The Shock of the Anthropocene

by Christophe Bonneuil

  Good housekeeping minimized the production of waste. Several handbooks with evocative titles such as The Frugal Housewife or The Family Save All: A System of Secondary Cookery taught the recycling of waste. It was commonplace, for example, to save cooking fat for the production of soap. The massive presence of animals in the city also limited the volume of organic waste, much of which was fed to domestic animals. In New York in the mid nineteenth century, 10,000 scavenging pigs provided sustenance for the poor and aroused the complaints of the middle class. ‘Be careful of the pigs if you visit New York’, Charles Dickens warned in 1842.26 Until late in the century, small pigsties and domestic chicken coops were very common in towns.

  Several factors explain the general crisis of the recycling economy in the late nineteenth century. First of all, urban transformation: the expansion of cities, followed by the general provision of running water and flush toilets, complicated the collection of human excrement and its application to agriculture. Then there were technological factors: the manufacture of paper from wood pulp, for example, made rags useless. In the same way, the use of artificial nitrate fertilizer from the mid twentieth century ended the agricultural function of excrement and urban mud. More generally, increases in productivity made recycling economically less profitable than manufacture.

  The culture of objects also changed. In the 1920s, Christine Frederick, a specialist in household management who was extremely famous at the time, popularized the idea of ‘convenience’ as the domestic equivalent of industrial efficiency. The meaning of ‘waste’ changed from rejected matter to lost time.27 Electrical household devices were marketed under the banner of household efficiency and the emancipation of women. In the 1930s, half of American households possessed a washing machine and a vacuum cleaner.28 Likewise, ready-made meals became popular in the 1920s for the American middle classes.

  A throw-away culture was also developed under the banner of health. Kimberly-Clark supplied the US Army with bandages during the First World War. In 1918, it found itself with surplus stocks of cellucotton, and Kotex, the first disposable menstrual pad, was invented in order to use this material. Industrial packaging was similarly popularized on health grounds.29

  Finally, psychological obsolescence became an essential tool in the struggle against overproduction.30 It was first developed in the automobile sector. In 1923, when half of US households already had a car and the Ford Model T dominated a saturated market, General Motors introduced an annual change of model. Obsolescence was bound up with the growing role of industrial laboratories: the electric starter, invented in 1913, showed the ability of R&D to make certain goods obsolete overnight. In 1932, Ford followed this practice, which rapidly became general for all household durables. And when innovation failed to keep pace, which was indeed the general case, the futurist industrial design of the 1950s maintained the illusion of permanent technical progress.31

  Time rather than money

  Consumerism is not simply an economic order. It also defines a temporal order organized around work. Its triumph eclipsed powerful social movements for a drastic reduction in working hours. These alternative voices scarcely had a chance, trapped between crisis and war.

  The trade-off between consumption and leisure was fiercely debated during the whole first half of the twentieth century. Alfred Marshall, the most influential economist of his generation, had already explained in ‘The Future of the Working Classes’ (1873) that productivity gains would increasingly have to be allocated to leisure, given that material needs were not infinitely extendable. He proposed a working day of six hours, and even four hours for unpleasant work.32 The eight-hour day was the common demand of all European and American trade unions. For the generation of 1910–30, the spectacular increase in productivity had necessarily to lead to a massive reduction in working time. Leisure, rather than consumption, was seen by economists and intellectuals (such as John Maynard Keynes and Bertrand Russell in England, Charles Gide and Gabriel Tarde in France) as the variable that would bring about economic equilibrium and win the struggle against overproduction and unemployment.

