The Poverty of Growth
BUELL, JOHN
The Poverty of Growth How competition stifles community BY JOHN BUELL In recent decades, American conservatives and liberals alike have based their politics on the economic assumption that...
...The whole point of breaking with an economy of forced growth is to allow opportunities for selfchosen, creative activity...
...As E.P...
...It is the great cultural task of progressives to show that an economy that includes social planning and the production of public goods need not enslave or stultify...
...Today, economists of both persuasions see renewed growth as part of the remedy for almost every economic and social problem—from reducing the national debt to funding Social Security...
...They shared a sense of appropriate work pace, work rules, and worker solidarity in times of unfair competition or economic distress...
...John Buell is an associate editor of The Progressive...
...it would free time for individuals to do as they please...
...And the delegitimated society would function only under the whip...
...Unlike conservatives, the liberals are willing to let the Government play an active role in redirecting investment to "sunset" or "sunrise" industries, but they insist that such intervention should be accompanied— and at least partially financed—by cutbacks in workers' traditional benefits...
...In fact, the principal institutions of our society make it difficult to define alternative values...
...Conventional conservatives, neoliberals, and supply- siders all believe that American politics is paralyzed by a lack of commitment to the goal of growth and an unwillingness to pay the price...
...We work too hard and too long at jobs that provide too little, if any, social value...
...Industrial capitalists attempted to shatter those commitments, which stood in the way of labor mobility and the quest for private affluence...
...The nature of that pact may be the most important political issue confronting us...
...As a consequence, they have promoted the notion of growth as enthusiastically as the corporate managers...
...A refashioned economy would not only produce essential public goods and services...
...Stanley Aronowitz, writing ten years ago in False Promises, detected this discrepancy at the giant General Motors plant in Lordstown, Ohio...
...These sundry approaches share a faith in the inevitability and indispensability of economic growth, as well as a conviction that the achievement of long-term growth requires short-term sacrifice...
...And it could produce what Ivan Illich calls convivial tools: such products and technologies as modern power tools or video equipment that individuals and small groups could master and employ for themselves...
...citizens would withdraw their voice...
...Economic growth in the Twentieth Century has provided satisfaction to many workers, but it has also strained those common visions that hold our society together and define our identity...
...A higher proportion of Americans reported they were "happy" in 1957 than at any time in the ensuing twenty years, even though considerable material progress was achieved during this period, notes Paul Wachtel in Poverty of Affluence...
...Many other cultures, however, reject the assumption that personal consumption and private acquisitiveness are the cornerstones of community...
...The process of cutting community ties has never been completed, and in some respects capitalism has benefited from these preindustrial common values...
...But the idea of a regulated economy connotes tedium and regimentation...
...At the same time, it chips away at those shared values and traditions that undergird the very notion of society and community...
...Without a commitment to neighborhood and community, it is doubtful whether any society would be viable—unless it relied on totalitarian forms of coercion...
...By and large, liberals share this vision, though they also look to economic productivity as the source of funding for those Government programs designed to ease the plight of the disadvantaged...
...It has been estimated that the average speed of an automobile in New York City today is less than that of the horse-drawn carriage a century ago...
...Talk of transforming the nature of production and consumption is routinely ridiculed as Utopian...
...Elaborate job ladders, pay scales, titles, and perquisites are designed so that workers will define their identities around those goods or possessions which make them different from (or better than) their fellow workers...
...The failure of the trade union leadership to offer a different course has squeezed rank-and-file resistance into inchoate, often furtive forms of protest: wildcat strikes, slowdowns, and absenteeism...
...It would establish public jobs and offer lowinterest loans for insulation, solar retrofitting, and other energy-efficient purposes...
...A society that planned the production of inclusive goods could eliminate the mountains of waste generated by the consumer system...
...Thompson and Herbert Gutman have noted, immigrant laborers generally came to this country not as isolated individuals but as members of ethnic communities, sharing certain preindustrial work routines and sorial rituals...
...The immigrants of the Nineteenth Century surrounded work with a whole way of life through which they expressed commitments to community and tradition...
...Labor unions, especially in the American context where no sustained anticapitalist movements have ever taken hold, usually define their task as achievement of greater affluence for the worker within the capitalist structure...
...Most participants in such movements do not harbor a theory of resistance to economic growth, nor do they share a commitment to an alternative sense of the common good...
...to others, the promise of material reward rings hollow...
...Economic and political activity presumes that the worker and the citizen share—either tacitly or openly—a certain set of beliefs about the existence and desirability of the community and the rules that govern it...
...The emphasis on communal rather than individual activity inverts the standard contemporary arrangement...
...We must break with growth, clearly and unequivocally...
...Where the work force is atomized, the working class fragmented, and housing dispersed, it becomes more difficult for workers to formulate a coherent language of protest...
...Supply-siders, whose views were prominent in the early years of the Reagan Administration, urge Americans to accept reductions in social spending so that tax rates can be eased and the savings redirected toward new plants and equipment...
...The Poverty of Growth How competition stifles community BY JOHN BUELL In recent decades, American conservatives and liberals alike have based their politics on the economic assumption that steady growth is not only possible but indispensable...
