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Surviving the Future: Culture, Carnival and Capital in the Aftermath of the Market Economy
Surviving the Future: Culture, Carnival and Capital in the Aftermath of the Market Economy
Surviving the Future: Culture, Carnival and Capital in the Aftermath of the Market Economy
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Surviving the Future: Culture, Carnival and Capital in the Aftermath of the Market Economy

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Surviving the Future is a story drawn from the fertile ground of the late David Fleming’s extraordinary Lean Logic: A Dictionary for the Future and How to Survive It. That hardback consists of four hundred and four interlinked dictionary entries, inviting readers to choose their own path through its radical vision.

Recognizing that Lean Logic’s sheer size and unusual structure can be daunting, Fleming’s long-time collaborator Shaun Chamberlin has selected and edited one of these potential narratives to create Surviving the Future. The content, rare insights, and uniquely enjoyable writing style remain Fleming’s, but are presented here at a more accessible paperback-length and in conventional read-it-front-to-back format.

The subtitle—Culture, Carnival and Capital in the Aftermath of the Market Economy—hints at Fleming’s vision. He believed that the market economy will not survive its inherent flaws beyond the early decades of this century, and that its failure will bring great challenges, but he did not dwell on this: “We know what we need to do. We need to build the sequel, to draw on inspiration which has lain dormant, like the seed beneath the snow.”

Surviving the Future lays out a compelling and powerfully different new economics for a post-growth world.  One that relies not on taut competitiveness and eternally increasing productivity—“putting the grim into reality”—but on the play, humor, conversation, and reciprocal obligations of a rich culture. Building on a remarkable breadth of intellectual and cultural heritage—from Keynes to Kumar, Homer to Huxley, Mumford to MacIntyre, Scruton to Shiva, Shakespeare to Schumacher—Fleming describes a world in which, as he says, “there will be time for music.”

This is the world that many of us want to live in, yet we are told it is idealistic and unrealistic. With an evident mastery of both economic theory and historical precedent, Fleming shows that it is not only desirable, but actually the only system with a realistic claim to longevity. With friendliness, humor, and charm, Surviving the Future plucks this vision out of our daydreams and shows us how to make it real.

LanguageEnglish
Release dateAug 4, 2016
ISBN9781603586474
Author

David Fleming

David Fleming has been an award-winning documentary filmmaker and a journalist, whose articles have appeared in the Guardian, Independent, The Telegraph and the Mail of Sunday. He co-wrote Barging around Britain (Penguin, 2015) with John Sergeant, which accompanied the BBC television series.

