Masters Of Degrowth Week 8.2 : Anti-utilitarianism, gift economy, dépense

 

“Institutions are silent, faceless, transparent, neutral. They cannot carry out any autonomous project, since this would infringe the cardinal principle of individual autonomy” (Onofrio Romano)

Growth is not a mere value or a policy, it is part of an institutional and social structuring which impacts what society pursue and how it organizes. The relationship between citizens, the environment and work changes.  Accumulation is no longer a medium to achieve sufficiency but rather the purpose of life itself.

The disintegration of the community via individualization for the pursue of growth, creates a never ending insecurity of citizens that respond to that with accumulation.

To reverse growth, it is not enough to confronted as a harmful pursue from economic and ecological lenses, but rather to repurpose community and the institutional working towards the common good.

These ideas are very important to effectively confront growth, not as a faulty feature in stakeholder-based business or as a poor policy for wide prosperity. Growth must be faced rather with alternative cultural and institutional projects that make again institutions as well as citizens active towards higher pursues than individual accumulation.

The sociology of growth  (Notes of Chater 1 of the book Towards a society of degrowth)

·       The tension towards growth is a mechanism that precedes the choice and the pursuit of values.

·       It is not rooted in nature, but it is rather the outcome of specific socio-institutional structures

·       Before the advent of Western modern capitalism, societies produced enough to satisfy the main needs of their members. Neither more nor less. The surplus – as we will broadly see in the next chapters, talking about dépense – was eventually consumed in festive moments, with the prevailing aim of strengthening community ties, or was even destroyed to avoid the growth of inequalities in the distribution of resources within the community

·       Success in professional life becomes a privileged sign of the state of grace. In order to self-fulfill this prophecy, Calvinists devote themselves to their professions with extreme severity. Germans call it Beruf, a word that means at the same time “profession” and “vocation.”

·       The earning of money within the modern economic order, so long as it is done legally, is the result and the expression of virtue and proficiency in a calling.... It is an obligation which the individual is supposed to feel and does feel towards the content of his professional activity

·       “conception of money-making as an end in itself to which people were bound, as a calling, was contrary to the ethical feelings of whole epochs”

·       The old leisurely and comfortable attitude towards life gave way to a hard frugality in which some participated and came to the top, because they do not wish to consume but to earn, while others who wished to keep on with the old ways were forced to curtail their consumption

·        To Weber, the natural impulse to self-promotion, to the limitless pursuit of the satisfaction of one’s own needs and to the realization of one’s own interests is not enough. There is a deeper impulse to explain growth, i.e., the search for the eternal salvation as a remedy for the unbearable mortality.

·       So growth, in our opinion, is not a value among others that miraculously gains hegemony in our societies after an ideological–cultural struggle, but it is the effect of the fundamental structural connotation of modernity, that is the break of the communitarian cohesion and the progressive emancipation of the single particles making up the whole. The tension towards growth is the basic result of individualization.

·       Any attempt to escape from the growth regime that does not touch the individualized structure of modern society is doomed to failure

·       When isolated, the individual embraces a fundamentally servile vocation and reverts to the status of an animal, for which obtaining resources is crucial.

·       The loss of contact with the community’s protective umbrella places the individual in a condition of structural precariousness, so that he feels obliged to act limitlessly for his own survival.

·        In advanced capitalistic society we witness a clear-cut separation between economics and culture. The former continues to be framed by the prerequisite values of protestant ethics (calculation, rationalization, maximization of profit, propensity to save and reinvest, tendency to limitless growth, etc.), the latter becomes the realm of pleasure, laziness, feeling, hyperconsumption, and so on. The contradiction is only superficial, because the one dimension feeds the other.

·       The sense of the object, as the sense of the individual and of all entities, is no longer socially defined. The community no longer coercively determines the value of things

·       The personal realization of the individual coming out of the individualization process is substantially identified with his economic growth, with his increasing capacity to satisfy his needs.So his privileged activity, through which, it is assumed, he acquires full self-affirmation, his authentic freedom and his dignity coincides with productive activity.

