Pathways to a Post-Capitalist World

Organized around exchange-value, not use-value, the capitalist system is over-productive and steadily worsening a multi-faceted ecological crisis. Is a post-growth, post-capitalist world conceivable?

The emergency brake

Step 1. End planned obsolescence

“We like to think of capitalism as a system that’s built on rational efficiency, but in reality it is exactly the opposite. [planned obsolescence] is like shovelling ecosystems and human lives into a bottomless pit of demand.” For instance, every year, “150 million discarded computers are shipped to countries like Nigeria, where they end up in sprawling open-air dumps that leak mercury, arsenic and other toxic substances into the land.”

Blaming consumers for buying too many things misses the point; people fall victim to the production logic of capitalism. The issue is the logic itself. If washing machines or smartphones lasted four times longer than they currently do, we would consume 75% fewer of them. Not only would it be a huge reduction in material throughput, but people wouldn’t have to deal with the frustration and expense of constantly replacing some piece of equipment. How to achieve this? For starters, a mandatory extended product warranty and a “right to repair” with affordable replacement parts could be introduced. A leasing model could also be used, requiring manufacturers to assume full responsibility for all repairs and regular upgrades.

Step 2. Cut advertising

“A survey conducted in the 1990s revealed that 90% of American CEOs believed it would be impossible to sell a new product without an advertising campaign; 85% admitted that advertising ‘often’ persuaded people to buy things they did not need; and 51% said that advertising persuaded people to buy things they didn’t actually want.”¹ Since then, browser cookies and social media profiles used on the internet by big data companies have allowed firms to present us with ads tailored to manipulate consuming anxieties and even to match our likely emotional state at any given time.

In the brave new world of advertising, people are constantly interrupted in what would otherwise be their personal thinking, imagination, and creative processes. The little space left in many minds for art, poetry, or messages that are meaningful and build community may explain why the feeling of loneliness is so prevalent today in our societies.²

Step 3. Shift from ownership to usership

We own a lot of products that we need only for a fraction of the day, the week, the month, or the year. A lawnmower, for instance, will be used once or twice a month during some part of the year and remain idle for the rest of the time. Manufacturers want everyone to own a garage full of things that can easily be shared.

A more rational approach would be to have neighborhood workshops storing equipment to be used on an as-needed basis. Such projects could be scaled up by city governments and enabled by apps for easy access. At any rate, shifting from ownership to “usership” could greatly impact material throughput while saving people time and money in the process. The use of cars is also emblematic of that easy shift with, notably, public transportation and bicycles, but also car sharing or lending—without the rentier intermediation that has made platforms like Uber so problematic.

Step 4. End food waste

One way or another, up to 50% of all the food produced worldwide is wasted yearly.³ Ending that waste could proportionally cut the scale of the agricultural industry and its greenhouse gas emissions while regenerating up to 2.4 billion hectares of land for wildlife habitat and carbon sequestration.⁴

Step 5. Scale down ecologically destructive industries

The fossil fuel industry is the most obvious example, but there are others. The beef industry, for instance, occupies nearly 60% of all agricultural land—directly for cattle pasture or indirectly for growing feed.⁵ “It’s one of the most resource-inefficient foods on the planet, in terms of the land and energy it requires per calorie or nutrient.” The simple shift from beef to non-ruminant meats or plant proteins like beans or pulses would allow returning vast swathes of the planet to forest and wildlife habitat, creating new carbon sinks and cutting up to 8 gigatons of carbon dioxide emissions per year, according to the IPCC. That’s around 20% of current annual emissions.⁶

While people get involved in steps 1 to 5 as consumers, governments need to cap resource and energy use at existing levels and ratchet them down each year until we get back into planetary boundaries. We already do this against capital’s exploitation of people with all kinds of social laws, so why not replicate it toward capital’s exploitation of nature? “The key,” says Jason Hickel, “is that this has to be done in a just and equitable way, to ensure that everyone has access to the resources and livelihoods they need to flourish, and so small businesses don’t get squeezed out by bigger players.”

Not only would the ecological benefit be the reduced flows of material goods but also the reduction of stocks that support them:⁷ “If we consume half as many products, we also need half as many factories and machines to produce them, half as many aeroplanes and trucks and ships to transport them, half as many warehouses and retail outlets to distribute them, half as many garbage trucks and waste disposal plants to process them when they’re binned, and half as much energy to produce and maintain and operate all of that infrastructure. The efficiencies begin to multiply.”

But what about jobs?

Undoubtedly, following the abovementioned policies will affect jobs for the concerned supply chains. These policies can only be implemented by shortening the working week, thus distributing the necessary labor and subsequent income more evenly among the population. What does this mean in practice?