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  • Rating: 5 out of 5 stars
    5/5
    I just finished a brilliant book called “Surviving the Future” by David Fleming. A friend got me down this road when she left us her copy of “Lean Logic,” the daunting non-linear tome out of which this much briefer and narratively-approachable “Surviving the Future” was crafted by a young Transition Towns guy named Shaun Chamberlin, along with Chelsea Green.It’s definitely my favorite book of 2016, and I recommend it to anyone whom is thinking of picking up a new book sometime soon.The core tenant of the book is about the importance of the informal economy, and the richness of life we’ve lost in our morbid fascination with the market. By no means does David call for us to bring down capitalism; he is quite assured that it is already collapsing under its own weight [and actually holds some nostalgia for capitalism’s golden age]. Instead, as the title implies, he’s deeply concerned about the outlook of humanity over the next century, and lays out a convincing argument that speedily investing in informal [or gift] economics is our only chance of finding existence and meaning.David outlines a stunningly practical and sweepingly broad set of frameworks. For example: the five varieties of truth: material [literal], narrative [story], implicit [reflective], performative [action], and self-denying [paradox]. Or his Adaptive Cycle, outlining the four stages of regeneration [exploitation, conservation, release, and reorganization]. Also, by no means does he underemphasize the importance of play: carnival is one of the fundamental pillars of informal economics.There’s so much more I could say about the book, but I’ll leave you with an excerpt from the epilogue, “Mourning the Market:”"The Great Transformation has already happened. It was the revolution in politics, economics and society that came with the market economy, and which hit its stride in Britain in the late eighteenth century. Most of human history had been bred, fed and watered by another sort of economy, but the market has replaced, as far as possible, the social capital of reciprocal obligation, loyalties, authority structures, cultures and traditions with exchange, price and the impersonal principles of economics.Unfortunately, the critics of economics have a had a tendency to discuss the whole structure as a tissue of misconceptions. It is a critique that fails. The strength of economics is its considerable, if far from complete, understanding of the flows and comparative advantages that underlie trade, jobs, capital and incomes, and the logic of optimizing behavior, all backed by glittering accomplishments in mathematics. That makes it a powerful analytical instrument, so that just a few misconceptions — such as a failure to understand the formal economy or resource depletion — can have leverage: like a baby monkey at the controls of a Ferrari, they can turn it into an instrument with extraordinary destructive potential. If it were a tissue of errors, it would not be dangerous: it is its 90 percent brilliance which makes it so…The market’s achievements and answers sound authoritative and final, but what is truly most significant about them is how naïve they are — if the flow of income fails, the powerfully-donning combination of money and self-interest will no longer be available on its present all-embracing scale, and perhaps not at all. And it must inevitably fail, as the market’s taut competitiveness demands ever increasing productivity and thus relies on the impossibility of perpetual growth.In the meantime, the reduction of a society and culture to dependent on mathematical abstraction has infantalised a grown-up civilization and is well on the way to destroying it. Civilizations self-destruct anyway, but it is reasonable to ask whether they have done so before with such enthusiasm, in obedience to such an acutely absurd superstition, while claiming with such insistence that they were beyond being seduced by the irrational promises of religion. Every civilization has had its irrational but reassuring myth. Previous civilizations have used their culture to sing about it and tell stories about it. Ours has used its mathematics to prove it."If you’re still looking for delicious morsels, you can reference my tweets on the book at [including a number of quotes]: @willszal #LeanLogicSome rights reserved

    1 person found this helpful

  • Rating: 2 out of 5 stars
    2/5
    Not a coherent argument in sight. Author thinks poetry is a valid substitute. He is very sure of what will happen without explaining in any useful detail why, how or when it will happen. At one point he uses a completely fallacious thought experiment to argue for a shorter work week and I was willing to let it go since he clearly is not a person partial to logic but then he uses that same argument multiple times to base his ideas on (I'm taking about the 100 people slowly replaced by robots argument). I find it hard to believe that at no point one of his friends pointed out to him that's not how the economy works.

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PRAISE FOR SURVIVING THE FUTURE

"Each time I encountered David Fleming, he left behind something whose value I was a little too slow to recognise. A sketch for Tradable Energy Quotas. A critique of the nuclear fuel cycle. And clearest in my memory: a slim working paper entitled ‘The Lean Economy.’ It took me nearly a decade to respond properly to its call. In Surviving the Future, Fleming has left behind his greatest gift: a remarkable clarity of vision—a way of seeing the world not just for what it is, but for what it might be. Hopefully, this time I’m ready for it."

—Tim Jackson, Professor of Sustainable Development, University of Surrey; author of Prosperity without Growth

David Fleming was an iconoclast in a time when orthodox thinking reasserted suffocating control. When many major environmental voices had, in effect, decided to ‘go with the flow,’ accept the mainstream economy, and do their best to make it greener, David Fleming went the other way. His analysis told him that nothing short of a paradigm shift could ensure our collective survival, and he said so, loudly, without fear of being marginalised. His courage in saying unpopular things is clear in these writings, and we should all thank him. Without the uncompromising clarity of David’s writing, we would delude ourselves as to the scale and the immediacy with which we must reshape the economy and our lifestyles. Thank goodness his analysis can now be shared more widely.

