The Enlightenment idea of progress is one of the ideological pillars of capitalism. The unspoken assumption motivating modern capitalism is that the world is evolving towards a better, more prosperous future and that the engine of this advancement is economic growth—the expansion of the volume of goods and services at humans’ disposal. There may be the occasional interruption to the process, such as periodic recessions, but the momentum is always forwards. Although the idea of progress is little discussed today, the silence serves only to emphasise the idea’s universal currency. It pervades our political discourse, the writing of our history, and the consciousness of ordinary people everywhere.
The idea of progress is in fact a new one in human history, perhaps only 200 years old, although its character now reflects the spirit of the golden age that followed the Second World War. Writing in 1851, a French historian confirmed that the new idea had to struggle to replace old conceptions: ‘From the beginning of this century the idea of progress has in effect established itself in such a way that in principle it is no longer contested by anyone . . . ’1 A century later, British sociologist Morris Ginsberg noted that, despite its popularity, progress remained difficult to define.2 In the early 19th century it was given substance by leaps in applied science and technology that were suggestive of infinite inventiveness, but only with Darwin’s theories of the later part of the 19th century did the idea of progress acquire an internal logic, the law of evolution. At the same time, enlightened thinkers saw the triumph of science over religious superstition as proof of humankind’s ability to create a better future for itself, free from the capriciousness of other-worldly salvation. This conception of meta-history was founded on a belief in the ethical perfectibility of humanity, a belief that provided a powerful philosophical stimulus to movements for social and political reform.
In developing the idea of progress, the intention was to find the impersonal laws that explained the sweep of human history. Hegel has been perhaps the most influential philosopher in this respect. He imagined history as an ineluctable process of expansion of consciousness of freedom or spirit. Eschewing the historians’ histories of peoples or of kings, his was a universal history of the evolution of humankind, something that happens over the heads of ordinary mortals. One could either simply watch the world evolve to greater things or, like the social reformers, one could be an active participant, secure in the knowledge that history is on one’s side. The more deterministic formulations of Marxism fell into the latter category, as do all theories suggesting that some historical outcome is ‘inevitable’ or subject to iron laws—including the belief in the inevitability of more economic growth. In a famous passage, Marx wrote, ‘Men make their own history, but they do not make it just as they please; [they make it] under circumstances directly found, given and transmitted from the past’.3 He might have added that they often make it while cleaving to the mistaken ideas of the past, ideas that are contrary to their own interests, so that the ‘errors of history’ are repeated.
In the first decades of the 20th century belief in progress wavered. Victorian hubris was assailed first by the First World War eruption of savagery, then by the economic collapse of the Depression. A further round of slaughter in the Second World War completed the breakdown. Indeed, between the wars prominent thinkers began to argue that belief in progress would dissolve under the weight of its own contradictions and that the idea should be dismissed as a superstition that is ‘nearly worn out’.4 Blood and misery seemed to call for the idea to be abandoned; after the Battle of the Somme, faith in the perfectibility of humankind became untenable; after Auschwitz, it became a cruel joke. However, by the mid-1950s these doubts were all but forgotten. The awful images of war were supplanted by visions of a new nirvana, one of consumer bliss, captured by the pervasive image of the American housewife. To be sure, a shadow hung over the whole project—the fear that humankind would annihilate itself by thermonuclear war—but the dark side only served to heighten the allure of the light.
High and sustained rates of economic growth through each decade after the war rescued the idea of progress from historical oblivion. But not only was it rescued; it was reconceptualised. Applied science, evolutionary biology and ethics no longer powered the idea. The new engine was more mundane: material advancement would drive progress, and the measure of success became the standard of living. This was convenient, for capitalist firms became the central agency of progress and the entrepreneurs brought their own thinkers to explain their role. Elbowing aside the scientists, philosophers and social reformers, onto this stage walked the new sages of progress, the neoclassical economists.
