Book summary: "Life After Progress: Technology, Community and the New Economy"

In The Economic Journal in 1960, professor of economics J.L. Sadie explained that, for the development of traditional societies, “Unhappiness and discontentment in the sense of wanting more than is obtainable at any moment is to be generated. The suffering and dislocation that may be caused in the process may be objectionable, but it appears to be the price that has to be paid for economic development; the condition of economic progress.”1)

Suffering, dislocation, unhappiness and discontentment – unfortunate but necessary costs for individuals and societies to achieve … “economic progress” in the guise of perpetual growth, expansion of production and consumption, acquisition and acceleration, more-bigger-better. All of this, in turn, supposedly for the eventual production of happiness and contentment, the very conditions that had to be originally destroyed in the process.

While such admissions of the true costs of modern economic development may no longer be uttered so brazenly, it would be a mistake to think that the underlying sentiment and prescription has been abandoned whatsoever. What is the global advertising industry – and the global corporate media in general – but a gigantic multi-billion-dollar discontentment machine generating frustrated desire and toxic affluence in service of accelerating capital accumulation through consumption (true to its original meaning, literally ‘burning up’)? Growth statistics – of everything from cars to waste to anti-depressant drugs – are testament to the spectacular business success of the enterprise, even as the planet and the majority of people suffer terminal burnout.

Such has been the over-riding meaning of the notorious term “progress” in the modern era, an obviously politically charged, ethnocentrically conceived concept that has nonetheless been passed off as the natural, universal trajectory and destiny of all peoples by its various protagonists over the centuries. On those who have resisted this universal prescription, it has been and continues to be imposed all over the world, by force if necessary.

It is against this violent project that a new book from Local Futures titled Life After Progress has recently been published. Not the various alternative conceptions of progress – “genuine progress” and the like – but against the still-dominant mainstream version, where accelerating economic growth and ever-more technology are axiomatic goods and desirable ends that can solve the very crises they themselves spawn. In a series of essays collected from many years’ of writing by Local Futures members, the book combines arguments against the globalization of the growth fetish and corporate rule, and for downscaling and localization alternatives – in food, education, technology, knowledge and many other areas.

The section heads provide a sort of roadmap to the argument. ‘Beginnings’ forms a baseline from which to measure ‘progress’. ‘Breakdown’ details the worldwide socio-ecological catastrophe unleashed by this system, while ‘Drivers of the Global System’ points to the pivotal role of such forces as technology, education, subsidies, and consumerism in perpetuating and spreading it.

Turning towards the multiplicity of alternatives emerging and long-existing needed to counter to this, the later sections of the book push back against fatalism and complacency in the face of the many noxious offspring of progress. ‘Towards New Economies’ explains the need for both resistance against the dominant system, and renewal of communities, local solidarity economies, ecological wisdom and the like. ‘Local Food’ focuses in on what is arguably the most critical area for change, and how communities everywhere are reclaiming their daily sustenance from the grip of global corporations. ‘False Promises’ flags dangerous market (and profit)-friendly distractions cooked up by said corporations, including greenwashing, green consumerism, micro-finance, etc. ‘Big Picture Activism’ sums up the collection, showing the inter-related nature and origins of the multiple crises afflicting both planet and people, and how many of them can simultaneously be solved through a systemic, radical shift in direction. Overall, the book shows that for life to persist on this planet, the mainstream and exhausted notion of progress must be left behind.

More information

1)
Sadie, J.L. (1960) ‘The Social Anthropology of Economic Underdevelopment’, The Economic Journal, 70(278), quoted in Gérald Berthoud, ‘Market’, in Sachs, W. (1992) The Development Dictionary, Zed Books