Brian Milani
From Opposition to Alternatives:
New Productive Forces and the Postmaterialist Redefinition of Wealth
[paper presented at the Environmental Studies Assn. of Cananda (ESAC) meetings, LavalQuebec,
May 2001]
In the wake of the anti-free trade protests in Quebec City (April 2001), debate among activists and supporters has raged about possible strategies for the anti-globalization movement. Most of the debate has centred on the relative value of non-violent protest vs. more militant direct action, the latter tact unfortunately attracting more media coverage. But some activists are beginning to point out that, whatever option is chosen, so long as the movement remains preoccupied with strictly oppositional activity, it will eventually burn out or deflate. The movement, they insist, must begin to clarify a positive vision and increasingly define the alternatives to corporate globalization. A strategy more geared to generating social and economic alternatives might provide a context to allow the violence/nonviolence debate to resolve itself, or perhaps even fade into superfluousness.
This is an important debate because the anti-globalization movement expresses a high-water mark of social activism dating back to the decline of the last mass tide of activism in the early seventies. The decline of those movements was due to many factors, but a major one was undoubtedly that they were unable to define satisfactory alternatives to what they opposed. This is understandable since they were relatively new movements, without a lot of time to find common ground and make their (largely implicit) alternative visions concrete. The environmental movement in particular was very young, and this is very significant in view of how central the ecological dimension is to economic alternatives. Besides this, the economic boom of postwar Fordist capitalism was just cresting, and the hollowness of the promises of the Welfare State and economic growth were just starting to be acknowledged.
Another reason why it would be unrealistic to expect that the new social movements of the sixties to provide comprehensive alternatives is that such an alternative project was historically unprecedented. The new social movements of the Fordist era—for peace, women’s liberation, the environment, Afro-American and aboriginal self-determination, etc.—were themselves expressions of emerging human potentials and new productive forces (NPFs). These potentials were first visible during the Roaring Twenties with its vibrant cultural experimentation. But after a harsh dose of material depravation in the Great Depression, and then wartime mobilization, it would be the sixties before the new sensibilities would reemerge in the new social movements.
These new sensibilities were largely the product of a major movement of industrialization into the realm of culture. Old roles and identities, based on labour and on gender, began to break down as work, social organization, and consumption changed. The process intensified throughout the twentieth century. The so-called information revolution is often seen to be the driving economic force behind this upheaval, but it has actually been only one small aspect of it. The most important thing is not the new role of information, but a new role for human creativity in general—expressed in a fundamentally new relationship of culture to the economy. It is a transformation that has also profoundly changed the nature of politics.
I will come back to elaborate on these political-economic-cultural dynamics, but my basic point is that in this new context, alternatives play a much more important role in social transformation than in the classical era of industrial capitalism. During the early period of industrialism, the progressive social movements were primarily concerned with the distribution of society’s wealth. In the current period—marked by postindustrial potentials—the new social movements are more concerned, at least implicitly, with the redefinition of wealth: from quantity to quality, from accumulation to regeneration.
Not only have the concerns of popular movements changed over time, but the new productive forces (NPFs) have also fundamentally changed the relationship between opposition and alternatives in progressive movement strategy. The old labour and socialist movements of the past needed to have control not only of the means of production but also of state power in order to implement any substantial alternatives. Today, it is possible to begin to create these alternatives directly without having prior control of the state (Roberts & Brandum, 1995). Partly this is because the new qualitative forms of wealth are based in human creativity—which is everywhere. But potentials for decentralization are increasing in many areas. We hear much talk concerning the new information infrastructure and “distributed intelligence”. But in agriculture, energy, manufacturing, etc. the most efficient forms of production are almost all decentralized. Even though market globalization is trying politically and economically to offset these technological potentials, this is very wasteful, and many decentralizing tendencies are still powerful. This can work in our favour, and we are in a very different situation than the one that, for instance, Ghandi faced when he advocated self-reliant community economies.
Culture and Qualitative Development
The new movements that have occupied the progressive political stage since WW II have been much more culturally-defined and more concerned with quality-of-life than the older labour and socialist movements. They sprung from a new form of capitalism in which industrialization had moved into the realm of culture and quality, with both inputs and outputs of production becoming more cultural. The rise of intellectual labour, new kinds of services, cultural industry, mass education, and more are all manifestations of this new importance of culture. Industrial capitalism has more or less integrated these elements into its forms of production and exchange, but it is not generally appreciated what contradictions have been involved and what strains this has put on the system.