—Andrew Simms, codirector, New Weather Institute; fellow, New Economics Foundation; author of Cancel the Apocalypse

David Fleming predicts environmental catastrophe but also proposes a solution that stems from the real motives of people and not from some comprehensive political agenda. He writes lucidly and eloquently of the moral and spiritual qualities on which we might draw in our ‘descent’ to a Lean Economy. His highly poetic description of these qualities is neither gloomy nor self-deceived but tranquil and inspiring. All environmental activists should read him and learn to think in his cultivated and nuanced way.

—Roger Scruton, writer and philosopher; author of over thirty books, including Green Philosophy

David Fleming has laid out a logical, persuasive, and very readable pathway to dealing with the most crucial catastrophe we face: the double bind of growth—if no growth the economy fails, if growth the economy fails. He illuminates the ‘transition from the global city’ to ‘habitats on a human scale’ and an economy ‘organized around the rediscovery of community.’ If there will be any survival following the coming collapse, it will be through following the wisdom provided here.

—Kirkpatrick Sale, author of Human Scale

Why do some of the truly great books only emerge and exact their influence upon us after the death of their authors? Perhaps it takes a lifetime to accrue and refine the necessary wisdom. Or perhaps it simply takes the rest of us too long to catch up. Like Thoreau, Fleming’s masterpiece brims not only with fresh insight into every nook and cranny of our culture and what it means to be human, but with such wit and humour that its challenging ideas and radical perspectives become a refreshing delight. If we’re to have a future worth surviving, this book demands to be read, re-read, and—ultimately—acted upon.

—Mark Boyle, author of The Moneyless Manifesto and Drinking Molotov Cocktails with Gandhi

"Shaun Chamberlin has edited Fleming’s Lean Logic to a string of gems that refract the burning issues of our times."

—Professor Alastair McIntosh, author of Soil and Soul and Poacher’s Pilgrimage

‘The end is nigh’ messages are a dime a dozen these days. Fleming’s work doesn’t shy away from that, but it’s his vision of what could come next—and the potential richness, carnival, and culture of it—that I think is so rare and precious in these books. Less what we stand to lose and more what we’ve lost already and stand to regain if we do things right.

—Jeremy Leggett, founder, Solarcentury and SolarAid; author of The Winning of the Carbon War

"David Fleming was an elder of the UK green movement and a key figure in the early Green Party. Drawing on the heritage of Schumacher’s Small Is Beautiful, Fleming’s beautifully written and nourishing vision of a post-growth economics grounded in human-scale culture and community—rather than big finance—is both inspiring and ever more topical."

—Caroline Lucas MP, former leader, Green Party of England and Wales; former Member of the European Parliament

I can’t say enough good things about this book. David Fleming’s keen interdisciplinary mind was at home in economics, history, and anthropology, so when he imagines the world beyond fossil fuels, the result is not just a schematic diagram but narrative with bone, sinew, flesh, and blood. This is how real human beings could and hopefully will respond to climate change and resource depletion.

—Richard Heinberg, senior fellow, Post Carbon Institute

Copyright © 2016 by The Estate of David Fleming

All rights reserved.

No part of this book may be transmitted or reproduced in any form by any means without permission in writing from the publisher.

Publisher’s note: In order to honor David Fleming’s voice, we have forgone our typical Chelsea Green house style, including using British grammar and spelling instead of American.

Developmental Editor: Shaun Chamberlin

Project Manager: Angela Boyle

Project Editor: Brianne Goodspeed

Indexer: Shaun Chamberlin

Designer: Melissa Jacobson

Printed in the United States of America.

First printing July, 2016.

