ASPECTS OF GREEN ECONOMICS
The Qualitative Conception of Wealth
The idea of post-materialism and a post-materialistic ethic and social order implies a new way of conceiving wealth. As Hazel Henderson puts it in Paradigms in Progress. “Economists must now change their models and assumptions to conform to the new reality: “inputs” to production are energy, resources and knowledge and the “output” must be more fully-human beings”. Of course, this redefinition is not new at all. ‘There is no wealth but life’ Ruskin wrote in Unto this Last. ‘Life, including all its powers of love, of joy, and of admiration. That country is the richest which nourishes the greatest number of noble and happy human beings; that man is richest, who, having perfected the functions of his own life to the utmost, has also the widest helpful influence, both personal, and by means of his possessions, over the lives of other’ (Ruskin Unto this Last, Essay IV).
This is an essay about wealth. Green principles, politics and economics all concern wealth, its true meaning as against its false meaning. The Marxist contrast of use value and exchange value is a variant of this ancient search for the true meaning of wealth. (see Economics of Good and Evil by Tomas Sedlacek (2011 Oxford) for a brilliant, richly detailed and perceptive exposition of how ethics and economics have gone together in various times and places, from the ancient world to the present.)
The capitalist conception of wealth refers to money and things, objects that can be bought and sold on the market. It is a quantitative conception that transforms resources, human and natural, into commodities and gives them a price. It is all about an accumulation that concentrates and centralises wealth and power. The central dynamic of accumulation takes use value and turns it into exchange value and systemically drives an economy that destroys more than it creates. The concept of wealth as life is a qualitative conception that focuses on the potentialities and capacities of human beings, the actualisation of social being, the development of community, the flourishing of all organic life and the plenitude of living systems. It is wealth as life that defines the purposes and processes of green economics. The idea of wealth as an immanent potentiality in all living forms is not a new conception at all. Aristotle defined the human being as a zoon politikon. Zoon is zoe, meaning life. It is the origin of the word zoology, a discipline which concerns the properties and vital phenomena of animals. Human beings require a politikon bion in order to actualise their essential capacities. Bion refers to bios, the origin of the word biology, a discipline concerning living organisms and vital life processes. That’s the composition of wealth, natural properties, potentialities and capacities. Which is why Plato argued that virtue is its own reward. To actualise one’s potential and exercise one’s capacities as a human being to the full through the cultivation of the virtues is true wealth. To repeat Ruskin, there is no wealth but life.
So far removed is the modern quantitative, monetary conception of wealth from these notions that arch-conservative Plato and the moderate middle of the road Aristotle would appear to be extreme counter-cultural radicals. Not so. It is the capital system that has so destroyed balance, proportion and harmony and substituted its own extreme notions. Capital has destroyed the centre ground and ensured that human beings must live their lives at extremes.
Green economics is typically considered as a branch of environmentalism and associated with interventionist measures, taxes, price systems, "clean up" strategies, ‘green’ products, new energies and new and/or alternate technologies. The ‘greening’ of the economy and environmental protection is undoubtedly important and is better done than not done. But it would be a huge mistake if this ‘greening’ of existing business is equated with ecological economics as such. Apart from diverting attention from more fundamental problems and changes, environmentalism leaves the existing economic system intact, thus reproducing the central conflict between humanity and nature. As a result it upholds an irresolvable dualism in which environmentalism is limited to the futile task of forever protecting human and nonhuman nature from the intrinsically destructive economic system which remains firmly in place.
The point, of course, is that the economic system need not be so intrinsically destructive. On the contrary, human beings possess the institutional and technological know-how to adapt and fit practical existence benignly within natural processes. The preoccupation with ‘greening’ industry and protecting the environment actually presumes the continued existence of an inherently and systemically rapacious economy. A more positive agenda is possible. Given scientific knowledge, technological innovation and social learning, there is no reason why human beings cannot organise themselves so as to redesign and implement sustainable agricultural, energy, and manufacturing systems.
