American Midwest. Even in those blessed good years when crops are
abundant in Russia, it has no river network to allow for easy transport
of products.
Russia has no good warm-water ports to facilitate international
trade (and has spent much of its history seeking access to one). Russia
does have long rivers, but they are not interconnected as the
Mississippi is with its tributaries, instead flowing north to the
Arctic Ocean, which can support no more than a token population. The
one exception is the Volga, which is critical to Western Russian
commerce but flows to the Caspian, a storm-wracked and landlocked sea
whose delta freezes in the winter (along with the entire Volga itself).
Developing such unforgiving lands requires a massive outlay of funds
simply to build the road and rail networks necessary to achieve the
most basic of economic development. The cost is so extreme that
Russia’s first ever intercontinental road was not completed
until the 21st century, and it is little more than a two-lane path for
much of its length. Between the lack of ports and the relatively low
population densities, little of Russia’s transport system beyond the
St. Petersburg/Moscow corridor approaches anything that hints of
economic rationality.
Russia also has no meaningful external borders. It sits on the
eastern end of the North European Plain, which stretches all the way to
Normandy, France, and Russia’s connections to the Asian steppe flow
deep into China. Because Russia lacks a decent internal transport
network that can rapidly move armies from place to place, geography
forces Russia to defend itself following two strategies. First, it
requires massive standing armies on all of its borders. Second, it
dictates that Russia continually push its boundaries outward to buffer
its core against external threats.
Both strategies compromise Russian economic development even
further. The large standing armies are a continual drain on state
coffers and the country’s labor pool; their cost was a critical
economic factor in the Soviet fall. The expansionist strategy not only
absorbs large populations that do not wish to be part of the Russian
state and so must constantly be policed — the core rationale for
Russia’s robust security services — but also inflates Russia’s
infrastructure development costs by increasing the amount of relatively
useless territory Moscow is responsible for.
Russia’s labor and capital resources are woefully inadequate to
overcome the state’s needs and vulnerabilities, which are legion. These
endemic problems force Russia toward central planning; the full
harnessing of all economic resources available is required if Russia is
to achieve even a modicum of security and stability. One of the many
results of this is severe economic inefficiency and a general dearth of
an internal consumer market. Because capital and other resources can be
flung forcefully at problems, however, active management can achieve
specific national goals more readily than a hands-off, American-style
model. This often gives the impression of significant progress in areas
the Kremlin chooses to highlight.
But such achievements are largely limited to wherever the state
happens to be directing its attention. In all other sectors, the lack
of attention results in atrophy or criminalization. This is
particularly true in modern Russia, where the ruling elite comprises
just a handful of people,
starkly limiting the amount of planning and oversight possible. And
unless management is perfect in perception and execution, any mistakes
are quickly magnified into national catastrophes. It is therefore no
surprise to STRATFOR that the Russian economy has now fallen the
furthest of any major economy during the current recession.
China and Separatism
China
also faces significant hurdles, albeit none as daunting as Russia’s
challenges. China’s core is the farmland of the Yellow River basin in
the north of the country, a river that is not readily navigable and is
remarkably flood prone. Simply avoiding periodic starvation requires a
high level of state planning and coordination. (Wrestling a large river
is not the easiest thing one can do.) Additionally, the southern half
of the country has a subtropical climate, riddling it with diseases
that the southerners are resistant to but the northerners are not. This
compromises the north’s political control of the south.
Central control is also threatened by China’s maritime geography.
China boasts two other rivers, but they do not link to each other or
the Yellow naturally. And China’s best ports are at the mouths of these
two rivers: Shanghai at the mouth of the Yangtze and Hong
Kong/Macau/Guangzhou at the mouth of the Pearl. The Yellow boasts no
significant ocean port. The end result is that other regional centers
can and do develop economic means independent of Beijing.
