The Tres Hombres turned around in the Kattegat because the wind was coming from the wrong direction and the waves were too rough. We are waiting for more favourable conditions. The two days at anchor in the lee of the island of Zealand are too much of a delay for Sami. The huge man from Finland came on board in Bornholm and quickly integrated himself. So we are all sorry to see him pack his things and take the dinghy ashore to return to his job on time. Now there are only 14 of us on board, and someone will be missing from the watch. That's why bosun Hanjo has to change roles and replace trainee Sami in one of the two watches: on a traditional ship, you need enough hands for the manoeuvres.
Fifteen people are needed to operate a ship with a cargo hold measuring around one and a half 20-foot containers (=TEU). On mega carriers, they transport up to 24,000 TEU with just under 10 more people on board. In terms of the ratio of manpower to transport volume alone, this results in a productivity increase of a factor of 16,000 compared to the Tres Hombres. Added to this is the time factor: the large ships are faster.
Disruptive increase in productivity
This example is extreme, as the Tres Hombres is actually too small. But it illustrates the immense increase in productivity that has profoundly changed not only the economy but also society over the seven decades of my life. At the same time, around half of the greenhouse gases that are fuelling the climate catastrophe today were blown into the air during this period.
In my youth, I used to help out on a remote farm in the Emmental during the school holidays. In the mornings and evenings, I took the milk to the collection point by horse, massaged the cows' udders during milking – which was still done by hand at the time – to get the milk flowing into the teats, or helped lead the horses during ploughing in the autumn. Steep slopes were ploughed with a winch: the farmer took the plough, which was attached to a wire rope, and ran down the slope with it. I had to operate the brake on the winch so that he would not be run over by the plough. Then he positioned the plough, raised his hand, I engaged the lever and the winch began to wind up the cable. The farmer stood on the plough and let himself be pulled up so that his weight would press it deep enough into the soil. When he reached the top, he raised his arm again and I had to stop the winch. My work was not physically demanding, but I was given considerable responsibility at a young age and was also paid a small wage. Four adults farmed seven hectares – and were happy to temporarily hand over certain tasks to the holiday boy so that an adult could do other work.
Back then, the grain was first mowed so that all the stalks were pointing in the same direction, then we raked them into small piles. We then picked them up with a wooden tool that looked like a scimitar and placed several piles on the sheaf strings that had been laid out. These had a wooden knob at one end. The farmer then tied the strings together by wrapping them around the knob several times. We arranged the sheaves in this way into ‘puppets’ so that the straw and ears of corn could continue to dry. Finally, the sheaves were brought in by horse-drawn cart and the grain was threshed in winter.
What I experienced back then corresponds to the role of children from around the age of seven for thousands of years: they were involved in production, which ensured the survival of the family and society. I do not wish to gloss over the fact that this sometimes degenerated into terrible exploitation, for example when orphans were kept as ‘Verdingkinder’ (contract children) on Swiss farms until the 20th century. Rather, I am concerned with the economically productive role of children.
Half a century later, I sat in a combine harvester as a journalist for a report: sensor-controlled automatic adjustment to the slope, touchscreen operation, high-tech, air-conditioned cabin. There is no longer any job for a holiday boy. Accordingly, the economic role of young people has changed. Children and teenagers are now expected to bombard their environment with demands for this or that new electronic device, because everyone else in their school class already has one. Young people are used as a gateway to push the products of accelerated innovation generations onto the market. Their millennia-old productive role has been economically reversed in highly developed countries into a consumer function.
Consumer capitalism
The productivity unleashed throughout the economy during my generation, which I have experienced in agriculture, tends to lead to overproduction. The surpluses made possible by high energy consumption must be sold. Access to markets – as global as possible – becomes crucial. This is evident not least in the fact that customs duties, as a barrier to market access, are suitable as a means of political blackmail.
There is a clear division of labour: in countries such as Switzerland, relatively few consumer goods are manufactured. Instead, as a centre of innovation, the tools of production for consumer goods are often further developed and exported. The majority of consumer goods, on the other hand, are manufactured in countries with low wages. As a result, the so-called developing and emerging countries are increasingly becoming the real industrial nations.
A statement from the English organisation Ocean Rebellion.
The shipping industry not only serves increasingly complex supply chains, but also the distribution of products. For example, 94 per cent of imports and 92 per cent of exports in intercontinental Swiss trade depend on ocean shipping. Half of Switzerland's ten most important export markets are located on other continents. This overseas trade accounts for 40 per cent of imports and 50 per cent of exports in terms of value.
