Less is More: How Degrowth Will Save the World

by Jason Hickel

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.

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.

Don’t get me wrong. 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.

Capitalism is so taken for granted that its proponents don’t even know how to justify it.

As evidence about the relationship between GDP growth and ecological breakdown continues to mount, scientists around the world are shifting their approach. 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.’

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,

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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 Tenochtitlá

if invested in 1800 at the historical average rate of interest, that quantity of silver would today be worth $165 trillion – more than double the world’s GDP. And that’s on top of the gold that was extracted from South America during the same period. This windfall played a key role in the rise of European capitalism.

what made the colonial frontiers so attractive to capital in the first place was that the land – and the people who lived on it – could be mistreated with impunity.

The United States extracted so much labour from enslaved Africans that, if paid at the US minimum wage, with a modest rate of interest, it would add up to $97 trillion today – four times the size of the US GDP.

Between the years 1765 and 1938, they siphoned sums that would today be worth around $45 trillion out of India and into British coffers. This flow allowed Britain to buy strategic materials like iron, tar and timber, which were essential to the country’s industrialisation. They also used it to finance the industrialisation of white settler colonies like Canada and Australia, and to pay for 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).

The point here is that 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.

as European capital grew, the South’s share of global manufacturing collapsed, from 77% in 1750 down to 13% by 1900.

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. This is crucial: those principles of homo economicus that we assume to be engraved in human nature were instituted during the enclosure process.

Because the refugees were many and jobs were few, competition among workers drove down the cost of labour, destroying the guild system that had previously protected the livelihoods of skilled craftsmen.

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.

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 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.

the historical record is full of commentary by landowners and merchants who felt that peasants’ access to commons during the revolutionary period had encouraged them to leisure and ‘insolence

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.

During the last quarter of the nineteenth century, the height of the British Empire, 30 million Indians perished needlessly of famine in what the historian Mike Davis has called the ‘Late Victorian Holocausts’

Private riches go up, but public wealth goes down. This became known as the ‘Lauderdale Paradox’

colonisers were burning down orchards that produced fruits and nuts, so people who once lived off the natural abundance of the land would be compelled instead to work for wages and purchase food from Europeans. What was once abundant had to be made scarce.

Salt was freely available all along India’s coasts – all you had to do was bend down and scoop it up. Yet the British made people pay for the right to do this, as part of a scheme to produce revenue for the colonial government. Public wealth had to be sacrificed for the sake of private riches; commons sabotaged for growth.

Early capitalists not only had to find ways to compel people to work for them, they also had to change people’s beliefs. They had to change how people regarded the living world. Ultimately, capitalism required a new story about nature.

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.

The ideas of Aristotle inspired many of the medieval peasant rebellions that sought to overthrow feudalism. These movements were denounced by the Church as heretical, and the charge of heresy was used to justify brutal violence against them.

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.

The historian Carolyn Merchant argues that animistic ideas limited the extent to which people considered it permissible to plunder the earth.

Those who sought to advance capitalism had to find a way not only to strip humans from the land, but to destroy the animist ideas that enjoyed such prominence – to strip the earth of its spirit and render it instead a mere stock of ‘natural resources’ for humans to exploit.

Bacon actively sought to destroy the idea of a living world, and to replace it with a new ethic that not only sanctioned but celebrated the exploitation of nature.

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.

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.

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. He urged people not to be fooled by the appearance of sentience or intelligence.

We often think of the Church and science as antagonists, but in fact the architects of the Scientific Revolution were all deeply religious, and shared common cause with the clergy: to strip nature of spirit.

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

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.

To deal with it, and assuage elite fears that the growing underclass might come to pose a political threat, states began to introduce laws forcing people to work. 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’

In 1547, Edward VI decreed that at the first offence vagabonds should be branded with a ‘V’ and subjected to two years of forced labour. The second offence was punishable by death.

These laws unleashed an extraordinary outpouring of state violence against the dispossessed. In England, as many as 72,000 ‘idle persons’ were hanged during the reign of Henry VIII, according to one account. In the 1570s, up to 400 ‘rogues’ were executed each year.39 The goal was to fundamentally change people’s beliefs about labour....

Dualism had established a clear divide between humans and nature, subject and object. But it was not only nature that was objectified in this new system. It was also the body. The body was recast as part of nature.

bodies were laid out in public and dissected, exposed as being mere flesh, profaned, devoid of spirit, composed of what amounted to ropes and pulleys and wheels. ‘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.’