What Is to Be Done?
When Growth Takes Precedence Over the Material and Spiritual Worlds
The failings of the growth paradigm — the idea that the economy must grow every quarter — surround us every waking hour. Its reliance on ever-increasing levels of mineral extraction and energy production has caused an ethnocide and ecocide the likes of which “nobody has ever seen before.” It has led to accumulation by dispossession, allowing power and wealth to be concentrated in the hands of the few at a cost to the most vulnerable among us. At its core, the bankrupt ideologies of globalization and neoliberalism deny existence to all those who fall outside their ability to subjugate — the largest consequences have been for global indigenous communities. As the anthropologist Wade Davis argues in his book The Wayfinder:
Modernity provides the rationale for disenfranchisement, with the real goal too often being the extraction of natural resources on an industrial scale from territories occupied for generations by indigenous peoples whose ongoing presence on the land proves to be an inconvenience.
Hardly a day goes by without information on some form of technocapitalist solution to the current global social and environmental crisis, such as renewables (which are better described as FossilFuel+), being touted on one of the numerous privately owned public infrastructures (e.g., Facebook) or the corporate media. These platforms are manufacturing consent for modernity and growth in the face of an indefensible global hegemony. There are, of course, the prognosticators such as Steven Pinker who tell us that in the end, everything will be OK, but history follows in cyclical patterns. When Rome fell, it wasn’t until the 14th century that much of human civilization started a long process of recovery. With all our chemical and nuclear facilities, it is difficult to say whether we would recover this time around. The idea that we can somehow dig our way out of the climate crisis through some miraculous technology is at best delusional when our atmosphere has a 415 ppm concentration of CO2. This is a time when we should be discussing adaptation instead of fairy tales of eternal economic growth.
Over the course of centuries, we have developed a fundamentally problematic relationship with our surroundings that has led us to believe the world exists for us to exploit in order to satisfy our selfish desires. This relationship, if not a result of, is certainly encouraged by some of the most deeply held beliefs of large swaths of humanity. See this example from Genesis 1:26:
Then God said, “Let Us make man in Our image, after Our likeness, to rule over the fish of the sea and the birds of the air, over the livestock, and over all the earth itself and every creature that crawls upon it.
Once we acknowledge these implicit values within our broader society, we must come to terms with the fact that no amount of talk of reducing emissions is going to change our circumstances. In some strange sense, we’re living in a universe where the dominant ideology of society is emission-reduction groupthink. What about the entirety of earth’s spiritual and living ecosystems, like the mountaintops we blow up to extract resources? Once all is said and done, these are never coming back.
We witness efforts by social, environmental, and energy justice advocates, who are arguing in earnest for cosmopolitan justice, restorative justice, distributive justice, recognition justice, and procedural justice, among other measures. But even assuming we reach a consensus to embark on an honest effort to implement these measures, we’ll soon have a reality check: the current global paradigms of capitalism and neoliberal ideology are fundamentally in contradiction with these frameworks. If for no other reason, because of the growth paradigm’s systemic reliance on class and social warfare — which should throw any notion of justice out the window.
Whether it’s imperialist nations or the so-called anti-imperialist nations, nation-states operate based on the principles of the global growth paradigm. At the risk of sounding too essentializing, I’ll claim that — though to a varying degree — industrial nation-states are driven by the same motives (e.g., corporate quarterly profits) and responsive to the same source of power (e.g., finance capital); this is in no small part due to globalization and its institutions: namely the International Monetary Fund, the World Bank, and the World Trade Organization, among others. Thus, any meaningful engagement with issues pertaining to life on earth requires us to abandon the comforts of the sustainable development newspeak and the growth paradigm. Engagement would have to happen at the core of a world that is the result of centuries of colonialism. Even the slogan of taking over the means of production does not go far enough, as our aim should be the reduction of and eventual end to the means of production as a result of its reliance on the exploitation of natural resources and labor. We must move away from a consumption-based society built on the glorification of consumerism; instead, we should encourage modesty and produce materials that are repairable and built to last to reduce our reliance on production.
As we move towards an uninhabitable earth, it is growing increasingly more obvious that the conversations we’re engaging in, such as sustainable development, are insufficient. Any effort that falls short of an end to the rule of the cult of progress — our current global community that values progress above all else — will fail to accomplish what it espouses to do. If we do not follow through with radical changes in our society, economy, and politics, that is, a fundamental departure from the exploitative narrative of the relationship of capitalism with labor and the earth’s living systems, we’ll just be waiting for the next crisis to arise.
Sooner or later, it will dawn upon us that we have nothing but radical options. This reality should not discourage us from working towards reforming institutions, forming worker cooperatives, building transition towns, and so on. However, we must simultaneously have a deeper examination of agendas such as post-growth, post-industrialization, and post-capitalism. These socio-ecologically friendly pathways offer alternatives to the technocapitalist vision that is trying and failing to create a unilateral pathway to socio-ecological sustainability. Of course, no such effort will be easy; we will witness the entirety of the state apparatus and its proxies (e.g., the thought police), which are primarily responsive to the interests of big finance and the national security apparatus, descend upon the citizenry. But as the title of Vladimir Lenin’s brochure asks, what is to be done?