·       In this key, we find insufficient the Marxian critique of the “exchange value” as the main drive of alienation (Marx, 1973, 1990). Certainly, the circumstance that capitalists produce fundamentally for the market marks a detachment of the production sphere from the human consortium and it triggers a tendency towards growth for growth’s sake (i.e., capitalistic enterprises do not produce for the satisfaction of their operators’ needs, but for the purpose of profit, in itself).

·       Man realizes that he can autonomously build the truth about the world and then forge, on this ground, his own existence. Magatti (2009) has properly redefined modernity as a regime characterized by individual freedom in the search for truth. When individualized, the research effort becomes limitless and reversible at any moment: truth cannot be revealed once and for all, if it is acknowledged as the outcome of an individual elaboration and it is no longer believed to be the revelation of an extra-human powerful entity.

 A neutralitarian regime: the political institutions of limitless growth

The self-regulating market is the regime in which “instead of the economy being embedded in social relations, social relations are embedded in the economic system”

Not only the feudal privileges and the craft guilds were abolished but any similar form of association. Even the aggregations aimed at mutual aid or benevolence were outlawed or subjected to rigid controls, as they competed on matters where the exclusive State competence was deployed. The religious orders suffered the same fate and ecclesiastical assets

Everyone is free to express his/her unique vision, but no one can claim to implement it. This is a central paradox: modernity is the age in which everyone is encouraged to go out and search for “sense,” but also everyone is prevented from translating it into a collective construction.

Under modernity, the recognition of micro-freedom becomes a veto to the great (collective) freedom.

The outcomes of the growth regime

To allow the market mechanism to be sole director of the fate of human beings and their natural environment indeed, even of the amount and use of purchasing power, would result in the demolition of society.... In disposing of a man’s labor power the system would, incidentally, dispose of the physical, psychological, and moral entity “man” attaché to that tag.... Nature would be reduced to its elements, neighborhoods and landscapes defiled, rivers polluted, military safety jeopardized, the power to produce food and raw materials destroyed. 

Modern collective institutions, by statute (i.e., because of the neutralitarian regime), are disabled. Institutions are silent, faceless, transparent, neutral. They cannot carry out any autonomous project, since this would infringe the cardinal principle of individual autonomy.

Society undertakes an irreversible process of disaggregation. In fact, the continuous value fluctuation of these founding elements of social cohesion, due to the blind dynamics of the law of supply and demand, becomes in the long run a harmful factor of uncertainty for social order.

ANTI-UTILITARIANISM  Onofrio Romano 

Anti-utilitarians challenge the theoretical approaches that interpret any human action as departing from the pivotal axis of the “individual” and thus oriented towards self-satisfaction

utilitarian doctrine claims that humans are governed by the logic of selfish calculation of pleasures and pains, by their interest only, or by their preferences only

Anti-utilitarians criticize utilitarianism because it reduces the human being. Far from qualifying itself as anti-modern thought, aims at rediscovering the true meaning of modernity, restoring the scientific spirit against scientism, reason against rationalism, democracy against technocracy.

The gift becomes the archetypal performer or the universal symbolic matrix of the alliance between individuals and groups. It acts on a micro-sociological level by the device of the triple obligation – “to give, to receive, and to return” – but it can be extended to the mesosociological scale of the “association” and, finally, to “politics,” i.e. the macro-sociological frame. “Each one of these three terms – gift, association and politics – is a metaphor, a symbol and a tool for interpreting the others”.

Democracy must enhance diversity by offering a variety of lifestyles, increasing public space for discussion, and pluralizing the possibilities of self-realization.

The risk they see in the degrowth discourse is that the emphasis on the imperative of the preservation of life stands as yet another translation of the “neutralitarian” root of utilitarian political philosophy: politics becomes a mere function for preserving citizens’ “biological” life.The strategy changes but the goal is always the same: life, without any political meaning.