Less is More: How Degrowth Will Save the World

by Jason Hickel

The problem with this kind of inequality is that the rich become extractive rentiers. As

we are made to plunder the Earth simply to pay tribute to millionaires and billionaires.

The economists Emmanuel Saez and Gabriel Zucman have proposed a 10% annual marginal tax on wealth holdings over $1 billion.

After all, nobody ‘deserves’ this kind of wealth. It’s not earned, it’s extracted: from underpaid workers, from cheap nature, from rent-seeking, from political capture and so on. Extreme wealth has a corrosive effect on our society, on our political system, and on the living world.

goods that are essential to people’s well-being. Healthcare and education are obvious ones. But why not the internet? Why not public transport? Why not basic quotas of energy and water?

Capitalists enclose commons (‘public wealth’) in order to generate growth (‘private riches’), forcing people to work more simply to pay for access to resources they once enjoyed for free.

the rise of capitalism depended on the creation of artificial scarcity. From the enclosure movement to colonisation, scarcity had to be created in order to get people to submit to low-wage labour, to pressure them to engage in competitive productivity, and to recruit them as mass consumers. Artificial scarcity served as the engine of capital accumulation.

The idea is that by making public goods scarce, people will have no choice but to purchase private alternatives.

In a growth-oriented system, the objective is not to satisfy human needs, but to avoid satisfying human needs. It is irrational and ecologically violent.

‘capitalism cannot operate under conditions of abundance’.

Casual observers of capitalist societies might conclude – as many economists have done – that vicious competition, maximisation and self-interested behaviour are hard-wired into human nature. But is it really human nature that makes us behave this way? Or is it just the rules of the game?

an economy that feels in key ways familiar, in the sense that it resembles the economy as we normally describe it to ourselves (in other words, perhaps as we wish it to be): an economy where people produce and sell useful goods and services; an economy where people make rational, informed decisions about what to buy; an economy where people get compensated fairly for their labour; an economy that satisfies human needs while minimising waste; an economy that circulates money to those who need it; an economy where innovation makes better, longer-lasting products, reduces ecological pressure, frees up labour time and improves human welfare; an economy that responds to – rather than ignores – the health of the ecology on which it depends.

prime objective of capitalism: accumulation.

The environmentalist movement will need to focus on building alliances with working class and Indigenous formations in order to galvanise a movement capable of capturing political power or forcing incumbents to change course.

make decisions collectively, with direct democracy,

The answer is that our ‘democracies’ are not actually very democratic at all.

As income distribution has grown increasingly unequal, the economic power of the richest has translated directly into increased political power. Elites have managed to capture our democratic systems.

If our struggle for a more ecological economy is to succeed, we must seek to expand democracy wherever possible. That means kicking big money out of politics; it means radical media reform; strict campaign finance laws; reversing corporate personhood; dismantling monopolies; shifting to co-operative ownership structures; putting workers on company boards; democratising shareholder votes; democratising institutions of global governance; and managing collective resources as commons wherever possible.

degrowth is, ultimately, a process of decolonisation.

People’s Agreement of Cochabamba,

It required, in a word, separation.

The paraadigm shift we need.

Once we grasp this, then it becomes clear that the struggle before us is more than just a struggle over economics. It is a struggle over our very theory of being. It requires decolonising not only lands and forests and peoples, but decolonising our minds.

Lessons from the ancestors

One of the real pleasures I’ve discovered in my career as an anthropologist has been the process of piecing together a much deeper sense of the human story than I used to have.

They had to swap the ideology of expansion for an ideology of integration.

Can this happen only after collapse?

We are a civilisation obsessed with expansion that has suddenly discovered, as it were, that it inhabits an island.

‘The greatest peril of life lies in the fact that human food consists entirely of souls.’

Graham Harvey defines animism quite simply as the claim ‘that the world is full of persons, only some of whom are human, and that life is always lived in relationship with others’.

we are heirs of René Descartes

a single substance

Ik onkar. A monism

It means that God ultimately participates in the same substance as ‘creation’. It means that humans participate in the same substance as nature. It means that mind and soul are the same substance as matter. In fact, it means that everything is matter, everything is mind, and everything is God.

Edmund Husserl and Maurice Merleau-Ponty began to question these everyday assumptions using a new framework called phenomenology.

The philosopher David Abram

In fact, the world that presents itself to us is co-created by other subjects, just as we co-create their world. We are all engaged with each other in a sensual dance of perception, an ongoing dialogue through which we come to know the world.

Honduran activist Berta Cáceres, who was assassinated in 2016 for defending the Rio Gualcarque; the Inuit leader Sheila Watt-Cloutier, who was nominated for the Nobel Peace Prize in 2007 before it went to Al Gore; the Brazilian Indigenous activist and leader Ailton Krenak; and, to mention two people who have been particularly influential to me, the Algonquian scholar-activist Jack D. Forbes and the Potawatomi scientist and philosopher Robin Wall Kimmerer.

Césaire described colonisation as a process of ‘thingification’.

any process of decolonisation must therefore begin with a process of de-thingification.

team of scientists associated with the Interdisciplinary Microbiome Project at Oxford University have suggested that discoveries related to bacteria may revolutionise not only our science but our ontology too: ‘Our ability to map previously invisible forms of microbial life in and around us is forcing us to rethink the biological constitution of the world, and the position of humans vis-a-vis other forms of life.’

Robert Macfarlane

multi-species organism?

There’s also something else going on here – something perhaps even more revolutionary. Dr Suzanne Simard, a professor in the department of forest & conservation at the University of British Columbia, has argued that mycorrhizal networks among plants operate like neural networks in humans and other animals; they function in remarkably similar ways, passing information between nodes. And just as the structure of neural networks enables cognition and intelligence in animals, mycorrhizal networks provide similar capacities to plants. Recent research shows that the network not only facilitates transmission, communication and co-operation – just like our neurons do – it also facilitates problem-solving, learning, memory and decision-making.17 These words are not just metaphorical. The ecologist Monica Gagliano has published groundbreaking research on plant intelligence, showing that plants remember things that happen to them, and change their behaviour accordingly. In other words, they learn. In a recent interview with Forbes, she insisted: ‘My work is not about metaphors at all; when I talk about learning, I mean learning. When I talk about memory, I mean memory.’

We are waking up

Nothing exists alone. Individuality is an illusion. Life on this planet is an interwoven mesh of relational becoming.

The British scientist James Lovelock and his American collaborator Lynn Margulis have described the Earth as a superorganism, which automatically self-regulates in a manner that maintains the conditions for life, just as the human body self-regulates to keep internal systems in functional balance. This is the Gaia hypothesis,

David Abram, The Spell of the Sensuous: Perception and Language in a More-Than-Human World

Brandon Keim, ‘Never underestimate the intelligence of trees,’ Nautilus, 2019. On plant learning and memory, see Sarah Lasko, ‘The hidden memories of plants,’ Atlas Obscura, 2017.

Andrea Morris, ‘A mind without a brain. The science of plant intelligence takes root,’ Forbes, 2018.

Keim, ‘Never underestimate the intelligence of trees.’