Without the dust mice, the maintenance and upkeep labor and expenses, and last but not least, the horrendous energy wastage.

I don’t want a rec room, a dining room, a TV room…I want a clean planet that I can go outside and enjoy. And I’ll use the space saved by the smaller footprint for a garden.

http://www.goodlife.org/index.html

One woman is living in a house that you really have to see to believe. “It’s 84 square feet, so roughly the size of a parking spot. Actually, smaller than a parking spot,” says Dee Williams, who decided it was time to move. She was living in a 1,500-square foot home in Portland, but decided the house wasn’t small enough – yes, small enough!

The simple answer: “A simpler life, time, more money. I don’t have a mortgage. I don’t have a big utility bill,” Dee says. Her monthly heating bill in the winter is $6, less in the summer. “I’m able to offer money to my family if they need it, (and to) my friends if they need it,” says Dee. To get to her bedroom, she walks up a step ladder to her loft.

http://www.katu.com/news/local/8499817.html (the video link gives a tour of the house.)

I’m glad it made the news; we need more images like this in the public eye. But knowing how much of the world lives, as an outsider I would think it was very odd that a woman living in a small house is considered newsworthy here.

STAN: And this. Thanks, Audrey.

So asking “the minimum amount of resources needed to be happy” isn’t even the right question. Sure, there is such a minimum–those starving, those without a roof over their heads, etc., lack it. But in the right circumstances, you don’t need much more than that.

I submit that the right circumstances have a lot to do with participating in meaningful work with comrades in an honestly egalitarian environment (that is, where both power and resources are honestly shared more or less equally)–and not much to do with how much Stuff you have.

Yes. Short answer: a lower-middle-class, or slightly
lower, level of lifestyle/consumption (developed
world or U.S. standard) is approximately sustainable;
i.e. eliminate ALL the most egregious, unnecessary
consumption (airplanes, automobiles, etc.), but
retain the essentials and modest pleasures (e.g. a
kayak here, a computer there). Rule of thumb: the
lifestyle that one can live on an income of, say,
$6-8,000 per year, excluding rent. PLENTY for all
real needs, but insufficient to satisfy wanton
greeds.

Alan

STAN: Thanks Alan. I will go one step further, however, and ask if general-purpose money is compatible with sustainability; and whether “developed” world standards can serve as a system of measures for a sustianable world. Before we make the conceptual and decontextualized leap along a kind of US-centric continuum, ask the question, “How does everyone eat in a sustainable world?”

Read Henry Liu’s latest two-parter at Asia Times. He doesn’t get machine fetishism; but he sure knows how metropolitan finance capital does organized theft.

Yes, the imperial dollar (however weakened by the rise of the euro) ensures that the US is the consumer of last resort and the inscribed habitus of living on credit (however imperiled by the crashing of subprime mortgages) ensures that US households are consumers of last resort

However, I find this nagging tendency among US leftists who are so preoccupied with the predatory and violent behavior of the US imperium in its death throes — which to be sure is a phenonmenon too real enough — to ignore the triumph of consumerism as both an ideology and a way of life in other metropoles as well as among the nouveau riches and the “new middle classes” of the “emerging market countries” (as the Economist magazine might so gauchely put it)

Exaggerated spending habits and consequent debt dependency among the US masses have as much or more to do with the peculiar use-value structure of US consumerism — the individual form of need satisfaction and the frontier mentality, rooted in US settler colonial history and currently manifested in the median consumer goods basket of a gas-guzzling SUV and a large-lot single-family suburban house — as it does with any peculiar and exclusive US disposition toward over-consumption

For example, if indigneous endowments of real estate and fossil fuels weren’t so scarce, the household spending patterns of mature Japanese capitalism would be just as profligate… but because said scarcities obtain, disposable income is directed toward low-impact and high-value consumer goods such as Italian luxury handbags and artfully expensive cuisine, rather than matter-and-energy-intensive powerboats and patio furniture… but the same fundamental desire toward “status differentiation through branded consumption” is still there

Hell, I’ve got 19-year-old kids in my university classes here who show up heavy-lidded at 9am because they’ve been awake from dusk to dawn, “night-trading” in emulation of the big institutional speculators who play the “carry trading,” borrowing yen on the cheap at less than one point and parking it in offshore Maltese accounts… all to pay the monthly note on their latest iPod upgrade or Honda scooter

