In the Mirror of the Past

by Ivan Illich

  Waste is not the natural consequence of human existence. Professor Ludolf Kuchenbuch, who is working on a history of waste, has gathered the evidence. A concept that we take for granted does not appear before 1830. Before that date ‘waste’, as a verb and as a noun, is related to devastation, destruction, desertification, degradation. It is not something that can be removed. Professors Tamanoy and Murata have built their theory on a similar assumption: if a culture steadily enhances the interaction of sun, soil and water, its net contribution to the cosmos is positive. Human societies that create waste are those which destroy the soil-water matrix of their locality and become expansive centers for the devastation of those around them. Entropy appears as a result of the destruction of cultures and their commons.

  It is therefore unwarranted to attribute waste management to all cultures. Miasma and taboo are in no way ancestors of modern pollution. They are the symbolic rules that enhance integration and protect subsistence cultures. So-called development is a programmed disvaluation of these protections.

  Disvalue versus waste

  Disvalue remains invisible as long as two conditions obtain. The first of these consists in the widespread belief that economic categories, whose task it is to measure ‘values’, can be used in statements about communities whose ‘business’ is not values but the good. The good is part of a local ‘ideology’ related to the mixture of elements native to a specific place — to speak with Paracelsus or Tamanoy — while values are a measure which fits the abstract ideology of science. The second source of blindness to disvalue is an obsessive certainty about the feasibility of progress. This reduction of conviviality to primitive economics and the abhorrence of tradition, masked as a commitment to the progress of others, together foster the myopic destruction of the past. Tradition comes to be seen as a historical expression of waste, to be discarded with the trash of the past.

  Only a decade ago it still seemed possible to speak of twentieth-century progress with assurance. The economy appeared to be a machine that increases the flow of money. Energy, information and money all seemed to follow the same rules — the laws of entropy were equally applicable to each. The development of productive capacity, multiplication of trained workers and rise in savings were seen as parts of ‘growth’ which, sooner or later, would bring more money to more people. In spite of wider social disintegration due to the increase of money flow, ever more money was proposed as the fundamental requirement to satisfy the basic needs of more people! Entropy then seemed a tempting analog for the social degradation resulting from the pervasive flow.

  In the meantime, a new and radical questioning of economic verities began. As recently as twenty years ago, it was not yet ridiculous to look for a world community based on equal dignity and fairness that could be planned on the thermodynamic model of value flows. This is no longer so in the mid-eighties. Not only the promise of human equality, but even the provision of an equal chance for survival, sounds hollow. On a world scale it is obvious that growth has concentrated economic benefits, simultaneously disvaluing people and places, in such a way that survival has become impossible outside the money economy. More people are more destitute and helpless than ever before. Further, those privileges which only higher income can buy are increasingly valued primarily as an escape from the disvalue which affects the lives of all.

  The ideology of economic progress throws a shadow of disvalue on almost all activities that are culturally shaped outside of money flow. People like the immigrants to Mexico City, and beliefs such as those in local health rules, are de-valued long before effective toilets can be provided. People are forced into a new mental topology in which locations for bowel movements are scarce, even though resources to create these places are beyond the reasonable reach of the new economy in which they find themselves. The ideology of production and consumption under the implied condition of ‘natural’ scarcity takes hold of their minds while neither paid jobs nor money are attainable for them. Self-degradation, self-junking, self-wasting are different ways to name this creation of the necessary conditions for the legitimate growth of a money economy.

  This is where Joshiro Tamanoy comes in. He not only translated but he taught Karl Polanyi. He picked up the distinction between formal and substantive economies that goes back to Polanyi. Forty years after Polanyi, Tamanoy — whom I know only from conversation, since most of his writings are in a language of which I am ignorant — brought this distinction into modern Japan. It can be used to sum up our argument. Entropy is probably an effective metaphor to stress de-valuation in the formal economy. The flow of money or information can in some way be compared to the flow of heat. But it is now obvious that macro-economics tells us nothing about what people consider good. Therefore, entropy cannot be relevant to explain the devastation of substantive cultural patterns by which people act outside the formal money economy. This is true because the ‘exchange’ of gifts or movements of goods in the substantive economy are, by their very nature, heterogeneous to the flow-model of values postulated by a formal economy. And, as the thermodynamic flow model spreads, it extinguishes a way of life to which entropy will forever be foreign.

  The Three Dimensions of Public Option

  * * *

  Keynote Speech at the 16th General Assembly of the Society for International Development Colombo, Sri Lanka, 15th August 1979

  Where sixteen years of your war against subsistence have led can best be seen in the mirror of development. During the sixties, ‘development’ acquired a status that ranked with ‘freedom’ and ‘equality.’ Other people’s development became the rich man’s duty and burden. Development was described as a building program — people of all colors spoke of ‘nation-building’ and did so without blushing. The immediate goal of this social engineering was the installation of a balanced set of equipment in a society not yet so instrumented: the building of more schools, more hospitals, more highways, new factories, power grids, together with the creation of a population trained to staff and need them.

