Transcript Perspectives on Green Business

The Threat of Abundance:
Emerging Human Potentials and
the Crisis of Capitalism
Oct. 22, 2013
OISE LHA1131 H Precarity & Dispossession
Addressing the Politics of Scarcity and Abundance
Brian Milani GreenEconomics.net
The Argument
• Capitalism’s basis in scarcity
• Abundance: not only possible today, but necessary for survival
• To perpetuate itself, capitalism deliberately creates scarcity
1. Fordism (1945-79)
2. Post-Fordism / financialization (1980-2008)
3. Austerity [with combinations of #1 & #2 & ?] (2008- ?)
• (rough parameters of) The Green Alternative
• Strategic Abundance-based Imperatives
The Green Economy
• A Historical Transition:
…from Quantity to Quality
• A Question of Potentials
…not simply limits
• Key to Sustainability:
Redefining Wealth
Green as Postindustrial
•
•
•
•
from mechanics to organics
from machinery to the landscape
culture-based development
substitutes intelligence for resources
(people-intensive)
• focus on end-use, or human and
environmental need
• from quantity to quality: redefining
wealth
The Centrality of the Landscape
“The industrial age replaced the natural processes of the
landscape with the global machine…while regenerative design
seeks now to replace the machine with landscape.”
…John Tillman Lyle
Industrialism: Accumulation
• Production-for-production’s-sake
• Invisibility of key factors
• Centralization of production, massive upfront
investment
• Focus on labour productivity : resources
substitute for human energy
• Cog-labour: humans as component parts
• Regulation: controls as limits
• Scarcity-based: role of waste since WWII
• Globalization: free trade & intellectual property
Postindustrialism: Regeneration
• New relationship of culture to economics: centrality of
human development
• Substitution of human creativity for resources
• Direct targeting of human need: conscious consumption
• Human-scale technologies: production ‘distributed’ over
the landscape ; Integration: ALL places are places of
production
• Qualitative Wealth is PLACE-BASED
• Distributed regulation: incentives for positive action
throughout economy.
• Self-reliance / interdependence:
“Trade recipes, not cookies”
Knowledge-based Development:
the 3 D’s
• Dematerialization: intrinsic:
substituting information for
resources
• Detoxification: ...great potential
to tune into benign process &
substances.
• Decentralization: intrinsic part of
the network economy
Redefining Wealth I
Culture-based Development
Production:
Key Factor: Human creativity
Consumption:
Key Factor: End-use or
Human need
Rising portion of “public
goods” …& growing
importance of the Commons
Redefining Wealth II
Quantitative:
Money & Material
Accumulation
Qualitative:
Well-being
Regeneration
Redefining Non-Material Wealth III:
Phantom/Casino vs. Real Economy
Casino (debt-based)
economy
Eco-service economy
Design Dimensions
• Political / Financial: trade, money /
currency, EPR / property /service
• Energy: soft energy path
• Technological: cradle-to-cradle, ecoindustrialism, Carbo Economy, shearing
layers, product design
• Spatial: urban design / green cities,
localization
Principles of a Green Economy
1.
The Primacy of Human Need, Service, Use-value,
Intrinsic Value & Quality
2. Following Natural Flows
3. Waste Equals Food
4. Elegance and Multifunctionality
5. Appropriate Scale / Linked Scale
6. Diversity
7. Self-Reliance, Self-Organization, Self-Design
8. Participation & Direct Democracy
9. Human Creativity and Development
10. The Strategic role of the Built-environment, the
Landscape & Spatial Design
The Green Economy:
Human & Eco Dimensions
1. “The Service Economy”
End-use: “Hot Showers and Cold Beer”
Nutrition, Illumination, Entertainment, Access,
Shelter, Community, etc.
2. The Economy in Loops —
The “Lake Economy”
Flowing with nature, Every output an input, Closed-loop
organization, Let nature do the work
Common Sense Economics
Increase restrictions on the flow
of material goods and physical
capital (to minimize transport
costs, etc.)
Lessen restrictions on the flow of
information and culture.
Herman Daly
“Trade Recipes,
not Cookies.”
note:
Globalization does exactly the
opposite: via free trade and
intellectual property law.
Creativity: the key to Real
development
• meet real needs:
– Don’t use material consumption as a substitute for
qualitative fulfillment
– Rifkin: The Empathic Civilization
• Greening: substitute human creativity for
energy and resources.
--People-intensive development
--Resource productivity
Mass Collaboration
• beats competition
every time
• wikinomics: based in
abundance not
scarcity
• undermines industrial
markets
Labour & Resource Relationship
• Industrial economy:
resource-intensive.
labour productivity:
Substitutes resources
for labour.
