May, 2015 - Uneven Earth

Should we force supermarkets to send food waste to charities?

May 25, 2015September 13, 2017

Food bank staff member loads supplies from Canadas largest food bank warehouse, Moisson Montreal. Photo: Aaron Vansintjan

by Aaron Vansintjan

I’ve been seeing a lot of news about food waste recently. In February, a report revealed that governments could save up to US$300 billion per year by cutting food waste. In March, it was announced that Loblaw’s, one of Canada’s major food retailers and supermarket chains, will start selling ‘ugly fruit’ at a discount. Then came the stories about start-ups in the US who are trying to source discarded vegetables from farmers, re-using them for other products.

And last week, many people excitedly posted the news from France: the government will force supermarket chains to send their food waste to charities. This announcement led several to suggest that the UK, and even the whole world, which tops EU in food waste, should follow France’s example. And now, I’m reading stories about a new ‘social movement’ in Germany, where people volunteer to pick up and redistribute food from grocery stores, food retailers, bakeries, and restaurants.

I recently completed a three-year research project where I studied the food waste system in Canada. Specifically, I interviewed food bank directors and researchers, trying to piece together the history of how food banks evolved. Knowing this, friends and family enthusiastically send me articles describing these new ‘solutions’ to food waste, thinking I’d also be excited. However, having studied the food waste system, I find it difficult to respond without being too much of a downer: it won’t work.

Don’t get me wrong, I think these are all promising developments. Sending surplus food to charities will mean that supermarkets will bear part of the costs of the food waste they produce, and that the poor get access to more food. Selling ugly vegetables will mean landfills don’t get filled with perfectly good produce. In short, they mean that we are in part succeeding at making our food system smarter. However, I don’t think this is really a cause to celebrate.

“If you care about changing the food system, then selling ugly fruit or forcing supermarkets to send the food to charities is not the answer.”

A story might help explain why I don’t think such efforts will address the food waste problem. Any discussion around food brings up a lot of feelings, so I’ll use a proxy. Say you own a major retail company, selling toys. You sell toys at really cheap prices, allowing as many kids as possible all over the world to get them. But some kids, because their parents don’t have any money, don’t get the toys. Meanwhile, because you try to produce as many toys as possible, for as many different kids (and parents) as possible, you will make a lot of toys that no one wants to buy. Also, accidents happen, and often. A pallett of dolls falls to the ground, breaking the boxes. A whole line of toys gets mislabeled. Because toys are quite cheap to make, it’s actually less expensive to dump these toys in the landfill than to pay someone to unbox them, sort them, re-label them, and so on.

But say a bunch of concerned citizens realize all these toys are being thrown out. This is ridiculous–kids all over the world are crying because they don’t get toys (and for many other reasons too, but let’s put that aside). So they approach one of your store managers and ask, can we take your broken toys and give them away for charity?

At first, your store manager isn’t into it. It will be annoying to let these people into the warehouse and rummage around. But they say they’ll make it easy for her: volunteers will drive in, pick up all the toys really fast, and drive out. She also concedes that, actually, it is a real shame that all these toys are being thrown out. So she agrees.

Pretty soon store managers at different locations are telling you the same thing. People are picking up toys and giving them away… all for free! You didn’t have to lift a finger. What’s more, they’re minimizing the costs of sending more things to the landfill–which often is calculated by weight. So you call in a bunch of these benevolent citizens and you tell them, “Listen, what you’re doing is great. We want to help you. We’ll give you funding, and all the broken toys you want. We’ll make it easier for you, so you don’t even have to ask a store manager anymore. We’ll also organize country-wide advertising so that consumers can give away their toys and know about all the good work you–and my company–are doing.”

This is an offer they can’t refuse–the toy-charities were quite expensive to maintain, since the amount of refused toys just seemed to keep increasing. Volunteers, many of whom take the toys home themselves, are tired, and any less work is appreciated. They are glad to get the extra support.

In order to cut costs even further, you put some of the broken and ugly toys in your store–advertising them as a new, smarter way to cut waste. You might also send some of your new designs to the charities as test products, to see if any of them catch on–a cheap way to do consumer product testing.

Eventually, your efforts are rewarded. The ugly toys campaign turns out to be an excellent public relations strategy, at very small costs to you. Soon enough, the government mandates that all toys should make their way to charities, which you helped create in the first place. While this will incur some costs–you’d have to make it easier for charities to pick up the toys, which will mean hiring more staff–you still benefit from the publicity you receive from the charity efforts, and you won’t really need to change your production line. So in the long run, not a big deal.

