By Ted Trainer

ABSTRACT

A sustainable and just world cannot be achieved without enormous structural and cultural change. The argument presented below is that when our situation is understood in terms of resource and ecological limits, it is evident firstly that getting rid of capitalism is not sufficient. A satisfactory alternative society cannot be highly industrialised or centralised, and it must involve highly self-sufficient local economies and largely self-governing communities that prioritise cooperation and participation. Above all, there must be degrowth to a far lower GDP per capita than that exists in rich countries today, with a concomitant embracing of very frugal material “living standards.” Only a basically anarchist society can meet these conditions satisfactorily. Secondly, given this goal the transition to it can only be achieved via an anarchist strategy. Both these themes point to the need for substantial rethinking of essential elements in mainstream socialist and Marxist theory.

A sustainable and just world cannot be achieved without enormous structural and cultural change.  The argument below is that when our situation is understood in terms of resource and ecological limits it is evident firstly that a satisfactory alternative society has to be built on Anarchist principles, and secondly that the transition to it can only be achieved via an Anarchist strategy.

THE GLOBAL STUATION

Consumer-capitalist society cannot be made ecologically sustainable or just. The accelerating global problems now threatening us with destruction cannot be solved in a society that is driven by obsession with high rates of production and consumption, affluent living standards, market forces, the profit motive and economic growth. The only way out is via a huge and radical transition to The Simpler Way.

An exaggeration? Only if you fail to grasp the magnitude of the overshoot. Just consider for instance the well known “footprint” numbers. (World Wildlife Fund, 2013.) It takes about 8 ha of productive land to provide water, energy settlement area and food for one person living in Australia. So if 9 billion people were to live as we do in Sydney we would need about 72 billion ha of productive land.  But that is about 9 times all the available productive land on the planet. Even now footprint analyses indicate that the world is consuming resources at 1.5 times a sustainable rate.

There are even worse multiples for minerals.  The top ten iron ore and bauxite consuming nations have per capita use that is around 65 and 90 times respectively the rates for all the other nations. (Weidmann et al., 2014.)  Mineral ore grades are falling. There is obviously no possibility of all people ever rising to anything like present rich world levels of mineral use.

These facts only describe the grossly unsustainable present rich world levels of production and consumption.  But we are determined to increase present levels of output and consumption, living standards and GDP as much as possible and without any end in sight.  In other words, our supreme national goal is economic growth.  Few people seem to recognise the absurdly impossible implications. If the expected 9 billion people were to rise to the ”living standards” Australians would have in 2050 assuming 3% p.a. economic growth, the total global amount of producing and consuming going on would then be about thirty times as great as it is now.  We’d need to harvest natural resources from about 45 planet earths.

In addition, it is also now clear that increasing the GDP in a rich country produces only a negligible if any improvement in the quality of life!

It is difficult to see how anyone aware of these basic numbers could avoid accepting that people in countries like Australia should be trying move to far simpler and less resource-expensive lifestyles and economies.  The decreases might have to be around 90%, so they could not be achieved without dramatic reductions in the amount of production and consumption and therefore economic activity going on. This is what the “limits to growth” literature has been telling us for decades, but most economists, politicians and ordinary people totally fail to grasp the point.

THE ALTERNATIVE – MUST BE AN ANARCHIST SOCIETY.

The limits to growth analysis of our situation means that a sustainable and just society for all has to be some form of classical anarchist society.  The following discussion shows that there can be no choice about this. The only way se can get resource and environmental impacts right down while enabling all people on earth to enjoy a good life is by moving to the kind of systems, goals, ideas and values anarchists stress.  Their main principles are

Social relations in which individuals and  institution avoid dominating others, that is, exercising the power to force anyone to go against their wishes. Some minimal power might be unavoidable, such as when criminals need to be locked up.

Thus there should be no government of people, that is government by separate bodies including democratically elected representatives.  Government should be by all people, via systems which enable all to participate directly in the discussion of issues and the forming of decisions and policies.

Issues involving large regions should be handled via federations, that is arrangements whereby the small towns and regions send delegates to conferences where ;policies are worked out, and send back down to the small units so all can accept or reject them. Simioarly there canbe a role for lbureaucraciesto opdratecomplex things like railway systems, but these would hvno poer toform policy; their role would be to suggest the best ways and people at the base level would deide.

Thus the principle of “subsidiarity” is crucial; no decision orprocess shouldbe carried outat a  higher level if it can be handed at a lover level.

Spontanaeity

Mutual aid    hnumans can do it

THE SIMPLER WAY.

“The Simpler Way” is the term some of us are using for the kind of society in which we could easily make these huge reductions, while actually liberating ourselves to enjoy a far higher quality of life than we have now … if we wanted to.  But we could not do it without historically unprecedented radical structural and cultural changes, above all abandoning the quest for affluence and wealth.

