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 scarcity1. 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 ICulture-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, eco-industrialism, Carbo Economy, shearing layers, product design
• Spatial: urban design / green cities, localization
Principles of a Green Economy1. The Primacy of Human Need, Service, Use-value,
Intrinsic Value & Quality 2. Following Natural Flows 3. Waste Equals Food4. Elegance and Multifunctionality5. Appropriate Scale / Linked Scale6. Diversity7. Self-Reliance, Self-Organization, Self-Design8. Participation & Direct Democracy9. 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
Herman Daly “Trade Recipes,
not Cookies.”
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.
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 Visible Use-value Exchange-value “Consumption” “Production” People Things Unpaid Paid Women Men Informal Formal Private Public
Invisible Economy (1) Total Productive System of an Industrial Society
(layer cake with icing)
GNP-Monetized
½ of CakeTop two layers
Non-Monetized
Productive ½ of Cake
Lower two layers
GNP “Private” SectorRests on
GNP “Public” SectorRests on
Social Cooperative
Love EconomyRests on
Nature’s Layer
“Private” Sector
“Public”Sector
“underground economy
“Love Economy”
Mother Nature
All rights reserved. Copyright© 1982 Hazel Henderson
2
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
Waste
Fordism
Suburbanization/ Consumer Economy
War Industry
Money
Debt
Keynesianism
Paper Economy
Planned Inflation
New forms of credit-money
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 peer-
production & 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: culture-based economics demands access not ownership
Property as Theft?• Capitalism as intrinsically material-
based 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 SecurityGeared 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; account-
money; 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:[next slide]
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