The neoclassical economists did not have a run free of obstacles. Economists of the Keynesian, Marxist and Institutionalist varieties were sceptical about this new idea of progress, and the neoliberals had to wait until the 1980s and 1990s, and especially for the fall of the Berlin Wall, before claiming complete triumph. Then they could finally dismiss the doubts about the virtues of market capitalism that had been sown, in different ways, by Keynesians and sputniks. As it turned out, the ideological standard bearer of liberal capitalism was not an economist but a little-known political scientist. Francis Fukuyama declared in 1989 that the victory of liberal democracy was so comprehensive that history itself had come to an end. Forms of government other than liberal democracy, and including social democracy, argued Fukuyama, ‘were characterized by grave defects and irrationalities that led to their eventual collapse’. However, liberal democracy is ‘arguably free from such fundamental internal contradictions’.5 Although confronted with various practical social problems, he wrote, liberal democracy as an ideal cannot be bested and it is for this reason that history—‘understood as a single, coherent, evolutionary process, when taking account of all peoples in all times’—has come to an end.6
This argument, and the political emotions it reflected, rested on a belief that history has a purpose, a grand pattern that is revealed with the passage of time and leads to a predefined endpoint. As it happened, Fukuyama adopted the Hegelian view of history as an inexorable process in which consciousness of freedom expands. But the implicit disdain for the lived experience of real people contained the fatal contradiction in his argument, for he concluded, ‘This evolutionary process was neither random nor unintelligible, even if it did not proceed in a straight line, and even if it was possible to question whether man was happier or better off as a result of historical “progress”’.7 In this statement Fukuyama deprived his thesis of meaning: it suggests that there could be other states in which humans are happier but which cannot come about, except temporarily, before being overrun by the juggernaut of history. While the entire philosophical rationale of liberalism, and especially neoliberalism, is to provide humans with the opportunity to express their free will, Fukuyama’s historical process, which has now reached its endpoint, has its own relentless logic, one that deprives people of their freedom to pursue greater happiness.
Real history, freed of deterministic forces (Hegelian, Marxian or other), confirms that free will can be devoted to good or ill, to achieving states superior to liberal democracy or to plunging the world into chaos. In place of free will, Fukuyama substitutes a post-Hegelian driving force for history—science and technology, the motors of economic growth. Hopelessly trapped in the pages of the economics texts, he ends up declaring, ‘Technology makes possible the limitless accumulation of wealth, and thus the satisfaction of an ever-expanding set of human desires’ [emphasis added].8 Ultimately, Fukuyama’s thesis turns out to be no more than a pseudo-philosophical variation on modernisation theory. Science, technology, markets, growth—these forces must take over the world and lead to homogenisation of societies, political systems, consumption patterns and tastes. And on which model does the world converge? That of the United States, of course.
Fukuyama’s triumphalism is interesting since his work displayed the contradictions that people experience when they do not consider the goals of actual societies and real people but simply accept the principal assumption of the economics texts and popular political debate—that more money means more happiness. What had triumphed was not democracy but liberalism or, more precisely, neoliberal economics: with the collapse of socialism in Eastern Europe and the convergence of social democracy on Thatcherism in the West, it was the only thing left standing. There seemed no alternative to the pursuit of economic growth through giving full rein to the forces of the market. There had been no challenge to growth, and among Western social democrats there had been no challenge to democracy; it was only the methods of economic organisation that had distinguished the parties.
In the last decades of the 20th century the notion of progress became increasingly associated with ideas of political freedom and liberation. The avatars of the free market have not been afraid to declare that political democracy is the inevitable by-product of economic liberalisation, so that the freeing of markets brings with it the boon of freedom from poverty and tyranny. Whatever the historical merits of the argument—and there are few—freedom from political oppression and material deprivation has presented neoliberalism with a dilemma: will citizens be happy exercising their freedoms simply through occasional trips to the polling station and frequent visits to the shopping mall, or will the democratic impulse take them into uncharted territory where perhaps the values that underpin neoliberalism will themselves come under challenge? It is hard to avoid the conclusion that the forces unleashed by affluence and democracy are getting out of hand, at least from the viewpoint of consumer capitalism. German sociologist Ulrich Beck is one of the most acute observers of the historical process: ‘. . . changing values and acceptance of democracy go hand in hand. An inner kinship exists between the values of self-determination and the ideal of democracy’.9
Taking democracy seriously means accepting the right to personal self-determination. Yet the dominant conservative view is comfortable with only one form of self-determination—personal choice in the marketplace—which, I argue, is a counterfeit form of self-determination. Beck has launched an attack on ‘conservative wailers’ of the moralising right for their attempts to constrain the historical evolution of democracy, attempts that are all the more surprising for conservatives who promote the free market as the last stage of freedom. Conservative resistance to the demand for self-determination conflates the pursuit of self-determination (individualisation) with the pursuit of selfish interests (individualism). The tragedy of market economics is that if it did in fact accurately reflect the essential motivation of human life—an anthropic version of Nature ‘red in tooth and claw’—we would soon find ourselves living a nightmare. The makers of post-apocalyptic films such as Mad Max and Waterworld recognised that it is only selflessness, love for others, that stands between us and the hell of rational economic man.