• Green Economy:
people-intensive /
resource-saving.
Substitutes human
creativity for resources
Industrialism: The Divided Economy
Invisible
Use-value
“Consumption”
People
Unpaid
Women
Informal
Private
Visible
Exchange-value
“Production”
Things
Paid
Men
Formal
Public
2
Invisible Economy (1)
Total Productive System of an Industrial Society
(layer cake with icing)
GNP-Monetized
½ of Cake
Top two layers
GNP “Private” Sector
“Private” Sector
“Public”Sector
“underground economy
Non-Monetized
Productive ½ of
Cake
Lower two layers
All rights reserved.
“Love Economy”
Mother Nature
Rests on
GNP “Public” Sector
Rests on
Social Cooperative
Love Economy
Rests on
Nature’s Layer
Copyright© 1982 Hazel Henderson
Invisible Economy (2)
The Economy in Loops
The Old Order: Materialism and
Industrialism
markets best suited to material
stuff
steel & autos; not culture and
quality of life
Crisis: overproduction and
"effective demand"
“Invisible Hand" doesn't work so
well in cultural production
post-Depression: Waste as
economic driver.
Watershed of Industrialism:
The Great Depression
• Structural “Overproduction”: productivity outruns worker
capacity to buy.
• Beginnings of long-term crisis of “effective demand”
• Waste: main development strategy to create demand
without redistributing wealth.
Scarcity, Class Power & Waste
• War production, suburbanization and
effective demand.
• Waste of resources
• Waste of human potential
The Post WW II Waste Economy
Permanent War
Economy
The Suburb
Economy:
Oil / Autos /
Subdivisions
“The greatest misallocation of resources in
human history.”
…James Howard Kunstler
Fordism & the Reinforcement of
Industrial Wealth
Matter
Money
Waste
Debt
Fordism
Keynesianism
Suburbanization/
Consumer Economy
War Industry
Paper Economy
Planned Inflation
New forms of creditmoney
1970s: End of the Line for the
Fordist Waste Solution
• saturation of markets
• social & environmental costs coming due:
fiscal crisis of the state
• limits to inflationary strategy
• Vietnam war, decline of the dollar,
German/Japanese competition
• OPEC & the energy crisis
– Petrodollars & Currency Crisis
Post-Fordist Casino Economy
• cost of waste come due: need for new
sources of “effective demand”
• new technologies & Megabyte Money:
money disconnected from Real economy
• financial sector: 30-50 times (?) larger than
the material economy
• Culture of Speculation: Stomp the weak /
Get rich quick
• Empty wealth creation: de facto
redistribution of real wealth.
• Polarization of work and society
– end of social contracts: attack on Welfare State
– the growing gap between rich and poor
Post-1980 Casino Capitalism:
Hijacking the Information Revolution
• Main strategy for reproducing scarcity shifts from waste to debt
• New info technologies supply new ways of creating money:
Fantasy Finance
• Decline in real wages; increasing polarization of the rich and the
rest. Benefits of productivity gains monopolized by the 1%.
• Great Risk Shift from organizations to individuals.
• Rise of McJobs, outsourcing.
• Shift in power from manufacturing to financial capital
The Global Casino: Hijacking the
Information Revolution
• expansion of employment in
speculative industry
– Wall St.: more advanced technologically than
the military.
• Bubble Economies: last ‘frontiers’ for
capitalist growth.
-stock crash of 1987
-tech stock bubble of late 90s
-housing bubble of 2001-07
• Housing speculation: most destructive
& exploitative of the poor & average
people.
Austerity: ‘Self’-imposed Scarcity
• most repressive solution to the overextension & destructive
impact of debt.
--creditors rights virtually sacrosanct
--a kick-start to the timid debt-based economy
• the other obvious solution: clean slate / jubilee / debt amnesty
--the traditional remedy down through civilization. But in an age
of potential abundance, this risks undercutting class power
altogether by eroding both material and cultural monopolies.
Security
Deliberately undermined by capitalism
to create scarcity conditions.
“Security” : a euphemism for defense
against Abundance.
-- focus of contemporary capitalist
“economic development”
National Security State
Incarceration Industry
Financial Industry
Info Technology Industry
The Economy & Culture of Fear
• Mainstream politics and media
today are mobilized for the
creation of fear, based in both
scarcity and personal insecurity.
• Reality TV competitions, extreme
fighting, Tea Parties, racist
fundamentalism, cultural
scapegoating, etc.
• Question: should we be careful
of adding more fear, however
justifiable? (climate change,
etc.)
The War on Creativity
...or Who are the real Pirates?
