A short prehistory of the future
From Griffith REVIEW Edition 25: After the Crisis
© Copyright Griffith University & the author.
Written by Tom Morton
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Tom Morton's biography and other articles by this writer
Ah, the old questions, the old answers, there's nothing like them!
– Samuel Beckett, Endgame
Above all, the bourgeoisie produces its own gravediggers.
– Karl Marx, Communist Manifesto
For me, the history of the crisis begins with a sound. It's a chilly spring afternoon in Berlin in March 1990, the day before the first and last free elections in what was then still East Germany, the German Democratic Republic. I'm taking a walk along the Berlin Wall, on the western side, when my attention is caught by a chinking, clinking sound echoing in the frosty air. I turn on my tape recorder, put on the headphones and move closer. Up ahead, a small group of Turkish guest-workers are busy chipping pieces off the wall with hammers and chisels. The chips will be sealed up in plastic bags and sold to tourists as souvenirs.
I still have that recording. At the time, the clinking of the hammers seemed to me a perfect metaphor for the historical process that was unfolding in Germany: entrepreneurial capitalism chipping away at the Eastern Bloc's most potent symbol, sounding a tiny but insistent death knell for fifty years of communist domination in Eastern Europe.
The following day, the citizens of the German Democratic Republic voted decisively for the Christian Democratic Party, the deutschmark and reunification. ‘Jetzt waechst zusammen, was zusammengehoert,' declared the former Social Democrat Chancellor Willy Brandt: what belongs together now grows together.
Shortly after the fall of the wall, one of the GDR's most venerable writers, Stefan Heym, published a short newspaper article decrying his fellow citizens' appetite for all things western, as they stormed the supermarkets of West Berlin and returned to their homes in the east with shopping bags bulging with consumer items. For decades Heym himself had walked the tightrope of dissidence, a ‘critical-loyal' writer who was tolerated by the East German authorities. Now, wrote Heym, fifty years of socialist tradition was being tossed on the rubbish heap, and what for? Bananas.
Heym's tirade drew a swift retort from another former East German writer, Monika Maron. She had left the GDR in the mid-1980s, after publishing a novel which exposed the appalling environmental degradation caused by the East German chemical industry in the city of Bitterfeld. Never one to pull her punches, Maron accused Heym of speaking from a position of extraordinary privilege: under the old regime, he had been allowed to travel to the West and buy western consumer goods, a privilege normally reserved for senior party officials. Heym's sanctimonious rebuking of his fellow East Germans over their appetite for bananas, she declared, amounted to nothing more than ‘the arrogance of the well-fed who are disgusted by the table manners of the starving'.
That pithy exchange between two German intellectuals seems to me to resonate, along with the clinking of the hammers, just as insistently twenty years later. The central question posed by the global financial crisis is a simple one: should we apply the old remedies, jump-start the sputtering global economy with a fresh injection of high-octane growth, a new orgy of consumer spending? Or is growth itself the problem, rather than the solution?
It's all too easy for well-meaning, well-heeled and well-educated intellectuals in the West to declare that it's time to put an end to the tyranny of consumerism, to toss out our flat-screen tellies, downsize our kitchens and opt for a simpler, slower, less cluttered existence. And there's an undeniable environmental logic in this position. But are we really prepared to tell two billion people in the developing world, a generation who see the promise of a western lifestyle finally becoming a reality, that they should forego exactly the same consumer goods which we have taken for granted for the past fifty years – not even flat-screen TVs or SMEG kitchens, but items as ordinary as a family car? Isn't that tantamount to the well-fed tut-tutting at the table manners of the hungry?
It's perhaps no accident that a professor from the Chinese Academy of the Social Sciences, Jiahua Pan, was reported recently to have told an audience at the Australian National University that the planet ‘could not afford countries like Australia and the US having wasteful and luxurious lifestyles'.