Noam Chomsky
The good doctor Professor Anthony Seaton (14 August) got the diagnosis so right. The political doctrine that growth is good and is therefore the antithesis of austerity is dead wrong. But this growth juju word is deceptive, suggesting (falsely) that more means better. Even our Adam Smith was wary: ‘it is this deception that rouses and keeps in motion the industry of mankind’.
Politicians expect us to clap when they are right but some expect us
to shout hosannas even when they are either mendacious or wrong.
Inequitable growth as a key political cross-party paradigm is just
plain wrong. It is wrong in principle; wrong as political strategy and
wrong in popular development practice.
Contemporary growth strategies rely on three key principles all of
which we can find across the globe from neo-liberal sources as well as certain models from Edinburgh.
Excessive mass consumption fuelled by massive private and public debt is producing personal physical obesity, social/cultural obesity (an example of which was seen at the £13 billion Olympics) and the kind of political ‘democratic’ obese expenditure currently on display in the US presidential elections. The advertising and marketing industry with its daily demand doggerel has much to answer for. But politicians scream and dream of more (Blair and Brown, Cameron and Clegg sing from essentially the same hymn sheet) making victims out of voters while rehearsing ‘you never had it so good’, Macmillan’s deceptive credo.
Make no mistake – it wasn’t America’s Fordism that produced the
revolution in consumerism; it was Stalin. He produced the greatest acceleration in growth, dragging near-feudal Russia into the 20th century in less than 20 years. It took gulags and millions of dead to make that growth spurt happen.
Growth like more orthodox faiths or cults cares little for human life
in order to appease its maker, the god of perpetual consumption.
Unwarranted consumption is also fuelled by population growth – what porridge did to medieval Scotland, milk powder is doing to the Third World. Not that I would deny feeding the hungry but behind the carrot comes the stick or rather the grab for resource-rich territory across Africa and Latin America.
It is not just old-money Europe or the US that plays the great scam game. Offshore banks and financial institutions have grown in number and in wealth exponentially with the ‘freedom’ provided to former Soviet Russia and its many satellites as well as Chinese state capitalist billionaires and dozens of mineral-rich impoverished regimes across Africa.
In their truly excellent book ‘The Spirit Level’, Kate Picket and Richard Wilkinson explain in damned detail the inequalities created within the growth paradigm expressed in GDP growth. Even in recession-broke UK, the growth in billionaires is startling in its obscenity. This is from a profoundly disturbing letter to the Guardian by the Labour MP Michael Meacham: ‘the 1,000 richest (in the UK) are now sitting on wealth greater even than at the height of the boom just before the crash. Their wealth now amounts to £414bn, equivalent to more than a third of Britain’s entire GDP. They include 77 billionaires and 23 others, each possessing more than £750m’.
The third of the wrong growth generators is global industrial
expansion. This might seem paradoxical. But when you tear off the
plastic PR packaging you discover that this technology-led expansion is built on low wage/no wage labour, jobless growth, unemployment and under-employment, gross extraction and consumption of the earth’s resources plus ubiquitous military conflict.
The Chinese model of mass industrial expansion (foreign capital allied to near slave-labour conditions) has produced the goods but at what price? The environmental costs both national and global are yet to be adequately measured but the price and pain paid by the Chinese proletariat can be adjudicated. An exploited Chinese labour force requires the state to maintain the largest standing army in the history of the world. These forces are not there to defend against Taiwan or Tibet but to protect the state mandarins from the popular revulsion at the economic conditions faced by the toiling millions. It is indeed a salutary lesson that in the state built by Mao we may yet see class warfare and a second Chinese revolution.
But it is symptomatic of the global industrial low-wage growth
strategy with gross abuse of labour and the mistreatment of women in particular seen around the world. With greater sophistication in
computer-driven productive forces we are seeing (especially in the
USA) forms of industrial economic recovery without a comparative
increase in employment figures as SR’s Alan Fisher reports.
Finally (sadly appropriately) there are the most deadly of growth
pathogens, the environmental degradation and climate change
outcomes. I fail to look at my wee grandchildren without a deep sense of shame and pity. What kind of world have we left when the growth paradigm allied to greedy capital has appropriated the natural world?
Yet there is even more morbidity in growth. With both of the wee-boys born within the last seven years they have never known a day that their/my/our country has not been fighting in some form of military conflict or war. To what extent war and the industrial complexes that feed off war are specific strategies of political economy I do not know yet. But my reading of Noam Chomsky suggests that military supply industries are major pro-war pedlars. Just look at the numbers of ex-military tzars who find jobs in ‘defence’ industries or former ministers of war who have gone on to make a nice little earner from the military supply industries who hire them to advocate for more and more consumptive warfare. And the conflicts are growing daily across the oil-rich Middle East (don’t create wars in poor countries, you hear) with potentially the big one to come in Iran.
The groans of growing pains are a daily experience for the many; while the demand for growth hour after hour is the resolve of the rich and a daily political imperative, or so it seems.
Let me play the romantic and suggest that distributive equity and quality of life is the new antithesis of austerity. A Scotland freed from the greedy demands of the Westminster/Whitehall/City triumvirate and with a solid social-democrat majority has the chance of choice.
Thom Cross is a writer and playwright
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