12th September 2023. Chile | Post-growth [2]

Other Americas and the other 9/11 // Towards a different politics of consumption. [#495]

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1: Other Americas and the other 9/11

It was the 50th anniversary yesterday of the “other 9/11”—the American sponsored coup d’etat in Chile in 1973 that overthrew Salvador Allende’s democratically elected government. The anniversary has meant that the events in Chile half a century ago have managed to peak out from behind the large shadow of the Twin Towers.

It’s worth saying the obvious: the coup in Chile led to the deaths and ‘disappearance’ of about the same number of people as were killed in the US 9/11, with thousands more tortured, imprisoned, and exiled, even if tragedy isn’t a competition.

To mark it, I am going to turn to the writer Ariel Dorfman, now turned eighty. Dorfman was born into an Argentinian family, and raised in the US until the age of 12. He later became a Chilean citizen and had a role in Allende’s administration. It was only by chance that he was not in La Moneda, Chile’s Presidential palace, when it was attacked on the day of the coup, and exile eventually led him back to the United States again.

(T-shirt: Philosophy Football)

I am going to interleave here a piece that he wrote in 2002, initially for Granta, with a couple of extracts from a review by Jonathan Dee in New Yorker of Dorfman’s most recent (and perhaps final) book, The Suicide Museum.

For me as a politically interested teenager, the Chilean coup was a significant event. I knew that the United States intervened in Latin America (everyone knew that!) but naively I didn’t think that they would overthrow a democratically elected government. We live and learn. Jonathan Dee, who is a bit younger, has a good passage that explains why Allende’s government caught the imagination. At the time, Allende’s attempt to create an elected, Parliamentary, route to socialism was a breath of fresh air:

Over furious, often U.S.-backed opposition, he unleashed a torrent of changes, some of them socialist boilerplate (nationalizing the coper industry, redistributing farmland, supplying milk to schoolchildren), and others more visionary, such as the remarkable Project Cybersyn, aiming to link the then nascent technology of computers to factories and even citizens’ homes as a way of managing the economy and exploring direct democracy.¹

And a bit more:

Comparisons to the American Camelot that John F. Kennedy conjured would be fair up to a point. Both figures bear out the sad truth that nothing lends itself to mythmaking... like the vacuum left by an untimely death.

Many of Dorfman’s writings about the difficult relationship between America, Latin America, and the rest of the world, are collected in a book called Other Septembers, Many Americas.

(Photo: Andrew Curry, CC SA BY NC 4.0)

Dorfman’s short piece for Granta, ‘Cold Waters’, tells the story of a day in Chile in the mid-60s, with his girlfriend (later, wife) Angelica, by a rocky outdoor pool in a remote part of the country.²

The peace of the afternoon is being wrecked by a noisy American three year old: “his gringa mother made no attempt to control him”. And worse:

The odious American boy and his inconsiderate American mother had taken over this serene Chilean pool as if they owned it. Absurd, perhaps, to think this now, but they symbolized to me the many ways in which the United States had dominated Latin America: its ownership of mines and fields and banks and steamers... its barely concealed idea that that the only thing Latin Americans understood was a kick in the pants.

As he says, everything was political in the 1960s. He pretends not to speak English as he tries to ignore them. And then the boy fell in:

May God forgive me... but I hesitated... (H)ow I remember it is that for a couple of seconds I let myself lapse into a murderous passivity. The boy didn't flail out; he sank into the blue, icy water, silently. Just his body sinking slowly and my eyes watching just as slowly. What comes back to me is the pang of indifference I felt.

He acknowledges that some of this, in 2002, may be a trick of the memory. In recalling it, he may be coloured by US involvement in later events: the Chilean coup, the arming of the Nicaraguan Contras, the training of the El Salvador death squads. All the same, “it was easier to blame the Americans for all the misery that surrounded me than to really do something about it myself.”

And then, if you like, he snaps to his senses:

I plunged in and scooped the boy out and deposited him (sputtering and screaming again) on the rim of the pool. His mother woke up—there must have been some special urgency in his shrieks—and I was so embarrassed by her gratitude that I forgot to pretend that I didn't speak English. She turned out to be a jazz enthusiast. We'd been to the same Louis Armstrong concert in Santiago ...That is how effortless it was, and still is, to cross over from Yankee basher to enthralled lover of American culture.

And perhaps this is the perpetual challenge for everyone—to separate out American culture and people from America’s endless realpolitik.

The Suicide Museum revisits some of this ground. It is set in the 1990s. A character called ‘Ariel Dorfman’ is hired by a mysterious billionaire, Joseph Hortha, to establish whether Allende killed himself in La Moneda as the palace was being attacked. He wants to know for a vast suicide museum that he is building “to warn the world of impending disaster”:

A literal gallery of people with only one thing in common, the apparent decision to end their lives: Hitler and Primo Levi, Japanese kamikaze pilots and Walter Benjamin, Irish hunger strikers and Marilyn Monroe. Only by doing so can we understand, and then begin to reverse, the fact that, as a species, we are slowly committing suicide every day.

Yes, large parts of the plot make little sense, as ‘Ariel Dorfman’ tells the reader from time to time. Some of the story may be true. ‘Angelica’, who also appears, along with many other real people, considers Hortha “undoubtedly insane”. He may be insane, but he is obsessed with Bill McKibben’s pioneering 1989 climate change essay, ‘The End of Nature’. And this, in turn, is a challenge to Dorfman’s lifelong Marxist politics—a politics of optimism, it should be said—as in a passage from the book that Dee quotes:

While McKibben indicted humanity as complicit in this ecological crime, and demanded a radical redefinition of our purpose as a species, I retained a boundless confidence in the indomitable ability of men and women to resolve any problem we might encounter... The solution to the current crisis was more control of the planet, not less.