A green politics is not just about political effectiveness, it is about translating a vision of the sustainable society into public policy, feasible proposals, workable solutions, and social practices. Means must have an end. This vision is possible. A green politics must continue to affirm the great and growing potentials for human and ecological health and happiness, what Aristotle called flourishing. The usual proposals for economic reform tend to focus on remedying the ills of the current system, correcting market failure and removing inequalities. Which begs the question as to why, if the private economy is so viable, why does it need continual public support, correction and regulation? An ecological economics affirms the larger vision of the sustainable society. The realisation of this vision, however, requires social change strategies which are effective in tapping existing potentials and which pertain to all aspects of human development in relation to the nonhuman environment. That is to develop a true growth strategy.
The distinction between quantitative and qualitative conceptions of wealth casts "sustainability" in new light. The dominant conceptions of sustainability assume all economic activity takes the form of quantitative development. This leads to sustainability being defined as sustainable development. At best, sustainability here is concerned to modify economic activity so that nature is destroyed no faster than nature can regenerate itself. This presumes a degree of public control over the private economy that evaded socialism. Just as delusional, this approach treats sustainability as a no-man’s land where humanity neither aids nor destroys appreciably (Paul Hawken 1993). To believe that the capital system is a public domain that enables us to impose limits or restrictions upon the private economy in order to reach this no-man’s land is certainly misguided. The capital system imposes its own imperatives, ensuring that development proceeds only on its terms of private accumulation.
This is not, therefore, a public choice between destruction or restoration on the basis of the existing capital economy, but whether economic life will be based on one or the other. Qualitative development is driven by economic activities that restore health and vitality to human communities and ecosystems. Quantitative development, driven by the dynamic of capital accumulation, is ecologically destructive. The key to the future lies not in constraining the capital economy, as though public limits could restrain private imperatives, but in transforming the economic system. The concept of sustainable living based on qualitative growth thus comes to replace sustainable development based on quantitative expansion. The point at issue in ecological economics is not how to modify environmental destruction but how to eradicate it through a qualitative approach that embraces the social and the spiritual within the environmental. Herman Daly (1996) calls this holistic "development" as against quantitative "growth", something which is concerned with the common good rather than private gain. (Daly, Herman E. 1996. Beyond Growth: The Economics of Sustainable Development. Boston: Beacon. Daly, Herman E., and John B. Cobb. 1989. For the Common Good: Redirecting the Economy Toward Community, the Environment, and a Sustainable Future. Boston: Beacon.)
Radical Vision and Pragmatic Politics
There are three underlying assumptions to Green politics.
one, that fundamental change is necessary, given the threat of climate change through global warming;
two, that fundamental change is desirable, not only in terms of preserving the conditions of human geography and other life systems but also in realising visions of a good society that conforms to human ontology;
three, that fundamental transformation is possible given institutional capacity, technological know-how, and economic interrelation.
There is often some debate as to finding the right balance between a radical vision and a pragmatic politics. The question is one of discerning where and what to compromise in order to move forwards from and to the common ground. The challenge is to be politically effective without diluting the vision. Political effectiveness lies in drawing larger numbers of people within and building their ecological consciousness progressively so that they come to understand the degree of qualitative change which is necessary to preserve the basis of life on earth. That degree of fundamental change will not be possible without a large constituency and without an ecological consciousness. The cuts in resource use required are well beyond the capacity of existing industrial production and regulation. The predicament lies in achieving radical ends by pragmatic means.
Technics, potentialities and social relations
The argument that fundamental change is necessary is insufficient in itself. People will act when they are convinced of the desirability and the possibility of change. The environmental crisis is the result of an economic system that is beyond human control and comprehension, human society and politics being subservient to quantitative economic imperatives that systemically suppress qualitative growth. These cultural, political, and technological potentials for the new qualitative economics have been building for over a century.
