Less is More: How Degrowth Will Save the World

by Jason Hickel

how something similar but even bigger could characterise our way of exiting from the inanities and insanities of ‘growthism’: how we could build a better and more equal society which has far less impact upon our ecosystems and which makes people happier. There is a sense in which we really can have it all – at least all that actually matters. A simpler way.

The coronavirus crisis showed us all who the key workers are, worldwide: our medics, our food-growers, our distributors, and so on. If we refocused society around need rather than artificially-created wants — Jason sets out powerfully how distorted our lives are by advertising, reminding us that basically that is all that titans such as Facebook and Google are — we could recalibrate a world where together we could become more satisfied, and less separated.

there is nothing unrealistic about what we are asking for. On the contrary: if one is really willing to face reality, there is nothing more unrealistic than the fantasy of continuing the status quo much longer.

This is the thing about ecology: everything is interconnected. It’s difficult for us to grasp how this works, because we’re used to thinking of the world in terms of individual parts rather than complex wholes. In fact, that’s even how we’ve been taught to think of ourselves – as individuals. We’ve forgotten how to pay attention to the relationships between things. Insects necessary for pollination; birds that control crop pests, grubs and worms essential to soil fertility; mangroves that purify water; the corals on which fish populations depend: these living systems are not ‘out there’, disconnected from humanity. On the contrary: our fates are intertwined. They are, in a real sense, us.

Ecosystems are complex networks. They can be remarkably resilient under stress, but when certain key nodes begin to fail, knock-on effects reverberate through the web of life. This is how mass extinction events unfolded in the past. It’s not the external shock that does it – the meteor or the volcano: it’s the cascade of internal failures that follows. It can be difficult to predict how this kind of thing plays out. Things like tipping points and feedback loops make everything much riskier than it otherwise might be. This is what makes climate breakdown so concerning. Take the polar ice caps, for example. Ice functions like a giant reflector, bouncing light from the sun back out into space. This is known as the albedo effect. But as ice sheets disappear and reveal the darker landscapes and oceans beneath, all that solar energy gets absorbed and radiated as heat into the atmosphere.

Feedback loops affect forests, too. As the planet heats up, forests become drier and more vulnerable to fire. When forests burn they release carbon into the atmosphere, and we lose them as a sink for future emissions.

The facts have been piling up for decades. They become more elaborate, and more concerning, with each passing year. And yet for some reason we have been unable to change course.

Even though we have known for nearly half a century that human civilisation itself is at stake, there has been no progress in arresting ecological breakdown. None. It is an extraordinary paradox. Future generations will look back on us and marvel at how we could have known exactly what was going on, in excruciating detail, and yet failed to solve the problem.

What makes capitalism different from most other economic systems in history is that it’s organised around the imperative of constant expansion, or ‘growth’: ever-increasing levels of industrial extraction, production and consumption, which we have come to measure in terms of Gross Domestic Product (GDP).29 Growth is the prime directive of capital. Not growth for any particular purpose, mind you, but growth for its own sake. And it has a kind of totalitarian logic to it: every industry, every sector, every national economy must grow, all the time, with no identifiable end-point.

Three per cent growth means doubling the size of the global economy every twenty-three years, and then doubling it again from its already doubled state, and then again, and again. This might be OK if GDP were just plucked out of thin air. But it’s not. It is coupled to energy and resource use, and has been for the entire history of capitalism.

As GDP grows, the global economy churns through more energy, resources and waste each year, to the point where it is now dramatically overshooting what scientists have defined as safe planetary boundaries, with devastating consequences for the living world.31

low-income countries, and indeed most countries in the global South, remain well within their fair share of planetary boundaries. In fact, in many cases they need to increase energy and resource use in order to meet human needs. It’s high-income countries that are the problem here, where growth has become completely unhinged from any concept of need, and has long been vastly in excess of what is required for human flourishing.

Clean energy might help deal with emissions, but it does nothing to reverse deforestation, overfishing, soil depletion and mass extinction. A growth-obsessed economy powered by clean energy will still tip us into ecological disaster.

Sometimes scientific evidence conflicts with the dominant world view of a civilisation. When that happens, we have to make a choice. Either we ignore science, or we change our world view.

high-income countries to actively slow down the mad pace of extraction, production and waste.46 Reducing resource use removes pressure from ecosystems and gives the web of life a chance to knit itself back together, while reducing energy use makes it much easier for us to accomplish a rapid transition to renewables

This is called ‘degrowth’ – a planned reduction of excess energy and resource use to bring the economy back into balance with the living world in a safe, just and equitable way.

Instead of mindlessly pursuing growth in every sector, whether or not we actually need it, we can decide what kinds of things we want to grow (sectors like clean energy, public healthcare, essential services, regenerative agriculture – you name it), and what sectors need to radically degrow (things like fossil fuels, private jets, arms and SUVs). We can also scale down the parts of the economy that are designed purely to maximise profits rather than to meet human needs, like planned obsolescence, where products are made to break down after a short time, or advertising strategies intended to manipulate our emotions and make us feel that what we have is inadequate.