Dee’s piece is a long one, and I am only touching the surface here. But he reads The Suicide Museum as an attempt by Dorfman, writing at the end of his life, to engage with the question of whether we need a different type of politics to save humanity from itself:

Thirty years later, the increasing synonymity between economic “progress” and extinction is hard to ignore. What good, ultimately, is workers’ control of the factories, say, if the factories are killing us all anyway? The radical rethinking required to keep us from destroying ourselves involves a kind of regress.

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2: Towards a different politics of consumption

The second part of my review of Kate Soper’s book Post Growth. Part 1, which introduced the idea of ‘alternative hedonism’, is here.

It’s hard to separate consumption from work, and Kate Soper has a chapter on this. On work, we seem to be in a world (I am paraphrasing wildly) where either you take your whole brain to work, or your emotions, or just your body. The second category includes care workers, but also retail and food service workers. In the last case I’m thinking of the algorithm-controlled workers in Amazon warehouses and Deliveroo riders or Uber drivers. Only the first of these has power in the labour market. Large amounts of this work is unproductive.

Soper engages sceptically with the left technofuturists who maintain that we can reduce labour by increasing the use of technology, mostly in discussing Srnicek and Williams’ book Inventing the Future. (Aaron Bastani’s Fully Automated Luxury Communism which is the doyen of this argument, came out at about the same time as Soper’s book).

What I took from her argument here was that while her proposal adds up to choosing to have more time, and less stuff, the tech-enabled argument about work is as likely to entrench existing power relationships as to lead to radical reductions in working hours. The evidence from the four day week seems to suggest that the time gains there are to do with workflows rather than technology.

At the heart of the argument, then, people need more time of their own, and we need a different politics of consumption:

Clean air, fertile soil, unpolluted water, a climate no longer over-heating: these wider goods are elemental conditions of life and health which cannot... be preserved only for the rich while allowed to be destroved for the poor. Unspoilt countryside, space in the city where people can move about and gather unharassed by cars: these pleasures, too, are not enjoyed only by a particular class. (p175)

These are all, effectively public goods, which everyone benefits from, regardless of social class or income. In short, then, we are talking about a shift from private consumption to shared consumption.

((C) Michele Redaelli, ‘I’d Better Go To The Beach’. Finalist, ‘Tilt’, 2023)

All of this implies a political programme, and Soper sets this out in a set of headings, at least for a British context. Since almost all of the political changes in the British Labour Party have been retrograde since she wrote the book, the only parties that seem to have a credible interest in this agenda at the moment are the Greens and the Welsh Labour Party, along with Plaid Cymru and perhaps some elements of the SNP.

But it comes in four parts:

• Citizenship and consumption: reversing the long Thatcherite project of defining citizens as a set of consumers, of both private and collective goods (such as health).

• Well-being without consumption: both curbing the production of goods and services that are contributing to runaway climate and change, and and enabling ‘social’ consumption that also contributes to well-being.

• New views of work: yes, some kind of Green New Deal is essential, and this should be coupled with the encouragement of forms of work that support greater equality and participation. (I would underline here the importance of reducing the amount of time taken up by work.)

• Restoring and reclaiming public space: we need to find ways of reclaiming for the public interest land that has been privatised over the past several decades. Transparency over who owns what would be a valuable place to start.

Reading this back, it seems to me like a programme which, if well articulated, could resonate with people who have had close to two decades of a low growth wage squeeze, and who have watched their public resources wrecked by austerity. (Quite apart from creating a positive story about the response to climate change).

(“Economic growth”, 1880-2019. Via Google Ngram.)

If I have an issue with the book, it’s in the title. The idea of “economic growth” is largely a post war construct, but right now it is one of the most deeply held notions of our time, and there are whole structures of political economy designed to prop it up. The mildest suggestions that it might not continue bring economists out in packs to hunt down the heresy.³ But the climate emergency means that our choice is between managed degrowth and some form of unmanaged social collapse.

Using the word “growth”falls into George Lakoff’s framing trap: using your opponent’s language to attack their most strongly held ideas never works. So: if we are going to manage to consume less, we definitely need a new language for it.

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Other writing

I have posted a couple of pieces recently to my Around the Edges blog, where I mostly write about film and books.

There’s a review of Kamila Shamsie’s Home Fire, which explores ideas of nationality and identity through a reworking of Sophocles’ Antigone. An extract:

Some of things I liked about the book:

[1] The portrayal of the way in which Parvaiz is (so-called) “radicalised”, which undercuts many of the assumptions made in the British mainstream about how or why people get enrolled in jihadi. Indeed, all of the cliches of “radicalisation” are parodied by one of Eamonn’s affluent white English friends in a jokey speech.

And, in a rather different part of the cultural woods, there’s a piece about the 1971 cult film Vanishing Point, admired by Spielberg and Springsteen. It is like a road movie on speed.

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j2t#495

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1. I’ll be returning to Project Cybersyn here at some point in the next few weeks.

2. There’s a shortened and slightly adapted version of the piece at Duke University’s website.

3. There are honourable exceptions. Diane Coyle pops up on Twitter from time to time to remind us that ‘GDP is only an idea.’