If we consider the evolution of the democratic impulse through its historical stages, the moral decline bemoaned by the conservatives is no more than a period of transition, in which the traditional expectations and roles that defined industrial capitalism are disintegrating and something new is emerging. The rejection of traditional standards, expectations and stereotypes represented by the various trends and movements dating from the 1960s—the sexual revolution, the counter-culture, and the women’s movement—was a manifestation of the longing for self-determination. Democracy, combined with the arrival of widespread material abundance in the West, has for the first time provided the opportunity for the mass of ordinary people to pursue self-actualisation. The political demand for democracy of earlier generations has become a personal demand for freedom to find one’s own path, to ‘write one’s own biography’. The constraints of socially imposed roles have weakened, oppression based on gender and race is no longer tenable, and the daily struggle for survival has for most people disappeared. All across the industrialised world bewildered people have been asking, ‘What do we do now?’10 Or, as the ethicist Peter Singer has put it, ‘How should I live?’. For if the life-determining constraints of class, gender and race have by and large fallen away, and the threat of poverty has for most been dissolved by decades of economic growth, the ordinary individual has, for the first time in history, a true choice.
The democratic impulse—which to date has taken the form of collective struggles to be free of autocrats, plutocrats and oligarchs—has segued into something else, a search for authentic identity, for self-actualisation, for the achievement of true individuality. Some have gone straight to the known sources in various spiritual traditions. But most have ended up seeking a proxy identity in the form of commodity consumption, consumer capitalism’s answer to meaninglessness. Others have looked for the answer in drugs. People continue to pursue more wealth and consume at ever higher levels because they do not know how better to answer the question ‘What do I do now?’. The agents of the marketing society have seized on the primal search for authentic identity to sell more gym shoes, cars, mobile phones and home furnishings. And what happens at the level of the individual translates into society’s preoccupation with growth, an autistic behavioural pattern reinforced daily by the platitudes of the commentators and the politicians. But this state of affairs can be sustained for only so long. Despite its extraordinary success over the last four or five decades, the marketing project must ultimately fail: in the last instance, a pair of designer jeans cannot satisfy the deeper urge to make sense of a life.
Drawing the decisive distinction between individualisation (self-determination) and individualism (selfishness), Beck succinctly poses the great question of our age: ‘How can the longing for self-determination be brought into harmony with the equally important longing for shared community? How can one simultaneously be individualistic and merge with the group?’.11 Finding the answer to the question is all the more difficult in an era of consumer capitalism, where the enormous resources of marketing are devoted to convincing us that the answer lies in the consumption process. Yet the true answer has long been known by the sages: the two are reconciled once we understand that genuine self-determination can be had only by committing oneself to others. As Beck reminds us, commitment to others does not necessarily mean total sacrifice of self. For most people, the art of living lies in balancing the two. Besides, if active compassion can be self-realisation, then looking to the interests of others is ‘self-interested’.
In the marketing society, power and oppression are no longer concerned predominantly with the domination of one group by another but are bound up with what people do to themselves. For most citizens, the fruits of growth have provided the means to seize emancipation, yet few have availed themselves of the opportunity. As is suggested later, this irony is perhaps most stark in the success of the women’s movement, where progress towards liberation was diverted into equality in work and consumption. While power, oppression and resistance were in an earlier era played out in the arena of production, now they are played out in the arena of consumption and the wider polity. This should not be taken to mean that the exercise of power has become wholly depersonalised by absorption into ‘the system’. As Andre Gorz argues, ‘. . . the dominated class is everywhere . . . it is no longer definable by its position in the process of production . . . domination is exerted over people outside enterprises as well as inside them, both in their work and in their lives outside work’.12
Industrial struggles still occur, but they are rarely life-or-death struggles. To be sure, certain groups in society are disparaged and victimised—the homeless, the long-term unemployed, people with disabilities, indigenous people—but the system has no structural interest in this sort of oppression, except perhaps a fiscal one.