Following are the basic elements in The Simpler Way. (For the detailed account see TSW: The Alternative.) It will be explained that these embody basically anarchist principles.  That is, a future society designed to be viable in terms of ecological, resource, moral and quality of life criteria in the coming era of intense scarcity will (have to) operate according to some of the basic principles argued by anarchist social and political thinkers.

First the required lifestyle, geographical and economic arrangements will be outlined, and then  their anarchist connections will be discussed.

Material lifestyles, levels of production and GDP must be far lower.

This is the most important element, and it is typically not grasped by people on the left. In fact critics of capitalism usually believe that it is to be replaced by systems that will free the forces of production to provide much higher material livings standards to all. A glance at the above “limits” issues to do with resource and ecological limits and the inequality in the global economy completely rules out anything like this goal.

The left also typically argues that reducing global production levels will further impoverish the poor majority of the world’s people. This fails to see that conditions for the poorest people can be raised to quite satisfactory levels if the capitalist development theory and practice are abandoned and The Simpler Way notion of “appropriate development” is adopted. (See TSW, Third World Development.)

The main purpose of advocates of The Simpler Way is to persuade people that it enables a higher quality of life than most people in rich countries have, on levels of resource consumption and GDP per capita that are a small fraction of those today.  But this is not possible unless profound changes are made from the values, sources of satisfaction and life goals dominant in consumer-capitalist society.  Groups such as the Simplicity Institute are trying to show how rich benefits derive from living in materially simple ways and gaining enjoyment from community involvement, personal development, gardening, arts and crafts, and from the many skills involved in running a self-sufficient, sharing, productive and frugal household. (See TSW: Your Delightful Day.)

Local economic self-sufficiency.

A society in which resource consumption is dramatically reduced must be mostly made up of settlements which are small and highly self-sufficient, producing most of the basic things they need from local resources.  This means far less trade within and between nations, and far less movement of goods within nations.  It means households, neighbourhoods, suburbs, towns and surrounding regions producing for themselves as much as they reasonably can. We need to convert our presently barren city suburbs into thriving and productive economies.

This is most easily done with respect to food.  Suburbs can be crammed with gardens, commons containing orchards and woodlots, fish tanks, and mini-farms. Many home gardens and mini-farms throughout suburbs would enable all nutrients to be recycled back to the soil through animal pens, compost heaps and garbage gas units.  This would largely eliminate the need for a fertilizer industry. Grain and dairy products would be brought in in bulk from areas as close to towns as possible.  Meat consumption would be greatly reduced but could mostly come from small animals such as poultry, rabbits and fish, rather than cattle. Food quality would be much higher than it is now.  There would be almost no need for fertilizers, food packaging, moving food long distances, or marketing and little need for fridges.

There will be far less need for transport. Most people could get to local workplaces on foot or bicycle.  We could dig up many roads, greatly increasing city land area available for community gardens, workshops, ponds, forests etc.  Most of your neighbourhood could become a Permaculture jungle, an “edible landscape” full of long-lived, largely self-maintaining productive plants. We should convert one house on each block to become the neighbourhood workshop, including a recycling store, meeting place, craft rooms, art gallery, tool library, surplus exchange and library. Local sources of leisure would reduce travel for entertainment and holidays.

There would be many varieties of animals living in our neighbourhoods, including an entire fishing industry based on tiny tanks and ponds.  The nutrient rich water would flow to gardens and hydroponic vegetable trays. In addition many materials can come from the communal woodlots, fruit trees, bamboo clumps, ponds, meadows, clay pits etc.

An extremely important element would be the many “commons” we would develop throughout neighbourhoods, the community orchards, herb beds, clay pits, sheds, craft rooms, windmills, ponds, animal pens and woodlots providing free food and materials.  These would be built and maintained by the voluntary community working bees, which would also carry out many services such as helping to care for old people, mind children, assist teachers, maintain the parks and the (few remaining) roads.  These resources, along with the many committees looking after various town activities, would give us many interesting and worthwhile contributions to make and therefore help to maintain town cohesion and pride.

It would be a leisure-rich environment, full of familiar people, small businesses, common projects, drama clubs, animals, gardens, farms, forests and alternative technologies.  It would therefore provide many interesting things to observe and do.  Any neighbourhood has abundant unused potential cultural and leisure resources including entertainers such as comedians, actors, artists, musicians, play writers, acrobats, jugglers and dancers.  People would be less inclined to travel for leisure or holidays, reducing the national energy consumption. The local leisure committee would organise a rich variety of concerts, festivals, mystery tours, visiting speakers and other activities.

The document TSW: Remaking East Hills details the way a normal outer Sydney suburb might easily be restructured along these lines, to be highly self-sufficient in food and other things, while dramatically reducing dollar, energy and ecological costs.

More communal and cooperative ways.