10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1 16 17 18 19

Our Commitment to Green Publishing

Chelsea Green sees publishing as a tool for cultural change and ecological stewardship. We strive to align our book manufacturing practices with our editorial mission and to reduce the impact of our business enterprise in the environment. We print our books and catalogs on chlorine-free recycled paper, using vegetable-based inks whenever possible. This book may cost slightly more because it was printed on paper that contains recycled fiber, and we hope you’ll agree that it’s worth it. Chelsea Green is a member of the Green Press Initiative (www.greenpressinitiative.org), a nonprofit coalition of publishers, manufacturers, and authors working to protect the world’s endangered forests and conserve natural resources. Surviving the Future was printed on paper supplied by Edwards Brothers Malloy that contains 100 percent postconsumer recycled fiber.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Names: Fleming, David, author. | Chamberlin, Shaun, author.

Title: Surviving the future : culture, carnival and capital in the aftermath of the market economy / David Fleming, Shaun Chamberlin ; foreword by Rob Hopkins.

Description: White River Junction, Vermont : Chelsea Green Publishing, 2016.

Identifiers: LCCN 2016014663| ISBN 9781603586467 (paperback) | ISBN 9781603586474 (ebook)

Subjects: LCSH: Social history. | Environmental economics. | Sustainable development. | BISAC: SOCIAL SCIENCE / Future Studies. | BUSINESS & ECONOMICS / Environmental Economics. | PHILOSOPHY / Social. | HISTORY / Social History. | POLITICAL SCIENCE / Economic Conditions. | POLITICAL SCIENCE / History & Theory.

Classification: LCC HN18.3 .F54 2016 | DDC 306—dc23

LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2016014663

Chelsea Green Publishing

85 North Main Street, Suite 120

White River Junction, VT 05001

(802) 295-6300

www.chelseagreen.com

In loving memory of David Fleming, 1940–2010

With thanks to the many who helped in the production of this book, including: Roger Bentley, Lucy Barlow, Biff Vernon, Sarah Nicholl, Simon Brett, Judith Thornton, Elena Trivelli, Rosalie Chamberlin, Jane Grinonneau, Brianne Goodspeed, Jen O’Brien, Rianne ten Veen, John Fellowes, Mark Boyle, Marcin Gerwin, Dan Dawson, Michelle Berriedale-Johnson, Anna O’Brien, Henrik Dahle, Rachel Cashdan.

Also, on David Fleming’s behalf, to those who supported his work (I am aware of David Astor, the R H Southern Trust, the Polden-Puckham Charitable Foundation and the Organic Research Centre) and the many who read, commented on and contributed to drafts of Lean Logic during his lifetime.

Shaun Chamberlin

CONTENTS

Foreword

Editor’s Preface

Introduction

The Story

Climacteric

The Boy Who Cried Wolf

Part 1: A Framework for Community

1: Three Principles

Manners

Scale and Presence

Slack

2: The Lean Economy

A Protocol for Lean Economies

Post-Market Economics

3: Lean Culture

Part 2: Rediscovering a Life of Place and Play

4: Carnival

5: Slack Employment

Leisure

6: Eroticism

7: Needs and Wants

8: Small Scale

The Intensification Paradox

9: Intentional Waste

10: Religion

11: Utopia?

Part 3: The Path from Here to There

12: Growth

Unlean Alternatives to Growth

Lean Alternatives to Growth

13: Population and Food

Food Prospects

Population Crash?

14: The Wheel of Life

15: Transition

16: Ethics and Ecology

Epilogue: Mourning the Market

Appendix: Survival Tool 1—How To Cheat in an Argument

including Begging the Question, Distraction, Indignation, Shifting Ground, the Scourge of Hypocrisy and the Straw Man

Appendix: Survival Tool 2—Lean Thinking

Notes

Bibliography

Illustration Credits

About the Author

About the Editor

FOREWORD

David Fleming would be so thrilled that you are holding this book in your hands. He was one of the most intelligent, kind and funny men it was ever my privilege to meet. I would also unreservedly go so far as to say that he was one of the most original, brilliant, urgently-needed, under-rated and ahead-of-his-time thinkers of the last 50 years. Let’s see whether by the end of this book you agree with that statement or not. I suspect you will.