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 chaotic and disastrous. What I’m calling for here is something completely different. It is about shifting to a different kind of economy altogether – an economy that doesn’t need growth in the first place. To get there, we need to rethink everything from the debt system to the banking system, to liberate people, businesses, states and even innovation itself from the stuffy constraints of the growth imperative, freeing us to focus on higher goals.

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 an inert, mechanistic object. This way of seeing the world is known as dualism.

Dualist philosophy was leveraged to cheapen life for the sake of growth; and it is responsible at a deep level for our ecological crisis. But this is not the only way of being that’s available to us. My colleagues in anthropology have long pointed out that for most of human history people operated with a very different ontology – a theory of being that we refer to, broadly, as animist. For the most part, people saw no fundamental divide between humans and the rest of the living world. Quite the opposite: they recognised a deep interdependence with rivers, forests, animals and plants, even with the planet itself, which they saw as sentient beings, just like people, and animated by the very same spirit. In some cases they even regarded them as kin. 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 slavery or even to cannibalism. Instead, you have to enter into a relationship of reciprocity, in the spirit of the gift. You have to give at least as much as you receive. This logic, which has inherent ecological value, runs directly against the core logic of capitalism, which is to take – and, more importantly, to take more than you give back.

In this vision, a lot has changed about the world. High-income countries brought their use of resources and energy down to sustainable levels. We began to take democracy seriously, shared income and wealth more fairly, and put an end to poverty. The gap between rich countries and poor countries shrank. The word ‘billionaire’ disappeared from our languages. Working hours fell from forty or fifty hours a week down to twenty or thirty, giving people more time to focus on community, caring and the arts of living. High-quality public healthcare and education were made available to everyone. People came to live longer, happier, more meaningful lives. And we began to think of ourselves differently: as beings interconnected with, rather than separate from, the rest of the living world.

It was only with the rise of capitalism over the past few hundred years, and the breathtaking acceleration of industrialisation from the 1950s, that on a planetary scale things began to tip out of balance. Once we understand this, it changes how we think about the problem. We call this human epoch the Anthropocene, but in fact this crisis has nothing to do with humans as such. It has to do with the dominance of a particular economic system: one that is recent in origin, which developed in particular places at a particular time in history, and which has not been adopted to the same extent by all societies.

because the goal of capital is to extract and accumulate surplus, it has to get these things for as cheap as possible. In other words, capital works according to a simple, straightforward formula: take more – from nature and from labour – than you give back.

Over the course of three centuries, huge swathes of Britain and the rest of Europe were enclosed and millions of people removed from the land, triggering an internal refugee crisis. It would be difficult to overstate the upheaval that characterised this period – it was a humanitarian catastrophe. For the first time in history, commoners were systematically denied access to the most basic resources necessary for survival. People were left without homes and food.

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 still gets repeated in economics textbooks. But historians see it as naïve. This was no innocent process of saving. It was a process of plunder. Karl Marx insisted on calling it ‘primitive accumulation’, to highlight the barbaric nature of the violence it entailed. But the rise of capitalism also depended on something else. It needed labour. Lots of it, and cheap. Enclosure solved this problem too. With subsistence economies destroyed and commons fenced off, people had no choice but to sell their labour for wages – not to earn a bit of extra income, as under the previous regime, nor to satisfy the demands of a lord, as under serfdom, but simply in order to survive. They became, in a word, proletarians. This was utterly new in world history. Such people were referred to at the time as ‘free labourers’, but this term is misleading: true, they were not forced to work as slaves or serfs, but they nonetheless had little choice in the matter, as their only alternative was starvation. Those who controlled the means of ...

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 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. We tend to think of these as separate processes, but they were all part of the same project, and operated with the same underlying logic. 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). And the slave trade is nothing if not the enclosure and colonisation of bodies – bodies that were appropriated for the sake of surplus accumulation just as land was, and treated as property in the same way.

much of the global South, particularly Asia, had their own artisanal industries – often regarded as the finest in the world - and they were uninterested in importing things they could make for themselves. 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.

In the wake of enclosure, Europe’s peasants – those who remained in rural areas rather than migrating to cities – found themselves subject to a new economic regime. They were back once again under the rule of landlords, but this time in an even worse position: at least under serfdom they had secure access to land; now they were granted only temporary leases on it. And these weren’t just ordinary leases. They were allocated on the basis of productivity. So to retain their access to land peasants had to devise ways to intensify their production, working longer hours and extracting more from the soil each year. Those who fell behind in this race would lose their tenancy rights and face starvation. This put peasants in direct competition with one another, with their own kin and neighbours, transforming what had been a system of collective co-operation into one organised around desperate antagonism.

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.

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. The scarcity was artificial in the sense that there was no actual deficit of resources: all the same land and forests and waters remained, just as they always had, but people’s access to them was suddenly restricted.

