Steps Towards Establishing a Post-Work, Post-Growth, Library Economy
It’s time to shift our perspective from that of capital, to that of life.
In this video, Post Growth Fellow, Andrew Sage, outlines his vision for a post-work, post-growth, library economy, and explains how capitalism and the growth imperative has led to the crises of the present. Below is an edited transcript.
It’s time to shift our perspective from that of capital, to that of life; from prioritizing the welfare of capitalism to the welfare of the living world. We need to recognise that what we’ve come to consider growth is primarily the process of our eventual destruction. We need to move away from the ideology of growthism. We need to dismantle the system of capitalism.
We need to shift our priorities. We need degrowth: a planned, collectively organized restructuring of the economy, a downscaling of energy and resource use to transition the economy back into balance with the living world in a safe, just, and equitable way.
In French, they use the term décroissance, and in Italian la decrescita, to refer to a river going back to its normal flow after a disastrous flood. While I believe it is important to present ideas in a way that challenges dominant cultural norms, and it’s best to use established tools when introducing the ideas in this context, I care very little about labels and far more about the substance.
So I will gladly advocate for a post-work, post-growth, library economy. The aim is to build a new economic system, an economy that is under the direct control of all involved in it. An economy that is organized around human flourishing instead of around and endless capital accumulation. An economy that is distinctly ecological and distinctly human. Rather than operating with an economic system that is built around constant need and filling that need by producing for profit, we can shift towards an economic system geared towards meeting needs by producing for use, which will drastically scale down total energy consumption.
However, there is a necessary caveat to this objective. There are many parts of the world that live far, far below planetary boundaries and do actually need to increase their energy use in order to meet human needs. I believe movements in the Imperial core must work in solidarity with movements in these places to give reparations in the form of resources and labor, where requested, to support people as they work to meet their needs and develop a better path to a healthier, more caring economy and ecology.
The colonized people of this world do not need to follow the same destructive roadmap as the places we consider ‘developed’ in order to flourish. To quote the Martiniquan intellectual, Franz Fanon:
We must find something different. We today can do everything, so long as we do not imitate Europe, so long as we are not obsessed by the desire to catch up with Europe… So, comrades, let us not pay tribute to Europe by creating states, institutions and societies which draw their inspiration from her… Humanity is waiting for something other […] than such an imitation.
The onus is primarily on the Global North and other countries that have exceeded planetary boundaries to scale down energy consumption. But how to degrow? Think about all the energy it takes to extract, produce, and transport everything in the world. Think about all the inputs and outputs that run this global capitalist economy. It’s quite the energy sucking behemoth and has been organized around one purpose: fueling economic growth. We need take on this behemoth and change how it works fundamentally, to slow it down, to scale it down, and to bring it in line with the limits of the biosphere. It sounds difficult because it will be. But a few relatively simple guidance steps will put us on the right track.
Here’s a small part of what it will take to establish a post-work, post-growth, library economy.
End planned obsolescence
First, we need to put an end to planned obsolescence. Household appliances, computers, tools, furniture, and other products have been designed under capitalism to break down and require new replacement after a relatively short period of time in order to increase profits. Planned obsolescence actively stifles the innovations we need to make things last longer and prevents us from being able to repair instead of replace our stuff. By putting an end to those deliberate manufacturing decisions and developing long-lasting modular products, we can greatly reduce our material and energy use worldwide.
Shut down the advertising industry
Next, we need to gut the advertising industry. Most advertising simply serves to generate social divisions, highlight class divisions, and manipulate people into consuming stuff they don’t need. It’s constant psychological warfare. I mean, it’s no secret that I hate it. Everywhere you walk, everywhere you scroll, everything you watch and listen to: it’s all trying to sell you something. It’s this constant, constant noise, and it’s bad for us. Thanks to the internet, we can search for information about the things we need without ads. Ads are actively corrupting the search experience. There are some beneficial ads, such as PSAs, but we really do not need the vast majority of ads. Tear them down and watch consumerism perish.
Move beyond ownership
Another step we can see is to shift from ownership to usufruct, which refers to the freedom of individuals or groups in a community to access and use, but not destroy, common resources to supply the needs. For example, rather than each individual in a community of 100 people owning an electric drill, we can keep three or four electric drills in a tool library to effectively serve everyone’s need for a drill when they need it. When we get rid of car dependency we can share the few electric cars we do manufacture to serve the needs that cannot be filled by bikes or our newly transformed public transportation system.
Transform our food systems
Another way to reduce energy and material use is to transform our agriculture systems. The way we currently feed the world is unequal, inefficient, environmentally degrading, and energy wasting — especially when current consumption patterns lead to up to 50 percent of all the food that’s produced in the world being wasted every year. We cannot keep treating farms like factories. It is incoherent with the demands of the living world. We can either rapidly scale down to more localized, permaculture and regenerative based agricultural systems supported by nearby communities through crop sharing and supplemented by urban gardens, hydroponics, cultured meat, and aquacultures — or, we can continue as we are with the old agriculture system until we run out of fossil fuels, our soils are all dead, and the population starts succumbing to the greatest famine the planet has ever seen. It’s our choice. I, for one, will be advocating for and trying to build food autonomy in my area as much as possible, and fighting for whatever it takes to cut down on waste so that we can rewild more farmland and sequester more carbon to recover the earth.
