No term in the past decades has had a greater effect on production, on personal behavior and private consumption even to the development of new paradigms (e.g. Sustainability) than that of climate change.
However, until now the limits to the enormous impact of the term appear to lie in the fact that its thrust has been accompanied by no automatic change to the social relations of production.
Thus a new wave of technical innovation could emerge out of the endangerment to the globe without the value-creation chain undergoing a structural change toward just relationships.
Many stories in our BLOG, in particular those from the North, point out that due to climate change there are strongly sensitized consumers who dedicate great energy to ecological innovation, without confronting the qualitative renewal of the value-creation chain. Above all, that would mean being concerned anew with the contribution of human labour as the source of added value, with the value of natural raw materials and from whom they are gotten, and it would mean asking about the extent of the transport costs and their valuation, but in addition about the genuine need for a product and the qualitative improvement of products.
The question is also aimed at how and in what manner new products and production processes can be defined; those which orient themselves toward the genuine needs of humans and do not damage nature and its creatures.
In times of service societies the valuation put on the activities with needy human beings for their benefit should be considered. Here the necessary reversal of the axial shift of inferior and superior activities from the bottom to the top is recognizable, and appears as a central issue. “The horse from the head to the feet”- everything that serves life – the armaments industry would also have to concern itself with this criterion.
Ute Wannig, November 2017