But what’s the problem here?

Even if you sponsor these charities, the financial support they receive doesn’t nearly compare to the amount of labor involved. Essentially, you’re shifting toy-waste-processing costs onto volunteers, who are doing the work that your company really ought to do. In the field of ecological economics, this is called cost-shifting, and it is one of the primary tools corporations use to increase their profit margin at the expense of society.
Many of these volunteers are there because they themselves can’t get access to toys. Or they need to fulfill community service hours because of a sentence. Or they don’t have anything else to do–they live lives of isolation. While you’re making the profits, these (mostly marginalized) people are paying the price of sorting your toys.
It’s not the waste that’s the root of the problem. It’s the production line. You’re producing cheap toys that break easily (endangering children), paying your workers minimum wage, and you constantly produce new toy designs that may not be bought but fill up the shelves nonetheless–guaranteeing a satisfied customer who’ll keep coming back for more.
While the government may mandate that you send your toys to charities, they do nothing to support the charities–already over-worked and under-budget–that have to process the toys. At the same time, the government gets to cut costs on its welfare programs, since it is argued that the poor now have access to the food they need from charities.
Even if you were to send the toys to charities, and if you were to pay the charities to process these toys, would it make things better? We’d just be making an extremely wasteful system more cost-effective, essentially subsidizing the production of crappy and wasteful toys.

“Forcing supermarkets to donate their food waste is really just part of the neoliberalization of the food system — where both the food industry and the government cut costs, while society has to pick up the slack.”

Extend this situation to the food retail industry, and it gets much worse. Because of the highly efficient production line, the agricultural process is incredibly environmentally hazardous, relying both on high inputs of fossil fuels and the use of toxic pesticides. The food industry relies on unjust migrant labor to drive production costs lower. This industry makes most of its new products from all the same ingredients, just packaged and shaped differently. For this reason, most food donated to food banks is highly processed, and quite unhealthy. Unlike with toys, volunteers often rely on the food they hand out. Food rots, so it is incredibly difficult to store and sort. With little funding and no municipal support, food banks rely more and more on volunteer service, while being increasingly bound to the continued existence of the industrial food system.

Because of these combined problems, forcing supermarkets to donate their food waste is really just part of the neoliberalization of the food system–where both the food industry and the government cut costs, while society has to pick up the slack, leading to the privatization of social safety nets through the establishment of food charities.

If you care about changing the food system, then a ‘smart’ approach to food waste, such as selling ugly fruit or forcing supermarkets to send the food to charities, is not the answer. In addition to forcing supermarkets to send food to charities, there are several things that would be much smarter.

Fine the corporations for the amount of food waste they produce. This will disincentivize a system that relies on charities to bear the costs of food waste processing. It will also ensure that the industry no longer makes most of its profit from endless lines of new products, which is one of the key drivers of food waste.
Clarify governmental rules and regulations around food waste, in favor of community groups. This might involve legalizing dumpster-diving, encouraging networks of citizens who wish to harvest food waste, and allowing the safe and hygienic processing and sale of food waste by non-profit community organizations.
This may sound crazy, but not only have food banks developed incredibly complex and efficient systems of dealing with food waste, they also aren’t just charities. They often are crucial spaces for poor, isolated people to meet others and break their loneliness, while learning how to cook food. But even though food banks have the will to run more community-oriented activities, they often don’t have enough funding, staff, or time. So create a fund that encourages food banks to start collective kitchens, cooking workshops for single mothers and migrants, urban gardens, compost programs, and community food events. This will generate local food systems and more inclusive, safe neighborhoods. It will give those who otherwise couldn’t buy at the supermarket support structures so that they too can access acceptable food. It will help shift food banks from disempowering, demeaning, top-down, bureaucratic organizations to ones that are engaged in their community, empowering, and fun. Furthermore, it may help deal with the other 95% of food waste not created by supermarkets.
A bit more challenging: align the goals and activities of governmental departments. Why does one arm of the government fund employment in the community food sector for marginalized residents, when another agrees to free trade deals, leading to a food industry that relies on cheap migrant labor? Why does one department fund research on carcinogenic food, or ban toxic chemicals, when another turns a blind eye to destructive farming practices? In most countries, health, sanitation, agriculture, trade, and municipal policies are often misaligned and should be joined up, otherwise food waste–and injustices–will just keep piling up.