Scientist and inventor Nikolai Tesla (1856-1943) is well known for being the first to develop AC current for widespread use and for inventing the means to convey information via radio waves. His ambitions expanded far greater than this, though. Tesla wanted to utilize radio transmission and send electricity through the atmosphere through an energy saving device. Ultimately he wanted to attach ‘machinery to the very wheelwork of nature’. This would mean free energy without suppliers. At this point, Tesla’s backers pulled out. The technics contradicted the central economic purpose of making money.
As Veblen showed, capitalist relations restrain production below what is technologically feasible in order to keep up prices and profit margins. Such technical capacity has been partially expressed within capitalist economics but is largely suppressed for the reasons given by Veblen.
In the Principles of Political Economy, John Stuart Mill states that 'It is questionable if all the mechanical inventions yet made have lightened the day's toil of any human being.' But as Marx comments here, lightening the day’s toil ‘is .. by no means the aim of the application of machinery under capitalism. Like every other instrument for increasing the productivity of labour, machinery is intended to cheapen commodities and, by shortening the part of the working day in which the worker works for himself, to lengthen the other part, the part he gives to the capitalist for nothing. The machine is a means for producing surplus-value’. (Marx CI 1976 ch 15). Surplus value goes to accumulate capital, the central dynamic of the system.
What Marx argues with respect to human toil applies also to technics and the way that it is subservient to the process of accumulation. The potentials of the ICT revolution will be constrained within this process and dynamic without fundamental transformation. Technics revolve around a special role for human creativity and require a new relationship of culture to the economy for their potentials to be realised. The new productive forces express and are grounded in a human culture that, as culture, is capable of being an end in itself. Instead, they are used as a means of accumulating capital. Realising the potentials of culture as a co-evolution with nature is precisely what ecological activism is about.
Desirability and possibility are coalescing. The institutional and cultural possibilities for humanity to harmonize technical activities with nature, meet everyone's basic needs and start to fulfil higher needs, and practise participatory and direct democracy alongside representative forms are great and growing. The green polity – ecopolis – is the institutionally and structurally appropriate expression of the level of technological and economic development that has now been achieved. This appears extreme or utopian only to those whose horizons are narrowed by specific economic necessities prevailing within existing social relations. Capitalist society is organised around money, wages and consumption, hence the concern with investment, employment and production. These may be called ‘false fixities’, the belief that transitory and historical institutions and practices are eternal and unchanging. Powerful interests exploit the natural conservatism of people and the inertia of institutions to mobilize opinion and pressure against new ideas and aspirations and thus entrench the prevailing social relations. This impasse can be broken only by broadening horizons, not only affirming values beyond existing parameters but actually practising them.
Social arrangements and relations shape the extent to which the economic system suppresses or channels emerging human potentials to human ends. Relationships of superordination and subordination are intrinsic to an exploitative system concerned with quantitative development. The central dynamic of this system is accumulation through the extraction of surplus value. In contrast, a system concerned with the qualitative growth of sustainable living is geared to the enlargement of human culture in co-evolution with nature. The emerging productive forces represent potentials which transcend the exploitative relation to human and natural resources and subvert all forms of domination and subordination. Governed by its accumulative logic, the capital system is compelled to use the new productive forces within its own narrow confines; it can never unleash these forces without thereby undermining its own relations and values.
Globalisation
The globalisation of economic relations is turning potentials for qualitative development into its opposite. The principal agencies of this globalisation are the transnational corporations who command vast processes of investment, production and employment. The result is that possibilities for human self-realisation, community self-reliance, direct democracy, social justice and equality, and integration of human culture with nature are not only being suppressed but are taking negative form. The new potentials are being used negatively rather than positively, intensifying and enlarging its narrow monetary, commercial concern and producing urban decay, cultural decline, the dissolution of communities, environmental destruction and a pervasive sense of hopelessness and powerlessness.