I don’t remember who it was who introduced us, but sometime in 2005 I rang him, as in my explorations around the idea of resilience his name was coming up again and again. This was in the very early days of the Transition movement, when it was still an idea taking shape, assembling eclectic ideas with a magpie eye for the shiny, the interesting, the new. Our key motivating question was how you might intentionally build more resilient communities in such a way that every step felt like a step forward, a rewarding, nurturing, inspiring, positive step. No-one really talked much about resilience then, which was why I was so keen to talk to David.

He was charming, and fascinated that anyone would have taken sufficient interest in his work to pick up a phone and call him. After an hour long conversation, he said he would send me a copy of the draft of a book he was working on, in case there was anything in there that I might find useful.

A couple of days later, a beautifully bound copy of The Lean Economy came through my letterbox—one of, as I later found out, only a handful of copies sent out to people whose opinion he respected. It is often said of the Sex Pistols’ first gig at Manchester Free Trade Hall that although only 50 people came, every person had their lives changed, and went on to form seminal bands, record labels and publications. It was the same with that early version of The Lean Economy, impacting massively on the small circle of us fortunate enough to get copies. I still contend that had that early version been published there and then, it would have been hugely influential and impactful. At that stage it was smaller than Lean Logic, but at that moment, with so many of us floundering about trying to piece together models for building resilience, The Lean Economy was rich with insight. Looking through things I wrote and published at the time, many of them list, in the references "Fleming, D. (2006) The Lean Economy (Unpublished)".

But David didn’t do editors, and he certainly didn’t do deadlines. Shortly after he sent me his book, he gave a talk in Totnes that I facilitated. I told him he had 40 minutes to speak, and after 50 he was still going. I tried gesturing him to wind things up, but he was so into the flow of his stream of ideas that he wasn’t stopping for anyone. After an hour I started making quite firm draw it to a close now gestures, to which he told the audience ah, now he’s telling me I need to wind up . . . Anyway, let me tell you about . . . and he was off again. He finally drew to a close after 80 minutes of speaking.

A talk by David was always a mesmerising experience. He talked at a speed that for him was the only way to keep up with the rate at which his brain generated ideas. Hands often went up to ask him to slow down a bit, a suggestion he would comply with for about 2 minutes before he inevitably picked up speed again. One of his most memorable presentations was at the 2009 Transition Network Conference at Battersea Arts Centre. It was titled Wild Economics: Wolves, Resilience and Spirit. To this day I couldn’t really tell you what it was about, other than it was a fascinating, breakneck and hilarious trip through the mind of David Fleming.

The Lean Economy became a constant feature of life around David. Ever-present under his arm was a tattered working version, constantly revised, scribbled on, amended. I had always rather naively assumed the idea of editing was to make something shorter, more concise, but under David’s editorial process, The Lean Economy just seemed to grow ever larger.

My suggestions that he needed an editor and, dare I say it, a deadline, were charmingly laughed off. He was in discussions with publishers, he’d tell me, and anyway it’d be finished in a couple of months. One of my favourite memories of David was in 2007, when he came to my wedding, in an old youth hostel perched high above one of the most beautiful stretches of the River Dart in Devon. The sun shone for the first time in weeks, and at the crack of dawn, when most people were sleeping off hangovers, David later told me he was awake and up, sitting at a bench overlooking the river, editing The Lean Economy in a blissful outdoor reverie.