For most workers, the modern economy and labour market provide some degree of autonomy that makes them much less subject to the dictates of the boss than they were in the past. This is more the case for some types of workers than for others, and it holds even in the face of attempts to remove protections in labour laws. In the West wage slavery belongs to another era. But if oppression is the opposite of liberation, and liberation means a life in which each person can live out their full potential and achieve true autonomy, we remain oppressed. Such a view is, of course, alien to the enlightened advocate of neoliberalism—after all, haven’t modern social movements swept away all the oppressions of the past? The sexual revolution freed us from our Victorian inhibitions; the women’s movement freed women from role stereotyping; gay liberation allowed free expression of sexual preference; and the civil rights movement eliminated institutionalised racism. Conservatives fulminated and progressive people celebrated.
The social movements of the post-war period have, however, for the most part represented no threat to consumer capitalism. Indeed, the counter-culture, the civil rights movement, the women’s movement, and even the mainstream parts of the environment movement have served to reinvigorate it. Post-war rebellions against oppression have worked in the interests of consumer capitalism because they have swept away ancient cultural and religious barriers to the most insidious form of oppression. This is the oppression implicit in sublimation of the self in pursuit of wealth, fame and social success, a form of oppression that is readily embraced. In the end, liberation is denied those who invest their lives in external reward.
This is not just a matter of personal choice: capitalism conspires to ensure that external rewards will triumph over the urge to liberation. In a famous passage on the conquering power of capitalism, Marx declared:
All fixed, fast-frozen relations, with their train of ancient and venerable prejudices and opinions, are swept away, all new-formed ones become antiquated before they can ossify. All that is solid melts into air, all that is holy is profaned, and man is at last compelled to face with sober senses, his real conditions of life, and his relations with his kind.13
Marx’s declaration was in some respects premature, since pre-industrial social conventions and conservative attitudes continued to impose constraints on the full manifestation of market capitalism for a century after publication of The Communist Manifesto. It is now becoming clear that the Sixties generation tilled the ground for the neoliberal reforms and ‘turbo-capitalism’ of the 1980s and 1990s. Railing against the conventions of their parents, the counter-culture tore down the social structures of conservatism that, for all their stultifying oppressiveness, held the market in check. The demands for freedom in private life, for freedom from the fetters of career and family, and for freedom of sexual expression were noble in themselves, but it is now evident that demolition of the customary social structures did not create a society of free individuals. Instead, it created an opportunity for the marketers to substitute material consumption and manufactured lifestyles for the ties of social tradition. In the face of revolutionary changes in social attitudes in the West, consumer capitalism has remained unruffled. Indeed, each new social revolution has provided an opportunity for consumer capitalism to rejuvenate itself. Both the counter-culture and environmentalism contained within them seeds of revolt, but they were effortlessly co-opted, so that now those who are inclined can simply buy an alternative lifestyle.
The women’s movement attacked the social and family conventions that kept women in the kitchen. The family built around the male breadwinner undoubtedly denied women the opportunity to spread their wings, but it also conditioned the labour market to operate on the assumption that workers had family responsibilities. Men formed trade unions to fight for limits on working hours, security of employment, and carefully regulated pay structures. When workers demanded a ‘living wage’ that could sustain a married man and his wife and children, the moral argument had wide appeal. This world of security in which people knew their roles as well as their social responsibilities has gone. The counter-culture took the hatchet to it long before the ideologues of the free market decided that we could all be richer if the labour market were deregulated. The counter-culture had its wish. Gone are the stuffy constraints of career expectations, nine-to-five regimentation and the life mapped out by the corporation’s hierarchy. Now workers are free-floating commodities in the labour market, often employed casually or on contract, the only consideration being their measurable contribution to the firm’s productivity. The future of each worker in the firm counts for little, although, as is argued in Chapter 6, this system also contains the seeds of its own demise.
So Margaret Thatcher should be thankful to Alan Ginsberg and Timothy Leary. The counter-culture tuned in, turned on and dropped out, but only long enough to sweep aside the social conventions that had provided the moral constraint on the amoral urgings of consumer capitalism. Born of the middle classes, the standard-bearers of the counter-culture returned with a vengeance in the shape of ‘bourgeois bohemians’, or bobos—switched-on share traders, professionals, journalists and executives in e-businesses.14 Bobos see no inconsistency between trading shares and sporting a ponytail. They feel they are making a personal statement by drinking coffee at a cafe decked out in ‘Third World chic’, unconscious of the fact that the manufactured style is alien to both rich and poor in the Third World. They support the oppressed of the Third World, but only so long as their support does not impinge on their own lifestyles. The best and most savvy marketers understand the psychology of the counter-culture; they are, after all, products of it. For the counterculture was never a revolt against capitalism: it was a revolt against the social conservatism that held capitalism back.
