Less is More: How Degrowth Will Save the World

by Jason Hickel

Growthism, as we might call it, stands as one of the most hegemonic ideologies in modern history.

I’ll explain the details in Chapter 3, but the conclusions boil down to this: ‘green growth’ is not a thing.

It’s not our technology that’s the problem. It’s growth.

Stirrings

Fredric Jameson once famously said that it is easier to imagine the end of the world than to imagine the end of capitalism.

Our capacity for thought – and even our language – stops at the boundaries of capitalism, and beyond lies a terrifying abyss.

He cited a study by Harvard University showing that 51% of US Americans between the ages of eighteen and twenty-nine no longer support capitalism, and asked whether the Democrats, Pelosi’s party, could embrace this fast-changing reality and stake out a vision for an alternative economy.37

Capitalism is so taken for granted that its proponents don’t even know how to justify it.

Pelosi’s response – ‘That’s just the way it is’ – was intended to shut down the question. But it did the opposite. It exposed the frailty of a tired ideology.

A YouGov poll in 2015 found that 64% of people in Britain believe capitalism is unfair.

a survey by the Edelman Trust Barometer showed that a majority of people around the world (56%) agree with the statement, ‘Capitalism does more harm than good’.

Degrowth

In 2018, 238 scientists called on the European Commission to abandon GDP growth and focus on human well-being and ecological stability instead.

The following year, more than 11,000 scientists from over 150 countries published an article calling on the world’s governments ‘to shift from pursuing GDP growth and affluence toward sustaining ecosystems and improving well-being.’

it’s not growth that matters; it’s how income and resources are distributed.

Let me emphasise that degrowth is not about reducing GDP. Of course, slowing down unnecessary extraction and production may mean that GDP grows more slowly, or stops growing, or even declines. And if so, that’s OK. Under normal circumstances, this might trigger a recession. But a recession is what happens when a growth-dependent economy stops growing.

It is about shifting to a different kind of economy altogether – an economy that doesn’t need growth in the first place.

As we take practical steps in this direction, exciting new possibilities come into view. We can create an economy that is organised around human flourishing instead of around endless capital accumulation; in other words, a post-capitalist economy. An economy that’s fairer, more just, and more caring.

Post-capitalist desire.

To find the path ahead of us, we first need to understand how we got locked into the growth imperative to begin with.

This requires reaching into the deep history of capitalism, to grasp the inner logic of how it works, and how it came to be imposed around the world – a journey we begin in Chapter 1

Along the way, we will discover that there is something else at stake; something unexpected. The processes of extraction that are so central to capitalist growth ultimately depend on a particular kind of ontology, or theory ...

Those of us who live in capitalist societies today have been taught to believe that there is a fundamental distinction between human society and the rest of the living world: humans are separate from and superior to ‘nature’; humans are subjects with spirit and mind and agency, whereas nature is ...

We inherit these ideas from a long line of thinkers, from Plato to Descartes, who primed us to believe that humans can rightfully exploit...

We didn’t always believe these things. In fact, those who sought to pave the way for capitalism in the sixteenth century first had to destroy other, more holistic ways of seeing the world, and...

Dualist philosophy was leveraged to cheapen life for the sake of growth; and it is responsible at a deep l...

for most of human history people operated with a very different ontology – a theory of being that we refer to, broadly, as animist.

We see traces of this philosophy still flourishing today, from the Amazon basin to the highlands of Bolivia to the forests of Malaysia, where people think about and interact with non-human beings – from jaguars to rivers – not as ‘nature’ but as relatives.

When you see the world this way, it fundamentally changes how you behave. If you start from the premise that all beings are the moral equivalent of persons, then you cannot simply take from them.

To exploit nature as a ‘resource’ for the sake of human enrichment is morally reprehensible – similar to ...

Instead, you have to enter into a relationship of reciprocity, in the spirit of the gift. You have to give a...

Enlightenment thinkers once disparaged animist ideas as backwards and unscientific.

Glimpses of a future

This book is about that dream. We have a journey ahead, which will carry us over 500 years of history. We’ll explore the roots of our current economic system, how it took hold, and what makes it tick. We will look at concrete, practical steps we can take to reverse ecological breakdown and build an alternative, post-capitalist economy. And we will travel across continents, to cultures and communities that interact with the living world in ways that open up whole new horizons of the imagination.

Part One MORE IS LESS

ONE Capitalism: A Creation Story Animism had endowed things with souls; industrialism makes souls into things. Max Horkheimer and Theodor Adorno

We humans have been on this planet for nearly 300,000 years; fully evolved, fully intelligent, exactly as we are today. For approximately 97% of that time our ancestors lived in relative harmony with the Earth’s ecosystems.

this isn’t the Anthropocene – it’s the Capitalocene.1

While markets have been around for many thousands of years, in different times and places, capitalism is relatively recent – only about 500 years old.

What makes capitalism distinctive isn’t that it has markets, but that it is organised around perpetual growth; indeed, it is the first intrinsically expansionist economic system in history.

In other words, capital works according to a simple, straightforward formula: take more – from nature and from labour – than you give back.

The ecological crisis is an inevitable consequence of this system. Capitalism has tipped us out of balance with the living world.

Once we grasp this fact, new questions come rushing to mind: How did this happen? Where did capitalism co...

The usual story holds that it’s in our ‘nature’ to be self-interested, maximising agents – what some have described as homo economicus – the profit-seeking automatons ...

Capitalism didn’t just ‘emerge’. There was no smooth, natural ‘transition’ to capitalism, and it has nothing to do with human nature. Historians have a much more interesting and significantly darker story to tell – a story that reveals some surprising truths about how our economy actually works.

A forgotten revolution

Everyone learns in school that feudalism was a brutal system that produced terrible human misery. And it’s true. Lords and nobles controlled the land, and the people who lived on it – serfs – were forced to render tribute to them in the form of rents, taxes, tithes and unpaid labour. But contrary to our dominant narratives, it wasn’t the rise of capitalism that put an end to this system. That victory belongs, remarkably enough, to a courageous struggle fought by a long tradition of everyday revolutionaries who have for some reason been almost entirely forgotten.

In the early 1300s, commoners across Europe began rebelling again...

As feudalism fell apart, free peasants began to build a clear alternative: an egalitarian, co-operative society rooted in the principles of local self-sufficiency.

The results of this revolution were astonishing, in terms of the welfare of commoners.

Historians have described the period from 1350 to 1500 as ‘the golden age of the European proletariat’.7