God bless “authoritarian capitalist” China and Russia for putting the squeeze on grandiose US hegemonist designs, but you gotta know the propertied and bureaucratic cliques populating Beijing and Shanghai, Moscow and Saint Petersburg have no more ennobling mission in mind

The mindset that insists that such follies are distinctively USian is guilty of an inverse national narcissism, a cousin of the epistemology that is shocked and disturbed when occupied Iraqis don’t greet US troops with a showering of rose petals, in ignorance of the empirical evidence that lies beyond such tunnel vision

Not saying you’re 100% guilty of this, or even 50%, just saw an opening for some insights I’ve long wanted to unload

BTW, Jim O’Connor has a fabulous analysis, more or less along the same lines, in what he claims (or used to claim when I knew him well) to be his magnum opus… _Accumulation Crisis_

LD

Akita, Japan

Here is the distinction between “consumerism” and “capitalism,” as best I can lay it out. It might sound like hair-splitting nowadays, because we tend to see systems only within our own lifetimes. But it is crucially important, because establishing consumerism as a phase with specific time and place locates one of the dots that, once connected, maps out a trajectory for the system that explains things about where the system is headed. It also tells us something about how gender norms an be adjusted in time and place to suit the needs of capital accumulation, as the strategies for accumulation are altered in the face of manifold crisis… without challenging either the fundamental rule of capitalists or men.

We need to ask ourselves why consumerism in global capitalism is concentrated in overdeveloped metropolitan areas (N Am, Eur, Japan, Aus, etc). There is more to it than just the fact that in semi-peripheries and peripheral nations, only a small sliver of the total population has the economic capacity (money) to engage in the consumption of “luxury” commodities. Because most of those commodities are now being manufactured precisely by people who have no capacity to consume them.

Back in the day, when the US was an industrial powerhouse (for more than infotech and weapons), esp in the immediate post WWII period, comparatively well-paid workers in the US were also the consumer market for a lot of those goods. So there is one big difference between then and now.

Those of us who can think back that far remember that the ethos promoted by the powers that be was one of fiscal conservatism, taking credit seriously as a responsibility, frugality, saving, etc. Now, we are inundated with promotions to take on irresponsible credit (see the film Maxed Out for a devastating analysis of how debt is crashing the US “middle class” as we speak).

Another big difference between then and now.

Before WWII, in the Depression/post-Depression period (it took a war to liquidate the excess capital underlying this crisis, and to shift the burden of this liquidation onto weaker populations), women’s responsibilities in the household economy were to do all those things required to survive, much as women in the 3rd World do now. After WWII, in the US, women were established as one of the primary expansion sectors for consumption of (then) hi-tech goods for the household.

Marx outlined how profit was the appropriation of surplus value at the “point of production.” But Luxemburg made note of the fact that the other stuff that was put in to the process was coming from outside the closed system of the formula M-C-M+ (turning money into more money in this point-of-production exploitation). In the larger scheme of things, someone had to be continually knocked in the head, ripped off, defrauded (“primitive accumulation”), because stuff keeps getting scarcer as it is used up. Moreover — as we point out here all the time — contrary to the whole pre-industrial stereotype of a “short, brutal,and nasty life,” pre-industrial people if they were left the hell alone to grow enough food and deal with life on their own terms, they had healthier lives with a lot more free time. Cities brought along things like plague epidemics, not subsistence farming or hunting/gathering. So people had to be knocked in the head, ripped off, defrauded just to make them work in the cities, in addition to “resources” being exhausted.

That’s still true. It’s why we are knocking people in the head, ripping them off, and defrauding them now from Baghdad to Capetown to Jakarta.

But now the world has become more specialized; and the US has taken on the collective role of consumer-to-the-world so that capitalists operating in Honduras or China have some place to sell their shit; and when buyers have more than they need, they are induced to buy shit they don’t need (thru demand-production, ie, advertising, fashion, and all these other chicaneries), or the M-C-M+ formula comes grinding to a halt. Capital cannot be “valorized,” as they say.

