Bernie Gunther said:
OK. Here's a starter on standard of living.
It seems to me that when people are expressing dissatisfaction with their standard of living, they're usually doing it in reference to some image they have of how things should be. That might be by comparing themselves to some other class, and feeling relatively deprived. It might also, especially in our culture, be by comparison to some media image of standards of living.
I think it's worth making a distinction between this kind of deprivation and absolute deprivation, for example lack of adequate food, shelter and so on.
Most of the time, when I'm thinking about sustainability issues, I'm focussing on the latter as more fundamental, partly because if you can't feed and house people sustainably you haven't got sustainability and partly because I think there's an interesting synergy with the ability of capital to impose work.
There are problems with the emphasis on sustainability when addressing the question of absolute poverty.
When we think of absolute poverty in the UK we maybe talking at most about thousands of people while internationally this may describe millions or even billions of people. Where in the Uk the causes of absolute poverty may be attributed to a failure in social policy, but internationally we are not talking of a failure of social policy (for the policy is successful in achieving what it sets out to achieve) but a systematic approach to economy, trade, public ownership etc at the various treaty conferences, held under various auspices and the imposition of deliberately neo-liberal policy at the hands of bodies such as the IMF etc.
It is no co incidence that some of the worlds poorest live in what are, or potentially are, some of the most resource rich countries worldwide.
Mechanisms such as transfer pricing are used to remove commodities from countries at way below market value almost free of taxation and repatriating profits while an imposed laissez faire agenda restricts governments ability to even probe into these very issues.
These are not essentially questions of sustainability (or otherwise) but of global trade policy. These are questions that while being grappled with by the anti globalisation movement were muddied by the paternalistic Geldof and his cynical Live 8 exercise.
This raises the issue of trade- some advocate fair trade while some in the higher echelons deem more freetrade as the solution. While some on the left balk at the idea of free trade as a solution while it has been imposed on the developing world, it is on tariffs in the industrial north and subsidies that further attention needs to be given. Such is the world we live in.
In a post I made regarding issues for the working class one of the key issues for me was "having a voice", not because as a well off working class individual it is a luxury that I can emphasise this over say shelter, food etc but because as a working class individual who while living most of the time uncomfortably close to destituion reads far too much. I am aware of the fact that decisions taken in trade talks thousands of miles away, and frequently closer to home will push me closer to the breadline while prescribing death through malnutrition and preventable disease to millions of others who are relatively far more poor than I.
Decisions on issues and diverse as patents and the marketisation of public service impact on billions across the globe to the detriment of the poor and to the benefit of TNC's.
The solution to the end of poverty however does not lie in sustainable agriculture or localisation, nor in more labour intensive production methods.
While such approaches may be successful (and I have read of frequent examples internationally) place this against the onslaught of neo liberalism and they can only offer partial solutions in themselves. The real challenge is to the movements active in forcing change- to press hard enough for change at the highest level.
Why I would argue that a sustainable approach while maybe desirable in the longer term provides no solution to the immediate grinding poverty is that even where local approaches are necessary these have to be based on production of supluses for the purpose of trade, to fund health programmes etc a square meal after all will be no consolation to someone dying of malaria.
Don't get me wrong here, I am not for one minute arguing for unsustainability- that would be a nonsense. After all unsustainable agriculture could provide short term benefits, until of course it is no longer sustainable, not necessarily a generation later but in a far shorter timeframe. Paticularly here (amongst other examples) I have in mind deforestation of the rain forest for agriculture. This approach has proved in practice a failure as aside from issues such as climate change and hazards such as flooding the soil becomes barren and frankly unusable in such a short time.
While sustainability issue anywhere in the world in the longer term may well be one that needs address the deliberate impoverishment through privatisation and skewed trade is a far more pressing issue. While this has to be coupled with practices such as subsistence agriculture over practices such as intensive farming for export (which over time becomes counterproductive as the more is produced the more the market price falls) this cannot be seen as a long terms solution. For us to advocate such an approach in the industrial north to the peoples of the developing economies of the south is to in effect say- "we are industrialised, we have food, shelter, cars, mobile phones and bloody furbies. You desire not these things, raise yourselves up and be peasants! So it is deemed, Geldof has spoken."
To take this further; the availability of credit to the much of the post colonial developing world was in itself a poisoned challice and rather than forge a new era of independence in effect bound the south to the north in newer ways- neo-colonialism. Debt servicing forced nations to depend on aid, while the IMF ordered the privatisation of services and the dismantling of non profitable infrastructure with an impact on health, education, communications, transport and more.
Of course where the IMF has impoverished peoples have become rightly pissed off, during the cold war this led to nationalist movements and national liberation movements that began meeting with some success, the antidote by the North keen to protect its interests has been for tied aid (tied to arms and the tools of oppression).
Much has been made about the corruption of certain leaders in the third world- these leaders are not necessarily corrupt as such. Forced between a population who seek improvements and an IMF who threaten bankruptcy should such demands be met they have often fallen into line behind doner (arms trader) states- the same states who in public may blame poverty on the corruption of the politian while at the same time funding and arming these governments, knowing which side their bread is buttered on.
So in terms of answering the questions of absolute and relative poverty it is a far more vexing question than can be answered simply with sustainability and localism. Other states who have answered such questions differently have met with some successes- Cuba following state socialism, South Korea by industrialisation, state intervention and a degree of protectionism in key sectors.
Sustainability questions and issues are still extremely important and need answering but for much of the world taking control of our lives has to mean the taking back control of our natural resources and manufacturing capacity- a course incidentally being charted today by the Venezuelan government as they take over idle land, resources and manufacturing often not on the terms of wholesale nationalisation but part state/part worker owenrship.
When democracy is taken back the appropriate forums for the debate of and implementation of policies vis-a-vis sustainability can surely lead to a shift in direction on the other hand for much of the developing world it is easy to see the attraction in leaving the land to work in manufacturing in TNC owned factories even where wages are barely subsistence.
Incidentally I read an interesting piece a while back on an NGO website (forget which) which argued a case against boycotts of the product of child labour. Its easy from here up North do take such a pious stand against such an exploitative approach but in the absence of a safety net may be a course that proves counterproductive- how do we answer a child who when asked by his or her family where the money is this week announces that a boycott by liberal do-gooders up north has resulted in the loss of work.
I know I ve jumped all over the place here in talking about standard of living and hopefully got in the points I meant to cover- debt, aid, transfer pricing, industialisation, globalisation, IMF but I may have forgot to put my oligatory reference to furbies in the post.
I have just noticed that this is a long post so I'd be better of leaving the issue of poverty, the media, mobility and aspiration in the Uk to another post-
I might even throw something controvertial into the mix by considering how industrialisation need not be an anathema to sustainability and how notions of labour intensity as a solution may turn out to be a luxury for the already heavily burdened working class that proves to be one straw too many for the back.
Hope this contribution is useful to the debate and that it goes some way to finding a synthesis between sustainability v standard of living, after all it may well prove that the two are not exclusive to one another.
