Plenitude: The New Economics of True Wealth Book

One of our current major problems on the Left is that we, for the most part, have a poor grasp of economics, partly because economic debates have become excessively econometric so get bogged down in arcane number crunching, partly because we spent many years in struggles based around identity and cultural politics, partly because economics as a field of work has been overtaken by not just neoclassical economics but by neoliberal economics. As a result, someone like Juliet Schor is all too rare in debates and whose interventions are therefore always worthwhile, even when I disagree. Schor is a social democratic economist whose work draws on Keynesian, Marxist and other unpopular sources of concepts but who has at the centre of her analyses critiques of finance capital and fictitious capital. What's more, she is an economist who writes superbly well for non-specialist audiences explaining the economic data clearly and lucidly while packing in 'real world' examples that we non-specialists can hang on to.

In her previous work she has looked at the moral pressure to work increasingly long hours, the dangers of and pressures leading to excessive consumption and the marketization and commercialisation of childhood. In each of these more popular outings (she also does 'proper' academic economic publishing) an essential issue has been the ability of people, their lives and the world they live in to sustain social and material life. In this book she cuts to the chase to explore sustainability economics and in doing so draws on key elements of the other three popular-audience titles.

So much of what I see about sustainability economics seems to rely on one of two options: either a technological fix or a back to nature, hairshirted restraint. One is a science fantasy option where all of a sudden we discover a new piece of technology that solves all our problems (dammit, where did I leave those dilithium crystals?) or we return to the simple lives of our (romanticised) great-great grandparents or Tom & Barbara Goode. Neither is feasible, and then neither are many of the slight retooling of capitalism proposals. At the heart of Schor's case is a paradox; that as we've become more materialistic in terms of acquiring more and more stuff we've also become less materialistic in terms of not knowing where our stuff comes from, how it is made or how it gets to use. In short, she has built a clearly argued and rigorous case for downshifting: working less, making more, knowing more about where our stuff comes from (while having less of it) and restoring investments in communities, so in a sense sharing more. This, she argues, is the only viable alternative to business as usual (BAU economics).

The argument is conventionally structured. Two chapters set up the problem - a consumer boom in the post-war era that has taken us close ecological destruction, backed up by a return to and reanalysis of the argument that there are limits to growth. She then shifts tone to focus on the four principles of plenitude:
1. a new allocation of time through reduced hours of market work
2. a shift to high-productivity self-provisioning (here she builds a case that is different to many sustainability approaches - technology is not the problem; it can be used to enhance self-provisioning)
3. the development of a low-cost, low-impact, but high-satisfaction consumer life, and
4. the revitalisation of community and social connection.
Along with this optimistic outlook she takes the discussion beyond the common approach to focus on technology and resources and the limit and solution, to a focus on knowledge. The apex of her argument, then, is that the four principles of plenitude can/should be central to an approach designed to build diffuse, smart and ecologically restorative ways to live. Throughout, she draws on mainstream as well as critical economic and sociological evidence, using the orthodox against itself.

It is easy for us to sneer, suspecting that this is little more than a Whole Earth Catalogue for the 21st century, but without the pictures. We don't have to go far, though, to find these principles in practice. Across The Netherlands a series of small community shop front centres run repair services for local communities, for free - local residents with skills give a few hours a week each to repair home appliances, equipment and so forth. In South London, and elsewhere, groups of people in the same street collectively buy equipment they may need but seldom use (farmers' coops have been doing this with harvesting equipment for at least 50 years - my father was, as I recall, a co-owner of a combine harvester when I was young). One of England's Sunday papers currently (December 2013) has a fund-raising campaign to buy solar powered batteries to provide electric lighting to households in rural Kenya, saving money on oil, saving oil and keeping households safe (from fire).

In other places, entire communities have taken on these kinds of ideas - in Chiapas in southern Mexico the Zapatistas went to war against the Mexican state to secure their autonomy and run their lives on similar ideas. A recent book by Dan Hancock, The Village Against the World , is turning out to be a very popular study of a collective village in Andalusia. We don't need to look much further than Al Jazeera English's excellent Earthrise show to see countless examples of the principles of plenitude in action.

Will it work? Now that's a different story - but even though I kept finding little niggling things that jarred, I also kept finding myself going back to the categories Erik Olin Wright points to in his superb Envisioning Real Utopias and wondering about the desirable, the viable and achievable; the nice thing about these principles is that they can apply as factors for success in all three states. And what's more, in accentuating the limits of knowledge Schor has pointed to an approach that works in a late capitalist world the stresses immaterial labour and knowledge economies - factors that play a key role in current struggles over the commons; these are conditions that we can work on in the current to build the achievable while keeping the desirable in sight.

This is one of those books that inspires and deserves our attention in our everyday life as well as in our more rigorous efforts to build new ways of being and doing.