These policies–most of them quite simple to implement–would ensure a safer, efficient, more just, and smarter food system. They wouldn’t only force supermarkets to limit their food waste. They would allow for a transformation from a food system oriented towards the bottom line to one that responds to people’s needs.

Aaron Vansintjan studies ecological economics, food systems, and urban change. He is co-editor at Uneven Earth and enjoys journalism, wild fermentations, decolonization, degrowth, and long bicycle rides.

Broadway, New Haven

May 25, 2015September 13, 2017

by Michael Lee-Murphy

Sunday May 17 was graduation day for Yale University. The day is more properly called commencement, and refers to the time when Yale graduates commence the part of their lives when they don’t live in New Haven. The day was marked by the full closure of several blocks of downtown, massive police presence, and sun dresses. The interchange of I-91 and I-95 was completely closed for a full half hour to allow for the escape of Joe Biden, who had addressed the graduating class.

I was on the corner of York Street and Broadway when Biden’s motorcade happened to pass. It’s been a pastime of many in New Haven to complain that Yale’s recent restructuring of the Broadway strip has been to effectively keep the non-White and poorer populations of the predominantly Black Dixwell neighborhood away from Yale. This was at the very least the result, if not the outright goal, of the University’s buying up of most of the property on the block. An article in Sunday’s paper, however, laid bare the racism at the heart of Yale’s machinations. Ethnic and economic cleansing was the desire as well as the result.

Sunday’s edition of the New Haven Register featured a front page with two stories both running several thousand words in length about what a great place Yale is, and what the school has done for New Haven. You could read in the paper what the cops and the secret service were telling you in the street through barricades and wags of the finger. Stay away, this is not for you.

The stories hung under the massive blue headline IVY + ELM, a photo of the Sterling Memorial Library and the text:Yale pumps more than $2B a year into city, region. The headline cleverly merges the city and the region as if the divided politics of the two in real life isn’t one of the big problems about urban policy in Connecticut.

One of the stories, by Yale beat reporter Ed Stannard, ran just over 3,000 words. The headline in the print edition gave us two words for the act Yale has performed upon Broadway. “Yale the star of rebuilding Broadway,” read the print version, while the web version of the story reads “Yale University and New Haven team up to remake Broadway for retail, restaurants.” Already there are some interesting differences between the version of the story meant for single day consumption, and the version archived to the internet.

“Remake” means “make something again, or differently.” Rebuild means “build (something) again after it has been damaged or destroyed.” So which act has Yale performed upon Broadway?

Yale’s Vice President for New Haven Affairs Bruce Alexander, of whom the article is essentially a profile, gives us yet a third word for the act Yale has performed upon Broadway. From the article:

“Alexander said he was walking on York Street near Broadway and noticing litter and storefronts such as barbershops and liquor stores. Since Yalies went through the area on their way to the Yale Co-op, he thought it needed an upgrade.”

An upgrade. A remake. A rebuild.

When was Broadway damaged or destroyed so as to be rebuilt? Why would the Sunday print edition of the paper need to imply that it was? The headline and the article itself was quite obviously geared toward the parents of Yale students in town for the weekend, looking for a souvenir of the day. The choice of headline, articles, and layout reflects what is a truism about Connecticut’s cities in general: they are not built for the people that live in them, especially in the era of late capitalism.

“Poor people will not be allowed to ruin the mall. People of color will not be allowed to ruin the mall. Barbershops will not be allowed to ruin the mall. New Haven is a mall and Yale kids are its customers.”

The article doesn’t say when Alexander had this stroll along York Street and slouched toward Broadway, but Alexander has been Yale’s downtown property man since the late 1990s. Before he came to Yale, Alexander negotiated with cities throughout America to build malls for the Rouse Company. The complaint of many that Broadway now feels like a mall rather than a city block is not a curmudgeonly gripe about the good ol’ days: that has been Yale’s goal for Broadway from the start.

Brian McGrath, the business manager of Chapel West Special Services District — a sub-municipal development organization with its own taxation and zoning policies, currently trying to change the name of the Dwight neighborhood to Chapel West — illuminated to the Yale Herald in 2012 Yale’s philosophy behind the redevelopment.