With geography complicating northern rule and supporting southern
economic independence, Beijing’s age-old problem has been trying to
keep China in one piece. Beijing has to underwrite massive (and
expensive) development programs to stitch the country together with a
common infrastructure, the most visible of which is the Grand Canal
that links the Yellow and Yangtze rivers. The cost of such linkages
instantly guarantees that while China may have a shot at being unified,
it will always be capital-poor.
Beijing also has to provide its autonomy-minded regions with an
economic incentive to remain part of Greater China, and “simple”
infrastructure will not cut it. Modern China has turned to a
state-centered finance model for this. Under the model, all of the
scarce capital that is available is funneled to the state, which
divvies it out via a handful of large state banks. These state banks
then grant loans to various firms and local governments at below the
cost of raising the capital. This provides a powerful economic stimulus
that achieves maximum employment and growth — think of what you could
do with a near-endless supply of loans at below 0 percent interest —
but comes at the cost of encouraging projects that are loss-making, as
no one is ever called to account for failures. (They can just get a new
loan.) The resultant growth is rapid, but it is also unsustainable. It
is no wonder, then, that the central government has chosen to keep its
$2 trillion of currency reserves in dollar-based assets; the rate of
return is greater, the value holds over a long period, and Beijing
doesn’t have to worry about the United States seceding.
Because the domestic market is considerably limited by the
poor-capital nature of the country, most producers choose to tap export
markets to generate income. In times of plenty this works fairly well,
but when Chinese goods are not needed, the entire Chinese system can
seize up. Lack of exports reduces capital availability, which
constrains loan availability. This in turn not only damages the ability
of firms to employ China’s legions of citizens, but it also removes the
primary reason the disparate Chinese regions pay homage to Beijing.
China’s geography hardwires in a series of economic challenges that
weaken the coherence of the state and make China dependent upon
uninterrupted access to foreign markets to maintain state unity. As a
result, China has not been a unified entity for the vast
majority of its history, but instead a cauldron of competing regions
that cleave along many different fault lines: coastal versus interior,
Han versus minority, north versus south.
China’s survival technique for the current recession
is simple. Because exports, which account for roughly half of China’s
economic activity, have sunk by half, Beijing is throwing the
equivalent of the financial kitchen sink at the problem. China has
force-fed more loans through the banks in the first four months of 2009
than it did in the entirety of 2008. The long-term result could well
bury China beneath a mountain of bad loans — a similar strategy
resulted in Japan’s 1991 crash, from which Tokyo has yet to recover.
But for now it is holding the country together. The bottom line
remains, however: China’s recovery is completely dependent upon
external demand for its production, and the most it can do on its own
is tread water.
Discordant Europe
Europe faces an imbroglio somewhat similar to China’s.
Europe has a number of rivers that are easily navigable, providing a
wealth of trade and development opportunities. But none of them
interlinks with the others, retarding political unification. Europe has
even more good harbors than the United States, but they are not evenly
spread throughout the Continent, making some states capital-rich and
others capital-poor. Europe boasts one huge piece of arable land on the
North European Plain, but it is long and thin, and so occupied by no
fewer than seven distinct ethnic groups.
These groups have constantly struggled — as have the various groups
up and down Europe’s seemingly endless list of river valleys — but none
has been able to emerge dominant, due to the webwork of mountains and
peninsulas that make it nigh impossible to fully root out any
particular group. And Europe’s wealth of islands close to the
Continent, with Great Britain being only the most obvious, guarantee
constant intervention to ensure that mainland Europe never unifies
under a single power.
Every part of Europe has a radically different geography than the
other parts, and thus the economic models the Europeans have adopted
have little in common. The United Kingdom, with few immediate security
threats and decent rivers and ports, has an almost American-style
laissez-faire system. France, with three unconnected rivers lying
wholly in its own territory, is a somewhat self-contained world, making
economic nationalism its credo. Not only do the rivers in Germany
not connect, but Berlin has to share them with other states. The
Jutland Peninsula interrupts the coastline of Germany, which finds its
sea access limited by the Danes, the Swedes and the British. Germany
must plan in great detail to maximize its resource use to build an
infrastructure that can compensate for its geographic deficiencies and
link together its good — but disparate — geographic blessings. The
result is a state that somewhat favors free enterprise, but within the
limits framed by national needs.
