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