These social changes can be tracked through the demographics of the labour market. The transformation since the 1960s has been seismic in its social implications; in terms of their speed and social impact, the changes have rarely been matched in human history. The entry of large numbers of women into the labour market and the greater educational opportunities for girls (to the point where they now out-perform boys)—perhaps the greatest achievements of feminism—are inseparable from the changing patterns of fertility and nuptial arrangements. In Western Europe in the seventies, nine out of ten 30-year-old women had married; today, the figure is around one in two. Four in ten women today wait until after their 30th birthday to have a baby; in the seventies it was one in ten.15
Women are postponing starting families until they have established themselves in the labour market. This does not represent an aversion to having children; it is a result of joining the workforce in their twenties. When young women leave school they envisage marriage and motherhood for themselves, but in their twenties they are exposed to the market. As a result they become more cautious and recognise the financial and career risks associated with motherhood. And so they delay motherhood and have fewer children. In most countries of Europe and in Japan the fertility rate has fallen sharply since the 1970s—to well below the replacement rate. Women today know they do not have to rely on a good marriage to build a life of material comfort. Gaining a university degree can be a safer option. If your husband leaves, you might be left without companionship and with extra responsibilities for the children, but you will have retained an income-earning capacity, professional respect, and a sense of self that does not dissolve with the marriage. Independence has its benefits as well as its costs.
It is fitting that Germaine Greer should now shatter the feminist dream in her book The Whole Woman. For all the advances in education and employment and for all the dramatic changes in attitudes, women have now become paid-up members of the market system. They have achieved equality so that they can feel alienated and exploited in the way men do. They sought liberation but settled for equality. Greer might have gone further and said that women wanted liberation but were bought off with equality. Women can never be liberated until men are too, and neither can be free when they are active and willing participants in consumer culture. In the 1950s middle-class respectability may have been oppressive but it carried with it a certain deference. Women are the subject of far more sexual objectification now than they were in the 1950s, although men have become more adept at concealing it. And even the need to conceal has been discarded by the crass exploitation of ‘girl power’. Why should a young man pretend that he doesn’t lust after the young woman who has just burned him off at the traffic lights, when nubile popstars thrust their groins at the camera and declare ‘more power to us’?
As happened with the counter-culture of the 1960s, feminism has been co-opted. Greer observes, ‘What none of us noticed was that the ideal of liberation was fading out with the word’. The liberation of women from oppression was understood by the early feminists as freedom from internalisation of self-hatred and self-denigration. Algerian anti-colonialist author Franz Fanon and South African black consciousness activist Steve Biko understood that oppression runs deep: while discriminatory laws can be changed, the internalisation of oppression is far more insidious. Colonialism was threatened by liberation struggles, patriarchy by feminism, and segregation by the civil rights movement. But what sort of people would be left by liberation? The results of feminist struggles have become painfully clear: ‘Women’s liberation did not see the female’s potential in terms of the male’s actual; the visionary feminists of the late sixties and early seventies knew that women could never find freedom by agreeing to live the lives of unfree men’.16
Patriarchy became interpreted as a sort of add-on to consumer capitalism that could be dealt with while leaving the system intact. Women’s liberation turned out to be a superb marketing opportunity. Here was a huge new demographic that wanted something different—commodities that would express how the new woman felt about herself.
Patriarchy reflects a particular approach to power and its exercise, to social structure, to systems of reward and punishment, to ways of knowing the world and the self. If any large group were to step outside the marketing society they would indeed pose a severe threat to that society. A handful of hippies and radical feminists can be accommodated, but for half the population to demand real liberation and the opportunity to seek authentic individuality would be intolerable. It is not so much that ‘the economy’ is the centre around which all else, including gender relations, revolves; the centre is the social structuring of the means by which people can strive to realise their potential.
