Less is More: How Degrowth Will Save the World

by Jason Hickel

UN scientists have found that 40% of the planet’s soils are now seriously degraded. Agricultural soil is being lost more than 100 times faster than it is being formed.8 In 2018, a scientist from Japan made the effort to sort through evidence on earthworm populations from around the world. He found that on industrial farms earthworm biomass had plunged by a dramatic 83%. And as the earthworms died off, the organic content of soils collapsed by more than half. Our soils are being turned into lifeless dirt.9

Recent figures show that around 85% of global fish stocks are now depleted or facing collapse. Haddock have fallen to 1% of their former volume; halibut, those magnificent giants of the sea, to one-fifth of 1%. Fish catches are beginning to decline around the world, for the first time in recorded history.12 In the Asia-Pacific, fishery yields are on track to hit zero by 2048.13

ocean acidification has driven mass extinction events a number of times in the past. It played a major role in the last extinction event, 66 million years ago, when ocean pH dropped by 0.25. That small shift was enough to wipe out 75% of marine species. On our present emissions trajectory, ocean pH will drop by 0.4 by the end of the century.16 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.

It found an accelerating rate of global biodiversity decline, unprecedented in human history. Around one million species are now at risk of extinction, many within decades.

The number of extreme storms that happen each year has doubled since the 1980s.

This will have serious implications for global political stability. Regions affected by food shortages will see mass displacement as people migrate in search of stable food supplies. In fact, it’s happening already.26 Many of those fleeing places like Guatemala and Somalia are doing so because their farms are no longer viable. 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. Factor in escalating displacement due to famines, storms and rising seas, plus dwindling arable farmland, and there’s no predicting what conflagrations might occur.

Once we reach that point, we tell ourselves, we’ll finally get around to doing something about it. But the ultimate eco-fact is never going to arrive. It’s never going to be good enough.

Growth

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.

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.

once we have 100% clean energy, what are we going to do with it? Unless we change how our economy works, we’ll keep doing exactly what we are doing with fossil fuels: we’ll use it to power continued extraction and production, at an ever-increasing rate, placing ever-increasing pressure on the living world, because that’s what capitalism requires. Clean energy might help deal with emissions, but it does nothing to reverse deforestation, overfishing, soil depletion and mass extinction.

It is because of their commitment to growthism that our politicians find themselves unable to take meaningful action to stop ecological breakdown. We have dozens of ideas for how to fix the problem, but we dare not implement them because doing so might undermine growth. And in a growth-dependent economy, that cannot be allowed to happen.

Some people try to reconcile this tension by leaning on the hope that technology will save us – that innovation will make growth ‘green’. Efficiency improvements will enable us to ‘decouple’ GDP from ecological impact so we can continue growing the global economy for ever without having to change anything about capitalism. And if this doesn’t work, we can always rely on giant geo-engineering schemes to rescue us in a pinch. It’s a comforting fantasy.

Technology is absolutely essential in the fight against ecological breakdown. 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.

Fredric Jameson once famously said that it is easier to imagine the end of the world than to imagine the end of capitalism.

In 2017, an American college sophomore named Trevor Hill stood up during a televised town hall meeting in New York and posed a simple question to Nancy Pelosi, the Speaker of the US House of Representatives at the time and one of the most powerful people in the world. He cited a study by Harvard University showing that 51% of US Americans between the ages of eighteen and twenty-nine no longer support capitalism, and asked whether the Democrats, Pelosi’s party, could embrace this fast-changing reality and stake out a vision for an alternative economy.39 Pelosi was visibly taken aback. ‘I thank you for your question,’ she said, ‘but I’m sorry to say we’re capitalists, and that’s just the way it is.’

In 2018, 238 scientists called on the European Commission to abandon GDP growth and focus on human well-being and ecological stability instead.45 The following year, more than 11,000 scientists from over 150 countries published an article calling on the world’s governments ‘to shift from pursuing GDP growth and affluence toward sustaining ecosystems and improving well-being.’46 This would have been unthinkable in mainstream circles only a few years ago, but now there’s a striking new consensus forming.

Moving away from growth is not as wild as it might seem. For decades we’ve been told that we need growth in order to improve people’s lives. But it turns out this isn’t actually true. Beyond a certain point, which high-income countries have long surpassed, the relationship between GDP and social outcomes begins to break down. This should not be particularly surprising. 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

the richest 1% (all of whom are millionaires) capture some $19 trillion in income every year, which represents nearly a quarter of global GDP.47 This is astonishing, when you think about it. It means that a quarter of all the labour we render, all the resources we extract, and all the CO2 we emit is done to make rich people richer.

We can also scale down forms of production 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.

As we slow down excess production and liberate people from the toil of unnecessary labour, we can shorten the working week to maintain full employment, distribute income and wealth more fairly, and expand access to key public services like universal healthcare, education and affordable housing. As we’ll see in Chapter 5, these measures have been proven, over and over again, to have a powerful positive impact on people’s health and well-being.