Spatial separation is required in this imperial system, because the state at the top of the heap (the US) requires at least some popular support at home to maintain its political grip. So the goodies are shipped in; while the waste and horror are shipped out. When you see African Americans and increasingly Latin@s as “external” even tho they are geographically internal, you can see why Elaina and me and others we know refer to systematic racism in the US as a “national” question (there are oppressed nationalities, as in imperial core vs periphery).

But the problem remains that the physical world is finite, that once you take all the guano out of Peru its gone, once you take all the trees off the English countryside, you have to get fuel elsewhere, once you peak out oil production in a system that has to “grow,” then somebody has to go…

These limits are reached, as are the limits of human tolerance for being extracted and abused, and the underpinnings of the system itself threatens the power at the top — then they have to go for what’s left, in this case, the US “middle” class (also called a labor aristocracy), because there’s not enough left elswhere.

So after WWII, we were encouraged to be responsible and buy US produced shit (and women were redefined as Mies shows as “consumers” and sex objects, ie, housewives), but that’s over now, and we are in a new phase of “consumerism,” where we are encouraged to take on more and more debt to continue the valorization of capital by being as irresponsible as possible (noticed how many credit cards you are being offered, how they wan to give you equity loans on the house, etc?), because now even consuming is means to an end… the new primitive accumulation (fraud) being directed at the last drops of juice in the big orange — consumption as a means to produce debt slavery into perpetuity.

it’s way more complex than this, but the point is that it is evolving, not static, and that capitalism is morphing through crisis after crisis, and that consumerism(s) are transient aspects of the same, and one concentrated in core areas.

Anyway, I’ve prattled on long enough. Final point is that dependence on money (in our case, US money) is the key to obedience. Think about that one.

That may seem like a silly idea to proffer (especially coming from an atheist Unitarian); and sure, the economics of consumerism (sometimes called “capitalism”) is to blame; but I want to go in a different direction this morning, so I blame God. Or maybe I should say people’s perception of God. At least “God” is the name given to the power that is expected to save the world by people like my mother, a mostly otherwise educated, intelligent womyn. Now, I’m not saying she isn’t a conservationist, we’ve even had discussions on it’s merits; but since God said She wouldn’t destroy the world again after the Noah flood (which science says couldn’t have happened and scholars believe was a mistranslation anyway), how could God let us run out of “stuff”. After all, the accumulation of “stuff” is, according to the Puritan heritage, God’s earthly reward for good behavior.

And much as I love his long hair and steely blue eyes, Jesus bears some responsibility here, too. After all, he did (supposedly) promise to come back and save the world, just in case you think God is too “hands off.” Then there’s comments attributed to him such as Matthew 6:25-34. Now we hear it is sin to even question whether God will be able to provide.

I make the analogy like this: if there were seven of us stranded on an island, what would we do? Would we allow the captain to lay claim to everything on the plane that wasn’t personal baggage and then begin an “every man for himself” barter and trade system (capitalism)? Would we gorge ourselves while believing that rescue by some act of God was imminent? Or would we have to get serious, making plans, assigning tasks, seeking out and distributing what resources could be found, taking on responsibilities for the good of the whole? Well there aren’t seven of us, there’s (going on) seven billion. And we don’t have an island, we have a planet. Still, we face the same issues and should approach our conclusions with the same focus on grim reality. Therefore, I submit that:

1. No amount of belief in a God will save us. In fact, it may even be detrimental to the cause in some cases. And the nearest planet that could sustain life intelligent enough to come rescue us is light years away and frankly, I doubt we’re worth saving to them. So we can write off the search party.

2. If the airline captains of our island (present day capitalists) want to play “every man for himself,” why do we agree to their silly rules that pretty much ensure they will always win? I mean, if you’re going to advocate for that approach, why have rules at all? This is how they have played in any number of third world countries (Somalia, Haiti, others) and you see how well it has worked for them.

3. I would love if the current debate was over what size a terron should be or which -ism could best achieve that, but until the Deus ex machina delusion is abandoned and people are ready to admit that Adam Smith might have missed a thing or two, we aren’t ready as a whole for the necessary paradigm shift yet, although we need to be.

Finally, I’ll paraphrase from Dr. Billings (FSU) who posed if it’s true that there is a crisis of overpopulation, and a decision has to be made, which can the Earth support more of: people eating fast food hamburgers in their cars, or people eating rice in grass huts? Some of us may not like the answer the other “bees” come up should the time come to kick out a few drones.