The capital system cannot even live up to its own nostrums. One hears the phrase ‘no such thing as a free lunch’ repeated as a mantra. The capitalist economy is the biggest free lunch in history. The only two sources of wealth are nature and labour, and capital exists only on the basis of the exploitation of both. Nature and labour can certainly exist independently of capital; capital cannot live independently of nature and labour. Further, for all of the rejection of ‘big government’, capital has from the first relied on the centralised state. Capital and the modern state exist in symbiotic relation. The economic agents pursuing their self-interest on the ‘free’ market do so with the safety net of taxpayers money when governments need to intervene to correct market failure. The apologists of the capital economy boast of the system’s 'efficiency’ but the fact is, in terms of inputs and outputs, the capital system is the most ludicrously wasteful economic system in history. Resources which could have been used to secure basic needs and harmonize the human interchange with nature have been dissipated through wasteful production, consumption, and competition. Of course, the definition of efficiency changes according to whether one is looking at quantitative or qualitative concerns. What is efficient for accumulating capital is not necessarily efficient for utilising natural and human resources and is often quite destructive in constraining them to a narrow purpose of money making. This is not wealth creation but its opposite. Capitalism’s biggest output is what Ruskin called "illth" (Cobb, Halstead, and Rowe, 1995). The current period has been described as the "cancer stage of capitalism" (McMurtry, 1999; Korten, 1999). (Korten, David. 1999. The Post-Corporate World: Life after Capitalism. San Francisco: Berrett-Koehler.) The cure is to unblock the social body, unleash the suppressed energy and technics and redirect these forces for regenerative purposes. This regeneration proceeds from a diverse mix of grassroots action within a holistic paradigm of qualitative development.
Composition 1938 S Delaunay
The New Holistic Paradigm
The green polity and the green economy is to be set a historical and philosophical context as the authentic form of human society in rational control of its interchange with nature. From this perspective it is apparent that a new holistic paradigm of qualitative growth is in the process of emerging. There is a need to establish the principles of this new paradigm and show how they are embodied in productive activity. This involves delineating the forms of production, consumption, and organization appropriate to a new stage of human development.
From quantity to quality
The contrast between quantitative and qualitative concepts of wealth is intended to locate green principles within a historical perspective of human evolution, examining the productive forces for potentials for qualitative change.
This notion takes its cue from Marx’s notion that at some point the "relations of production" become fetters on the emerging “forces of production". “At a certain stage of development, the material productive forces of society come into conflict with the existing relations of production or - this merely expresses the same thing in legal terms - with the property relations within the framework of which they have operated hitherto. From forms of development of the productive forces these relations turn into their fetters. Then begins an era of social revolution.” (Preface to the Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy). In other words, the social institutions and arrangements of existing society constrain the emerging productive forces. In the context of this discussion, this suppresses the potential for a qualitative/regenerative mode of production. The accumulation of capital creates illth rather than wealth and can never serve as the means for creating and sustaining wealth as life. From being a means, economics has become an end which subjects society to the imperative of accumulation. This is the economic determinism that Marx criticised as a dehumanisation. Rehumanisation requires that economics be put in its place as a means to an end determined by conscious human purpose and design. Communities now need to determine what these ends are in relation to what they consider to represent real wealth. New forms of valuation are required to build real wealth creation into social practices.
The fact that the new productive forces have emerged within capitalist relations, and hence diverted to the purpose of capital accumulation, has tended to obscure their potential. There has been plenty of good writing on postindustrialism — Alvin Toffler (1980), John Naisbitt (1982), Charles Handy – which points out how inappropriate modern institutions are for the emerging technologies. We are tackling twenty first century problems with nineteenth century mentalities, these authors rightly argue. The problem is that these works evade the question of the constraining character of capitalist social relations and therefore fail to identify the real block on the realisation of postindustrial potentials.