• New wave of intellectual property
law: use of copyright and patent
law to suppress rather than
encourage innovation.
• Making pirates out of everyone,
and criminals out of young people.
• Current struggles over IP and the
Internet among the key strategic
struggles of our day.
Strategies for Abundance I
• Invest in social and natural
regeneration everywhere—in the
informal as well as formal
economy
 infrastructure & public goods
 ‘prosumption’ and self-provision
 reintegrate the Divided
Economy
• Find new ways of distributing
and remunerating real wealth,
especially in the Commons
• Guarantee everyone’s material
economic security
Strategies for Abundance II
• Disable the Coercive
power of Money
 Community Currencies
 Basic Income guarantees
 Free Health, Education,
Housing, etc.
• Free Culture: from
ownership to access;
from belongings to
belonging
Structural Change:
Unleashing the Informal Economy
• Juliet Schor: emphasizes
“Self-Provisioning” as one
of the key features of
Plenitude, “the new
economics of true wealth”
Rooftop gardening, self-help
building, preventive health
care, natural water treatment,
etc.
Property & Stewardship
• Ownership should be relative: designed to
support stewardship and human
development
– property: good for earlier materialistic
development.
• Centralized ownership: EPR
• Small-holder stewardship: good for land
Beyond Property:
Demarketization at the Cutting-edge
• Wikinomics: New forms of peerproduction & mass collaboration superior
to even the best-paid hired talent.
• Need for new forms of remuneration to
support cultural & eco-production in the
Commons.
• Culture & Information restricted by the
rules of old-line scarcity-based markets.
Brand: “Information wants to be free”.
• From belongings to belonging: culturebased economics demands access not
ownership
Property as Theft?
• Capitalism as intrinsically materialbased and scarcity-based
• Property, Ownership & material
accumulation
• Markets: forms of material
allocation.
• Abundance: the natural state of
information & culture.
• Real development in an Info
Economy: access, not ownership.
• Green Development: ownership has
to be subordinate to stewardship &
empowerment.
Commons in the Info Economy
• Sharing & conservation: key
role of design.
• Sharing: flip side of the new
importance of creativity.
• Green goods and info goods
as “public goods”, not easily
served by market exchange.
• Key struggles today: over
control of the Commons—the
“2nd Enclosure”
Brand: “Information wants to be free!”
Daly: “Trade recipes, not cookies.”
A New Paradigm of Security
Geared as much to unleashing
individual and community
creativity as protecting the
vulnerable.
Eliminates fear on many levels.
Deflates the coercive power
of money—allows ethical
values to factor into personal
economic decisions.
Supports imagination &
innovation that transforms
other sectors: e.g.
community business.
Meet everyone’s basic
needs...or else!
Ending the Coercive Power of
Money
Community Currencies
• especially account-money
systems
Basic Income Guarantees
• the more universal, the better
Public Provision of Services
• health care, transport,
housing, infrastructure
Decommodifying Money
•
diversification of forms of everyday
exchange
– supporting the informational character of
currencies.
– undercutting the scarcity-power of money.
•
financial industry restructured as public
utility and/or service industry.
– money directed to priority areas of green
development
– transition: green Tobin tax
•
new forms of remuneration
–
•
direct consumption; basic incomes; accountmoney; free food, health care & housing
gradually enlarging the sphere of gift
relationships
–
consistent with new productive forces based in
mass collaboration
the appropriate goal:
Gift Circulation
• Money as information &
energy
• Brand: “Information wants to
be free.”
• Requires social / eco value
to be embedded in everyday
life : indicators
• Question: transitional
mechanisms
Qualitative Economic Development
• focus on locally-owned
business
• increase resilience &
diversity
• raise standards:
“high road” development
Green Financial Strategy
1. Limit and starve Wall
St. gambling
2. Find ways of getting
capital to regenerative
enterprise
Regenerative Finance Toolbox
•
•
•
•
•
Cooperative investing
Impact investment
Local Stock Exchanges
Crowdfunding
Community investment &
revolving loan funds
• Public banking
... but check out these fascinating links:
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Links
Bill Moyers talks to Susan Crawford author of Captive Audience
Yochai Benkler on Open-source Economics
Laurence Lessig on the War on Creativity
Van Jones: America is not broke!
Michael Shuman on Local Investment
Juliet Schor on the Plenitude Economy
SolarShare: Solar Power Your Portfolio
Jeremy Rifkin: The Empathic Civilization: The race to global
consciousness in a world in crisis
Wikipedia on Graeber’s Debt: the First 5000 Years
Rev. Billy: What Would Jesus Buy?
2008 OISE Transformative Martial Arts series