  The Nemesis of development

  Today, the moral imperative often years ago appears naive; today, few critical thinkers would take such an instrumentalist view of the desirable society. A host of reasons have changed people’s minds: undesired externalities exceed benefits — the tax burden of schools and hospitals is more than most economies can support; the ghost towns produced by highways impoverish the urban and rural landscape; although plastic buckets from São Paulo are lighter and cheaper than those made of scrap by the local tin-smith in Western Brazil, they put the tin-smith out of existence, and the fumes of the plastic leave a special trace on the environment — a new kind of ghost. The destruction of age-old competence as well as these poisons are inevitable byproducts and will resist all exorcisms for a long time. Cemeteries for industrial wastes simply cost too much, more than the buckets are worth. In economic jargon, the ‘external costs’ exceed not only the profit made from plastic bucket production, but also the very salaries paid in the manufacturing process.

  These rising externalities, however, are only one side of the bill which development has exacted. Counterproductivity is its reverse side. Externalities represent costs that are ‘outside’ the price paid by the consumer for what he wants — costs that he, others or future generations will at some point be charged. Counterproductivity, however, is a new kind of disappointment which arises ‘within’ the very use of the good purchased. This internal counterproductivity, an inevitable component of modern institutions, has become the constant frustration of the poorer majority of each institution’s clients: intensely experienced but rarely defined. Each major sector of the economy produces its own unique and paradoxical contradictions. Each necessarily effects the opposite of that for which it was structured. Economists, who are increasingly competent to put price-tags on externalities, are unable to deal with negative internalities and cannot measure the inherent frustration of captive clients which is something other than a cost. For most people, schooling twis
ts genetic differences into certified degradation; the medicalization of health increases demand for services far beyond the possible and useful, and undermines that organic coping ability which common sense calls health; transportation, for the great majority bound to the rush hour, increases the time spent in the servitude to traffic, reducing both freely chosen mobility and mutual access. The development of educational, medical and other welfare agencies has actually removed most clients from the obvious purpose for which these projects were designed and financed. This institutionalized frustration, resulting from compulsory consumption, combines with the new externalities. It demands an increase in the production of scavenging and repair services to impoverish and even destroy individuals and communities, affecting them in a class-specific manner. The peculiarly modern forms of frustration and paralysis and destruction totally discredit the description of the desirable society in terms of installed production capacity.

  Defense against the damages inflicted by development, rather than access to some new ‘satisfaction,’ has become the most sought-after privilege. You have arrived if you can commute outside the rush hour; probably attended an élite school, if you can give birth at home; are privy to rare and special knowledge if you can bypass the physician when you are ill; are rich and lucky if you can breathe fresh air; by no means poor, if you can build your own shack. The underclasses are now made up of those who must consume the counterproductive packages and ministrations of their self-appointed tutors; the privileged are those who are free to refuse them. A new attitude, then, has taken shape during these last years. The awareness that we cannot ecologically afford equitable development leads many to understand that, even if development in equity were possible, we would neither want more of it for ourselves, nor want to suggest it for others.

  Dimensions of redress

  Ten years ago, we tended to distinguish social options exercised within the political sphere from technical options assigned to the expert. The former were meant to focus on goals, the latter more on means. Roughly, options about the desirable society were ranged on a spectrum that ran from right to left: here capitalist, over there, socialist ‘development.’ The how was left to the experts. This one-dimensional model of politics is now passé. Today, in addition to ‘who gets what,’ two new areas of choice have become lay issues: the very legitimacy of lay judgment on the apt means for production, and the trade-offs between growth and freedom. As a result, three independent classes of options appear as three mutually perpendicular axes of public choice. On the x-axis I place the issues related to social hierarchy, political authority, ownership of the means of production and allocation of resources that are usually designated by the terms, right and left. On the y-axis, I place the technical choices between hard and soft, extending these terms far beyond pro and con atomic power: not only goods, but also services are affected by the hard and soft alternatives.