Scale down destructive industries
We need to scale down or get rid of certain especially destructive industries. Agriculture was just one example, and even within agriculture there are particularly harmful offenders, such as the beef industry, which is responsible for the destruction of the Amazon rainforest. Getting rid of the beef industry alone would liberate over 28 million square kilometers of land — almost the size of Africa. Factory farming as a whole is very environmentally destructive. The pandemic has already shown us which industries are essential. The fossil fuel industry, the arms industry, and the private jet industry all need to go, obviously. The automobile and commercial airline industries have to slim down drastically.
We can reduce all of these industries and more, thereby reducing the flows of materials, thereby reducing the stocks that support those flows, like factories, warehouses and trucks, thereby reducing the amount of energy and infrastructure required to produce, maintain, and operate all of it. All the while directing our efforts and energy toward things that actually improve human welfare. These steps of scale on total energy use should be taken by a broad range of affinity groups and especifist organizations in mass movements, popular assemblies in communities, and unions of all varieties — not waiting for the state, but going beyond it. Some of these steps may be achieved by concessions won from the state. Let those concessions fuel us to go further still, and not slip into the complacency of electoralism until we are in direct control of all the spheres of our lives.
Revolutionize work
Workers cooperatives, councils, and unions can collaborate to transform, reduce, or eliminate their respective industries, freeing more and more people of burdensome, unnecessary and BS jobs. We need a quantitative and qualitative shift in work. Quantitatively we need to cut down the amount of work being done by a significant margin — because most work today is simply useless, if not actively damaging and unnecessarily time consuming. We don’t need the 40-hour work week. Qualitatively, we need to take the activities we enjoy and need to do to promote human welfare, and self organize them to cooperatives and other groups in ways that promote self-actualization and community. We don’t need bosses. The whole concept of full employment, which is impossible to achieve under capitalism, will be turned on its head. No one would necessarily be employed in the traditional sense, but through flexible self-organization, everything that needs to get done gets done, while people are free to engage in caring, learning, socializing, exercising, crafting, creating, and everything else.
Universal access to the Commons
This kind of post-work, post-growth, library economy can only function to the establishment of an irreducible minimum, which is a guarantee provision of the means necessary to sustain life, the level of living that no one should ever fall below, regardless of the size of their individual contribution to the community. This includes access to adequate food, water, shelter, clothing, education, health care, internet, and transportation, organized through the Commons by affinity groups and popular assemblies. The Commons can only succeed through collective decision-making power. We cannot outsource this revolutionary transition to government agencies, corporations, NGOs, or parties. Without a renewed access to the Commons, a reversal of the enclosure of common wealth and creation of scarcity that allowed capitalism to rise to prominence, we cannot achieve a post-growth economy. The abundance of the commons is an antidote to the growth imperative. We can use community land trusts, food and clothing banks, libraries of things, and cohousing cooperatives to lay the foundation of those Commons as our social revolution is building its momentum.
Social and ecological liberation
It’s important to emphasize the social aspects of this revolution. Not only will we be liberating ourselves from the growth imperative in the economic sphere, but we will also be liberating ourselves from the ways that the growth imperative has shaped our technologies, education, identities, institutions, and even our cultural norms and values. Our mindsets will need to shift, our relationships are going to evolve, and while such a necessarily rapid transition may be disorienting for many, I believe it will be a worthwhile shift.
Believe it or not, the earth can recover. Scientists have found that across ecosystems, it takes an average of only 66 years for a forester to cover 90 percent of its old growth biomass. That’s what in many of our lifetimes. In some cases, the transformation has even happened in less time. Rainforests in Costa Rica were able to regrow in as little as 21 years, pulling tons of carbon out of the atmosphere every single year. If we act quickly, we can see change sooner than we think. Through degrowth, we can open and expand spaces for healing, recovery, and repair.
My interpretation of degrowth or post-growth is that it’s essentially an anti-capitalist idea that challenges the dominant growth imperative and prompts a planned, collectively organized restructuring of the economy and downscaling of energy and resource use to transition the economy back into balance with the living world in a safe, just, and equitable way. Degrowth means a reduction of production and consumption in the Global North and liberation from neo-colonial exploitation in the Global South so that we can self-determine an ecologically sustainable path to human flourishing. Degrowth means decolonization of lands, of people, and of our minds. Degrowth means the creation of open, connected, steady-state and localized library economies. Degrowth means the establishment of autonomous bodies of democratic decision-making spheres of life. Degrowth means an economy and society that sistans the natural basis of life. Degrowth means striving for a self-determined life in dignity and abundance for all.
Inspired? Here are some ideas for things you can do:
- Support Andrew’s work on Patreon.
- Follow Andrew on YouTube and explore his videos, which aim to invigorate imaginations and encourage people to create a better world in the shell of the old.
- Browse our Bookshop to discover titles by diverse thinkers and activists whose work feeds into and pushes forward the post-growth movement.