We would be on voluntary rosters, committees and working bees to carry out most of the orchard pruning, child minding, basic educating and care of aged and disabled people in our area.  We would perform many of the functions councils now carry out for us, such as maintaining our own parks and streets.  We would therefore need far fewer councils and professionals, greatly reducing the amount of income we would need to earn to pay for services and to pay taxes.  A strong sense of cooperation, solidarity, responsibility and empowerment would be built by the voluntary community working bees.  The situation would encourage us to contribute, cooperate and share, and be involved in decision making because we would know that our welfare depended on all doing these things, and more importantly we would experience the intrinsic rewards of collectivism.

The new economy

There is no chance of making these kinds of changes within the present economic system.   The new economy would have to enable rational collective application of the limited available resources and productive capacity to providing the basic things needed for all to have a good life. It could have no growth and it could not be driven by market forces. There might be a role given to them but the basic production, investment and distribution decisions would have to be made by deliberate and collective processes. Remember resources will be extremely scarce and there will be little scope for production of unnecessary luxuries and trivia. If it is left to competition within the market to determine who gets resources and what industries are developed, the strongest and richest few will quickly win that competition and grab everything.

Towns and suburbs will be able to completely eliminate unemployment, poverty and homelessness.  They will simply set up small firms and cooperative gardens and workshops whereby those without jobs can contribute to producing goods and services the town needs, being paid in our local currency.

Most people would need to work for money only one or two days a week, because they would not need to buy much, and many of the things they need would come freely (such as fruit from the commons) or could be paid for by contributions to community working bees. (In consumer-capitalist society we probably work three times too hard!)  We could spend the other 5 or 6 days working/playing around the neighbourhood.

Surrounding the town or suburban economy there would be a regional economy in which more elaborate items would be produced, such as shoes, hardware and tools. Few items, including steel, would be moved long distances from big centralised factories. Very little would need to be transported from overseas.

Local economies would need to import some (few) things from the wider regional and national economies. These would need to be radically reorganised to provide export opportunities for all towns so that they could pay for the (few) imports they need. (See below.) As people become more dependent on and involved in their local economies (as the existing global economic system increasingly fails) they will realise how crucial it is for the national economy to be reorganised to provide necessary basic inputs to the towns.  They are therefore very like insist that the basic industries such as steel and railways must be publicly owned and run.

Contrary to the common “socialist” assumption, most of the small firms and farms could (and in my view should) remain as privately owned ventures or cooperatives, so long as their goals did not include profit maximisation or growth.  They would have to operate within strict guidelines set by town assemblies. This would give their owners the satisfaction associated with running their own little bakery or farm. These activities would be seen as ways of earning a stable income and being appreciated for helping to provide the town with necessities. Obviously in a zero-growth economy it cannot be possible for some firms to strive to take more sales and business and become rich, driving others into bankruptcy. The town will have the (possibly difficult) task of managing these matters, for instance working out the best restructuring if one baker is far more efficient than the others, to maximise the welfare of the town.  (They would not allow one to be eliminated by bankruptcy, deprivingt a family of its livelihood and wasting town productive capacity.) Private little firms will (have to be) seen as providing secure livelihoods for families and cooperatives, enabling the earning of stable adequate incomes while enjoying their chosen craft and deriving reputation and satisfaction from contributing quality contributions to meeting town needs.

The town would have a “business incubator” made up of experienced people, to help firms to be viable.  If a firm was struggling, or no longer needed it would help to work out how best to reallocate the premises and people.

Most of the real economy would function without money. Most of our daily goods and services would come via households, neighbourhood gardens, workshops and kitchens and the swapping of surpluses and giving and helping. We would get many things free from the commons, and many services would be free, such as the concerts. Most of us would not need to earn much money.  The town would have its own bank and its own local currency, enabling it to set up enterprises to “employ” homeless etc. people and to pay them with IOU’s enabling them to buy things produced by other town firms.

In the early years of the transition these new arrangements would gradually be built up in an Economy B under the old Economy A which continued to operate according to market principles.  (See TSW; The Transition.) As the global situation deteriorates Economy A will increasingly run into trouble, prompting increasing numbers of people to come across to the alternative system. However in the longer term a town might opt to retain a small Economy A in which some people might seek to produce for instance hand-made dresses or works of art to sell in a more or less “free” market.  Over time we would be able to see whether it was a good idea to retain such a sector, but in my view it is quite likely that town assemblies would not see a need for it, given that their overriding concern would be to make sure that all needs, including for initiative, efficiency, freedom and personal growth and fulfilment were being met.  (See TSW: The Case Against the Market.)

The very large reductions in resource use that these ways could enable are illustrated in their application to an outer Sydney suburb, discussed in TSW: Remaking East Hills. Detailed numerical analysis indicates how the suburb might produce most of its own food, water, energy and many other goods and services while greatly reducing present resource costs, the paid working week, and ecological damage, eliminating unemployment, and greatly increasing community and the quality of life.

Note that these changes would be made gradually, as the global economy deteriorates and local communities grope their way to providing more for themselves. They cannot be made quickly, because they have to be made by ordinary people slowly shifting to and running new ways where they live. So it will be possible to avoid any alarming suggestion that the transition has to involve sudden, massive or chaotic revolutionary change.

