We are paying now for capitalism in a dramatic way

Capitalism deserves much praise and is responsible for many wonderful things, but those benefits have come at a price, among them, a seriously damaged atmosphere.

The quartet of Alexander Jung, Horand Knaup, Samiha Shafy and Bernhard Zand have discussed both the value and disadvantages of capitalism in an article on Spiegel Online International.

In their story headed: “The Warming World: Is Capitalism Destroying Our Planet?” they say humans are full of contradictions, including the urge to destroy things they love. Like our planet.

The Four-Hour Work Day would derail capitalism and play a significant role in rehabilitating earth and renewing communities.

Naomi Klein backs, by implication, the idea of a Four-Hour Work Day

The idea of a Four-Hour Work Day is justified by many things, among them a changing climate, the blatant inequality arising from the existing economic structure and, critically and importantly, the desire to survive.

Naomi Klein.

The need to survive our changing climate has prompted Canadian author, journalist and social activist known for her political analyses and criticism of corporate globalization and of corporate capitalism, has made that point in an interview with Spiegal Online International.

A kicker headline on the story says: “Can we still stop global warming? Only if we radically change our capitalist system, argues author Naomi Klein. In an interview with SPIEGEL, she explains why the time has come to abandon small steps for a radical new approach.”

Embedded in Klein’s view is the urgent need to dethrone the capitalist system and work at creating a more egalitarian society and maybe one which would revolve around many of the ideas upon which the Four-Hour Work Day is built.

Read the interview here: “SPIEGEL Interview with Naomi Klein: 'The Economic System We Have Created Global Warming'”.

Adaptation is about understanding how we live with something different

Adaptation to the rigours of climate change that will settle upon society is often contemplated in terms of what exists.

Adaptation is about
learning to live
in a society as
different from what
we now have as a
blink is from a wink.

First, people need to understand that what exists today, and what has taken shape over the past two centuries will be strikingly different from what will exist as the climate change template is pressed upon communities.

Adaptation is not about the preservation of the status quo, it is about understanding that what exists today and what we will have tomorrow will be fundamentally different.

Adaptation is about learning to live in a society as different from what we now as a blink is from a wink.

Survival in tomorrow’s circumstances will force us to disengage to from now is normal and live a life significantly less energy intensive and one in which happiness and contentment is found in things other than material and consumer goods whose existence  depends almost entirely upon the world’s finite resources.

We need to turn our attention from profit and growth, the mantra of our capitalistic world, to the enhancement and enrichment of peoples’ lives where they live.

Our modern world has brought many positive things and improved the lives of millions, but the cost has been alarming with an inequality that denies the egalitarianism boast of many.

Adaptation to the strictures settling upon us will force us to at least consider a Four-Hour Work Day, that is excepting public services, genuine farmers and privately owned businesses employing four or less people, will be inevitable.

The Four-Hour Work Day will make all of us fundamentally poorer and so less able to consume energy and resource intensive goods; force a dynamic that will see us all to live within walking or cycling distance of where we work; create more jobs as business eager to operate longer than four hours will need a whole new shift of workers; as second jobs will be frowned on (taxed at about 95%); and people will have much more free time which they can us to contribute to their communities, grow vegetables, repair household goods, share their resources (skills and tools) with their neighbours and work with their neighbourhood to build resilience into their communities.

The Four-Hour Work Day is an inticate part of adaptation and mitigation

Adaptation and mitigation are rarely considered together when people discuss a response to climate change.

This book to be launched next
 month at the University of
Melbourne helps us
 understand the different,
unfolding world humans
will have to live with.

However, they are in fact complementary, one and the same thing for if you apply mitigation processes correctly adaptation will follow.

Human-induced climate change has arisen, primarily, because humanity discovered fossil fuels and worked out a way to employ them for humanity’s benefit, but failed to recognize that in the burning they would be dumping inordinate amounts of carbon dioxide into the atmosphere.

Initially all was well for there were relatively few people on the earth (about one billion in 1800) and aided by the fossil fuels that brought the agricultural and industrial revolutions, along with marked increases in public health, we began to live longer and healthier lives.

Being better fed and educated, along with becoming much smarter, we learned how to exploit those fossil fuels and in making life far more comfortable, our numbers began to expand and in the past 40 years our population has more than tripled to an alarming seven billion plus.

