Less is More: How Degrowth Will Save the World

by Jason Hickel

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.

Poverty was recast not as the consequence of dispossession, but as the sign of personal moral failing.

In the new capitalist system, a mass of hidden female labour was appropriated by elites virtually for free. Descartes’ dualism was recruited for this task too. Within the dualist framework, bodies were set out on a spectrum. Women were regarded as closer to ‘nature’ than men. And they were treated accordingly – subordinated, controlled and exploited.

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.

The development of bigger blast furnaces allowed for faster iron smelting, which in turn paved the way for more mining. And more logging was needed to fuel the furnaces, to the point where huge swathes of Europe’s forests were felled to produce iron. The power of technology is that it enables capital and labour to be more productive – to produce more and faster. But it also speeds up the appropriation of nature.

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.

Some credit this aggressive energy for the rapid innovation that characterises capitalism. Certainly there is truth to that. But it also has the tendency to become extremely violent. Every time capital bumps up against barriers to accumulation (say a saturated market, a minimum-wage law, or environmental protections), then like a giant vampire squid it writhes in a desperate attempt to whip those barriers out of the way and plunge its tentacles into new sources of growth.3 This is what is known as a ‘fix’.4 The enclosure movement was a fix. Colonisation was a fix. The Atlantic slave trade was a fix. The Opium Wars against China were a fix. The western expansion of the United States was a fix. Each one of these fixes – all of them violent – opened up new frontiers for appropriation and accumulation, all in service of capital’s growth imperative.

Kuznets warned that we should never use GDP as a normal measure of economic progress. He thought we should improve it to account for the social costs of growth, so that governments would take human well-being into account and pursue more balanced objectives.

This more aggressive vision of GDP ended up becoming dominant. And at the Bretton Woods Conference in 1944, when world leaders sat down to decide the rules that would govern the world economy in the wake of the war, it was enshrined as the key indicator of economic progress – exactly what Kuznets had warned against.

As soon as we start focusing on GDP growth, we’re not only promoting the things GDP measures, we’re promoting the indefinite increase of those things, regardless of the costs.

Suddenly the objective was to pursue not just higher levels of output for some specific purpose, but the highest rate, indefinitely, for its own sake. The British government followed suit, setting a target of 50% growth over the course of a single decade – an extraordinary rate of expansion, and the first time growth for its own sake was enshrined as a national policy objective.

The progressive policies that had been used to improve social outcomes after the Great Depression, like higher wages, labour unions and investment in public health and education, suddenly became suspect. These policies had led to high levels of well-being, but in so doing had made labour too ‘expensive’ for capital to maintain a high rate of profit. So too with the environmental regulations that were rolled out during this period, which restricted the exploitation of nature

In the late 1970s, growth in Western economies began to slow down and returns on capital began to decline. Governments came under pressure to do something about it – to create a ‘fix’ for capital. So they attacked unions and gutted labour laws in order to drive the cost of wages down, they dismantled key environmental protections, and they privatised public assets that had previously been off limits to capital – mines, railways, energy, water, healthcare, telecommunications and so on – creating lucrative opportunities for private investors.

Structural adjustment forcibly liberalised the economies of the global South, tearing down protective tariffs and capital controls, cutting wages and environmental laws, slashing social spending and privatising public goods – all to break open profitable new frontiers for foreign capital and restore access to cheap labour and resources.

The imposition of neoliberal policies caused two decades of crisis, with rising poverty, inequality and unemployment. Income growth rates across the South collapsed during the 1980s and 1990s, down to an average of 0.7% over this two-decade period.8 But as far as capital was concerned, it worked like a charm: it enabled multinational companies to post record profits, and sent the incomes of the richest 1% soaring.

The legacy of this intervention has been an extraordinary increase in global inequality over the past few decades. The real per capita income gap between the global North and global South is four times larger today than it was at the end of colonialism.

