Less is More: How Degrowth Will Save the World

by Jason Hickel

Things feel different, somehow. When I’ve returned to southern Africa for research in recent years, the car turns out more or less clean even after long journeys. Maybe a few flies here and there, but nothing at all like before. Perhaps it’s just that the insects loom large in my childhood memories. Or perhaps there’s something more troubling afoot.

‘We appear to be making vast tracts of land inhospitable to most forms of life, and are currently on course for ecological Armageddon,’ one of the scientists said. ‘If we lose the insects then everything is going to collapse.’1 Insects are essential to pollination and plant reproduction, they break down organic waste and turn it into soil, and they provide a vital source of food for thousands of other species.

Crop yields are now declining on a fifth of the world’s farmland.10 If this continues, scientists warn, the Earth will be able to support only another sixty years of harvests.11 The very soils that have formed the foundations of human civilisation for tens of thousands of years are suddenly, in a matter of decades, on the verge of collapse.

We know what’s about to happen. We can see it coming. In fact, it’s already beginning to play out in real time: marine animals are disappearing at twice the rate that land animals are.

What begins as a vague inkling about moths and beetles, the flickers of a childhood memory, turns into a crippling realisation, like a blow to the gut. We are sleepwalking into a mass extinction event – the sixth in our planet’s history, and the first to be caused by human economic activity. The rate of extinction is now 1,000 times faster than before the Industrial Revolution.

Scientists are not known for using strong language. They prefer to write in a neutral, objective tone. But reading through these reports, one can’t help noticing that many of them have felt compelled to shift registers. A recent study published in the prestigious Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences – a serious, stuffy journal – described the extinction crisis as ‘biological annihilation’, and concluded that it represents a ‘frightening assault on the foundations of human civilisation’.

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.

The number of extreme storms that happen each year has doubled since the 1980s.21 They now hit so frequently that even extraordinary spectacles blur together in our memories.

These were Category 5 hurricanes – the most severe type. Storms like these should happen only once in a generation. But in 2017 they rolled in one after another, leaving mayhem and destruction in their wake.

On our current trajectory, as of 2020, we are on track to reach a rise of up to 4°C by the end of the century. If we factor in countries’ pledges to cut emissions under the Paris Agreement – which are voluntary and non-binding – global temperatures will still rise by as much as 3.3°C. These are not incremental changes. Humans have never lived on such a planet. That deadly heatwave that struck Europe in 2003? That will be a normal summer. Spain, Italy and Greece will turn into deserts, with climates more like the Sahara than the Mediterranean as we know it.

The international system is already straining, with 65 million people displaced from their homes by wars and droughts – more than at any time since the Second World War. As migration pressures build, politics are becoming more polarised, fascist movements are on the march, and international alliances are beginning to fray.

The philosopher Timothy Morton has likened our obsession with eco-facts to the nightmares suffered by people with post-traumatic stress disorder, or PTSD. In PTSD dreams, you relive your trauma and wake up viscerally terrified, sweating and shaking. For some reason the nightmares happen over and over again. Sigmund Freud argued that this is your mind’s attempt to ameliorate your fear by trying to insert you into the moments right before the trauma happened. The idea is that if you’re able to anticipate the traumatic event, you might be able to avoid it – or at least prepare yourself psychologically. Morton thinks our eco-facts serve a similar function. By endlessly repeating terrifying eco-facts, on some subconscious level we’re trying to insert ourselves into a fictional moment right before collapse happens, so we can see it coming and do something about it. At least we’ll feel prepared when it arrives.30

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 production and consumption, which we have come to measure in terms of Gross Domestic Product (GDP).31 Growth is the prime directive of capital. And as far as capital is concerned, the purpose of increasing production is not primarily to meet specific human needs, or to improve social outcomes. Rather, the purpose is to extract and accumulate an ever-rising quantity of profit. That is the overriding objective. Within this system, growth 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.

Under capitalism, global GDP needs to keep growing by at least 2% or 3% per year, which is the minimum necessary for large firms to maintain rising aggregate profits.

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. There’s a bit of give between the two, but not much. As production increases, 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.

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. Global ecological breakdown is being driven almost entirely by excess growth in high-income countries, and in particular by excess accumulation among the very rich, while the consequences hurt the global South, and the poor, disproportionately.34 Ultimately, this is a crisis of inequality as much as anything else.

The tricky part is that it seems we have little choice about this. Capitalism is fundamentally dependent on growth. If the economy doesn’t grow it collapses into recession: debts pile up, people lose their jobs and homes, lives shatter. Governments have to scramble to keep industrial activity growing in a perpetual bid to stave off crisis. So we’re trapped.

We need all the efficiency improvements we can get. But scientists are clear that they will not be enough, on their own, to fix the problem. Why? Because in a growth-oriented economy, efficiency improvements that could help us reduce our impact are harnessed instead to advance the objectives of growth – to pull ever-larger swathes of nature into circuits of extraction and production. It’s not our technology that’s the problem. It’s growth.

We are a culture that is enamoured of newness, obsessed with invention and innovation. We claim to celebrate creative, out-of-the-box thinking. Certainly we would never say of a smartphone or a piece of art, ‘This is the best gadget or painting that has ever been created and it will never be surpassed, and we shouldn’t even try!’ It would be naïve to underestimate the power of human creativity. So why is it that, when it comes to our economic system, we have so readily swallowed the line that capitalism is the only possible option and we shouldn’t even think about creating something better?

