Gentle Decline 1/16: Capitalism & Comparison

Hello. My thinking from early on in Gentle Decline has been that capitalism is the root cause of major environmental damage (not that there were not anthropogenic climate alterations before capitalism), and that it's unlikely to be helpful in getting people past climate disaster. This is largely because capitalism doesn't "help" with anything, except incidentally, and mostly it does what it's "designed" to do, which is concentrate more money where there is already money. I have "designed" and "help" in scare quotes because neither word is really doing what it should there - systems don't help, they move resources around according to the way they're set up, and emergent behaviours happen based on those, and capitalism was never really designed, no matter what neo-liberals believe about Adam Smith. This issue concentrates on things that can be done to get around the limitations of capitalism, and to reduce some of its impacts.

There are two core concepts that have come up as I've been thinking and reading about this; externalisation and generosity.

Externalisation is, at its core, how capitalism does environmental damage. An organisation, a capitalist process, makes the most profit if it leaves as many costs as possible unpaid. So disposing of excess carbon dioxide isn't done; pollutants are disposed of as cheaply as possible, which may include just dumping them out the back of your factory; health issues employees incur through work are their own problems, and so on. This is externalisation of costs. Some of it is forgivable in ignorance - the people who started burning fossil fuels had no idea that they were releasing greenhouse gases, for example. But capitalism allows an organisation to continue to externalise costs - encourages it to do so - as much as it can, even when those externalised costs are known.

Generosity is a counterpoint to this, although not directly an opposite. In this case, it's the concept that an organisation or a process can be deemed to have enough, and that any excess money (or food, or energy, or what-have-you) can be given away to those that need it. Generosity, in the form of charity, did a bit to mitigate the excesses of capitalism in the 19th century, although I suspect that if a proper economic analysis was carried out, it was much more a comfort to the donor than a prevention of harm by the system.

Anyway. Capitalism encourages externalisation, and does not recognise generosity as anything other than waste. Because even the most venal of governing bodies can recognise that pure unregulated capitalism is a shortcut to disaster, some externalisation is prevented or mitigated by law, and some generosity is incentivised by tax breaks or other benefits. But any system that is going to work to stop and eventually cancel out the effects of capitalism is going have to not externalise costs, and be generous. Funny enough, the best solution to the rather daft Prisoner's Dilemma game is called "always generous"; Kim Stanley Robinson talked about that a lot in his excellent Science in the Capital trilogy, which I've referenced in these newsletters before. Such a new system is also going to have to grow within or at the very least alongside capitalism, because the only other way is violently replace it, and that will be pretty harmful in and of itself.

I don't think that the people currently knowingly benefiting from capitalism way more than "enough" should necessarily be made safe from harm in this process; they're certainly not extending that to the people at the other end of the wealth spectrum. But they wouldn't be the only ones harmed, and if we can find a way there where the only damage is to the silly numbers some very rich people have attached to them, all the better.

The obvious alternative to capitalism is communism. It's understood that it's been adequately demonstrated by history that communism doesn't work - although I'd bring up two points to (partially) counter that. First, actual communism has never been tried at a state level. And second, a few people I know who lived on the other side of the Iron Curtain pre-1989 have noted that while life wasn't necessarily easy, there was comfort in knowing that no matter what happened, you'd be able to get food and a roof over your head, and that there was work you could do to get more than that whenever you were able. There are swathes of the capitalist world - which is most of it, now - where that's really not the case, and because they're socio-economic swathes rather than geographical, there's some of that poverty-without-safety-net near you right now.

(I don't think any of the people reading this are going to be spluttering about the evils of communism as a basic concept. If you are, well, there's not a lot I can do for you, but since the preschool lesson of "share nicely" didn't sink in the first time, you can try thinking about it some more. The issues with communism are in the implementation by humans, not the principles.)

Looking at things from a reasonably sensible point of view, it's pretty clear that communism's problem is not that it doesn't work, but that it doesn't scale (considering my previous commentary on that term, that might be seen as an advantage, mind). There are kibbutzim in Israel that have been running for nearly a century (there's at least one that pre-dates the establishment of the state), and other communes worldwide that have been running for longer than most companies. There are co-operatives and worker-owned companies and the like all over the place. And of course, religious orders and military (and scientific) outposts have been run under communist-in-all-but-name systems pretty much forever. It's only when you go past a few hundred people that the general stupidity and occasional malice of humans starts to break communism down.