However, those who study such things argue population growth is slowing and although there are more people living on the earth now than in the whole of human history, we will see fewer than 10 billion people on earth by the end of this century.

Of course, the numbers are in a sense irrelevant to how we adapt to a mitigate climate change.

The die, it is important to note, is already cast.

The amount of carbon dioxide dumped into out atmosphere as an unaccounted for externality is such that what is now a nearly one degree increase in the earth’s surface temperatures above pre-industrial times will soon become two degrees.

Writing in the 2013 book, “Four Degrees of Global Warming: Australia in a Hot World”, there was consensus among the many authors, the Australians would need to learn to adapt to living all the shortcomings and difficulties associated with a four degree increase in temperature.

The two degree increase is unavoidable and roaring down the pipe toward us is a four degree increase and so we need not just adaptation, but mitigation if we are to have any serious likelihood of surviving these quite different circumstances.

People need to educate themselves, read the literature and learn about what is ahead.

What we are facing is so different from what has existed that it escapes the comprehension of most and the outcome is of such complexity, that to attempt an explanation here would do a disservice to all, short to say that the world of tomorrow will be different, damnably difficult and effectively a step into the unknown.

Let’s talk about adaptation and mitigation – first we must throw off the human created economic shackles and create a new life that is people focussed rather than one the emphasises that human-created construct of money.

 The world's population has grown
 exponentially since we found and
understood fossil fuels.
 

Work, a process that enslaves many and benefits just a few, needs to be relegated to a position of lesser importance and so rather than be “working for the man”, we need to be in a position of working for the greater wellbeing of all.

Subsequently a four-hour work day would still see us produce more than enough to ensure our comfortable survival and yet allow each of us sufficient time in which to work with and for our respective communities.

An inherent part of such an approach would see us all poorer, in brutal economic terms, and so less able to consume “stuff” and so society’s use of and consumption of fossil fuel-powered energy would drop dramatically.

Freed from the “need” to work most of our waking hours, each of us would be in a position to use that time, energy and skill to help make our neighbourhoods, communities, towns and cities better places in which to live.

Places that because of the work/life balance would be less energy intensive, more resilient in a changing world and a way of life that would be more adaptive to the emerging difficulties associated with climate change and actually mitigate the cause of our declining atmospheric conditions.

Complex equations made startlingly simple

Equations leading to climate change are complex and yet, in fact startlingly simple.

 Daly's book,
explains 'Steady
State Economics'.

The capitalist system to which the developed world adheres is energy intensive with most of its dynamism being derived from the combustion of fossil fuels.

To avoid the complexities and confusion of climate change, or at least begin to mitigate the contributing dynamics, we need to reduce, constrain and seriously limit our use of fossil fuels and that means slowing trade at all levels within the capitalist system.

An interim step to enable the world community to embrace a new lifestyle, one changing the emphasis from one of profit to a focus on people, would be the introduction of a four-hour trading day.

Complex and impossible many would argue, but no more so, however, than the development of the profit motivated capitalist system that has arisen over about three centuries.

There is one strikingly important difference for what exists took many generations to assemble and in doing so consumed most of the world’s finite resources, upon which the modern world desperately depends, and left many people emotionally and physically disabled, and resulted frequently in divided and disrupted communities.

Critically, we don’t have three centuries to resolve this dilemma for by 2050 life on earth will become rather rickety when we will be hard pressed to trade for even four hours a day, let alone eight or even longer, as is the desire of many.

How this will evolve is beyond my comprehension, but until we can we can understand how to live fulfilling lives without living in the shadow of a monetary mantra, then a rather grimy conclusion is likely.

The four-hour work day is simply an interim step, but it takes us closer to what Herman Daly discusses in his 1977 book “Steady State Economics”, that discusses simply having what we need, and not what we want.

“Sustainability is a slippery word with meanings as different as those who use the term and for some it is about sustaining profit, whatever the cost, while for others it is about moderating the cost, ignoring our wants and ensuring our needs are sustained.

Sustainability, at least for the moment, seems to be about deconstructing the present greed and profit driven creed of an unbalanced capitalist system and replacing it with a more people-centric process that sensitively combines the best of what has lifted humanity from the morass of the distant past and the strengths of what is a softer, gentler and a more socialist-like way of governance for our society.