“If you want synergy, and you want the maximum number of customers, you need to run it like a mall. You need everyone opening and closing at the same time. You have some stores that close early? That’s going to ruin your mall. You can’t have a customer leaving trash on the sidewalk—that’s going to ruin your mall. You can’t have a customer attracting bums—that’s going to ruin your mall.”

This fear of their mall being ruined led Yale to force out a number of undesirable businesses along the road. Streetview on Google Maps has a feature which allows you to take a cyberstroll down Broadway and compare what the street looked like in 2008 to what it looks like now. The Yale Co-op, a locally owned bookstore, was forced out in favor of a Barnes & Noble branch. Next door, the new Apple store gleams into the night, and happily offers workshops to the New Haven Police Department. Next to the Apple store is the building York Sq Cinema used to share with a store selling Yale themed clothing. York Sq closed in 2005 and the building is now entirely Campus Customs. Cutler’s Record Store. Quality Wine and Liquors. Even the Au Bon Pain at the intersection with York was seen to be not fit for Yale’s purposes when Yale decided not to renew its lease back in 2013.

Yale has had varying degrees of involvement with the closure of these businesses — Yale said it loved Cutler’s — but at the very least, the Art House theater, record store crowd ain’t the J Crew Kiko Milano crowd.

There were usually homeless people outside or inside the Au Bon Pain. Now they are gone. No longer will the homeless of New Haven be allowed to ruin the mall. Now the location is a “Emporium DNA,” where you can get a pair of shiny trousers for the price of a month’s rent.

But for Win Davis, the executive Director of the Town Green Special Services District, it is the Apple store that is the jewel in the shitcrown that is the new Broadway. The store is “a huge get. … That’s a huge bellwether for our retail community and what is difficult about retail and something that Yale has helped us overcome is talking with people and getting people to come to town despite the census data.”

There are only two possibilities for what “despite the census data” means here: either despite the people of color, or despite the poor people. In New Haven’s segregation, there is significant overlap between the two categories.

Poor people will not be allowed to ruin the mall. People of color will not be allowed to ruin the mall. Barbershops will not be allowed to ruin the mall. New Haven is a mall and Yale kids are its customers.

It is further unclear in the above quote which “people” Davis was trying to convince to come to New Haven. Either he means national chains who want to sell their high-end shit despite the fact that 25% of New Haven residents live below the poverty line, or suburban types who would come into town, but have been looking at the census data and doing reconnaissance on the skin color of the people that live there and they don’t like what they see. Let us keep the community away so we can bring in a retail community, which along with synergy is an unspeakably horrible phrase that only signals the destruction of things we hold dear.

The remaking of Broadway as a mall is in fact a very old tradition in New Haven, representing no new ideas. As Mandi Isaacs Jackson details in her book Model City Blues, the 1960s saw an effort to “remake” New Haven as “New England’s Newest City,” as if there was no New Haven that existed before.

Here’s a 1960 pamphlet from New Haven’s Redevelopment Agency replicated in Jackson’s book, with an army of zombie housewife shoppers lurching toward New Haven.

As Jackson writes,

“[G]eographer Don Mitchell argues that inherent in spaces like the new downtown “shopping mecca” is the ‘perceived need for order, surveillance, and control over the behavior of the public.’ The primary aim of corporate planners, like those who planned New Haven’s new downtown shopping, parking, and hotel center, argued Mitchell, was to impose ‘limits and controls on spatial interaction.’ In this way, public spaces such as malls, shopping centers, and redeveloped downtowns become what Mitchell calls ‘spaces of controlled spectacle.’ But Mitchell also asserts that such spaces have never actually been inclusive, even in their most basic early forms–such as the forum of ancient Rome or the colonial town square. It was only through what he calls ‘concerted social protest and conflict’ that they were opened up. ‘Spaces were only public,’ he asserts, ‘to the degree that they were taken and made public.’”

Broadway must be made public again. They’ve ruined Broadway by making it a mall. We have to ruin it back.

Later Jackson quotes historian Eric Hobsbawm, who says that “the rebuilding and reorganization of cities is one of three strategies employed by the state to counter urban insurrections.”

Indeed, during New Haven’s last major insurrection of May Day 1970, Liggett’s (where the $1000 shiny pants store is now) boarded up and demanded freedom for the imprisoned Black Panthers of the city.