  The First World War and the massive application of Taylorist methods visibly showed the productivity gains being made in the factories. At the end of the war, the British industrialist Lord Leverhulme (founder of Lever Brothers, eventually Unilever) argued for a six-hour day. In the 1920s, the European left supported the scientific organization of work, as this would make possible an increase in free time. The unions recycled the traditional pride of the worker in his trade into a collective affirmation of mass production and productivity.33 Free time was an important political issue both in the democracies and under the fascist regimes, with the expectation that it would become the centre of social life. Holiday camps, discussion groups and the practice of sports were encouraged by government. In France, Léo Lagrange symbolized these concerns.34

  In an initial period, the crisis of the 1930s reinforced this movement for a reduction in working hours. In Europe, trade unions demanded the forty-hour week, which was voted into law in France in 1936. In 1932, the American Federation of Labor called for a thirty-hour week with reduction of wages. A law imposing a thirty-hour week was even adopted by the US Senate in April 1933 but rejected by the House of Representatives.35 The world crisis seemed to have discredited the hymn to consumption of the 1920s.

  The triumph of consumerism

  How is the resurgence of this powerful current to be explained?

  For economists trained in marginalist theory, the traditional distinction between natural and artificial needs disappeared in favour of a subjective theory of utility. Paradoxically, the economic crisis led to the idea of growth being naturalized. Previously, growth was bound up with a process of material expansion: it was a question of increasing production of a particular material, opening up new resources or territories for the economy. With the overproduction crisis of the 1930s, growth came to be thought of no longer in material terms but rather as an intensification of the totality of monetary relations. The abandoning of the gold standard in the 1930s (i.e., the end of the idea that bank-notes represented gold) and the invention of GDP for national accounting completed the dematerialization of economic thinking, so that the economy could now be conceived as growing indefinitely without coming up against physical limits.36

  Figure 12: The post-war world as technological consumerist paradise, General Electric advertisement, 1943

  In the United States, the economists of the New Deal acted on the assumption that the crisis had been caused not by a lack of demand, but rather by a weakness of purchasing power. Franklin D. Roosevelt accordingly made Keynesian revival and an increase in purchasing power the linchpin of his policy of public works.

  The war brought the Keynesian boost that the New Deal had lacked. The start of the war, for Americans, coincided with a period of intense consumption: car sales leapt by 55 per cent in the first half of 1941, sales of refrigerators by 164 per cent.37 The war massively enriched Americans, their purchasing power rising by 60 per cent between 1939 and 1944. It is true that official propaganda called for recycling and saving, but simply to consume more later on. The purchase of well-remunerated war loans made it possible to benefit from technological advances. A propaganda campaign titled ‘Why we are fighting’ promised post-war abundance. Advertising presented the world to come as a technological paradise. As the manufacturer of Sparton radios explained: ‘Home will be truly a House of Wonders in this after-Victory world. Science already knows how to make it comfortable beyond our dreams. Invention will fill it with conveniences we have never known.’38 It was during the Second World War, in fact, that the dream of the ‘American way of life’ based on the family home in the suburbs was constructed, along with its panoply of electrical equipment.

  In the aftermath of the war, the United States experienced once again a major strike wave. In the words of Charles E. Wilson, president of General Electric and adviser to President Eisenhower, the problems of the Uni
ted States could be summed up in a few words: ‘Russia abroad, labour at home’.39 The employment law of 1946 and the Taft-Hartley Act on industrial relations established a new order often referred to as Cold War Keynesianism. The employment law stipulated that the government had to promote full employment and maximize production and purchasing power. The Taft-Hartley Act restricted the right to strike. Trade unions abandoned a reduction in working time in exchange for an increase in consumption. From now on, their main demand was for an indexing of wages in relation to prices. In exchange, capitalists obtained the social stability they needed for their investments. They also accepted state intervention into the economy, on condition that this guaranteed their opportunities of profit. Hence the option for military expenditure to fill order books, for highways rather than public transport, for the single-family home rather than public housing, loans to veterans (the G.I. Bill) and private pensions rather than the financing of public education and universal health coverage.