It will be explained below that so far the discussion has only been about Stage 1 of a two stage revolution, and the second stage will be where the biggest and most radical structural changes take place, including scrapping growth, national industrial planning and reorganisation, and preventing market forces from determining national economic functioning.  Only if the above developments at the local level proceed well will people come to the outlook that must be there before they will insist on the Stage 2 goals.  Revolutions of this magnitude, bigger than any ever made previously, cannot take place unless there is very strong mass support, and the way to build that is through the above focus on localism. (See further below on the transition.)

                                 Government and politics.

This is where the significance of anarchism begins to become more apparent.  Viable and satisfactory communities of the kind described would have to be largely self-governing and independent of any state or centralised authority.  These communities simply could not work if they were not free to run their own affairs. The people who live in the town are the only ones who understand the local conditions, know what will grow best there, what people there want and how they think, what the traditions are, and what strategies will and won’t work there.  They will have to do the planning, make the decisions, run the systems, turn up to working bees and do the work. They are the only ones who can monitor, maintain and adjust the social machinery that has to be in good shape or the town will fail. The right decisions for the town can only be decisions the town’s discussion and thinking has led it to believe are right for it.  The townspeople must be conscientious, energetic, innovative, responsible, keen to make things run well, proud of what they have built and how they do things, and they must feel empowered and able to run their own affairs.  These elements cannot exist if people are governed by distant politicians and bureaucrats.  Responsibility has to lie with them, not some external authority. These conditions have to be in place or the most important element will not be there, i.e., the spiritual attitude, the sense of empowerment, the recognition that responsibility is required, that the collective welfare must be top priority, the satisfaction that comes from community and caring, and the pride that comes from knowing that we run our town well.

Thus the appropriate form of “government” must be a thoroughly participatory democracy, not a representative democracy. Most of the decisions that mattered will have to be taken at the level of the town assembly at which everyone has the right and the duty to speak, serve on committees, work out the best option, and vote. Without this participatory process the best technical decisions for the town will not be arrived at, and the town will not have the necessary world view and spirit. Obviously centralised governments cannot do these things.  In any case in the coming era of scarcity they will not have the resources to decide what every tiny town and suburb should do.

Our situation of dependence on the local ecological and social systems will generate a more cooperative outlook, more concern with the public good and the welfare of others. It will be obvious that we as individuals would only live well if our town thrived.  Our real wealth and welfare will be due to public factors, such as a caring community around us, the beautiful landscapes we have planted, the support networks, the high quality free fruit and the great concerts. Our personal incomes and property will not be important. The situation would require and reward good citizenship and concern for the town’s welfare.

Anarchists understand that good conditions bring out the best in people. Bad behaviour is mostly due to the intolerable conditions oppressive societies force people to endure. Free them from deprivation, exploitation and fear and you will be surprised at how nicely they treat each other.  It is much more satisfying to share, cooperate, work together and care for each other than to compete and beat each other and take more than your fair share. In The Simpler Way there is a powerful synergism. The conditions and incentives it involves produce good feelings and behaviours. We will be in conditions where our personal welfare is directly dependent on how well the town works together and how well people cooperate, care for and help each other. Because these conditions involve us in contributing together on the working bees and committees, having to think about the best use for the parking lot we are going to dig up, giving and receiving surpluses and assistance, and cooperating, we will constantly experience the reinforcing benefits of being nice and good citizens.

Think of it in terms of what controls behaviour and keeps people doing what is socially acceptable.  In societies where there is domination by “authorities” compliance and order are at least partly due to force and fear.  People conform because they know that if they don’t they will be punished by authority. So if there is no higher authority and people are free to make arrangements and negotiate with each other why would a person abide by social rules? In a satisfactory society he would do so because a) he had participated in deciding what the mutually beneficial rules were, b) he would therefore want to maintain the social order those rules enable, and c) he would want to maintain his reputation as a good citizen. Reputation is a very important force for good behaviour in a small community where people know you and your history.  If you don’t turn up to working bees well that can not be removed from your record.

So most “government” will take place at the very small scale level of the town and it will take place informally, almost without thinking about it.  Groups will see things that need doing or fixing and just get together to do them. This is the anarchist principle of “spontaneity”, the belief that people can come together to do what’s necessary without guidance or orders from any authority. The overt and deliberate decision making will mostly take place through discussions in kitchens and on working bees as people consider the pros and cons and implications of options.  Sometimes there will be lengthy processes of groping towards what everyone eventually realises is the best thing to do, maybe involving formal town-level debates and votes.

Thus the norm and at least the goal will be consensus decision making.  Taking a vote at the town assembly will usually at best be a formality, or a way of seeing whether agreement on the best option for the town has been reached. If the split is 51 to 49 that just means we are far from agreeing on what is best and to decide now would be to leave half our town unhappy.  Contrast this with politics in representative democracies and especially capitalist societies where the vote is about self-interested groups and individuals competing to get the decision that favours themselves, and close votes leave many discontented.