The system has been strained because, compared to material products, culture is not so easily commodified and accumulated. Culture is largely a qualitative phenomenon. Industrialism, by contrast, is essentially a system of quantitative development, based in money and matter. More is always better. The system prioritizes accumulation above everything else, satisfying people’s needs only indirectly as a by-product, spin-off, side-effect or trickle-down. For example, it produces as many cars as is profitable, assuming people’s transportation needs will be taken care of. It produces any food commodities that will sell, assuming nutritional needs will be satisfied. The state is charged with filling in the gaps when the spin-off is intolerably insufficient, but real needs, be they social or environmental, still take a backseat to accumulation. This in fact is the very definition of capitalism: “exchange-value” must always come before “use-value” or social need.
During an earlier phase of industrialism—when the primary end-markets were overwhelmingly for products to satisfy primary needs (food, shelter, clothing, etc.)—this one-sided focus on accumulation made more sense. Primary needs are pretty standard, and the goal of overcoming scarcity was uncontroversial. Socialists and labour activists generally had no quibble with the industrial definition of wealth—money and matter. They were concerned primarily with the distribution of this wealth, and the conditions in which workers produced it (Paehlke, 1989). Except for some communitarian and utopian socialists, few argued with the benefits of economic growth or what I will call quantitative development.
Things change, however, when both the inputs and outputs of production become less material. In the conventional industrial system, the key factors are cog-labour and vast amounts of physical resources. With the industrialization of culture, human creativity becomes the key factor; it can begin to displace both drudge-labour and resources from production.
This is a major threat to capitalism for a couple important reasons. First, cultural production is not really compatible with capitalist markets geared to accumulation and the “allocation of scarce resources”. Industrial capitalism is a mode of quantitative development, based in matter and money; its supposedly self-regulating markets do not work properly when faced with non-standardized needs and products. This is one reason behind the Great Depression—a market failure that dramatized the historical limits of quantitative development. At this stage, some kind of conscious intervention is needed.
Qualitative wealth defies commodification for a variety of reasons, but one of the most important ones is that it requires the direct and specific targeting of human need. It doesn’t just happen as a spin-off or trickle-down of accumulation. In fact, as we see so clearly in terms of environmental health, an excess of quantity (e.g. economic growth) can destroy quality (e.g. ecological balance or community). Increasingly real quality requires dematerialization. This is not an argument against matter and money—only that they be dethroned as humanity’s economic gods, and become strictly means to the end of real qualitative development.
Scarcity, Power and Waste
The second and related reason why the industrialization of culture has been a latent threat to capitalism is because the NPFs embody the possibility of moving beyond scarcity. Capitalism is a class society, and class society is based in relative scarcity, both material and cultural. Class power involves the control of scarce resources—the economic surplus—by a minority. Absolute abundance undermines class, because when people have all their basic needs taken care of, they are not so compelled to take orders.
In this sense, industrial capitalism has always been a living contradiction, because its open-ended productiveness and its constant economic growth were destined from the first to eventually undermine the scarcity basis of class rule. This inevitability came to fruition with the Great Depression, which has been referred as a structural crisis of overproduction. The post-WWI technological explosion of the twenties generated a productive output far beyond the capacity of worker-consumers to purchase. After the 1929 crash, a chronic crisis of “effective demand” and “business confidence” ensued and put a final end to classical capitalist free markets (Block, 1986; Guttmann, 1994). In this sense, the Great Depression was a spontaneous system shutdown in response to the threat of abundance, and capitalism would henceforth need various forms of state intervention not simply to perpetuate economic growth but to maintain scarcity.
The threat to scarcity and class was, however, been just as much cultural as economic. Class society has always been based on a monopoly of “high culture” by a privileged minority. The maintenance of a gap between high and folk culture has been just as essential to ruling groups as control of the state or the economic surplus. By industrializing culture, however, industrialism gives workers new cultural and intellectual capacities that might undercut their cultural dependence. The twentieth century has seen the virtual elimination of the distinction between “high” and “folk” culture—as we see so clearly in the sophistication attained by folk arts like jazz. Capitalism has had to reproduce class relationships in other more subtle ways, but always there has lurked the latent spectre of a classless society.