In arguing that the women’s movement sought liberation but settled for equality, Greer is asking once more about the nature of oppression. Patriarchy was not just something that men did to women; rather, it was a system of self-understanding embedded in a structure: ‘Equality is cruel to women because it requires them to duplicate behaviours that they find profoundly alien and disturbing. Men like the masculine world they have built for themselves . . . In constructing its male elite, masculinist society contrives to be cruel to most men, all women and all children’.17
Gender equality has meant, above all, unfettered opportunity for women to create themselves in the images invented for them by the marketers. Whether a woman is a dutiful housewife or a kick-arse careerist is a matter of indifference to the marketers, as long as she continues to spend. There is no difference between an advertising campaign that appeals to the image of the nurturing, caring mother and one that targets the power-dressed professional; indeed, the cleverer campaigns manage to combine both. Each is just a demographic; the only difference is that the independent professional believes she is more in control of her life when she is deciding what to buy. Greer has a cruel term for it—‘lifestyle feminism’:
. . . the kind of feminism that sees getting membership of the MCC or the Garrick Club as a triumph is lifestyle feminism that gives tacit support to a system that oppresses women worldwide. A ‘new feminism’ that celebrates the right (i.e. duty) to be pretty in an array of floaty dresses and little suits put together for starvation wages by adolescent girls in Asian sweat-shops is no feminism at all.18
Greer is right to say that feminism is incompatible with consumerism, because feminism, as a form of liberation, is about being true to one’s real self, while consumerism creates and sustains a false sense of the self, of the world and of one’s relationship to it. Equality is good for the market. It has meant a growing and better qualified workforce; it has destroyed old-fashioned ideas that employers need to pay enough to support a family; it has helped turn nurturing households into nodes of consumption; it has hastened the development of lifestyle thinking; and it has exposed a much larger proportion of the population to the direct influence of the advertisers. Mrs Thatcher has much to thank feminism for.
At the broadest level, globalisation is seen as either the most powerful contemporary source of progress or a new and insidious form of oppression. It is usually characterised as a process in which mighty economic forces increasingly link all corners of the world in a network dominated by, and operated in the interests of, large corporations. The process, which began in the 1970s, has seen potent economic actors, in tandem with political and cultural ones, impose their will on others who are seen to be passive victims. It is the product of the transformation of international institutions and domestic economic policies, which has facilitated almost unrestricted mobility of commodities and capital. Trade has been liberalised, international capital flows have been freed up and currencies have been floated, and all of these have been justified on the grounds that they will improve the rate of economic growth.
Perhaps the most dramatic feature of the modern globalised world is the extraordinary size and influence of international capital markets. Their power is usually measured in economic terms—their ability to change the status of a whole economy within days, or even hours. Definitions of globalisation tend to be specifically economic (‘the increasing organisation of finance, investment, production, distribution and marketing in a way that pertains to or embraces the world’19) or broadly social (‘the widening, deepening and speeding up of worldwide interconnectedness in all aspects of contemporary social life’20), perhaps focusing on cause and effect in turn. These are the terms in which globalisation has been viewed both in popular debate and in academic discourse. But such a simple explanation is implausible, not least because it leaves unasked the most important question. Why, at least until very recently, has globalisation met with so little resistance?
Notwithstanding the role of technological factors, which follow a largely autonomous path, the dimensions of globalisation could have been very different. Globalisation has gone as far as it has only because political decision makers, in countries with both democratic and authoritarian governments, have made a series of decisions to remove obstacles from its path—including decisions affecting trade, investment, capital markets, fiscal and monetary policies, public ownership and the operation of international institutions, all designed to reflect the wishes of the market. Apart from decisions to dismantle existing barriers, there have been important decisions, explicit or implicit, to resist pressure to put obstacles in the way of globalisation. The attempts in Malaysia and Mexico in more recent years to restrict capital flows raise the question of why more extensive attempts were not made earlier. If globalisation has such widespread negative effects, why have people, especially in Western nations, not done more to stop it?
The ideological power of the forces of globalisation is little discussed, yet it provides the beginning of the answer to the question of why globalisation has met with so little resistance. ‘The markets’ are not politically neutral. They constantly make judgments, or at least their actors make judgments, about the political desirability of all manner of policy decisions by national governments. For instance, they have a strong preference for measures that reduce inflation at the expense of higher unemployment, for measures that reduce public spending in ways that diminish welfare provision, and for precedence to be given to ‘development’ over environmental protection. While on the face of it the objective is to maximise returns on investments, in fact the pursuit of profit is not based on ‘objective’ information: it is based on political and ideological choices. To illustrate, the markets and their apologists in the economics profession consistently ignore evidence that contradicts their preference for small government, fiscal restraint and low inflation. Globalisation is thus not just the spread of corporate and financial activity: it is the spread of political ideas backed by economic power.