Of course from time to time issues that can’t be win-win or consensus will be encountered.  Caring communities conscious of the crucial importance of avoiding discontent within the town will work hard to compensate or console.  At least people will be inclined to accept their share of unfavourable decisions for the good of the town.

This political situation therefore illustrates another important anarchist principle, that of self organisation and self regulation.  Kropotkin pointed out that in nature no overarching authority decides what is to be done.  Those elements involved in an ecosystem adjust to each other through their interactions, often cooperating and shifting in mutually beneficial ways.  In The Simpler Way most of the processes and changes will be worked out by mutually beneficial discussion between those affected, and the whole town will mostly exhibit self-regulation at a level below that of the town assembly. If your family is going on a picnic there is no need to fill out forms in triplicate and submit them to the picnic licencing authority.

It should not need to be noted that small communities can be conformist and oppressive.  A sensible town will be very conscious of the need to monitor and think critically about how things are going, levels of satisfaction, and important social indices.  It would be wise to have a standing committee watching things like how contented the old people are, whether adolescents have enough to do, is there a gossip problem, are the free community bikes not being returned well enough, do we need the leisure committee to organised more activities, are some people depressed or struggling…  The regular weekly meeting on a Kibbutz, Eco-village or commune is where such issues and reports from committees are raised.  Developing the processes and skills needed to raise critical issues and discontents in non-offensive ways are among the factors constituting the wisdom of a good town. Some communities set up networks of “village elders” with whom issues can be discretely discussed.

Because the new communities will be highly dependent on their local ecosystems for food, resources, water, leisure, security and wellbeing there will be strong “earth bonding”, sense of place and of belonging, and feelings of appreciation and respect for nature.  People will not be isolated from nature as they are in cities. Thus The Simpler Way is likely to remedy what Bookchin saw as the readiness to dominate nature as well as other humans. When your welfare depends heavily on how well you treat your local ecosystems you will probably care for them. But it goes beyond self- interest. When you live close to the earth you are frequently confronted by its miracles and bounty, and are therefore likely to feel appreciative, in awe, and humble, and to treat the environment properly. Thus The Simpler Way is well-described as a variety of “Eco-anarchism”. It claims that ecological sustainability can only be achieved via transition to anarchist social ideas and practices.

But all this has only been about the political situation within the local neighbourhood, suburb and town. But towns cannot be perfectly self-sufficient.  They will need (a relatively small amount of) inputs from the wider economy. The wider regional and national economies outside the town must be radically restructured to have as their overriding function the provision of basic inputs to the towns, the corrugated iron, poly-pipe, chicken wire netting, boots, cloth rolls, soldering acid…  (The list is remarkably short; see TSW: The Local Economy Input List.)  Achieving this enormous restructuring is Stage 2 of this revolution, discussed in more detail below.  The point here is that this new “state” level economy must also be organised and governed according to anarchist principles whereby the power and authority remains with the town assemblies, enabling every person to have an equal say in those aspects of government that have to be more centralised.  Thus towns will send delegates to committees and conferences dealing with for instance the water management of a big river valley, to think out what the best plan might be, but these ideas will be taken back down to all the town assemblies to be approved.  “State” level agencies will only be bureaucracies that manage (and organise and research and report…) and will have no power to make decisions.  Again only the towns are capable of saying what wider arrangements are workable and desirable.  Centralised rulers cannot do this. Thus the remnant “state” would be very small, and powerless, and even major national decisions would be made by everyone.  There might be situations in which this would be complex, messy and time consuming, but that would be seen as the price for democracy and avoiding state power.

These arrangements reflect the necessity for the anarchist principles of “subsidiarity” and “federation. The management of that river catchment can be handled by delegates from the towns and regions affected, without edicts from any higher body.

Note that this is a different and stronger case for anarchism than anarchists have typically put in the past. They have rightly argued that it is undesirable in principle for people to be ruled over, that rule by superior authorities is not necessary, that the state is an especially dangerous and undesirable thing (typically operating in the interests of the rich and itself, and with the power to make war) and that we should rule ourselves.  But that case is essentially “moral” and we now have in addition a very coercive case deriving from sustainability.  In the coming era of severe limits and scarcity a sustainable and just society cannot be an affluent, industrialised consumer society, let alone one that pursues ever greater wealth, so must involve mostly small scale local communities focused on a high quality of life for all and with no interest in competition or gain.  This is not optional. Such communities cannot work well unless they function according to the basic anarchist model of self government via thoroughly participatory democracy.

New ideas and values.