Broadway is just one block in Yale’s master plan. Of Yale’s properties, only $108 million’s worth is taxable, bringing in $4.49 million in tax into New Haven. Yale owns a separate $2.5 billion dollars worth of property that goes untaxed. Here is a map of their empire.

The arguments defending Yale’s designs for large parts of the city usually feature some variation of this: “New Haven without Yale would be Bridgeport or Hartford.” Whether this is more insulting and condescending to the people of New Haven who have no involvement with Yale, or to the people of Hartford and Bridgeport is an open question. The other argument is often, “We need Yale for the money it brings in to the city.” This argument is a variation on the first, and we hear it parroted anytime Yale buys up another street (literally), or forces out a locally owned store for a high-end chain.

This is the nerdish warbling of a company stooge, and it makes us all look like assholes. As a friend pointed out in a Facebook discussion about this, that argument almost completely overlooks the fact that the money Yale brings into New Haven is meant to be circulated within Yale’s properties. The whole point of the rebranding of Chapel Street and Broadway as “The Shops at Yale” is that Yale money never gets spent at something that is not Yale-owned, and furthermore to keep non-Yale people away from the area. (Observe the closing of the Anchor, as an example.) The other work the argument performs is that it turns every complaint about Yale’s behavior into an argument about Yale’s existence. This this the Stockholm syndrome of a hostage. We need them, so we can’t criticize them.

Certainly it strikes me as the same type of thinking that would operate in the coal towns of Appalachia, where, robbed and exploited by the company store, the townsfolk plead with the company to be nice to them.

Is New Haven a place of its own, or is it a company town? (And let’s be clear: Yale is a company as much as or even more than it is a University. Its University Properties real estate holding company has done things like buying out locally owned stores and leaving the storefront vacant because they didn’t like the fact that booze was being sold so close to campus.)

What is the purpose of New Haven? Is it for the people that live there to be able to live happy lives, or is it for Yale to crank out raw materials and provide these raw materials with ample shopping opportunities?

Let’s ruin the mall. They haven’t won yet. Skate it like Jim Greco did in the 1990s. Wear punk patches. Be drunk. Sneer. Don’t buy. Don’t cede.

Michael Lee-Murphy is a reporter and writer based in New England, USA. He has written for Jacobin, Ricochet Media, and Maisonneuve Magazine.

This story originally appeared on Michael Lee-Murphy’s blog, A Furious Return to Basics.

“My neighbors…”

May 21, 2015September 13, 2017

photo and words by Cindy Milstein, chalk by Lisa Ganser

Just as I was about to snap this photo, two guys walking by stopped to read the pavement, too, and said, “Another arson. They keep happening here in the Mission.” They hadn’t noticed me, but our eyes met after the one spoke, and I nodded agreement. We all had a worn look about us, deep in those eyes of ours.

I took my picture.

The chalking is becoming too routine on the dirty concrete in my neighborhood. I know who does it, carefully, with solemn respect and raw pain. Chalking, as public and plain as the mourning in the Mission, but likely washed away by tears and time, not rain.

There is a lack of rain here. Drought they call it, as in a period that “causes extensive damage.” Yet there is no lack of people “getting killed and displaced by fires, gentrification & police.”

Minutes later, as I tried taking another shot, this time of the haphazard array of flowers clinging desperately to the padlocked security gate pulled tight across the front of the charred liquor store at Treat and 24th streets, another couple of folks strolled by, walked past, and then turned back toward me.

“What happened?” they inquired, as if somehow they knew that I would obviously know. Maybe it was those serious eyes of mine.

Burned household objects litter the street still in two big mounds, one to each side of this corner store’s entry, like sentries, like graves, smelling as if still smoldering, still dangerous.

The blackened piles are remnants of life, tossed quickly out windows in haste, one imagines, to battle flames. Yet they feel an affront now, left as if warning sign for others — by landlord? by city? by police? — as a way to spark further fear for the marginalized and precarious in this neighborhood.

Mostly, it feels like a violation, an injury, a dishonor toward the people who used to call these things “home.” This is not a fitting part of the communal makeshift shrine and quiet witnessing, quiet processing, that’s going on in between the smelly, messy heaps of disaster.

Indeed, one can still hardly take in a breath for the stench of it all.

