What is a Green Red Economics?
The Future of Work
When you mix green and red together, what you get is a sort of sludgy brown colour - not to shirk indelicacy - the colour of shit. This coincidence - if coincidence it is - is not an embarrassment to be avoided but a welcome gift of synchronicity. Because if there is one issue which most neatly encapsulates the contradictions and dilemmas of trying to synthesise the green aims of care for the planet and renewability of energy with the socialist aims of ensuring an equitable division of labour it is this: what do you do with the shit?
Let us take the example of the disposable nappy - surely the greatest misnomer ever. It is, of course, anything but disposable - one of the nastiest and most indestructible forms of litter of our time. Nowadays we encounter them everywhere, dragged out of dustbins on inner city housing estates by roaming Alsatian dogs, piled up around rubbish bins in parks and roadside lay- bys, washed up by the tide on beaches. The most usual way to get rid of these things is to stuff them, shit and all, into a plastic carrier bag which eventually ends up - if you are lucky - in a landfill rubbish site where the shit, wrapped impermeably in plastic, does not so much biodegrade as ferment, producing a cloud of methane gas which eventually bursts the bag and is released into the environment to add its twopennorth to the hole in the ozone layer.
So, what should a green socialist policy on disposable nappies be? Many Greens, I suspect, would favour outlawing them altogether, and returning to the 'traditional' method of dealing with baby shit - reusable cloth nappies. But this raises the question of how they are to be washed, and by whom. Tens of thousands of electric washing machines and tumble dryers, each in a separate individual household, using biologically harmful detergents is surely just as environmentally destructive, in terms of energy consumption and water pollution, even if we discount the environmental damage generated by the process of producing the washing machines, the tumble dryers, the detergents and fabric softeners and all the other paraphernalia of commodified washing. If we regress further - as some would advocate - we end up with washing as a labour-intensive service industry, carried out for the rich by domestic servants, for the employed urban working classes by industrial laundries, and for country-dwellers and the urban unemployed by the slow, back-breaking unpaid labour of women. Because of the division of labour it embodies, this solution would present serious difficulties to many socialists and most feminists.
There are, of course, other possible solutions. In parts of China, traditionally, while babies are still exclusively breast-fed, their shit is fed to dogs. When they are older, as with adults, it is used as manure for crop-growing. This is accompanied by practices of very early toilet-training, which involve high levels of vigilance and intensive work for the child's carers - women, of course - and may be regarded as psychologically unacceptable by many in the West. So, ecological soundness is here - as so often seems to be the case - linked with a domestic division of labour which is repressive to women and arguably also to children.
An alternative to the 'no-technology' approach is that of 'appropriate technology'. Here, one can imagine the possibility of disposable nappies made from some locally-grown biodegradable substance which, when used, is fed, along with the shit, into a machine which converts it into a usable form of energy: fuel, for instance, or fertiliser. The trouble with this approach, as with so many other technological fixes is that, in order to function effectively, such a solution would require a high degree of social coercion and centralised planning - anathema to some of the libertarian strands in green thinking.
I do not wish to get too sidetracked into the technicalities of this particular issue. Rather, to illustrate the fact that, in order to devise an acceptable solution it is necessary to address a number of overlapping questions which seem to me to be fundamental to the more general problem of how to integrate green goals with red ones:
It is difficult to imagine a policy for the liberation of women, or for the improvement of health and living standards in many third world countries which does not involve increasing socialisation of many of the tasks which are currently carried out without pay. And this socialisation would inevitably lead to enormous growth in the amount of activity taking place in the money economy. However this 'growth' cannot be automatically equated with increasing consumption of energy or non- renewable natural sources. The issue of energy-consumption has to be treated quite separately from that of economic growth, at least as currently defined.
The first of these options would effectively involve 'freezing' many of the worst features of the present - the divisions between 'haves' and 'have-nots', the environmentally destructive, energy-hungry and hazardous nature of products and processes, and the exploitative division of labour which their use currently entails. Because existing social relations are actually designed in to many of the machines currently in use, a decision not to develop these machines any further is effectively a decision to accept the continuance of these social relations. The second option has the advantage of allowing for greater possibilities for change. However it is important to disabuse ourselves of the idea that such change could ever include the possibility of effectively eliminating work for the majority of the population. This carrot - the complementary, not to say compensatory, other (daydream) side of the mass unemployment nightmare - is, it seems to me, a dangerous delusion which has in the past played a powerful role in discouraging workers' resistance to technological change. The socialist dream of a dignified, leisured future with no more coal to dig and no more floors to scrub is immensely seductive to anyone exhausted by manual labour, and, although it has always existed in tension with an alternative Morrisite vision of the joy of unalienated creative labour, has become inextricably linked in the public imagination with the idea of scientific and technological progress. It is a necessary task, it seems to me, to disentangle this connection. There is no empirical basis for arguing that the need for nasty work to be done is going to wither away, and the difficult questions about what is an equitable division of labour cannot be so easily ducked.