  In Europe as well as the United States, the post-war decades were marked by a very sharp rise in GDP, which quadrupled in thirty years. Median and average incomes tripled. In the United States, consumption increased still more rapidly, thanks to the credit explosion. The guaranteed loans for veterans and the appearance of credit cards massively expanded household debt. By 1957, two-thirds of Americans were in debt.

  A good part of this economic dynamism was based on the expansion of suburbs and motorization. The return of 14 million G.I.s and the ‘baby boom’ intensified the housing crisis. To stimulate supply, the housing developer William Levitt proposed applying to the construction sector the production methods of the arms industries: mass production to negotiate prices with suppliers, the division of tasks (twenty-six in the building of a house), specialization of labour, massive use of prefabrication, vertical integration and a simplification of construction with everything being electrical (see Chapter 5). Before the war, between 200,000 and 300,000 houses per year were built in the United States; in 1949, the figure was 1 million. Levitt became a national hero.

  Suburbanization encouraged the purchase of consumer durables: refrigerators, cookers, washing machines and televisions, particularly since these items were often integrated into the house itself. In 1965, in the United States, car production reached a historic peak of 11.1 million per year. One job in six was bound up with automobile construction.

  To stimulate demand, the state guaranteed housing loans. Thirty-year mortgages brought the suburban dream within reach for less than $60 per month, or the equivalent of three days’ wages. Suddenly, for millions of Americans, buying in the suburbs became less expensive than renting in town. The move to the suburbs was accompanied by public investment in roads. During the 1950s, 80 per cent of new homes in the US were built in the suburbs, which gained an extra 30 million inhabitants between 1947 and 1953. Suburbanites overtook city dwellers and country folk together by 1960. By that time, half of the economically active population lived in the suburbs, and three-quarters of those under forty.

  State-supported suburbanization redefined the political and social world of the worker: it dissolved the ethnic and social solidarities that had been the support of working-class solidarity, and in combination with television it domesticated and privatized leisure, which shifted from the urban public space to the suburban living room. The share of household income spent on cinema and public entertainment fell by an annual 2 per cent between 1947 and 1955.40

  Cold War Keynesianism gave consumerism a moral and political meaning, linking it with national prosperity and civic virtue, as well as with competition with the USSR and the defence of freedom. Mass consumption was presented as an alternative to Communism: the United States would beat the Soviet Union at its own game by effacing the traditional barriers of class society. In 1951, the sociologist David Riesman published ‘The Nylon War’, a satirical essay in which a US colonel decides to bombard the Soviet Union with nylon hose, cigarettes and watches with the aim of convincing Russians to embrace capitalism. Unfortunately, the Soviet government responds with its own ‘aggressive generosity’ in the form of caviar, fur coats and copies of Stalin’s speeches. The pertinence of the essay was confirmed a few years later with the famous ‘kitchen debate’ between Nixon and Khrushchev at the US exhibition in Moscow on 29 July 1959.

  In Europe, the Nazi and fascist regimes sought to forge a consumerist culture in the service of political stabilization.41 The Nazis demonstrated a certain ambivalence towards the consumer society: on the one hand, this appeared as an American invention, decadent and Jewish; on the other, they recognized the role it could play in winning the support of the middle and working classes. The solution was to promote an Aryan consumer society that preserved certain elements of its American exemplar (the ‘Fordism’ that Hitler greatly admired) while differentiating itself from this by the state organization of the market, the promotion of healthy products, and the despoliation of non-Aryans. To this end, the Nazi regime drew up a list of 146 products designated as ‘people’s products’ (Volksempfänger – radio, Volkswohnung – apartment, Volkswagen, etc.), production of which was to be rationalized. According to the German historian Götz Aly, the abundance of consumer goods was more decisive than ideology in winning popular support for the regime; tracing the Nazi origins of the ‘German miracle’, he shows that the pillage of occupied countries and the plunder of Jewish goods made it possible to establish the consumer society, welfare state and social market economy that post-war West Germany inherited.42