Although this is suggestive of the reasons why elites have acquiesced in the face of globalising forces, it does not explain why ordinary people have been complicit, albeit in many instances with reservations. The barrage of pro-market propaganda in the media, popular confusion about what is happening, and a pervasive sense of powerlessness all undoubtedly contribute. At another level, however, globalisation represents not just the export and imposition of economic policies built on neoliberal orthodoxy. It represents the export of a culture and a psychological disposition, one based on growth fetishism, compulsive consumption, and thoughtless exploitation of the natural world. In rich countries, popular scepticism was overruled by the repeated claim that deregulation in all its forms would increase growth, incomes and consumer choice. In the Third World, while many nations achieved political independence after the Second World War, their leaders had absorbed the most intoxicating idea of their colonisers, the belief that the first objective of any state should be economic growth. Colonialism could not have left a more powerful legacy, one that has morphed from the developmentalism of the 1960s into full-blown consumer capitalism. If the income has not trickled down, the ideology certainly has.
At its heart, therefore, globalisation is not so much about the deepening of global economic and financial networks or the extension of the international reach of corporations; it is about the restless spread of the ideology of growth and consumer capitalism. The instrumental processes of globalisation—the opening up of trade, the emergent power of financial markets, the trans-nationalisation of corporations, and international economic coordination—are the mechanisms by which a historically and culturally specific ideology, constituted as an independent force, has spread and colonised the world, including the ‘communist’ world. While the motive force is the accumulation of wealth through profit seeking, the ideology draws its legitimacy from the core belief that human wellbeing is advanced above all else by increasing the quantity and quality of goods and services consumed by individuals. This gives privileged place to all activities and policies that promise an increase in the rate of economic growth. Parallel with this formal set of beliefs are cultural forms of behaviour that place enormous emphasis on consumption as the foundation of lifestyle. This is why there has been so little resistance to globalisation: people from Beijing to Berlin, Boston to Beirut, have been persuaded by the ideology of consumer capitalism, that economic growth is the path to happiness and that unfettered markets will maximise that growth. In other words, globalisation has succeeded because people are besotted by consumption.
Belief in the power of growth and consumption is in turn buttressed by an instrumentalist attitude to the natural world, an attitude in which the environment is characterised as providing ‘resources’ that have value only because, and to the extent that, they contribute to human welfare as measured through market activity. This ideology conceives of the natural world as a more or less infinite source of material inputs into the production process and a more or less infinite sink for absorbing wastes, so that exploitation of it is not only a right but almost a duty. This reflects an approach to Nature whose genesis lies deep in the cultural roots of Western society, stretching back at least as far as the foundation of Christianity.21
Like growth itself, globalisation is now implanted in people’s minds as a force beyond human control. It is remarkable how widely it is believed that economic expansion is inevitable. This view is accepted uncritically by even the most progressive people, people who are quite willing to concede that more growth will not make us any better off. ‘The Economy’ has assumed such supremacy in people’s minds that it has taken on the character of a law of nature, like evolution. It is as if The Economy has broken away from human society and assumed a life of its own. We attempt to exert some control over it through macro-economic policy, but in the end it is beyond us. This objectification of the economy is a relatively recent development, although it has an older political precursor, the belief that ‘we can’t stop progress’. Before the 1970s fewer people believed that growth was inevitable; it was popularly believed that sustained productivity growth would soon take us to a time of plenty, when we would all be satiated and the need to work would sharply decline.
Several arguments are used in support of the belief that growth is inevitable. They are the arguments that will be used to suggest that the ‘post-growth society’ advocated in this book is utopian. The economics texts share at least one thing with popular wisdom—that human desire is insatiable and people will always want to increase their incomes. This is obviously a culturally specific belief that has been presented as ‘human nature’. Anyone with a knowledge of pre-industrial societies knows that, while greed has a very long history, the idea that human desire for material goods is inherently limitless is contradicted by the anthropological facts, including (as discussed in Chapter 8) some anthropological facts of the 21st century. But perhaps a more compelling explanation for the fact that so many people believe that economic growth is inevitable is simply that the mantra is so often intoned, and all authoritative people seem to believe it. So rarely is the inevitability of growth questioned that most people immediately become defensive when asked to follow the position through. Maybe the belief in the inevitability of growth is the counterpart of the consumerist dream: it is convenient to believe that growth will never end because such a belief opens up the possibility of unrestrained expansion in our lifetimes, thus validating our guilty acquisitiveness.