And the list of differences goes on: Spain has long coasts and is
arid; Austria is landlocked and quite wet; most of Greece is almost too
mountainous to build on; it doesn’t get flatter than the Netherlands;
tiny Estonia faces frozen seas in the winter; mammoth Italy has never
even seen an icebreaker. Even if there were a supranational authority
in Europe that could tax or regulate the banking sector or plan
transnational responses, the propriety of any singular policy would be
questionable at best.
Such stark regional differences give rise to such variant policies
that many European states have a severe (and understandable) trust
deficit when it comes to any hint of anything supranational. We are not
simply taking about the European Union here, but rather a general
distrust of anything cross-border in nature. One of the many outcomes
of this is a preference for using local banks
rather than stock exchanges for raising capital. After all, local banks
tend to use local capital and are subject to local regulations, while
stock exchanges tend to be internationalized in all respects. Spain,
Italy, Sweden, Greece and Austria get more than 90 percent of their
financing from banks, the United Kingdom 84 percent and Germany 76
percent — while for the United States it is only 40 percent.
And this has proved unfortunate in the extreme for today’s Europe.
The current recession has its roots in a financial crisis that has most
dramatically impacted banks, and European banks
have proved far from immune. Until Europe’s banks recover, Europe will
remain mired in recession. And since there cannot be a Pan-European
solution, Europe’s recession could well prove to be the worst of all
this time around.
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Sunday, January 10, 2010
|
as a bookseller in a previous decade, i think (in the UK) the rot set
in when 1] the net book agreement wa filletted and fried [with help
from WHSmith's and Dillons] & 2] when supply shifted from publisher>shop>public to publisher
>Wholesaler>shop>public [guess who took the biggest cut? -
come on down, Gardners Books; Heathcote; Bertrams; THE...]... The
supermarket share was negligible, and the internet cleaned up off the
back of the destruction of bookselling that was already underway. Nevertheless, below is where we may be now...
- Tim
http://www.evergreenreview.com/120/electronic-book-burning.html
The Electronic Book Burning
by Alan Kaufman
In the past few years I have witnessed in San Francisco a sudden
epidemic of bookstore closings that has turned my city into a bookstore
graveyard.
Staceys, on Market Street, a once iconic, tasteful and sumptuous
85-year old book emporium rises like a reproach, vacant, unrented, a
ghostly shell.
Other bookstores that have closed doors in the Bay Area include both
branches of Codys, all branches of Black Oak Books, as well as Ninth
Avenue Books, Chelsea Books, Valencia Street Books, ReJoyce Books,
Acorn Books... a long and tragic list. According to reports coming in
from other parts of the country, the awful scene is reoccuring
everywhere: venerable, much beloved bookstores closing and that portion
of the populace who cherish books—an ever-shrinking minority—left
baffled and bereft; a silent corporate Krystallnacht decimating the
world of literacy.
Accompanying this plague is a feel-good propaganda campaign that enjoys
the collusion of the major media outlets, including such true hi-tech
believers as the NY Times and NPR—print and broadcast venues that are
themselves cheerily being rendered obsolete by the hi-tech rampage—and
that in subtle ways positions the destruction of book culture like so:
“books” in and of themselves are nothing, only another technology, like
the Walkman or the laptop. What is sacred are the texts and those are
being transferred to the Internet where they will attain a new kind of
high-tech-assured immortality. Like dead souls leaving their earthly
bodies the books are, in effect, going to a better place: the Kindle,
the e-book, the web; hi-tech's version of Paradise.
This massive deportation of literary texts to a new home in electronic
heaven has about it an air of inevitability that makes its consummation
seem all but certain, a veritable act of God.