This way of seeing the world is known as dualism. We inherit these ideas from a long line of thinkers, from Plato to Descartes, who primed us to believe that humans can rightfully exploit nature and subject it to our control. We didn’t always believe these things. In fact, those who sought to pave the way for capitalism in the sixteenth century first had to destroy other, more holistic ways of seeing the world, and either convince or force people to become dualists. 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.

Animism had endowed things with souls; industrialism makes souls into things. Max Horkheimer and Theodor Adorno

We humans have been on this planet for nearly 300,000 years; fully evolved, fully intelligent, exactly as we are today. For approximately 97% of that time our ancestors lived in relative harmony with the Earth’s ecosystems.

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. As the sociologist Jason Moore has pointed out, this isn’t the Anthropocene – it’s the Capitalocene.

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.

In England, Wat Tyler led a peasants’ revolt against feudalism in 1381, inspired by the radical preacher John Ball, famous for his call: ‘Now the time is come in which ye may (if ye will) cast off the yoke of bondage, and recover liberty.’

‘Servants are now masters and masters servants,’ complained John Gower in Miroir de l’Omme (1380). As one writer put it in the early 1500s: ‘The peasants are too rich … and do not know what obedience means; they don’t take law into any account, they wish there were no nobles … and they would like to decide what rent we should get for our lands.’9 And according to another: ‘The peasant pretends to imitate the ways of the freeman, and gives himself the appearance of him in his clothes.’

What that new society might have grown to look like we will never know, for it was brutally crushed. 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 Thousands of rural communities were destroyed during the enclosure movement; crops were ripped up and burned, whole villages razed to the ground. Commoners lost their access to land, forests, game, fodder, water, fish – all the resources necessary for life. And the Reformation added further fuel to the bonfire of dispossession: as Catholic monasteries were dismantled across Europe, their lands were snapped up by nobles and cleared of the people who lived there.

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. We don’t need to romanticise subsistence life to recognise that enclosure produced conditions that were far worse; worse even than under serfdom. In England, the word ‘poverty’ came into common use for the first time to describe the mass of ‘paupers’ and ‘vagabonds’ that enclosure produced – words that prior to this period rarely if ever appeared in English texts.

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.

All of this upends the usual story that we’re told about the rise of capitalism. This was hardly a natural and inevitable process. There was no gradual ‘transition’, as people like to assume, and it certainly wasn’t peaceful. 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. Indeed, by securing virtually total control over the means of production, and rendering peasants and workers dependent on them for survival, capitalists took the principles of serfdom to new extremes.

For human welfare, the consequences of enclosure were devastating. It reversed all of the gains the free peasants had won. According to the economists Henry Phelps Brown and Sheila Hopkins, from the 1500s to the 1700s real wages declined by as much as 70%.13 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.

The monarchy had initially sought to limit enclosure, worried about the social crises it was creating. But those limits were abolished after the Civil War of the 1640s and the so-called Glorious Revolution of 1688, when the bourgeoisie assumed control of Parliament and obtained the power to do more or less whatever they pleased. Wielding the full force of the state, they introduced a series of laws – the Parliamentary Enclosures – that set off a wave of dispossession faster and more far-reaching than anything that had come before. Between 1760 and 1870, some 7 million acres were enclosed by legal writ, about one-sixth of England. By the end of this period there was almost no common land left in the country.

This final, dark episode in the destruction of the English peasant system coincided exactly with the Industrial Revolution. The dispossessed poured desperate and shell-shocked into the cities, where they provided the cheap labour that fuelled the dark Satanic mills immortalised in the poetry of William Blake.

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 Manchester and Liverpool, the two giants of industrialisation, life expectancy collapsed compared to non-industrialised parts of the country. In Manchester it fell to a mere twenty-five years. And it was not just in England; this same effect can be seen in every other European country where it has been studied. The first few hundred years of capitalism generated misery to a degree unknown in the pre-capitalist era.

When Europeans began to colonise the Americas in the decades after 1492, they were not driven by the romance of ‘exploration’ and ‘discovery’, as our schoolbooks would have it. Colonisation was a response to the crisis of elite disaccumulation that had been caused by the peasant revolutions in Europe. It was a ‘fix’. Just as elites turned to enclosure at home, they sought new frontiers for appropriation abroad, beginning with Christopher Columbus’s first voyage to the Americas. These two processes unfolded simultaneously. In 1525, the very year that German nobles massacred those 100,000 peasants, the Spanish king Carlos I awarded the kingdom’s highest honour to Hernán Cortés, the conquistador who slayed 100,000 Indigenous people as his army marched through Mexico and destroyed the Aztec capital of Tenochtitlán. The congruence of these two events is no accident. In the decades that inaugurated the rise of capitalism, enclosure and colonisation were deployed as part of the same strategy.

the British welfare system that, after the 1870s, finally started to address the misery generated by enclosure (in the late 19th century, more than half of Britain’s domestic budget was funded by appropriation from India and other colonies).21 Today, British politicians often seek to defend colonialism by claiming that Britain helped ‘develop’ India. But in fact exactly the opposite is true: Britain exploited India to develop itself.