GDP growth is, ultimately, an indicator of the welfare of capitalism. That we have all come to see it as a proxy for the welfare of humans represents an extraordinary ideological coup.

The rise in material use after 1945 reflects what scientists have called the Great Acceleration – the most aggressive and destructive period of the Capitalocene. Virtually every indicator of ecological impact has exploded as a result.

Since 2000, the growth of material use has outpaced the growth of GDP. Instead of gradually dematerialising, the global economy has been rematerialising.

On our present trajectory, with business as usual, we are on course to be using more than 200 billion tons of material stuff per year by the middle of the century, more than double what we’re using right now. That’s four times over the safe boundary. There’s no telling what kind of ecological tipping points we might trip in the process.

Annual emissions more than doubled from 2 billion tons per year to 5 billion tons per year during the first half of the 1900s. During the second half of the century they rose fivefold, reaching 25 billion tons by the year 2000. And they have continued to rise since then, despite a string of international climate summits, reaching 37 billion tons in 2019.

High-income nations depend in large part on extraction from the global South. In fact, fully half of the total materials they consume are extracted from poorer countries, and generally under unequal and exploitative conditions.

The United States is single-handedly responsible for no less than 40% of global overshoot emissions. The European Union is responsible for 29%. Together with the rest of Europe, plus Canada, Japan and Australia, the nations of the global North (which represent only 19% of the global population) have contributed 92% of overshoot emissions. That means they are responsible for 92% of the damage caused by climate breakdown. By contrast, the entire continents of Latin America, Africa and the Middle East have contributed a combined total of only 8%. And that comes from only a small number of countries within those regions.

North America, Europe and Australia are among the least vulnerable to the effects of climate change. The real damage is happening across Africa, Asia and Latin America – and it’s happening on a truly dystopian scale.

According to data from the Climate Vulnerability Monitor, the South bears 82% of the total costs of climate breakdown, which in 2010 added up to $571 billion in losses due to drought, floods, landslides, storms and wildfires.28 Researchers predict that these costs will continue to rise. By 2030 the South will suffer 92% of total global costs, reaching $954 billion.

The distribution of climate-change-related deaths is even more skewed towards the South. Data from 2010 indicates that around 400,000 people died that year due to crises related to climate breakdown – mostly hunger and communicable disease. No fewer than 98% of these deaths occurred in the South. And the vast majority, 83%, occurred in the countries that have the lowest carbon emissions in the world.

As Philip Alston, the UN Special Rapporteur on extreme poverty and human rights, has put it: ‘Climate change is, among other things, an unconscionable assault on the poor.’

Two degrees will be a death sentence for much of the global South. The only reason that people have come to accept 2°C as a reasonable target is because climate negotiators from the United States and other powerful countries have pushed for it, over the loud objections of their colleagues from the South – and particularly from Africa.

The trauma of climate breakdown in the South directly echoes the trauma of colonisation. The South has suffered twice over: first from the appropriation of resources and labour that fuelled the North’s industrial rise, and now from the appropriation of atmospheric commons by the North’s industrial emissions. If our analysis of the climate crisis is not attentive to these colonial dimensions, then we have missed the point.

According to the most recent data, we have already shot past four of the planetary boundaries: for climate change, biodiversity loss, deforestation and biogeochemical flows. And ocean acidification is nearing the boundary.

Even as the evidence about the relationship between economic growth and ecological breakdown continues to pile up, growthism remains entrenched. It has the staying power and ideological fervour of a religion.

Even if all the countries in the world fulfil their pledges – which are voluntary and non-binding, so there’s certainly no guarantee of this – global emissions will keep rising. We’ll still be hurtling towards 3.3°C of global warming by the end of the century. In other words, even with the Paris Agreement in place, we’re on track for catastrophe.

Professor Kevin Anderson of Manchester University, one of the world’s leading climate scientists, has been a particularly vocal critic of BECCS. In a 2016 article in the journal Science, he argued that the Paris Agreement’s reliance on BECCS is ‘an unjust and high-stakes gamble’.6 Dozens of other scientists are coming forward with the same conclusion.