The biggest and most difficult changes required for The Simpler Way will have to be in outlook and values.  The present commitment to individualistic competition for affluent-consumer “living standards” and endless increases in wealth would have to be replaced by a strong desire to live simply and frugally, cooperatively, and self-sufficiently.  The enormity of this challenge is difference easily underestimated.  It involves extremely radical cultural change, including reversing and scrapping some of the fundamental assumptions and commitments that have driven Western society for hundreds of years ( and that have been fundamental in much Left thinking.) But there is no way of avoiding this contradiction.  Our global predicament means that our resource-squandering conception of “progress” and our ultimate goal of limitlessly increasing material wealth has to be abandoned.  This is not possible unless there is enormous reversal in some of the fundamental ideas, values and goals that have driven our society for hundreds of years.

There are however grounds for thinking that this problem is more tractable than it might at first seem to be. It is very important to stress that living very simply does not have to mean deprivation or hardship.  Firstly it means being content with what is sufficient for comfort, hygiene, efficiency, etc.  It means realising that there are alternatives to seeking life-satisfaction in consuming or wealth accumulation. A small, sustainable, warm, fireproof mud brick house can be quite sufficient for comfort and convenience, and very beautiful. And if you are content with one of these you will have gained several years to put into your art or gardening or sitting in the sun, as distinct from working to pay off a huge mortgage.

Nor should living in ways that are frugal and that minimise resource use be seen as an irksome sacrifice that must be made in order to save the planet.  These ways can be rich sources of life satisfaction, including gardening, making things, sharing surpluses, joining in working bees and contributing to community celebrations and festivals.  (Again see TSW: Your Delightful Day.)

It should also be stressed that The Simpler Way does not mean cutting back on research, universities or advanced technology.  It would enable retention of all the high tech and modern ways that are socially desirable, e.g., in medicine, windmill design and public transport.  In fact we would have far more resources for these things than we have now.  This is because we could transfer many of the resources currently being wasted on the vast production of unnecessary things, including arms. In addition when we only need to work one day a week for money people will have far more time to devote to science and technical research, especially on the plant varieties, mechanical devices and social arrangements that are best suited to their town’s location.

THE TRANSITION.

If the goal must be a Simpler Way society then there are major and novel implications for thinking about the process of transition to it.  One is that most previous thinking about transition strategy has been mistaken.  Another is that much of the “socialist” Left’s thinking about transition has been mistaken.  The path that has to be taken is basically an Anarchist one.

Marxists and Anarchists seem to have quite similar ideas about the form that society will take in the long term, i.e., a “communism” in which there are no classes and no domination of some by others, no relations of power or privilege, and no state power, and in which things are done cooperatively, all are cared for, and there is no “alienation”.  But they differ sharply on how to get to such a goal.

Those who identify as Marxists but who are more accurately labelled Leninists believe that getting rid of capitalism requires the leadership of a strong, centralised and determined revolutionary group, and that it will involve violence because dominant classes never voluntarily give up their privileges. (This is not Marx’s position; see Avineri, 1968.) This is a plausible position and these “Marxists” criticise Anarchists for failing to accept the need for direct confrontation, to see that it will be necessary to be ruthless and violent, and to accept that strong top-down rule will be essential to establish the new ways.  “Marxists” and  “socialists” today generally believe that a leadership group should take state power and push through the big changes but that in the long run when people have come to see that the new ways are better state power can be wound back and people will be capable of self government (with little and possibly no role for a state as we know it.) The argument below is that this puts the cart before the horse.  It might have been the right order of events in all past revolutions, in which the goal was to take control of a existing socio-economic system basically geared to producing increasing wealth and run that same basic economy for the benefit of all, more efficiently and productively.

But that worldview has been decisively invalidated by the advent of the era of scarcity, by the fact that we have run into limits to growth and the goal now has to be a society which not only has no growth but functions at a much lower level of GDP, industrialisation, production and consumption.  This revolution is vastly more extensive and complex than just replacing the capitalist control of the affluence machine.  It is a revolution utterly different from any others.  The biggest and most problematic element in it is not even economic, it is the cultural reversal; we cannot get anywhere unless all interest in gain is abandoned and life purpose and satisfaction are sought in other than material goals. Thus the essence of this revolution, its absolutely crucial pre-requisite, is the development of that radically new set of ideas and values.

This is a core principle in the thinking of some of the most important Anarchists, notably Kropotkin and Tolstoy.  They realised that there is no point in trying to get state power in order to establish an anarchist society if people in general have no interest in governing themselves.  We can add now that there must also be the readiness to live frugally and self-sufficiently in the new settlements described above.  If we got state power tomorrow we could not force or entice or bribe people to do these things.  They will only build and run the kinds of economies and communities discussed above if and when they have become strongly committed to the Simpler Way world view.  We are at present a very long way from that situation, so the task for revolutionaries here and now is clear; it is to work for the long time required to build that world view, it is not to try to take state power.

