Intro to Economic Life 10: The Re-Growths
Redefining progress beyond utopias, and five paradigms of change
Imagine finding yourself inside a city that’s beginning to burn. Your survival impulse kicks in and you raise the alarm. There are two options. Flee to a place that’s not burning, or stop the fire. Getting fellow citizens mobilized in this situation is simple, because everyone can see the fires, recognize them as abnormal, and agree that there’s a need for action.
In the case of a ‘burning planet’, however, this process is far more complex. It’s true that many of us detect that our economic system is beginning to burn, in both a metaphorical sense, and a literal sense in the case of climate change. In Part 9 I sketched out some of the destructive aspects of our economic life, from social injustice to ecological degradation and soullessness. People who are sensitive to these ‘fires’ will be alarmed. Their survival impulse kicks in. They might fantasize about fleeing to a separate economic system, or finding a way to stop the problems.
But mobilizing action on this is hard. Most people have been immersed since birth in an expanding and accelerating system of corporate capitalism that morphs around them. They have seldom experienced anything different, and while they might have gone through booms and recessions, there’s no obvious way to see a clearly demarcated ‘fire’, or to have a common experience of it. If they’ve been living in it for a while, it just seems normal.
Moreover, many people are just trying to survive, and often don’t have the emotional space or energy to think about shifting the structure of our world, especially when it’s so hard to see, and so hard to envisage changing. While there’s a small class of people who do specialize in thinking about how to change stuff, the majority of people in the world are employed in maintaining stuff, and often partly derive their sense of self from that role. A person who survived by installing lead water pipes for households in the 1950s didn’t think of themselves as slowly poisoning people. They thought of themselves as maintaining a vital water infrastructure. Similarly, an engineer in the coal industry may be predisposed towards believing they’re playing an important role in maintaining energy for their fellow citizens. They may feel wounded when a climate campaigner tells them they’re undermining society. That can quickly shift to antagonism.
There’s no shortage of ideological defenders of our economic system who will exploit that wound and stoke the antagonism. There’s a long history of think-tanks, politicians and economists who not only deny that a problem exists, but who present our situation as utopian. For example, the venture capitalist Marc Andreessen recently proclaimed that free markets and technology will lead us to ever greater social and environmental progress. People like him insist that any alarm being raised is false. If you suggest changes, they’ll perceive you as seeking a parallel world they reject, a kind of demonic mirror image of the system they idealize. This is why Marc rails against ‘pessimists’ and ‘socialists’, who he believes are a dangerous drag on society.
He’s not alone in doing this. When I offer critiques of economic processes, I frequently get people who call me a ‘communist’. They’re often possessed by a dualistic worldview, in which they imagine the forces of light fighting the forces of darkness: You don’t like Capitalism? So you’d prefer to live in the authoritarian burning hell of Communism!
Not all economic debates are as polarized as that, but in general our disagreements about economic systems are rife with gaslighting - people with totally different ideas of what constitutes reality, projecting those ideas onto each other in a way that infuriates and confounds the other. For example, I have a distinct strand of left-wing libertarianism in my own work, but I have to constantly interact with right-wing libertarians and social conservatives who sometimes appear to occupy a different planet. We might agree on narrow issues - such as the need to defend privacy, for example - but they cannot see the same systemic ‘fire’ that I do, and when I come along with a bucket of water they see it as gasoline. They might tell me that fighting climate change requires more markets, growth, acceleration and industrialisation, not less. They’ll believe that I want to burn down their burning paradise, and will fight me.
Moving beyond one-thingness
It’s very easy to spend years fighting people you disagree with, but how do we start to move more strategically and empathetically through this? The first step may be to realise that our diverse and conflicting perspectives on economies often stem from a common source: the need for survival, inclusion, identity and meaning. It’s important to remember that our global system of large-scale fluid interdependence (see Part 6) is very hard to see, which means people can projects all sorts of visions onto it from their particular vantage point. That vantage point shifts by geography, economic strata, culture and sub-culture. We’re group animals, and if you’re hanging around others in a particular social scene who’ve come to believe that our system is one particular thing, you could very well start to see it as one thing too.
There’s a long tradition in Western philosophy of ‘one-thingness’, the attempt to describe reality through discrete objects that supposedly have independent existences. Here is Capitalism. It is one thing. Here is Communism. It is a different thing. They are separate objects that fight each other. From the very beginning of this course, however, I’ve suggested that these imagined pure forms are abstractions. From the earliest human economies, we’ve always lived with simultaneous conflicting moral logics that can be neither reconciled nor separated from each other (see Part 3). Even in the most ‘capitalist’ society, everyday communism abounds, despite the constant attempts of the system to commodify everything. Similarly, in the heyday of state-sponsored Communism, all sorts of trading was at play.
I have often used the term ‘capitalism’ in this course, but I’m not referring to a set structure that remains constant. Rather, I’m referring to a strong tendency within our economic web, which coexists alongside other tendencies. These tendencies cannot really be placed on a battlefield against each other, with some eventual winner, because all of us have all the tendencies within us (see Part 2).
One way to grasp this is through a sensory metaphor. Most of us simultaneously have five senses - hearing, sight, smell, touch, and taste - but it might be the case that you’re particularly sensitive to one or another. Perhaps you’re a visual person, or a tactile person, but you still have four other senses. Similarly, in our search for identity, inclusion and meaning we often end up sensitized to one or other moral logic in an economy. We might latch onto it, but it doesn’t mean we don’t carry the others with us. A person who calls themselves a ‘libertarian’ will behave socialistically every day, and yet forms their identity by railing against Socialism, spotlighting one part of themselves by contrasting it with another. Similarly, ‘socialists’ have capitalistic traits, but push that to the margins of their identity.
To maintain these identities, people might seek out their (inner) ‘enemy’ everywhere. For example, in anti-capitalist circles, there’s a strong tendency to see capitalism in everything. Similarly, in the aftermath of de-colonization, sub-saharan African socialists were preoccupied with trying to prove that a natural socialism permeated all aspects of African life (in my home country South Africa this often goes under the name Ubuntu). While Ubuntu theorists speak about Xhosa people as natural socialists, US libertarians imagine Americans as natural capitalists, and these dualisms get compounded by further dualistic abstractions like The State versus The Market, with the latter being inhabited by still further abstractions, like the imagined sovereign individual: Homo Economicus.
Many people casually believe in these abstractions without having a particularly politicized view on them. The world is complex and overwhelming, so we try to to navigate through our reality by setting up imagined pure forms, expressed through language, images and metaphor. Homo Economicus is an abstract form that economists use to build a picture of reality, and we can counter it by proposing alternative forms - e.g. Homo Ecologicus - but these are always partial mental models to help us process our lived experience. Once you’ve locked onto one model, you might find it hard to let go. That’s why it’s important to put our anthropologist goggles on from time to time. It helps to remind us that we have multiple forces co-existing within us, and multiple forces co-existing within our economic system. This becomes important in thinking about how you build ‘alternative’ systems.