If we don’t take precautions, clean energy firms could become as destructive as fossil fuel companies – buying off politicians, trashing ecosystems, lobbying against environmental regulations, even assassinating community leaders who stand in their way, a tragedy that is already unfolding.

James Watt had just introduced his steam engine, which was significantly more efficient than previous versions: it used less coal per unit of output. Everyone assumed that this would reduce total coal consumption. But oddly enough, exactly the opposite happened: coal consumption in England soared. The reason, Jevons discovered, was that the efficiency improvement saved money, and capitalists reinvested the savings to expand production.

The technological innovations that have contributed most to growth have done so not because they enable us to use less nature, but because they enable us to use more.

Take the chainsaw, for instance. It’s a remarkable invention that enables loggers to fell trees, say, ten times faster than they are able to do by hand. But logging companies equipped with chainsaws don’t let their workers finish the job early and take the rest of the day off. They get them to cut down ten times as many trees as before. Lashed to the growth imperative, technology is used not to do the same amount of stuff in less time, but rather to do more stuff in the same amount of time

The steam engine, the cotton gin, fishing trawlers – these technologies have contributed so spectacularly to growth not because money springs forth from them automatically, but because they have enabled capital...

Facebook isn’t a multi-billion-dollar company because it allows us to share pictures with each other, but because it expands the process of production and consumption.

Once we grasp how this works, it should come as no surprise that despite centuries of extraordinary innovation, energy and resource use keeps going up. In a system where technological innovation is leveraged to expand extraction and production, it makes little sense to hope that yet more technological innovation will somehow magically do the opposite.

There is always a limit to how ‘lightweight’ a product can be. And once we approach that limit, then continued growth causes resource use to start rising again.

Growth in GDP ultimately cannot plausibly be decoupled from growth in material and energy use, demonstrating categorically that GDP growth cannot be sustained indefinitely. It is therefore misleading to develop growth-oriented policy around the expectation that decoupling is possible.

once we are liberated from the growth imperative, we will be free to focus on different kinds of innovations – innovations designed to improve human and ecological welfare, rather than innovations designed to speed up the rate of extraction and production.

For 500 years, capitalism has depended on extraction from nature. It has always needed an ‘outside’, external to itself, from which to plunder value, for free, without an equivalent return. That’s what fuels growth. To

The growth imperative already places extraordinary pressure on politicians around the world to cut wages and labour regulations. It’s reasonable to expect that in a resource-steady scenario this pressure would intensify considerably. There would be a race to find ever-cheaper sources of labour.

When capital has bumped up against limits to profit-growth in the past, it has found fixes in things like colonisation, structural adjustment programmes, wars, restrictive patent laws, nefarious debt instruments, land grabs, privatisation, and enclosing commons like water and seeds. Why would it be any different this time?

It’s not growth itself that matters – what matters is what we are producing, whether people have access to essential goods and services, and how income is distributed. And past a certain point, more GDP isn’t necessary for improving human welfare at all.

For decades, progress towards the goal of public sanitation was opposed, not enabled, by the capitalist class. Libertarian-minded landowners refused to allow officials to use their property, and refused to pay the taxes required to get it done. The resistance of these elites was broken only once commoners won the right to vote and workers organised into unions. Over the following decades these movements, which in Britain began with the Chartists and the Municipal Socialists, leveraged the state to intervene against the capitalist class. They fought for a new vision: that cities should be managed for the good of everyone, not just for the few. These movements delivered not only public sanitation systems but also, in the years that followed, public healthcare, vaccination coverage, public education, public housing, better wages and safer working conditions.

Progress in human welfare has been driven by progressive political movements and governments that have managed to harness resources to deliver robust public goods and fair wages.10 In fact, the historical record shows that in the absence of these forces, growth has quite often worked against social progress, not for it.

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