Some time later, he announced that he was going to completely rework The Lean Economy, and that it was now going to be called Lean Logic: a Dictionary for Environmental Manners. I had a long conversation with him about whether the world actually needed a dictionary for environmental manners, indeed whether it would even have any kind of idea of what such a thing actually was or to what use one might possibly put it. He listened very patiently and carried on regardless, and I’m glad he did. Although I still contend that The Lean Economy should have been published, as it was, back in 2005, Lean Logic, and now this brilliant paperback version so lovingly created by Shaun Chamberlin, beautifully capture the extraordinary thing that was the mind of David Fleming. Both have the distinct advantage over The Lean Economy that they have passed through the hands of an editor, and in this case, an editor who worked closely with David for years.

His mind wasn’t a linear thing. It leapt from one thing to another to another, making connections that no-one else ever would. Being the most widely-read person I have ever met helped. I remember a great discussion we had where I asked him what gave him hope. After a long pause he said Bach. He introduced me to some of the classics of what one might think of as early resilience literature, such as The Worm Forgives the Plough and George Sturt’s The Wheelwright’s Shop, for which I am deeply grateful. He was a great friend and supporter of the early London Transition groups, often attending their events, and acting as an elder. Personally I learnt so much from him, and he was always willing and happy to talk through and debate ideas, and to share his thoughts on the emerging Transition model, something he was a great admirer of.

His death in November 2010 came as a huge shock. The last time I saw him he was as full of his usual indefatigable curiosity as always, fit and well, the very physical embodiment of the lean that he so enjoyed prefixing everything else with. Death was the one deadline he wasn’t able to evade. At the time, he still had the umpteenth rewrite of Lean Logic, complete with its strikethroughs, scribblings and notes in the margin, with him. That final working version was self-published by his family shortly after his passing, but I am so delighted to see my dear friend and mentor’s work edited properly by Shaun and presented to the world.

In many ways, I have seen a lot of what I do as being about trying to make David’s ideas (in so far as I managed to grasp them) intelligible to a wider world. For me, much of that is captured in my favourite quote of his:

Localisation stands, at best, at the limits of practical possibility. But it has the decisive argument in its favour that there is no alternative.

Genius. Now Shaun Chamberlin has done a far better job of clearly and intelligibly presenting his ideas than I could ever do. History will come to place him alongside Schumacher, Berry, Seymour, Cobbett, and those other brilliant souls who could not just imagine a more resilient world, but who could paint a picture of it in such vivid colours. Step into the world of David Fleming, you’ll be so glad you did.

Rob Hopkins

EDITOR'S PREFACE

Last year, Ursula K. Le Guin gave an impassioned speech in accepting the National Book Foundation’s Medal for Distinguished Contribution to American Letters. She declared that her beautiful reward was accepted on behalf of, and shared with:

. . . Writers of the imagination who, for the last fifty years, watched the beautiful rewards go to the so-called realists.

I think hard times are coming, when we will be wanting the voices of writers who can see alternatives to how we live now. Who can see through our fear-stricken society and its obsessive technologies to other ways of being, and even imagine some real grounds for hope. We will need writers who can remember freedom—poets, visionaries; the realists of a larger reality. Right now, I think we need writers who know the difference between production of a market commodity and the practice of an art.

. . . We live in capitalism; its power seems inescapable. So did the divine right of kings. Any human power can be resisted and changed by human beings. Resistance and change often begin in art, and very often in our art: the art of words. . . . The name of our beautiful reward is not profit. Its name is freedom.¹

I believe she was thinking primarily of her fellow writers of fantasy and science fiction, but in my ears her words sounded a clarion call to complete my work on this book. David Fleming’s writing is doubtless grounded on the non-fiction side of literature’s great divide, but it perhaps begins to bridge the gap, anticipating Le Guin’s call for visionary memory and imagination as it reaches towards the future. And certainly it is more artwork than market commodity, with its poetry-spattered prose, radical content and unique structure.

Surviving the Future is a story drawn from Fleming’s masterpiece Lean Logic: A Dictionary for the Future and How to Survive It; a hardback that has proved an influential and entertaining read even before its publication, feeding the fire of thinkers, writers, activists and academics in the UK and beyond as drafts circulated. The beauty of the dictionary format is that it allows Fleming to draw attention to connections that might otherwise be overlooked (each definition contains pointers to related entries) without detracting from his in-depth exploration of each topic. It also creates a book perfectly suited to dipping in and out.