Google, the internet server, has taken upon itself to dare the entirety
of world literature and those of its authors living, to prevent this
inevitability. Thus, the choice is set before authors: consent or
oppose. However, you cannot simply abstain. The subtle subtext
underscoring these legal maneuvers is that one way or another, you must
decide where you stand in all this; the internet appropriation of all
the world's books is a given, so either get aboard or be left behind
and forgotten.
Some have chosen to oppose in the form of a mysterious lawsuit that one
somehow belongs to if one is any sort of author, agent or publisher.
Rumors abound as to the outcome of this lawsuit. Some claim that Google
and the world's authors, living and dead, have reached a “settlement”
but what it is no one seems to know for sure. Google has, apparently,
the power to commune with authors in our dreams or even to contact and
negotiate with deceased writers in the afterlife.
The reports given over NPR or in the Times as to the lawsuit's outcome
appear to conflict. The truth is, few have any idea what the suit is
about or how they got involved in the first place. It is a lawsuit
reminiscent of Jarndyce vs. Jarndyce in Charles Dicken's 'Bleak
House'—a boundless ever-extending spiderweb engulfing everything and
everyone in its fine legalistic filigree.
In tandem with this giant transfer operation is the astonishing shift
in the complexion and fortunes of book culture and publishing itself—a
development that indicates not only a rapid demise of the book as a
cultural artifact and marketplace commodity but a concerted effort to
promote its devaluation, even degradation, even by the chieftains of
book publishing.
For instance, in a recent article, Barnaull Nourrey, CEO of Hachette
Livre, the French book publishing conglomerate that owns a big piece of
American book publishing, including Time Warner Books (Random House and
its affiliates is owned by Bertelsmann, the German publishing
giant—Europeans now control most of American publishing) warned that
unless E-Book reverses their recent decision to set the ceiling price
for book downloads at $9.99, then hardcovers, which are the premise for
much book publishing and even bookstores, will be dealt a death blow.
In effect, it will precipitate the end of the book.
One wonders why Nourrey cannot simply advise E- Book to go fuck itself
and produce high-quality reasonably priced books, even if in smaller
numbers. But the truth is, Nourrey, like Bertelsmann, like most
American book publishers, are linked to twenty first century,
late-stage hypercapitalist imperatives predicated entirely upon
ceaseless expansion, the inherent belief in Darwinian obsolescence and
succession as the lifeblood of successful economics and societal
advance.
Thus, publishers, like the technologists who slit their throats, are
producers not of books but money, while books have become simply
another vehicle, along with the Washing Machine and the iPod, for
generating capital.
Like any product, the book must run harder and faster in the
marketplace or else fall and die. And the books are falling. Only the
fittest now survive. While mid-list authors drop in the snow,
blockbuster thrillers and middlebrow memoirs and diet books huff their
way forward. Soon, though, they too will drop. The idea is for no one
to be left standing. All physical books must go up the chimney stack.
Such was the methodology of the SS who forced their prisoners to run
naked races round and round the barracks yard in the Polish winter, a
race that no one was meant to win.
The book is fast becoming the despised Jew of our culture. Der Jude is
now Der Book. Hi-tech propogandists tell us that the book is a
tree-murdering, space-devouring, inferior form of technology; that
society would simply be better-off altogether if we euthanized it even
as we begin to carry around, like good little Aryans, whole libraries
in our pockets, downloaded on the Uber-Kindle.
Further, we are told that to assign to books a particular value above
and beyond their clearly inferior utility as a medium for language is
to mark oneself as an irrelevant social throwback. And then, goes the
narrative, think of the extraordinary sleekness, efficiency and
amplitude of a Kindle, where thousands of texts lie at your fingertips.
