Less is More: How Degrowth Will Save the World

by Jason Hickel

We don’t have a right to ask whether we are going to succeed or not. The only question we have a right to ask is what’s the right thing to do? What does this Earth require of us if we want to continue to live on it? –Wendell Berry

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.

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.

In 2020, a survey by the Edelman Trust Barometer showed that a majority of people around the world (56%) agree with the statement, ‘Capitalism does more harm than good’. In France it’s as high as 69%. In India it’s a staggering 74%.40 On top of this, fully three-quarters of people across all major capitalist economies say they believe corporations are corrupt.41

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.’

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

Enclosure was a process of internal colonisation, and colonisation was a process of enclosure.

as European capital grew, the South’s share of global manufacturing collapsed, from 77% in 1750 down to 13% by 1900.22

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

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.’

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

The proponents of capitalism themselves believed it was necessary to impoverish people in order to generate growth.

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.

Private riches, on the other hand, consist ‘of all that man desires as useful or delightful to him; which exists in a degree of scarcity.’ The scarcer something is, the more money you can extort from people who need it.

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.

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’.

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.

the main contribution that technology makes to growth is not that it produces money out of thin air, but rather that it enables capital to expand and intensify the process of appropriation.

Kuznets was careful to emphasise that GDP is flawed. It tallies up the market value of total production, but it doesn’t care whether that production is helpful or harmful.

not only does it leave out what is bad, it also leaves out much of what is good: it doesn’t count most non-monetised economic activities, even when they are essential to human life and well-being.

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

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.

What’s happening here should be understood as a process of atmospheric colonisation. A small number of high-income nations have appropriated the vast majority of the safe atmospheric commons,

BECCS would be an ecological disaster in its own right.

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,

the Jevons Paradox. In modern economics, the phenomenon is known as the Khazzoom-Brookes Postulate,

Growth tends to require an ‘outside’: an external source from which to extract value for free, or as close to free as possible. In a circular economy, the cost of materials is internalised.

The UN estimates that fairer trade rules at the WTO could allow poor countries to earn over $1.5 trillion in additional export revenues each year.49

It was devised specifically in order to measure the welfare of capitalism. It externalises social and ecological costs because capitalism externalises social and ecological costs. It’s naïve to imagine that if policymakers stop measuring GDP, capital will automatically cease its constant pursuit of ever-increasing returns, and our economies will become more sustainable.

Indeed, a job guarantee is one of the single most powerful environmental policies a government could implement, because it enables us to have an open conversation about scaling down destructive industries without worrying about the spectre of unemployment.

longer working hours are directly associated with higher consumption of environmentally intensive goods, even when correcting for income.31

the real heart of a post-capitalist economy. Ending planned obsolescence, capping resource use, shortening the working week, reducing inequality and expanding public goods

scarcity is created, intentionally, for the sake of growth. Just as during the enclosures in the 1500s, scarcity and growth emerge as two sides of the same coin.

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.

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.65

capitalism has a tendency to be anti-democratic, and democracy has a tendency to be anti-capitalist.

Husserl argued that the universe of experience isn’t defined by subject-object relations; rather, it is an inter-subjective field which is collectively produced.

Ultimately, what we call ‘the economy’ is our material relationship with each other and with the rest of the living world. We must ask ourselves: what do we want that relationship to be like? Do we want it to be about domination and extraction? Or do we want it to be about reciprocity and care?

Plunder of the Commons (Penguin, 2019).

Matthias Schmelzer, The Hegemony of Growth: The OECD and the Making of the Economic Growth Paradigm (Cambridge University Press, 2016).