Some reflections on the concept of

sustainability and possible alternatives

Nora Räthzel Department of Sociology, University of Umeå. Sweden

Structure� Concept of Sustainability – historical note

� Model of Sustainable Development – separations and blind spots

� The relationship between work and consumption

� Alienation from production, from nature, from social relations – lack of control and privatisation

� Consumption as alienated desire

� Privatised individuals, consumption and authoritarianism

� Reinforcement of individualism – the problem as solution

� The social relations of production, consumption and the political

� The socio-spatial relations of re-production: life-stories project

� Places of work in a global dimension – Trade Unions

From ecodevelopment to Sustainable development

� The commission (Brundtland in Rio 1992) immediately

ran up against the opposition of the United States, which

refused any discussion of ecodevelopment. It was

permitted to say that the needs of the present generation

should be satisfied without compromising the possibilities

of successive generations, and to call this demand

"sustainability." But the term "ecodevelopment" was

taboo, to the extent that it connoted the end of unbridled

free trade, the prohibition of the exploitation of one

territory by another, and so forth.

Alain Lipietz 1996

Justice vs. Nature – Space vs. Time� In the definition, the attention to the dimension of time is

not counterbalanced by an equal attention to the dimensions of space. It is therefore not an exaggeration to say that the canonical definition has resolved the ‘nature versus justice’ dilemma in favour of nature. For two crucial questions remain open: what needs and whose needs?... Is sustainable development meant to meet the needs for water, land, and economic security, or the needs for air travel and bank deposits? ... Are the needs in question those of the global consumer class or those of the enormous numbers of have-nots?

Wolfgang Sachs 1992

Model of Sustainability

Interpretation of goals and actions

Political debates on sustainability

Source: University of Brighton, Centre for Learning and Teaching

Weakness of the social

Source: WWW.Grist.Org

A limited view of social context

Paul C. Stern, Thomas Dietz and Linda Kalof 1993

Origins of materialistic values� My understanding of the connection among insecurity, a

materialistic value orientation, and well-being is that sometimes people experience circumstances (nonnurturing parents, poverty, death anxiety) that lead them to feel insecure. This causes unhappiness and dissatisfaction …At the same time, insecurity also makes it likely that people will pursue materialistic aims, as both inner predispositions and external consumer culture suggest that resources can purchase security.

Kasser 2002

Consumption and Work� Consumerism acts to maintain the emotional reversal of

work and family. Exposed to a continual bombardment of advertisements through a daily average of three hours of television (half of all their leisure time), workers are persuaded to ‘need’ more things. To buy what they now need, they need money. To earn money, they work longer hours. Being away from home so many hours, they make up for their absence at home with gifts that cost money. They materialize love. And so the cycle continues.

Zygmunt Bauman 2007

Alienation at work� Firstly, the fact that labour is external to the worker – i.e.,

does not belong to his essential being; that he, therefore,

does not confirm himself in his work, but denies himself,

feels miserable and not happy, does not develop free

mental and physical energy, but mortifies his flesh and

ruins his mind. Hence, the worker feels himself only when

he is not working; when he is working, he does not feel

himself. He is at home when he is not working, and not at

home when he is working.

Karl Marx: Economic and Philosophical Manuscripts of 1844

Effects of alienation at work on consumption

� The result is that man (the worker) feels that he is

acting freely only in his animal functions – eating,

drinking, and procreating, or at most in his dwelling

and adornment – while in his human functions, he is

nothing more than animal. It is true that eating,

drinking, and procreating, etc., are also genuine

human functions. However, when abstracted from

other aspects of human activity, and turned into final

and exclusive ends, they are animal.

Karl Marx: Economic and Philosophical Manuscripts of 1844

Three dimensions of alienation� Alienation from the production process and the product

� Alienation from nature transformed into natural resources

� Alienation from social relations – privatisation of the

individual = individualisation

Lack of social control over living and working

conditions

Consumption as alienated Desire

� “In ‘consumer society’, which is allegedly based upon mass consumption and massive production for needs, the manufacturers of consumer goods do all they can to manufacture consumers. To a large extent they succeed.

� The consumer does not desire. He submits. He has ‘strangely’ motivated behaviour patterns’. He obeys the suggestions and the orders given to him by advertising, sales agencies or the demands of social prestige.

Henri Lefebvre 2002: 11

Consumerism and Individualism

Individuals are “pushed and pulled to seek and find

individual solutions to socially created problems, and to

implement such solutions individually, with the help of

individual skills and resources. This ideology proclaims

the futility (indeed, counter-productivity) of solidarity: of

joining forces and subordinating individual actions to a

‘common cause’.

Zygmunt Bauman 2008: 20

Causes: Individual vs. Structural

Solutions – societal from above

“Man to Man is an arrant Wolfe”

Among many bright and not so bright ideas for which Margaret

Thatcher will be remembered was her discovery of the non-existence

of society . . . ‘There is no such thing as “society” . . . There are only

individuals and families’ she declared. But it took a lot more of her

and her successors’ efforts to recast that figment of Thatcher’s

fanciful imagination into a fairly precise description of the real

world, as seen from the inside of its inhabitants’ experience.

Zygmunt Bauman 2007

Title: Hobbes: Leviathan

Problems of the Sustainable Development Paradigm

� The separation of areas into distinct spheres obscures the social relations, power relations, and social drives that guide actors engaged in different kinds of social practices. The social, the environment, and the economy are always already the product of specific societal relations at specific times and in specificplaces.

� The approach is ahistorical and does not take society in its entirety into account (unknowingly and unconsciously perhaps) and thus reproduces and reinforces the conditions of consumption (i.e., alienation, privatisation, lack of democraticcontrol over production and consumption), the effects of which it seeks to heal.

Societal relations producing the environment

� Relations of production and reproduction(e.g., social actors and their (conflicting) interests; the positions within society at large of producers and their work)

� Relations of consumption(e.g., relations between producers and consumers, marketing strategies)

� Political relations (e.g., forms of democracy, lobbying, citizens and government, political institutions)

Body politic on a global scale

Sustainable development as an integrated practice

Socio-spatial relations of (re)productionNetwork: The Relationship between Space, Place,

Sustainability

• One has to think of all these cycles as superimposed on each other, that is, happening simultaneously.

• The term (re)production is to be seen in a very general sense, in terms of making, re-making, re-creating through social practices that do not necessarily take place inside a factory or an office.

• Places, spaces, and subject positions are always already there, but since they are transitional, they are also always reproduced, transformed, or replaced.

• Struggles for power and control take place at any time in any space/place, but they are about different relations, therefore the different naming.

• Gender, ethnic, class, generational relations are made and learned everywhere, but the family is the place where they are at stake,created and lived expressively and learned first.

The production of places Course of everyday life

Interpretative

Repertoires –

Struggles for

resources

The production of spaces

The production of subject positions

Trade Unions on North-South and the

Environment

Managers, Shareholders

Space of Representation

Management Strategies, Employers’Organisations

Representational Space

Local working places

Spaces of resistance

Local, National, and International Trade Unions

Trade union members Trade Union officials,

Spaces

Workers,

Employees

Global relations of Production, Consumption and Politics