The whole thing only works if the products are actually purchased. Culturally, this means that citizens – in the sense of the French word citoyen – are pushed into the role of consumers. People are expected to fill the time they save through technology-assisted production with (over)consumption. Lifestyle is supposed to create identity, shopping is supposed to shape leisure time, and the consumption of prestigious brands is supposed to mark status. Consumers are supposed to feel that they are participating in society through their consumption. "In the past, goods were produced to satisfy needs; today, needs are produced in order to sell goods,‘ says US professor Benjamin Barber (Wikipedia, n.d.). Marketing takes on a crucial role, with specialists in the field knowing ’that no one would buy the superfluous junk produced on their own. It must first be made desirable to people." (Burkhardt, 2016)
Today's goods are tomorrow's waste
This consumer capitalism leads to wasteful consumption of resources and the corresponding violation of planetary boundaries. As early as 2018, a scientific study by the Swiss Federal Office for the Environment left no doubt that we can only respect planetary boundaries by significantly reducing our consumption of raw materials. The range of sustainable material use in 2050 would be between 3 and 6 tonnes per person per year. ‘Today, consumption-related raw material requirements are 20 tonnes [...] per person. This means that a reduction [...] of 75 per cent is necessary.’ (Frischknecht et al. 2018)
Consumer capitalist rubbish dump: Chile's Atacama Desert is one of the places where old clothes from fast fashion production pile up in mountains. They were shipped to Chile by boat. (Image: Antonio Cossio, dpa)
The demand for a three-quarters reduction in raw material consumption cannot be generalised. Many people in the global South have virtually nothing at their disposal; they have a right to more. Poverty is the other side of the consumerism coin. However, if we consider that humanity's current lifestyle could only be sustained if we had 1.6 planets – consumption in countries such as Switzerland or Germany would even require around three planets – then it is necessary to eliminate two of the five tonnes transported.
The everyday life of sailors on the sailing cargo ships of the 19th and 20th centuries was in no way ‘romantic’, as Eric Newby vividly illustrates in ‘The Last Wheat Race’ (Newby, 1968). Such a working environment would be a step backwards.
The fact that ships such as the Tres Hombres are ‘unproductive’ from an economic point of view is therefore not simply a matter of traditionalism. It is not about returning to the ‘good old days’, which were never really good. Rather, traditional sailing cargo ships challenge industrial productivism, which not only leads to a wasteful glut of consumer goods and mountains of waste, including in the oceans. It also leads to fossil fuel consumption that fundamentally and adversely alters the physical, chemical and biological systems of the planet which were stable enough for civilisation to develop in the first place for 11,000 years.
‘Do you want to go back to the Stone Age?’ critics of growth are often asked polemically. No, that is precisely what we as the true conservatives want to prevent by preserving the foundations of life and the economy. These are currently being threatened by global warming fuelled by consumer capitalism. As the Oxford Economics Institute notes: "2.2°C of warming has the potential to reduce projected global output by 20% in 2050 (...). Extending forecasts over longer time horizons indicates that total warming of around 5°C would result in economic annihilation by 2100." (Oxford Economics, 2022)
References
Bierhoff, Burkhard (2016): „Aufstieg und Elend des Konsumkapitalismus – Ambiguitäten und Transformationschancen heute,“ in: Fromm Forum (Deutsche Ausgabe – ISBN 1437-0956), 20 / 2016, Tuebingen (Selbstverlag), pp. 17-24. https://fromm-gesellschaft.eu/wp-content/uploads/2016/01/Bierhoff_B_2016.pdf
R. Frischknecht, C. Nathani, M. Alig, P. Stolz, L. Tschümperlin, P. Hellmüller (2018): Umwelt-Fussabdrücke der Schweiz / Zeitlicher Verlauf, 1996–2015. Bern: Bundesamt für Umwelt, S. 103. https://www.bafu.admin.ch/bafu/de/home/themen/wirtschaft-konsum/publikationen-studien/publikationen/umwelt-fussabdruecke-der-schweiz.html
Newby, Eric (1956): Thwe last grain race. London, Pan Books Ltd.
Ocford Economics (2022): Temperature volatility comes at a price to worldwide growth. https://www.oxfordeconomics.com/wp-content/uploads/2022/12/Temperature-volatility-comes-at-a-price-to-worldwide-growth.pdf
Wikipedia-Artikel «Konsumkapitalismus», https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Konsumkapitalismus