‘Public wealth,’ Maitland wrote, ‘may be accurately defined to consist of all that man desires, as useful or delightful to him.’ In other words, it has to do with goods that have an intrinsic use value even when they are abundant, including air, water and food. Private riches, on the other hand, consist ‘of all that man desires as useful or delightful to him; which exists in a degree of scarcity.’ The scarcer something is, the more money you can extort from people who need it. 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’.

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 with gifts exchanged among people, transactions with non-human beings are hedged about with rituals of respect and politeness. 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.

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. This was a problem not only for priests, but also for the kings and aristocrats who ultimately depended on their sanction. Animistic ideas had to be defeated because they were loaded with subversive implications. If spirit is everywhere, then there is no God – and if there is no God then there is no priest, and no king.

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, commodification and ever-increasing productivity, or, in the discourse of the time, ‘improvement’. But in order to possess and exploit something you must first regard it as an object. In a world where everything was alive and pulsing with spirit and agency, where all beings were regarded as subjects in their own right, this sort of possessive exploitation – in other words, property – was ethically unfathomable.

Not only is nature something to be controlled and manipulated, it is also transformed from a living organism into inert matter. Nature may appear to be alive and moving, but its motion should be understood as that of a machine, Bacon said – nothing more than a system of pumps and springs and cogs.

‘I am not my body,’ Descartes insisted. Rather, it is disembodied thought, or mind, or reason, that constitutes the person. Thus the phrase by which we all know him: ‘I think, therefore I am.’ Descartes succeeded in not only separating mind from body, but also establishing a hierarchical relationship between the two. Just as the ruling class should dominate nature and control it for the purposes of productivity, so the mind should dominate the body for the same purpose.

In the 1700s, these ideas coalesced into a system of explicit values: idleness is sin; productivity is virtue. In the Calvinist theology that was popular in Western Christianity at the time, profit became the sign of moral success – the proof of salvation. To maximise profit, people were encouraged to organise their lives around productivity.39 Those who fell behind in the productivity race and slipped into poverty were branded with the stigma of sin. Poverty was recast not as the consequence of dispossession, but as the sign of personal moral failing.

In the 1800s, factories developed timetables and the assembly line, with the purpose of squeezing maximum output from each worker. The early 1900s gave us Taylorism, with every tiny motion of a worker’s body reduced to the most efficient possible movement. Work was progressively stripped of meaning, pleasure, talent and mastery.

There is nothing natural or innate about the productivist behaviours we associate with homo economicus. That creature is the product of five centuries of cultural re-programming.

Spaniards referred to Indigenous Americans as naturales. Dualism was recruited in order to justify the appropriation not only of land in the colonies, but of the bodies of the colonised themselves. This played out clearly in the European slave trade. After all, in order to enslave someone, you first have to deny their humanity.

We are all heirs of dualist ontology. We can see it everywhere in the language we use about nature today. We routinely describe the living world as ‘natural resources’, as ‘raw materials’, and even – as if to emphasise its subordination and servitude – as ‘ecosystem services’.

‘Environment’. The strangeness of this innocent-seeming term becomes even clearer when we translate it into Spanish: ambiente. In the language of the conquistadors, the living world is cast as nothing more than mood lighting. From the perspective of animist ontology, this would be equivalent to regarding your mother and siblings as mere decorative portraits adorning the wall. It would be unthinkable.

Enclosure, colonisation, dispossession, the slave trade … historically, growth has always been a process of appropriation: the appropriation of energy and work from nature and from (certain kinds of) human beings.

A farmer might grow a pear because they like its juicy-sweet flavour or because it takes the edge off their hunger in the afternoon. An artisan might build a chair because it’s useful for sitting on: to relax on the porch or to enjoy a meal around the table. And they might choose to sell these things in order to get money to buy other useful things, like a hoe for their garden or a pocketknife for their daughter. In fact, this is how most of us participate in the economy today. When we go to the shops it’s usually to buy things that will be useful to us, like ingredients for dinner or a jacket to protect against the winter cold. We can summarise this kind of economy like this, where C stands for commodity (like a chair or a pear), and M stands for money: 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 there is nothing here that is particularly capitalist. It could be any economic system at all, at more or less any time or place in human history. What makes capitalism distinctive is that, for capitalists, value is reckoned quite differently. 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 m...

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.

GDP is flawed. It tallies up monetised economic activity, but it doesn’t care whether that activity is useful or destructive. If you cut down a forest for timber, GDP goes up. If you extend the working day and push back the retirement age, GDP goes up. If pollution causes hospital visits to rise, GDP goes up. But GDP includes no cost accounting. It says nothing about the loss of the forest as habitat for wildlife, or as a sink for emissions. It says nothing about the toll that too much work and pollution takes on people’s bodies and minds. And not only does it leave out what is bad, it also leaves out much of what is good: it doesn’t count non-monetised economic activities, even when they are essential to human life and well-being. If you grow your own food, clean your own house or care for your ageing parents, GDP says nothing. It only counts if you pay companies to do these things for you.

As soon as we start focusing on GDP growth, we’re not only promoting the things GDP measures, we’re promoting the indefinite increase of those things, regardless of the costs.

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’.