It is a nonsense because people do not and cannot live by information alone. You can now easily send digitised information into any corner of the globe, or indeed into space, cheaply, easily and virtually instantaneously, but you cannot eat it, you cannot wear it, you cannot sit on it or make love to it. Information alone will not keep you warm or keep the rain off, it will not bring down a fever, wash the dishes or wipe a baby's bottom. To imagine that all economic activity can be reduced to the processing of information is little short of lunacy. Many people, of course, can work from home in this way, and some might even want to; but working is not the only thing they do. They will still need to buy, or have delivered to them, food and other goods; they may well have partners, parents or children who need to travel to work or school, they will need to visit (or be visited by) doctors, dentists, hairdressers, plumbers, repair technicians and other specialists; they will probably want to see their friends. If they live in remote rural communities instead of cities, all this will involve more travel, not less. It will also be much more likely to take the form of energy-guzzling individual trips in a private car, rather than the less wasteful mass transit of cities.
The fact that this model, as proposed, is oppressive to women is not, of course, enough in itself to render it implausible. Neither is the fact that neither Gorz nor Illich, nor, to my knowledge, any of their followers, has proposed a feasible route from our present situation to their two-sphere utopia. What places this model as firmly in the myth category as that of the electronic cottage or the all-robot working class is its assumption that human needs are absolute and unchanging. The most cursory study of anthropological literature, should indicate that most of the things regarded as 'needs' in any given society are highly culturally and historically specific. One culture's needs are another's luxuries. An Australian aboriginal needs to be able to travel freely along ancestral routes without encountering fences as much as a frightened old lady on an inner city housing estate needs a panic alarm. To each, the other's need is an unnecessary luxury.
The recent history of Eastern Europe is surely enough to show how badly wrong things can go when attempts are made to fix and institutionalise the definition of needs without mechanisms for responding to consumer demands.
I have already discussed the dynamics of the capitalist process of commodification, whereby the introduction of new commodities creates a demand for new services which in turn become the basis for new commodities and so on. Parts of this process can no doubt be dismissed as genuinely wasteful and unnecessary, and evidence of the cancerous nature of a system which manufactures artificial demands in order to profit by meeting them. However there is a sense in which some of these demands can be said to be genuine needs. In many cases, once one step has taken place, life becomes impossible without the next. Once you've put people to live in a glass-walled high-rise block with nowhere to keep food cool, it really is necessary for them to have a fridge, though this might be a luxury in a stone- walled cottage with a deep dark cellar. Once you've introduced the motor-cycle, you need the crash helmet.
Any attempt to establish a universal definition of 'needs' is likely - consciously or unconsciously - simply to institutionalise the value-system of whichever dominant group has control of the decision-making process at the time. In the process, not only will the things valued by the subordinated groups be rendered invisible, but their very oppression will also become institutionalised.
The definition of human need is perhaps the most difficult political task there is. It is too simple to say that one should just ask people what they want. The experience of oppression is overwhelming. When asked what they need, few people can get past the negative demands that oppression should cease. Indeed, some may have so successfully internalised the ideology of their oppressors that they may believe that continued oppression is what they need (thus, slaves 'need' the protection of their masters; women 'need' to be sexually dominated and so on). At best, the poor will say they need money; the hungry, food; the over- worked, rest. How can an illiterate imagine the need to read poetry? Or a slum-dweller who has never left the city the need to walk on a quiet mountainside? Or your great- grandfather the need to play an electric guitar?
A truly democratic definition of need, based on the liberation of human desire, is not conceivable in the world as it is today, with its extremes of hunger and glut, poverty and affluence, masculine leisure and feminine toil. Perhaps it is an impossible goal. That, however, is no excuse for freezing the grotesque values of the 1990s into a permanent structure of oppression.
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I realise that I have given no answers here. Perhaps, however, in the negative process of rubbishing other people's answers, I may have lighted on some of the necessary ingredients of a new red-green synthesis. I leave it to you to decide.
copyright (c) Ursula Huws, 1991