The argument of this essay is clear that, to realise the potentials of the new technics, any possible postindustrialism would need to be a postmaterialism in the sense of going beyond the accumulative logic and imperative of the capital system, in going beyond economics as a rationalisation of a system of scarcity. Materialism here is the dynamic of the capital system as an economic determinism, a dynamic that is structured into its forms of exploitation and domination, its regimes of regulation, its market institutions. This system defines wealth as capital, defines labour and nature as exploitable resources, and defines the goal as the accumulation of as much capital as possible. Capital, the central goal of capitalistic economic activity, is essentially abstracted labour, what Marx called ‘dead labour’, a living quality reduced to pure quantity. Use-value, which is the service function of a good, shaped by social need, is subordinated to exchange-value. This system of exchange value is a system of exploitation (of labour and nature), of quantitative accumulation and of qualitative waste. Economics is claimed to be the science of scarcity. The capital system emerged from within natural scarcity and is reproduced through an artificial scarcity. As a quantitative system, the capital economy requires scarcity in order to perpetuate its existence, to keep prices up and profit margins high. And keep the workers dependent upon wage labour. The expansion of productivity has required that waste has been built into the system in order to reproduce material scarcity.
This perspective explains the tension that emerges whenever economic development and ecology are compared and contrasted. Whilst ecologists argue for constraining economic growth in the name of sustainable economists, others argue that the world’s poor require economic development. The ecological argument that current social and environmental problems are problems of abundance and affluence, of over-development, runs counter to the argument that they are problems of scarcity, of under-development requiring economic growth. Environmentalists need to be clear that social and environmental problems have one and the same cause and hence one and the same solution.
The paradox of the capital system has always been ‘the poverty of abundance’, excess on the basis of artificial scarcity.
In these crises a great part not only of the existing products, but also of the previously created productive forces, are periodically destroyed. In these crises there breaks out an epidemic that, in all earlier epochs, would have seemed an absurdity - the epidemic of overproduction. Society suddenly finds itself put back into a state of momentary barbarism; it appears as if a famine, a universal war of devastation had cut off the supply of every means of subsistence; industry and commerce seem to be destroyed; and why? Because there is too much civilization, too much means of subsistence, too much industry, too much commerce. The productive forces at the disposal of society no longer tend to further the development of the conditions of bourgeois property; on the contrary, they have become too powerful for these conditions, by which they are fettered, and so soon as they overcome these fetters, they bring disorder into the whole of bourgeois society, endanger the existence of bourgeois property. The conditions of bourgeois society are too narrow to comprise the wealth created by them.
Marx Manifesto of the Communist Party
‘Too much’ destroys industry and commerce precisely because accumulation and money making in a quantitative sense requires scarcity. Qualitative abundance implies what Bookchin calls a ‘postscarcity’ society. This society does more with less, focusing less material upon human and environmental regeneration, fully employing technical capacity to satisfy these real needs with minimal resources.
The Hayfield 1855-56 Ford Madox Brown
Postindustrialism and ecology
The green vision has two components: the realisation of human nature within society, and the symbiosis between this realised human society and nature. At the heart of the new productive forces is human self-development, genuine, qualitative growth. This achieves a human culture of productive activity and creativity in its widest sense. The character of society is determined by the character of the individuals composing it. Sustainable living is based not only on a natural and social ecology but an ecology of mind.
The visionary poet and artist William Blake identified the extent to which oppression can be attributed to mentalities as much as modalities:
“I wander thro' each charter'd street, Near where the charter'd Thames does flow, And mark in every face I meet Marks of weakness, marks of woe.
In every cry of every Man, In every Infant's cry of fear, In every voice, in every ban, The mind-forg'd manacles I hear.”
The capital system is based not only material scarcity but a psychological scarcity. The economic dependence of employment and income is associated with the addiction of want, desire, consumption as people robbed of their essential humanity attempt to fill up their inner hollowness. It is an addiction and a dependence that diverts people from who they are, from what they have lost and from what they could gain. It is the mental slavery identified and opposed by Blake.
“I will not cease from Mental Fight,
Nor shall my Sword sleep in my hand:
Till we have built Jerusalem,
In England's green and pleasant Land.48
Sustainable living requires new forms of ecological practice based on human creativity, new social skills which involve service, both to other people and to the planet. But the creation of an ecological sensibility is not merely a matter of changing values or beliefs. Consciousness is changed in the process of changing reality. It is a question of praxis, the changing of circumstances and the changing of the self as coincidental, generating the forms of awareness appropriate to the society brought into being. This praxis can take many forms, but the main point is that it cannot be the product of parties, political leaders, poets or visionaries alone, detached from the people. Self-change cannot be separated from social change.