Nonetheless, after Fleming’s death in 2010, demand grew for the production of this paperback version, to concisely present his rare insights and remarkably enjoyable writing style in a more conventional read-it-front-to-back format. It has been necessary to edit the text a little in places in order to ensure the flow of this new arrangement, but my editorial approach has been to leave Fleming’s unique voice untouched as far as possible.

In truth, there were many different books ready to be teased from the fertile ground of Lean Logic. A feature of its ‘linked dictionary’ format is that it allows the reader to follow the narrative of their choice as they explore the entries, breaking free of the imposed order of a conventional book. Surviving the Future is one of those possible narratives, and I have sought to provide here a real taste of not only Fleming’s playful writing, but also his gift for challenging the divine right of economists to pronounce from the heights of mathematical abstraction.

He reminds us that the subject matter they claim for their own consists of essentially straightforward questions such as: Who should work at what? And for how long? And how should our wealth be shared out and distributed? Society’s answers to these questions shape the bulk of our waking hours, and so Surviving the Future returns them to their rightful owners. In the process, it reminds us of how extreme and unusual today’s ‘ordinary’ is, and shows zero tolerance for those who benefit from presenting these life-defining questions as impenetrable, none-of-our-business and, of all things, boring.

Whichever version of his work is read, there is no denying that since his death in 2010, Fleming’s far-sightedness has become ever more apparent. He predicted the schisms and convulsions shaking the economies of Europe. He was among the first in the world to reveal the ongoing pressure on oil supply, and predict the subsequent volatile prices and growth in ‘unconventional’ oil and gas. Ever-improving scientific understanding of our environmental crises has vindicated his belief that a fundamental change of direction is needed if we are to maintain a benign climate. And above all, his diagnosis of the roots of our cultural malaise looks ever more acute as the years pass. It seems that this book’s powerfully different—yet deep-rooted—vision for a post-growth culture may have its time after the passing of its creator.

Yet, as Fleming says within, the future he sketches out is a scenario, not a prediction.

It is only appropriate that society should explore a diversity of paths in response to the challenges of our times, but I for one hope that the future that comes to pass is tangibly inspired by that laid out here. Long before she made it, David Fleming was answering Le Guin’s call for those visionary writers who can see alternatives to how we live now . . . and even imagine some real grounds for hope.

As visions of the future go—and they have long been a particular fascination of mine—Surviving the Future is by far the most grounded, inspiring and impelling I have yet encountered. I am honoured to have played a part in its publication.

And on that note, over to David.²

Shaun Chamberlin, September 2015

INTRODUCTION

I never volunteer for anything. It only gets me into trouble. So when we were asked to volunteer for parts in a game to illustrate the virtues of what is known as lean thinking, I stood at the back, and stared at the floor. This was especially necessary because the other people on the course were senior management in industries which I had read about from time to time, but who lived on a different planet from the one I mooch about in: aerospace, automotive, logistics, reinsurance. One of them made tanks. I concentrated on not catching anyone’s eye.

What I didn’t realise was that the last person to volunteer—or anyone foolhardy enough not to volunteer at all—was punished by being nominated for the job that nobody wanted.

Okay, you’re the CEO.

?

Yes, you.

?

Chief Executive Officer.

?

The Boss.

No, really, I’m not that ambitious.

You’re the Boss. Now, let’s get a move on.

Well, they put a lot of thought and effort into designing the games they play in business schools. And here is what they had us doing. They wanted us to assemble little plastic coloured bricks together in a very particular way. If you got it roughly right, that wouldn’t do. If you got it almost exactly right, that meant you had built an aeroplane that would stall on take-off. It had to be exact—and agreed to be exact by the incorruptible referee, the lady who was making this distressing event happen.

