A model of ecowelfare

Abstract

Post-productivism is therefore opposed to the social dominance of waged work, as this involves neglecting the reproductive value of emotional and ecological labour. As such, productivism has begun to reach the limits of itself because of its increasing inability to reproduce its own conditions. Like a dying star, productivism survives by consuming the waste that it has produced, it absorbs the consequences of too little care and too little sustainability by attempting to convert them into further sources of productivity. But these waste products are no substitutes for a proper ethics of care and sustainability, ethics that guide us beyond the employment society of endless GDP growth and endless productivity, so that this process cannot last indefinitely. Productivism does not necessarily reach a crisis – there is nothing historically inevitable about post-productivism – but it does implode into a cycle where productivist solutions are more and more ephemeral, re-inverting into further social problems at an everaccelerating rate. It is the disease that purports to be the cure. So, over the last couple of chapters I have stressed the importance of care work and sustainability, on the basis that these continue to be underemphasised by social democrats, old as well as new. In addition to distributive justice, these are the philosophical foundations of an ecowelfare politics, of a post-productivist social democracy. We have already addressed the main features of distributive justice in Chapter 2 and so our task here, in the following two sections, is to give an account of care and sustainability. I will then provide a simple model of ecowelfare and explore the main points of creation and tension between its three principal components.