The habitation alternative
For more than half a century in Europe and the U.S., factory work was the most common occupation. Huge manufacturing facilities, employing many thousands, were the economic anchors for entire communities. This was the industrial era that now has passed into history. Factories still exist, but the numbers they employ are now in the hundreds rather than the tens of thousands. This is happening everywhere. Even in China, the manufacturing work force is shrinking as firms turn to robots and other technologies that reduce the numbers needed to maintain production.
But what comes after the industrial era? People have been arguing about this for decades. Some say it really doesn’t matter — whether people are making potato chips, computer chips, or fish and chips, it is still just a capitalist society and it will prosper when we leave almost everything to the coordinating power of free markets. Ronald Reagan and Margaret Thatcher first embraced that message almost four decades ago and their approach has dominated ever since. The results have not been pretty. On both sides of the Atlantic, we have escalating economic inequality and rising discontent.
But there is a better answer to what follows the industrial era. After industrialism, we have the opportunity to create a habitation society. Habitation encompasses all that is involved in creating and sustaining human communities. In a habitation society, the main economic priority would be building the physical and social infrastructure of communities in which the citizenry could thrive. In the industrial era, millions of people were uprooted from their earlier communities to move to find factory jobs. They tried their best to construct new communities, but habitation work was always subordinated to earning a wage and it was crippled by the class inequality of that time.
Today, however, the largest share of the labour force works at producing, sustaining, and improving human habitation as farm work and factory work have fallen to little more than 10% of all employment. People who work in health care, education, social services, construction, communication, and local government can be coded as habitation workers. So, also, can public and private sector scientists, engineers, and technicians working on developing new products and services since most innovations are designed to help communities and households accomplish their ends.
But all of this labour is being done within institutional structures inherited from the industrial era that treated habitation — except for the wealthy — as a wasteful luxury. So, in fact, decisions about what our towns and cities will look like and what infrastructure would be created were taken out of politics and handed over to unelected technocrats. Industrial era budgetary priorities systematically short-changed spending on affordable housing or on upgrading neighbourhoods. It was assumed that some had to live in misery so others could prosper. But those structures no longer make sense; habitation improves when nobody is left behind in poverty.
This is why our current moment is so contradictory. On the one side, the potential is enormous. For the first time in centuries, most people are free of having to grow food or toil in factories; we can devote ourselves to creating, sustaining, and improving the communities in which we live. And we can collectively find ways to use the powerful tools of advanced technologies — both computer-based technologies and renewables — to create more vibrant, resilient, and sustainable communities. But in actuality, people are being pushed into more and more precarious types of employment, decent housing is out of reach for growing numbers, and our environment and many neighbourhoods are deteriorating.
As Mariana Mazzucato argues in The Value of Everything, our conceptual tools, including mainstream economics, make it impossible to distinguish between what creates value and what destroys value. Our public policies, for example, encourage the growth of a financial sector that extracts value and does nothing to strengthen habitation. But when we recognise that the purpose of economic activity is to create thriving and sustainable communities, we can start to distinguish between expenditures that are wasteful and those that are productive. This paradigm shift means changing our tax policies and our spending policies to align with the habitation society that we could have. And most critically, we need to restructure our political institutions so that people can participate in the critical decisions that shape the communities in which they live.
Watch Fred Block’s lecture at UCL on Capitalism: The Future of an Illusion
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