Wasting the Nation.indd - Groundwork

Chapter 4: The toxic cradle of productionConspicuous consumptionAs organisms, people constantly draw materials from their environment. At the mostbasic physical level, this amounts to 800 kg per year in the form of food, water andair, according to Sachs. Early hunter-gatherers using basic clothing, tools and shelteradded a few kilograms to this amount. The first major change came with settled peasantagriculture which, as it exists today for possibly half of humanity, requires the use ofbetween 2 and 5 tonnes of raw material per person per year. Industrialisation wroughta far greater change. Europe, for example, uses between 40 and 70 tonnes per personper year, excluding air and water, mainly for “installations run by organizations atvarious levels of the system: high-rise buildings, steel plants, supermarkets, swimmingbaths, airports, armoured vehicles and so on” [2005: 36].‘Per person’ is thus a little misleading. The institutions of capital and state consumemore than ‘consumers’. It is not just the goods on the shelf, but the shelf itself, theshopping mall, the city that sustains the mall, the machinery of manufacture and theinfrastructure of energy and transport and, finally, the extravagance of arms. On arms,the Pentagon’s budget for the coming year is $700 billion, equal to the Treasury’s fund tobailout the finance system 60 and more than the rest of the world’s military expenditure.$100 billion of the Pentagon’s stash is for laying waste to Iraq and Afghanistan whilethe other $600 represents its normal operational budget. In South Africa, the armsdeal remains shrouded in secrecy and scandal, but the state’s intention to use the stateowned arms corporation Denel as a vehicle for ‘strategic’ investments is explicit.Or take the city. It is not incidental that the financial crisis is connected to thecontemporary process of urbanisation through the so called ‘sub-prime’ mortgagedefaults, argues geographer David Harvey [2008]. Historically, grandiose urbandevelopment has repeatedly been used to absorb surplus capital when over accumulationthreatens profits. Over the last decade or so, this process has gone global reflecting theglobalisation of finance capital. The urbanisation of China has dwarfed everythingelse, but property markets have boomed across the world accompanied by frenzieddemolition and construction. From the towers of Dubai to the golf estates of theWestern Cape, it has been marked by competitive conspicuous consumption. And, asnoted in The groundWork Report 2006, this investment has been focused in enclavesto the exclusion of the poor who are driven to the urban peripheries to make way forthe high value investments of ‘world class’ cities.60 James Carroll, Making some sense of $700b, New York Times, October 6, 2008.Wasting the Nation - groundWork - 87 -