The second component of the green vision is the connection of human and nonhuman nature. The notion of qualitative wealth addresses the controversy between social ecologists and deep ecologists by affirming the interrelation between human and biospheric interests. When human beings act to humanize the social order, they are acting in their own deepest interest as social beings. Acting in accordance with this deepest nature is, of course, precisely what the ontology denying structures of the quantitative economic system of capital blocks. The task of an ecological economics is to make it clear that human beings are falling short of their capacities and potentialities when pursuing narrow, short-term self-interest. The feedback loops for human ignorance are becoming tighter and tighter as human beings are becoming increasingly aware of a deeper sense of identity with the society of others and with the environing nature that sustains life on earth.
This argument places the accent on the ontological interrelationship between individual, social, and environmental change as a co-evolution that issues in the integration of culture and nature. The challenge to eliminate relations and forms of exploitation and domination is also a quest to emancipate repressed human potentials as expressed in the emergent productive forces.
The practical task of establishing alternative forms of social intercourse in every area requires extensive networks and connections. This is nothing less than civilisation building. The roots of civilisation lie in the institutionalization of domination and exploitation of both people and nature as resources. The task is to eliminate the forms and relations of domination and exploitation whilst reinstitutionalising on the basis of human and ecological potentials. The point is that the repression of nature without has been associated with the repression of nature within, resulting in the creation of social forms which contradict the human ontology. By creating regenerative relationships with and between the nature within and without will generate social forms which correspond to the human ontology.
This project combines both technical and spiritual dimensions in a holistic growth. Science and technology have a vital role to play in this growth as means. Their misuse as a techno-science subservient to capital and state power has encouraged some to see science and technology as a rational madness The problem is one of use as means within specific social relations. Science and technology have a role to play within ecological forms of production and organization which employ human intelligence and creativity in order to conserve nature's materials and energy. To achieve this requires that alienation and the inversion of means and ends be overcome. Just as machines should cease to be subservient to the end of capital accumulation, so humans must cease being appendages of the machine and systematically develop their technical knowledge by expanding their holistic sensibilities. Human and ecological health and well-being are interdependent. Human ingenuity and creativity is built into the design of the ecological economy, with ecological production and consumption proceeding through a decentralized economy which furnishes the basis for direct democracy and social justice and equality.
This is to reclaim the connection between economics and ecology, a connection severed by the increasing abstraction of civilisation from nature. This is to see economic production as necessarily an ecological production. Economy and ecology share the same stem in the Greek word oikos, meaning household. Both concern what Barbara Ward called ‘the home for man’. Economics is the human side of ecology, the science of how human beings manage and organise scarcity through their productive interchange with nature. The problems of the modern world are problems of overdevelopment, of an economic system that is separated from nature and which operates by its own laws and imperatives. By implementing economic processes that function as subsystems of nature human beings can be more productive, both in terms of the development of human capacities and the potentialities of productive forces. Ecological economics is inherently predisposed to using less to produce more. It achieves this by directly targeting inputs to the output as measured by social and environmental need. This is a form of natural engineering which mimics the elegance of living organisms. It is basic systems analysis. The problem with the capital system is that it is not a self-regulating closed system which generates its own resources but a parasitic system which survives only on the basis of inputs which are extracted from nature and labour. Whereas ecological economics forms a living system that is capable of replenishing and renewing itself, the capital system is a form of necromancy, capital is ‘dead labour’, its energy, oil, is dead matter.
Sustainable living requires an economy which is integrated into the natural productivity of nature, an institutional framework which thrives on the basis of an eco-infrastructure. The system thrives by replicating the multifunctionality of ecosystems within human-made institutions and organizations.