“A 13-year-old, Amal Shaibi, died last night from smoke inhalation during the fire last week,” I tell this second pair of passersby. “Her 38-year-old dad, Mohamed Shaibi, died a couple nights ago. I heard the 13-year-old helped a younger sibling out a smoke-filled window during the heat of the blaze.”

I go into detail, too much probably, weaving in nearby evictions, nearby harassment by landlords and immigration agents and plainclothes cops, who also murdered 21-year-old Amilcar Perez-Lopez only about a block and a half away, only about three weeks ago, and wander further afield to offer the story of the enormous fire on Mission at 22nd streets that killed one and dehoused many dozens of longtime, low-income, mostly Latino residents. I repeat the words heard often these days here: arson. “Or that’s what everyone thinks, at least those who think about and are impacted by gentrification.”

I can’t quite tell if they wanted to hear this thoroughly interconnected story, but they listen eagerly, and thank me profusely. They aren’t from this neighborhood, so all this seems like news to them. I can’t quite tell, either, if it touched their hearts or not, or was simply spectacle after a nice dinner and evening walk.

Earlier today, at a public hearing at city hall about all the fires of late, politicians fell over themselves to congratulate city workers for bravery, courage, and hard work. The workers fell over themselves to cover each other least they’d made any mistakes, and speak of how they are objective in determining the cause of fires. The politician who called the hearing for his district, David Campos, mentioned that people in the neighborhood have “conspiracy theories,” by which he dismissed any thought of arson even as he vaguely noted that such theories arise from “what’s happening in the Mission,” by which I assume he means gentrification and eviction by whatever means necessary.

The closest that any of these officials, all feigning investigative vigilance, got to touching on what nearly everyone at risk of disposal in the Mission believes — that the fires are part and parcel of dispossession — was when they danced around how sometimes landlords don’t keep their buildings up to fire codes in terms of safety.

This is, I think, arson as well, by any means, whether flagrant conflagrations are the result of landlord “negligence,” or secondary-degree burning of buildings comes in the form of winking away code violations until rent-stabilized apartments, say, catch fire.

Funny, people in the Mission observe, how the huge 3-story building at Mission and 22nd got thoroughly destroyed but the extremely expensive new Vida apartment complex right next door — literally touching each other — didn’t seem to receive even a scratch.

All “conspiracy theories,” mind you, but they have a certain ring of reality down on the street level, especially around 24th and Mission these days.

Meanwhile, on Treat and 24th, two shopkeepers across the street from the vacant burned building, with plastic blowing out its windows now, tell me they are collecting funds for the family. “They keep refusing money, though. So we’re encouraging cards. But yes, we’ll insist they take the money for all their health expenses.” They explain how the family returned earlier today, briefly, and said they were doing OK.

I imagine they can barely begin to understand how they are doing, and hope they somehow didn’t notice those two sprawling heaps of burned objects, so they won’t become a memory, when memories return.

Grief settles slowly, like ash.

This family is now a woman, wife, and mom, now in a wheelchair from her own injuries, now with one husband less and one child less, no home, and no family business below it. She is left with two kids, ages six and sixteen, and too much pain to almost comprehend.

All that’s left on this forlorn building — ripe for the plundering for some new, bland, luxury project that has no community — is another chalked sidewalk soon to fade, flowers already beginning to wilt, and a cardboard sign with handwriting briefly attempting to explain the loss, attached on the liquor store door next to a beer ad with an image of the Bay Bridge, on this sad corner of a neighborhood being disappeared.

#LaMission #RestInPower

For two news stories about the family, fire, and their needs now, see:
http://missionlocal.org/2015/03/injuries-from-fire-take-13-year-olds-life/
http://missionlocal.org/2015/03/after-fire-shaibi-family-searching-for-2-bedroom-in-mission/

Cindy Milstein writes about gentrification struggles, police brutality, anarchism, and capitalism. She’s also actively engaged in “solidarity not charity” forms of anti-displacement and anti-police organizing, ranging from Eviction Free San Francisco to Coffee Not Cops, in her neighborhood, San Francisco’s Mission, alongside fighting her own eviction. Cindy is the author of Anarchism and its Aspirations, coauthor (with Erik Ruin) of Paths toward Utopia, and recently curated the zine “Revolutionary Solidarity: A Critical Reader for Accomplices” following the Ferguson uprising.

This story originally appeared on Cindy Milstein’s blog, Outside the Circle.

We’ve been here before, haven’t we?

