Growth is both the strength and the failing of modern economics. As long as you try to ensure growth, you will grow, and the moment you abandon this aim, the modern production structure and market grinds to a halt. The rule is simple: A product without customers is a loss. If a product has no customers, then there’s no reason for that product to be produced.Man wants to possess the entire world, even the universe. Lucifer had tricked Adam even while in the Garden of Eden with the promise of “unlimited property and perpetuity.” What is desired of us is a model of economic activity that can respond to frugal, modest and basic needs. Otherwise, as the Prophet Muhammad said, “If the son of Adam possessed a valley full of gold, he would want to have two valleys, yet his mouth will only be filled by earth.” Man is limited by his basic needs and physiological capacity. His stomach can be filled, but his desire is insatiable. The growth ideology maintains its footing by provoking this insatiable, greedy, hoarding and ambitious side of mankind. But these three points are important:
1) Growth has an aspect that follows from its physical space, financial grounds and ecological capacity. Every material/physical action is limited. As economics comprises material actions, then growth must also have limits. Many experts and intellectuals say that today economic activity has been objectified by capitalist economics and has brought physical boundaries to growth and depends upon them. It is more threatening. What is under threat is not just the physical world, but communal life, including man.
Think about an apartment building. If you constantly dig up and truck away dirt from underneath it, one day it will collapse, and hundreds of people will be buried under the rubble. For the past 200 years, we have been extracting underground natural resources with increasing speed and growing skill (petroleum, natural gas, iron, coal, etc.). This fatefully paves the way for earthquakes. Perhaps it was in connection to precisely this that the Prophet Muhammad had indicated that “one of the signs of the coming of the Day of Judgment is swarms of earthquakes.”
2) Growth has a face that is oriented toward prosperous Western and northern societies, and this comes around to us as “development and progress.” As non-Western societies come to worship the growth (development and progress) ideology, the prosperity of rich nations increases, and their military, political and geostrategic power is consolidated. For they are the ones who designate the economic and technological forms of growth; they find them and recommend them to us, and as we try to catch up to the “development level” that they’ve just surpassed, they are busy developing “more advanced forms.” By keeping us in the palms of their hands by controlling their old forms and production monopolies, they turn us into a market and sell us products. Our raw materials are cheap; their high-tech products are expensive. Until our traditional education, societal structure and understanding of the family is modernized in the name of development, their prosperity won’t increase, and they won’t be able to add riches to their riches. In short, “improvement programs and development projects” in societies like ours depend upon the principle of increasing the West’s prosperity and new production processes. As we continue our development efforts, we remain dependent upon them.
3) Growth is in its nature unequal and depends on inequalities. Put differently, growth is the rationalization of injustice and an institutionalizing process. The expansion to the global level of the structure of globalization and capitalist production, division and consumption is foreseen, and as a result of this, deep inequalities exist between nations, regions and classes. And every step that deepens this inequality increases the potential for conflict, war and a social eruption.
This is my question for conservative/religious economists: Do you have no objection to growth processes within the context I’ve discussed?