(Avineri explains that this is in fact also at least close to Marx’s position, and this is not well understood. His theory of the historical development of society focused on the way crucial new structures and institutions that will sustain post-revolutionary society emerge within, are produced by, the old society, and nothing can be achieved by trying to take power and force through new ways if the required new ways have not emerged.  He criticised many revolutionaries for not understanding this. )

Yes of course eventually we will (have to) “take state power”, because the national economy will have to be radically reorganised to provide the towns with the inputs they need.  In The Simpler Way vision that’s Stage 2 of the revolution, where the big macro-structural changes, scrapping growth and the market, cutting down industrialisation and trade, and distributing factories to all towns, must be made.  But a) Stage 2 cannot even begin unless Stage 1 has been very effective in developing the required consciousness and establishing new ways such as participatory town meetings, b) working for the Stage 1 goals described above is by far the best way to contribute to that consciousness and those social processes, c) when we have done that well radically restructuring at the level of the state will be easily done!  Only if and when people in general have come to see that their towns cannot survive let alone thrive in an era of severe and lasting global resource scarcity unless the national economy is geared to serving the towns will they push these Stage 2 changes through … not request or demand them, but start making them.  Early on they will have begun to realise that their towns need grain and dairy products and bike tyres so they will have begun to organise their own regional coops and community owned farms, factories and supply chains.  This will soon lead to pressure on governments to enable these initiatives, to divert scarce resources from frivolous industries, to rezone bankrupt farms for us to use, to regulate steel production towards the hardware town handymen need, etc. But none of this will or can happen unless people have come to regard as normal social processes such as everyone having an equal say, citizens taking responsibility for their collective fate, non-market systems that can prioritise needs. These taken-for-granted ways have to slowly become normal through being shifted to and practised.

In Stage 1 we will be doing what the Anarchists call “prefiguring”.  That is, we will be building elements of the post revolutionary society, here and now within the old.  Whereas the Marxist or socialist view is that it is necessary to fight against and eventually defeat and get rid of capitalism before you can start to build the new society, The Simper Way strategy involves beginning to create, live in and enjoy elements of it long before the revolution will come to a head.  More importantly, it emphasises that doing this is the most effective way to bring people to the new world view.

It should be stressed that it is not being assumed that just building more and more alternative things like community gardens will eventually result in a radically new society having been built (This is a major fault in the Transition Towns movement; See Trainer, 2014.)  As has been explained there will have to eventually be a Stage 2 in which quite different goals become focal.  Again there are two stages in the revolution, the first being about slowly working within the prefiguring arena to build the realisation that radical economic, political and cultural change has to occur before global problems can be solved, and the second much later stage will be about making those huge and difficult structural changes.  They can’t be made unless powerful and widespread grass roots support for them has developed and that’s what we have to try to build up during Stage 1.

Thus it should be clear why Simpler Way Anarchists think it is a mistake to focus on trying to take state power. Obviously if the ultimate goal of the revolution is communities running themselves without state authority, and people in full control of the few remnant “state” level agencies.  But that situation cannot come to be unless there has first been a long process whereby people come to embrace the prerequisite ideas and values, and enabling that is the core revolutionary task we must work on.  If we achieve that well, then you could say the revolution has occurred!  People will then quickly push through the big structural changes and convert the national economy to supporting communities, within a zero growth economy that is not determined by market forces.  These state-level changes, especially the transfer of state power to the town assemblies, will best be seen as consequences of the revolution.

A most inspiring illustration of these points regarding the transition process comes from the remarkable achievements of the Spanish anarchists in the 1930s. During the civil war they were able to reorganise areas mostly around Barcelona including about eight million people, rapidly carrying out major improvements in living conditions, the treatment of women, equality, justice, education, leisure and culture etc. Health clinics and hospitals and even a university were set up. Workers ran their own factories. They did these things via voluntary committees and citizen assemblies of ordinary people, deliberately refusing to have any politicians or paid bureaucracy. But this would not have been possible had there not been within people deep commitment to anarchist ideas, and these had been well established by their peasant village origins and by the work of anarchists since a visit by Bakounin decades earlier.  This reinforces the consciousness raising theme; the new society we must work for cannot function unless people in general hold the necessary ideas and values, so our task in Stage 1 of this revolution has to be to try to establish them. (See TSW: The Spanish Anarchists.)

At this point the socialist is likely to say, “But if we had state power the whole process could be speeded up by effort to educate.”  But consider the logical fault here.  Nothing would be achieved if by some miracle any of the existing socialist parties took state power by winning an election, because none of them is committed to The Simpler Way.  If a party standing on a Simpler Way platform was elected then long before it had 51% of the votes millions of people would have been building the new systems!  That is, the taking of state power could not occur without a Stage 1 process in which we had gone a long way down the path to new settlements, economies, communities, polities and values. There is, in other words, no alternative to a basically anarchist bottom-up prefiguring transition process.  The task for us here and now is therefore to plunge into the building of local community alternatives, in order to a) create the systems we will have to depend on, b) be in the best position to help people see the need to work for those Stage 2 goals.