  In Western Europe, productivism and the consumer society similarly took root as the cement of a social compromise promoted by the Marshall Plan.43 In 1944, the general secretary of the French Communist Party, Maurice Thorez, declared to the miners of Waziers: ‘Produce, that is today the highest form of class duty.’44

  After the war, American films launched a semi-official propaganda campaign for the ‘American way of life’. Modern domestic life and the world of abundance were presented as self-evident, and the natural stage for romantic or criminal plots.45 The pioneering writings of Henri Lefebvre and Roland Barthes (Mythologies, 1957), then George Perec’s acrid novel Things (1965), mapped the entry of French society into a consumerist culture with its own icons and temples: the Salon de l’automobile and the ‘Arts of Housekeeping’ show, the ‘motor’ ever-present in New Wave films, the talk of the emancipation of women by consumer durables, the hypermarkets that sprang up in the 1960s.46 As in all industrialized countries, the consumerism that fuelled strong economic growth was made possible by drawing on the planet’s finite natural resources and by unequal exchange with the countries that produced raw materials, the terms of trade shifting against these by 20 per cent between 1950 and 1972. As far as oil was concerned, this shift came to an end with the ‘oil shock’ of 1973, but for renewable and mining materials it continued until the 1990s.47

  The Anthropocene body

  The entry into consumerist society that was the foundation of the ‘Great Acceleration’ not only degraded environments; it also deeply affected the bodies and physiology of consumers.

  In 1947, the Rockefeller Foundation sent a team of researchers to study European nutrition. The people of Crete, despite being relatively tall, were described as suffering from deficiencies on account of a consumption of meat and dairy products that was insufficient by American standards.48 This study formed part of a broad movement of imposing on Europe after 1945, and on the whole world in recent decades, a new dietary model high in meat and sugar and dominated by industrial foodstuffs. This model, actively constructed by the major agricultural and food corporations,49 has gone hand in hand with a degradation of the planet’s ecosystems: overfishing, specialization and monoculture that undermine biodiversity, pollution by fertilizers and pesticides, the shrinking of tropical forests in favour of stock-raising, soya and palm oil, with enormous emissions of greenhouse gases.

  Its corollary, too, is a sharp rise in chronic diseases such as cancer, obesity and ca
rdiovascular illness. Ever-earlier puberty in poor American families and the rise in child cancer incidence in Europe (up 35 per cent in thirty years) are a regular cause of concern. But the problem is global. Chronic diseases have become the prime cause of mortality worldwide (63 per cent of the 57 million deaths in 2008), much higher than infectious diseases (27 per cent) and amounting to a real time bomb, especially in India and China.50 The number of people in the world suffering from overweight and obesity rose from 857 million in 1980 to 2.1 billion in 2013.51 And now nutritionists explain to us the virtues of the Cretan diet.

  The Anthropocene body is also one damaged by thousands of toxic substances. In 2004, when the European Union’s Registration, Evaluation, Authorisation and Restriction of Chemicals (REACH) Regulation was being debated, the World Wildlife Fund published blood tests for thirty-seven European parliamentarians showing the presence of an average forty-one persistent and accumulative organic poisons. The malleability of regulations, and particularly the notion of thresholds, has authorized the proliferation of substances produced by synthetic chemistry since the Second World War. In the late 1940s, toxicologists warned governments that even at the lowest doses certain of these molecules increased the risk of cancer, and a consensus formed to ban such substances from foods. In 1958, in the United States, the Delaney Clause prohibited the presence of pesticide residues in foodstuffs. But in the 1970s, regulatory bodies turned to deploying a cost/ benefit analysis that allowed risk to be accepted in view of economic importance, along with the definition of thresholds. New international norms such as ‘daily acceptable dose’ for foodstuffs or ‘maximum authorized concentration’ for air quality made a subtle deception: given the non-existence of a threshold effect, they confirmed the de facto agreement to an acceptable rate of cancer for economic reasons.52