Which teen or twenty something in their right mind is going to opt for
paper over electronic texts? No one of course. That's just the way of
evolution, goes the narrative. Publishers and readers, writers and
agents, are well-advised to get with this truth or perish. As to the
bookstore, it is like the synagogue under Hitler: the house of a doomed
religion. And the paper book is its Torah and gravestone: a thing to
burn, or use to pave the road to internet heaven.
I know many writers who do not see anything wrong in any of this, who
can without too much trouble foresee a career spent entirely in
electronic media, who simply regard this development as the future and
are not particularly disconcerted by the prospect of a world without
books. To them, my sentiments and opinions may seem exaggerated, even
silly, perhaps crazy.
Maybe they are right. Perhaps I am crazy. Perhaps this is only a
private complaint. For writing does not come easily to me. My books
have been hardwon. What made it all seem worthwhile was the book, the
physical item, a kind of sacred and appropriate temple for the text
contained within. Had I been told from youth that my literary
destination would be some 7 inch plastic gizmo containing my texts
shuffling alongside thousands of other “texts” I would have spit in the
face of such a profession and become instead a hit man or a rabbi.
To me, the book is one of life's most sacred objects, a torah, a
testament, something not only worth living for but as shown in Ray
Bradbury's ‘Fahrenheit 451’, something that is even worth dying for.
And yet, though I have been willing to sacrifice everything for the
books I have written, compiled or just read, though I have given the
days of my life, my years, my youth and adulthood to the book, as both
sacred object and text, I am now witness to the culture turning away en
masse from the book. The world is moving to embrace the electronic
media as its principle mode of expression. The human has opted for the
machine, and its ghosts, over the haptic companionship and didactic
embodiment of the physical book. And though this development seems
inevitable yet I cannot and will not accept it.
I will fight it. I will resist. For not only is this effort at
consolidation of the world's literature into the hands of a single
central repository a demoralizing cultural prospect but it is a move
towards a new form of hi-tech totalitarianism. In a recent incident
reported in the NY Times, when a publisher decided to withdraw two of
its books from circulation as an electronic download, Kindle
unilaterally eliminated the two volumes from the Kindles of every
single user in the United States who had purchased the downloads. The
implication couldn't have been more clear: the hi-techers can decide as
they wish who gets to read what, and who dosen’t. Appropriately, the
two Kindle-deleted texts were George Orwell's ‘1984’ and ‘Animal Farm’.
Not since the advent of Christianity has the world witnessed so
sweeping a change in the very fabric of human existence. Behind the
hi-tech revolution is an idea of Progress that in many regards
resembles the premises of Christianity itself. The superseding of the
new way over the old, of the New Testament over the Old Testament, the
discrediting of the traditional as inferior or even evil, a sense of
powerful excitement about the revolutionary, and of course, most
importantly, the promise of heavenly immortality over the temporal
limitations of the wasting physical body—the accursed haptic book
versus the blessed Holy Ghostly Internet—all these earmark the hi-tech
pogrom against the book.
Heinrich Heine, the early 19th century German Jewish poet, wrote:
“"Where they burn books, they will ultimately also burn people." The
advent of electronic media to first position in the modern chain of
Being—a place once occupied by God—and later, after the Enlightenment,
by humans—is no mere 9/11 upon our cultural assumptions. It is a
catastrophe of holocaustal proportions. And its endgame is the
disappearance of not just books but of all things human.
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Sunday, January 10, 2010
|
http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2010/jan/04/standard-of-living-spending-consumerism
After this 60-year feeding frenzy,
Earth itself has become disposable
Consumerism has, as Huxley feared, changed all of us – we'd rather hop to a brave new world than rein in our spending
o George Monbiot
o guardian.co.uk, Monday 4 January 2010 20.30 GMT
Who said this? "All the evidence shows that beyond the sort of standard of living which Britain has now achieved, extra growth does not automatically translate into human welfare and happiness." Was it a) the boss of Greenpeace, b) the director of the New Economics Foundation, or c) an anarchist planning the next climate camp? None of the above: d) the former head of the Confederation of British Industry, who currently runs the Financial Services Authority. In an interview broadcast last Friday, Lord Turner brought the consumer society's most subversive observation into the mainstream.