  A third choice falls on the z-axis. Neither privilege nor technique, but rather the nature of human satisfaction, is at issue. To characterize the two extremes, I shall use terms defined by Erich Fromm. At the bottom, I place a social organization that fits the seeking of satisfaction in having; at the top, in doing. At the bottom, therefore, I place a commodity-intensive society where needs are increasingly defined in terms of packaged goods and services designed and prescribed by professionals and produced under their control. This social ideal corresponds to the image of a humanity composed of individuals, each driven by considerations of marginal utility, the image that has developed from Mandeville via Smith and Marx to Keynes, and that Louis Dumont calls homo œconomicus. At the opposite end, at the top of the z-axis, I place — in a fan-shaped array — a great variety of subsistence activities. In its unique way, each of these cannot but be skeptical about the claims of growth. In such new societies where contemporary tools ease the creation of use-values, commodities and industrial production in general are deemed valuable mainly insofar as they are either resources or instruments for subsistence. Hence, the social ideal corresponds to homo habilis, an image which includes numerous individuals who are differently competent at coping with reality, the opposite of homo œconomicus, who is dependent on standardized ‘needs.’ Here, people who choose their independence and their own horizon derive more satisfaction from doing and making things for immediate use than from the products of slaves or machines. Therefore, every cultural project is necessarily modest. Here, people go as far as they can toward self-subsistence, producing themselves what they can, exchanging their surplus with neighbors, avoiding —insofar as possible — the products of wage-labor.

  The shape of contemporary society is the result of the ongoing choices along these three independent axes. And a polity’s credibility today depends on the degree of public participation in each of the three option sets. The beauty of a unique, socially articulated image of each society will, hopefully, become the determining factor of its international impact. Esthetic and ethical example may replace the competition of economic indicators. Actually, no other route is open. A mode of life characterized by austerity, modesty, constructed by hard work and built on a small scale does not lend itself to propagation through marketing. For the first time in history, poor and rich societies would be effectively placed on equal terms. But for this to become true, the present perception of international North-South relations in terms of development must first be superseded.

  The Rise and fall of wage-labor

  A related high status goal of our age, full employment, must also be reviewed. Ten years ago, attitudes toward development and politics were simpler than is possible today; attitudes toward work were sexist and naive. Work was identified with employment, and prestigious employment confined to males. The analysis of shadow work done off the job was taboo. The left referred to it as a remnant of primitive reproduction, the right, as organized consumption. All agreed that, with development, such labor would wither away. The struggle for more jobs, for equal pay for equal jobs, and more pay for every job pushed all work done off the job into a shadowed corner hidden from politics and economics. Recently, feminists, together with some economists and sociologists, looking at so-called intermediary structures, have begun to examine the unpaid contribution made to an industrial economy, a contribution for which women are principally responsible. These persons discuss ‘reproduction’ as the complement to production. But the stage is mostly filled with self-styled radicals who discuss new ways of creating conventional jobs, new forms of sharing available jobs and how to transform housework, education, childbearing and commuting into paid jobs. Under the pressure of such demands, the full employment goal appears as dubious as development.

  New actors, who question the very nature of work, advance toward the limelight. They distinguish industrially structured work, paid or unpaid, from the creation of a livelihood beyond the confines of employment and professional tutors. Their discussions raise the key issues on the vertical axis. The choice for or against the notion of man as a growth addict decides whether unemployment, that is, the effective liberty to work free from wages or salary, shall be viewed as sad and a curse, or as useful and a right.

  In a commodity-intensive society, basic needs are met through the products of wage-labor — housing no less than education, traffic no less than the delivery of infants. The work ethic which drives such a society legitimates employment for salary or wages and degrades independent coping. But the spread of wage-labor accomplishes more — it divides unpaid work into two opposite types of activities. While the loss of unpaid work through the encroachment of wage-labor has often been described, the creation of a new kind of work has been consistently ignored: the unpaid complement of industrial labor and services. A kind of forced labor or industrial serfdom in the service of commodity-intensive economies must be carefully distinguished from subsistence-oriented work lying outside the industrial system. Unless this distinction is clarified and used when choosing options on the z-axis, unpaid work guided by professionals could spread thr
ough a repressive, ecological welfare society. Women’s serfdom in the domestic sphere is the most obvious example today. Housework is not salaried. Nor is it a subsistence activity in the sense that most of the work done by women was such as when, with their menfolk, they used the entire household as the setting and the means for the creation of most of the inhabitants’ livelihood. Modern housework is standardized by industrial commodities oriented toward the support of production, and exacted from women in a sex-specific way to press them into reproduction, regeneration and a motivating force for the wage-laborer. Well publicized by feminists, housework is only one expression of that extensive shadow economy which has developed everywhere in industrial societies as a necessary complement to expanding wage-labor. This shadow complement, together with the formal economy, is a constitutive element of the industrial mode of production. It has escaped economic analysis, as did the wave nature of elementary particles before the Quantum Theory. And when concepts developed for the formal economic sector are applied to it, they distort what they do not simply miss. The real difference between two kinds of unpaid activity — shadow work which complements wage-labor, and subsistence work which competes with and opposes both — is consistently missed. Then, as subsistence activities become more rare, all unpaid activities assume a structure analogous to housework. Growth-oriented work inevitably leads to the standardization and management of activities, be they paid or unpaid.