Living Well at Others' Expense by Stephan Lessenich;

Author:Stephan Lessenich; [Lessenich, Stephan]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: John Wiley & Sons, Inc.
Published: 2019-04-16T00:00:00+00:00

Design or disaster – or democracy after all?

This might all sound a little unkind and perhaps even unfair. But it's the principle that matters – or, in this case, two principles: consumer choice versus structural change. ‘Concern is not enough’, said the Swiss director and playwright Milo Rau in a noteworthy contribution to the ‘refugee disaster’, a topic that will be looked at in greater detail in the next chapter.55 His dictum also applies to the context of unequal ecological exchange being considered here: concern, reparation supplements and ethical consumption are not sufficient to overcome the underlying structural problems of asymmetrical power distribution in the global capitalist system. Nor do ‘intelligent’ technologies provide a solution, as long as the fatal alliance between private profit, systematic growth imperatives and structural power asymmetries is not broken up.

There can be no material growth without growing resource and energy consumption – and hence further destruction of habitats and the natural environment. Above all, there can be no growth in the early industrialized societies of the Global North, inflated by the post-war economic boom into high-performance and extreme consuming economies, that is not at the expense – rising even further with every percentage point of increase in the GNP – of exploitation, and of nature and social habitats, in the Global South. The term ‘green economy’ frequently arises in discussion of the future of growth capitalism, suggesting that the power of an enlightened consumer society could combine with energy-efficient and eco-effective technological innovations to permit ‘green growth’.56 But, however understandable the vain desire to separate growth from exploitation of natural resources while retaining the living conditions and consumer habits of the externalization society might be in theory, in practice it must remain an illusion. It is not even necessary to make fun of the most absurd flowers of this unfettered lifestyle ecology – edible aircraft seat covers fitted in the first-class section of the long-haul Airbus A38057 – to show up ‘green capitalism’ for what it is: the hoped-for sheet anchor for highly developed economies that are feeling the pinch after the latest cycle of capital accumulation, and the desperate reassurance for an externalization society doing its utmost to somehow salvage its exclusive lifestyle model in spite of all the signs that it has run out of steam.

Similar drives are at work when it is not only business lobbyists and financial analysts but also ‘ordinary people’ who get excited about, or make fun of, the discussion of ‘peak oil’, ‘peak water’ or ‘peak everything’58 that has been conducted recurrently in environmental policy circles and among critics of capitalism since the 1972 Club of Rome report about the ‘limits to growth’59 – the worry in these circles that the maximum amount of oil, the maximum worldwide availability of freshwater, or the maximum amount of practically any non-renewable resource has been reached or will soon be exceeded. Confronted by such prophecies of doom, ‘experts’ and non-experts alike point to the sinking oil prices, to new and ‘unconventional’

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