is still an insufficiency, this assertion stands – conditionally at least. Where there is already excess, it categorically doesn’t. One of two critical flaws at the heart of capitalism is its inability to know where this point is. The other is not knowing how to stop when we get there.
These flaws are so deeply engrained that escaping them isn’t simple. There’s no convenient magic trick to spring ourselves from the trap, without shaking the foundations of our own cultural beliefs. The goal of this book is to engage in that task. By pulling apart the assumptions coded in capitalism and reframing the underlying propositions, I aim to reconstruct the foundations for a postgrowth narrative.
The journey itself is entangled in the history of thought. That history was created by some extraordinary people. Their lives and struggles provide a way of grounding theory in story. Listened to with respect, they become our guides. In this chapter, self-evidently, our principal guide was Robert F. Kennedy, former US Attorney General and aspiring Presidential candidate in the 1968 campaign. As the book unfolds, the cast begins to multiply.
I am not entirely sure whether I chose these characters or whether they chose me. Nor could I reliably say that I guided the direction of their narrative. As I wrote, their voices teased me relentlessly away from my original, more simplistic aims and forced me into complexities I hadn’t intended to address. These women and men became my intellectual companions. I would lose myself over and again in their lives and their struggles. Not too much, I hope. But enough to arrive occasionally in that liminal space where something unexpected can happen. More often than not it did.
But I was also very aware that the performance of this particular journey has a potential cast of thousands. That there were others I could have chosen is blindingly obvious. That there are voices who are missing is inevitable. This is not ultimately a book of answers. It’s a book of questions. With some tentative suggestions that happen to emerge from it. Another book, written on another day (or in a different year), might have had a very different cast list. I dare to imagine it might nonetheless have arrived at a similar destination.
We are trapped in an iron cage of consumerism. But the cage is of our own making. We are locked in the myth of growth. But the key was forged in our own minds. There are physical, material limits to our existence. But there is a creativity in our souls that can free us to live meaningfully and thrive together. These were the principal insights that have emerged for me, through endless conversation with my intellectual guides. For different readers, something different may emerge. If it does, I will consider my assignment a success.
‘Too much and for too long’
Only a few short minutes of Kennedy’s speech in Kansas were about the measurement problem of the GDP. Some of it was a visceral reaction to the rhetoric of war. ‘I don’t want to be part of a government, I don’t want to be part of the United States, I don’t want to be part of the American people,’ he said, ‘and have them write of us as they wrote of Rome: “They made a desert and they called it peace.”’
The underlying core of RFK’s political vision was a burning concern for social justice. He spoke passionately about the grinding poverty he had seen around him, corrupting the very heart of America. He spoke of children in Mississippi with distended stomachs, of Black ghettos with dismal schooling, of the long-term unemployed in the ex-mining communities of Appalachia, of rising suicide amongst indigenous people. ‘I don’t think that’s acceptable,’ he declared, ‘and I think the United States of America – I think the American people, I think we can do much, much better. And I run for the presidency because of that.’
It was a run he was never to finish. Shortly before midnight on 4 June 1968, the day of the California Primary, Kennedy gave his last speech in the Embassy Ballroom of the Ambassador Hotel in Los Angeles. It was the end of a long day in which he’d finally taken a definitive lead over his rivals. The mood was buoyant as he thanked his supporters for their help. The result would almost certainly have guaranteed him the Democratic nomination. But as he was making his way through the kitchen to a press conference on the other side of the hotel, he was shot three times at close range.
He fell to the ground immediately. A 17-year old hotel busboy with whom he had just shaken hands dropped to his knees to protect the Senator’s head against the cold concrete of the floor. Still conscious, Kennedy asked: ‘Is everyone ok?’ ‘Yes, everyone’s ok,’ replied the boy. The young waiter took a rosary he’d been carrying in his pocket and wrapped it round the Senator’s right hand. But it was already too late for prayers. One of the bullets had entered the skull just behind Bobby’s right ear and its fragments had done irreparable damage to his brain. He died just over a day later in the Good Samaritan Hospital.23
‘Too much and for too long,’ he told his Kansas audience a few short weeks before that tragic day, ‘we seem to have surrendered personal excellence and community values in the mere accumulation of material things’.
It was to be another four decades before this resounding critique of the myth of growth achieved any real purchase in politics. Strangely, what caused things to shift had as much to do with the economy itself as it did with the environmental and social limits to growth. The story of the unravelling of the myth of growth, as we shall see in the next chapter, is as much about the failings of capitalism as it is about the constraints of our finite planet.
Notes
1 1. Greta Thunberg’s speech to the UN Conference on Climate Change, September 2019. Online at: https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2019/sep/23/world-leaders-generation-climate-breakdown-greta-thunberg.
2 2. Kennedy’s speech at the University of Kansas, 18 March 1968: https://www.jfklibrary.org/learn/about-jfk/the-kennedy-family/robert-f-kennedy/robert-f-kennedy-speeches/remarks-at-the-university-of-kansas-march-18-1968.
3 3. Details of the day in Kansas from Halberstam 1968, Kennedy 2018, Newfield 1969 and the personal recollections of Kennedy’s speechwriter, Adam Walinsky.
4 4. Kennedy’s speech at Kansas State University, 18 March 1968: https://www.k-state.edu/landon/speakers/robert-kennedy/transcript.html. ‘Happy roar’: Newfield 1969, p. 232.
5 5. This particular anecdote comes from Adam Walinsky’s account of that day (personal correspondence). It is also reported in Newfield’s (1969, pp. 232–5) account of the trip.
6 6. Newfield (1969, p, 234) describes RFK’s second speech that day as extemporaneous. Walinsky’s account of the re-write on the journey from KSU explains why it had this slightly informal quality.
7 7. Cult phenomenon: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kmkmJk7LHdk; https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YgLSH-VvwRY. Scientific evidence, see, for instance: IPBES 2019; IPCC 2018; Klein 2019; Porritt 2020.
8 8. The full text of RFK’s speech at the University of Kansas can be found in full online (see note 2). A recording of the speech is available on YouTube at: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=z7-G3PC_868.
9 9. For a more detailed history of the emergence of the GDP, see, for instance: Coyle 2014; Fioramonti 2015; Philipsen 2015.
10 10. In keeping with the preferences of the