There are however significant differences between the anarchist view and that of Marx.  His account is to do with a basically automatic or inevitable process whereby the development of capitalism creates the institutions that will be synthesised into post capitalist society.  This would seem to have nothing to do with prefiguring, with any attempt to deliberately select and build desirable aspects of the future society intended.  To do so would seem to invoke the scathing criticism he directed at the “utopian” socialists, who failed to grasp the element of historical determinism foundational in his theory of social change.

Another  difference is revealed in the (very few) things Marx said about post-capitalist society. Avineri discusses the distinction he made between the first and second stages of post-capitalist society. The first involved only a “crude communism” in which there would remain unsatisfactory attitudes and ideas regarding property, work, income and acquisitiveness.  In effect society would have become the capitalist, the owner of the means of production and workers would still receive (equal) wages, experience division of labour, suffer alienation, and, most importantly for our revolution, would still be focused on property and material wealth.  In stage two these dispositions would have been overcome, via a transformation of mentality/culture.

But because of the unique nature of this revolution, determined by the advent of scarcity and limits, within the next few decades we must have become capable of running local communities focused on cooperative, participatory frugality.  The resources will not be there to sustain a long period in which the vanguard party helps materialistic passive masses within industrialised systems to overcome their greed (Avineri’s term) and phase down to eventually enjoy living simply.

Note the significant problem Marx has here.  He argues convincingly that the development of capitalism produces various practices that will be important elements in the post-capitalist synthesis, but willing acceptance of frugality, which from the perspective of The Simpler Way is the most crucial of all, is not one of them.  He could not have been expected to see how supreme this requirement is, given that he wrote long before scarcity and limits were seen to be such overriding determinants.  Any “revolution” that got us to a “crude communism” in which most people remained as fiercely obsessed with wealth and gain as they are now would either not be likely to survive very long, or would set a gargantuan “educational” task for the vanguard party.

The Simpler Way account of the required alternative society, and the transition to it, does not involve this problem.  It explains firstly that yes the new dispositions and institutions must be built before significant change at the level of capitalism becomes possible, but that when they have been built a fully-fledged “communism” will be possible with no need for a distinction between this and ultimate goal. (Of course this assumes that those psychological and social changes can be achieved, within a very few decades, and as I have often said, this is such an historically gigantic revolution that it is not at  all likely to be achieved. The point however is that scarcity gives us no option but to try to do it.)

The point can however be integrated into Marx’s account.  It could be argued that the path capitalism is now taking is in fact beginning to produce acceptance of and practice of frugality, cooperation, and non-material satisfactions.  In The Simpler Way strategic vision this syndrome too will emerge from and be produced by late capitalism, through its increasing failure to provide and the resulting realisation that communities must start providing for themselves.  But a significant difference remains.  If this Stage 1 of the revolution goes well we will not have to deal with the “crude communism” Marx anticipated; we will already have the ideas, values and practices that will enable a good post-capitalist society.

Becoming involved in the locality is not the only ay we can contribute to the revolution. Some of us can contribute best by writing and working within media and educational institutions, and through raising the issues in everyday conversations. But it would seem that the most effective thing most of us can do is to be active within the many localism initiatives that have sprung up over the past two decades, because these are working to establish post-capitalist ways.

The Anarchist approach also holds open the possibility of a relatively peaceful transition.  If most people wanted the transition it could occur quickly and without violence as they simply moved to establish the new cooperative local systems.  If we do this well enough then when Stage 2 arrives it is conceivable that the 1% and those who benefit from serving them will see the writing on the wall and realise that their ways cannot continue.  (In Spain many owners of factories ended up joining the anarchists in helping to run the factories for the public good.) Obviously there is a good chance that there will be much conflict, and obviously the chances of a Simpler Way transition must at this point in time be rated as very poor. However the above argument has been that it is the best strategy to work for.

Finally, the anarchist approach to transition offers us the possibility of experiencing and enjoying post-revolutionary social systems and relations here and now, whereas the socialist can only look forward to this in the far distant future after the revolution. This is an important point in encouraging people to join us.

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The Simplicity Institute,

Trainer, T., (2010), The Transition to a Sustainable and Just World, Sydney, Envirobook.

TSW:  The Alternative.

TSW: Third World Development. https://socialsciences.arts.unsw.edu.au/tsw/ThirdWorldDev.htm

TSW: The Transition. https://socialsciences.arts.unsw.edu.au/tsw/TRANSITION.Thoughtson.htm

TSW: The Case Against the Market. https://socialsciences.arts.unsw.edu.au/tsw/MARKET.htm

TSW: Remaking East Hills. https://socialsciences.arts.unsw.edu.au/tsw/EASTHILLS.htm

TSW: The Spanish Anarchists. https://socialsciences.arts.unsw.edu.au/tsw/Spanish.html

TSW: Your Delightful Day. https://socialsciences.arts.unsw.edu.au/tsw/YOURDAY.htm

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