Less is More: How Degrowth Will Save the World

by Jason Hickel

C1 → M → C2

This might seem like a good description of capitalism on the face of it – free exchange of useful things between individuals. Just like in a farmers’ market or a souk. But in reality the...

While a capitalist might recognise the usefulness of things like chairs and pears, the goal of producing them isn’t to have a nice place to sit or a tasty afternoon snack, or even to sell them for other useful things. The goal is to produce and sell them for one purpose above all others: to make a profit.

In this system, it is the ‘exchange-value’ of things that matters, not their use-value.2 We can illustrate it like this, where the prime symbol (’) represents an increase in quantity:

M → C...

This is the exact opposite of a use-value economy. But here’s where things get interesting. Under capitalism, it’s not e...

The goal is to reinvest that profit to expand the production process and generate yet more profit than the year befor...

M → C → M’ → C’ → M’’ → C...

For capitalists, profit isn’t just money at the end of the day, to be used for satisfying some specific need – profit becomes capital. And the whole point of capital is that it must be reinvested to produce more capital. This process never ends – it just continues expanding. Unlike your local restaurant, which is focused on satisfying particular concrete needs, there is no identifiable end point to the process of accumulating exchange-value. It is fundamentally unhinged from any conception of human need.

Here’s how it works. Imagine you’re an investor. You want returns of, say, 5% per year, so you decide to invest in Facebook. Remember, this is an exponential function. So if Facebook keeps churning out the same profits year after year (i.e., 0% growth), it will be able to repay your initial investment but it won’t be able to pay you any interest on it. The only way to generate enough surplus for investor returns is to generate more profit each year than the year before. This is why when investors assess the ‘health’ of a firm, they don’t look at net profits; they look at the rate of profit – in other words, how much the firm’s profits grow each year. From the perspective of capital, profit alone doesn’t count. It is meaningless. All that counts is growth.

The choice is stark: grow or die. And this expansionary drive puts other companies under pressure, too. Suddenly no one can be satisfied with a steady-state approach; if you don’t push to expand, you’ll get gobbled up by your competitors. Growth becomes an iron law to which all are captive.

Why do investors engage in this restless quest for growth? Because when capital sits still, it loses value (due to inflation, depreciation, etc.). So as capital piles up in the hands of accumulators, it creates enormous pressures for growth. And the more that capital accumulates, the more the pressure builds.

Chasing the next fix

Where can this quantity of growth possibly be found? The pressures become enormous. It’s what is driving the pharmaceutical companies behind the opioid crisis in the United States; the beef companies that are burning down the Amazon; the arms companies that lobby against gun control; the oil companies that bankroll climate denialism; and the retail firms that are invading our lives with ever-more sophisticated advertising techniques to get us to buy things we don’t actually want. These are not ‘bad apples’ – they are obeying the iron law of capital.

Over the past 500 years, an entire infrastructure has been created to facilitate the expansion of capital: limited liability, corporate personhood, stock markets, shareholder value rules, fractional reserve banking, credit ratings – we live in a world that’s increasingly organised around the imperatives of accumulation.

From private imperative to public obsession

To really grasp the pressures that are at play, we also have to pay attention to what governments are doing. Of course, governments have always been involved in advancing the interests of capitalist expansion. After all, enclosure and colonisation were ultimately backed up by the force of the state. But beginning in the early 1930s, during the Great Depression, something happened that added real fuel to these flames.

Kuznets warned that we should never use GDP as a normal measure of economic progress. He thought we should improve it to account for the social costs of growth, so that governments would take human well-being into account and pursue more balanced objectives.

For the first time in history, the goal was to raise the level of output specifically in order to improve people’s livelihoods and achieve progressive social outcomes – quite unlike during the previous 400 years. In other words, early progressive governments treated growth as a use-value.

When the OECD was founded in 1960, the top goal in its charter was (and remains) to ‘promote policies designed to achieve the highest sustainable rate of economic growth’.

The idea spread like wildfire. During the Cold War, the grand competition between the West and the USSR came to be adjudicated largely by rates of growth. Which system could grow GDP the fastest?

