Adam Smith or Adam Bede?

Work, Craft and Environment in a Green Economy

Molly Scott CatoProfessor of Strategy and Sustainability

University of Roehampton

Nature is not a place to visit, it is homeGary Snyder

Work and Life

• The division of labour

• The division of labour from land

• The division of humankind from nature

• Published in 1776, on the cusp of the industrial revolution and before its technological advance had had the chance to impact significantly on social and economic structures.

• David Ricardo’s Principles of Political Economy and Taxation (1817) set the parameters for the world of laissez-faire capitalism and export-led growth that we inhabit today.

The Wealth of Nations

• Archetype for the division of labour that was used to minutely subdivide tasks within workplaces to achieve efficiency

• Increased profits but no consideration of social and ecological ‘externalities’

The Famous Pin Factory

• Fourier was critical of Smith’s depiction of work as a ‘unversal bad’, a myth that undercut attempts to improve the quality of work.

• Factory work crushed the God-given passion ‘the Butterly’

Toil and Trouble?

• Workers should enjoy good rewards, variety and autonomy and were properly rewarded; work could be ‘a servant of the passions and thus a route to self-expression and self-realisation’

Extract I: Green Economics and Work

Labour: Loss of Identity

• ‘to give man a chance to utilise and develop his faculties; to enable him to overcome his ego-centredness by joining with other people in a common task; and to bring forth the goods and services needed for a becoming existence.’

• E. F. Schumacher

• Enclosure deprived the population of the means of subsistence.

• Illich considered the degradation of work to be the primary cause of a society without meaning, ‘where individuals, throughout their lives, live only through dependence on education, health services, transportation and other packages provided through the multiple mechanical feeders of industrial institutions.’

Labour: Loss of Right Livelihood

Land: Loss of Connection

• The Earth does not belong to man; man belongs to the Earth. Every part of this Earth is sacred because everything is connected, like the blood which unites one body. Trees, air, water, animals, grass, Earth are like many fine strands that weave the web of life; men are merely a strand of it.

• Chief Seattle

• ‘They wander through the shopping-mall winding passages, guided by a semi-conscious hope of finding an identity badge or token that will bring their selves up to date – and also by a semi-conscious apprehension that they might not notice the crucial point at which what were badges of pride become transformed into badges of shame. . . If identity jigsaw-puzzles are available solely in the commodity form, and cannot be found outside shopping malls, the future of the market is assured.’

‘Getting and spending we lay waste our powers’ Wordsworth

• ‘As a nation we are already so rich that consumers are under no pressure of immediate necessity to buy a very large share – perhaps as much as 40 per cent – of what is produce, and the pressure will get progressively less in the years ahead. But if consumers exercise their option not to buy a large share of what is produced, a great depression is not far behind.’

• A McGraw-Hill executive writing in Advertising Age in 1955

Work as Craft

• The Magic of the Woods: the Perfect Staycation

• The Life and Work of Adam Bede

• The Body of the Artisan• Connection through

Craft

Auto-ethnography?

The Growth of an ‘Artisanal Epistemology’

• Arose as a result of the artisans’ need to understand the natural materials that they used during their processes of creation: ‘When artisans looked to nature, they were interested, not surprisingly, in its powers of generation and transformation’

• This knowledge arose through their direct experience of natural materials: ‘certain knowledge can be extracted by engaging with nature, and . . . this engagement takes place through a bodily encounter with matter’

Extract II: Artisanal Epistemology

• ‘The Large Piece of Turf’ by Albrecht Dűrer

• The artist seeking to understand nature’s mystery

• Art as reconnection• Craft as

reconnection

Adam Bede• A more rounded and humanist view

of the nature of work, and one quite at odds with the economistic conception of Smith and Ricardo.

• The eponymous hero of her novel is a journeyman carpenter in rural England some two centuries ago.

• The novel explores the frustrations and satisfactions of productive, emotional and spiritual life through the experiences of its central character

• ‘The afternoon sun was warm on the five workmen there, busy upon doors and window-frames and wainscoting. A scent of pine-wood from a tent-like pile of planks outside the open door mingled itself with the scent of the elder-bushes which were spreading their summer snow close to the open window opposite; the slanting sunbeams shone through the transparent shavings that flew before the steady plane, and lit up the fine grain of the oak panelling which stood propped against the wall’

• ‘In contrast, the mass-produced artifacts of civilization, from milk cartons to washing machines to computers, draw our senses into a dance that endless reiterates itself without variation. To the sensing body these artifacts are, like all phenomena, animate and even alive, but their life is profoundly constrained by the specific “functions” for which they were built. Once our bodies masters these functions, the machine-made objects commonly teach our sense nothing further; they are unable to surprise us, and so we must continually acquire new built objects, new technologies, the latest model of this or that if we wish to stimulate ourselves.

• David Abram, The Spell of the Sensuous

Sustainability as Craft

• Work as relationship– with nature, with one’s body and with the environment

• Learning sustainability as we learn a craft

Life is relational not rational

• ‘Our ideas about our place in the world pervade all our thought, along with the imagery that expresses them, constantly determining what questions we ask and what answers can seem possible.’ Mary Midgley

• Rationalist, capitalist models of economic life have lead to the ‘disenchantment of the world’

• ‘The world and I reciprocate one another. The landscape as I directly experience it is hardly a determinate object; it is an ambiguous realm that responds to my emotions and calls forth’

• David Abram

The Spell of the Sensuous

Extract III. Loss of Self and Embedding

• ‘the origins of the cataclysm lay in the utopian endeavor of economic liberalism to set up a self-regulating market system’

• ‘previously to our time no economy has ever existed that, even in principle, was controlled by markets’

Community not Market

Livelihoods in Common• Side by side with family

housekeeping, there have been three principles of production and distribution:ReciprocityRedistributionMarket

• Prior to the market revolution, humanity’s economic relations were subordinate to the social. Now economic relations are now generally superior to social ones.

• Based on Sennett’s theories of The Craftsman

• Learning to work in harmony with your materials

• A deep sensual connection with the materials you draw from the natural world

Sustainability as Craft

Re-embedding: Walking the Land

Find out more

www.greeneconomist.org

gaianeconomics.blogspot.com

Green Economics: AnIntroduction to Theory, Policy and Practice (Earthscan, 2009)

The Bioregional Economy: Land, Liberty and the Pursuit of Happiness(Earthcan, 2012)

Find out more