Scientific knowledge and technological innovation makes it possible to "do more with less" whilst leaving nature to its own restorative processes. For instance, an environmentally benign "carbohydrate economy" can be facilitated through the use of enzymes and plant-based chemistry, replacing the use of petrochemicals and other non-renewable matter. The knowledge of ecology makes it possible to build "living machines," mini-wetlands and greenhouses that can purify water without chemicals or non-renewable energy inputs.
Ecological production offers an answer to the problem of unemployment. Decades ago, books like Giles Merrett’s World Without Work were predicting social crisis through the application of technologies wiping out millions of jobs at a rate faster than the economy was capable of generating them. One of the greatest defences of the industrial revolution is that it created opportunities for paid labour that overcame the endemic problem of unemployment and underemployment. It is now apparent that the old ideal of full employment cannot be achieved without a drastic redefinition of what constitutes work. Stable, full-time work is being replaced by insecure, casual, marginal, part-time work. Decades ago Hannah Arendt had foreseen the problem and asked what would happen when 'the work society runs out of work'. Books such as Arendt’s The Collapse of Work focused on the impact of microelectronics on employment. Rather than explore the possibilities new kinds of useful work or even a world of constructive and creative leisure, the labour market and work ethic appropriate to a bye-gone age remains intact, with society organised around an outmoded notion of employment.
The intrinsically people-intensive nature of eco-production makes it possible create a society of useful work. Marx argued that ‘a society of too many useful things produces too many useless people’. And too many unemployed and underemployed and misemployed people. Eco-production puts the accent on useful people engaged in useful work by replacing materials and energy with human intelligence. This checks the tendency to displace people with machinery and materials. The paradox of the capital system generating too many ‘useless’ and unemployed and underemployed people is that there is never a shortage of useful work to be done. The problem lies in the system of wage labour which rations the opportunities for paid employment, leaving those outside the paid formal sector. This focuses attention on the need to properly remunerate all useful work, inside or outside the formal sector, so as to share out the wealth created in a more equitable manner. There is ample scope here to revalue useful work since eco-production is undertaken in all places—urban spaces, green spaces, community projects, residential buildings, city parks and gardens, streets, townscapes, on rooftops. Local currency schemes and time banks exchanging work, time and talent for services or even direct forms of remuneration with respect to food, energy, water, feedstocks, and services. All this is possible. A whole eco-sector can be developed through mechanisms such as local currencies, credit unions, community banks, land trusts and basic income plans, all of which are designed to support essential forms of eco-production and realize opportunities for what Ivan Illich called useful employment. (Illich The Right to Useful Unemployment 1978 Open Forum; Illich, Celebration of Awareness 1971 Calder and Boyers).
Peasants in the Fields, Eragny 1890 Pissarro
Alternatives: the emergent productive forces
The realisation of the potentials of the emergent productive forces in the form of sustainable living changes politics as much as it changes economics. Beyond institutional questions concerning the formulation and implementation of policy and the need for effective planning mechanisms, the form and content of politics are transformed. Since the new productive forces or technics are everywhere as part of the eco-infrastructure, the everyday social lifeworld becomes co-extensive with the field of political action. Civil society is invested with political significance and becomes a sphere of governance, deliberation and decision making. At this point, social movements become more than vehicles of protest and opposition and instead become active players in the creation of feasible, working social and economic alternatives.
The question is not one of small against big, decentralisation against centralisation but of scale ensuring that power resides at the appropriate level of competence for the issue. The key problematic is dehumanisation, involving creativity, participation, equality, and the direct satisfaction of need against a systemic-institutional world that is abstracted from human purpose and functions according to its own imperatives. In contrast to capital's priorities of accumulation based on exploitation and domination, the emerging ecological mode is in congruence with the new productive forces.
The forces of exploitation and domination have the power of institutional force and inertia behind them, but they are ‘false fixities’ which are increasingly challenged by the liberating potentials of the emerging productive forces. This clash between the narrow purpose of the capital system and the productive power of the new technics will be the groundwork of politics until the social and environmental movements generate a commensurate power though the involvement of a range of social actors in the realisation of feasible alternatives.
