GIVE UP ON SHOPPING AND GO LIVING INSTEAD?

Beijing Municipality cloth ration coupons. 1983

Some ten years ago I wrote a piece set in 2030, a utopian world where diversity of all sorts and a doctrine of limits and  “Slonomics” (slow economics) were the strategies by which disaster had been avoided and a new human culture had been established. It sounds even more fantastic now than it did a decade ago. I wrote that text as part one of an iBook entitled China Dreaming. I worked on it just after the 2014 Sunflower Revolution in Taiwan and the Umbrella Revolution in Hong Kong. Reading it over, so much of what I imagined happening later in that decade, did happen but in a more devastating fashion. For instance, I wrote: "The rich stayed rich, and the poor were disavowed," where in reality the rich have got even richer. But my focus was on the utopian, on the strategies put in place by a world youth movement, called the "Alliance for a New Human Culture", which had organized a planetary summit. The Chinese branch of the Alliance had produced a manifesto entitled Limits or Death  which called for the fixing of ceilings and limits proposed by Jacques Ellul as essential to the drawing up of a “road map for a possible future”. The manifesto concludes: "We believe it now falls to China, once colonized by, and currently the agent of the system, to fix “willed-for limits” since as Ellul taught us “it is not the unlimited that is capable of founding and constituting a culture, or a even a human being....It is by establishing limits that humans institute themselves as human.” I shan't cite any more of the text here, but I do encourage you to go and read it.*
We all now know that targets and ceilings, such as limiting global warming to 1.5 °C, are easily missed. Measures imposing the necessary limits and ceilings to assure a minimum chance of survival for coming generations will not come from governments who are enmeshed in the technical-economic system that refuses to face the reality of the need not simply to institute a policy of low growth but rather a strategy of ungrowth. The pressure to do so can only come from civil society through grass-roots democracy. Looking around at the world today that's quite a tall order. In the past limits on consumption, the sharing out of scarcity, has mainly only been imposed in times of war and its aftermath, such as the system rationing during the Second World War and the decade that followed. However, the so-called "socialist" countries in the twentieth-century also used rationing as a means of distributing essentials. In the case of the Soviet bloc, such rationing was accompanied by widespread corruption and black marketeering. But rationing remains the only logical alternative by regulating by pricing. As the recent soaring petrol prices have shown, consumption may well be reduced as a consequence but the hardest hit are the poor. The wealthy continue to  consume and move about as they please. 
I lived in China for many years under a system of rationing. Buying cloth and clothes were controlled by a system of cloth coupons measured in inches and feet, and rice and wheat products by a system of grain coupons. There were also coupons for cooking oil and so on. Such rationing did not cause great suffering in itself, it was rather the paucity of diet that people suffered from.
Deng Xiaoping appealed to people's desire to consume after the grey times of the Cultural Revolution, and his words were readily lapped up by a population eager for variety and plenty. But we can see forty years later the environmental and health costs of such a society of mass consumption. And then, of course, where restrictions and limits are put in place in China they are not open to discussion, they are not arrived at democratically. But is this a good example? Is autocracy the only system that could impose the limits we need to save the planet?
A "New Human Culture" would look beyond the politics of greed and the economics of penury to the cultivation of individuals within a truly a democratic society. Indeed, mass education needs to be available to inform people's choices, but people also need an education that would equip future generations for fulfilment beyond and outside established patterns of consumption. What we need now is a retort to the old Bluesman B. B. King's classic lyric “I’ve got a good mind to give up living, And go shopping instead.” In order to avoid tomorrow's generation from feeling "they'd be better off dead", we must work towards a world where it is possible and desirable to "give up on shopping and go living instead."

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* China Dreaming is available free on Apple books: https://books.apple.com/us/book/china-dreaming/id1046404801. A French eBook version of my text also exists as Sortie Treize in Nathalie Caritoux and Florent Villard (ed) Nouvelles psychogéographies . If you have difficulty accessing either please let me know and I'll make a copy available.