If you haven’t watched Annie Leonard’s “The Story of Stuff,” I suggest you do. These videos include detailed examinations of the waste economy, subsidized inefficiency and planned obsolescence.
A recent installment, “The Story of Broke,” itemizes wasteful government spending on things like the military and enormous subsidies to prop up the well-named “dinosaur economy.” But this is only a preface for Leonard’s argument that the government really isn’t broke: If it stopped wasting money on bad stuff, it would have more than enough for “building a better future.”
Her laundry list of good things the government should spend money on includes energy efficiency projects, retrofitting homes, subsidies to alternative energy and green technology, and millions of college scholarships. But her vision of a “better future” reflects the internal contradictions of progressivism.
On one hand, we have the mid-20th century, conventional liberal vision of government intervention to build giant blockbuster infrastructure projects, spur creation of new industries, and “create jobs.”
On the other, we have the green, “small is beautiful” sensibility which emerged in the hippie era, of eliminating waste and mass consumerism.
The two just don’t go together.
When Rachel Maddow stands in front of a giant hydroelectric dam, or talks about the Interstate Highway System, as examples of doing “great things,” she channels the mid-20th century managerialist liberalism that made Galbraith’s heart go pitty-pat. That vision really isn’t compatible with the “green” and “small is beautiful” stuff that progressives also talk about.
You simply can’t have a capital-intensive economy based on large-scale, centralized infrastructures, unless you can guarantee a revenue stream to service all those overhead costs. Which brings us to the Galbraith’s dark side: Creating social mechanisms to guarantee the output of industry will be absorbed so that the wheels of industry don’t get clogged up with unsold inventory. It was precisely that imperative that gave us subsidized waste, sprawl, the car culture, and all the rest of it in the first place.
The “progressive” capitalism model of Gates and Warren Buffett is a greenwashed version of Leonard’s dinosaur economy. There’s an inherent contradiction in her dismissal of that archaic economy, while calling for government policies to provide “good jobs.”
Expansionist government activity to utilize industrial capacity and keep everyone working full-time is the old 20th century model. But it requires an ever-diminishing amount of capital and labor to produce a given standard of living. If we eliminate the portion of industrial capacity and labor that goes to waste production, we wind up with lots of abandoned mass-production factories, and lots of people working fifteen hour weeks and buying stuff from relocalized garage factories close to where they live. And that’s not the sort of thing Gates and Buffett like, because they can’t make money off it.
Another problem is Leonard’s prescription: “Who has the real power? We do.”
Really? Barack Obama is the most progressive Democrat in at least two generations. He garnered the largest Democratic majority since LBJ defeated Goldwater, entering office with an apparent mandate from the financial collapse. Congressional Democrats picked up a super-majority. If “we” didn’t have the power to do these things with this once-in-a-lifetime alignment of the political stars, it’s safe to say it will never happen.
A government powerful enough to “build a better future” will almost certainly — on the principle that power is drawn to power — use that power benefit the few, the rich and the powerful. A continent-sized representative government, by its nature, is not amenable to control by a majority of millions of people. That’s why we had all those “dinosaur economy” subsidies in the first place.
If we want to build a better future, contesting the corporate oligarchy’s control of the government is probably not the best way to go about it. Fortunately, there are millions of people out there who really are building a better future, and they’re doing it by treating big business and big government both as obstacles to be routed around.
They’re building a new society within the decaying old society of dinosaur capitalism and its pet government, ready to replace it with something better when it collapses under its own weight.
They include Wikileaks, the file-sharing and free-culture movements, and Occupy Wall Street.
They include Linux developers, micromanufacturers in projects like Open Source Ecology and Hackerspaces, permaculturists, and community-supported agriculture.
They include the builders of encrypted currencies, barter systems, encrypted routers, and darknets.
And they’re not waiting for a government to give them permission.
Translations for this article:
- Portuguese, Dois Vivas para A História das Coisas.
- Spanish, La Historia de las Cosas.
Citations to this article:
- Kevin Carson, Two cheers for the Story of Stuff, Dhaka, Bangladesh New Age, 11/29/11
- Kevin Carson, Two Cheers for “The Story of Stuff”, Counterpunch, 11/28/11
I suggest you watch The Critique of the Story of Stuff to see all the fallacies in it.
What precisely do you object to in 'car culture'? I don't happen to own a car myself, but my reading of history is that the automobile has brought immense social benefits, especially to young people, for precisely the reason that Russell Kirk decried "mechanical Jacobins".
You've listed a number of technological and economic actors who are buulding a functional decentralised economy. Wha cultural forces would you consider fundamentally compatable or aligned with them?
Well… I ran various historical cases past this idea, particularly ones from developing countries and colonial situations (or think of the slant that Marxian ideologues applied to analysing Mongolia, coming up with the idea that it had jumped from feudalism to communism). It is possible to organise resource extraction from lots of decentralised stuff, with the organising effort itself working out as a centralised structure. Think mines worked by people mobilised by hut taxes, and so on. So there is a compatibility, considered transitionally: moving away from the decentralised stuff leads to eliminating it, but it can still co-exist with centralisation during the transition.
At our current position along the curves representing development etc., yes. But don’t forget that running far enough in that (wrong) direction would start to hit Malthusian constraints, after which it would require an ever-increasing amount of capital and labour to produce a given standard of living – avoiding which is roughly what drove the original “small is beutiful” people.
I still suspect it would take something more in place, both to avoid the would-be replacement being dragged under too and to avoid something else doing the inheriting and resetting but still moving things along similar lines as before (think Fall of Rome:Dark Ages:Feudalism:growth of new states). Vanguard movement, anybody?
While the story of stuff is very interesting and something that I generally agree with, there are a number of critiques that should be noted as well.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=c5uJgG05xUY
These 4 youtube videos point out some problems with the philosophy being taught.
I am a minimalist at heart so I am not advocating consumerism in bringing up critiques.
"Immense social benefits" is a very loaded phrase. Entirely subjective as well. Not really a precise qualifier of the essential benefits of motor vehicles.
We could start with the burning of fossil fuels, the waste of materials (because it's treated culturally as a consumer signifier and object more than as a tool, and because people don't drive them to exhaustion), the radical alteration of landscapes in environmentally negative manner just to have roadways that are "efficient" or "safe".
We could talk about the alienation created by the cocoon life (house-vehicle-office).
We could talk about the bad ways towns and communities are "developed" for motor vehicles, rather than for non-drivers or for promotion of non-driving life.
But it sounds as though you're already decided on it, Alice.
Which means I'm probably just spitting into the wind here. But you could try reading these 3 books for further exploration:
The Unsettling of America: Culture and Agriculture, by Wendell Berry
The Geography of Nowhere, by James H. Kunstler
A Sense of Place, by Tony Hiss
The "critique" by HowTheWorldWorks (which I'm assuming is the one you're talking about) is extremely sloppy.
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Personally, I would like to see "car culture" go the way of the dodo. Cars are incredibly isolating, and I feel they contribute not just to environmental damage but to social alienation as well. I'd like to see more efficient mass-transit systems as a replacement.
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