Marx argued somewhere (The Poverty of Philosophy?) that the most important of the productive forces is the working class itself, labour not only as the creator of capital but of human social reality in general. This view is capable of extension in terms of valuing the contribution that all social actors make in constituting and transforming reality. Science, technology, ecology too are all important productive forces, human culture generally, hard and soft culture. Technics as human culture, technics of thought, ideas, values. Here one can value the role of new movements organised around ideas and identities, issues of gender, race, ethnicity, peace, ecology. The most important thing that these productive forces produce is people. Marx argued that the ‘new fangled’ forces of production require ‘new fangled’ people to make best use of them. These people exist. The new civilisation is about people-production, the free and full realisation of human capacities and their exercise as social forces. These forces challenge and subvert every form of exploitation and domination embedded in civilization, and push the questions of justice and equality beyond the distribution to focus on the way and what kind of wealth is produced in the first place. Going beyond ‘movementism’, these various social actors need to find the common ground that they share and proceed to developing concrete alternatives which are socially viable and politically compelling.
The transition from movement to party, from protest to politics, is a test of how far social agencies and forces are capable of moving from demanding change from someone or something else to actually constituting a public realm of their own and delivering change themselves. That is the only way that a new society will be constituted and will continue to exist as a viable social order. The central importance of developing feasible alternatives in transformative strategy follows from the conception of praxis as social change as a self-change and also reflects the need to build in the power of example. It also recognises a fundamental change in the conception of politics in the ecological society of sustainable living, the ecopolis. Human culture and technics have progressed to such a level of sophistication as to require more participatory and direct forms of governance to realise their full potential with respect to humanising social power. Productive activity achieving human self-realisation through the integration of society and nature requires an overarching framework of conscious planning that embraces and is powered from the grassroots level upwards. Both the unconscious play of market forces and the unwieldy bureaucratic impositions of the state are incapable of organising the new productive forces. These require more fluid and flexible structures of participation and coordination, networks of all kinds which are capable of responding to every change in the microclimate.
A green economy implies a new role for the public realm. The environmental and social crisis is not one of management but of design (Paul Hawken 1993). Contemporary problems originate in the clash between the old institutions and arrangements and the new potentials. The recurring, accumulating crises are not ones of political parties and politicians, of governments with alternative regulatory apparatuses. The problems originate in a faltering system, requiring the fundamental redesign of the central dynamic, the structure, the content and the end of the economy. This redesign is a transition from a quantitative to qualitative social order. The role of political organisation here requires that the state live up to its claim to be the realisation of ‘rational freedom’, eliminating the excesses of accumulation and exploitation and setting the economic life of the community within a broader institutional and moral framework. A genuine public life, in other words, what Aristotle called politikon bion, the holistic socio-political matrix for human flourishing.
One way of reorienting the economy is to redefine outputs in terms of their service qualities so as to create an "ecological service economy." Such an economy would incentivise the provision of service and disincentivise the use of materials and energy. An ecological design would encourage access or mobility over cars; heat and light over electricity; nutrition over fast and processed food; live entertainment and socialising over home based TV.
The transition to sustainable living is ultimately driven by new kinds of values rather than interests, self or sectional. The world of making money out of matter on or about the world’s surface needs to be returned to its proper place, as one part of a functioning whole, the means to an end determined by conscious human purpose. The principles of end-use and ecological design are practically applied within community-based economies, with the knowledge-based economy becoming an economy of service. This economy is well within institutional and technological capacities.
Although the argument set out in this essay outlines the contours of a new theory, it is also intended to be of practical significance in suggesting how principles can be translated into practice through cognitive praxis and ecological praxis. Although wide ranging in taking a perspective on civilisation building, the argument is far from exhaustive. The main purpose has been to identify key arguments, outline the contours of the future society and suggest the best ways of moving from here to there with the active support, consent and contribution of the largest numbers of people. That is to define a conception of eco-praxis.