Less is More: How Degrowth Will Save the World

by Jason Hickel

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 ...