GDP is an indicator of aggregate production, as measured in terms of real market prices. As we’ll see in Chapter 4, it’s not increasing aggregate production that matters; what matters is what we are producing, whether people have access to the things they need to live decent lives, and how income is distributed. The question of distribution is particularly important here, because right now income is distributed very, very unequally.

While markets have been around for many thousands of years, in different times and places, capitalism is relatively recent – only about 500 years old.2 What makes capitalism distinctive isn’t that it has markets, but that it is organised around perpetual growth; indeed, it is the first intrinsically expansionist economic system in history. It pulls ever-rising quantities of nature and human labour into circuits of commodity production. And 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.

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 rivers that sustained rural communities – they were fenced off and privatised for elite use. They became, in a word, property. This process was known as ‘enclosure’.12

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 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.

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.

Nutrition deteriorated and starvation became commonplace: some of the worst famines in European history struck in the 1500s, as subsistence economies were ripped up. 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

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.

In the decades that inaugurated the rise of capitalism, enclosure and colonisation were deployed as part of the same strategy.

The application of this logic to land and farming marked a fundamental transformation in human history. 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.

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 ‘improvement’ we call it ‘development’, or ‘growth’. Virtually anything can be justified if it contributes to GDP growth. We take it as an article of faith that growth benefits humanity as a whole; that it is essential to human progress.

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. 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. Scarcity was created, then, in the very process of elite accumulation. And it was enforced by state violence, with peasants massacred wherever they found the courage to tear down the barriers that cut them off from the land.

How odd that the history of capitalism – a system that generated such extraordinary material productivity – is marked by the constant creation of scarcity, scarred by devastating famines and a centuries-long process of immiseration. 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 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,

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 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.

Descartes realised that the domination of nature Bacon called for could only be justified if nature was rendered lifeless. To accomplish this, he reached back to Plato’s idea of a world divided in two, and gave it a new spin. He argued that there was a fundamental dichotomy between mind and matter. Humans are unique among all creatures in having minds (or souls), he claimed – the mark of their special connection to God. By contrast, the rest of creation is nothing but unthinking material. Plants and animals have no spirit or agency, intention or motivation; they are mere automatons, operating according to predictable mechanical laws,

While the animals writhed and wailed in agony, he insisted this was only the ‘appearance’ of pain, just a reflex: muscles and tendons responding automatically to physical stimuli.

What a psychopath

During the revolutionary period, peasant work followed a rhythm that from the perspective of industrialists appeared to be irregular and undisciplined: it depended on weather and seasons, on festivals and feast days. Life was organised around the principles of sufficiency and desire: people would work as much as they needed, and the rest of the time they spent dancing, telling stories, drinking beer … having fun.

Peasant lifeways were incompatible with the kind of labour that was required for capital accumulation. Labour needed to go well beyond need; it needed to become a total way of life.

In 1531, England’s King Henry VIII passed the first Vagabonds Act, describing ‘idleness’ as ‘the mother and root of all vices’ and ordering that vagabonds should be bound, whipped, and forced to ‘put themselves to labour’.

Elites had to literally whip people into becoming docile, obedient, productive workers. During this time, philosophers and political theorists developed a peculiar fascination with the body, which they came to see as the repository of hidden labour-power, the key engine of capitalist surplus.

Any inclination towards joy, play, spontaneity – the pleasures of bodily experience – was regarded as potentially immoral. 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.40 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.

And while capital paid wages, however meagre, to Europe’s proletarian workers (mostly males), it did not pay for the (mostly female) labour that reproduced them: the women who cooked their food, cared for them when ill, and raised the next generation of workers. Indeed, it was enclosure that first produced the figure of the housewife that remains with us today, by cutting women off not only from the means of subsistence but from wage labour too, and confining them to reproductive roles. In the new capitalist system, a mass of hidden female labour was appropriated by elites virtually for free.

Women were regarded as closer to ‘nature’ than men. And they were treated accordingly – subordinated, controlled and exploited.42 No need for compensation. As with everything shunted into the category of ‘nature’, the costs of extraction were externalised.

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. Africans and Indigenous Americans were cast as objects in the European imagination, and exploited as such.

The colonised were cast as ‘primitive’ precisely because they refused to accept the principles of human-nature dualism.44 In the writings of European colonisers and missionaries we see they were dismayed that so many of the people they encountered insisted on seeing the world as alive – seeing mountains, rivers, animals, plants, and even the land as sentient beings with agency and spirit. Europe’s elites saw animist thought as an obstacle to capitalism – in the colonies just as in Europe itself – and sought to eradicate it. This was conducted in the name of ‘civilisation.’

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 make a profit. In this system, it is the ‘exchange-value’ of things that matters, not their use-value.

Under capitalism, it’s not enough to generate a steady profit. The goal is to reinvest that profit to expand the production process and generate yet more profit than the year before.

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.

From the perspective of capital, profit alone doesn’t count. It is meaningless. All that counts is growth.

Compound growth – which is the basic structure of capital reinvestment – can be difficult to get our heads around.