It's worth looking, too, at the things that drive capitalism, rather than emerge from it. Capitalism works, primarily, by turning greed - a sin, vice, or other undesirable characteristic in every other regard - into a virtue. So the enablement of greed is one of the very first problems, and because humans are apparently greedy by nature (or at least, the vast majority of our current societies don't see greed as an issue, and teach that), that's honestly going to be hard to resolve.

In existing communal economic units (my term, possibly a placeholder and possibly something I'm stuck with), there are two ways of handling this - either people have very, very few personal possessions (religious, army outpost), or there's no attention paid to it as long as everyone has sufficient material to live in reasonable comfort (most long-term communes). Part of the way in which this works is that in small groups (by which I mean less than about 20), personal vs. group ownership blurs a bit. Sure, it's Jo's television, but most people can watch it. And Si might have brought the washing machine, but even if they retain priority on it, they can't use it 24/7, so everyone benefits. Conversely, the lawnmower might be held in common, but Al is the one to use it, because they actually enjoy mowing the lawn.

This leads to the concept of co-housing, which is more common than might be thought. This is a setup where there are small private houses (or wings, or stories of a house, or apartments within a single building) with shared facilities - a kitchen, a dining space, recreation facilities, utilities, storage, gardens, even vehicles - that are held in common. A rota or sign-up sheet or the like can govern both usage and maintenance, where necessary. For some reason, this is regarded with mild horror in Ireland; they're increasingly common in Europe, having apparently originated in the current form in Denmark. They're a pretty good mirror of the organisational structure of large castles and small villages/hamlets in medieval Europe, too; I've read accounts of archaeological studies of Swedish farms from the ~1400s which even look like modern co-housing in layout.

Leaving aside ideological questions of ownership and private property, etc, I want to take a look at this concept as a sort of non-capitalist-system-with-training-wheels. First and foremost, it reduces each household's (single person, couple, family, whatever other arrangement) share of the costs of the common facilities. In the situation where each house is complete onto itself, each house needs a washing machine, a set of garden tools, storage for seasonal stuff, etc. If you have one washing machine (even an industrial one) for ten houses, you've suddenly cut the costs by a _lot_, and reduced the environmental damage of making, shipping, and plumbing in such a device. The same goes for each other thing. Even if there's a small kitchen in each house, you can still have a huge hob and an enormous oven in the common space, for making jam or cooking a really big roast. The preserving pan held in common is another saving; those things are _expensive_, and they're only used a few times a year. Having a pool is madly expensive for one household; shared between 20 or 30, it becomes much more affordable, probably less than the cost of membership in a gym that has one. And so on, for everything from grindstones through coffee grinders, and that's just for domestic stuff; a shared workshop expands what anyone can make or repair by a huge amount - and gives access to other people's skills.

And as I've touched on above, where costs are reduced, environmental impact reduces almost in parallel. If vehicles are held in common (or there's a decent carpooling system, or the place where your co-housing arrangement is has a bus service or is near a train line, etc), it reduces it even further, because one of the huge costs that private transport has on the environment is this huge chunk of processed metal and plastics sitting idle for 90% of its existence.

I'm voicing the above in terms of reduction of costs, which is still a capitalist framing. Part of the issue here is that I don't really know how to frame it otherwise. But for some very non-capitalist thoughts, consider that with the savings detailed above, many of the people living in this kind of co-housing arrangement will not need to earn as much as they would living in single/couple/family houses. They could switch to four or three day weeks, to freelancing, to less-well-paid but more enjoyable jobs. A few of them can be employed by the co-housing project itself.