This new focus on GDP growth for its own sake – growthism – forever changed the way that Western governments managed their economies.

The progressive policies that had been used to improve social outcomes after the Great Depression, like higher wages, labour unions and investment in public health and education, suddenly became suspect.

So they attacked unions and gutted labour laws in order to drive the cost of wages down, they dismantled key environmental protections, and they privatised public assets that had previously been off limits to capital – mines, railways, energy, water, healthcare, telecommunications and so on – creating lucrative opportunities for private investors.

During the 1980s this strategy was pursued with particular zeal by Ronald Reagan in the US and Margaret Thatcher in the UK, inaugurating the approach that today we call neoliberalism.6

the shift to neoliberalism was not a mistake; it was driven by the growth imperative.

governments had to shift away from social objectives (use-values) to focus instead on improving the conditions for capital accumulation (exchange-value).

today the distinction between growth and capital accumulation has almost...

Now the goal is to tear down barriers to profit – to make humans and nature cheaper ...

The real per capita income gap between the global North and global South is four times larger today than it was at the end of colonialism.

The straight-jacket

Today, nearly every government in the world, rich and poor alike, is focused single-mindedly on GDP growth. This is no longer a matter of choice. In a globalised world where capital can move freely across borders at the click of a mouse, nations are forced to compete with one another to attract foreign investment.

The governments of the world are bound to a new rule: not to achieve a level of output adequate to improve wages and build social services, but rather to pursue growth for its own sake.

The concrete use-values of economic production (meeting human needs) have been subordinated to the pursuit of abstract exchange-value (GDP growth).

There are other traps governments find themselves in. If a government wants to invest in public healthcare and education, it has to find (or create) the money to do so.

One option is to raise taxes on the rich and on corporations, but in countries where moneyed interests have political influence this risks triggering a backlash.

How do you get the resources to improve the lives of ordinary people without turning powerful ric...

Geopolitical pressure has become a powerful driver of the growth imperative.

Growth is so deeply embedded in our economics and politics that the system can’t survive without it.

Under capitalism, growth is not just an optional feature of human social organisation – it’s an imperative to which all are hostage.

All of this has powered an extraordinary acceleration of GDP since 1945. And from the perspective of ecology, this is where things start to go wrong.

A world devoured

None of this is to say that growth is bad, in and of itself. That’s not my argument. It’s not growth that’s the problem, it’s growthism: the pursuit of growth for its own sake, or for the sake of capital accumulation, rather than to meet concrete human needs and social objectives.

We can see this playing out in the statistics on raw material consumption. This metric tallies up the total weight of all the stuff humans extract and consume each year, including biomass, metals, minerals, fossil fuels and construction materials. These figures tell an astonishing story. They show a steady rise of material use in the first half of the 1900s, doubling from 7 billion tons per year to 14 billion tons per year. But then, in the decades after 1945, something truly bewildering happens. As GDP growth becomes entrenched as a core political objective around the world, and as economic expansion starts to accelerate, material use explodes: it reaches 35 billion tons by 1980, hits 50 billion tons by 2000, and then screams up to an eye-watering 92 billion tons by 2017.13

Overindulgence in service of the growth imperitive.

The graph on page 102 is almost breathtaking to look at. Of course, some of this increase represents important improvements in people’s access to necessary goods (in other words, use-value), particularly in poorer parts of the world; and we should celebrate that. But most of it does not.

Scientists estimate that the planet can handle a total material footprint of up to about 50 billion tons per year.14 That’s consi...

virtually all of this overshoot is being driven by excess consumption in high-income nations – consumption that is organised not ...

The horizontal black line indicates what scientists consider to be the maximum sustainable threshold (Bringezu 2015). Source: Kraus...

According to the United Nations, material extraction alone is responsible for 80% of total global biodiversity loss.15 In fact, scientists often use material footprint as a proxy for ecological impact itself.

The rise in material use after 1945 reflects what scientists have called the Great Acceleration – the most aggressive and destructive period of the Capitalocene.