Most of the twenty-four people on the course had sensibly volunteered to be production workers. The remaining one third were management. The production workers were divided into four groups, sat down at four tables, and required to put the bricks together in subassemblies, each one an exact replica of the model which had been placed in front of them on their table. Each subassembly then had to be taken to the next table to have some more bits added to it. The object was completed by the fourth group and handed to the referee for inspection. The task of the managers was to make sure the workers got it right. My task was to make sure the managers got it right.

A lot of things happened at once. Putting those little bricks together was tricky. At each table, piles of duff subassemblies collected. Sometimes a completed object did make it to the end of the line, only to be rejected. Disputes broke out between the tables. There was a lot of shouting. My team of managers were worked off their feet. I realised it is hard work being a manager. The workers blamed the management. The management blamed me. I tried to remember how to look calm and confident. If anyone, having lost their way to the university’s art department, had looked in on the scene, they would reasonably have been impressed by the sheer scale of activity. Everyone was furiously busy checking, carrying, informing, suggesting, inspecting, disagreeing. This, clearly, was a group of highly-motivated people. If people can work with this level of enthusiasm on the task of assembling little plastic bricks, what chance has the competition? The world is beaten.

The problem was that not one single assembly was put together correctly. The sound and fury signified nothing. It began to become clear, even to me, that there must surely be a better way of doing it.

After some trial and error, the tables were rearranged; they were pushed against each other in a row. The group at each table now worked to a rule: only one subassembly to be made at a time, then to be placed in reach of the group at the next table, waiting to be picked up. When the next group found that there was something wrong with it, the two groups would get together and work out the problem. There was good reason, now, to apply their minds. Neither table would even attempt to make another assembly until the problem with the first one had been cracked, and only one subassembly could now be in play at the same time. Problems were revealed quickly; people talked to each other. The shouting stopped.

And then the talking, too, got quieter. The production workers had worked out how to get it right, every time. Something new began to come from the tables: a sense of quiet satisfaction.

And the management? Quite suddenly, I remembered my pivotal role as CEO, and looked round to see what the other members of my management team were doing. It can be easily summarised: we were standing in a straight line, with our arms folded. We were observing the scene, and trying to make ourselves believe that we were in some way responsible for this smoothly-running model of diligence, accuracy and intelligence.

But then we realised: we were out of work. I would have been out of work anyway, so for me it was a lucky reprieve; I could leave with relief and honour. But for the others in my team it was a moment of truth: if you declutter things so that the problems become visible, and you set things up so that people talk to each other and start to believe they can work things out for themselves, you are calling on information-processing power which has a tendency to be overlooked. It is there in the space right above the nose. You need some reasonably well-defined intention in the first place, but within that frame of reference there is freedom to invent. It is called lean thinking.¹

The lean thinking described in this book should not be taken as a comprehensive guide to how to run a railway or to make tanks. Rather, it is about how to recruit the intelligence and purpose of the people in the extraordinary task of inventing a future. And here is why we need to do so.

The Story

When long-established systems break down, they often do so in many different ways at the same time. Our economy and society depend on a lot of things working right, all the time: cheap and reliable flows of energy, a stable climate, fertile soils, abundant fresh water, productive oceans, an intact, diverse ecology, high levels of employment and a cohesive culture. These are all in trouble.

How should we respond to this? Well, with care, application and references, no doubt, and we shall come to that, but for now: four kinds of response are possible—that is, four paths which lead off in their different directions, each of which counts as the most enticing and delightful one, depending on who is looking at them.

Growth. Market economies, like bicycles, are only stable when they are moving forward—and that, for an economy, means growth. Growth keeps unemployment down and governments solvent. These are extremely good reasons to keep it going: how could any responsible government and business establishment contemplate anything else? The snag is that growth destroys the foundations on which it relies. This is the double-bind of

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