First, it is worth noting that under capitalism, productivity gains have marginally been used to liberate humans from work. Squarely betraying the very Enlightenment values its ideology claims to advance, capitalism uses these gains to fuel constant growth for higher profits; like mere pawns, employees are systematically required to work as much as ever.

On the other hand, transitioning toward a more rational, just, and efficient economic system would require easy access to retraining programs. A public job guarantee could facilitate this process so that anyone who needs to work can do useful things that communities require and be paid a living wage.

That may seem drastic. From a practical standpoint, however, multiple studies confirm that reducing working hours positively impacts people’s well-being, even when the reduced working time is controlled against income.⁸ People can spend more time caring for their children or sick relatives or doing community work—all things valuable and highly meaningful, but which under capitalism are externalized or unpaid because they are unrepresented in GDP figures. Data also show that shortening the working week is one of the most immediately impactful climate policies available.⁹ “Overall,” says a group of scientists, “the existing research suggests that working time reduction potentially offers a triple dividend to society: reduced unemployment, increased quality of life, and reduced environmental pressures.”¹⁰

Reduce inequality

How can we finance the transition to a shorter working week? There is, in reality, plenty of room for that. In the U.K., labor’s share of national income has declined from 75% in the 1970s to 65% today. In the U.S., it’s down to 60%. CEOs in this country earn, on average and counting only for salary, 300 times more than their employees.¹¹ In the sixties, it was about 20 times more.

One approach to stop income growing almost exclusively for top executives could be introducing a cap on wage ratios. At ten or even twenty to one, chances are that CEOs would immediately seek to raise wages as high as they can reasonably go.¹² Such a cap could apply nationally by deciding, for instance, that income above a given ratio with the national minimum wage would face a 100% tax. More than a matter of Robin Hood re-distributing, as it is often portrayed, this is plain and common-sense pre-distributing to those who effectively do the work rather than to the lords of our time, who use their privileged position to siphon benefits to their advantage.

However, income is just one side of the issue; wealth is the other. In the United States, the richest 1% have nearly 40% of the nation’s wealth, while the bottom 50% have almost none—0.4%. On a global level, it is even worse: the richest 1% possess nearly 50% of the world’s wealth. Trapped in a system geared toward constant profit-making, most other people must scramble to keep up with ever-rising prices.

It is also important to note that the wealth owned by the richest 1%, or even 10%, is not earned; it is extracted from underpaid workers, cheap nature, political capture, and so on. Since profit-making is the sole engine of our current economic system, perpetual growth is its underlying implication. The few who benefit from the rent-seeking situation they create with their wealth have very little interest in seeing the machine stop.

1. Andre Gorz, Capitalism, Socialism, Ecology, trans. Chris Turner (London: Verso, 1994).
2. Nicole Torres, ‘Advertising makes us unhappy,’ Harvard Business Review, 2020.
3. Global Food: Waste Not, Want Not, Institute of Mechanical Engineers, 2013.
4. ‘Food is responsible for one-quarter of the world’s greenhouse gas emissions,’ Our World in Data, 2019; ‘Land use,’ Our World in Data, 2019.
5. ‘Grade A Choice?’ Union of Concerned Scientists, 2012.
6. Joseph Poore and Thomas Nemecek, ‘Reducing food’s environmental impacts through producers and consumers,’ Science 360(6392), 2018, pp. 987–992.
7. Fridolin Krausmann et al., ‘Global socioeconomic material stocks rise 23-fold over the 20th century and require half of annual resource use,’ Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences 114(8), 2017, pp. 1880–1885.
8. Anders Hayden, ‘France’s 35-hour week: Attack on business? Win-win reform? Or betrayal of disadvantaged workers?’ Politics & Society 34(4), 2006, pp. 503–542; ‘Reduced working hours and stress in the Swedish social services: A longitudinal study,’ International Social Work 60(4), 2017, pp. 897–913; Boris Baltes, et al., ‘Flexible and compressed workweek schedules: A meta-analysis of their effects on work-related criteria,’ Journal of Applied Psychology 84(4), 1999; Anna Coote et al., ‘21 hours: why a shorter working week can help us all flourish in the 21st century,’ New Economics Foundation, 2009.
9. David Rosnick and Mark Weisbrot, ‘Are shorter work hours good for the environment? A comparison of US and European energy consumption,’ International Journal of Health Services 37(3), 2007, pp. 405–417.
10. Jared B. Fitzgerald, Juliet B. Schor and Andrew K. Jorgenson, ‘Working hours and carbon dioxide emissions in the United States, 2007–2013,’ Social Forces 96(4), 2018, pp. 1851–1874.
11. Lawrence Mishel and Jessica Schieder, ‘CEO compensation surged in 2017,’ Economic Policy Institute, 2018.
12. Sam Pizzigati, The Case for a Maximum Wage (Polity, 2018).