For capitalism, the crucial means by which it has perpetuated scarcity—both material and cultural—has been waste. Quantitative growth has been kept going, and yet this hasn’t begun to meet all the basic needs of the people. After the second world war, the key elements of the Fordist waste economy were the arms economy and the privatized consumer economy based in suburbanization. The latter was a fragmented landscape, populated by bungalows and cars, and powered by oil, which maximized the consumption of virtually every material. The blatant wastefulness obviously maintained material scarcity. But just as important is the fantastic waste of human potential implicit in the extension of cog-labour to all kinds of unnecessary or alienated production—from cars, to finance, to TV, to junk foods, to pornography. Alienated forms of consumption have been just as suppressive of cultural development. Such a capital-intensive form of development also inevitably worked to limit the power of organized labour—since it channeled the information revolution in the direction of displacing labour (rather than resources) from production. Even with the legitimization of collective bargaining in mass production, eventually labour’s strength would be eroded. This has been very obvious since the mid-seventies.
This role of scarcity in maintaining class and quantitative development is one reason why certain environmentalists are wrong when they see our environmental crisis as resulting from affluence in the developed countries. The problem is not affluence but effluence—i.e. waste that artificially reinforces scarcity relationships. The compulsion to get money is a constant distraction from more regenerative goals. If we were able to free people and firms of the compulsion to get money or accumulate capital, we could more easily target real human and environmental needs and substantially de-materialize the economy.
Appreciating how important waste is in maintaining class today shows how environmental questions are absolutely central to questions of economic development, political power and social justice. Waste has been the crucial structural means by which industrial capitalism has maintained anachronistic relationships. The alternatives that must be implemented are not simply new forms of distribution or governance, but substantial new designs for every economic sector to fit within natural processes. Ecological design helps establish the economic basis for justice, equality and democracy.
The New Ecology of Politics
Real postindustrialism is all about actualizing potentials for qualitative wealth creation, for putting human development first, for dematerializing the economy, and integrating economic processes within natural cycles. Besides spawning new potentials for economic development, the industrialization of culture has also created the possibility of new forms of regulation and political action. A green economy does not simply require a new politics of ecology (as the mainstream green parties tell us), but a new ecology of politics—featuring the de-compartmentalization of politics as a separate realm.
It is no surprise that the new social movements have not focused primarily on elections, party politics or the state. Intuitively they know that the old political forms are designed to narrow and fragment important issues and relationships. It is not even enough to democratize the state, because the state itself is a problem, serving to keep politics out of daily life and everyday activity. The role of the state as a rule-maker is a very important one. But there are all kinds of ways to create pressure to change the rules while building parallel grassroots power.
The original separation of politics, economics and culture in classical industrial society was to some extent inevitable. Perpetual economic growth was a totally new phenomenon, and industry was the engine of progress. As Polanyi (1957) showed, the new market economy and the associated property relationships were deliberately created by the state. But it is also true that the new industrial economies raged on like runaway trains without anyone at the controls. The new importance of production gave the working classes a strategic position to exercise power it never had in agricultural societies. Workers struggled for the right to vote, but this unprecedented political power was something that ruling groups could concede. On one hand, electoral democracy could act as a kind of social feedback mechanism for the elite, providing some stability for the runaway economy. On the other hand, the political realm could be isolated from the economic realm, where the real power lay. Class interests used the state to institutionalize property relationships that insulated the economic realm from the political (Montgomery, 1993). But the propertied interests were also protected by the real difficulty of controlling the market economy at this level of economic development. Even if the state was intent on providing a conscious alternative to market distribution, in the absence of sophisticated information technologies and management systems, it was certainly at a disadvantage.
This was a temporary situation, however. As the industrialization of culture gathered stream early in the twentieth century, markets became increasingly incapable of performing their assigned tasks of efficiently distributing resources. The cultural-economic revolution also began to provide the state with the organizational and informational tools to manage the economy: especially white-collar labour, the substance of bureaucracy. The erosion of the industrial separation between politics, economics and culture had begun—an erosion that would threaten class power if left to continue. Bureaucracy might be seen as something of a threat to markets, but it could also be a new means of reproducing class relationships. It depended on how the new political-economic forms of integration would take place.