Читать книгу Productive Economy, Contributory Economy - Genevieve Bouche - Страница 20

The so-called “Western” model was born at the end of the 18th century in Europe with the discovery of coal in Germany. This coal made it possible to develop steel and industry in general. This industry was described as heavy because it mobilized a lot of energy, financial and human resources.

This industrialization made it possible to manufacture products in large quantities that were previously very labor-intensive. In order to make the investment profitable, it was necessary to sell in large quantities, which gave rise to marketing.

Everything worked well as long as we were in a demand⁸ economy. There was no need to set production maximums: demand was always greater than supply. It was a time when bad products found takers, even without marketing!

This has led to the development of a business and economic doctrine that ignores the notion of tolerance. In any system, the interacting components are designed to remain within a tolerance range that lies between a minimum and a maximum value.

For the doctor examines the blood pressure, and if it is outside the tolerance limits, a problem must be discovered and treated.

All the parts of a mechanical system respect tolerances compatible with each other, so that the machine functions when there are variations in temperature, humidity or vibrations.

Our model of society does not care about this: no limit to enrichment, nor to the production of goods!

Today, this lack of tolerance thresholds may seem surprising and even arrogant on the part of the human race. It is simply the world view of the last few centuries in Europe, which, through its demography, effectively dominated the world a few centuries ago. However, among the progress we have propagated, we have reduced mortality (diseases, accidents, wars), without compensatory regulation. Unlike animals, we have let our demography run away.

This land, Europe, is Christian, and in the Book of Genesis, God tells man that he will find everything he needs in nature. With the conquest of the “new world” and then with technological progress, we have the impression that we will solve all problems by constantly finding substitutes for the raw materials we lack. It remains true, however, that humans cannot heckle their environment without measuring the consequences.

The nomads knew this notion of a limit to consumption: not to wear down nature and to let it reproduce. The 19th-century European thought was not very far-sighted, or at least it was indifferent to the warnings of philosophers (who had become economists) who were asking questions about the world that the “industrialists” were predicting for us. American thought, which is merely an extension of European thought, was not concerned about this either.

The mobilization of capital and men, at the time of the birth of the industry in Europe, was carried by the slogan “the betterment for all through technical progress”. Many sacrifices were required of Europeans to set up this so-called “heavy industry”. Many books bear witness to this, including those by Émile Zola.

With the conquest of the oceans and the rise of the United States, Western civilization took shape in the eyes of the other occupants of the planet. It became Americanized with the promise of the “new world”. It demands many sacrifices from its migrants. It replaces the term “progress” with the term “innovation” and the term “technique” with the term “technology”. The result is not the same.

“Progress” indicates that there is a search for improvement. “Innovation” indicates that it doesn’t matter what came before. That is what the migrants did when they arrived on American soil. They did not seek to get the instruction manual for climate and geography. They did as they pleased, without listening to what the natives had to say.

“Technique” does not make politics. It is not at the service of a particular cause, it is simply the fruit of the fascination of those who conceive it. It has its place in the sun only when an intuitive decides to make it emerge.

“Technology” is becoming almost a science. Its purpose is to produce more and more with greater efficiency or to arouse more desire in customers… And finally it must produce more profitability! If progress seems limitless, then profitability also seems limitless, which is not true in the medium and long term: everything has a limit in our life system.

The heyday of the industrial age is clearly behind us in Europe, now in North America and soon in China. It is this “after” that we must concern ourselves with.

In the “capital/labor” equation that characterizes the corporate world, we have seen a gradual shift to the priority of capital as technological and organizational progress has allowed us to produce more and better with fewer resources. Capital owners have absorbed the growing profits without really sharing them with workers.

Finance is an instrument, not the center of our lives. This imbalance, which is matched by the scattering of poverty and the consequent concentration of wealth, has been made possible by the absence of profit thresholds. The minimum wage is hard to impose. Maximum profit is not even under discussion!

These famous tolerance thresholds are reminiscent of the planned economies that claimed to produce the right quantity. Without today’s digital technology, they have led to sinister dictatorships. These dictatorships were highly centralized and provided a sounding board for all the errors and shortcomings of their decisionmakers, who were boosted by the feeling of power. They did not demonstrate anything in terms of threshold. They only demonstrated the dangers of centralization.

The tribes that we call “primitive” knew very well how to deal with this notion of threshold. They took into account many local parameters when deciding to move to ensure the renewal of the areas they had exploited.

They did it with observation and transmission of knowledge from generation to generation. In the digital age, managing thresholds seems increasingly possible.

There is an ideological problem in not addressing this question of thresholds: if we become aware that we are an element in the system of life within Gaia, we must admit that we must respect thresholds of tolerance with minimums and maximums.