Self-sufficiency or self-determination?
Comment by Alex Bainbridge
Significantly reducing consumption is key to achieving sustainability, according to just about every current in the environment movement. The idea has been thrust further into the spotlight as part of the current debate about immigration.
Most advocates of the consume less thesis avoid facing up to its economic and political implications. One of the few who doesn't is Ted Trainer of the University of NSW. His 1995 book The Conserver Society is one of the most consistent presentations of this perspective.
Trainer proceeds from two basic points: "a) the world's present levels of resource consumption and environmental damage are unsustainable, and b) if all people the world will have by 2060 were to live as we in rich countries do now, these levels would be 10 times as high." He concludes that the only answer is a society based on largely self-sufficient neighbourhoods with minimal trade or large industry.
Trainer correctly locates these problems in a market and profit-driven economy and argues in favour of systematic change rather than purely individual solutions. Nevertheless, there are major problems with his vision.
Present non-renewable resource usage is unsustainably high, but this is not an argument for a society in which even more people have to go without the things they need and want. It is even less the case that individuals can save the planet by reducing their personal consumption.
Socialists argue that a society free of the profit motive (and ecological sustainability is inconceivable in a society governed by private profit) can be built only on the basis of abundance of the things people consume. Only abundance can ensure genuine and lasting social equality and, therefore, decisions made by the majority in their own collective interests.
Wanting less
On abundance, Trainer tries to have his cake and not eat it too. On the one hand, he says that "living in the ways described would not involve material or cultural deprivation or any threat to the sophistication of our technology". However, he makes clear that not being deprived requires people to want less: "reducing personal consumption is primarily a matter of redefining what constitutes a satisfying and respectable lifestyle".
It is true that a large amount of wasteful and destructive production could be cut out without reducing people's standard of living. The main obstacle to cutting it out, however, is that the vast majority of people have very little control over the production process.
The capitalist owners are free to produce according to the only criterion they understand — the profit motive, with its inevitable tendencies toward environmental destruction.
The solution is a social system in which ownership and control of productive resources lies with the community as a whole.
Trainer implies that a largely self-sufficient neighbourhood economy is the best form of economic democracy. Nevertheless, planning up to the national and international levels will be necessary to coordinate major programs of wealth redistribution, environmental clean-up and so on, and self-sufficient local economies could not contribute much to such efforts.
Neither would local neighbourhoods be able to undertake large-scale production, such as steel or computers, with their own inputs. Trainer does not suggest we go entirely without these things and advocates co-ops or state control for large enterprises.
He also advocates a substantial cash sector in his "conserver society". Small-scale "free enterprise" is different from capitalism, he argues, ignoring the fact that the former develops into the latter.
Trainer hopes this will be an "interim step on the way to a completely cooperative and rational economy without competition, profit motivation or market mechanisms". But he seems to think that all that is required to get there is an attitudinal shift.
Social change will involve changes in attitudes, challenges to the selfish and greedy traits fostered by the competitive society we live in. But we cannot rely on attitudinal change as the motive force for social change. On the contrary, it is changes in society that will have a major impact on the way people think and behave.
This underlines the importance of achieving an abundance of basic consumer items. People who have as much as they want of these things will, over time, consume only a rational amount, thereby also breaking down acquisitive and competitive traits.
Contrary to popular mythology, it is possible to satisfy most people's needs and wants (excluding lavish luxuries). The acquisitiveness that seems to be "human nature" in capitalist society is a product of the alienation and insecurity that capitalism generates. (Enough wealth for today is not enough, because tomorrow you might lose your job and thus your ability to obtain what you need.)
Working more
One of the problems with small-scale neighbourhood production is that it can't produce very much. Collective labour (industry) is much more productive and, potentially, requires less effort.
Trainer's "conserver society" would condemn its citizens to much higher levels of work than would be required in a democratically planned industrial society — even excluding further technological advances.
He claims that work will become recreational. However, throughout human history, reducing the necessity to work has been a major driving force for social development. Freeing the mass of people from some of the work they now do to survive will contribute to the development of human creativity and innovation, participatory democracy and social solidarity.
While some people may enjoy Trainer's "conserver" lifestyle, most people would have a higher standard of living, more leisure and more choices in a democratically planned, ecologically sustainable society — that is, in a socialist society.
There is no reason why permaculture, energy-efficient buildings and so on can not be implemented on an industrial scale. There is no technical reason why recycling programs could not extend to cover all industrial outputs (that is, no pollution!).
In many areas, humanity already has the technical and scientific knowledge for such transformations; all that is needed is for humanity as a whole, rather than the wealthy profiteers, to control production. And who knows how quickly further advances will be made when science is freed from commercial and military constraints?
Even if it ultimately proves necessary to move to a simpler society, the shift would be much easier to make from a democratically planned economic basis. It would simply be a matter of choice for the citizens involved.
Today's rulers have considerable legal, political and economic power. Trainer seems to think that the capitalists will turn a blind eye to gardens in supermarket car parks and suburban streets, local currencies and the like. While these schemes stay small, this may be the case. But the capitalist rulers will try to crush any serious challenge to their power.
Calling on people to consume less is not just inadequate, but is a diversion. Social change requires a strategy to wrest political and economic power away from the current rulers and transfer it to society as a whole. Once the productive capacity of humanity is in the hands of the majority, we will be able to make rational choices ourselves as to how much or how little to produce and consume.