In our hearts most of us know it is true, but we live as if it were not. Progress is measured by the speed at which we destroy the conditions that sustain life. Governments are deemed to succeed or fail by how well they make money go round, regardless of whether it serves any useful purpose. They regard it as a sacred duty to encourage the country's most revolting spectacle: the annual feeding frenzy in which shoppers queue all night, then stampede into the shops, elbow, trample and sometimes fight to be the first to carry off some designer junk which will go into landfill before the sales next year. The madder the orgy, the greater the triumph of economic management.
As the Guardian revealed today, the British government is now split over product placement in television programmes: if it implements the policy proposed by Ben Bradshaw, the culture secretary, plots will revolve around chocolates and cheeseburgers, and advertisements will be impossible to filter, perhaps even to detect. Bradshaw must know that this indoctrination won't make us happier, wiser, greener or leaner; but it will make the television companies £140m a year.
Though we know they aren't the same, we can't help conflating growth and wellbeing. Last week, for instance, the Guardian carried the headline "UK standard of living drops below 2005 level". But the story had nothing to do with our standard of living. Instead it reported that per capita gross domestic product is lower than it was in 2005. GDP is a measure of economic activity, not standard of living. But the terms are confused so often that journalists now treat them as synonyms. The low retail sales of previous months were recently described by this paper as "bleak" and "gloomy". High sales are always "good news", low sales are always "bad news", even if the product on offer is farmyard porn. I believe it's time that the Guardian challenged this biased reporting.
Those who still wish to conflate welfare and GDP argue that high consumption by the wealthy improves the lot of the world's poor. Perhaps, but it's a very clumsy and inefficient instrument. After some 60 years of this feast, 800 million people remain permanently hungry. Full employment is a less likely prospect than it was before the frenzy began.
In a new paper published in Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society, Sir Partha Dasgupta makes the point that the problem with gross domestic product is the gross bit. There are no deductions involved: all economic activity is accounted as if it were of positive value. Social harm is added to, not subtracted from, social good. A train crash which generates £1bn worth of track repairs, medical bills and funeral costs is deemed by this measure to be as beneficial as an uninterrupted service which generates £1bn in ticket sales.
Most important, no deduction is made to account for the depreciation of natural capital: the overuse or degradation of soil, water, forests, fisheries and the atmosphere. Dasgupta shows that the total wealth of a nation can decline even as its GDP is growing. In Pakistan, for instance, his rough figures suggest that while GDP per capita grew by an average of 2.2% a year between 1970 and 2000, total wealth declined by 1.4%. Amazingly, there are still no official figures that seek to show trends in the actual wealth of nations.
You can say all this without fear of punishment or persecution. But in its practical effects, consumerism is a totalitarian system: it permeates every aspect of our lives. Even our dissent from the system is packaged up and sold to us in the form of anti-consumption consumption, like the "I'm not a plastic bag", which was supposed to replace disposable carriers but was mostly used once or twice before it fell out of fashion, or like the lucrative new books on how to live without money.
George Orwell and Aldous Huxley proposed different totalitarianisms: one sustained by fear, the other in part by greed. Huxley's nightmare has come closer to realisation. In the nurseries of the Brave New World, "the voices were adapting future demand to future industrial supply. 'I do love flying,' they whispered, 'I do love flying, I do love having new clothes … old clothes are beastly … We always throw away old clothes. Ending is better than mending, ending is better than mending'". Underconsumption was considered "positively a crime against society". But there was no need to punish it. At first the authorities machine-gunned the Simple Lifers who tried to opt out, but that didn't work. Instead they used "the slower but infinitely surer methods" of conditioning: immersing people in advertising slogans from childhood. A totalitarianism driven by greed eventually becomes self-enforced.
