Source: “Le travail dans un monde post-croissance (Dominique Méda)” (56-minute video)
- Currently, the economy and commercialized work dominates our society.
- Many societies are not based on “commercialized work” and don’t have a word for it.
- Adam Smith: work enables us to create wealth. We are interested in the latter (not in work itself).
- During the 18th century, our values changed significantly: from valuing moderation (a traditional christian value) to valuing wealth.
- The goal became to produce as much as possible – more than we need to fulfill out immediate needs.
- Work becomes something meaningful: To assert ourselves in the world, we have to work.
- Philosophers that advocate in favor of “humanizing” nature (which also means dominating it): Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel and Karl Marx. The caveat is that they lived during times when nature was more threatening than threatened.
- Presently, young people are increasingly disillusioned by work: They often see it as alienating. Additionally, climate change can make it more difficult to find meaning in one’s work.
- If our societies are guided by the GDP (gross domestic product) then that number only measures work. It does not measure political activities, time spent with families, romantic endeavors, taking care of family members, etc.
- The GDP has become a major indicator of how rich a society is – if it has succeeded or not. Therefore, our societies have few built-in mechanisms that cause consequences if someone damages nature. We only count and value what has economic value. The difficulty is that we can only count money and we can’t really assign a monetary value to our natural heritage.
- Potential solution: replacing monetary scores with physical and social scores.
- Plans for the future:
- Less factory farming
- More manual labor – but managed better than previously:
- Sustainable work hours and practices
- Supported by clever engineering (sometimes high-tech, sometimes low-tech)
- Localized production
- Smaller factories, ideally cooperatively organized
- Production should focus on benefitting society, not on making profits. This can still happen within capitalism and there can be profits but we should break with current extremes and excesses. We have to take care of all stakeholders – including the environment.
- We have to transition in a way that is fair to the people doing the actual work (farmers, workers, etc.)
- Mrs. Méda is now against reducing working hours because she thinks we will need more labor to produce enough for everyone.
- People could spend their working ours differently and switch (e.g.) two hours of their usual work to work that helps society become more sustainable. For example, they could work at a sustainable farm.
- This could be thought of as “community service” but we have to be careful that we give people freedom to choose, act and organize (vs. planned economies and more subordinate work).
- Transitioning from a focus on productivity and exploitation to a focus on sustainability and common good is going to be difficult because our current system is based on the former (w.r.t. education, values, political structures, etc.).
- She explicitly uses the term “post-growth” because she is worried about what “degrowth” may do to our societies.
- Personally, I hope we can achieve a society that is mostly independent of growth – where everyone is always more or less OK.