Less is More: How Degrowth Will Save the World

by Jason Hickel

Backlash

During the revolutionary period from 1350 to 1500, elites suffered what historians have described as a crisis of ‘chronic disaccumulation’.

This is an important point. We often assume that capitalism emerged somehow naturally from the collapse of feudalism, but in fact such a transition would have been impossible.

Capitalism requires elite accumulation: piling up excess wealth for large-scale investment.

But the egalitarian conditions of post-feudalist society – self-sufficiency, high wages, grassroots democracy and collective management of resources – were inimical to the possibility of elite accumulation. In...

What that new society might have grown to look like we will never know, for it was brutally crushed. Nobles, the Church and the merchant bourgeoisie united in an organised attempt to end peasant autonomy and drive wages back down. They did so not by re-enserfing peasants – that had proved to be impossible. Rather, they forced them off their land in a violent, continent-wide campaign of evictions. As for the commons – those collectively managed pastures, forests and riv...

This process was known as ‘...

In England, the word ‘poverty’ came into common use for the first time to describe the mass of ‘paupers’ and ‘vagabonds’ that enclosure produced – words that prior to this period rarely if ever appeared in English texts.

Yet as far as Europe’s capitalists were concerned, enclosure was working like magic. It enabled them to appropriate huge amounts of land and resources that had previously been off limits.

Economists have always recognised that some kind of initial accumulation was necessary for the rise of capitalism. Adam Smith called this ‘previous accumulation’, and claimed that it came about because a few people worked really hard and saved their earnings – an idyllic tale that ...

This was no innocent process of saving. It was a process of plunder. Karl Marx insisted on calling it ‘primitive accumulation’, to highlight the bar...

Those who controlled the means of production could get away with paying rock-bottom wages, and people would have to take it. Any wage, no matter how small, was better than death.

All of this upends the usual story that we’re told about the rise of capitalism. This was hardly a natural and inevitable process. There was no gradual ‘transition’, as people like to assume, and it certainly wasn’t peaceful. Capitalism rose on the back of organised violence, mass impoverishment, and the systematic destruction of self-sufficient subsistence economies.

It did not put an end to serfdom; rather, it put an end to the progressive revolution that had ended serfdom.

The period from 1500 to the 1800s, right into the Industrial Revolution, was among the bloodiest, most tumultuous times in world history.

For human welfare, the consequences of enclosure were devastating. It reversed all of the gains the free peasants had won. According to the economists Henry Phelps Brown and Sheila Hopkins, from the 1500s to the 1700s real wages declined by as much as 70%.

The social fabric was left so shredded that between 1600 and 1650 populations across Western Europe actually declined.

In England, we can see the imprint of this catastrophe clearly in the historical public health record: average life expectancy at birth fell from forty-three years in the 1500s to the low thirties in the 1700s.14

We all know that famous quote by Thomas Hobbes, where he says that life in the ‘state of nature’ was ‘nasty, brutish and short’. He wrote those words in 1651. We read Hobbes as describing a putative condition of misery that existed befo...

But exactly the opposite is true. The misery he described was created by the ri...

Indeed, at that time Europe was one of the poorest, sickest places in the world; at least for commoners.15 And what Hobbes didn’t kn...

The enclosure movement went further in Britain than anywh...

Between 1760 and 1870, some 7 million acres were enclosed by legal writ, about one-sixth of England. By the end of this period there was almost no common land left in the country.

Industrial capitalism took off, but at extraordinary human cost. Simon Szreter, one of the world’s leading experts on historical public health data, has shown that this first century of the Industrial Revolution was characterised by a striking deterioration in life expectancy, down to levels not seen since the Black Death in the fourteenth century.

The first few hundred years of capitalism generated misery to a degree unknown in the pre-capitalist era.16

Growth as colonisation

When Europeans began to colonise the Americas in the decades after 1492, they were not driven by the romance of ‘exploration’ and ‘discovery’, as our schoolbooks would have it. Colonisation was a response to the crisis of elite disaccumulation that had been caused by the peasant revolutions in Europe. It was a ‘fix’. Just as elites turned to enclosure at home, they sought new frontiers for appropriation abroad, beginning with Christopher Columbus’s first voyage to the Americas. These two processes unfolded simultaneously. In 1525, the very year that German nobles massacred those 100,000 peasants, the Spanish king Carlos I awarded the kingdom’s highest honour to Hernán Cortés, the conquistador who slayed 100,000 Indigenous people as his army marched through Mexico and destroyed the Aztec capital of Tenochtitlán.