Let me give you an example of how far this self-enforcement has progressed. In a recent comment thread, a poster expressed an idea that I have now heard a few times. "We need to get off this tiny little world and out into the wider universe … if it takes the resources of the planet to get us out there, so be it. However we use them, however we utilise the energy of the sun and the mineral wealth of this world and the others of our planetary system, either we do use them to expand and explore other worlds, and become something greater than a mud-grubbing semi-sentient animal, or we die as a species."
This is the consumer society taken to its logical extreme: the Earth itself becomes disposable. This idea appears to be more acceptable in some circles than any restraint on pointless spending. That we might hop, like the aliens in the film Independence Day, from one planet to another, consuming their resources then moving on, is considered by these people a more realistic and desirable prospect than changing the way in which we measure wealth.
So how do we break this system? How do we pursue happiness and wellbeing rather than growth? I came back from the Copenhagen climate talks depressed for several reasons, but above all because, listening to the discussions at the citizens' summit, it struck me that we no longer have movements; we have thousands of people each clamouring to have their own visions adopted. We might come together for occasional rallies and marches, but as soon as we start discussing alternatives, solidarity is shattered by possessive individualism. Consumerism has changed all of us. Our challenge is now to fight a system we have internalised.
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Thursday, January 07, 2010
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http://www.monbiot.com/archives/2010/01/04/consumer-hell/
Consumer Hell
Posted January 4, 2010
How do we break a system which now permeates every aspect of our lives?
By George Monbiot. Published in the Guardian 5th January 2010
Who said this? “All the evidence shows that beyond the sort of standard of living which Britain has now achieved, extra growth does not automatically translate into human welfare and happiness.” Was it a. the boss of Greenpeace, b. the director of the New Economics Foundation, or c. an anarchist planning the next climate camp? None of the above: d. the former head of the Confederation of British Industry, who currently runs the Financial Services Authority. In an interview broadcast last Friday, Lord Turner brought the consumer society’s most subversive observation into the mainstream(1).
In our hearts most of us know it is true, but we live as if it isn’t. Progress is measured by the speed at which we destroy the conditions which sustain life. Governments are deemed to succeed or fail by how well they make money go round, regardless of whether it serves any useful purpose. They regard it as a sacred duty to encourage the country’s most revolting spectacle: the annual feeding frenzy in which shoppers queue all night, then stampede into the shops, elbow, trample and sometimes fight to be the first to carry off some designer junk which will go into landfill before the sales next year. The madder the orgy, the greater the triumph of economic management.
As the Guardian revealed yesterday, the British government is now split over product placement in TV programmes: if it implements the policy proposed by Ben Bradshaw, the culture secretary, plots will revolve around chocolates and cheeseburgers and ads will be impossible to filter, perhaps even to detect. Mr Bradshaw must know that this indoctrination won’t make us happier, wiser, greener or leaner; but it will make the television companies £140m a year(2).
Though we know they aren’t the same, we can’t help conflating growth and well-being. Last week, for example, the Guardian carried the headline “UK standard of living drops below 2005 level”(3). But the story had nothing to do with our standard of living. Instead it reported that per capita gross domestic product is lower than it was in 2005. GDP is a measure of economic activity, not standard of living. But the terms are confused so often that journalists now treat them as synonyms. The low retail sales of previous months were recently described by this paper as “bleak”(4) and “gloomy”(5). High sales are always “good news”, low sales are always “bad news”, even if the product on offer is farmyard porn. I believe it’s time that the Guardian challenged this biased reporting.
Those who still wish to conflate welfare and GDP argue that high consumption by the wealthy improves the lot of the world’s poor. Perhaps, but it’s a very clumsy and inefficient instrument. After some 60 years of this feast, 800m people remain permanently hungry. Full employment is a less likely prospect than it was before the frenzy began.