May 5, 2015September 13, 2017

by Salvador Pueyo

We are often told that we need economic growth to address social problems such as unemployment and poverty and to improve everybody’s welfare. However, if one of your sleeves is tight on you, this does not necessarily mean that you need a bigger shirt: perhaps what you need is to reshape your shirt. Indeed, this will be your sole option if you have little thread left.

Economic growth is not a realistic answer to social problems in a world with vanishing natural resources, ecological degradation and climate change. The sensible answer is a deep transformation of the economy to make it more egalitarian and better suited to people’s aspiration to satisfy their basic needs and to live a meaningful and fulfilling life, while we get rid of many economic activities that we do not really need, and contract the economy to sustainable levels, carefully and in a truly democratic way. Currently, this idea is best known with the name of degrowth (see this website or this one), and their supporters pursue it at all levels, including individual consumption choices, grassroots self-organization to experience alternative forms of collective functioning, and political action.

However, very few people in the degrowth movement are aware that we are essentially repeating a cycle of mobilization that had already taken place from the late 1970s to the early 1990s (Piulats 1984 is a good sample, in Spanish). In that period, the ideas and practices that we currently call degrowth were labelled just as green, without knowing that the environmental movement would later become dominated by other different shades of green. The movement was especially strong in West Germany, becoming a reference all over the world when its political arm, Die Grünen (the German Greens) irrupted into the Federal Parliament in 1983.

Unfortunately, Die Grünen became split in two main factions. The fundamentalist or fundi, which we would currently call degrowther, would soon have to share the party with the self-called realists or realos, closer to what we currently call green capitalism. Fundis went under pressure after an electoral defeat in 1990 (when the Greens did not share the general enthusiasm for a quick reunification of Germany, warning of the many problems that this would cause to East Germans, and focused their campaign on the then virtually unknown issue of climate change; paraphrasing the German Railways’ slogan Everyone is talking about the weather. We don’t, their slogan was Everyone is talking about Germany; we’re talking about the weather!; e.g., Jungjohann 2013). In a party congress in 1991, the fundis were defeated and left the party (see different views of this congress here and here). The end of the German Greens of the 1980s was rounded off with the death in 1992 of its most emblematic member, the fundi Petra Kelly.

After these events, the ideas, experiences and illusions of the early Grünen were forgotten almost completely. However, their spirit has never ceased to manifest itself in lots of grassroots initiatives. And, behind this veil of amnesia, there is a hidden treasure: the political programmes of the German Greens of that times. As described in a paper that Jorge Riechmann published in Ecología Política in 1994 (if you understand Spanish, this review is a must read), there was a conscious process of programmatic elaboration. It was carried out by the assemblies and representatives of the party all over West Germany, the many social movements where they had their roots, and hundreds of experts hired with the funds obtained from the presence of the party in the institutions. They envisioned, with much detail, how Die Grünen could foster a transition toward a socially fair degrowth.

Even though Die Grünen had already moderated some of their positions before the upheaval of the early 1990s (Blühdorn 2009), the rich programmatic document on international economic policy elaborated between 1988 and 1990 still declares that “For us it is no longer international politics in the national interest but national politics in the international interest” (p. 7) and that “we should not hide the fact that our foreign economic guidelines could bring about a noticeable reduction in our current standard of living” (p. 93). Few current radical parties would dare to go so far.

I was appalled by the amnesia surrounding the early Grünen, which I noticed in many different ways, not least by failing to find some key programmatic documents with search engines. Taking advantage of a trip to Berlin to give a talk, I visited the historical archive of Die Grünen (run by the Heinrich Böll Foundation) and I photocopied some of these documents. I put them together with some other documents in this small repository.

By studying the early programmes of Die Grünen, the degrowth movement can save much effort and leap forward in the detail and quality of its political proposals. Like the protagonist of Groundhog Day, we can also learn from that past to avoid a repetition of the same story.

This is just the beginning. I hope that this (or some other) repository will be enriched with more programmatic documents and with translations.

Salvador Pueyo is a scientist and an activist. He holds a PhD from the Dept. of Ecology of the University of Barcelona, and has worked at research institutions in several countries. He applies complexity science to macroecology, macroeconomics and global change. He is a member of Research & Degrowth.

The two images in this article were found in the document, “Gegen arbeitslosigkeit und Socialabbau: Sinnvoll arbeiten – solidarisch leben” by Die Grünen.