...And it is questionable whether, even during periods of affluence, monetary reward has been as widely and fully accepted a norm as sometimes assumed...
...the engineering and creative skills engaged in such tinkering surely could be more usefully deployed...
...Their analysis has led to insistent calls for a new "social contract...
...But failing to dream, and failing to promote the dream, consigns us all to the stagnant economics and parched politics of the present...
...these expenditures surely could be put to more productive use...
...This is not an insurmountable task...
...Workers would withdraw their labor...
...No half-step will suffice...
...This premise is critically flawed, and the politics that flow from it are misguided and ultimately dangerous...
...If the worker and the citizen reject them, any semblance of voluntary participation would disintegrate...
...The existing social contract contains an inherent contradiction: By sanctioning the pursuit of private affluence, it diminishes the prospects of generating public wealth and assuring the common well-being...
...Such a restructured economy would shift the patterns of consumption toward what French socialist Andre Gorz has called inclusive, or public,housing, public recreation, and preventive health care...
...Instead of viewing social life as the happy byproduct of economic activity, this orientation defines social life as the primary goal, and economic activity as only one among many functions of the community...
...they yearn for a mode of production they can understand and control...
...Neoliberals who criticized the supply-siders' faith in "the magic of the market" likewise consider economic growth as essential...
...in this way, they subsume all discussion of the public good...
...And it would afford local communities the opportunity to fashion their own economic goals for their own specific needs...
...As more and more people need and own autos, the car provides less convenience and fewer satisfactions—even as life without it becomes increasingly difficult...
...Many Americans are now striving—however haltingly—to fashion alternatives to a culture of individual wealth...
...Even today, watered-down forms of communal activity can be found in enclaves of our mass society—in the ethnic banquets, neighborhood taverns, and local congregations that call people together...
...We need to construct a positive alternative for our economy, one that places at the forefront the common needs of society's citizens, not the private desires of the economy's participants...
...Even cultist groups, religious fundamentalists, and right-to-lifers are symptomatic of popular resistance to a system that subordinates communal values to the quest for private gain...
...The U.S...
...Older workers in the plant as well as a minority of the youth admit that they have never seen this kind of money in their lives," noted Aronowitz...
...In the midst of economic crisis, there remain signs that workers reject economic growth as the be-all and end-all of life...
...The consumer society makes all of us dependent on private possessions: We need cars to commute to work, refrigerators to store food, television to relax...
...economy spends $100 billion a year on advertising and sales promotion...
...They did not oppose economic activity, but they kept it within the rhythms and norms of their cultural life...
...Conservatives believe that social stability is ensured by a constantly expanding gross national product which, they say, allows higher and higher levels of personal affluence...
...Unless the social contract is fundamentally refashioned around the idea of a common purpose, it will dissolve in a new wave of political authoritarianism...
...They argue that renewed growth can generate the social consensus needed to lift America out of its economic and political doldrums...
...At Lordstown, they are looking for 4a chance to use my brains' and a job 'where my high school education counts for something.'" But opposition to the pursuit of private affluence is muted...
...But more than just common work habits sustained them, as Gutman explains: "A model subculture included friendly and benevolent societies as well as friendly local politicians, community-wide holiday celebrations, an occasional library (the Baltimore Journeyman Bricklayer's Union taxed members one dollar a year in the 1890s to sustain a library that included the collected works of William Shakespeare and Sir Walter Scott's Waverly novels), participant sports, churches sometimes headed by a sympathetic clergy, saloons, beer gardens, and concert halls or music halls and, depending upon circumstances, trade unionists, labor reformers, and radicals...
...The ancient Greeks as well as the Christian philosophers believed instead in the rituals and traditions of the city, state, nation, or parish...
...The growth of food cooperatives, barter arrangements, farmers' markets, and free labor exchanges over the past twenty years is but one sign that people sense the unfairness of the present industrial order...
...Indeed, a large part of the program of modern capital in the Twentieth Century has been to divide workers against each other...
...And liberals sometimes contend that economic growth serves to stave off "the communist challenge," as John F. Kennedy put it in 1960...
...The importance of ritual and tradition stems from the fact that they are shared, that everyone knows them to be shared, and that everyone participates in passing them down and reformulating them...
...But today, free-market conservatives, neoliberals, and even social democrats avoid the larger question of the social contract, preferring instead to adhere to the notion that economic growth is the glue that holds our society together...
...this public culture, shared by all, was paramount in the polis and the Church...
...We need not romanticize life in that era to recognize that it contained elements of a genuinely shared common good...
...To some, the sacrifice is not worth the candle...
...Such expansion, in turn, will theoretically generate needed revenues while diminishing the demand for Federal assistance programs...
...Luxuries turn into necessities, and so-called advances in our standard of living increase the demands on us...
...Certain precapitalist groups manifested this communal orientation...
...Over the years, style and model changes have accounted for roughly onefourth the cost of each automobile...
...They, too, ask American workers to forego satisfaction of their immediate demands in the interest of long-term growth...
...They yearn for simpler patterns of economic interaction and economic survival...
...But the young people are seeking more from their labor than high wages, pensions, and job security...
Vol. 48 • July 1984 • No. 7
