Exploitation and absolute economic growth

June 21, 2009

Today’s CO2 concentration is higher than it ever was in the history of this planet (latest news). The reason is the ongoing industrialization since 250 years. The notion of absolute economic growth has led to a situation, where mankind starts to pay the price for decades and centuries of exploitation. Workers have been exploited, populations have been exploited, plants and animals have been exploited, resources have been exploited, and nature as a whole has been exploited. We are at the point where the system breaks down because of exploitation.

Exploitation is an unavoidable side-effect of the belief in absolute economic growth. Or let’s turn this around: The belief in absolute economic growth is necessary in order to distract from exploitation. To distract from the fact that certain forms of growth are only possible because of exploitation.

Relative economic growth is very easy to conceive of. If A grows, B shrinks. We are living in a limited system. There is a limited amount of air, of water, of earth ect. In order to let something grow, it needs more resources, be it coal, air, water, space, light, workforce, attention. These resources then are not longer available for letting grow something else.

Absolute growth instead suggests that anything can grow without taking away resources from anything else. The fiction helps to claim more space, it can become a strategy for relative growth. Absolute growth implies that if you use up resources there will be more resources than before, more air, water, earth etc. The idea has been extremely successful.

The utopia of absolute growth has aspects of a religion, the most important being the aspect of salvation. It suggests that growth will spread until it reaches everyone. This gives hope to the ones who don’t have anything else. Relative growth, on the other hand, doesn’t allow to postpone justice to some distant day of salvation. Relative growth is reality. It’s the opposite of what a religion needs, because it implies the eternal state and repetition of the present resources and struggles. And yes, it does imply struggle. There will be no alternative to our eternal struggling for more space in the sun. You can’t live without killing. It sounds strange, but we have to accept to be killers in order to get rid of the most dangerous of all religions. Only then can we kill less. The religion of absolute growth will have killed far more people than any other abuse of religious ideas, the christian, the islamic, “stalinism” and “national socialism”.

To live means to kill, and to grow means to take away, but there are ways of taking away that don’t hurt anybody. Trade, exchange based on freedom and transparency from all sides. The price has to be visible.

Only when this is clear for everybody can we start to deal with our existing problems in a secular and reasonable way. If the notion of a delayed salvation is gone, along with the idea of absolute growth, then every growth has to pay its normal price immediately. It then becomes possible to judge on the singular case. The price of growth becomes visible case by case. We can judge about the case and the situation, instead of preaching the ideology of salvation by absolute growth which in reality is exploitation. Let’s not postpone the price of growth any longer.