If many people live in this kind of arrangement, then we're going to see a few larger-scale effects. For a start, all the things that are sold to individual households now and would be shared in co-housing have a reduced market. White goods, televisions, lawnmowers, maybe even cars. That means less mining, less shipping, less use of plastics and other oil-derived stuffs. It _won't_ cut down on individual possessions, necessarily, like clothes, personal electronics, etc, so it's not like retail will disappear, but it'll change - in similar directions, perhaps, to what we're already seeing with the rise of online commerce and parcel delivery.

Recycling and waste disposal will also change; the co-housing project will be able to either work with industrial-scale disposal companies, or just process a lot of their own stuff and bring it direct to appropriate facilities - that depends a great deal on local availability and laws, so I'll just note it and move on.

If our putative co-housing project moves on to providing food in common, then that's a fairly major step. Our current thinking on food - where each household, and maybe even each individual in a house gets a different meal in every meal slot every day - is pretty new. The constraints of seasonal food and time-consuming production made this difficult in most historical eras, and meals were very much more in common. Most of our concepts of the future - Star Trek, Blade Runner, whatever you're having - take this individual meals thing to an extreme, and food in common is seen as a bit dystopian. I'm not saying that's a capitalist plot, but individual food sure as hell costs more, and gives more profit to retailers and suppliers. This is absolutely evident to anyone who's ever cooked for an event of more than 10 people; economies of scale hit mad levels around there, and the cost of a modest lunch per person at individual levels - say €5 per person - suddenly allows for the 10-or-more people to have an elaborate multi-course meal with plenty of leftovers.

We're still not at actual communism here. We're just pooling resources among a number of people, and we're at levels of participation where anyone trying to follow the virtues of actual capitalism - as in, being greedy - is visible to everyone else. But even this kind of project can have a huge impact on both personal and systemic finance. Since people don't need to spend as much, there's less need for debt, whether it's loans or credit cards. The whole co-housing project may be able to provide health insurance in the same way employers do, where that's a necessity. If there are a lot of kids around, then babysitting or other childcare becomes a lot simpler, because there are a whole bunch of other people around in the same spaces. And there are undoubtedly benefits I haven't considered in terms of access to facilities, education, hobbies, or just plain community.

So what's the tradeoff here? I've lived in shared housing at a small scale my whole life - with family growing up, and in shared houses for most of my adult life. Nina and I had a place to ourselves for about a year once, and I can't say we noticed a vast difference - and the differences we did notice would mostly be addressed by having a private space like a small house, apartment, etc. There would probably be some overhead in terms of organisational time, and participation in whatever decision-making process the project has as a collective. There's the possibility of falling out with someone in the project. I don't really regard any of those as serious issues, up to and including the falling out bit, because making collective decisions and getting on with people are essential skills for adults in general, and I'm not going to even make a stab at designing economic systems for children.

I'm leaving aside the question of the collective co-housing project actually acting as a service or goods-providing economic unit, too, apart from noting that it's possible. Providing things like self-storage or sports facilities - with the co-housing members having priority and "selling" the overflow - is pretty obvious, but there are lots of other possibilities, which I might get around to discussing again.

There are probably other ways to get some distance between you and the core activities of capitalism. Isolated self-sufficiency is the one that gets the most attention in both media and fiction, but I honestly don't think that's a great idea. We have experts in all sorts of areas for the simple reason that they're necessary - your isolated farm where you provide all your own necessities is going to run into trouble the first time you realise that someone has a serious allergy to bee strings, needs a root canal, etc, not to mention knowing how to maintain all your tools and infrastructure is a serious burden of knowledge.

This is, as ever, thinking in progress. I'd particularly welcome other people's thoughts on the kind of co-housing project I've outlined above - the more so if you have reasons you wouldn't want to be involved in such a thing. As is, I think it reduces externalisation, and is fairly inherently generous, at least to its participants, and thereby my initial aims are met.

(I also appreciate this being forwarded, or recommended for subscription, or whatever, to other people. Just don't turn it into a chain letter.)

It's still November, and it's mostly still raining, which statement invariably provides the voice of Eric Draven saying "it can't rain all the time", which provides you most of the demographic knowledge about me you might ever need. This issue has been brought to you by quite a lot of coffee, a visit to a 16th century tower house in Wexford, and the continued efforts of the snoring cat in the radiator adjacent cat-bed.