The congruence of these two events is no accident. In the decades that inaugurated the rise of capitalism, enclosure and colonisation were deployed as part of the same strategy.

The scale of colonial appropriation was staggering. From the early 1500s through the early 1800s, colonisers siphoned 100 million kilograms of silver out of the Andes and into European ports. To get a sense of the scale of this wealth, consider this thought experiment: if invested in 1800 at the historical average rate of interest, that quantity of silver would today be worth $165 trillion – more than double t...

This windfall played a key role in the rise of Eur...

By the year 1830, Britain alone was appropriating the equivalent of 25 to 30 million acres of productive land from its New World colonies.

And this was not regulated, conscientious extraction. Colonial mining, logging, and plantation monoculture caused ecological damage on a scale that was, up to that point, historically unprecedented.

Indeed, what made the colonial frontiers so attractive to capital in the first place was that the land – and the people who lived on i...

The United States extracted so much labour from enslaved Africans that, if paid at the US minimum wage, with a modest rate of interest, it would add up to $97 trillion today – four times the size of the US GDP.

The slave trade amounted to an extraordinary appropriation of labour, transferred from Indigenous and African communities into the pockets of European industrialists.

In India, British colonisers extracted extraordinary sums of money in the form of taxes levied on farmers and artisans. Between the years 1765 and 1938, they siphoned the equivalent of $45 trillion out of India and into British coffers.

Today, British politicians often seek to defend colonialism by claiming that Britain helped ‘develop’ India. But in fact exactly the opposite is true: Britain used India to develop itself.

The point here is that the rise of capitalism in Europe – and Europe’s Industrial Revolution – did not emerge ex nihilo. It hinged on commodities that were produced by enslaved workers, on lands stolen from colonised peoples, and processed in factories staffed by European peasants who had been forcibly dispossessed by enclosure.

Enclosure was a process of internal colonisation, and colonisation was a process of enclosure.

Europe’s peasants were dispossessed from their lands just as Indigenous Americans were (although, notably, the latter were treated much worse, excluded from the realm of rights, and even humanity, altogether).

It might be tempting to downplay these moments of violence as mere aberrations in the history of capitalism. But they are not. They are the foundations of it. Under capitalism, growth always requires new frontiers from which to extract uncompensated value. It is, in other words, intrinsically colonial in character.

Colonial interventions added a final piece to the rise of capitalism. Europe’s capitalists had created a system of mass production, but they needed somewhere to sell.

Who would absorb all this output? The enclosures provided a partial solution: by destroying self-sufficient economies, they created not only a mass of workers but also a mass of consumers – people wholly dependen...

Colonisers solved this problem by using asymmetric trade rules to destroy local industries across the South, forcing the colonies to serve not only as a source of raw materials but also as a captive market for Europe’s mass-produced goods.

This completed the circuit. But the consequences were devastating: as European capital grew, the South’s share of global manufacturing collapsed, from 77% in 1750 down to 13% by 1900.22

The paradox of artificial scarcity

It meant that, for the first time, people’s lives were governed by the imperatives of intensifying productivity and maximising output.23 No longer was production about satisfying needs, no longer about local sufficiency; instead, it was organised around profit, and for the benefit of capital. This is crucial: those principles of homo economicus that we assume to be engraved in human nature were instituted during the enclosure process.24

The same pressures were at play in the cities. Refugees from enclosure who ended up in urban slums had no choice but to accept work for meagre wages. Because the refugees were many and jobs were few, competition among workers drove down the cost of labour, destroying the guild system that had previously protected the livelihoods of skilled craftsmen.

Faced with the constant threat of replacement, workers were under pressure to produce as much as was physically possible; they regularly worked for sixteen hours a day, significantl...

The English landowner and philosopher John Locke admitted that enclosure was a process of theft from the commons, and from commoners, but he argued that this theft was morally justifiable because it enabled a shift to intensive commercial methods that increased agricultural output.