In a new paper published in Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society, Sir Partha Dasgupta makes the point that the problem with gross domestic product is the gross bit(6). There are no deductions involved: all economic activity is accounted as if it were of positive value. Social harm is added to, not subtracted from, social good. A train crash which generates £1bn worth of track repairs, medical bills and funeral costs is deemed by this measure as beneficial as an uninterrupted service which generates £1bn in ticket sales.
Most importantly, no deduction is made to account for the depreciation of natural capital: the overuse or degradation of soil, water, forests, fisheries and the atmosphere. Dasgupta shows that the total wealth of a nation can decline even as its GDP is growing. In Pakistan, for example, his rough figures suggest that while GDP per capita grew by an average of 2.2% a year between 1970 and 2000, total wealth declined by 1.4%. Amazingly, there are still no official figures which seek to show trends in the actual wealth of nations.
You can say all this without fear of punishment or persecution. But in its practical effects, consumerism is a totalitarian system: it permeates every aspect of our lives. Even our dissent from the system is packaged up and sold to us in the form of anti-consumption consumption, like the “I’m not a plastic bag” which was supposed to replace disposable carriers but was mostly used once or twice before it fell out of fashion, or lucrative new books on how to live without money.
Orwell and Huxley proposed different totalitarianisms: one sustained by fear, the other partly by greed. Huxley’s nightmare has come closer to realisation. In the nurseries of the Brave New World, “the voices were adapting future demand to future industrial supply. ‘I do love flying,’ they whispered, ‘I do love flying, I do love having new clothes … old clothes are beastly …We always throw away old clothes. Ending is better than mending, ending is better than mending’”(7). Underconsumption was considered “positively a crime against society”(8). But there was no need to punish it. At first the authorities machine-gunned the Simple Lifers who tried to opt out, but that didn’t work. Instead they used “the slower but infinitely surer methods” of conditioning(9): immersing people in advertising slogans from childhood. A totalitarianism driven by greed eventually becomes self-enforced.
Let me give you an example of how far this self-enforcement has progressed. In a recent comment thread, a poster expressed an idea which I have now heard a few times. “We need to get off this tiny little world and out into the wider universe. … if it takes the resources of the planet to get us out there, so be it. However we use them, however we utilise the energy of the sun and the mineral wealth of this world and the others of our planetary system, either we do use them to expand and explore other worlds, and become something greater than a mud-grubbing semi-sentient animal, or we die as a species.”(10)
This is the consumer society taken to its logical extreme: the Earth itself becomes disposable. This idea appears to be more acceptable in some circles than any restraint on pointless spending. That we might hop, like the aliens in Independence Day, from one planet to another, consuming their resources then moving on, is considered by these people a more realistic and desirable prospect than changing the way in which we measure wealth.
So how do we break this system? How do we pursue happiness and well-being rather than growth? I came back from the climate talks Copenhagen depressed for several reasons, but above all because, listening to the discussions at the citizens’ summit, it struck me that we no longer have movements; we have thousands of people each clamouring to have their own visions adopted. We might come together for occasional rallies and marches, but as soon as we start discussing alternatives, solidarity is shattered by possessive individualism. Consumerism has changed all of us. Our challenge is now to fight a system we have internalised.
www.monbiot.com
References:
1. http://www.guardian.co.uk/business/2010/jan/01/fsa-adair-turner-green-economy
2. http://www.guardian.co.uk/media/2010/jan/03/backlash-plan-extend-tv-advertising
3. http://www.guardian.co.uk/business/2009/dec/31/economic-growth-recession-uk
4. http://www.guardian.co.uk/business/2010/jan/01/christmas-consumer-spending-figures
5. http://www.guardian.co.uk/business/marketforceslive/2009/dec/23/marketforces-enrc
6. http://rstb.royalsocietypublishing.org/content/365/1537/5.full
7. Aldous Huxley, 1932. Brave New World. Flamingo 1994 edition, page 43.
8. p46.
9. p45.
10. EvilTory, posting at http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/cif-green/2009/dec/14/climate-change-battle-redefine-humanity?showallcomments=true#start-of-comments
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