Mike Soron makes a good point about consumption and the economy over at his blog:

At No Impact Man, Sean Sakamoto questions the media assumption that non-consumption means one is “dead weight“.

So here’s a question: if we stop consuming do we harm or stall economic recovery? Mainstream media suggests we are, that we have a responsibility to buy.

Yet, why do we feverishly pursue this so-called “economic growth”? How did it serve us? What did it serve us? So far, this growth has wreaked tremendous damage on our lives, our planet, our societies and hasn’t fulfilled its end of the bargain.

I agree, and it’s unfortunate, but obviously expected, to hear our “progressive” leaders like President Obama cheer the capitalist line about bringing back 3% annual growth (the average annual growth to sustain a capitalist economy). But what might a zero-growth economy look like? Obviously, this isn’t referring to technological innovation or increases in productivity, but rather with the amount of surplus-value that’s extracted from the world’s supply of wealth.

In an interview with Democracy Now!, David Harvey makes a similar argument for a zero-growth economy, pointing to the limits of the world’s wealth with respect to the necessary amount of value that needs to be extracted in order to achieve 3% annual growth throughout the 21st century. I’m sympathetic to this argument, but I think Harvey’s argument is a little bit naïve, if I’ve understood it right. Basically, Harvey seems to argue that capitalism won’t be able to surpass 9 trillion dollars in global wealth, that all the wealth will be extracted by then and it can’t continue to grow without serious environmental/social problems. Obviously, there is a potential danger for this, but on the other hand geography isn’t limited to “actual” topos, but can also expand into “virtual” topos, i.e., the Internet. The Internet is just a virtual geographic space that, after its invention, became another continent from which surplus-value could be extracted—just like any other “actual” continent. To that degree, capitalism can invent its own plane/space/topos from which to extract actual wealth. So the world does not impose any natural limit, and I think Harvey, being a geographer, would in the end agree here.

This is all to say, and I think Mike Soron would agree with me, that the world’s supply of wealth does not impose any necessary limits to the amount of value that can be extracted from it. Hence, in order to achieve something like a zero-growth economy—this being another way of saying an “anti-capitalist” economy, since capitalism cannot, by its very nature/structure be zero-growth (though not necessarily socialist/communist since it doesn’t refer to distribution of resources/wealth)—there needs to be serious action and intervention first. You can’t have a revolution without a revolution.