Work should be about answering needs and not the accumulation of wants – a dynamic that is much less energy dependent.

Clip adds to our understanding of the Four-Hour Work Day

Four-Hour work day enthusiast, Eric Fortune, alerted us to this YouTube clip explaining the dynamic.

In arguing that such an eventuality with the life of all, the attached promotional material says:

To end with this demented state of things once and for all, we must reduce working shifts in proportion to increases of productivity, establishing, to start, a worldwide work shift of four hours. This will end the world economic crisis, and give us full employment, a stable economy and a better quality of life for all human beings.

 

The YouTube clip is simply entitled: “The four-hour workday”.

Writing about population, but solving another issue

Professor Danny Dorling doesn’t specifically endorse the Four-Hour Work Day, but the implications of his 2013 book, “Population 10 Billion” suggest he would support the idea.

Danny Dorling's
 book - "Population
10 Billion".

The Professor of Human Geography at the University of Sheffield sees the future welfare of the world as intimately implicated in humanity’s broad consumption habits and discussing how we could live in a vastly fairer and essentially better world he wrote: “But first we need to control growth, not population growth – that is being controlled – but economic growth, which is still uncontrolled.”

The near uncontrolled hours allowed for work (work in its traditional and understood sense) is the driver of economic growth and that, along with insistent advertising ensuring we always remain materialistically aspirational in an our ambitions.

That near daily grind with its unrelenting hours of work brings a range of individual and communal difficulties from personal dissatisfaction to neighbourhood dystopia.

Chief, however, among the ailments arising from seemingly unlimited work hours and the unbridled consumption that arises from our personal wealth is the dissonance humans have brought upon the world’s climate.

There appears to be a simple equation: if we worked fewer hours; we would have fewer funds at our disposal; we would consume less; our subsequent carbon footprint would be smaller; we would have vastly more time to invest in the welfare of our neighbourhoods; our social lives would become richer through cooperation and working together, rather than spending most of our time, and our thinking, living in the combative and frequently de-humanizing world or business; we would also be in a position to expand and enrich the natural human social capacity that allows for collaboration that until now has been poached for profit by the world of work that is largely insensitive to the environmental needs of the planet – those needs being considered “externalities”, which are never represented in business balance sheets.

Climatologists who understand how we (humans) are disrupting the world’s climate system and grasp the seriousness of our behaviours, along with our insistence on burning fossil fuels, can only see successful mitigation through the immediate cessation of our embedded consumptive ways of life.

The Four-Hour Work Day is an immensely simple concept, but its implication is both intricate and complex in that it is seen confusingly through an ideological prism and its successful implementation demands an honest reappraisal of what it is the humans deem as “success”.

The idea of success for many is inextricably linked to the traditional mechanistic world of work, where a world in which work is simply realigned with answering needs is fundamentally kinder to earth, or at least the environment that allows humans to flourish.

Traditional work with which most of us are familiar, is, unequivocally, climate-disrupting and the energy consuming targets of the commercial world that are about massaging the toxic demands of our wants.

It is a risk of extreme proportions to abandon work without first understanding what we do to replace it for work as we experience it today answers out natural human need for the sociability that injects steadfastness into our lives.

Revolution is fine, but what happens after such a social upheaval is equally, if not more important.

A change to our lifestyle that bring changes that more than doubles our free time, demands that we reimagine how we live and within that create a paradigm that ensures that we are actually busy living fulfilled lives that bring many bring many positive psychological traits and allow us to flourish, both as individuals and as a group.

Work has become probably the most important tribal experience in our lives and we need to re-think that to make our neighbourhoods the source of the richness we draw from those tribal encounters.

Followed faithfully and through adherence to its principals, the Four-Hour Work Day will play a critical role in refreshing equality throughout civilization.

A degree is inequality has societal value in that it drives innovation and ambition, but too much of what today is a class-driven imbalance is massively de-motivating, which will ultimately lead to the very confrontations that those in charge fear the most.

A few guidelines for the Four-Hour Work Day:

People are only to work four-hours a day, no double shifts, no overtime;

Public services, such as hospitals, transport, postage, law enforcement and various essential facilities are not restricted; and

Any business that is privately owned and operated that employs four or fewer people does not face the four-hour limitations.