These regimes of forced competition generated a dramatic surge in productivity. Between 1500 and 1900, the quantity of grain extracted per acre of land shot up by a factor of four. And it was this feature – known at the time as ‘improvement’ – that came to serve as the core justification for enclosure. The English landowner and philosopher John Locke admitted that enclosure was a process of theft from the commons, and from commoners, but he argued that this theft was morally justifiable because it enabled a shift to intensive commercial methods that increased agricultural output.25 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.

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. But even in Locke’s time the alibi was clearly a ruse. While the commercialisation of agriculture did increase total output, the only ‘improvement’ was to the profits of the landowners. While output soared, commoners were hit by two centuries of famine. So too in the factories. None of the gains from the surge in labour productivity went back to the workers themselves; indeed, wages declined during the enclosure period. Profits were pocketed instead by those who owned the means of production.

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.

‘Our forests and great commons make the poor that are upon them too much like the Indians,’ wrote the Quaker John Bellers in 1695; ‘[they are] a hindrance to industry, and are nurseries of idleness and insolence’. Lord John Bishton, author of a 1794 report on agriculture in Shropshire, agreed: ‘The use of common lands operates on the mind as a sort of independence.’ After enclosure, he wrote, ‘the labourers will work every day in the year, their children will be put out to labour early,’ and ‘that subordination of the lower ranks of society which in the present time is so much wanted would be thereby considerably secured.’ In 1771 the agriculturalist Arthur Young noted that ‘everyone but an idiot knows that the lower classes must be kept poor, or they will never be industrious’. The Reverend Joseph Townsend emphasised in 1786 that ‘it is only hunger which can spur and goad them on to labour’. ‘Legal constraint,’ Townsend went on, ‘is attended with too much trouble, violence, and noise … whereas hunger is not only a peaceable, silent, unremitted pressure, but as the most natural motive to industry, it calls forth the most powerful exertions … Hunger will tame the fiercest animals, it will teach decency and civility, obedience and subjugation to the most brutish, the most obstinate, and the most perverse.’

Patrick Colquhoun, a powerful Scottish merchant, saw poverty as an essential precondition for industrialisation: Poverty is that state and condition in society where the individual has no surplus labour in store, or, in other words, no property or means of subsistence but what is derived from the constant exercise of industry in the various occupations of life. Poverty is therefore a most necessary and indispensable ingredient in society, without which nations and communities could not exist in a state of civilisation. It is the lot of man. It is the source of wealth, since without poverty, there could be no labour; there could be no riches, no refinement, no comfort, and no benefit to those who may be possessed of wealth.

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 themselve...

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. In such a world, the divine right of kings crumbles into incoherence.

For Bacon, science and technology were to serve as the instruments of domination. ‘Science should as it were torture nature’s secrets out of her,’ Bacon wrote. And with the knowledge thus gained, ‘man’ would not ‘merely exert a gentle guidance over nature’s course’, but ‘have the power to conquer and subdue, to shake her to her foundations’. Nature must be ‘bound into service’ and made into a ‘slave,’ ‘forced out of her natural state and squeezed and moulded’ for human ends. Bacon’s use of torture as a metaphor here is revealing, as he himself – in his role as Attorney General under King James I – deployed torture against the peasant rebels and heretics of his time, and worked to legitimise the practice as a means of defending the state. Just as Bacon saw torture as a weapon against peasant insurrection, so he saw science as a weapon against nature. Like peasants, nature had resisted domination too long. Science was to break her once and for all.

During the Enlightenment, dualist thought became mainstream for the first time in history. It gave sanction to the enclosure and privatisation of common land, as land was rendered but a thing to be possessed. And it was enclosure, in turn, that enabled dualism’s rise to cultural dominance: only once commoners were alienated from the land and severed from forest ecosystems could they be convinced to imagine themselves as fundamentally separate from the rest of the living world, and to see other beings as objects.

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. As the sociologist Juliet Schor puts it: The medieval calendar is filled with holidays … not only long ‘vacations’ at Christmas, Easter and midsummer but also numerous saints’ and rest days. In addition to official celebrations, there were often weeks’ worth of ales – to mark important life events (brides’ ales or wake ales) as well as less momentous occasions (scot ale, lamb ale and hock ale). All told, holiday leisure time in England took up probably one-third of the year. And the English were apparently working harder than their neighbours. The ancien regime in France is reported to have guaranteed fifty-two Sundays, ninety rest days and thirty-eight holidays. In Spain, travellers noted that holidays totalled five months per year.

During the 1600s, Descartes’ views were leveraged to bring the body under control, to defeat its passions and desires, and impose on it a regular, productive order. 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.