Less is More: How Degrowth Will Save the World

by Jason Hickel

Any increase in total output, he said, was a contribution to the ‘greater good’ – the betterment of humanity. The same logic was used to justify colonisation, and invoked by Locke himself to defend his claims to American lands. Improvement became the alibi for appropriation.

Today, the very same alibi is routinely leveraged to justify new rounds of enclosure and colonisation – of lands, forests, fisheries, of the atmosphere itself; but instead of ‘im...

Virtually anything can be justified if it contribut...

The essential point to grasp here is that the emergence of the extraordinary productive capacity that characterises capitalism depended on creating and maintaining conditions of artificial scarcity.

Scarcity – and the threat of hunger – served as the engine of capitalist growth.

all the same land and forests and waters remained, just as they always had, but people’s access to ...

David Hume (1752) built on these sentiments to elaborate an explicit theory of ‘scarcity’: ‘Tis always observed, in years of scarcity, if it be not extreme, that the poor labour more, and really live better.’27 These passages reveal a remarkable paradox. The proponents of capitalism themselves believed it was necessary to impoverish people in order to generate growth.

During the last quarter of the nineteenth century, the height of the British Empire, 30 million Indians perished needlessly of famine in what the historian Mike Davis has called the ‘Late Victorian Holocausts’.

Needlessly, because even at the peak of the famine there was a net surplus of food. In fact, Indian grain exports more than tripled during this period, from 3 million tons in 1875 to 10 million tons in 1900. This was artificial scarcity taken to new extremes – far worse than anything that was inflicted within Europe. 28

In Africa, colonisers faced what they openly called ‘the Labour Question’: how to get Africans to work in mines and on plantations for low wages. Africans generally preferred their subsistence lifestyles, and showed little inclination to do back-breaking work in European industries. The promise of wages was in most cases not enough to induce them into what they considered to be needless labour. Europeans fumed at this resistance, and responded by either forcing people off their land (the Native Lands Act in Sou...

Either course of action left Africans with no option but to sell ...

The same process of enclosure and forced proletarianisation played out over and over again during the period of European colonisation – not just under the British but under the Spanish, Portuguese, French and D...

This apparent contradiction was first noticed in 1804 by James Maitland, the 8th Earl of Lauderdale.29 Maitland pointed out that there is an inverse relation between what he called ‘private riches’ and ‘public wealth’, or commons, such that an increase in the former can only ever come at the expense of the latter.

For instance, if you enclose an abundant resource like water and establish a monopoly over it, you can charge people to access it and therefore increase your private riches.

This would also increase what Maitland called the ‘sum-total of individual riches’ – what today we might call GDP. But this can be accomplished only by curtailing people’s access to what was once abundant and free. Private riches go up, but public wealth goes down. This became known as the ‘Lauderdale Paradox’.

What was once abundant had to be made scarce.

The great separation

Early capitalists not only had to find ways to compel people to work for them, they also had to change people’s beliefs. They had to change how people regarded the living world. Ultimately, capitalism required a new story about nature.

For most of our 300,000-year history, we humans have had an intimate relationship with the rest of the living world.

We know that people in early human societies were likely to be able to describe the names, properties and personalities of hundreds if not thousands of plants, insects, animals, rivers, mountains and soils, in much the same way people today know the most recondite facts about actors, celebrities, politicians and product brands.

Indeed, the art our ancestors left hidden on stone surfaces around the world suggests that they believed in a sort of spiritual interchangeability between humans and non-human beings.

Anthropologists refer to this way of seeing the world as animism – the idea that all living beings are interconnected, and share in the same spirit or essence.

We know from animist cultures today that while people of course fish, hunt, gather and farm, they do so in the spirit not of extraction but of reciprocity.

Just as we take care not to exploit our own relatives, so animists are careful to take no more than ecosystems can regenerate, and give back by protecting and restoring the land.

In recent years anthropologists have come to see this as more than just a cultural difference. It is deeper than that. It is a fundamentally different way of conceptualising the human. It is a different kind of ontology – an ontology of inter-being.

This ontology came under attack with the rise of empires, which gradually came to see the world as split in two, with a spiritual realm of gods sepa...

This idea – the principle of ‘dominion’ – grew firmer during the Axial Age with the rise of transcendental philosophies and religions across the major Eurasian civilisations: Confucianism in China; Hinduism in India; Zoroastrianism in Persia; Judaism in the Levant and Sophism in Greece. We can see it spelled out in ancient Mesopotamian texts dating back 3,000 years. And perhaps nowhere is this clearer than in Genesis itself:

And God said, Let us make man in our image, after our likeness: and let them have dominion over the fish of the sea, and over the fowl of the air, and over the cattle, and over all the earth, and over every thing that creeps upon the ground.

In the fifth century BC this new way of seeing the world received a boost from Plato, who built his whole philosophy on the idea of a transcendental realm separate from an earthly realm.

The transcendental realm was the source of abstract Truth and Reality, the ideal essence of things, while the material world was ...

Aristotle, Plato’s most famous student, publicly rejected transcendentalism, insisting that the essence of things lies within them, not in some ethereal elsewhere, and that all beings have souls and share versions of the same spirit.

Building on Aristotle, many philosophers regarded the living world itself as an intelligent organism, or even as a deity.

Cicero wrote in the second century BC that ‘the world is a living and wise being’: it reasons and feels, and a...

For the Stoics, who were influential in Athens during the first century, God and matter were synonymous – and therefore m...

The Roman philosopher Seneca saw the earth as a living organism with springs and rivers flowing through her like blood through veins, with metals and minerals forming slowly in her womb...

These ideas remained prominent in so-called pagan cultures across Europe, which rejected the Christian distinc...

after 1200 animistic ideas enjoyed a striking revival, as new translations of Aristotle’s texts became available in Europe and gave legitimacy to peasant beliefs.

But then something happened. In the 1500s, there were two powerful factions of European society who were worried about the striking revival of animistic ideas, and set out to destroy them.

One was the Church. As far as the clergy were concerned, the notion that spirit suffused the material world threatened their claim to be the only conduits to the divine, and the only legitimate proxies of divine power.

If spirit is everywhere, then there is no God – and if there is no God then there is no priest, and no king.

The ideas of Aristotle inspired many of the medieval peasant rebellions that sought to overthrow feudalism.

These movements were denounced by the Church as heretical, and the charge of heresy was used to justify brutal violence against them.

But there was another powerful faction that regarded animist ideas as a problem: capitalists. The new economic system that began to dominate after 1500 required a new relationship with the land, with the soils, and with the minerals beneath the surface of the earth: one built on the principles of possession, extraction, commodifica...

But in order to possess and exploit something you must first reg...

The Roman naturalist Pliny wrote in the first century that earthquakes were an expression of the earth’s indignation at being mined out of avarice rather than out of need:

Those who sought to advance capitalism had to find a way not only to strip humans from the land, but to destroy the animist ideas that enjoyed such prominence – to strip the earth of its spirit and render it instead a mere stock of ‘natural resources’ for humans to exploit.

They found their first answer in Francis Bacon (1561–1626), the Englishman celebrated as the ‘father of modern science’.

Bacon’s legacy is eulogised in school textbooks today, and for good reason: he made significant contributions to the scientific method.

But there is a rather sinister side to his story that has largely fallen out of public consciousness. Bacon actively sought to destroy the idea of a living world, and to replace it with a new ethic that not on...

To this end, he took the ancient theory of nature-as-female and transformed her from a nurturing mother into w...